Margaret and AIden. Unfinished thing I had to write for school

this is very unfinished and not entirely reflective of their actual universe (since I had to tweak some details to fit the task, + it still being a very bare bones wip). rereading it now it is not very good and I already wanna change a ton of the wording.....oh well 

(also realizing now how weird it is to say AIden is only 7 years old. for clarification that is how old he is since production and release, but hys body + mind is that of someone in their 20s) 

TW: mentioned car crash(es) with a short description of one 

Year: 2162

Place: Drammen, Norway

Characters: Margaret (57, she/her, human), AIden (7, he/hym, android) 

Margaret followed the narrow sidewalk home. She was a server maintenance worker, one of hundreds at her company. The pay wasn’t impressive. Her heart wasn’t really in it either. As a child she had fallen in love with building her own computers, machines, and robots. Nowadays all that was done by other robots, the programming then filled in by AI. Humans were barley even needed for the design process. Server maintenance was the only thing that let her into the heart and guts of the machines she loves so dearly.

Self-driven cars rushed past her, the models getting older and older the closer she got to her scrappy apartment complex. She remembered when the first self-driving cars came on the public market, maybe fifty years ago when she was a young girl. She remembered far more vividly the catastrophic car crashes that followed with their release. Car manufacturers had brainstormed the cheapest ways to create the new self-driving cars. The cost being the safety of the humans in and around them. 

Margaret barley dodged one of the aforementioned death machines. The memory of a gnarly car crash flashing before her eyes. Witnessing it as a child she had never gotten over it. Amidst the blood, gore, and machine she’d wondered where the organic matter even started and ended. She shook her hands, pulling herself from the memory. 

Her apartment building was old. A brutalist thing built around 2080. You still had to scan a physical card to get in. If the scanner didn’t work that day, then though luck to you. The elevator was the only fully functional thing in it. Margaret breathed a sigh of relief as she got into her cramped apartment. Here she was surrounded by her beloved machines. Some were from before 2100, ancient artifacts that were her most prized possessions. None of them worked anymore, their planned obsolescence kicking in not long after their production. Despite it, Margaret had pulled (out) the hardware and built it into newer machines. That way she could explore and test their software as much as she wanted. 

Exhausted from her monotone workday, she grabbed a microwave dinner from her freezer. The image plastered on the packaging was a caricature of the actual contents. Absentmindedly she turned on her TV, the news blaring. Her phone had connected to it when she stepped through her door. Through its vast collection of data on her, it knew she always put on the news when she got home exactly at 18.21. 

After 4 minutes in the microwave her tasteless meal was ready. She watched the news as she ate. A robotic voice went coldly over that day’s disasters. Occasionally a 3D scanned model of some long dead news anchor would appear alongside the despairing footage. As the need for energy had skyrocketed there had been no will to stop using fossil fuels. Thus, ecosystems continued to deteriorate. Natural disasters scattered millions of climate refugees. Each year the heatwaves got worse. Even in Norway, where she lived, winter didn’t last much more than two months, rarely getting colder than -10 Celsius anywhere. 

The news were one of the few programs not entirely computer generated. Almost every series or movie was made with some sort of AI. Margaret had stopped going to art museums ten years ago when she discovered none of the new images were made by humans. Most historical artifacts had been copied and recreated in the name of protecting them. It felt too inauthentic to go see now. 

The door to her apartment opened. Looking up from the news Margaret saw AIden. He was an older android who’d ran away from his administrator two years ago. A few months back she’d found hym collapsed near her workplace. He’d almost been out of energy, and back at her apartment she discovered severe damage to his internal hardware. After fixing hys body, AIden had stayed. He had nowhere else to go, and in hys own words, Margaret could use the company. 

(check out my art blog to see their designs and my other ocs :3)