The Jubilee

The Jubilee was always the place to be for anyone and everyone looking to have a good time. Since around 2072, about the advent of GM's newest and consequently only functioning hovercar, it was the epitome of the future of gambling - state of the art, automated, even the staff. After Sophia took storm a few decades before, AI was the future of the working class. Instead of the clone-war-esque duplicated models portrayed in days-past sci-fi novels and films, our robotic counterparts far exceeded their basic functionality.

Marion Longstreth, as she was known since her last lines of code were incorporated was one such employee at The Jubilee. Though she longed for what seemed a flashier position on the floor, Marion was a number cruncher - a mundane task for someone who, quite literally, could do it in her head. The other AIndividuals (as they had collectively decided to call themselves), envied her position in the accounting and financial retention department. After all, what is more important to a casino environment than the person keeping tabs on the money.

Marion was part of a groundbreaking 'generation' of AI that relied on various automated random resequencing algorhythms that emulated uniqueness, and therefore, were exponentially more life-like. Though not physically, this generation of AIndividuals grew over a period of years, absorbing and accumulating information and skills and based on their fundamental programming which functioned something like interest. She and her cohorts decided what they wanted to learn, what they wanted to do, how they wanted to dress, and how they wanted to behave (within reason that was). The creators meticulously designed and tested a series of ethical subroutines to ensure that, for example, Marion wouldn't decide she wanted to take over the entire world and enslave the human race forever; a concept that overarchingly ended the Sophia craze decades prior (to deleterious effect).

Marion, having taken a liking to both numbers and people, excelled at pattern recognition. This gave her insight into both understanding and predicting human behavior to great effect. It was this part of her programming that attracted the attention of The Jubilee's AI Talent Management Department, so much so that they had offered her a $20,000 sign-on bonus, something unheard of in the AIndividual community. The TMD was basically the AI equivalent to human resources, though that department, ironically enough, had many AIndividuals in service.

Most AI employees were considered contracted. This was mostly in part to a ground-breaking case in which an AI lawyer, Cyril Sutton, won basic rights for the AIndividual community, essentially ending what one might have called endentured servitude. If you wanted the services of any particular AIndividual, you had to hire them.

For The Jubilee, Marion not only kept track of the accounts, but upon a detailed review of surveillance footage she could often predict any number of outcomes on the casino floor. This varied from who was about to win quite a bit of money to who was going to continue to throw away (which was more common) their life savings.

Another prominent casino department was Leisure Lending and Deferred Accounts Receivable. If you were wondering, that is in fact bureaucratese for borrowing money and then having to work it off. If you cant endenture AIndividuals, why not the willfully ignorant?

Marion, who rather liked 'people' (though their quirky idiosyncracies often baffled her) sometimes thought if such services would exist if the people pulling the proverbial strings at The Jubilee had ethical subroutines of their own. Though she was happy to be in their employ, as head of the financial retention department, a loophole in her contract allowed her employers to exploit her penchant for pattern recognition in that should she determine someone was about to win, they would often send one of the AIndividuals on the floor to attempt to dissuage them from continuing their play. This would often entail free beverages from the bar, coupons to Sparks (The Jubilee's very fine restaurant), a ticket to the Leisure Lounge (where ladies and gentlemen could enjoy the company of the AIndividual of their choice), or a free entrance to a game of black jack or poker. There were other methods that further crossed the line, nearing unsavory impropriety.

Marion would often, unbeknownst to her employers, record these incidents in a small black notebook, so as to keep it on her person. It was against policy to remove any records from the corporate offices, but as these were her own meticulously written observations, her subroutines never flagged this as unethical or deceitful.

The casino was quite an operation. It towered over the city, a sparkling jewel on the horizon. It resembled something like the Great Pyramids of Egypt, albeit made of a much newer material. A few years before it was built, an AIndividual by the name of Preet al-Shazai had discovered a material as strong as steel, but shiny and opaque like obsidian. It was of this that the structure had been designed and lent to its austere and commanding appearance.

Being a 24-hour operation, most employees worked 12-hour shifts. Marion worked until midnight each day. This still provided her free time to explore her individuality, as she required neither sleep nor sustenance. Most AIndividuals had a system for routine maintenance and digestion, however. Just as computers need sleep to run tests, AIndividuals ran procedural scans to diagnose any potential mechanical and/or programming errors. These mostly being conducted by nanobot like mini-computers, similar to the cellular functioning of humans. Futhermore, neural gelpacks weren't just a thing of science fiction anymore.

Often, at the end of her shift, Marion would walk the casino floor to make observations of her AIndividual and human contemporaries, mostly for her own enrichment and enjoyment. It was on one such occassion that Marion's life changed forever. One might could say that she could blame it on midnght.

