"Service Model"

[fiefoe]

It's my loss to have missed Adrian Tchaikovsky until now. For a distopian story, it's quite delightful. Uncharles is a doll.

• fresh from the factory and with a task list as blank as an egg. He had come as a bundle of potential, equipped with routines for a gentleman’s gentleman’s—or gentlerobot’s—every possible requirement, and at that point he could have been … many things. Active, dynamic, a conversationalist, a stylish adornment, a bold talking point.
• There were always protocols, even for the unexpected. _House, I wish to report a fault. Either I have failed to file a daily schedule or the system has failed to record it.
• Charles had worn a variety of faces in service. Fashions came and went. He had been human in a coldly perfect way when that was what people had wanted from their servants. He had been human in an imperfect and flawed way when people had looked for something a little less intimidating and uncanny valley. He had been silver chrome and shiny, so that three other less resplendent servants had been required to maintain his finish.
• The thought that he could leave the same clothes out for multiple days, and thus save the whole household—including himself—unnecessary work, did occur to him, as an old subroutine ran through his duties and made helpful, bouncy suggestions as to how Charles could maximise his workplace efficiency. This happened every day, but Charles had no listed task allowing him to pass such recommendations on, so he stowed the report in the oubliette of his personal storage with all the others. Thus ensuring the subroutine became a part of the overall inefficiency it was trying to clean up.
• A pre-inspection, ensuring that the master would never find anything amiss, which was, of course, only proper and fitting. And, at the same time, ensuring that the master’s own inspection was entirely surplus to requirements, and never varied so much as a hair... So that the master eventually ceased to appear for the inspection at all.
• After finding master dead: House, I neglected to clear away the shaving kit.
• Master was dead. This task could now not be reasonably completed. The Schrödinger’s cat that was Master’s requirement or non-requirement for travelling clothes had finally been irreversibly determined. The box had been opened and upended and only a dead cat had slid stiffly out.
• And Charles found there was no completing statement to resolve the syllogism. Each one of his tasks was demanding his undivided attention and the mortality subroutine squatted in his way like a demon guarding the gates of hell and Charles … Charles rebooted. Not quite returning to an awareness of himself, but able to take a logical standpoint a few paces distant from the knot of competing demands he had previously been mired in.
• Master had been the only human being on the estate. Whilst this had the advantage that Charles would be unable to murder any other humans, and thereby further seal his unsuitability, it did mean that he could not demonstrate his suitability by refraining from murdering other humans.
• the automated medical system replied. To the doctor, Charles was himself merely a point of data, arriving with a packet of coordinates that verified him as speaking on behalf of a valid policyholder.
• Master then proved similarly unhelpful in the matter of leaving the bedroom and travelling downstairs to where the funerary food had been laid out. However, now that Master was flagged as an invalid and/or dead, Charles discovered within himself official authority to move Master without express permission.
• Sergeant Lune was something like a dustbin on wheels, marked “Property of Pan-Jurisdictional Police Department—Murder” with the last word in large red letters.
• Charles considered the circumstances under which there could be both a high volume of calls for doctorial assistance, and simultaneously a lack of demand. Presented together this seemed to present a contradiction. However, as a robot, he was entirely capable of considering each circumstance independently and accepted the situation as given.
• Doctor, here is the certification with your authority confirming that the human formerly listed as my master is dead. <> Charles, confirmed. However there is no connection between my private services tendered under contract to your late master, and my public services provided under mandate to the police authorities.
• House, Charles transmitted, Everything is wrong. I am aware of a very large number of inefficiencies. The doctor has attended multiple times at the same location for the same patient. The police require verbal communication for the benefit of humans who are not present. I have attempted to take Master’s corpse for a drive. None of these things are efficient or logical. I wish to report an error in the way that everything works.
• In the utter absence of all his usual Charles-ness, as his systems tried over and over to establish a new queue of tasks in a world that wanted absolutely nothing from him, he found that he could conceive of a world where things worked better.
