Servants

George peeked his head out the door.  The coast was clear.  He stepped out into his kitchen and opened up two cabinets.  Out of the first he picked out a lowball glass and out of the second a bottle of eight year old bourbon.  He filled the glass and cautiously entered the living room.  After he sat down on the couch he looked at his glass and realized something: he had never seen a servant take a drink, ever.  It’s funny the things you think of when you get that close, he’d never even approached the thought before.  The fact that none of them drank alcohol wasn’t surprising; hell, they didn’t drink anything.  What was surprising was that in his hands was the last drink George was ever going to have.

Yesterday was his last dinner.

George figured it was akin to facing death and in a way it was.  This was the first time he had really understood why the philosophers discussed it to no end.  He took another sip of his bourbon and thought, “Do they have souls?” 

That wasn’t the question about which he really cared.  He cared if he would have a soul at this time tomorrow.  He wondered if he would be conscious, aware, alert, trapped.  He could hear them, the servants, starting to stir in the garage.  It was almost six in the morning so they would walk in soon to start breakfast.  Ironic, he thought, the only people in the world who cook are the only ones who don’t eat.

He took another sip.  Since he was in kindergarten he had learned that they don’t actually need to eat but that the only parts of the brain that are still active in servants are the ones that control the baser instincts.  In fact, every high school graduate knew that if one was able to take out a servant’s chip then all that that servant would want to do would be to kill, eat, and unsuccessfully fornicate.  But every child was also informed that removing the chip would sever the connection between the servant’s brain and body, making it useless.  George rubbed the back of his neck.

He knew how it would happen: he would lie in his bed as the doctor put him under, that’s the last thing he would know in this world.  Then the doctor would transport him to the hospital, cut through his spinal cord and insert the chip.  The last step was for the doctor to inject him with the virus.  “The next time I wake up I’ll be one of them,” he thought.

The two servants shuffled in and wordlessly moved to the kitchen.  George wasn’t even sure that they saw him sitting there.  Sure, plenty of studies had shown that people lost virtually none of their vision after conversion but George was never really sure about it.  Maybe it was the fact that they were vacuous behind the eyes.  What does it matter if you can see if you don’t know what you’re seeing?

There wasn’t much to preparing a meal anymore.  For breakfast it was little more than cracking some eggs into one spot and throwing half a pound of bacon in another.  George and his wife Helen had already programmed into the machine how they liked their eggs, bacon, waffles, et cetera.  The machine made the waffles, pancakes, and hash browns automatically.  Throughout George’s life that had been the big push of technology: to make a mundane task so easy that even the servants could do it.  Well, that and various ways for the living to occupy themselves.

George reflected a bit more.  This was the first time in history that the people in a society didn’t need to work.  The servants were able to grow crops and raise livestock with minimal supervision.  They also did the majority of the labor in home construction.  Use of the servants had made most of the old economy useless.  The new world had grown from extreme hardship to a life of ease, made possible by the chip, and in this new world people truly pursued their passions instead of whatever paid the bills.

There were those who refused to subscribe to this new world. The Moralists, as they called themselves, refused to join the rest of society.  The Moralists had mostly come from old religious traditions: Muslims, Jews, Christians.  They believed that to own a servant or to become a servant was wrong and as such they toiled their days away in menial activities pursuant to their own meager survival.  They would not own servants because they believed that the servants had lost their souls and were forced by God to wander this world until someone was gracious enough to end their miserable existence.  Most of the historians likened them to the Amish of the old world, unwilling to engage in the activities of general society because they saw those activities as obscene.  For his young life George had always seen this view as overly harsh and unproductive and like most people George had unwittingly entered into a societal contract, one from which most had never seen any reason to extricate themselves.  As the final hours passed toward his 65^th birthday, and his conversion, George started to see how those damn Moralists might be right.

What were these things cooking his breakfast?  They weren’t men, although they looked like men, old men.  They weren’t animals, although they were treated as such.  George wondered what these men had done for the world before they had come to be his servants.  The internet had been reestablished in the new world but most families would remove any trace of a person’s existence when a loved one was converted.  It made George think of the Amish once more.  More specifically the connection historians had with the Amish that they didn’t have with their own age.  A man could, if he were so inclined, find a book 300 years old documenting the genealogy of an old Amish family but he couldn’t successfully find the accomplishments of his own grandfather, he had only stories passed down from his mother.  It created a most unusual dichotomy: a world where a man was as free as ever to make the most of himself and at the same time he had the least chance of his accomplishments being passed down to posterity.

Of course there were exceptions to the rule.  Proctors would never be made to convert and on the rare occasion that a proctor chose conversion he would be given a job even easier than the one he had in life. For regular men like George conversion was mandatory and he could only hope to be placed in a servitude as light as that of his own servant, if he would even know the difference.  Those who were still hearty at age 65, as George was, would end up in fields or farms, or worse yet in steel mills or factories.

Helen roused and in her nightgown walked from the bedroom to the kitchen and shooed away the servants.  George set down his empty glass as they shuffled through the living room and back to the garage.  He inhaled deeply of the delicious smell of honey coated bacon and felt Helen’s hand on his shoulder, “You know I’ll always love you,” she whispered.

George brought his fingertips from each hand together just in front of his nose, “What will you love?”

“Well, I’ll love your warmth, kindness, your strength, intelligence,” she was quite taken aback by the question and it showed in her answer.

“But you won’t love my body.”

“Dear, we all know that we aren’t just our bodies.  Why, our bodies are just the container for who we really are,” she was going back to what every child learned in school.

“But, dear, if what I am is no longer contained in my body and what I am is not readily accessible, then what will you love?”

Helen wrapped her hands around him and squeezed tightly, “I’ll love everything that you are, everything that you were.  I’ll love you as I do now and I will know everything that you are into the future.  Come now, it’s time for breakfast.” She walked back into the kitchen and brought two plates to the table.  George obliged his wife and sat in his normal seat before she handed him a fork and knife.

He stared at the food as he never had before, “This is my last meal, Helen.”  He poked at his eggs, unconsciously wishing that the longer he ate the longer it would be before conversion.

“Oh George, don’t think of it that way.  It’s not like conversion is death.”

George slammed his fork down on his plate, “Well then what the fuck is it Helen?  A Goddamn walk in the park?  It’s not like I’m coming back after conversion, nobody ever has.”

They both continued eating in silence until the servants walked back in a few minutes later.   George grabbed the bottle of bourbon off the counter and walked back into the living room.  He refilled his glass and sat back down on the couch.

“Oh, George, come now.  You know that the anesthetic won’t work right if you’re drunk, put that down,” Helen reached for his glass and he pulled away.

“What the hell are they going to do if I can’t be converted, kill me?”  It’s amazing how the fear of ‘death’ will turn a 65 year old man back into his 16 year old self.

Still though, he was right.  His bride walked to the kitchen and came back with another lowball glass, she poured her own drink.  “If I can’t stop you from drinking, which I never could, I might as well join you,” she brought up her glass and George clinked his against it.  They both downed the entirety of their glasses just before the doctor rang the doorbell.