Warden

have the meal of your choice delivered directly to you, and while you ate it you could socialize with friends across the city—or the world—just as if they were in your own living room.
Most of the buildings and stalls weren’t labeled in any way: customers were apparently supposed to guess what was offered based on the displayed goods. Then again, with all the machines flying about, maybe humans weren’t the intended audience anyway. Or at least, not the preferred audience.
Those few people she saw out and about were dressed in loose, drab clothes, selected so as to not stand out, she thought, with hooded cloaks draping their heads and shoulders. To a man, their eyes seemed defocused while they walked: they studied empty regions in front of the different shops as if viewing something only they could see.
The cloak Rhea wore was little different from those of every other citizen. She fit right in. Well, she was one of the few who kept the hood raised, but hey.
Will showed her how to access the public profiles of the scarce passersby via her HUD. This allowed her to see their age, occupation, and whatever else they wanted to share publicly—basically the equivalent of the “feeds” or “walls” one often found on social media when looking up someone. Even the robot vendors had public profiles, though their feeds were usually blank.
Up until now, Will had stayed roughly in the middle of the path, equidistant from the buildings on either flank, but now he swerved toward the leftmost side. Horatio and Rhea followed. As she neared the buildings there, suddenly she knew what the few passersby were looking at.
As soon as she got within three meters of each stall or building in turn, augmented reality popups would overlay her vision, inviting her to explore such creatively named stores as “Bardo’s Battery Emporium—Best Lithium Salt in Rust Town.”
As she continued, the overlays appeared with such profusion that they began to become annoying. Though sometimes they obscured much of her vision, they were translucent, and any real-world objects behind them were outlined a bright blue, preventing her from accidentally running into anything, or anyone.
“Gotta love AR spam,” Will commented.
When she neared a rather decrepit looking cargo container, the overlays took a turn to the pornographic, and she quickly learned how to deactivate them entirely.
The instant her vision cleared up, she couldn’t help but sigh in relief. She also realized that roughly half of the graffiti on the surrounding buildings had vanished at the same time. It made some sense that virtual graffiti would be just as popular as the real-world variety, if not more-so.
A drone the size of her thumb buzzed down from above and swerved toward her face. She batted it away. The drone hummed angrily, righting itself.
A panel slid aside in the door of the decrepit container beside her, and a shady looking man peered out.
“Hey, wanna come work for me?” the man said. He glanced at Will. “Whatever he’s paying you, I’ll double it. Girl like you could make a fortune in this place.”
Rhea realized her face had been caught on the drone’s camera and pulled her hood tighter. She took a moment to examine the decrepit building, which looked like it was made of four or five ancient cargo containers stacked together.
“No thanks,” Rhea said, and began moving on.
“You sure Missy?” the man pressed. “Chance of a lifetime here.”
That made her pause.
“Leave her alone,” Horatio said, turning around suddenly. The robot took a menacing step forward.
The man retreated a pace, and Rhea could see his raised palms behind the door slit.
Horatio grabbed Rhea by the hand and led her forward. She didn’t mind his tight grip. It seemed comforting, somehow. She wondered if she would have felt the same way if Will had grabbed her, and that thought worried her.
She started when a loud clang came from behind; glancing over her shoulder, she saw that the panel in the door had slammed shut.
“Guess we offended him,” Rhea said.
“He offended us,” Horatio said. “There’s one thing you have to learn out here, Rhea. And that’s you have to stand up for yourself. Man, robot or cyborg, if you show weakness to anyone, they’ll try to take advantage of you.”
“Even you?” she said. “Or Will?”
“We already took advantage of you, in a way,” Horatio said. “Signing you to that contract.”
“The terms seemed fair to me,” she commented.
Horatio nodded that blank face, saying nothing more.
On one of the buildings, Rhea spotted a strange sign that was still visible in the real world—it depicted a baby surrounded by a circle, plastering the entire front facade of the stacked cargo containers.
“What’s this?” Rhea asked before she could look it up on the Net.
“A fertility center,” Will replied. “We don’t allow natural evolution anymore, not in the rich quarters or the slums. If you want to get pregnant, by law you have to visit a fertility center. They’ll take your egg, wipe away all the chromosomes, and replace them with a standardized set of two, creating a fertilized ovum. Those standardized sets are slightly randomized, trait-wise, so we don’t all look the same.”
“But why go through all the trouble?” she pressed. “If they’re going to randomize it anyway?”
“It’s only randomized for a few mostly external traits,” Will explained. “The rest are set in stone. According to the government, this way there’s no chance of hereditary diseases. Plus, it avoids the risk of humanity slowly devolving over time. You see, as far as natural evolution is concerned, you don’t use something, you lose it. Like the tailbones we carry, vestiges of the prehensile tails we used to have as primates. Or our appendixes. Useless in every way. And because of all the mental augmentation we’ve had available to us over the past century, parts of our brain are being used less and less across vast swaths of the population. No one needs to perform complex calculations in their heads anymore—we have a chip for that, or AR to