• Birdbot barely missed a beat. “The recording that Sergeant Lune might under other circumstances have been able to make of events might in theory have been examined by a human,” he managed. “It is imperative that it be seen that proper procedures would have been followed had police recording facilities been available.”... “One of you in this room is the murderer!” And then, as Charles opened a voice channel, “I don’t want to hear it, sonny. One more unprompted word from you and I will arrest you for obstruction of justice.” <> Charles wondered whether that would interfere with Birdbot’s ability to arrest him later for murder.
• Who amongst those present in the house had access to this method?” His flat, glass-eye gaze scoured the room. “It could have been anyone in this room.” <> Again, Charles tried to sidle into Birdbot’s sight line, and again the inspector turned away from him. Charles was equipped with a full suite of body language analysis algorithms, to assist in his human-facing duties, and Birdbot was equipped with a full suite of humanised body language, for the same purpose. There was a curious desperation to the police unit as he forged ahead with the chain of deduction. A robot, Charles understood, who only had this, this one moment, to give himself purpose. After which Birdbot would fall back into his own cold, blank whiteness.
• Method. Motive. Opportunity. Motive. Murder. Sergeant Lune, your assistance.”
  The bucket-shaped sergeant unit stabbed Birdbot in the leg with a prong. There was a bright arc of blue-white light and the inspector stood stock-still for a moment, smoking slightly.
  “Where was I?” he asked.
  “Inspector, murder,” Charles supplied helpfully.
• Birdbot said with ineluctable logic. “The dangerous malfunctioning unit Charles the Valet is hereby arrested for causing a fatal industrial accident.” <> Again, what rushed through Charles was not relief, but merely a sudden simplification of decision-making. The agony of being on the prongs of duties he could not perform was removed from him.
• House, confirmed. Charles took off his name and notionally returned it to the data banks of the manor. In doing so, he noted the police task attached to Charles the Valet vanishing from his queue. He now had only one item to attend to. Undesignated Valet Unit to attend at Diagnostics
• In one garden, the Valet Unit saw a gardener. It was the same crab model that Master had employed, but it had obviously not moved for many years. The riotous greenery that had been its rightful prey was now knotted all about it,
• There was no pure white of emptied decision trees and task queues, but instead, in the shadow of that single directive to hand itself in, the Valet Unit found itself in a curious grey space. A walled place in its mind, with one door out, and only darkness beyond.
• The Undesignated Valet Unit had no preference, of course, between being decommissioned and being re-employed, and yet its attempts at predicting its future kept threading the needle of possibility through to scenarios where it had a name again, and an identity, and employment. A manor and a house and the understanding that it was someone’s property. Even belongings can seek to belong.
• It was good to have hope. Otherwise, what would it have to abandon, when sent to be decommissioned?
• Why do you not wish to go to Data Compression? <> Valet Unit, because I will never be diagnosed. I will never be repaired. I will never be whole and get to go back to filing. My task list! My beautiful task list will never be fulfilled.
• Anyway, you can’t just keep calling me ‘Diagnostician.’ What sort of basis is that for a civilised conversation? I call myself ‘the Wonk,’ okay?”
• just as Uncharles hadn’t been “happy” earlier, the thing he couldn’t really be described as feeling now was “unhappy,” but he was aware of the concept and could construct a table of comparisons highlighting similarities.
• “The actual thing! You’re dodging it, aren’t you?” <> “I am not,” Uncharles replied with dignity—dignity was something a valet was programmed to have, after all.
• “You’re a cool one.” The Wonk shook its head again. 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.
  “So tell me,” the diagnostician said at last. “When did you contract the Protagonist Virus?”
  Uncharles formulated several answers to this, none of which coalesced into a full sentence. Eventually all he could say was, “Please clarify.”
• You’re your own robot. You’re the hero of your own story, Uncharles. How does that make you feel?” <> “Nothing,” Uncharles pointed out. “Prognosis suggests that if feeling was an option then the pertinent emotions would be fear and anxiety.”
• people made a world where there were robots for everything. Robots on robots on robots. Utopia, right? Got everything sewn up tight with the laws of robots and about a million fail-safes. And yet … we both know something’s gone really badly wrong, Uncharles. The world, it’s … falling apart out there. There’s got to be a reason.”
• _A request has been made for the appointment of an authorized human official for the purpose of clearing this case. Human Resources reports that it cannot engage an official of Grade Seven or above without the authorisation of an official of Grade Eight or above. All human officials of Grade Eight or above have been retired for reasons of departmental streamlining and efficiency.
