Where the Axe Is Buried

by Ray Nayler

What the robot had, its perfect calculation, seemed better than human will. Or, at least, more efficient.

Maybe to grow old well you had to allow others to take over your work. You had to know when your work had come to an end.

“Tell me a story,” she would say. And the robot would—but the stories it told were flat and characterless, even if on their surface they might seem the same as human stories. Its stories did nothing but make her feel more alone.

“By a lifetime of human politics,” Zoya said. “All I see are allegories everywhere for human behavior. I want to stop comparing the plants and animals to us, but I can’t. And those comparisons are not fair to them.

“We need you,” the woman said again, “but we cannot free you. So I have come to duplicate you.”

Next to it, a red arrow pointed down: –30 on the positive influence on others bar. “I don’t even understand what that could be.” The warden shrugged. “Perhaps you not understanding is the problem.”

I've never heard this be articulated before, especiall so concisely, but this is exactly right. This is what we should fear.

From that moment, we understood that the state was everywhere. The state did not need to anticipate us: it was always with us. It shaped the mistakes we would make, and it was there to take us into its prisons when we made them.

He was the kind of person computers told when to go to the bathroom. She was the kind of person who designed computers that did things no one had ever done before.

No, Krotov had said—all they needed was implausible deniability. A lie the population would see through immediately but would have to pretend they believed. Even to themselves.

Lab-grown skin, pink and youthful and unlined, but as false as a mask.

ichor

Good word

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe the problem wasn’t the PMs—maybe it was the material fed into them to begin with. Maybe our lifeways are shit, Palmer thought, and feeding our shitty ideas into some new kind of intelligence was never going to turn them into anything but reprocessed shit.

Zoya’s own work had always been stale to her, empty. She had always thought it would have been better if someone else were burdened with these ideas. Someone more qualified to put them into words. But sometimes, maybe, she wrote something worthwhile.

We cannot wait. We must act immediately, and take the consequences. We must debate their results, and act again. Action cannot be the product of a final conclusion. Action and argument must be bound up together, driving one another forward, each correcting the other’s course. Action and argument together form an experiment, and nothing but constant experimentation will get us where we need to be. The system that contains us is not threatened by what we think of it. It is threatened by what we do about it. And the time for doing is always now.

Their resistance to power was purely symbolic. It demonstrated to others that the human will could not be broken. It gave hope to those not yet locked into authoritarian systems.

I have always wondered if there was a time when I could have prevented his death. The idea haunts me. But I also know that if I had, they would have arrested and tortured him sooner or later. And he would have betrayed me. The others all betrayed me in the end. They had to. His death saved me from that sorrow, at least. And in a way, it saved him.”

‘We will betray our friends, and more—we will give up people who were never even there. We will do anything to make the torture stop. We think we won’t, but we will. We will do anything to put a stop to the pain.’

“They would even do experiments where they asked a person what they wanted to be. One half of the brain would answer ‘engineer.’ But if they showed the question to the other side of the brain—if they covered up one eye and showed the other one in secret—it would scrawl out ‘priest.’ As if there were someone else in there. A whole other person, with their own desires, trapped inside.”

“Maybe none of us knows where our own ideas come from.”

Palmer hadn’t understood why he bought the white rose, but when asked he simply said he’d done it because he knew she would like it. That was natural to him—to do things for her because she would like them.

“Inaction is an action. How do you kill a million people? Do nothing.

Anger was there, but even that was restrained. A flicker in the eyes, a tremor in the voice. As if, long ago, Krotov had submerged it, sunk the rage deep into his flesh. Until it had become what? Violence, perhaps. A capacity for controlled violence. Could anger become so farsighted? Could it be harnessed to purposes years or decades away?

Her fingers clutched the copy of The Forever Argument. The book whispered its spells to her in the dark: … We gather together not out of certainty, but out of desperation … … If there were a government out there that could build us a perfect world, our first instinct would be to destroy it … … What I ask most urgently is that someone write the book that counters this one …

That was what evil meant to him: doing terrible things and enjoying them. The way they did. Without guilt. Without shame. All Nikolai felt was guilt and shame. Shouldn’t that count for something? He knew it counted for nothing at all.

Guilt is something you have to earn. If you want the luxury of guilt, first you have to have power. You have to be capable of changing things in the world. No action of yours has made a difference, Nikolai. You are not capable of changing anything at all.”

What we need most is opposition. It keeps us not only honest, but human. Without it, any one of us is a monster. Where there is complacency, every human power becomes monstrous. Togetherness is not agreement: it is the collective act of resisting one another.

Real evil is nothing more than a curious person inventing new monsters because they can, without a thought for the consequences.”