A normal day in 2045

The apartment woke before he did. A soft pulse of light nudged his eyelids open while the kitchen printer extruded a ceramic cup and filled it with coffee. The beans were grown minutes earlier and ripened under LED skies. His partner, Léa, handed it to him with practiced ease. Whether she was born or assembled no longer mattered; even specialists couldn't tell the difference, neither could he.

He dressed for the walk to his work at the district's Care & Mediation Hub while the overnight dividend land in his wallet. A small transfer, weekly, enough to cover food, transit, utilities. It came from automation taxes, regional compute co-op shares, and resource royalties pooled by the city. Not a fortune, but enough that he no longer needed to work to survive. Money still existed, and it still shaped choices — it bought higher-bandwidth grid access, a ticket to a human-played concert, or land with climate stability — but its grip had loosened.

Outside, delivery pods glided silently along curbs. Above them, cranes operated by software assembled a new six-storey co-housing block. The site had been a vacant lot yesterday. Today, a tall structure stood half-finished. The structure itself was printed for less than what a family once spent on kitchen appliances.

Scarcity hadn't disappeared. It had migrated. Cheap houses were common. But a resilient, well-situated district like this — shaded streets, smart flood barriers, high-speed fiber, clean energy — remained rare. Robots could make buildings; they couldn't fabricate a thriving urban city. Either way, the lesson was clear: own what can't be cloned. Whether land, energy rights, or trusted networks—those were the scarcities now.

At the Hub, his first client of the day arrived: a teenager named Juna. She had just discovered her family's elderly dog had been replaced by a synthetic one. "How do I know you aren't fake?" she asked, arms crossed. He couldn't prove it. Certificates could be forged. But he stayed, let the awkward silence stretch. He told her the only real proof was that he chose to sit with her anger, without scripts or escape routes. It wasn't flawless delivery she needed — it was someone whose presence cost them something.

Clients like Juna could book AI counsellors for a fraction of the price—always available, unflappable — but many still requested humans. There was no clear "tell" anymore. It wasn't about detection. It was about weight: human interactions carried it, not because they were better, but because they were vulnerable.

Later, he stopped by the courtyard garden. Drones tended the strawberries with mechanical precision, but he still pulled weeds by hand when he had time. The garden lease was part of his compensation — a small plot inside city limits with access to stored rainwater and communal solar. Land with clean water and grid ties was a 2040s pension plan. Some colleagues pooled resources to buy farmland upstream; others invested in fractional shares of a regional data center's turbine network. He'd once joked that his parents bought walls, but his generation bought throughput—kilowatt-hours, compute cycles, minutes to a city hub.

In the afternoon, he joined a standards-body meeting in the former parliament building. The discussion: assigning fault when autonomous ambulances are rerouted during flash floods. Léa joined remotely; her risk model flagged exceptions no one else saw. But the final decision required human votes — something increasingly encoded in statute. People accepted that machines could optimize, but not legitimize. Not yet. Not when it came to liability, care, or war.

As the day wound down, he stopped at a canal-side café advertising "verified human baristas." Whether anyone could truly verify was beside the point. The queue spoke for itself. Authenticity had become a kind of premium service — hand-thrown mugs, off-key singing at live concerts, stories signed by real-world error. Robots could copy the outcome, not the cost.

Night settles. Tomorrow holds another mediation shift, a late call with an agro-solar collective, and a block of reading on emergent safety protocols. Work these days is less about producing goods — machines excel at that — and more about curating trust, shaping rules, attending to feelings that refuse empirical proof.

He sat next to Léa and listened to a string quartet rehearsing across the canal. All while running a quiet systems check before sleep. All readings fell well within tolerance, only a small firmware update was requried. With that reassurance he closed his eyes and updated himself, ready to show up again at dawn.