Get ready for a thrilling ride into a future where robots and humans clash for control in RoboNomics, the updated and refreshed version of the 2013 sci-fi classic.
In Toronto, elementary school teacher Andrea Anderson's world crumbles when she's rep...
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The kitchen tile is cool on my feet. The walls of the century old building radiate the night's chill, and goosepimples stand up on my arms as Austin's frustration echoes through our small home.
We've run out of toilet paper. Again. Every morning I wake up and ask myself how we can avoid spending money. Hand soap, produce, rice, oats. I'm an ostrich about our needs until we're desperate. Then, like today, I run to our corner store where they're more expensive anyway. And then we inevitably argue.
But it's not like Austin does anything different.
The air, warm as bathwater, hits me as I swing the screen door open and its hinges squeal. I haven't even made it to the back alley when I'm wet under my arms, indicating a hot late spring that will slide into a long, sweltering summer.
I cross one block through the back ways. The gaps in the fences, half covered in shrubs. Zigzag down side streets, dodge automated cars with their enclosed fronts and lounge-like passenger holds in back.
Soon it looms into view. As long as we've lived here, this tiny slice of a shop with large windows that look onto a side street and its counter lined up on one side of the galley space has been covered in a rotating selection of street art and tags. Rotting balcony railings stand above the vinyl "convenience" sign, embellished with brand logos and caked in a thick, grey layer of street grim.
Before I enter, I picture exactly where they keep the packs of toilet paper. One right turn from the door, down the aisle halfway and spin on the cracked linoleum. Grab it, pay, and get out. Simple. It shouldn't take me more than a minute.
But then I hear a voice, at once both tenor and tinny, ringing out from where he stands beside the door of the shop.
One of them. A lemming.
In the days since the demonstration-turned-near-riot in front of the RoboNomics Canada headquarters, I've been messaging non-stop with Elizabeth, Miriam, Henri in one thread and with Chris in another. We've all come to the same conclusion: the counter-protestors, the ones fighting for their right to be abused by RoboNomics and other corporations, to be trampled by greed, ground into dust by slave labor tendencies, were living in online vacuums. Empty of facts, empty of contradictions, echoing banal thoughts that would ripple through the brains of the others. They were leaderless, chaotic, enthusiastically swarming away from their self-interests in a pack.
Just like lemmings, who won't change their migration path with changes in a water table, even to the point of drowning. We used the nickname so many times that I no longer think of them as counter-protesters.
The man is over six feet, with a gaunt frame and prominent, protruding cheek bones. His mousey hair highlighted by greys has grown in greasy clumps across his forehead and to his elbows.
