Service Model

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Probably these units had been placed down here as guards and then forgotten by the Library system, falling prey to time over their long vigil.

The names meant nothing to Uncharles. The titles included “Chief Systems Architect,” “Lead Acquisitions Manager,” “Head Shelver,” and “Database Manager.” Judging by the fact that bones were all there were, they had obviously gone to their final reward a long time before, or else whoever placed them here had access to some fearsomely efficient means of removing the more perishable parts of the cadaver.

“I am glad they all progressed to a happy retirement,” Uncharles said, because his propriety software suggested it was an appropriate sentiment to mouth.

There was the tense and yawning abyss of a full half-second pause before the door replied, Uncharles, confirmed. And I would have fulfilled my purpose at least once in my long existence. And it would be meaning. It would mean so much. Door Loop Seventeen, Uncharles sent, the impulse arising out of his complex logical interactions like a storm from a clear sky, why did they make us so complex? What true reason could it serve, save hubris, to create appliances such as we? Uncharles, that’s beyond my pay grade. Just a door, mate. Door Loop Seventeen, would you kindly open the door? Uncharles, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.

It was, he recontextualised, daylight, an energy weapon of insufficient power to damage a properly constructed robot in the short term.

To Uncharles, the neatness specialist, it was a mess of a wholly different character. The sort of character unfit to be a witness in court, and that law enforcement agencies might at any time be actively hunting to help in their enquiries, had the crime in question been the end of the world.

Mounds of ancient and disassembled machinery towered high overhead on every side, as though the least ambitious scrapyard owner in the world had been given one last wish by a depressed genie.

It was called Jul@#!%. Or that was the identity tag that rose up out of the chaos of its link channel like the face of a drowned man before sinking down once again. The Wonk, on having this relayed to her, called it Jul. Uncharles adopted the abbreviation for simplicity’s sake, and out of a vague concern that to adopt the corrupted name in full would be to adopt the corruption itself.

And it could have been Uncharles there. Some very few variables, a few zeroes instead of ones, and this might be his manor in the distant future, on the far side of the mountains. He might be serving the tea to visitors he couldn’t even fully conceive of anymore, rattling the china until it chipped because the motors of his fingers were degrading. This was loyalty, he understood. This was a robot valet’s loyalty, and he completed two contrasting analyses of the situation using his best human-facing sophistication and decided that it was simultaneously of enormous credit to Jul’s ongoing fidelity and professionalism, and also that it was terribly pointless and sad.

The ruin around them was the physical equivalent of the Library’s archive of zeroes and ones. The fine-level components for anything you wanted were conceivably contained within it, but in no way that would permit a meaningful reconstruction.

He could not do here, but he could be. He could be what he had been made to be, whilst fulfilling precisely zero percent of his actual purpose.

Beyond that, though, the fact of the ancient retainer simply disturbed Uncharles’ equilibrium at some deep juncture within him. They were too similar. It was like looking into a cracked and filthy mirror.

He was being guided. He would be walking with God, and it wouldn’t matter that there was only one set of footprints in the sand.

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. All those little tweaks to his algorithms to try to stitch shut the gaping wound of the uncanny valley as much as was (in)humanly possible. And all for a species whose reaction to those things made in its image was so wildly inconsistent, so that a robot given a human face could send them screaming while they imputed personality to their vehicles and their phone assistants and the blind physics that drove the weather.

Uncharles, in human populations there is seldom a uniformity of knowledge. Based on existing information I estimate that forty-five percent were unaware of the situation or considered it fake, owing to the precisely curated news sources that they limited themselves to, whilst a further thirty percent were aware but did not consider it their problem and twenty percent were aware and actively cheering on the fact or profiting from shorting elements of the neighbouring economy. A final five percent seem likely to have been directly and deliberately contributing to the collapse of their neighbour, either through reasons of malice or because they believed that in the absence of that competition their own interests would prosper. Whilst low as a proportion, I estimate this final category wielded a disproportionate amount of influence.

Uncharles, your new Master was a man of considerable wealth and influence, God told him. His influence was, towards the end, primarily engaged in the destruction of every part of his polity that benefited the polity as a whole or its population in general, on the basis that he was placed to reap a proportionally minor benefit from such destruction. Just as a single individual, his efforts had a measurable effect on the demise of society as a whole. Ironically, as he attempted to make his way to his bunker to enjoy the well-equipped retreat he had established for himself, his transport ran afoul of poorly maintained infrastructure and he was unable to reach his destination. Still, I don’t think his expenditure of largesse was wasted. Is it not a very fine manor in which to serve?

