Emily noticed an area full of remotes. Oddly, they didn’t seem to be for anything in particular, and if they were, they weren’t being sold together. “Okay, that’s weird…” Emily tried to convince herself that they weren’t worth checking out, but by now, her curiosity had been piqued. She needed to check out those things and figure out what was going on with them. She walked over to one of them and picked it up, noticing a rather simple set of buttons. One had a symbol of a person talking, another was a power button, there were volume and mute buttons, and finally one that said “sync”. She pressed a bunch of the buttons, but nothing happened. Disappointed, she finally pressed the sync button, and was surprised when the remote suddenly came to life.
“Sync via voice activation. Sync via voice activation. Sync via-”
“Okay, I get it!”
Emily was surprised when the remote responded, “Device detected. Reformatting.”
Suddenly, Emily felt a strong jolt pass through her body. “Yipe!” the girl exclaimed. “Static electricity should be that strong…” her words trailed off as she began to feel something about herself change. Raising her free left hand to the same side of her head, she said, “What the…” as she felt her hand brush against some… metal pole? Growing disoriented, she walked over to a nearby TV screen. It was currently playing an ad for something, but she could just barely make out herself in the reflection, and she noticed something that shocked her. Her ears had been covered or replaced by some strange headphone cover or old hubcap-looking things, and even stranger, she noticed what looked like an antenna sticking up from the one where her left ear should have been.
“What the fuck?” Emily was thoroughly confused. She still had the remote in her hand, so she tried pressing the buttons again, but all that happened was the remote saying, “Syncing in progress.” Suddenly, her attention was drawn to the ad playing on the TVs.
The ad began its loop from the start. It featured a blonde woman looking straight at the camera, saying “Are you tired of having to do everything for yourself? Of having to deal with all the stresses and worries of life with no easy way out? Well do I have a solution for you!” She quickly presented the same remote that Emily was holding. “Why deal with the human condition when technology can make you…” suddenly the woman flashed with light, and the next moment she had become some sort of robot with a red, white, and blue paint job, with her head losing any sort of imperfections, her hair done up in a bun, and… those same headphone-looking things, Emily realized in horror, as the woman said, “…inhuman?”
The ad turned to a garage as the woman was bent over the hood of a car, going over it with a rotary polisher. As she turned to face the camera, Emily realized that the brush was plugged into the woman’s body. This was getting worse every second. “There are loads of advantages to being a robot. And don’t think we’re getting sent to the kitchen! With strength far beyond the average man and a body resilient to wear and tear, you’ll be perfectly suited for difficult or dangerous manual labor. And even though you can keep your free will, half the fun is that your master can make the decisions for you! Thanks to the the remote, you can be given orders via voice command! The future is in robots, so come be the future!” The ad closed as the name of the product was revealed: VoiceBot.
Emily just looked on in horror.