Joe, a golem technician

Joe sat on the driver’s seat of his idling car tired from a night of bad sleep at a hotel his company had paid for him. His job as a golem technician required him to travel the country, often to cities that didn’t have a corporate presence or a golem maintenance center, and today Joe was in an unremarkable medium sized town sitting in front of a large-ish hospital.

The hospital Joe was parked in front of had started purchasing golem doctors a few years ago, even after doctor scripts were banned by the government, turns out that finding qualified candidates for cheap in less desirable locations such as this city wasn’t an easy task, so this hospital in particular chose to go the let’s say “earthen route” to solve it’s staffing issues.

“Okay, let’s take a look at today’s list of patients”, said Joe knowing the irony of his words as he brought up his tablet and logged on to the company app and brought up his assigned golems for the day.

* Albert Whitman, Male, 62 years old, Room 203, divorced.

* Pierre Montclair, Male, 49 years old, Room 417, divorced.

* Fatima Hassan, Female, 45 years old, Room 608, married.

* Natalia Petrova, Female, 53 years old, Room 812, married.

As Joe eyed the list of golems, he saw the same pattern emerge again. “Huh, divorced men, again? What’s the deal with hospitals ordering so many old divorced dudes lately, seems like this pattern has been happening in every hospital I go to. Anyway, let’s see how they look like” said Joe as he tapped on his tablet and suddenly each row had a portrait picture of the golem with a blank expression, Joe had always thought these must have been taken right after sculpting and before they actually got a personality script as a) they were naked, even when the frame barely showed their shoulders it was pretty obvious and b) because god damn did they look mindless in these pictures, thought Joe as he eyed his roster for today.

Seeing the golem’s true nature used to unsettle him, Joe remembered in his early days, in one of his first assignments he’d had to perform maintenance on a particularly bubbly school teacher golem right after seeing her emotionless portrait on the app, it unsettled him a bit as she offered him a drink and brought a chair all the way from the back of the room to her desk for him after he introduced himself as the maintenance man (golems are scripted to treat employees like Joe as IT technicians), he could tell this golem was programmed to be a very kind individual, perfect for a school teacher, just as her owner asked his company to design her, he thought. Over time Joe’s gotten used to this contrast, it’s just something he has to see every working day, except when he’s in the office filling paperwork or doing some BS corporate training course.