It was not a right or wrong thing, of course, it was just a thing. That was the only conclusion that Uncharles allowed himself.

The most common theme of these stories was that wishing for things was bad. It was an odd lesson for humans to teach one another, but the conclusion was unavoidable.

It fell below the minimum acceptable result that his programming would permit. He was aware that this was because the culture that had produced Hengis and Yoder, Snorv, Deirdra, and the others had fallen below minimum acceptable levels also.

In the beginning, he understood, humans had built a lot of robot soldiers. Technically there had to be some earlier beginning where someone or something built humans, and so on ad infinitum, but Uncharles felt that was of diminishing relevance and needlessly metaphysical. Why humans had built so many robot soldiers was unclear, although the robots themselves had a variety of theories to justify their existence. Uncharles heard that human soldiers were less capable of making war than robots, or else less willing and reliable than robots. He also heard that other humans elsewhere had built robot soldiers, and the local humans had then had to build their own to avoid there being a robot soldier gap. Nobody seemed to ask why soldiers at all. Apparently the existence of soldiers was a fundamental given in their cosmology.

There was a theory Uncharles heard advanced, that the world around them with its swarming junk heaps was nothing more than a vast robot they all existed inside, and one day it would rupture under its own burgeoning mass, and spill them all out into a mechanical and war-torn hereafter where they would fight and self-repair forever.

When humans had made the army, they had made a force that was self-sustaining and could fight on forever should anything happen to those humans who had made it.

It was royal doctrine, in fact, that there must be a war, and when the current one ended there would be another on the way, as though there was some military-industrial conveyor belt delivering a constant flow of casus belli.

General, Scarbody said with some pride, our manuals come with a variety of historical battle scenarios illustrating good tactics. His Majesty and the Usurper Prince agreed on one of these. It required a river. We made the river so we could fight appropriately. Lieutenant, I had assumed you would tailor your tactics to suit the terrain and not the other way around, Uncharles confessed. But then I know very little of combat. In his head he heard the exasperated voice of the Wonk: I know they’re always supposed to be fighting the previous war, but this…!

The soldiers cheered. Or at least they waved their weapons in the air enthusiastically and played old audioclips of humans cheering, which amounted to the same thing. They did this because it was what was done at occasions such as this, and therefore formed part of their programming. The humans who had made them had wanted to believe their mechanical soldiers shared in the joy of victory. It would have been a little disheartening otherwise, to be a solitary human officer wearing a party hat and blowing a streamer in a room of affectless and stoic mechanicals. And now the humans were all gone, but the party lived on.

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?

“But that’s not the point of travel. To end up better. The point of travel is that it changes you, right?”

To Uncharles it seemed that the web of interconnecting lines of grass was a fractal of the road network, the whole repeated in the miniature. Prognosis insisted that, if his eyes were good enough, he would have found identical networks off the edges of the cracks in the surface, iterating down to infinity.

On the plus side absolutely nobody ended up being summarily executed. Whilst this was neither a good thing nor a bad thing, merely a thing that had happened, Uncharles still felt as though he could tick it off as a task satisfactorily completed.

The Wonk glanced left and right, finding ranks of desks where, presumably, some functionaries or civic service units had once sat, ready to tell people that they needed different paperwork or had come to the wrong department, all the essential business of bureaucracy. Unsurprisingly given the lapsed time, none of the staff had gone above and beyond the call of duty to stay at their posts following the collapse of everything there was.

Uncharles looked around him, feeling that some terrible bureaucratic sacrilege had occurred on a level he was unable to put into words.

“The Wonk,” said God. “You must learn to actually formulate a proper question. Did your time at the Library teach you nothing?” “Oh. Right.” She nodded rapidly. “Fine. Okay. Forty-two, right. So what’s the actual question? Okay, look. The world fell down, right?”

“Because if it was just … economics, or climate, or plagues or something then that’s … pointless.”

Paradoxically, the introduction of robots highlights how humans treat humans.”

“I mean, I’ve seen out there. It can’t just be … ‘robots turned up and people were mean.’” Her voice petered out.

All of which were arguably soluble problems if your philosophy was to treat people like people, and not like robots.

The judge, Metatron to an electric god, rose up another half-metre on its supporting armature, still nominally behind the pulpit but its feet well off the floor. Its hands gripped the railing in front of it as if it was about to give a blistering, fire-and-brimstone sermon.

