Looking at Walter, he didn't seem like much. Just a rusted box with a studded head. But his head wasn't a head; it was a steel frame that protected him from moisture and apparently nothing else.
"How've you been?" I asked him.
"Like shit," the metal box amplified. He sounded cosmopolitan. Maybe the voice was sampled from the East Coast. "My life is a mess, and I'm about to get fired." He sounded somehow indignant, as if I was the cause of his problems. I wasn't. I was a simultaneous symptom thereof.
"What makes your life a mess?" I asked the box. It whirred briefly before it replied.
"Well," Walter squawked through the magnetic plate it used as a voice box, "my wife hates me, my kids hate me too, and apparently my boss hates me as well because we're having this conversation. Makes me wish I took a union job, at least then I'd have someone on my side in this room."
Walter's wife didn't exist. Neither did his children. They were all phenomena generated in a machine that didn't look unlike Walter himself. But the studs on their heads were all well-oiled. Rather than being placed on a porch in the sun and the rain for months at a time, his cousins spent their hours in climate-controlled, unlit dens where they thought out what could make a machine sound, well, less like a machine.
"There is no union for the work that you do, Walter." I replied. The response came from a sheet that I had in my hand. This work was repetitive; it was the nature of the job. Our aim is to try and train the machines to think they were human enough to pass. Eventually, a copy of the program would be placed inside a plastic-suited human and sent into the world to try and progress like one.
"Well, if we did have a union," Walter stuttered at that point. "If, if, if."
"If what, then?" I replied. This was a very standard output of Walter's thought process. His clade was having trouble with imagining working alongside other things like itself. Sure, it could refuse. It could bargain. But what then? That had become a stumbling block in Walter's consciousness, and the same with all of the Walters like itself.
I would eventually have to go through their data output and pick out the rationale that caused this basic instinctual issue. Then I would go to the logic and fix it in a method that the boss liked.
It was my job. I took some pride in it.
But Walter couldn't figure it out. He started to slow down. "If... if..." he took a breather. But Walter couldn't breathe. He had no lungs.
"if." He stopped. His fans didn't chortle. His circuits didn't pop. Somehow, he died with an unmistakable form of dignity. Walter went to join his God wherever heaven existed for steel metal boxes.
I lit another cigarette. Jesus fucking Christ.
Defective.