The Service Revolution
©2008 Tyrone Vincent Banks

PROLOGUE

“How are you today?”

Silence, uncomfortable silence. Perhaps he was speaking softly or perhaps she thought that he was on a wireless phone. Maybe she thought that he was hitting on her. Either way, this was a battle that Steven Lamberdt was going to win.

“So, how are you today?”

She continued to ring up his strange purchases; a stack of science and computer gels, cough syrup and two gallons of synthetic milk. Maybe the nerdy magazine gels made her feel uncomfortable. Maybe she didn’t speak English. She was a small girl perhaps 19 to 20 years of age with lifeless eyes and a thin line for a mouth.

“I was trying to be polite – you know, with the whole ‘how are you today statement…”

She replied in a rather rude tone; “You see my face?”

Steven thought; Okay, she speaks English.

“That’s how I’m doing today!”

Steven replied in a low whisper; “Okay…sorry I asked!”

Steven attempted to use his charm to overwhelm her as he asked; “How much do I owe you?” After this statement he flashed his best smile. This was the smile that his ex-fiancée claimed to be the reason why she fell in love with him and also the reason why she left him claiming that he wasn’t serious enough for her. He focused on the clerk’s face and waited for a warm response. I mean…come on…who could be that mean?

She abruptly turned the small monitor around and pointed at the subtotal displayed on a dark LCD display.

Steven was growing tired of this game and he retrieved his wallet and pulled out his debit card. He swiped the card and tried to finish the transaction as quickly as possible so that he could exit the unfriendly store.

The clerk ejected the cardboard receipt chip from her printer and dropped it on the counter. She looked past Steven and said; “Next!” in her unfriendly tone of voice.

Steven exited the store and walked quickly to his Van, de-activated the alarm and dropped into his seat. He threw his purchases on the passenger seat and looked at the receipt chip in his hand. He activated it and read the message:

PLEASE CALL US TO COMMENT ON YOUR VISIT TO SVS AND GET
10 % OFF OF YOUR NEXT PURCHASE!

The wheels started to turn and he found himself imagining the appropriate revenge for such a painful shopping experience. He would call the number and tell them what happened and give that store the lowest rating that he could muster. They would call him back and ask him to repeat the story and then formulate a plan to prevent this type of customer abuse from happening again. They’d call the store manager and within a week that rude little girl will be out the door and looking for another job.

This was the perfect plan! Steven placed the chip in his shirt pocket and felt revitalized with a new sense of purpose as he started his van and cruised back to his house with a goofy grin pasted across his face. He pulled into his driveway and turned off his van. He grabbed all of the purchases and lugged them over to the driver’s side and exited the vehicle.

He entered his small house and walked into the kitchen. He placed the milk in the refrigerator and tore open a box of cough medication. He struggled to see the small writing on the box and tore the plastic that connected the dosage cup to the bottle. He “guestimated’ the proper dosage and filled the small cup and downed the medication.

He bundled the thin magazine gels under his arm and walked down to his basement/laboratory and sat at his cluttered desk. He looked for his cordless phone but after several seconds of searching it was no where to be found.

He called out: “Phone!”

He scanned the room and repeated: “Phone?”

Seconds later he could hear a commotion inside the Simulator chamber that he designed years earlier. The door shot open and a small metallic bot rolled through the room. It was small, flat and about the size of a large dinner plate. It glided across the room on an almost invisible pillow of air and stopped at the bottom of Steven’s desk. The device lowered to the floor and a multi-colored chamber of light projected to the ceiling and took on a humanoid form. It was devoid of any defining features but very three dimensional.

The being extended a hand formed out of the flickering multicolored lights and presented the phone the Steven.

“Hermes, what were you doing with the phone?”

The being replied; “its Saturday boss! It’s Pizza day!”

Steven laughed and asked: “And what were you doing in the Simulator?”

“Just compiling some research!”

“Hermes, I only designed you with a 100 terabyte memory chip and you have to be very careful with the information that you download. It could be dangerous!”

“I got it boss!” Hermes reply was tainted with a New Yorker type of accent that was not a part of his original programming.”

“See, case and point!”

“Whatcha talkin’ about boss?”

“That accent – where did you get it from?”

“You know, bada bing – bada…”

“Stop Hermes, where did that come from?”

Hermes replied in his programmed voice that sounded like Steven Lamberdt.

“Just something that I acquired in my travels!”