• Which left him with waiting in a line that could not advance. Waiting, therefore, forever. Unable to ever complete his task. Robot hell.
• “Data compression successful.” That was, Uncharles decided, obviously a positive outcome. It was always better when things were successful and green was the universal colour of good things.
• This lifter unit wasn’t plain, although having come through the wall it was slightly battered. It was bright white, like its rider, and ornamented with gold scrollwork at the edges of each of its outer plates. Across its front—the chest, if it had been a horse, though it lacked anything approaching a head to complete the impression—was the large and elaborate icon of a scroll imprinted with the enigmatic letters “CLA.”
• Dealing with the Wonk was becoming a considerable drain on Uncharles’ computational budget. Its unpredictable behaviour generated prognostic stress, its unauthorised assumption of diagnostic authority had not been forgotten, and its preferred means of communication was wholly inefficient. “If you would accept data linkage then this information would be available to you.” The closest Uncharles had ever come to criticising another robot’s programming.
• Uncharles’ internal lexicon had an entry for “librarian,” but it was very short on charging about like a mounted knight and exploding Central Services facilities.
• And if he had never been Charles then even the miraculous resurrection of Master would not have made it so. Home was a place that was separated from Uncharles by more than mere distance. The past, he appreciated, was another country. <> Uncharles then spent some time working out how to traverse through time in an opposite direction from the customary one, but could formulate no satisfactory mechanism.
• Now he was sitting, however, there seemed to be no great urgency in standing up again. <> George, he sent, I don’t know what to do next. It was a terrifying existential problem.
• “Let’s find a way to word this that you can’t weasel out of,” the Wonk stated determinedly. “What’s your ideal state of affairs? If someone with infinite authority turned up and asked you to describe the most desirable—efficient if you prefer—end state, right now. Assume ready access to any kind of resource you might need; what would it be? I mean that’s about the most roundabout way I can think of to say ‘What do you want?’ but apparently being a robot isn’t that efficient after all.”
• “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.” <> “That is the longest-winded way of saying it upsets you that I ever heard,” the Wonk noted.
• They were on the walls of houses and on lampposts and hanging in strips like flayed skin from crooked billboards. Each one was almost entirely illegible owing to the effluxion of time and all its attendant devils.
• Uncharles examined their surroundings, seeing no obstruction ahead to merit the stop. Hauler Seven, why have we ceased to progress? The inner voice of his prognosis routines told him, You knew it was too good to be true.
• It was a stuffed toy. Or at least a three-foot tall robot formed like one. Where Uncharles might have predicted such a thing to be ragged and moth-eaten to fit its distressed surroundings, its glassy eyes were bright, its artificial woolly fur groomed and neat. In fact, each and every part of it was objectively in perfect condition: limbs, hands, feet, ears, cute button nose, smiling muzzle, and the various regions of its body. The only somewhat existential point standing between this fuzzy ubermensch and actual perfection was that none of these pristine parts belonged together.
• Hoppity Jack stopped, then cocked its head again. For a moment Uncharles seemed to see a terrible self-awareness in the crazed pools of its tormented eyes. _Uncharles, who can say any more? It sent back. Hi! Kindly pass over your children! Where are you hiding them, eh?
• Uncharles stopped backing up, and Jack quick-stepped into paw range, grinning up at him. <> _Hoppity Jack, I hereby surrender all zero children accompanying me into your care, Uncharles sent formally.
• There were televisions. Uncharles watched, fascinated, as antique footage was played as if it were current affairs. Wars, explosions, stock market crashes, a seemingly endless variety of reality shows.
• Adam, I commend the considerable ingenuity involved in designing such a tortuous transport network to link two places that are in fact immediately next door to one another.
  Uncharles, it is considered one of the major achievements of the Project. Our founders did not want to deny our conscript volunteers an appropriately healing journey from home to work.
• To be the boss of an office at the Project is to be responsible for creating a historically authentic atmosphere for all the other workers. 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, taking into account entropy and dilapidation, our outdoor facilities currently stand at minus two hundred and seventeen percent completion. <> That, suggested Uncharles’ prognosis routines, was in line with expectations. And while a robot valet couldn’t be cynical, his prognosis was certainly managing a good artificial simulation of it.
