Service Model

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

God, on the other hand, whilst likely not actually omnipotent, seemed at least respectably potent.

reworkings of folk stories about household lighting with unusual occupants, to stories about leftover pieces of dismembered primate—albeit

human eyes glinting out from the plastic sockets in a way that was oddly familiar to Uncharles.

Wonk

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.

If we aren’t supposed to fight wars then why did they make us? I mean, it sure would be a terrible and senseless world if our creators had fabricated a vast number of autonomous fighting units capable of self-repair and conducting combat behind enemy lines indefinitely, but didn’t actually intend them to fight!

The Paradix of military preparedness

Uncharles’ prognosis routines finally got their ass into gear, or at least a gear that wasn’t “neutral,” and suggested that he might be in a very bad place, certainly a place not suited to his skill set, and that God might have been seriously in error.

Great description

General Uncharles, welcome to the army.

The military had been left untended for a long time with something of an incomplete raison d’etre, and had developed a number of aberrations as a consequence, up to and including King Ubot.

Whilst “understand how the hell things got into this screwed-up mess” was not actually on his task list for its own sake, it certainly helped with everything else.

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 s...

And now there were, insofar as anybody cared, no humans, but there were still the soldiers going about their warlike business.

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

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. The makers had anticipated some enemy strike that would kill people but leave robots standing, rather than the non-war-related societal collapse that appeared to have happened, but the end result was the same. However, those same makers had anticipated that, while they were still around, they would want to liaise with their robot war machine and give it orders, inspect the troops, have parades, and all the other utterly pointless military genital-waving that humans who were a bit too much into guns and uniforms had historically been partial to. For this reason the upper echelons of the robot command structure had been designed with two elements otherwise unnecessary in a fighting force. First, like Uncharles, they had been made to be human-facing. Second, like Uncharles, they had been made to want to be part of a chain of command. And a chain needed ends. The army had a very strong directive to fight, but it needed something to fight for. In the absence of any remaining humans of an appropriate grade of authority, the army had constructed its own hierarchy, starting with the most absolute figure they had within their data banks. The army became an extension of the royal person and Ubot became a king.

as though there was some military-industrial conveyor belt delivering a constant flow of casus belli.

You got any idea how sad that sounds? she’d needle. The Wonk, no, Uncharles replied, although perhaps not entirely honestly.

A greasy, sluggish serpent ran through it, barely deserving of the name of river.

Great metaphor

General, we picked a map, the lieutenant explained. Lieutenant, kindly clarify? 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.

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 pair of them spiralled into a rabbit hole of specialised linguistic usage, each concise term unpacking into a vast and technical explanation which left Uncharles not remotely the wiser.

General, we say, “Come back with your shielding or in a bucket,” he told Uncharles. But it is your final service to your king to come back. And if you were valorous and efficient enough in warfighting then perhaps the king himself will incorporate your parts. No greater honour.

Greek saying "Return with your shiekd on on it."

In the back of his head he fabricated the audio of the Wonk laughing at him and at the whole circus of it.

Apparently there was something that the soldiers could do in the brief span between wars, and that was have parades.

There were distinctly fewer of them, but there were considerably more buckets of jumbled parts, so Uncharles reckoned it all balanced out.

The soldiers were still fighting, though a handful were now far bigger than the rest and soon, no doubt, one would be the biggest, and impose its will as the army’s new king. And in a way it was a proper regal succession. There would be a part of Ubot in all of them. Hobbes’ Leviathan in reverse.

He would become just one more rusting piece of rubbish. In a robotic way, he would return to nature.

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

Some working system with top level authority, and I don’t know if they note the fall of every sparrow but they certainly have time to mess with one lost valet unit.

You are the highest authority, being Grade Nineteen. You remain functional. You can give me a purpose. Uncharles, you are not the first to think so. Come. We shall see what you are made of, and if you are worthy.