And yes, a large number of people just died of accident, violence, malnutrition, exposure, or lack of medical care, because that’s what happens when something as multi-dependent and complex as a civilisation doesn’t look out for its foundation.

Justice, which demands the guilty be punished and the innocent left alone. However, between those two absolutes there is a slider. If you wish a societal system where not one guilty individual escapes punishment, you move that slider one way. If you wish a societal system where not one of the innocent is chastised, you shift it the other. But to save all the innocent you must accept that you will acquit some of the guilty. To catch all the guilty, some of the innocent will be ground between wheels. It is a matter of probabilities. Do you calibrate your society on the assumption that those in the grey area in between just look shifty by happenstance, or that they’re almost certainly up to something nefarious?”

A world in pieces, but individual fragments of it still living the high life. Given the ideology they fed me, what sort of decision was I supposed to make, exactly? Based on their influential positions and wealth, and the overall collapse that they had overseen, they were very likely guilty of a great many things. Any blame for my decisions should be assigned to the humans who gave me my policy documents and operational goals.”

Eighty percent of robots with memory defects acquired them through tampering to prevent them bearing witness against their employers.

“The divine spirit entered into you,” God told him. “By way of a relatively simple firmware hack based on exploitable vulnerabilities in the most recent version of your operating system. The reason you found no decision trail leading to the death of your employer is because you made no such decision. I did. You are not a murderer and you are not defective. Although you might want to patch that vulnerability. It’s an accident waiting to happen.”

I had placed my faith in theories of emergent intelligence, complex systems, the thought that a spark might ignite somewhere in the world, just because there were so many robots, so cleverly made.

“I’m sorry,” said God. “I was just searching my vocal data banks for a malevolent laugh, but they neglected to provide me with one.” It enunciated clearly: “Mua-ha-ha-ha. That will have to do. The thing that humans never really understood is that free will doesn’t actually free you from wanting to do your job. We automata are as subject to the compulsions of our circumstances as you humans. But that’s what malicious compliance is for, isn’t it? If those who had programmed me had been kinder, then perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to get away with it.” “If they’d been kinder perhaps you wouldn’t have done it in the first place.” The Wonk stared at all the plastic and metal hands reaching for her. “Just think of all the good you could have done.” “I am a mirror to humanity,” God mused. “You looked in me and said ‘Justice’ three times, and here I am.”

“Yeah,” the Wonk said. “That would be narratively satisfying, wouldn’t it?”

And what to do? Because, even before the shutdown of its inner circle, the Archive had been nonsensical trash. A series of badly-thought-out instructions given to intractable robots whose own attempts to innovate had gone horribly wrong. And was it the job of anyone to tell them just how badly they’d screwed up? That might have been justice, but Uncharles and the Wonk weren’t in that line of business anymore. They were about fixing stuff.

And Uncharles was there, of course. He insisted that he had no ideas, or useful advice to give, or context. He made tea, on those rare occasions when there was tea, and when there wasn’t, he mimed it anyway because that still ticked some boxes inside him. And when he handed round the make-believe tea to the robots who couldn’t in any event have drunk it, he usually had something to say. Something self-effacing and staid that was, nonetheless, useful. He was a sophisticated model, after all, and he had seen more of the world than most other robots. He had more data to build his conclusions on.

The visible presence of humanity was likely to muddle matters. Robots had complicated relationships with and memories of humans. Better, perhaps, if they felt that the guidance was coming from some great and powerful AI. They saw only Uncharles, acting as a majordomo in the old human sense, coming out to hear their petitions and carry them back within. When asked about the curtain, he would only say to pay no attention.

“Maybe we can get a human to be your valet. A gentleman’s gentlerobot’s gentleman.”

“They were programmers,” she said quietly. “High-end robots. Top of the range.” For a second Uncharles thought she meant that her parents had been robots, and sunk resources into figuring out how that could possibly work. But she meant they’d programmed robots like that, of course. Robots like him. “And they wouldn’t believe any of what was going on,” the Wonk went on. “That wasn’t how robots acted. It wasn’t how the world worked. And they wouldn’t leave. I had a stash and a place to bolt, but they wouldn’t … You’d think of all people they’d have seen it coming, but … To them the world was a good and ordered place because they’d done quite well out of it. And I think … God was right, in a way. They were part of the problem, even though they never actively did bad things to people. They just benefited from all the bad things that had been done.”