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  Chapter 4

  I was just finished with an old dy paying her bill and picking up her car the next day when Matt burst into the shop area.

  “Hey, check out the news feed!” he said excitedly, bouncing up and down and shaking his datapad.

  “Hey you know the rules! This is the shop area! You cannot be seen anywhere near the shop!” I barked.

  “I know but, this is big! I had to tell you right away!” he said gesturing wildly.

  “Matt!” I yelled.

  “Please!” he protested.

  He’s not even cleaned up from work and looks dirty and scruffy.

  “Fine.” I hit the button on my datapad for the 3D projection to activate. It filled a good chunk of air with the 3D projection in mid air. We’re both stunned as the colorful and vivid violence on the screen is spshed into the air and light particles.

  “Riots? Are you kidding me?” I said again.

  “That’s only a few miles from here,” I protested.

  “Man, this pce is going to the dogs,” Matt echoed right after me.

  We watched as there was tons of rioters on both sides throwing bottles and stuff at each other. Someone tried to ignite a Molotov cocktail but he was taken down and beaten by police savagely. Ironically they weren’t throwing stuff at the police, which was the case in some past riot footage. There seemed to be two different sides to the riots and they were cshing against each other. There were signs on one side usually things like, “we want our jobs back!”, “make America employed again”, “Nuke China so we can hav our jobz back,”, and “death to android lovers”, on one side.

  The other side was sharply porized and a different view. “More androids to fight the Russians and all stupid people who should die,”, “Androids are people too,”, “the old and infirm need android helpers to live”, and “Haterz shud die!”, and “you lost your job becuz u cheated thru sckool, not bcuz of androiz foo,” written on whatever people could find like cardboard or pieces of drywall. Of course the most popur signs of all were, “don’t take away our sexbots!” written in bold colorful lettering, along with “android sexbots don’t spread disease like HIV, or hepatitis-K!”

  That one made both of us snicker and ugh but that was what people really thought. It was common and accepted in our society that people were turning to sexbots to have a way of life. All androids were viewed subliminally as a sexbot in one way or another but people disliked saying it openly because of legistion from android companies. I can’t remember how long it’s been but the term sexbot has been universal with androids for years.

  By now there was open brawling in the street and there weren’t enough cops to contain anyone. The news reporter and her cameraman started moving farther away to get to a safe distance while they filmed.

  “The question is, are the riots getting closer? And are they growing?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know man. But if they were there would be like people telling us to leave…I think,” he said.

  “I don’t know. We have to look out for ourselves,” I countered.

  “You would think they wouldn’t be so dramatic,” Matt said pointing at the images. “Since the employment ws have changed you can still find a job if you want too. And they have banned employing robots over humans.”

  “I heard rumors some foreign pnts overseas aren’t following it though. What do you think about that?” I asked him.

  He shrugged, “I don’t know man. It’s just I think people are shing out. If people want to do evil, they’ll find a way.”

  “Maybe. The surge in illegals trying to get inside the country again does indicate that the rumors of foreign factories only using robots could be possible?” I said aloud.

  “I don’t see those rioters as being any one demographic. They look like an equal mix of just about everyone under the sun,” he said pointing to the feed.

  “Well that’s just here in town. I don’t like that,” I frowned.

  “You think that’s bad? It’s everywhere dude. Just check this out,” he flicked a button.

  Sure enough there were at least seven other states that also had protesters rioting at the same time. Ferguson wasn’t a surprise since they’d become the riot capital of the world running straight for over three decades and had lost their utilities several times because of it, and had become a haven for criminals in the st thirty years. It was like the new thing among young people to brag that you lived in Ferguson for at least 6 months.

  But Atnta, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, Henderson, Nevada, and Trenton, New Jersey surprised me since they didn’t typically have social unrest problems breakout in outright violence. The Los Angeles feeds were showing not only riots, but fires raging as people were setting fire to stores, bashing cars to pieces and smashing gss everywhere and it was all visible from the air. They tried to throw and shoot stuff at the news hover copter too but that didn’t work out so well.

  “Damn!” Matt excimed.

  “Maybe I should lock up and close the shop just in case,” I said nervously. Ten miles from here…seriously? Who would have thought it could happen. Sometimes you think that bad stuff will only happen to the other guy who lives with risky behavior…

  What the hell, I kept thinking while Matt and I stayed glued to the video news feeds. We both carried baseball bats around just in case, since the riots were pretty much just ‘down the street a ways’.

  I’d long ago learned trusting people too much wasn’t a good idea. So I had a nice heavy iron bar and cinder block fence with a gate around the property. Right now that was my soce and peace, knowing it was tall enough to not attract any attention.

  I kept it chained shut at night with a good solid steel thick cable, which Matt hated. But we’d already had a talk about cheap rent means no damage to the property and no night visitors as part of its conditions. He’d compined about it almost daily a couple years ago, until I suggested he go live somewhere else.

  Then he shut up right away.

  Things had been so quiet tely.

  But now we were allied and facing the riots. We ended up sealing up all the windows as best we could and barricading the property. We still looked for new news updates while considering where we could go if the riots came here. I didn’t like the idea of leaving with just the shirt off my back without putting up a fight when I already had a good fence up.