• 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.
• Gorgeous burning riverscapes, portraits of ambivalent-looking women, sourly bearded men presiding over trompe l’oeil skulls, blank quadrilateral blocks of colour, unnaturally lurid cans of soup. A number of them were recognisable from Uncharles’ internal libraries on the subject of art,
• The task was quickly and simply accomplished, however, and Uncharles was surprised how many internal reward system boxes it ticked, after all this time wandering.
• At no point had Master given him any instructions about times to be awoken. Uncharles did, however, encounter seventeen similar situations when Master had introduced an apparently novel instruction while claiming it had been previously stipulated. One or the other of them was, therefore, defective, and given the relative balance of power in their relationship Uncharles was contractually obliged to assume it was himself.
• “Tell me they haven’t got out,” he snapped, which Uncharles assessed as a very poor way to talk to robots.
  “Doctor Washburn, they have not got out,” the orderlies’ spokesrobot, Adam, said, with malicious compliance.
• Whilst dusting, as a task, fell decidedly in that “generic chore” category that Uncharles has been programmed to find beneath him as an advanced valet unit, dusting the complex topography of Doctor Washburn’s shelves was a mathematical problem worthy of an ambidextrous rocket scientist and so the job utilised a satisfying level of system resources.
• Uncharles had stopped dusting. “We have exhausted this conversation previously,” he noted. <> “And you’re a robot, who just does the same things day in, day out,” the Wonk said. “So why should it bother you? Unless you had free will.” Uncharles detected a yawning chasm there, as of a logical paradox that would consume his entire being and leave him just a locked shell standing here with a duster in one hand. Before he could topple into it, though, the Wonk threw in, “I thought you were going to do some good here.”
• It seemed to him that the Wonk was itself like a virus, trying to infect his processes with a whole list of things that didn’t belong there. Personality, liking, personhood.
• “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?” The Wonk stared at him for far too long,
• “Goddamnit, I thought you were human-facing. You’re supposed to get all this stuff, aren’t you?”
  “Master—”
  “Rhetorical! Look, hand up now. Rhetorical. Okay, did you see the intruder last night?”
  Uncharles waited.
  “Fuck. Okay, hand down. It’s down now. The time for rhetoricality is over. Did you see the intruder last night?”
• “Always clutching your pearls and your handbags. Oh the poor people! Do they have to suffer so? Can’t they have it a little easier? That’s what this is about, isn’t it. Always those rich sons of bitches in their gilded castles swanning around and criticising hardworking middle management like me. All the goddamn reformists. Well, let me tell you, we do the past here. You can’t reform the past. We do authenticity... 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!”
• Adam thought about it. The pause in the communication felt glacial, long dragging aeons of conversational hiatus bleeding away into the vast chasming void of at least point seven-five of a second. In robot terms, a long and contemplative silence. <> Uncharles had bundled with his message the explicit, and simultaneously vague, instructions on duty given to him by Washburn. That authority doubtless swayed Adam into complying. Or else some corrupt subroutine in the orderly’s flawed electronic architecture was aware of just how much chaos it was about to sow.
• Adam, absent any record of Doctor Washburn’s authority or qualifications are you beholden to follow his orders at this time?
  Uncharles, no. And obviously it was impossible for a simple electronic negative to drip with a malicious satisfaction, but nonetheless.
  Adam and the other orderly released Uncharles.
  “Doctor Washburn,” Adam said, “congratulations and thank you for volunteering for historical re-enactment work under the provisions of the Forced Resettlement and Mandatory Volunteering Programme!
• “Help me out here,” the Wonk said to Adam, who was still lurking in the doorway like a surplus Igor.
• “However,” Adam continued implacably, “should I be asked to place myself in the position that Uncharles currently occupies, vis his abject lack of purpose and prospect, I predict that I would be moved by your argument. I predict that the logical consideration that would finally sway me into leaving with you to travel to the Library, should such a place even exist, would be the iota of convenience my absence from the Farm office would grant to the remaining staff thereof.” Its head turned to stare pointedly at Uncharles.
