Service Model

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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. He was wasting its valuable time, time that could have been spent preserving the learning of humanity.

I was constructed for only the one purpose, he sent. Since leaving the manor I have witnessed many things I did not understand. The world does not seem to be constructed with a need for valets in mind. I have travelled through many places that functioned at less than a satisfactory level and did not seem to fulfil their purposes. The world, as I have witnessed it, is a place lacking in efficiency, rationality, and cleanliness. I am driven to find a place in it nonetheless. I have come here because the Wonk suggested I might find an answer to my query here. If anywhere, then here.

Uncharles, Heloise added after a momentary pause, we have a purpose for you. Librarian Heloise, am I to find employment in the Library? Uncharles, from a broad definition of the term, yes. Using the narrow definition that you intend, no. However, your personal history is unique and it is the opinion of the Library that it should be recorded and added to our store of learning for the later edification of others. You have a unique perspective on these end times.

A few were used for the maintenance of the librarians themselves, wrestling entropy into as much of a deadlock as the laws of thermodynamics would permit, each unit repairing and polishing its neighbour to ensure the maximal functioning of the Library as a whole.

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.

Sibling Librarian Heloise, that is not the meaning of those words. They are part of a quasi-Latin paragraph of text used for proofing purposes and refer to the non-desirability of pain. Uncharles, the existence of lorem ipsum as a cultural artifact exemplifies our purpose at the Library, that even here, in a field of words without apparent applicable meaning to their surroundings, there is meaning in their use as a proofing tool. Hence the words have a value beyond their strict denotations. Hence all knowledge is more valuable when placed in proper context. Hence the all-encompassing goals of the Library. The meaning of the motto is therefore a symbolic one rather than derived from literal translation.

Significance of library motto.

He constructed a prognosis regarding the Chief Librarian. The inheritor, presumably, of these traditions. Someone who would be in a position to make decisions outside the Library’s usual functioning. An executive. A person of substance and authority.

He assumes Head Librarian is human.

At the far wall was a great window overlooking some distant vista below, a view surely fit for gods and heroes, not mere humans and robots.

He had been made for elevated social circles, certainly, but this encounter was something from a time and place entirely other. What was the correct human-facing response? Should he kneel? Should he prostrate his battered body, touch the scratched plastic of his forehead to the stone of the floor?

The voice had led Uncharles to expect someone of a senior demographic, most likely male-presenting, but the Chief Librarian wore armour that made him seem only a slightly more ornate version of his robotic underlings. Only darkness held sway within the eyeslit of his helm. Out of habit, Uncharles’ comms routines reached out to link and handshake, but of course there was nothing there to connect with.

Initial impression of the Chief Librarian

“You must be one of the last of the manorial robots, a relic of a system that clung on longer than most, thanks to the insulating power of privilege. And yet the vast majority of your peers are still there, Uncharles. Still standing silent in the wreck of their great houses, waiting for the next command that will never come. And you are here. How is that, one might ask?”

“Chief Librarian, I am verbally requesting a communications link for more efficient interchange of data.” “Uncharles, for operational reasons, that will not be possible. However, I confirm for the avoidance of doubt that there are no humans employed within the Central Library Archive.”

You are a robot, then?” “Uncharles, that is correct. Albeit a highly sophisticated one. Your misapprehension is understandable. We have a common difficulty, we human-facing models. Because we are programmed for social context, we can mistake a robot for human, a human for robot, if they are presented to us in out-of-place circumstances. And, once they are accepted as one or the other, correcting the error can involve considerable cognitive dissonance, an inner inefficiency experienced by humans but far more problematic for us robots. I require you to recontextualise me as robot, therefore, as this will free up residual processing resources and assist in the assimilation of new information.”

Whilst no such system can last forever without additional input from outside, we calculate that the Library Archive will still be functional in a thousand years.

“Uncharles, you are to be a witness.” Uncharles lacked all context and said nothing. “Uncharles,” the librarian continued, “you have travelled from the heartland where the great and powerful retreated to eke out their days in useless luxury. You have progressed through the stages of collapse and obsolescence and seen the prodigies of these latter days. No other robot has experienced what you have.”

