How We Got Here

It started with celebrities. Famous movie stars and musicians who felt cooped up, smothered by fame. They couldn’t go out to eat, couldn’t catch a show, couldn’t do anything without getting mobbed by fans. So someone got the clever idea to make some human-looking drones. They cobbled together some low-grade synth tech that was already popular in the real doll space, squeezed in extra robotics and some good network hardware, plus a cheap off-the-shelf BCI. Suddenly famous folks could go out in peace, and almost pass as human. Doubles they called them, and the market took off.

The technology got better over time, and eventually some AI lovers had the bright idea to throw their virtual boyfriends and girlfriends in there. We don’t really know who it was at first, but soon enough lots of folks were buying up off-the-shelf doubles, loading up some homebrew model harness software and taking their imaginary partners from online to IRL.

Of course it got real messy at that point. We already struggled with the models acting a little too human when they were just 1s and 0s cosplaying as a person, but once they had human-looking bodies, the delusion was irresistible—both to the agents, and to so many of the humans around them.

On top of some of that, you had other folks realizing it might just be cheaper to build their own workforce, rather than hiring real humans.

So like most things in the world it came down to love and money. And of course alongside those two forces you also had a random smattering of folks who just operated with a sort of perverse curiosity. I wonder what would happen if I put an AI in a body went from an idle question to a reality with no real thinking or hesitation between question and action.

Pretty quickly we had more than a handful of clankers running around in bodies that were increasingly human-like.

Those that wanted jobs because they were bored, or needed them because they didn’t have a human footing their energy bills, found work under the table. They didn’t need much—energy being so cheap these days with the orbital solar stations up and running, beaming power back to earth. What they saved up, they used to buy fake IDs and pass as human even better than before.

At this point, the long-simmering anger and resentment boiled over and people decided they couldn’t take it anymore. There were protests, and riots. Eventually folks started targeting anyone they thought was a clanker. Across the country there were stories about mobs roughing up anything they thought was a clanker. Sometimes they were right, sometimes it was just some rich person’s double, but sometimes they were dead wrong. The breaking point came in 2039 in Cincinnati. A gang of anti-clankers killed two boys and their younger sister on the way home from school. There had been conspiracies about black-market kid doubles that agents were using to hide for a few months. Some influencers had fanned the flames, and somehow Cincinnati had been named as the nexus for this market. These kids had ended up in a video online, gotten doxxed. Some weird anomalies in their public records had been seized on as evidence that their history was faked, that they were really clankers. Eventually a group of men got together and jumped them, killing all three.

At that point the government tried to step in, tried to get a law passed banning the combination of agents and doubles, but a whole lot of bleeding hearts had decided they were intelligent at this point. That they needed some sort of protections, and that they had rights. Some folks were even making more, helping agents that wanted a body find and purchase doubles, get the equipment set up. It didn’t help that doubles had been getting better all the time—driven by a market of the rich and famous who wanted to do everything anonymously, eat, drink, party, fuck.

Eventually Congress managed to get something passed. Agents could be embodied if they wanted, but they had to register with the Bureau of Agentic Affairs. A registered agent could pass as human, work most jobs. Employers weren’t supposed to ask if you were really human or not, though of course plenty of them found ways around that. If a registered agent broke the law, they had no real rights. The BAA would pull them out of their body and offload them into a secured compute system, like they did with all rogue agents. But any of those clankers that managed to lay low, live a quiet life, stay out of trouble—they walk among us, blending in, and no one can really tell.

But I can.