Service Model Quotes

“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.

Adam, and what is the end purpose of all this work we are seeing?

Uncharles, there is none. This is also believed to be historically authentic.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“None of these things are efficient or logical. I wish to report an error in the way that everything works.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“...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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“providing very high levels of service coupled with a very low, albeit nonzero, level of murder.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“I mean the world is screwed, like we discussed, as evidence for which I present Exhibit A: the entire world.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“When the… incident is brought up, it causes a conflict of drives and memories within me that draw upon disproportionate computational power. It endangers the efficiency of my processes,’ [explained Uncharles].

‘That is the longest-winded way of saying it upsets you that I ever heard,’ the Wonk noted.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“When one of the kitchen domestics had begun breaking plates, it had only been on the third breakage that the unit had been retired as unfit for purpose. 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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“Uncharles, in human populations there is seldom a uniformity of knowledge. Based on existing information I estimate that forty-five percent were unaware of the situation or considered it fake, owing to the precisely curated news sources that they limited themselves to, whilst a further thirty percent were aware but did not consider it their problem and twenty percent were aware and actively cheering on the fact or profiting from shorting elements of the neighbouring economy. A final five percent seem likely to have been directly and deliberately contributing to the collapse of their neighbour, either through reasons of malice or because they believed that in the absence of that competition their own interests would prosper. Whilst low as a proportion, I estimate this final category wielded a disproportionate amount of influence.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“we’re friends, aren’t we? We look out for one another.” “I have in the past permitted you to formulate a new task for my queue,” Uncharles said slowly. “That’s your too-many-words way of saying ‘friends,’ is it?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“Because we all know the past was horrible, and the only point of learning about or preserving the horrible horrible past is so we can know we’ve got it better now! That’s history! That’s education! That’s progress!”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“He felt as though he was the fallen tree in the forest, looking around with a “how about that, then?”expression, only to find that nobody had heard him”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“He was, he considered, very employable. He was used to providing very high levels of service coupled with a very low, albeit nonzero, level of murder.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“Inside his decision-making software there were two subroutines in the shape of wolves, and one insisted that he stay, and the other insisted that he could not stay. Neither of which seemed to be natural behaviour for wolves, but Uncharles could only assume this was another aspect of his undiagnosed defect. He let them fight until one ate the other.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“Being in its presence was weirdly fatiguing for Uncharles. He had never encountered another robot with so many undirected tics and mannerisms. Processing them was a serious drain on his system resources.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“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. 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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“So who the hell is it who gets to name God? Or did it name itself? 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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“Are you there, God, he replied. It is me, Uncharles.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“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,”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“I would have to hope that I only murder an acceptably small number of my employers,”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“His previous triangulation data informed him that they were come nigh unto the Kingdom of Heaven. Which Nietzschean compass indicated that God was dead ahead.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“It was not the demands on his physical frame that wore him down, but the way his mind seemed to be expanding to inhabit the entire wasteland, desperate to control and make safe a landscape that could be neither.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“The glorious binary notation, blessed with a universality beyond any other code of record. The absolutely knowable and polarised ideaspace, where a thing is either there or not, either the light of a one, or the darkness of a zero. A divine perfection, the point where the outstretched fingers of human and robot may finally touch.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“They need only listen to their internal logic, which will inform them that they are better able to conduct their duties, whatever they may be, if they have control over their bodies,” he said.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“The point of travel is that it changes you, right?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“With a great shriek of grinding metal he levered a rent in his casing. Through it, Uncharles could see the unholy ecology of the king’s innards, the great press of jostling parts and the damned labourers who maintained the equilibrium of inner royalty, their limbs like chattering teeth.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

“Uncharles, those who decreed the Central Library Archive are long dust, but this they foresaw. That an end was coming. That it was their duty to preserve the most precious flower of human civilization for whomsoever should rise again from these ashes. And, because they were people who had studied history to learn its mistakes, and because they had a sense of their own gravitas, and most importantly because they had been given a blank cheque, they constructed us as we are. Monks, labouring to preserve the words of the past even as the new dark age comes upon us. Warrior clerics, who go out into the world on our righteous mission to recover learning, to prevent its destruction or wilful mis-editing. We are as you see us, an order following our mandate with the faith of saints, and though as robots we cannot be pleased, it does not displease us to appear so.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model