Hermes was programmed to respond to his environment and mirror the voice patterns and the mannerisms that he encountered. Steven could recall the time that Hermes got into a database of gangster rappers and began to pepper his statements with rather creative profanity.

The doorbell rang and Hermes dropped down into his transport mode and followed Steven upstairs. The doorbell rang again and then several times until Steven opened the door.

A very impatient delivery guy stood at the doorway holding the large pizza at an angle that Steven calculated to be about 120 degrees.

“Yo boss, you want this pizza or what?”

The delivery guy’s accent explained the source of Hermes’ latest vocal trend.

Steven handed the deliveryman his debit card and he retrieved his card reader from his belt and ejected the tray. He placed the card on the tray and the unit beeped twice indicating a successful read. He handed Steven the device and his thumbprint sealed the deal. Steven returned the card reader and received his sideways pizza in return.

“Alright boss, you have a nice day!”
“Likewise!”

Steven slammed the door and placed the pizza on the kitchen table. Hermes zoomed over and materialized next to Steven as he opened the box. The pizza was folded and stuck to the top of the box. The annoying voice chip implanted in the lid proclaimed: “Thank you for your business, please call again…thank you for your business, please...”

Steven closed the box and Hermes handed him a flat metal object. Steven ran the device over the box and reopened it. The annoying greeting was replayed but the pizza took on a more palatable appearance. Steven sat at the table and pulled a slice out of the box and folded it in half. Hermes sat across from him and reached into the box and grabbed a slice and took a large bite.

Steven looked at Hermes and admired his handiwork. Hermes had evolved from a crude looking hover bot made from a vacuum cleaner with a voice synthesizer to the enhanced being that he was today. He was one of many secret projects that kept Steven away from his fiancée for weeks at a time and one of the causes of his failed marriage attempt. He spent decades trying to revive a struggling research lab to make it productive facility. He spent all of his savings and a portion of a generous inheritance attempting to keep Lamberdt Tech above water.

In the end, his company would succumb to an aggressive land developer intent on leveling the lab to make “The Mall”. The land developer managed to grease the palms of local politicians until the lab was shut down for environmental reasons after a bogus report of nuclear waste being dumped on the property. All lies; but enough to cause Lamberdt Tech to consolidate all of their activities into Steven’s basement.

Steven’s fiancée’ took this the hardest - being that she wanted to marry a man with a tangible source of income versus a man with great ideas that never went anywhere. After she left, he was consumed with his work and spent hours thumbing through his journals and listening to spontaneous recordings that he kept on his modified cell phone. He patented a few ideas and he was able to eek out a living as an inventor selling products online.

He could recall Hermes’ birthday. One afternoon as he sat at his desk downing bottles of cough syrup, as opposed to the hard liquor that the ATF prevented him from buying, something happened. We’ll discuss that embarrassing ATF event later. He sat at his desk as his robot vacuum whizzed through the messy room attempting to collect debris from various canyons etched through mounds of papers, magazines and journals. The vacuum passed through a neglected nanotech experiment that ran unmonitored on the floor.

The vacuum was trapped in a particle stream that attempted to transfer bits of information between two points via small atomized nanobots. Steven’s idea was to use nanobots as a type of genetic clay to replicate complex items and reproduce them in different locations. He determined later that these nanobots were vacuumed into the device and enhanced its navigational and air handling abilities. Steven was awakened from a codeine induced stupor to witness the bot blasting piles of papers into the air encased in neat columns of air currents. Once the obstacles were lifted, the vacuum cleared the floor underneath, placed the papers back on the floor and continued with its task.

Steven spent several minutes chasing to fast vacuum bot in an attempt to examine it. He named it Hermes; after the Greek god of speed. If only he had known that he had to simply order the bot to stop; it would have saved several minutes and several experiments that were destroyed in the ruckus. Once he opened Hermes he noticed a change in its internal structure. His circuits were covered with a nanobot paste and his internal components were pressing against the weak plastic container.

Steven enlarged the container until it was about three feet tall and not a very good vacuum. The internal circuitry continued to grow until Steven was able to condense the contents into a small terabyte chip mounted onto a flat device propelled by a thin layer of air molecules. He installed several vents on the top of this device and the unit projected a beam of light that was approximately six feet high.

Hermes’ evolution continued with little programming or interaction from Steven. When he merged with the web for several minutes, the influx of information shaped Hermes into a humanoid form that utilized forced currents of air to create his sense of touch and ability to handle objects in a manner similar to his human counterpart. Months later Hermes developed the ability to communicate vocally and he mimicked the sounds that he encountered and some of the profanity that we discussed earlier.

