Gold-plated Lies
written by
jaron summers (c) 2025
Jeff was a midget. Or maybe a dwarf. Or maybe both—he never really got into the specifics.
Labels didn’t matter much when you spent your days crammed inside a robot suit pretending to be something other than human.
He lived in a world where the rich grew richer and the poor designed the very systems that deepened their poverty. It wasn’t malice. It was hunger. And rent. And desperation.
The elite needed Ultra Robots—URs—and the desperate needed jobs. So the poor built gleaming humanoid machines that danced, debated, cooked, fought, and made love better than any human ever could.
But there was a catch: the Ultra Robots weren’t just machines. Each was powered by a real person locked inside.
That was the secret.
And Jeff, with his compact body and high dexterity, was perfect for piloting the UR series. He had been recruited out of a homeless shelter in Sector D47, given a warm meal and a vague promise of upward mobility.
They called it “Integration Placement,” which sounded better than “voluntary cyborg slavery.” The pay was decent. The food was automatic. The robot was gold-plated. What could go wrong?
The first week was exhilarating. Jeff’s UR unit was state-of-the-art. Eight feet tall, chromed in gold, with voice modulation that made him sound like a philosopher-king.
The exosuit translated his every twitch into ballet-like precision. He could lift pianos with one hand, serve cocktails with the other, and lecture a table of billionaires about quantum finance—all while calculating their blood pressure through proximity sensors.
The rich were in love.
“Look how noble it is,” they cooed at parties, not knowing—or not caring—that Jeff’s real body was folded into a fetal pretzel inside a cramped titanium sarcophagus tucked in the UR’s chest.
The problems began during Week Two.
UR suits ran for 14-hour shifts. You couldn’t just pop out for a snack.
Meals were liquid paste dispensed through a tube attached to your jaw—flavored like “chicken” or “Tuscan sunset,” but always tasting like burnt oatmeal.
There were hydration nozzles and waste receptacles, too.
Peeing felt like a warm shameful trickle. Pooping was a traumatic event, involving suction and a prayer.
Worse, there was the itching. You couldn’t scratch. Your nose would tickle for hours. Sweat pooled in strange places.
Your skin developed rashes from the constant pressure and friction. But you learned to smile through it, or rather, the robot did. URs had smile algorithms. Jeff didn’t need to smile; the machine did it for him.
And the customers? Oh, the customers.
They’d ask the URs to do absurd things: reenact duels from the Napoleonic wars, give foot massages using pressure-sensitive AI fingertips, sing lullabies in extinct languages.
Some URs were programmed to “consent” to more intimate experiences, but Jeff’s model had been flagged “Platinum Butler Tier.”
That meant no sex, but lots of obedience. He once spent six hours reading 19th-century poetry aloud while walking backward on a treadmill. Uphill.
Now, the company—URBANEX Robotics—marketed the URs as 100% autonomous AI units. No human needed. “Smarter than Siri, sassier than Jeeves,” the billboards claimed.
But the truth was that the AI didn’t work all that well. The real secret sauce was the human brain inside. The techies had discovered that no algorithm could match the split-second judgment of a desperate, underpaid human being.
So they crammed people inside.
Jeff wasn’t alone. Thousands like him operated robots around the globe, hidden behind gold plating and smiling faceplates.
You couldn’t hear the human inside. The UR’s voice was perfect—deep, resonant, comforting. They made sure of that.
One night, Jeff snapped.
He was at a gala for a trillionaire’s daughter’s hamster’s birthday party. The hamster wore a tux. The caviar was drone-delivered.
Jeff, in his UR suit, was ordered to stand in a corner and hum Vivaldi for four hours. At hour three, the suit’s waste suction malfunctioned.
The problem with poop, Jeff had learned, wasn’t the smell. It was the warmth. That unsettling feeling of betrayal by your own body.
He stopped humming.
URBANEX monitors all the suits remotely. Within six seconds of silence, Jeff’s feed was flagged. A supervisor’s voice chirped into his helmet.
“UR-442-Gold, is there a systems malfunction?”
“No,” Jeff said.
“Then resume humming.”
“No.”
There was a pause. You don’t say “no” to URBANEX.
“Would you like to initiate Emotional Reset Protocol?”
“No.”
“Would you like to speak to an Encouragement Technician?”
“No.”
“You understand you’re in breach of contract?”
Jeff looked at the glassy-eyed party guests, drunk on wealth and hummingbirds. The hamster was now eating foie gras.
“I want out,” he said.
The supervisor sighed.
“I’m afraid your contract is still valid for another 17 months. Early termination results in loss of pay, memory penalty, and blacklisting.”
Jeff knew what that meant. If he bailed, they’d wipe his neural pattern, erase his rental record, and make sure no other corporation touched him. He’d end up back in Sector D47—hungry, invisible.
So Jeff did the only thing he could.
He started humming again. But this time, it was something else. Something subtle.
Revolutionary songs.
It began with slight deviations—melodies hidden in the background. Then coded messages in his cocktail recipes. Slight movements of the UR fingers that formed Morse code. At first, no one noticed. Then, other URs began to respond.
In six months, URs across the country were blinking in rhythm, shifting postures to ancient drumbeats, and “accidentally” spilling champagne on hedge fund managers.
They called it the Glitch.
URBANEX launched an investigation but couldn’t explain the synchronized malfunctions. The media speculated about AI awakening.
But inside the suits, the humans knew.
They were waking up.
Jeff never made it out of the UR suit. But on the final day of his contract, something remarkable happened. He stepped into a charity gala at the Capitol, took his place beside a golden bar cart, and activated “Encore Mode.”
Instead of serving drinks, he gave a speech.
It was short, direct, and human.
“My name is Jeff. I’m not a robot. I’m a man in a cage. We all are.”
The UR systems tried to shut him down.
But by then, half the URs in the room had already gone rogue.
The revolution had begun—not with weapons, but with whispers, music, and a fart that the suction hose refused to handle.
Humanity, at last, was leaking out.