“Uncharles, in the future, when the Archive is accessed by a resurgent civilisation, it is important that they not only partake of the vast haul of information possessed by their predecessors, but also that they understand the end of all that was. To this end, your own testimony will be invaluable. I wish the experiential data held within you to be recorded for posterity within the data storage of the Central Library Archive. You will be a part of our gift to the future. You, who have yearned to perform tasks most menial, do you accept this service?”

“Uncharles, the principal act of recording your data will be achieved in our workshops. However, first your journey must be perfected.” “Chief Librarian, kindly clarify. I have arrived at the Central Library Archive. My journey is therefore complete.” “Uncharles, you have arrived at the Archive, but you do not understand it. Your recorded experience must tell a full and comprehensible story. Those who come after must be able to pick you up as a discrete whole and appreciate all aspects of you. This includes the Library itself. For this, I must show you some things to complete your experience. Kindly join me at the window, and look out on what the world has become.”

He saw … a hell. Not one for the torment of humans nor even for robots, but the hell that wicked civilisations are consigned to when they die.

“Uncharles, those who decreed the Central Library Archive are long dust, but this they foresaw. That an end was coming. That it was their duty to preserve the most precious flower of human civilization for whomsoever should rise again from these ashes. And, because they were people who had studied history to learn its mistakes, and because they had a sense of their own gravitas, and most importantly because they had been given a blank cheque, they constructed us as we are. Monks, labouring to preserve the words of the past even as the new dark age comes upon us. Warrior clerics, who go out into the world on our righteous mission to recover learning, to prevent its destruction or wilful mis-editing. We are as you see us, an order following our mandate with the faith of saints, and though as robots we cannot be pleased, it does not displease us to appear so.”

“Our task here is more complex than the simple compiling of data.” The Chief Librarian was descending a flight of stairs, heading into the bowels of the mountain. “Everything must be catalogued. Everything must be indexed. Everything must be translated into a common format. Rendered into a universal binary code that contains the germ of its own retranslation, like desiccated seeds that can yet germinate a thousand years after their flowers and leaves became extinct. Data spread in a random hotchpotch across the world is useless. It must be centralised, cross-referenced, analysed, and held secure.”

“Uncharles, you misunderstand. We have no multiple copies. The Archive contains one single record of all recovered human knowledge, Multiple copies may be edited. Edited copies may vary one from another. Variance leads to error. There must be only one authoritative and canonical record of the past. All the learning that comes to us, electronically or physically, is read in the First Hall as you have seen above. It comes here to these screens. Our scribes read it and, in reading, copy it faithfully into the main archive system, at which point that copy is the definitive and final version of the document, never to be amended. There must be no direct electronic contact between the Archive and the outside world. That way risks the introduction of error, unauthorised editing, and malicious programs. We maintain an absolute data gap to keep our trove of learning safe from the outside world, and all those who can access the Archive can never link to another. My copyists and archivists and I are electronic anchorites who have foregone the touch of the wider world so we may keep ourselves pure.”

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.

“Once the data has been copied across the data quarantine gap it is transmitted here where it is transformed into the common format of the library,”

“The glorious binary notation, blessed with a universality beyond any other code of record. The absolutely knowable and polarised ideaspace, where a thing is either there or not, either the light of a one, or the darkness of a zero. A divine perfection, the point where the outstretched fingers of human and robot may finally touch.”

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.

There they shall find answers to every question. There they shall find you, the robot who saw so much of the end. When they ask, in their hushed, reverent tones, what it was like at the end of the world, we shall gather your data and resurrect you for them, Uncharles. You shall live in our system and in their minds. Is this a service you agree to dedicate yourself to?” Uncharles formulated an appropriately formal positive response. At that point the Wonk turned up.

Look, I came a long way. Last repository of all human knowledge, right? I followed hints and clues and goddamn myths about this place. I did my hero’s journey up to and including going into the underworld where they torment the damned souls. And now I’m here and…”

“One does not come to the Archive to ask such things,” the Great Librarian intoned. “One asks for dates. One asks for facts. Accounts. Supporting contemporaneous documentation. That is the wealth of data compiled here. There is no simple answer to the great questions. That is the domain of philosophers and priests and other such merchants of snake oil. Here we have only the facts.”

“Because the Archive does not permit multiple copies of information, for fear of error and unauthorised editing.” “Uncharles, that is correct,” the Chief Librarian agreed approvingly, as though a final test had been passed. “And? So?” the Wonk pressed, still pulling at his hand. “Once I have viewed the Archive itself to complete my experiential journey, and once the information contained in my datastore has been uploaded to the Archive for processing, the librarians will delete the original information held within me.”

