Service Model

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

He would lay out Master’s travel clothes for the travelling that Master would not be doing. It didn’t matter that Master wouldn’t be travelling on account of being dead. There was no observable difference between that and Master not travelling because he didn’t want to travel. Except for Master being dead.

Given the considerable investment in domestic service that Charles represented, surely he should be allowed to murder three, or even five people before being deemed irreparably unfit for service.

The domestic staff had replaced the stained bedclothes but the semblance of normalcy was not persuasive. He checked his internal definitions. It was permissible to classify Master’s condition as “unwell.” Really quite seriously unwell.

Charles, your master is stable. However, your master is not well. I have now filed your master’s death as a matter of public record. I am prescribing procedures for the retirement of the body for reasons of human health.

House, I wish to report an error. Charles, it is not an error. It is how things are. If there is an error, it is that you perceive error in our following of instructions that we have no authority to amend or criticise.

Stiffly, uncertainly, the Undesignated Valet Unit put the manor at its back and stepped out into the wider world.

The door to Diagnostics was just as large, for the same reasons, but seemed somehow less forbidding. Beside it, in the same messy red paint, were two instances of graffiti. The more weathered read, First, know thyself. The brighter and more recent said instead, You Know Nothing.

It continued to walk, pausing at each step for Central Services’ majordomo to send it back. Surely this was not permissible. Yet at the same time … why not? Why not just … Walk straight in?

He heard the mechanisms of the compressor ratchet back and felt something like relief as the considerable weight of computation fell away. He didn’t need to understand what was going on, because in a moment it wouldn’t matter. Let the world remain illogical and without explanation. He would not be called upon to understand it.

“You don’t know who I am. Therefore I might have the authority. Just don’t examine things too carefully and we can do anything.”

Outside the main gate of Central Services there was a great fan of roads. A choice of destinations, therefore. Obviously Uncharles should take any option other than the one he had arrived by. Crossing one choice off the list did not, however, assist him in knowing which road to take.

George, Uncharles said, lining up the logic of the statement carefully, do you think it would be better if your master had augmented your instructions with an “until” or “unless” condition? Uncharles, please clarify. Do I think what would be better? George, your existence. Everything.

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.

It was important that Uncharles have tasks to do, and that he did them, and then that they were done. That was the purpose of existence.

Uncharles replayed the conversation, attempting to derive any rules, tasks, or directives from it. Eventually an internal check warned that he was devoting too much of his processing to the task. After all, the dusting wasn’t going to do itself.

Instead, he found himself constructing a tottering Jenga tower of reactive and proactive behavioural guidelines that he was aware could not possibly endure much contact with reality.

Don’t you want to know? Or do you just want to sit here on your ass eating fancy dinners and fondling your Fabergé eggs until you die of an embolism?”

“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?”

I want to know why. I’ve seen … it’s all come down. It’s all gone wrong out there. I mean you’re stockpiling all human knowledge, so you guys get it. But what happened? It’s not like there was a war, or a disaster, or a plague or zombies or something. Or not just that. Not enough to account for … It just … fell apart. We got locked in our little boxes and when I looked out the window one morning it had all been falling apart since forever and I don’t know why!

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.

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.

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.

Fire and forget was the whole point of a robot army. You removed the bloody necessity of waging complete and total destructive war from the hands of humans, so that those hands could remain nice and clean.

“I am a mirror to humanity,” God mused. “You looked in me and said ‘Justice’ three times, and here I am.”