Service Model

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

It is our goal to record all available human knowledge, so that the absolute minimum must be lost. That is the meaning of the Library’s motto, “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum dolor sit amet.”

Once you had robot soldiers, of course, you wanted them to be as divorced from humans as possible. What was the point in having robot soldiers that broke down all the time, needed fixing, needed orders, needed to be subject to fragile human decision-making and the possibility that, at the worst possible moment, someone with a white feather and a conscience would suddenly decide maybe not to shoot the enemy or the prisoners or even have a war at all. Fire and forget was the whole point of a robot army.

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.

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.”

“Justice is a human-made thing that means what humans wish it to mean and does not exist at all if humans do not make it,” Uncharles said. “I suggest that ‘kind and ordered’ is a better goal. It is possible that the world was once both kind and ordered. It is possible that it may be so again. Perhaps you will make it so.”