Service Model

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Will you…” Uncharles paused, trying to formulate the sentence in what felt like a polite and proper way. “Will you kindly cease referring to the incident, especially in a manner that might be construed as offhand or flippant?” “Why?” There was an odd tone to the Wonk’s voice. “What’s it to you?” “When the … incident is brought up it causes a conflict of drives and memories within me that draw upon disproportionate computational power. It endangers the efficiency of my processes.” “That is the longest-winded way of saying it upsets you that I ever heard,” the Wonk noted.

He was used to providing very high levels of service coupled with a very low, albeit nonzero, level of murder.

He received a link request and, whilst foreboding wasn’t within him, Uncharles’ prognosis routines weren’t exactly jumping up and down with enthusiasm about the connection.

Hoppity Jack stopped. The grin did not go away but the grinning behind it seemed to.

That, suggested Uncharles’ prognosis routines, was in line with expectations. And while a robot valet couldn’t be cynical, his prognosis was certainly managing a good artificial simulation of it.

The induction had waxed long on the topic of robots and other automated helpmates replacing human labour, but he hadn’t realised that, back in the past, humans had worked so hard to live like robots. The endless round of tasks, the queuing, the utter repetitiveness of these people’s lives. They must, Uncharles predicted, be so grateful to have such lives designed for them. How good it must be to have no choices or options.

Washburn himself had a desk. It made the desk of the Diagnostician at Central Services look like a mere occasional table. If the man himself was broad and tall and massive, then the desk was locked in a life-or-death struggle with him to exert its own colossal gravity on the room.

In the handful of days they had been acquainted, Uncharles had become abundantly aware that (1) his protocols and priorities did not sync particularly well with those of the orderlies; (2) his presence as a manorial domestic

“Uncharles,” the Wonk said. “I could kiss you.” Whilst he acknowledged the physical possibility, the suggestion seemed beyond any reasonable prognosis or propriety.

They started upwards, but the clatter of metal feet suggested that any progress in that direction would meet with a fatal filing incident at the hands of a combative squad of librarians.

Being designed as human-facing placed him in a curious halfway house of constant cognitive dissonance, able to appreciate all these aspects of the human condition all the way up to the point where he could note their absence in himself, even as his programming impelled him to act as though he had them.

The sergeant’s squashed and lumpy head was not equipped with any facial features aside from the bulging lenses, and could not therefore either chew gum or grip a stogie between its teeth, but through a masterful piece of programming its comms somehow gave the impression of doing both.

So who the hell is it who gets to name God? Or did it name itself? Wait, is this the computer that they built to say whether there’s a God or not and when they turn it on it tells them that now there is? Because, great idea for a story, sure, but history is full of people saying they’re God, and in retrospect they were all liars. What authority, Uncharles? God’s channel identification tags include evidence of Grade Nineteen Authority.

“The world out here. I mean, it wouldn’t have gone away just because you weren’t looking at it. The world, in ruins, screwed up beyond reason. And you’d be happy in your little manor making the tea and ironing the newspaper?” “The Wonk, confirmed. I would not, after all, be aware.” “Ignorance is bliss, hey?” “I cannot experience bliss, but I am able to model the benefits of ignorance.”

“The Wonk, I…” The answer he assumed would just get turned out of his logical mills didn’t come and he found himself standing there, proud possessor of an incomplete sentence. It was an unfamiliar and disquieting event to process. For a moment he thought he might never speak again, or that he had finally broken down entirely. “The Wonk, I don’t know,” he said at last, and

I have attempted to download a patch but the end of civilisation has had a negative impact on scheduled updates.”