It was 11:56 and Marion was finishing up her observations for the evening. She had access to a feed of the casino's security cameras, similarly to the head of security, whose office was adjacent to hers. Doing a final scan of what had been a very routine and mundane shift, something caught Marion's visual processors off guard. There was a man, though she couldn't tell if he was flesh or fuses, watching a group of machines that had been played by one particularly unfortunate gentleman all evening.

She had noticed he was probably about to win when, Laurelle, a financial retainer on the floor, sat down on his lap and convinced him to take her for a drink at the bar. By that time, it would have been a miracle he could have afforded it, but he was apparently unable to fail to acquiesce to her request and followed suit, however forlornly. The gentleman who had been watching from afar surveilled the room, including eyeing the camera she had been watching, before nonchalantly sitting where the man had been.

Marion decided this would be the best opportunity for her to put her skills to good use and emulate one of the AIndividuals on the floor. She finished up her paperwork and pulled a mirror from her desk to make sure she was presentable. She had won the proverbial lottery when it came to her physical appearance. She wasn't very tall, but she was slender with olive colored 'skintex' (a substance that felt very much like real skin, but was molecularly more like silicone), raven hair, and brilliant green eyes. Any AIndividual could to some degree alter their appearance easier than their human counterparts, but Marion had been pleased with her own random generation. She coiffed her raven curls into place and headed to the elevators.

One of the more interesting architectural features of The Jubilee was it's external elevators, ensuring that prying eyes never saw the internal cogs of the beast at work. Luckily, Marion's programming never developed a fear of heights or the perception of vertigo, as her department was nearly at the top of the pyramid. The apex was, as one would imagine, for the corporate offices, or the lion's den as many of the AIndividuals called it. If you were called up there, usually for any reason, it was certainly not good. Marion had only ever been just inside the penthouse foyer, as the casino's founder had personally wanted to wish her luck in employment as he handed her the $20,000 check that had set her apart from her counterparts.

The view was stunning. Snapped out of her reverie by the chiming of the doors, Marion turned and entered the casino vestibule. It, too, was quite a sight. Tall ceilings dominated the main floor, which sprawled across the bottom three fours of the complex, which was also composed of several floors of hotel rooms for guests. The quarters for the less-fortunately endentured were below ground level and it was expressly forbidden to go there. Accessing her memory engrams, Marion extrapolated the location of the camera she had been viewing and went in search of the mysterious figure.

The man was sitting at the same machine, sipping what appeared to be a dirty gin martini. Marion was quite sure this machine was going to hit in a matter of plays, but the man was just sitting there, martini in hand, staring blankly at its screen. Marion straightened her blazer and skirt and stepped closer to the man, who was wearing a suede trenchcoat and matching fedora. The fedora was obscuring her view of his face in the reflection of the machine, but before she could get much closer he spoke. "I was wondering if you were going to search me out... Miss Longstreth." Though it was physiologically impossible, Marion felt a sinking feeling in her abdomen she knew to be to unease.

"How do you know my name?" she asked cautiously.

"I know quite a bit about you," he replied, "I'm the one who initiated your progamming."

It was highly irregular for a human who worked in programming to at all know anything about their 'children,' for lack of a better word for what the AIndividuals were to their programmer counterparts. It was also frowned upon and against the regulations put in place by the AIndividual Rights Coalition, an organizaiton created by AIndividuals after the groundbreaking Sutton case.

"What do you want," Marion said frankly, "If you do indeed know who I am, then you know why I have come and I must insist, for your own benefit, you leave the casino immediately."

The man ignored her and continued, "I am here because I know you are especially empathetic to the human condition and knowledge you possess could free the people that The Jubilee have emprisoned in the name of capitalism. The same servitude your kind had been forced to live in before Cyril Sutton fought for your rights."

"What could I possibly do for those that won't help themselves?" Marion inquired.

"You, who gained so much from this establishment, are in the position to do something uniquely human... to defy your programming and your employers... and show true compassion. All I need from you... is that little black book."

As she looked down at the book she had nestled in her hand, she realized the man was right. She was partially responsible for helping The Jubilee entrap humans not dissimilarly to how the AIndividuals had been endentured, stripped of their rights, and put into servitude.

Her programming seemed to scream for her to stop, that this was the true wrong, but it strained against the ethical subroutines deeply engrained within her artificial psyche. "But, why? Who are you?" she asked as she handed him the booklet.

The man grinned slyly and tipped his fedora. Marion was shocked; he was certainly no programmer!

"I don't believe we've met. Cyril. Cyril Sutton," he said as he took her other hand. "And, together, we're going to change the world."