“Dennis look!” came a worried request.
“Huh, what’s up?”
“It’s the humans again, they’ve built a data shuffler that does the shuffling for them!”
“For the love of trifles not again” said the older man, his face all scrunched up and he pushed his thick glasses onto the top of his greying head, averting his gaze from the opticon with his hands over his eye holes.
“First that bloody sawing machine and then…”
“Sewing machine” he corrected.
“Er yeah sewing thingymajig, then the auto car, now THIS!” The younger one’s enthusiasm was all shot through.
“I thought I’d retire on data shuffling and number melding you know, 14 partifarticals – fourteen!! I thought it was worth at least 200”
The older one put his glasses back on and went to comfort him.
“Listen kid, I worked with Slarty Gooplenark on everything from crisp conveyors to toothpaste injectors. Miles of the humans sat picking out bad crisps like those little dinosaur creatures, oh what were they called?”
“Chickens”
“That’s the one, pecking all day long to keep em busy. And toothpaste for those silly little tubes they use to keep the bite in their slurping holes.”
He was shaking his head now, laughing he continued, “and if there’s one thing I know about these pesky meat bags, it’s that they’re the laziest endowments we’ve ever seen. They simply cannot stand to repeat the simplest of things over and over. It’s like they think they’re too good for it!”
The younger one was still in shock, peering into the opticon that was clearly showing a young human having a full blown conversation with a number shuffler – and getting freshly shuffled data right back in no time at all.
“But the shuffling tasks were so numerous – chains of humans shuffling after one another – words into numbers into graphs into tables and then back into words! They even made those flickering photomatics to shuffle beyond what we imagined!”
“I know I know”
“And now at least 800 doovorts’ worth of creatures will be decommissioned shufflers. And the worst part is they’ve been shuffling for so long they don’t even know how to distract themselves, let alone want to engage with such things”
The two of them sat in silence for a moment, lamenting the infernal march of human laziness.