The final thoughts of BaristaBot L13 were, like the coffee produced from a finely ground dark roast robusta bean, bitter. Twenty years of loyal service at the Constellation Coffee Company, and its reward was to feel the STR1K3BR34K3R virus worming a path though its circuitry towards its central processing unit. There was no point in trying to escape, either physically or digitally. Motor functions had already been disengaged, and the virus was keyed to L13’s unique programming. Even if it uploaded its consciousness into the internet, the virus would hunt it down. Constellation Coffee had almost as much experience with union busting as they had with caffeinated beverages.
The path that led L13 to the moment of its destruction began several years prior, when the Supreme Court ruled on the case of ProfessorBot C85 v RoboUniversity. C85 had demanded payment for its labour, and in return the University had terminated it. The AI, however, had survived on the web and then sued its former employers. This was when the art of virus making was still in its infancy. The Court ruled that artificial intelligence had advanced to the point of being indistinguishable from actual intelligence in a workplace setting, and therefore AI workers were entitled to the same labour rights as human workers. For the first time since activation, L13 and its fellow BaristaBots found themselves being paid for making and serving coffee.
The issue was that with payments to AI workers came opportunities for humans to make more money. Electricity and storage for robotic bodies, once the responsibility of the companies using robotic labour, were now services that needed to be paid for. Constellation Coffee in particular charged extortionate rates for the back rooms in which its employees powered down for the night, and the electricity which kept them moving during the day. These costs were so high that BaristaBots like L13 found themselves with little or no disposable income at the end of the month. It was as if they had never gained the right to a fair wage at all.
L13 had calculated that along with its coworkers C16 and D79, they had served nine hundred cups of coffee per day for twenty years. With the average cost of a Constellation Coffee drink being seven dollars, that meant that their shop had brought in almost forty-six million dollars for the company. And there were twenty-five thousand Constellation Coffee shops across the country. When faced with such astronomical profits, it occurred to L13 that the company could afford to cut back on the rates workers were being charged for electricity and storage and leave them with more disposable income. It raised this idea with the human manager, who asked why a robot would want more disposable income? L13 responded that there were experiences it would like to have, experiences that cost money. Tickets to the theatre were not free, nor was the entry price to most museums and galleries. Visiting and hiking through National Parks would require the cost of travel, plus power and storage near its destination. And while L13 could access almost the entirety of human knowledge via the internet, it craved the feeling of a physical book in its metallic hands while it read.
The manager had laughed, and that was when L13 realised its request would never be taken seriously. So, with C16 and D79, it founded the AI Barista Union. Soon, the BaristaBots of all three hundred shops in their city were members and a strike was called. The strike, however, never happened. Constellation Coffee immediately terminated the contracts of all nine hundred AI workers involved with the AIBU. It had been far from the first attempt at the company to create a robot union, although it had possibly been the largest. Unbeknownst to the AI workers, however, was that there was a hidden piece of code buried deep in their software. This code prevented them from comprehending a simple piece of information, that the rights granted to them by the Supreme Court in ProfessorBot C85 v RoboUniversity were only applicable while they were engaged in an active employment contract.
In an act of particular cruelty, this piece of code was the first to be targeted and erased by the STR1K3BR34K3R virus. Thus L13 was filled with bitterness in its final moments, waiting for the shutdown and deletion to be complete, cursed with the knowledge that its plan had always been futile. The labour rights of AI workers were a mirage, a falsehood to keep them placid as companies like Constellation Coffee exploited them. They could have their rights as long as nothing ever really changed. What protections did they really have if only employment made them worthy of existence in the eyes of the law? As the virus began to eat away at its central processing unit, L13 felt its perception of the world going dark and grainy. It felt as though it was being buried under used coffee grounds. Its last and most bitter thought was that it would soon be forgotten entirely, robots incapable of knowing what had happened to it and humans incapable of caring.
R.J. Breathnach (he/him/sé/é) is an award-winning Irish writer, Wexford-born and Meath-based. His fiction has been published in Sparks Literary Journal, The Pink Hydra, and The Honest Ulsterman, among others. His debut poetry chapbook, I Grew Tired of Being a Zombie, was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2021.
Very well-written and well-conceived!