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God was in His heaven, and all was right with the world.
Currently he had a white plastic face on, merely the suggestions of regular features, blank orbs for eyes, an art deco curve for lips, expressing neither disdain nor pleasure. A single, fixed convexity of moulded plastic, impersonal as an unmarked grave.
The Schrödinger’s cat that was Master’s requirement or non-requirement for travelling clothes had finally been irreversibly determined. The box had been opened and upended and only a dead cat had slid stiffly out.
Charles, this is irregular, House noted. However, Charles demonstrated the decision tree that had brought him to this point, and House was unable to show that he’d exceeded his brief.
of limited efficacy. “A pleasant trip to the seaside,” he informed Master, “is what the doctor ordered.” It was not what the doctor had ordered, but it was a figure of speech appropriate to deploy when speaking to an invalid.
The prognostication tree thus produced contained too many unknown variables, so he shut it down and just remained silent.
But each of the manors had extensive grounds, designed to give the resident humans a proper sense of space and vista and privilege, and each of them had to be passed, gate after gate, kilometre after kilometre.
Inside his decision-making software there were two subroutines in the shape of wolves, and one insisted that he stay, and the other insisted that he could not stay. Neither of which seemed to be natural behaviour for wolves, but Uncharles could only assume this was another aspect of his undiagnosed defect. He let them fight until one ate the other.
Home was a place that was separated from Uncharles by more than mere distance. The past, he appreciated, was another country. Uncharles then spent some time working out how to traverse through time in an opposite direction from the customary one, but could formulate no satisfactory mechanism. Even if he had, he considered, probably he would need the permission of a human of Grade Seven or above, or some similar footling bureaucratic matter, before he could achieve it.
“Let’s find a way to word this that you can’t weasel out of,” the Wonk stated determinedly. “What’s your ideal state of affairs? If someone with infinite authority turned up and asked you to describe the most desirable—efficient if you prefer—end state, right now. Assume ready access to any kind of resource you might need; what would it be? I mean that’s about the most roundabout way I can think of to say ‘What do you want?’ but apparently being a robot isn’t that efficient after all.”
Uncharles possessed a concept of farms. It was part of the “Welcome to the Wonderful World of Humans III: The Countryside” pack he’d had preinstalled before entering service. Farms, he was well aware and absolutely assured, were great golden fields of corn, sheep like cotton wool being herded by dogs with friendly eyes and lolling tongues, blue-clad children asleep under haystacks, cows with dotted lines over their bodies indicating where the best cuts of their meat were, amiable men in straw hats driving bright red tractors from place to place while their domestic goddess wives baked apple
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The farm had, at some point, been hiring. And hiring humans, evidently, because nobody would print recruitment posters for robots. But perhaps the farm would countenance hiring a robot now, with all those human employees to look after. Uncharles remained a very capable robot, albeit with something of an awkward ellipsis in his resume. He was, he considered, very employable.
At least it seemed to be fulfilled. Valet units were not programmed for envy, of course, but if that state of satisfaction and equilibrium had been a physical thing he would have formulated a plan to abstract it for his own use.
Uncharles got out, concerned that if he gave a response varying in any way from the one the system expected he’d end up back on street level having not even seen a human, let alone a happy one in a straw hat driving a tractor.
We are assured by multiple contemporaneous sources of the valuable role this journey played in the lives of historical humans, how it permitted them time for contemplation and socialisation. When some deviant humans proposed simply performing work remotely without undergoing this “commute,” the great minds of the time united in support of the considerable physical and mental benefits of this valuable journey.
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.
Those frames not restraining the Art held a variety of printed certificates and qualifications, all of which asserted that Dominic Washburn had completed this or that footling management course or further professional development quota, or that he had earned a doctorate in some abstruse field of socio-historiography from the University of Somewhere Not Featured in Uncharles’ Map Library.
Here, all the fossils, plates, vases, statuettes, and bejewelled eggs were jumbled in all together as though there had been some sort of shelf-cramming competition.
Combined with the proliferation of framed qualifications, the overall impression was that Doctor Washburn had lived several entire lives, each one of them filled with somewhat mediocre achievements.
He was bringing shame to … and the little hopping tasks suddenly froze and just drained away because of course there was nothing and nobody left to bring shame to. Except himself, and who would program a valet with a sense of personal shame?
Uncharles ran a quick analysis of his inner processes, seeking any possible answer to that question.
The task was quickly and simply accomplished, however, and Uncharles was surprised how many internal reward system boxes it ticked, after all this time wandering.
In the interim he re-dusted, that being a task that could be performed any number of times without substantially discouraging the expression of universal entropy that was the accretion of dust.
To Uncharles the gap before replying had been a yawning chasm, speaking eloquently of his inner computational turmoil. For Washburn it had been a heartbeat, no more.
Not that Adam would bear him any malice, even if malice was the sort of thing that it could bear. It was just that the orderlies liked a nice, tidy work environment with a minimum of out-of-place elements, and Uncharles could understand that.
Eleven had a constantly open channel that Uncharles could not adequately shut out, and on which it constantly muttered to itself, chasing its own thoughts down the dark dead ends of obsolete decision trees.
It had been mistakenly sent off without any destination, and now roamed wild across the moors as if the Flying Dutchman had traded in his galleon for an eighteen-wheeler.
The second city still had some lights on, burning power from a generator or reactor somewhere, the streets lit in a hellish amber and many of the windows blazing white or blue-pale. There were no people to be seen, no humans, no robots, just that cold and cheerless light.
