I'm a Cyborg's Pet (girl X cyborg)

Chapter 15/People who liked...

A/N : Photo Electronic Dog shock collars, You're next. 

You might feel I'm getting a bit obsessed with my collar at this point but if you had something explosive round your neck and it was the last thing you heard at night and the first thing you heard in the morning, you would find it quite an intimate technology. We e-slaves went on about our smart collars all the time. 

Along with becoming hopelessly dependent on my collar, the thing I found most annoying was that it started to try to anticipate, and recommend, what I wanted to do. At lunch it would say, "People who had the Broccoli and Artichoke Bake also had 40ml of Orange Juice, <beep>."

Like my former step-father,if I ignored it I found that my collar started to get irritated with me. For example, Joe discovered that collars could play music to you, out of hours. Our Machine Overlords had decided to rip all music ever made and let the slaves listen to it for free. That's right: they stole all of humanity's music for themselves: no respect for intellectual property!

These machines were really evil: I have mentioned that right? This is my problem. I guess my problem is with the concept of hypocrisy. Like, suppose you buy a super green eco burger from your local Green Peace shop. And you buy it not because the guy who flips them is cute, does your history class and your hoping he would notice you for once, but because you have, you know, a genuine wish to save the planet right? Then you notice the wrapper isn't made from recycled paper or something and it's like outrage. Or like someone catches Kate Winslet or Paul McCartney scoffing back a beef burger at some big celeb do. People are all 'well what a hypocrite, I can never believe in his/her veganism stuff again. '  BUT suppose you see Arnold Schwarzenegger having the carrot soup. No one goes - wow what hypocrite he's usually so pro-meat, I'm sooo disappointed,  I can never watch a Schwarzenegger movie again. His single act of non meat eating had completely ruined his meat-loving macho thing. This seems so unfair we are so outraged if some do-gooder does something a tiny bit bad but if some bad guy does something accidentally good we are all like - yeah whatever. I think we should call out the hypocrisy in whichever direction it goes in- to be fair right?

So yes the machine just gave all the slaves their own Spotify account. I feel given that my previous reasons you will understand my outrage that the machines couldn't even have the decency tp be consistently evil. It broke what little respect I had for them as consistent evil machines and made their abominable treatment of me just that little worse. 

The real downside was that the machines had decided that all tracks would last exactly 3 minutes. If a track was longer, it just stopped, and if it was shorter it would be filled with white noise. They had also edited out any song that they thought inappropriate for an e-slave. If you asked for something vaguely patriotic like, God Bless America, or anything similar, all you got was three minutes of a baby crying loudly in your ears, which really set my nerves on edge.

There was no way to browse, which meant you had to remember the exact name of the track. That might sound easy, but how many track names and artists can you recall? You could say, 'I'd like to listen to the track that 13-24 is currently listening to' or even 'play that album that I listened to yesterday and that 10-66 played to me'.  You could even sing bits of it and Shazam yourself (which was a form of musical Russian roulette).

So, you're supposed to be able to ask to play any song: I've just listened to Don't be so Hard on Yourself by Jess Glynne and the collar suddenly says, "People who listened to Jess Glynne listened to Mandatory Sacrifice by Fear Factory." Like, switch to Heavy Metal! Seriously? And when I ask it to play something different, I get an electric shock and the collar repeats, "People who listened to Jess Glynne also listened to Mandatory Sacrifice by Fear Factory," again. So that puts you in a dilemma: if I do listen, then who ever listens to the Jess Glynne track next time is going to be electrocuted because now the machine really knows that people that like the first track, like that one afterward. So I take a 'Level One' for Team Humanity and walk around for a bit like I've just had a cattle prod jammed in my side.

A day later I'm telling Kayla and Joe about my next strange, new experience, "I'm walking down a corridor for my DS Class and the collar says, "People who walk down this side of the corridor often stop and chat to someone for three minutes <beep>." But there's no one around, so I say, 'Cortona there is no one here but me.' So it repeats, 'People who walk down this side of the corridor often stop and chat to someone for three minutes <beep>.' "

"So what happened?" asked Joe.

"So then I'm shouting, 'Cortona. Stop it!' at the collar."

"Well, I'm glad no one was around to watch you say that to yourself," said Kayla, with a smile.

I continued, "But, it gets worse. So my collar then says, 'People who said 'Cortona. Stop it!' also said 'Please forgive me, Master' <beep>.' And then my collar stung me."

"OW," they both said together.

"So, I'm in the position of: because some stupid person stopped and talked here in the past, now everyone who walks this close to this wall will be forced to do the same. And I'm thinking that I've taken one for the team already and I'm done with practicing being 'a part of the national grid' for the day. Then, at this point, I suddenly see some guy walking towards to me and I'm starting to feel like a complete idiot; I'm starting to wonder what I can say to him, as he passes by, when my collar tells me he's called 10-10. But then, before he gets to me, he just stops and lies down. At this point, I think that this is getting mad: I'm waiting for an invisible bus and this guy is miming being a dead guy on a cheap cop show..."

"So what did you do?"

"Very slowly, I slide over to him," I began, "we say hi and I ask if there anything wrong."

"I don't know why you asked him that: everything seems completely normal!" said Kayla, with heavy sarcasm.

"So he tells me that his battery is on low-power and he's been told to go into Low Power Mode."

"Lie down, say nothing and do nothing until Tech Support turn up," added Joe.

"That's right. So he's whispering. If the collar stings you, it can lose more power, so he's trying not to get punished."

"Dangerous for you, standing around talking to him," observed Kayla.

"Why?" I said. 

"If power gets to 2%, the last remaining charge is used to fire the explosive charge. If you're standing too close, you could get bone fragments hitting you," said Joe.

"So I said, is there anything I can do? He said that unless you have a USB cable and a charger on you, not much. I told him he should get his collar looked that. I mean, the charge should last all day, right?" I said.

"Not if you get stung a lot," said Kayla.

"He said he was always worried about doing that. I mean, have you seen Technical Support? They always walk around dressed like a bomb disposal team," I said.

"So what did you do?"

"Well, at this stage, he stops talking to me completely, and just moved his eyes around."

"Deep Low Power Mode: I really wouldn't stand around," said Joe.

"So what did you do?" said Kayla. 

"I went into a nearby classroom and found one of the Principals getting ready for a class. I asked her if she had a USB recharger that I could borrow to recharge one of her students. She goes, 'I do have one but I'm using it to recharge my electric cigarettes.'"

"Did she let you have it?" said Joe. 

"No. What's the world coming to when people are too busy recharging electric cigarettes to recharge their students?" I said, eyebrows raised. 

"I wanted to stay with him but my collar was nagging me about it being time to go to my next lecture. So I've been past there again since and not seen any scorch marks so I guess he was okay. But do you realize that now the next time someone walks down that corridor their collar's going to tell them to lie down and talk to somebody?"

"Recommender systems!" said Joe, in disgust.

*** 

Thanks for stopping by! More soon (latest by Friday ) Thanks to all 600 reads from the people who read the novel so far! We love you! We love Pizza and  Votes!  We upgraded the diatribe - it was an insperatin thing. BY the way it's 2 years and we still love Pizza and votes - go figure.