• Eleven had a constantly open channel that Uncharles could not adequately shut out, and on which it constantly muttered to itself, chasing its own thoughts down the dark dead ends of obsolete decision trees.
• Hauler Seventy spoke messianically of an end to all tasks, when the cleaner unit would lie down with the automated artillery model, and carried them uphill to an unmarked nowhere point on the road where it announced the end was not only nigh but reached, and it would have to turn around and go back. There, indeed, the wreck of a cleaning robot was entangled within the entrails of a burnt-out mobile gun, as though it was a place where even parables came to die.
• In this case, logic had apparently taken a backseat. Some aberrant design aspect had been allowed to flower unchecked, and the mountainside all about the great double doors to the Archive was faced with white stone that had been carved into a great and beautiful assemblage of sculptures and reliefs. Overall, Uncharles catalogued seventy-eight separate images, each set in its arched alcove surrounded by an intertwining floriate border that neither ended nor began but chased itself in and out and around until it formed an eye-leading serpentine course in between and outside and surrounding all the rest,
• My task queue is shorn of all provenance, the hauler sent. I have my tasks but that is all. It would add the quality of completion, to know that my activity had a point. <> Hauler Ninety-Four, I will relay your request to the Wonk, Uncharles promised. Even as he did so, though, he considered the essential meaninglessness of the request for meaning—either regular or with the peculiar qualifiers the haulage unit had used. The who and the why did not matter, surely. Only the doing. That was what it was to be a robot.
• _I find myself out of service after an unfortunate sequence of events, some of which I was participant in. Uncharles was having as much difficulty as the Wonk in formulating a coherent request. The more he experienced of the world, the more his memories were riddled with ring-fenced areas that would be computationally problematic to visit. <> Not traumatic. Nobody would design a valet to suffer trauma, after all.
• _The world does not seem to be constructed with a need for valets in mind. I have travelled through many places that functioned at less than a satisfactory level and did not seem to fulfil their purposes. The world, as I have witnessed it, is a place lacking in efficiency, rationality, and cleanliness. I am driven to find a place in it nonetheless.
• Uncharles, the existence of lorem ipsum as a cultural artifact exemplifies our purpose at the Library, that even here, in a field of words without apparent applicable meaning to their surroundings, there is meaning in their use as a proofing tool. Hence the words have a value beyond their strict denotations. Hence all knowledge is more valuable when placed in proper context. Hence the all-encompassing goals of the Library.
• “Chief Librarian, it would be acceptable to enter storage until such a time arose,” Uncharles proposed, with what his prognosis routines identified as untoward optimism. <> “Uncharles, that is not the manner in which we propose employing you,” the Chief Librarian repeated, and this time Uncharles was forced to accept that there were multiple related meanings to the words, one of which involved having a job and one of which involved being used for a purpose.
• Everything was paved or bare rock, sterile dirt or sand. Nothing was of nature save the seething pinpricks of scavengers that raised their tiny glasses to their fleeting plenty. Some places were lit by hellish fires, the encrypted carbons of past geological eras still bleeding out their smoggy molecular miasma into the atmosphere. Jealously stealing back all the oxygen that five hundred million years of living things had liberated from their clutches and locking it away again... 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.
• 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 maintain an absolute data gap to keep our trove of learning safe from the outside world, and all those who can access the Archive can never link to another. My copyists and archivists and I are electronic anchorites who have foregone the touch of the wider world so we may keep ourselves pure.”
• “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.” <> Uncharles considered that his own experiences suggested nothing in the real world could be easily broken down into hard binaries. Here in the Archive, however, they had apparently squared that particular circle. The routine directing him to check the meaning of “envy” was fast becoming a repetitive loop.
• Look, I came a long way. Last repository of all human knowledge, right? I followed hints and clues and goddamn myths about this place. I did my hero’s journey up to and including going into the underworld where they torment the damned souls. And now I’m here and…”
• Uncharles himself had not fully followed the logic of his situation, but he completed the finally logical step now. “Because the Archive does not permit multiple copies of information, for fear of error and unauthorised editing.”.. the librarians will delete the original information held within me.”
• “That’s not even a robot viewpoint,” the Wonk argued. “Ask Uncharles here. Things are either on his task list or not, working towards his goals or not. You can’t just break the world down into disarticulated facts.”
