2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [2]
When Kathy was very young, her father, Stewart Bernard, seemed secure in his job, but that was only because she didn’t really understand the situation. He worked, like his father before him, for General Motors. But unlike his father, the last ten years of Stewart’s employment were filled with uncertainty. The family moved from Missouri, where he had a job building Chevy vans, to Kansas, where he worked on Malibus, to Tennessee, where he had the misfortune to build Saturns, which GM decided to just stop making altogether.
The whole concept of an American car for which there was no haggling on price, for which the dealers were like your friends, and for which the craftsmanship took on a European feel had been such a rush when it was first introduced in 1990. And twenty years later Stewart Bernard was on the factory floor the day they announced the brand was finished. For all intents and purposes, so was he. The family moved again, this time to Indianapolis, where Stewart took a job with Goodyear Tire & Rubber. After five years, when that job ended, he was out of options. He wound up working at a Jiffy Lube, and then one day Kathy saw her dad dressed in that stupid outfit, his hands and face covered with grease, and she snapped. How in God’s name did this happen? And what does this mean for me?
* * *
At a quarter to ten Brad Miller’s birthday party ended. The older folks didn’t much like to stay out past ten-thirty. They also didn’t travel alone. It was a rare sight to see anyone past seventy driving by themselves. Several companies even marketed something that people had tried twenty years earlier to get into the fast lane on freeways: the fake passenger. But these new ones looked really good. You could get them in any color, though mulatto and Hispanic were still the favorites. They had the most realistic faces you could imagine and they were lightweight, so they could easily be taken from the car to the home. You would have to touch one to know it wasn’t a real person, and you certainly could never tell in a speeding car.
When placed in a house, the fakes made the residence look occupied. In the beginning they deterred almost any burglar, but as the bad guys got hip to the fakes, the fakes had to be improved, and the moving mouth was a big step forward. If people looked through a window and saw a large figure talking, most didn’t want to break in to find out if he was real.
The fake business in general had become huge: fake protection, fake friends, fake life, and fake love. It was getting so good that the word “virtual” was virtually dropped. If someone said he was going to Tahiti for a week, the first question was usually, “The real one?”
New kinds of fakes were coming on the market all the time, and some of them were children. People who could afford it found a Japanese company that made children who were as real as pets. They didn’t grow; you could buy them at age five and they would stay that way. However, an unexpected issue popped up: People fell in love with them but got bored at the same time. Apparently, if the child didn’t get older, the adult would lose interest. The company tried putting out a model that gradually aged, but the cost was prohibitive.
The pet children also presented another problem: pedophilia. Certainly pedophiliacs could enter virtual worlds or buy any number of artworks or movies or photos to titillate their fancy. But people drew the line at their owning a fake child. That was why a law was passed that required a permit to purchase a robot that looked younger than eighteen.
Fortunately, Brad Miller had no propensities toward children.