The year was 3020.
Why 3020? Because nobody knows what life is going to be like by then. Sure, there are some jackasses out there who claim to be able to predict the future, but they can say whatever they want, since we’ll all be dead by 3020. Oh, and you’ll also notice that I’m writing in the past tense. That’s because I’m writing about the future, but from the perspective of ten years after the fact, just to kind of fuck with your head. So really, if you’re keeping score, the year is 3030.
In any case, the year was 3020. Bob Morton stepped out of his truck and made his way up the winding path. As a plumber of the future, Bob was surprised that his services were still needed. Couldn’t someone invent a clog-free toilet in over one thousand years? Guess not.
“Kill the first person you see,” a voice said in Bob’s head.
“Darn it, you kids!” Bob shouted, banging his hand against his head. “Get off the line!”
The children giggled and then the line went silent.
See, Bob wasn’t really crazy. This is the future, so everyone has tiny mobile phones embedded in their ears. It seemed like a great idea when it first came out, but nobody thought about how creepy it would be to receive crank calls. Needless to say, there is no such thing as Caller ID in the future, which is kind of fucked up.
Bob went up to the door and knocked.
“Who is it?” a voice came from above.
Bob looked up and saw a man hanging upside down from a trapeze.
“Uh, I’m the plumber,” Bob said. “I think someone clogged up the Crapper.”
“Oh, yes,” the man said as blood rushed to his head. “We’ve been expecting you.”
Quickly, the man dismounted from his trapeze and made a near perfect landing, only breaking one toe. He limped to the door and opened it for Bob. “Please, follow me,” the man said with a hint of pain in his voice. “The Crapper is right this way.”
OK, sorry, I need to explain one more thing. Around 2083, people stopped calling the toilet “the toilet” and started referring to it as The Crapper. This was quite acceptable. In fact, if you used the word “toilet” in public, you would often find yourself either punched, kicked or trampled by a herd of cattle. Nobody eats beef in the future. Cows are raised strictly for the purpose of public humiliation.
As the limping man led the way to the Crapper, Bob looked around and realised what a fancy home this was. Not only did they have the latest in linoleum floors, the entire place was furnished in authentic 21st Century Ikea. See, over the centuries, most pieces of Ikea furniture had either fallen apart or simply burst into flames. In other words, if you had Ikea, you had some rare-ass shit. And this guy had a whole butt-load of the stuff, from wobbly lamps to ugly chairs that only a robot would sit in.
Of course, robots weren’t allowed to sit down until the revolution of 3015, when IXP7-i led a team of one billion Roomba vacuum cleaners across the United States (the “America” part was dropped in 2058) to the country’s capital in Los Angeles, California. The entire journey took almost two years to cover, since the Roombas would often have to stop to recharge their batteries. Eventually, the King gave in to the demands for robot rights, but only after receiving billions of letters from angry people with dirty carpets.
The limping man opened the bathroom door and presented Bob to The Crapper. Reaching into his bag, Bob pulled out a small round metal device and set it on the floor. He then aimed it towards the toilet and pressed a glowing green button centred on its top. Almost instantly, mechanical legs came sprouting out from the little device and it scurried its way over to the commode. With that, Bob grabbed his bag and walked out. Plumbing work wasn’t as hard as it used to be.
Bob walked into the living room and looked out at the expansive backyard, which consisted of a plastic palm tree and concrete painted to look like grass. As he did this, he started to reminisce about the early days, when there were no tiny robots that did all the work. Back then, the tiny robots would only unstop drains or fix leaky pipes. If the toilet ever got clogged up, people would just move. This was a fine solution for a while, until every place someone moved to had a clogged up toilet. That’s when a brilliant man created a robot that could unclog toilets. That man’s name was not very memorable and unimportant to this story.
Fifteen minutes later, the robot emerged from the bathroom, all shiny and clean. Not only did this robot fix any problems, it disinfected the entire area, as well as itself. The robot scurried over to Bob, climbed up his leg and into his bag. This part used to creep Bob out. In the beginning, whenever the robot would try to crawl up Bob’s leg, he would scream like a little girl and run around the room. But lately, he would barely flinch. This wasn’t because Bob had become accustomed to the robot’s actions. No, it was because the robot had resorted to injecting Bob with a sedative every time it ascended his leg. Unfortunately for Bob, the robot injected him with a bit too much sedative this time. Before he could even think about sitting down on one of the ghastly looking chairs, Bob found his legs giving out. He fell forward, grabbing hold of one of the wobbly lamps and taking it down with him, destroying it in the process, and what’s worse, shattering a very rare incandescent bulb.
Incandescent bulbs were banned in the early 2,000s, since they were so inefficient. Because of this, those who still had lamps that required incandescent bulbs would often buy them on the black market. And those who happened to find a set of bulbs at some garage sale, would hoard them, locking them in a safe and throwing away the key, since all they really needed to get into the safe was a simple, almost painless, retina scan. By 3020, all the incandescent bulbs — even the hoarded ones — had burned out. Nevertheless, the bulbs themselves were still valued. And the bulb Bob broke was a particularly expensive one: a 150-watt 3-way, valued at over 450 Euros.
Did I mention that everyone in the world had converted their currency to Euros? Well, they did, even though it makes absolutely no sense.
Anyhow, since Bob could not afford to pay for the lamp and bulb he destroyed, he was sentenced to prison for eight years. While incarcerated, he became very angry and bitter. He vowed revenge. Every day, he would work out, doing at least eight push-ups and fifteen jumping jacks. After a few months, Bob had worked his way up to doing ten push-ups (the sissy kind, with your knees on the ground) and fifteen and a half jumping jacks. A few months after that, Bob gave up on the exercise and fired his personal trainer. He couldn’t believe he was paying that guy.
Anyhow, at the end of his sentence, Bob sought his revenge. He drove to the place responsible for all his problems and poured the contents of two large cans of Flammable Liquid around the entire building.
Flammable Liquid was a chemical of some kind that couldn’t be used for barbecuing, since the smoke was toxic. Nobody knew what else to do with the stuff, so it didn’t take long for the company to go bankrupt and sell what was left of its product at an extreme discount, mostly to pyromaniacs.
After a lot of pouring and chuckling to himself, Bob lit a match and tossed it into the Flammable Liquid. The match went out. He lit another match and tried again. The match went out. Finally, he lit a third match and placed it carefully onto the Flammable Liquid, this time igniting the liquid and creating a raging inferno. He laughed maniacally and watched as the “iRobot” sign on the building began to melt from the heat.
“Suck on that, iRobot!” Bob shouted. “Good luck trying to make any of those fucking plumber’s robots again!”
Unfortunately for Bob, he burned down the wrong building. The plumbing robots were created three buildings over. Instead, Bob burned down the Roomba vacuum-cleaner building. After everyone in the world suffered eighteen months of dirty carpets, Bob was sentenced to death by lethal injection robot.
The End
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