Much more than just sport, Talinz permeate everyday life,
and affect the way people interact with each other and with society. These frames
tend to be offered in two general formats: those for domestic use, and those
for industrial use. Their jobs vary widely within these two very broad clades,
and they are present in every economic sector, for better or worse.
Domestics
People will always clamour for the next new gadget,
especially if it is billed as something that makes life easier. And just like
the washing machines and the televisions of a post-war world before, the Talinz
fell into the newfound prosperity gap of the post-Baku treaty era. For a
one-off fee, small maintenance costs and a slight addition to the electrical
bill, a family could have a machine to take the kids to school, take care of
them if they were too young, or if parents had to stay late, manage the family
finances, and wash, cook and clean to boot. It was too good to resist.
In the present, Talinz are extremely common. With a few
exceptions – mainly from those who are opposed to their existence altogether,
or those who have a political interest in ‘liberating’ the frames – every
family has one. One might see a few hundred whilst out walking through a busy
shopping centre, many likely out doing weekly groceries for their families, or
perhaps picking up more specific items. If a family has a fancy new model, you
might find it indistinguishable from a human walking down the street.
Such robot-human similarities has led to a number of campaigners
attempting to enforce some kind of identification protocol, or stop production
of these human-likes completely, under the grounds that mistaking a human for a
Talinz unit could lead to any number of awkward or dangerous social encounters.
Opposition to these groups have been strong, however. Many want more human-like
figures. The common people have begun to empathise with Talinz in a heretofore unseen
way, and having a housemaid that looks less robotic enough and so doesn’t scare
the children is always a bonus. With Hana Electrics’ use of common fictional characters
or the social media interfaces offered by the American Landon Corp, many people
want their Talinz to look as
authentic as possible. Some, it could be said, might even desire some of the
social awkwardness that comes with that.
Outside of domicile servants, cafes and restaurants staffed
entirely by Talinz units, or staffed with a mix of human and human-like Talinz,
have become quite popular. Some more upmarket outlets might even purchase ‘skin
models’ – skin-like polymer coverings constructed from images of an individual
to create a perfect likeness – and challenge customers to guess whether they
are being served by a human, or a robot.
Such an industry has created a hotbed for crime, however.
Police can often be taxed by bodies that look lifelike until they sit under
autopsy. Life insurance companies have been pressuring to shore up regulations
after a number of seemingly cut and dry deaths resulted in huge payouts, only
for it to turn out that a remarkably lifelike decoy had been placed in the
individual’s stead.
Two years ago, workers at the Metropolitan Police department
found a body so badly disfigured that any attempts to identify it were notably hindered.
Police scrambled to find the killer, but couldn’t seem to find an appropriate
dead or missing individual by any of the records they had. When the killer was
found, it was more by luck and chance than anything else. When a few
inopportune statements were made at a dinner party, a swift smack to a
seemingly-human jaw revealed a Talinz frame beneath a low quality, thin skin-model.
Tobias Moore, the killer, it occurred, had murdered his partner in a fit of
rage after an argument that resulted in the other attempting to end the
relationship. In the following week, Tobias, a Talinz technician by trade, used
the body to construct his own frame from scratch, with his partner as the
model, before dumping what remained in the Thames to attempt to clear away the
evidence. He had rebuilt his partner’s memory using their social media
profiles, recent internet purchases and search histories, supplemented by a few
recordings of calls they had made. It was capable of interpolating from recent
events to give the illusion of memory, and easily gathered from records of
school friends and connected media a number of useful recollections of the
victim’s life before they met Tobias.
It took 18 months to find him. None of their closest friends
had noticed.
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