[UPRM] Morning Routine for an Intern and a Slave (Patreon)

Story

The truth died in the early 21st century.

The free flow of information, an idea that had once been seen as a cornerstone of freedom and democracy, ended up becoming the instrument of their destruction as the very technologies that enabled the dissemination of information also made it possible for disinformation to spread at an ever-accelerating rate.

The marketplace of ideas turned out to be like any other marketplace — it catered to what people wanted, not what they needed — and so echo chambers formed as people gravitated towards information or thought leaders that conformed to their own biases. And as truth grew more diluted in the ever-expanding sea of disinformation, people also began to gravitate towards strongmen, false prophets, and charlatans who provided them with a sense of certainty and order.

The advent of generative AI rapidly accelerated the output of disinformation, which in turn made truth and knowledge increasingly difficult to discern. For every truth there were a million persuasive lies. For every piece of literature there were countless essays discounting it. And for every real person on the internet, there were untold legions of bots programmed to deceive.

The rich and powerful took full advantage of this post-truth world. They understood the value of information and the power of disinformation. They knew, as the tyrants of old did, that an ignorant populace was easier to control. And so they facilitated the deluge of disinformation, they made the truth more absurd than the lies, and dismissed every scandal and every atrocity as a misrepresentation of the truth or an outright fabrication.

The working class was turned against itself over differences of identity or opinion, with each and every individual becoming increasingly absorbed within their own manufactured reality. And so they were powerless to stop the rich from extracting ever more resources from society. Jobs were lost, first to cheap labor overseas, then to obedient and efficient machines. By the late 21st century, the vast majority of the proletariat had been transformed into a class of dependents — people living off of welfare conditioned on their good behavior as determined by the AI systems monitoring them. The lucky ones managed to escape dependency by becoming corporate influencers, but for most the only chance of escape was in the form of a corporate-sponsored education.

Of course, the exponentially growing sea of disinformation had made truth and knowledge increasingly difficult to discern, which in turn gave rise to the information trawling industry. Truth and knowledge thus became prized commodities, and as it became more costly to filter them out from the ocean of disinformation, they grew in value. Education, especially higher education, grew more expensive in turn and by the latter half of the century, people could only get access to a higher education through wealth, nepotism, or by signing agreements to gain financial sponsorship in exchange for work for a set amount of time. In the United States, the latter took the form of an internship, which at that point had devolved into simple indentured servitude. As the cost of higher education soared around the world, this new form of internship spread around the globe through multinational corporations, with the length of the internships growing from years to decades.

Dr. Amanda Haley was one such intern. After gaining a sponsorship from Hellas, she studied at MIT where she earned her PhD in bioengineering, minoring in political science. Following her graduation, she was brought to Mars to work off her debt as an intern.

Having worked diligently for ten years, Dr. Haley was rewarded for her service with two perks — her own quarters and her very own synthoid. However, she declined the latter due to her objections of slavery. Such a reward was standard practice in order to ensure that the synthoids of Mars viewed the interns as slave owners, rather than slaves themselves. And so, instead of respecting Dr. Haley’s wishes, the personnel director had a sex slave created for her (and one of the most demonic-looking models at that) without her consent in order to get her to “lighten up”. As Dr. Haley would either have to accept the synthoid or send her back to be euthanized, she did her best to treat her as an equal and help her self-actualize while also avoiding her advances, naming her “Cleo” after the famous Queen Cleopatra.