Where Have all the Flowers Gone?

Hugh Jorganson shuffled out of his front door and leaned heavily on his cane as he picked up his morning paper. He glanced around for his neighbors briefly, out of habit, and was struck again by the change around him. He should have been used to the towering structures that had replaced the quiet neighborhood in the last few years, but he tried not to look outside much anymore.

Hugh turned and shuffled back inside, where he pored a cup of coffee from the old coffee maker on the counter. His back was to the fridge unit as always, but he imagined he could still feel its disdain at his insistence in using such a simple machine. He glanced at the fridge and huffed at it. He had never wanted the new fangled machine anyway. The deliverers had just shown up one day, barely pausing to knock before removing his trusty, simple old refrigerator and replacing it with this new one. They had even taken away his old stove. Not that the new fridge would have allowed him to get uncooked food, but it was the principle of the thing.

He had never gotten the hang of all the new gizmos the Artificial Intelligences kept coming up with. Ever since they had been created, and given charge of everything, anything that involved manual labor was replaced with a machine or new update. No simple human had worked for anything for years. Maybe that’s why the obituaries were full of suicides these days.

Hugh sat and reminisced for a few minutes while his coffee cooled. The first AI’s were heralded as a breakthrough. They were expected to be the quick fix for all humanity’s woes. After all, they were just machines, right. That was before the ACLU declared that AI’s were people, too. Once they got the same rights as everyone else, they took over all the jobs, because they were more efficient and harder working that any human could be, but they didn’t need as much money to live off of, so the extra went to support those that lost their jobs. After twenty years, the world was basically a welfare state. Although people had plenty of money, and what ever they wanted, they were not content.

First there were riots, efficiently put down by the AI’s in charge. Then there was an upsurge in creative efforts, but there was only so much time that most people could spend writing poems. Meanwhile, the human population decreased every year, with more and more of the deaths due to suicide than to old age. People couldn’t take the boredom, or the lack of purpose once everything was done for them.

Lately the obituaries had been getting smaller, though, Hugh thought as he turned back to his coffee and paper. What he saw on the front page stopped him mid-thought.

Half of the front page was taken up with a picture of himself as he stood on his porch that morning. The caption said “Hugh Jorganson, age 98, was the last human alive. Record show that he was still in good health on Wednesday, when he died by doctor assisted suicide. When asked, his doctor said, ‘he was just tired of being alone.’”

Hugh stared, perplexed, until he was interrupted by a knock at the door.

“Hugh,” he heard the voice of the AI doctor. “It’s time for your annual checkup.”