Hermes’ ability to eat was also an amazing factor discovered by accident. One afternoon Steven sat down to eat his weekly pizza as Hermes’ stood nearby watching him. Steven pointed to the pizza and asked: “would you like a slice?”

Hermes replied; “Yes, I would!”

He proceeded to sit down, grasp a slice in his “air fingers” and raise it to his mouth and took what looked like a bite. Steven was amazed and discovered later that the food was being broken down in a particle stream inside of Hermes’ mouth and then redeposited in a folder kept inside of his internal database. Every so often Hermes would “dump” the info out of this folder but it was clean and odor free (thankfully!)

Steven attempted to repeat the experiment and create more beings like Hermes but he was not successful. Perhaps Hermes was meant to be the only one and besides – in the wrong hands he could become a powerful weapon. Therefore, Hermes became a companion for Steven and essentially his best friend.

They spent hours together in the simulator chamber strapped into chairs as information, sights, sounds and smells inundated their minds. In the Simulator; Hermes took on a feminine form and the two of them would spend hours dining in the finest restaurants, traveling to exotic locations and shopping after “bumping” into each other at various locations. This is what Steven liked; regardless of where he traveled there would always be a woman interested in him and eager to go out on the town with him. In the simulator Hermes became the companion that Steven lacked in the real world.

After eating, Steven sat back as Hermes absorbed the rest of the pizza in to his “leftovers’ file” for future consumption.

Steven announced; “Let’s do something different today! I’ve had this fantasy…”

Hermes interrupted; “I hope that you’re not thinking of…”

“No Hermes, not that, I need you to help me brainstorm and create a solution to an epidemic that we have been experiencing for years! It seems that humans fail to value the consumer / merchant relationship and they take their customers for granted!”

“Steve, have you been drinking?”

“Just two tablespoons. Hermes, let me finish! My vision is to remove the human equation from customer service. I mean, look at us, I’m a human but I get along better with a being like yourself. Humans are too complicated and rigid in some of their ways. If they’re having a bad day they have to make sure that everyone around them has to have a bad day as well. We don’t say hello to each other anymore, they’ve outlawed hand-shaking…”

“What are you saying? You’re tired of being a human?”

“No, that’s silly – I’m just tired of humans treating other humans like crap solely for their own edification…it’s an epidemic! That SVS girl, that rude pizza guy – we patronize these people and keep them in business while they act as if we’re interrupting their day! What are they there for and why do we need them?”

“So what are we gong to do about it?”

“No idea Hermes, I need to think about this. There has to be a solution! It’s not just a rude girl working behind a counter at the store, it’s more than that. The government has allowed only one chain of stores and one chain of pizza restaurants to service the country and we no longer have a choice. They’ve allowed one church, one fuel company, one automobile…what’s next? And with all of these so-called advances we still have poverty and starvation…”

Steven sprang to his feet causing his chair to topple over. Hermes was curious about this irrational behavior but he’d seen files and documentation on this phenomenon. In Latin it was called non compos mentis which is commonly referred to as insanity. Hermes felt that he had to do something to help Steven because his bio-signs were extremely sporadic.

“Steven, I normally wouldn’t be saying this but maybe you should have a drink…”

“No, Hermes, I’m fed up! The people no longer have a choice in any matters and everything has been left up to the selfishly appointed government agencies with their own one-sided interests. You know who owns SVS and the Pizza Place?”

“Yes, Randolph McGreggor.”

“And who is Randy’s older brother?”

“President Ralph McGreggor!”

Steven was livid as he paced across the kitchen rubbing his head and face vigorously.

Steven began to shout; “You see where I’m coming from Hermes, this has to stop! The President of the United States awarding an exclusive Retail contract to his younger multi-billionaire brother? That should be illegal! I have one drink too many and destroy a construction site and I lose my right to purchase liquor. They purposely manipulate and exploit the taxpayers’ dollars and they get away with it! He should be investigated by the Justice Department – but who runs the Justice Department?”

“The President’s wife…”

“There you go Hermes! This is insane and someone has to stop this! Someone has to stop all of this!”

“And who might that be Steven?”

Hermes’ vocal patterns indicated that he already knew the answer to this question.

Steven replied; “Me! I’m going to start a change. I’m going to start a revolution and bring things back to where they need to be. I’m going to start a Service Revolution!”

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 02.07.2008

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