The Jon Lymonday Teaser: Free sample of Last Writer Sitting

What a way to start the working week - a free sample from Last Writer Sitting:

My hair had grown long and greyer, even white in places thanks to the stresses of the year, with the luxury of a haircut something I couldn’t entertain as regularly as I used to. My daughter had offered to step in and snip, but my loyalties lay with the brilliant Lucio’s barber shop just off the high street. Cuts there gave me a rare chance to converse with fellow males away from the enclosed world of advertising, a chance to put the world to rights. But on a visit to the establishment a couple of days after meeting Cartwright, I got another sense of the scary future that awaited the world if the machines were permitted to proliferate without regulation.

I was in the chair as usual, preparing for a cut from the legendary local hairsmith of over 45 years standing and cutting, Lucio. My visits to his impeccably presented establishment always prompted us to share tales of football defeats and life’s woes, and on this occasion the main subject of moaning concerned our respective downturns in business. Lucio’s financial woes were so acute, he’d been forced to invest in a CutBot (brand name withheld for the same reason as previously stated) as all his local rivals were now offering Ai haircuts, fashioned in seconds by machines for a fraction of the cost of a cut by human hands.

I’d heard of the bots of course and point blank refused to even consider letting one near my hair, but I now had a front row seat to see one in action for the first time as this young guy sat down in the chair next to me and uploaded a picture of the hairstyle he desired. I don’t know who he thought he was kidding, but the picture that appeared on the mirror in front of him which seemed to double as a screen, featured an actor half his age with a completely different hair type, hair colour and head shape. That didn’t seem to bother the bot. Two sponge clamps slowly closed in on either side of the guy’s jaw to hold his head in place while another pair of clamps encircled his wrists, pinning them to the arms of the chair. Was he in for grooming or electrocution? I didn’t ask, but waited for his last requests. Lucio wasn’t interested either way and the guy didn’t flinch.

I watched in awe as a pair of scissors emerged from the bot’s left arm and a comb from the right. Then the centre of the machine’s forehead glowed red and the thing leaned toward the man’s fulsome head of light brown hair. I watched as a line of infrared laser scanned from his forehead to the nape of his neck and back again in less than five seconds, seemingly mapping the contours of his scalp and assessing his hair type.

Scan over, three beeps announced some kind of countdown, followed by the dust of several clouds of water particles being puffed out of the bot’s mouth, wetting the customer’s hair. Then, in a whirr of metallic cuts and silver flashes as the fast moving scissors and comb reflected the sunlight filtering through the shop’s floor to ceiling window, the cut was complete.

Lucio barely gave the performance a second glance, no doubt used to the show by now. Annoyingly, it was mightily impressive, even for someone so anti this sort of career stealing tech as myself. I played down my reaction massively, instead asking Lucio how his family was doing which unfortunately wasn’t good. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the bot rock back on its rollerball heels to admire its handiwork as the clamps automatically withdrew from each side of the customer’s jaw.

Photos of the man’s cut from several angles appeared on the mirror in front of him, and the guy nodded his approval. Apart from being a good degree uglier than the model whose haircut example the customer had shown the bot, it looked an accurate interpretation of the desired style. But as the guy tried to get out of the chair, the bot pushed him back down and held him there as it re-scanned his head. The red forehead light pulsed and without warning the bot started stabbing its scissored hand into the customer’s scalp with considerable venom.

Lucio yelled something in Italian at the bot and battled to release the guy’s wrists from the chair clamps, but the locks remained stuck fast. I heard the sharp end of the scissors’ blades repeatedly pierce thin scalp and dig into skull, as the customer yelled, swore and screamed for help. I launched myself at the bot, tempted to punch its red lights out but suspecting (correctly) that Lucio wouldn’t want the thing damaged having invested so much in it. Instead, I dragged its body away from the customer, noticing for the first time the blood splattered mirror.

The bot was tricky to hold down and overpower, being fashioned from thick, heavy, cumbersome steel.

‘Fucking machines,’ Lucio raged at no one in particular as he finally wrenched open the wrist bands to free the victim. The customer jumped out of the chair, hands immediately investigating his blood soaked scalp.

‘You ill?’ Lucio asked him.

The customer looked at him disgusted.

‘I’d get your head checked out,’ Lucio advised. ‘You must have some kind of abnormality up there somewhere. The machines are programmed to spot that kind of shit and destroy it.’

‘I came in here for a fucking skin fade mate, not a brain scan. You can fuck your tip.’ He threw five on the counter, grabbed his jacket and staggered out.

‘You want tissues for the blood?’ Lucio called after him.

The man didn’t respond.

Lucio reached behind the bot’s head and flicked a switch. Its body bowed submissively, and I almost felt sorry for it, looking so apologetic for what its human creators had programmed it to do.

If only we could switch off all Ai as easily as that, I thought.

‘More trouble than it’s worth,’ Lucio grumbled or words to that effect intercut with expletives. He pointed up to a shelf and the thick User Manual that had accompanied the bot. ‘As if I’ve got time to read that piece of shit,’ he said, and took the cold metallic bot off my hands, setting it up by the side of the spare chair and looping an Out Of Order placard on string around its neck. ‘I’ll have to call aftercare again later,’ he moaned, ‘not that I’ll get through to anyone but another of these fucking bots.’

‘Lot of them about,’ I said.

‘I’d like to tighten this,’ he said, grabbing the out of order sign, ‘and throttle it. But what good would that do? The thing doesn’t even have a life to lose.’

Lucio nodded to me to resume my chair. ‘Just gimme five minutes would you to clean up the blood and flesh.’ He sighed and trudged downstairs leaving me sitting next to the crazed bot, sleeping now. Getting Lucio to cut my hair cost me four times what that other customer paid, but getting out of there with my scalp intact made it worth every fucking penny.