Real World/Technology

Every day technology grew more powerful, more encompassing. People just accepted this as the way things were. No one questioned it. No one grew alarmed when things that once required effort now could be done with the simple push of a button. Out of coffee? Press a button and it is delivered to your hand freshly brewed and ready to drink. Need to go to the bathroom? Press a button and your waste is extracted from you. Even the very act of waking up in the morning was no longer a task requiring effort. Your alarms goes off and wakes you up. But people did still want to do things for themselves. Those things just no longer required effort to do. AI had entered the creative fields so the competition was no longer in favor of the human artists. It was no surprise then when the technology reached the point where humans no longer needed clothes to function.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's go back some 15 years to the first time a human gave up doing a task for themselves. The man's name was Larry. He was a brilliant man. He was also VERY lazy. He hated having to do simple things like wash his dishes or mow his lawn or even roll out of bed. Like I said, he was VERY lazy. At the same time, he was a brilliant inventor. His inventions had improved life over and over. He perfected many machines that had been invented by others. His driving for his inventions was making his life easier...and in-turn the lives of others, but mostly he was about being as lazy and effortless as possible. It was this drive that caused him to invent a machine that would remove all personal effort from a very simple task, peeing. I know. Gross, right? Well, despite the rather disgusting nature of the task, it caught on fast. Larry had been working on his device for nearly three months.

Every bathroom break he had to take just pushed him to further improve the device. You might be asking why didn't he simply wear diapers. Well, the thing was he was lazy, brilliant, and...shy. He didn't want anyone to know that he wasn't using a toilet to...relieve himself. So the day he finished the device, he was ecstatic. Dropping his pants (he wore no underwear as it was one step too many for him), Larry slid the device onto his penis and activated it. Nearly instantly, he moaned in pain as his penis was locked away forever out of reach of a toilet. Larry was lazy and brilliant, not sexually active. He also tended to not think ahead. He had wanted the device to be secured when he was walking around. He never really thought about the other use for his penis in that moment. As the tube of the device began to syphon his bladder dry, Larry smiled a huge smile. He would never again have to stop to pee. He still would have to stop to crap, but that was another issue entirely.

Right now he would celebrate his latest successful invention. As this was the only item on his todo list for the day, and being the lazy man he was, Larry walked slowly up to his bed and fell asleep for the rest of the day. Pulling back the covers, Larry yawned and fell onto his mattress. He pulled the sheet up over his body and was out like a light with in seconds. Larry slept well that night. His dreams were a bit strange, but nothing he hadn't had before. Waking the next morning was not so normal. Larry pushed back the sheet and went to sit up. Or at least he TRIED to push back the covers and sit up. it seems in the night Larry's invention had...evolved a bit. Specifically, it had now encompassed his entire lower body from the waist down. Larry couldn't sit up because he no longer had the ability to bend in the middle. He carefully swung his legs (such as they were) out from under the covers and placed his feet on the floor.

Scratching his head for a moment, Larry thought about what he might have screwed up. He couldn't for the life of him remember anything that could allow the device to grow so much over night. He had designed the device to learn from his behaviors in order to anticipate his needs, but it wasn't supposed to be able to grow, much less adapted like this. Larry waddled (he still couldn't bend his knees) over to his dresser and tried to figure out how to get pants on over his... He stopped as it suddenly occurred to him that he was already basically wearing pants. As he had this thought, he moaned as the "pants" rewarded him for his correct thinking. He would still need to figure out how to get down the stairs without bending his knees. Larry continued out the door to the hallway. With each "step", though, his movements grew more fluid as the pants shifted to better accommodate his walking.

It seemed the nanites he had used as the basis for the pants was still learning. He could only hope they learned enough to allow him some freedom from them. He now headed down to his kitchen to make breakfast. The energy his pants were draining from him was enhancing his hunger. Cereal, toast, and coffee. Like clockwork every morning. This particular morning there was something slightly different. Specifically, he didn't need to stop eating breakfast to pee (or, as he would later find out, shit). Once he was full, he left his dishes on the table with all the others. (I told you he was lazy, right?) Walking down to this lab, Larry flipped on the light. That was the last clear thought had for nearly 3 hours. When he came to, he no longer understood even the basic principles of using a toilet. Looking at his wall clock, he sighed as he would need to hurry if he was going to get that upper body invention completed.