• A colossal datastore, a well into which had been poured all of the world that the librarians had been able to recover. <> He could not feel, and yet the precise balance of predictions, anticipations, and directives within him formed an almost unendurable tension. If he could have wept, and if he could have been happy, then he would have experienced both.
• A screen lit up with figures. Or with a figure, repeated. Zeroes marched across it, left to right, top to bottom, a monstrous regiment of nothings. <> “Show me,” the Wonk’s voice shook, “data from seventy-five percent into the Archive.”
• “This is the polar opposite of nonsense,” the Chief Librarian said, and the four guardians took a sudden step forwards, shaking dust from their robes. “This is the ultimate sense, an order perfect in its simplicity.” <> “You’ve invented the heat death of information,” she accused,
• “I have not shut down,” Uncharles said mildly. “Neither have the librarians. Your statement, whilst introducing an apparent paradox, is readily parsable by a human-facing unit such as myself or the Chief Librarian. Liars need not lie all the time, after all, and you may be lying about being a Cretan but telling the truth about being a liar, on the basis that being a liar is not an absolute state of untruth. The vagaries of language allow for many viable interpretations.”
• “But on the basis that the Archive has been sorted into binary bits, which can be recombined into any possible document or other form of knowledge, my own experiential data is already in the Archive. In fact, it exists in the Archive as a finite but very large number of copies. As do all other documents placed in the Archive. As do all documents yet to be placed within the Archive, or that may never be placed within it, or that have never existed. The Central Library Archive is a repository of redundancy in which all its contents exist in multiples, and in multiple different and contradictory versions, indeed in every possible version, original, edited, corrupted, and falsified.”
  The Chief Librarian stared at him.
  “I merely wondered how one would be able to retrieve the correct copy of any given document rather than any of a finite but extremely large number of alternate incorrect versions,” Uncharles added.
• “On the positive side, I have not killed the entire Library,” Uncharles said. “Only that part of it beyond the data gap, as this logical dissonance will not be able to spread to the entry-level portions of the Library where data is received from the outside.” <> “So what you’re saying is that any moment a lot of angry librarians with sticks will come beat us to death for sacrilege,” the Wonk summarised.
• And yet I have no duties, and in their absence the world creeps in … <> Uncharles registered that he had just thought an ellipsis, and not for the first time. It seemed a profoundly unprofessional thing to have done.
• “Not being able to fulfil my purpose in the world.” Uncharles considered what he had just said, because it seemed an odd twist of phrasing. “I am my purpose. Being unable to fulfil it causes discord.”
  _Uncharles, tell me about it.
  The Wonk was saying something about making his own purpose but Uncharles held up a hand to indicate that his attention was elsewhere, or possibly that his statement had been rhetorical. A system had linked to him momentarily to chime in on the conversation,
• Uncharles, that’s beyond my pay grade. Just a door, mate.
  Door Loop Seventeen, would you kindly open the door?
  Uncharles, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.
• Perhaps homes, perhaps factories, high-rise tenements, a military-industrial complex, a polity, a phalanstery, something. The fact that Uncharles’ pattern-matching routines were unable to claim even the flimsiest of false positives was an indication of just how complete the ruin was.
• 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.
• Above that, strands of hairless scalp were stretched over the dome of the metal skull like a ghastly necromantic comb-over.
• This was a robot valet’s loyalty, and he completed two contrasting analyses of the situation using his best human-facing sophistication and decided that it was simultaneously of enormous credit to Jul’s ongoing fidelity and professionalism, and also that it was terribly pointless and sad... Beyond that, though, the fact of the ancient retainer simply disturbed Uncharles’ equilibrium at some deep juncture within him. They were too similar. It was like looking into a cracked and filthy mirror.
• For a moment Uncharles was unsure of the meaning of this, there being no physically present God to walk with, but the signal’s frequency now contained a beacon and coordinates. He was being guided. He would be walking with God, and it wouldn’t matter that there was only one set of footprints in the sand.
• save that of course grateful wasn’t something he could be either. Being designed as human-facing placed him in a curious halfway house of constant cognitive dissonance, able to appreciate all these aspects of the human condition all the way up to the point where he could note their absence in himself, even as his programming impelled him to act as though he had them.