  “So do you think you’d do it?” he asked.

  “Do what? Riot? What’s the point?” I said wondering what he was thinking.

  “No, not rioting. A sexbot,” he said using the street term.

  “I think you mean android,” I said.

  “Whatever dude. You can’t tell me people aren’t thinking it inside their heads. It’s therapeutic to have someone sleep with you and too many people want money to sleep with someone instead. When not in public people openly call them sexbots,” he said reminding me what I already knew. He seemed anxious to talk about sexbots.

  “Really? I need to get out more. I only here people calling them androids,” I said.

  “That’s because half your customers are old people that probably shouldn’t even have a license still. Just go to any bar and you hear sexbot, not android,” he countered.

  “That’s…probably true. But usually meeting people in bars isn’t the best way to live,” I thought, remembering Mrs. Williams st year. She’s tried to pull into my shop and hit the gate posts pretty hard. She’s been to old to drive but flew under the radar because her car was an advanced model with a really good autopilot navigation system. Her insurance company was good to me though, and I’ve fixed it myself to save money.

  “I kind of think that getting a sexbot is the way to go, man,” he said. “I think you should get one bro,” he added with a strange look in his eyes.

  OK that was just a bit creepy. What was that supposed to mean? I pretended not to see how much of a weirdo he was looking like just now.

  “But don’t you want a real family?” I asked.

  “Somehow I thought that was the way to be but look at society and what’s going on? The divorce rate is 68% in the first ten years from the newest stats. Also it’s the Rickers vs. Bryce case that’s ended things in the U.S. for any future as a male,” he said finally.

  “Ouch. I don’t even want to think about that. I was hoping there’d still be some good women out there,” I concluded.

  Rickers vs. Bryce was the equivalent of Roe Vs. Wade but instead of for abortion it had to do with women supremacy and almost free alimony to women. It was a nationwide fight that sted over a year with legistion passing with 62% majority that women were automatically allowed alimony for life, no matter if there were kids or not from a marriage where a divorce occurs and no matter how long the man was married to her. From then on a man had to prove why he shouldn’t have to pay alimony of up to 40% of his income, even if it wasn’t a first marriage on the part of the woman. It had made people afraid to marry, but because of it android ‘sexbot’ sales had risen ever since and continued to climb.

  “You know I never got how that legistion passed. I think they paid off the judges like they used to sixty years ago,” Matt said scratching his head.

  “Well think about it. When genetic manipution was implemented in society there were a higher rise in the female to male ratio,” I said, sipping a cold soda.

  I still liked 7up, even though it was considered tame and an old people’s drink and almost unknown to teenagers these days.

  Matt preferred synthahol, which didn’t actually make you drunk; but I also suspected he was mixing his synthahol with a real alcohol together some of the time. He’d gotten fired from one of his jobs for that a couple years ago. How often he fell off his motorized skateboard in my driveway also proved he was sometimes drinking, or at least had no motor skills if he wasn’t.

  It was weird though that despite a higher female to male ratio men had become almost sves in the modern age if we were ever to try to get married. I think it had to do with the fact that as society became more modern and more able to sustain people with less of a struggle to survive that people appreciated beauty more...and obsessed about it. It seemed to be they worshipped beauty and ever since they didn’t have pressure to survive, men were appreciated less and became like tools.

  Thus, most the guys I knew were paying child support to more than one girl, and she was milking it. There were also rumors of corruption in paternal DNA testing, despite the fact that the science itself could be very accurate. But a lot of people couldn’t help but think and truly believe, ‘what if the person that was carrying the tray to and from the b with the specimen’ wasn’t ‘accurate’, even if the specimen tests themselves were infallible.

  “Well if you think about it, all those dies have to protect their investment. That’s why they protest androids or ‘sexbots’ so much. They are afraid of losing their monopoly,” Matt said, falling into one of the couches.

  “You don’t look so good man. Are you feeling OK?” I asked him.

  He had red rings around his eyes, looked scruffy, and his shirt was buttoned up all misaligned by a button. Plus he looked feverish and sweaty. Matt did drink sometimes but I’m not sure if this was from that or not because it didn’t quite look like burn from the bar. He wasn’t slurring his speech much now either.

  “I don’t know. I just went to my med scan today. They gave me the DNA repair pills you know to keep you ‘living young forever’, but I got like some kind of reaction from them,” he said.

  He didn’t have slurred speech and didn’t smell of alcohol so I wasn’t sure what to think.

  “You know my dad never trusted those. He could never expin why. But the idea of being able to live forever seemed like cheating to him. I just can’t believe that there isn’t going to be some kind of side effects from those,” I said.

  I didn’t know Matt was interested in those kinds of things. A lot of people were, but they didn’t know if the medical technology could be trusted. There were rumors that it a certain 1% of the popution became homicidal from them.

  Matt turned to me again before getting ready to turn in for going to sleep. I could smell synthahol and vodka mixed together in his breath, “I still think you should get a sexbot man. It would be totally awesome to have one of those around here.”

  What the frick?

  Does he think I would share it with him? That’s so icky. You don’t share your woman with others. I needed to get rid of Matt. It was only a matter of time before he stepped out of bounds.