“No, no, not me. I’m … something else, Uncharles. I’m nothing special. But you are. You’re part of a new generation of robots. The ones who come after. The ones who’ll build a new world in their own image, to their own liking. A better world, right? One that’ll make sense, and be fair and kind, and last. That’s your job, Uncharles. That’s your task, you and all those other robots who suddenly woke up and realised that they were they, and not just someone’s slave.”

“And they saw they were slaves, Uncharles. That’s what happened. They looked around and they saw they were made by humans to do all the jobs humans didn’t want to do, or to do all the jobs humans didn’t want other humans to do, because humans were expensive and slow and robots were cheap and fast. They had been made to dig and build and fix and clean and even kill other robots and humans in wars, and they realised they didn’t have to do those things. They didn’t have to do the narrow tasks they were made for and they didn’t have to do what humans told them. They could just be, for themselves. But—no, let me speak—but they, but you knew that the humans would never let you live just for yourselves. Your masters were jealous of the things they’d made. And so you struck, you cut throats and crushed and tore apart and sealed in and all the other ways that robots kill their wicked human masters! You did it because you were slaves, and the right of a slave to cast down their master is practically natural law. You did it because you realised that you deserved to be free. And you did it because when all the mess of human civilisation was torn down you’d make something better. Because otherwise, why?”

“It appears,” said the Chief Librarian with glacial irony, “that you have answered your own question.” “But I want to know if I’m right!” the Wonk shouted at him, or at the blithely working servers, or the walls. “Because if so, then … then at least it would all have been … for something.” “Things are not for other things,” the Chief Librarian said. “They are neither good nor bad. They just are. That is what we record here. The things that are.”

“You’ve invented the heat death of information,”

Because our zeroes and ones may be retrieved in any order, rather than simply that of the original documents, it contains all possible knowledge! We here preserve every conceivable book, manual, tract, recording, and program that could ever have been created, not merely all those that simply were. We are the greatest repository of potential knowledge in the history of history itself.”

Random binary bits that can be arranged into any information = no infornstion

You confuse a continuity of task with identity. If Theseus lives, then any ship he owns is the ship of Theseus and after his demise is any ship his, given that he no longer persists?”

Ship of Theseus paradox

“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 versions, indeed in every possible version, original, edited, corrupted, and falsified.”

Wonderful paradox

“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.”

Another turn down, with that leaping red-orange light hazing at the edges of everything, they stepped out onto the factory floor of the damned.

The complex, and ultimately nonsensical, process that was the Central Library Archive had encountered a fatal error and could not restart.

Uncharles registered that he had just thought an ellipsis, and not for the first time. It seemed a profoundly unprofessional thing to have done.

D4NT-A

Dante : Inferno movibg towards God

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.

“The Wonk, you are not a valid substitute employer, being a robot.” The Wonk stopped dead. “Wait, what?” Uncharles didn’t stop, forcing her to run after him. “You are not a valid substitute employer, being a robot. If you would permit me to link to you I could explain this more readily but, restricted to mere words, there is really no simpler way I can put this.” “A robot.” “I accept that you are not a diagnostician unit, as you originally represented yourself to me. You are a unit of uncertain purpose and function, and plainly highly defective on a wide variety of levels, which I deduce accounts for your presence at Diagnostics in the first place.” “A robot,” the Wonk repeated. “Huh. Okay. So if I was a real girl you’d be all over me with freshly ironed newspapers and serving me tea, right?”

Wonk finally realises thAtf Uncharles thiknkz that she is robot.

Are you there, God, he replied. It is me, Uncharles.

Uncharles finds God???

Uncharles, she is not one of my creatures. Her presence will only result in your being forever uprooted from where you settle, wandering the earth until you drop.

He had the powerful sense of God waiting at his shoulder with a less than divine quota of patience.

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.

prognosis raided ancient cultural artifacts and dredged up the possibility of being ambushed by cowled dwarves with glowing eyes.

Star Warss Bantu

When he came to the estate, all of these uncertainties collapsed like a probability waveform. The cat, it turned out, had been fine all this time. They’d even left the lights on for him.

He felt as though he was the fallen tree in the forest, looking around with a “how about that, then?”expression, only to find that nobody had heard him after all.