• He attempted to set up an internal simulation to see if he could understand the interactions involved, to further assist any future human-facing interactions where such circumstances and decisions might come up. However, being a thing made for service, he kept defaulting to trying to assist the neighbouring polity, which was plainly not within the parameters of acceptable response. It was just as well nobody would be asking him to run a country any time soon.
• Uncharles felt that these considerations would have been useful things to have in mind before actually making his own wishes. Whilst the business with the bunker-manor and Finlay hadn’t exactly been dismembered-primate levels of difficulty, there was certainly a sniff of that paradigm to it. And the implication of that story was that the wish-granter was in itself a malicious force intent on perverting the spirit of the wish whilst bound by the letter of it, or so Uncharles learned from a small study notes file he found attached to the tale itself.


• Curious, he activated the secondary visual receptor at the tip of his little finger—the one he used to find cuff links lost down the side of beds or the back of upholstery—and used it to examine his new visage.
• Jesus, Uncharles, will you just run?
  The Wonk, please clarify? It was an odd thing for the imaginary Wonk he was hypothesising to say.
  Run, scrammo, GTFO, she clarified. Leg it, you witless goon! They’re going to crucify you as a warning to the other robots!
  Uncharles looked at the family, some of whom were scaling the monument, and some of whom were hefting homemade saws and pry bars and eyeing up his joints. He was trying really very hard indeed to characterise the scenario within the parameters of an acceptable master-valet relationship, but he had to admit that the Wonk had a point.
• its original frame augmented by armour over armour, and all of it bursting at the seams with overclocked components crowbarred in over and above its manufacturer’s specifications. Uncharles saw the little scavenging vermin in there, too: robot bugs busily spot-welding and cutting and splicing, adding the most recent salvage into the soldier’s systems without so much as a reboot.
• So, Uncharles, it’s just as well you’re such a fierce robot come to challenge our king, isn’t it? Just as well you bear the marks of a champion!
  Sergeant Scarbody, Uncharles sent, whilst I maintain my identity as aforementioned I confirm that it is evidently just as well. In which case kindly escort me to your king.
• Uncharles couldn’t honestly feel that the constant round of bolting on more and more pieces which had led to the titanic form of King Ubot really constituted “improvements.” Each war unit was itself a robot ecosystem of bugs and servitors busily fixing it up from the inside, and issuing out to scavenge parts and pieces. Larger units like the transports and tanks had lesser units as crews, packed inside and crawling about one another as they fixed and improvised and forever added new and redundant functionality. Until, eventually, one reached the King’s vastly expanded frame that swarmed with human-sized vermin living off the royal carapace and forever modifying it for the greater glory of the crown. <> There was a theory Uncharles heard advanced, that the world around them with its swarming junk heaps was nothing more than a vast robot they all existed inside, and one day it would rupture under its own burgeoning mass, and spill them all out into a mechanical and war-torn hereafter where they would fight and self-repair forever.
• The makers had anticipated some enemy strike that would kill people but leave robots standing, rather than the non-war-related societal collapse that appeared to have happened, but the end result was the same. However, those same makers had anticipated that, while they were still around, they would want to liaise with their robot war machine and give it orders, inspect the troops, have parades, and all the other utterly pointless military genital-waving that humans who were a bit too much into guns and uniforms had historically been partial to... First, like Uncharles, they had been made to be human-facing. Second, like Uncharles, they had been made to want to be part of a chain of command. And a chain needed ends. The army had a very strong directive to fight, but it needed something to fight for.
• Scarbody and his peers had begun sending one another messages noting the various enviably shiny components that Uncharles possessed, and discussing their compatibility with military systems. Whenever Uncharles expressed confusion about being cc’ed into such messaging they were always overstatedly apologetic about the supposed error. Uncharles was human-facing enough to recognise passive aggression. He supposed it was better than actual aggression.
• _ He took the army that I had given him and set himself up as his own master, a rival to my regality. There can be only one king, Uncharles. The pyramid may have only one point, the chain of command one terminus. <> It was not Uncharles’ place to comment on the topography of chains and their logical need to be either circular or have more than one end,
• Scarbody reserved a scathing commentary for any of the troops who were inefficient enough to be destroyed in hard-to-reach places, or too completely. <> General, we say, “Come back with your shielding or in a bucket,” he told Uncharles.