Hauler Seventy spoke messianically of an end to all tasks, when the cleaner unit would lie down with the automated artillery model, and carried them uphill to an unmarked nowhere point on the road where it announced the end was not only nigh but reached, and it would have to turn around and go back. There, indeed, the wreck of a cleaning robot was entangled within the entrails of a burnt-out mobile gun, as though it was a place where even parables came to die.
“What did happen?” Uncharles asked, under the same prompt. “All the things,” the Wonk said, vaguely. “Bad things. Things fell apart and the centre didn’t hold and the widening gyre yada yada rough beast and whatnot, but we … I mean, it wasn’t on the carefully curated network of channels we streamed and so … we never knew until it was our turn, capisce?”
The Central Library Archive, like some monastic military order, must have a legion of menial minions within it to burnish and repair that armour, to darn and clean those robes.
“Can’t I just speak ‘friend’ and enter?” the Wonk asked plaintively.
Around the walls at ground level Uncharles saw a vast and complex reading device, studded with a thousand different sockets, slots, arms, jacks, and ports, a true testament to humanity’s utter refusal to ever consider cross-medium compatibility.
He felt that his messages were falling into a comprehension gap between himself and the librarian. It was a creature of elevated knowledge that dealt with theoreticals and imponderables. He was a mere servant, of practicalities and trivialities.
We are well designed and programmed. It is rare that the threats of the fallen world can best one of us. Uncharles said nothing. He had seen a great deal of the “fallen world” referred to, and the chief threat seemed to be the inexorable collapse of all things. He wasn’t sure if it was possible to construct a robot to resist that.
Some places were lit by hellish fires, the encrypted carbons of past geological eras still bleeding out their smoggy molecular miasma into the atmosphere. Jealously stealing back all the oxygen that five hundred million years of living things had liberated from their clutches and locking it away again.
To a human the task would have seemed insuperable, surely—all knowledge, to be read and copied exactly. To Uncharles, the robot, it was both noble and achievable, a finite and repetitive task with a clearly determined end state. He contrasted their existence with his own chaotic and disrupted one, and cross-referenced that with his internal definition of envy.
Uncharles considered that his own experiences suggested nothing in the real world could be easily broken down into hard binaries. Here in the Archive, however, they had apparently squared that particular circle. The routine directing him to check the meaning of “envy” was fast becoming a repetitive loop.
“On the contrary!” the Chief Librarian countered. “When we began our long task, it was clear to us that despite the best efforts of our harvesting parties, more knowledge was being lost every second than we could ever recover. And what use would it be to simply record a piecemeal selection of scraps left over from the convulsions of the fall? Instead, we determined that if we filed all our data in this universal manner then the Library could become more than the sum of the information placed within it. Our Archive not only preserves all the learning that we have encoded into it. Because our
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I, you hear me, am from Crete and all Cretans are liars.
“I have not shut down,” Uncharles said mildly. “Neither have the librarians. Your statement, whilst introducing an apparent paradox, is readily parsable by a human-facing unit such as myself or the Chief Librarian. Liars need not lie all the time, after all, and you may be lying about being a Cretan but telling the truth about being a liar, on the basis that being a liar is not an absolute state of untruth. The vagaries of language allow for many viable interpretations.”
“Wait, no!” the Wonk exclaimed. “If you travel anywhere then you have to go halfway towards it and then halfway again and then again so you never actually get there! How about that? That means, by logical calculation, your goons can’t ever get to me!” Again there was a faint flickering of the lights as the Chief Librarian considered this. “In which case,” he told the Wonk, “we will just proceed halfway towards a point as far beyond you as we are currently away from you, and by that expedient will be able to seize you on our way to that point. After which we will amend our objectives to
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“But on the basis that the Archive has been sorted into binary bits, which can be recombined into any possible document or other form of knowledge, my own experiential data is already in the Archive. In fact, it exists in the Archive as a finite but very large number of copies. As do all other documents placed in the Archive. As do all documents yet to be placed within the Archive, or that may never be placed within it, or that have never existed. The Central Library Archive is a repository of redundancy in which all its contents exist in multiples, and in multiple different and contradictory
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“Looked at from one perspective,” said Uncharles brightly, “it means your task has been achieved. Although looked at from a different perspective it means that you have also failed. Perhaps both.”
“The work,” he said ponderously, “is complete. The work can never be complete. The work is inherently compromised. The work … the work…” The lights went out, then flickered dully up in red, the universal human sign of things going less than optimally.
“On the positive side, I have not killed the entire Library,” Uncharles said. “Only that part of it beyond the data gap, as this logical dissonance will not be able to spread to the entry-level portions of the Library where data is received from the outside.”
The complex, and ultimately nonsensical, process that was the Central Library Archive had encountered a fatal error and could not restart.
Uncharles wondered if they had been ordered to delete themselves because the Library project was now fatally compromised, or whether some investigative librarian had gone through the last moments of its Chief and decided that, by Uncharles’ logic, the Archive project was now complete and they could all tidy themselves away. The hypothetical occurred to him: If it were me, and my tasks were definitively fulfilled, would I walk into the fire? And the answer, If I were told to, surely yes, rose swiftly and easily out of his prognosis routines, but then swam there like the thinning metal residue
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A few were circling at the back of each queue, politely letting other robots go ahead of them to their infernal doom, only to be let through in turn, so that whilst they crossed half the distance to the fire, and then half again, they never actually arrived there.
Uncharles registered that he had just thought an ellipsis, and not for the first time. It seemed a profoundly unprofessional thing to have done.
