"Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: But a woman who fears the Lord, She shall be praised. (Proverbs 31:30 Modern King James Version)" – Anonymous, Modern King James Version of the Holy Bible.

9 am, 10th of March, Friday. 2541. NovLondon.

"What have I done?"

She didn't know.

But there were things she had to take care of.

So off she went.

As soon as the check above the identity slot turned green, the office door slid open. The tall rectangular building loomed over her, grey and glass-like. She couldn't say it was unattractive, but the metallic tingly atmosphere seemed to cling to every office building, including this one. Everything was clean, polished, and shiny – a block of black amidst white floors. The one thing she liked about the building was light that seldom reflected from its walls; the glass-like metal it was built out of was slightly bent inwards like a collecting lens, so as not to stand shining like an Olympian medal in a field of inferior nothingness.

But she tripped.

Her stomach soared into her ribcage as she was caught by one other pair of arms. Something was up with her today.

"M'lady, a-yu-lright?" using such an old-fashioned phrase, the voice startled her, but she slowly stood up nevertheless.

"Yeah, thank you. My card – here," she freed herself from the arms and showed her identity card.

"No worries, m'lady, DNA checked already," the robot smiled without glancing at the ID. The "m'lady" raised her eyebrow, lips slightly parted, and gave him a fixed stare for a solid five seconds.

"Where's your Russian accent?" she asked the blonde-haired robot indignantly. Work AI manufacturers always seemed to add a weird Jossian (former Russian) accent – to which she had gotten used to - but there she was greeted by not a Jossian, but a Chinese accent. Must've been a reprogrammed robot.

The grinning AI was about to explain some new version modification to her, but in a fraction of a second his face turned serious and the light bouncing off of his thinly-framed glasses shifted to pretentious sympathy. It had been programmed to appear as "unburdened pity".

"Oh. Oh. (between Oh's his processor sonorously buzzed and "bick-ed" as the Ins programme activated).Did-I-upset-you-or-worsen-your-mental-psychological-health-with-the-Chinese-accent-that-has-been-programmed-by-the-version-6-6-6-of-Penguin-Penguin-mind-approved-publishers-of-the-golden-prog-answer-from-a-scale-of-1-to-10."

"No-no, everything's fine-"

"From-1-to-10 your psychological situation, m'lady." The robot didn't give up, stepping closer in his black coat. He was dressed in all black, like the person she had met just before. This made her reply a bit more flustered than expected.

"It's fine, 10, it's 10, everything's alrigh-"

"Work's up the 66th floor," the robot said, giving a crooked smile, froze for a while and fell into pieces. Then, it metamorphed into a vacuum and started to clean the platform.

(Talissa had heard of the things that caught dirt sometime in her PI-adparition classes. Not that she loved the subject.)

But this had been too over the edge for a simple case of program issues. Of course she hesitated, watching the now vacuum clean the oval platform outside the office, but her distraught mind really did continue to play tricks on her. She had to go.

She went inside.

The interior of the office was covered with tight impossible to see through material. There were no windows, but a thing called "zero-harm" lighting worked 24/7 in the building on the upper floors and made it look like sunlight was rushing out of the windows. But be that as it may, most people who worked in such places often couldn't bear to come out and see the real sun again. The many assortments of the virtual realities that got more boring with every novel-film setting incorporated into real life couldn't replace it. Technology couldn't replace real things.

Going in and not quite yet recovered from the surprise of her last conversation, Talissa saw many people and robots and machines which offered food, snack and drink tablets, sweet pills that could make one forget one's worries and get ready for an exciting day of work...Of course not. This wasn't a 5-star hotel or a Mind's residence; this was an office for lower-class workers – Belmen or Belwomen, as they were often called.

Originally, the Minds had stated that the people who didn't have much money should be classified as BelievePeople to give them "motivation to get back on their feet" (quote from H. Unell, the fifth Mind ruling Engel). However, the statistics reported that no such motivation had been gained due to the numbers of "BelieveMen" continuously increasing. Honestly, the crowd thought that they were no better than Belmen, a meta-morphed version of "bellhops". Talissa was a Belwoman, her parents were Belman and Belwoman, and each of the people she worked with at the robot department was all Belpeople.

Fortunately, she was also an astronaut, so sometimes she wasn't solely thought of as a "Belwoman" due to how close she was to the World Space Organization. And not many members of the WSO were Belpeople.

In reality, the inside of the building was dull, blue, and terribly clean. There were no human-form robots here; only little AIs swept the rooms from time to time. The non-human-looking AIs were simply small machines with metallic mops and shovels sticking out. They could only reply to basic commands, while the intelligence levels of human AIs were high enough to strike decent conversations with arranged sets of emotions, gestures, and expressions. Even realistic deep physical interaction could be performed at will if the buyer didn't have a partner; however, most failed to buy them because 1) these types of robots were too expensive; 2) the "roboterest" still stood out, and 3) such interactions with even robots could be used against the customer by JusticeMen if a girl- or boy-friend was nearby.

After doing her morning workout of finishing the flights of stairs that had been built in due to the increase of societal muscular system deficit percent that had to be at least monitored (the sign in front said so), Talissa finally found the office room on the 66th floor (marked "BelieveWomen Believe!"), and, with flushing cheeks from the morning cross, pressed her ID to the slot. She was instantly choked and knocked over.

That had been the end of her peaceful living.