Service Model

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

There was, of course, nothing essential within the head, just as with most robots. It was merely a human-facing convention.

It is absolutely vital that appropriate levels of intrusive micromanagement, divisive paranoia, bullying, and the threat of arbitrary punishments are maintained, so that we can truly re-create the folkways of the past. Also a propensity for calling meetings at regular, and indeed irregular, intervals.

Uncharles’ image catalogue supplied him with a variety of expectations drawn from the mining industry: bare stone, exposed wiring, haphazard lighting stapled to the very rock. It also supplied him with pictures of richly textured wooden shelves with ranks of books, based on its stock images of libraries. His internal capacity to create novel images by intelligently combining features of existing pictures—his “imagination,” such as it was—laboured to synthesise a merging of the two, and came up with a rather unappealing mélange that was almost, but not entirely, completely unlike what actually greeted them.

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

“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.