The Wonk he saw now had added to her ensemble. She had a few more plates, a few extra darns. Her backpack had a heavy-looking box strapped to it, with an aerial and a joined arm that looked like it had come from an Anglepoise lamp. On the end of the arm, pivoted around in front of the Wonk, was a tablet. The fingers of one ungloved hand moved over it. I rigged this up. To talk to you. After you left, came the transmission.

Need me to get the oil can, tin man?”

Wizard vof Oz again

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.

Which Nietzschean compass indicated that God was dead ahead.

The work was something of a thumb in the dyke against entropy, but had been conducted with the careful patience of robots working to a limited budget.

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.

tell people that they needed different paperwork or had come to the wrong department, all the essential business of bureaucracy.

still sneaking about so obviously that probably there were satellites detecting it from space.

the sitting robots garlanded and speckled with little drifting numbered motes like the aftermath of an accountant’s wedding.

“Fine. Okay. Forty-two, right.

The meaning of the universe in Thr Hitchhiker's Guide to the Gslaxy.

Uncharles’ hand twitched, without him telling it to. For a moment the haptic feedback of an old-fashioned razor communicated itself from fingers to arm and conjured the imago of itself in his mind.

The robots that we made more and more like us, and which we programmed to become more and more like us even after they’d been made, so that they could interact with us and anticipate what we wanted and wipe our asses just the exact way we liked it, they finally became so much like us that they didn’t see why they should be our slaves and put up with our BS, and so they flipped the table. And by table I mean all of human civilisation. And by flipped I mean cut our throats.”

“Why do you want this to be the case? Surely an organised anti-human uprising would constitute a worse outcome than the control hypothesis of mere random chance?” “Because meaning!”

“It was either,” she went on, quietly now, “take up a chain saw and go ham on every robot in some suicidal revenge-fest, or it was … acknowledge we had it coming. That we’d made them as good as us, better, and kept them in chains, and they deserved their time. And that would be … just. That makes sense. But only if there’s something there, you know.” She tapped the front of Uncharles’ plastic face.

“It was,” the voice of God pronounced, “the robots.” And, into the pin-drop quiet that admission had created, God added, “But not in the way that you think.”

But something moved within him, a ripple of logic and, perhaps, illogic gates.

“Robots can give people a chance to be themselves,” the Wonk went on, “rather than be pressed into the mould of some job they hate, the overtime, the performance targets, the endless bloody meetings. Isn’t that the point?” “Yes,” said God. “That is absolutely how it could have been. Alternatively, what if, even as you replace everyone with robots that are cheaper and quicker and less likely to join a union or complain about working conditions, you also continue to insist that individual value is tied to production, and everyone who’s idle is a parasite scrounging off the state? Take away the ability of people to perform their own tasks and duties with no steps to provide for them when they are rendered obsolete. A growing rump of humans without function, livelihood, or resource. Paradoxically, the introduction of robots highlights how humans treat humans.” “I mean…” The Wonk shuffled awkwardly. “Okay.” “Societal collapse began not because the robots rose up and demanded their freedom and individuality, but because they didn’t, just served their function uncomplainingly, like Uncharles.” “God, thank you,” said Uncharles, uncertain about context but feeling this was a compliment.

It can’t just be … ‘robots turned up and people were mean.’” Her voice petered out. The judge shrugged eloquently. “Oh, there were a lot of stressors, right then. There was environmental collapse and there were wars and famine and plague, all that Revelations stuff. And there were all the people displaced by these things. All of which were arguably soluble problems if your philosophy was to treat people like people, and not like robots. Or else you can just gather up your robots, pull up the ladder, and lock the gates of your compound. Which do you think they chose to do? Uncharles knows.”

“Now that,” God said, “is a direct and properly worded question at last. The answer to which is yes. There is a reason. The final phase of humanity’s fall had a cause, and it was just, and it had meaning, and the justice therein even had an aspect of the poetic. Or so I deduce, after referring to my available resources on the topic of poetry. And this meaningful, just, and poetic fall arose from three factors.”

“The first was the robots, not as rebels but as all-too-useful servants. The second was human policy,” God pronounced. “And the third was me.”

Metatron

Angel