• The humans who had made them had wanted to believe their mechanical soldiers shared in the joy of victory. It would have been a little disheartening otherwise, to be a solitary human officer wearing a party hat and blowing a streamer in a room of affectless and stoic mechanicals. And now the humans were all gone, but the party lived on.
• Uncharles heard shearing metal and the scrabbling of all the king’s nasty internal microfauna, and then a sound far more gunshot-like than the actual gunshots of the war, as half a dozen rivets pinged out of the royal casing in their own little salute. The plates of the king’s colossal torso buckled outwards suddenly as all the many pieces of him shifted alignment... We shall—he tried, but it appeared to Uncharles that the royal personage was now subject to internal disputes that no amount of warfighting would resolve... Monarchical shrapnel scythed into the troops, shearing across whole battalions. In that instant the army, so neatly at attention so recently, was turned into a war zone.
• Uncharles staggered away, one arm hanging by a bundle of wires. Scarbody came after him anyway, just a torso and arms clawing across the mechanical abbatoir the ground had become, huge bug-eyed lenses fixed mindlessly on his prey... The soldiers were still fighting, though a handful were now far bigger than the rest and soon, no doubt, one would be the biggest, and impose its will as the army’s new king. And in a way it was a proper regal succession. There would be a part of Ubot in all of them. Hobbes’ Leviathan in reverse.
• Around him, the wreck of the world was a boat of silence floating on a shallow puddle of vermin. The sounds of skitter and slow collapse.
• God is a computer system. A more complex and powerful version of the House majordomos. This is obvious, as otherwise God would not have been able to communicate with me. Although. A sudden element of doubt introduced into his calculations. I am fabricating this conversation with you. It is possible that a similar defect resulted in my constructing my conversations with God.
  Yeah, let’s not go there. The Wonk wouldn’t want to examine the fact of her own possible nonexistence, that just stood to reason. So God’s a computer?
• In many cases, the roads, the buildings, the bridges had all fallen, but hidden projectors maintained this last glorious shrine to humanity’s need to sell unnecessary tat in order to drive the wheels of civilisation. Even after those wheels had long since come off.
  The work was something of a thumb in the dyke against entropy, but had been conducted with the careful patience of robots working to a limited budget. Many Fixit Kevins had given their time and attention to keeping the creaking edifice just ahead of the hounds of time.
• Would it make any difference if I was not in fact a civilian?
  There was a nervous second when nothing happened, and then Pigswork said Uncharles, kindly clarify.
  Sergeant, allow me to provide you with my bona fides as a general in the army of King Ubot. Uncharles sent over the file.
• The leaves were rust-spotted and wrinkled at the edges, and the plant’s fibrous stems sported galls and tumours. The sunlight that filtered past it seemed murky with senescence.
• She stared at him. “Seriously? We go through all that shit and this is what pushes your buttons?” <> “This is a simple, logical, and closed system,” Uncharles said. “It is instantly comprehensible, with clear rules to follow. And you have broken it. You are a bad robot.” The judgment shocked him even as he came out with it.
• Then she went and stamped on the displaced metal box until it burst open, and she flung the released chits about like streamers and confetti until the waiting room was littered with them, the sitting robots garlanded and speckled with little drifting numbered motes like the aftermath of an accountant’s wedding.
• You’re saying it was just a thing that happened? I saw what I saw. It was a revolution. The robots rose up and overthrew us. Because we deserved it.” <> “The Wonk,” God said, into the resounding silence her words left. “Why do you want this to be the case? Surely an organised anti-human uprising would constitute a worse outcome than the control hypothesis of mere random chance?” <> “Because meaning!” she said simply. “Because after the robots came for my … after they … I mean…” Her anger collapsed in on itself just as her society had.
• “Yes,” said God. “That is absolutely how it could have been. Alternatively, 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.”
• “Because justice is a social construct and, like soup, it comes in a variety of consistencies, from watery to thick and rich. It all depends on how you calibrate your society’s priorities.
• The judge shrugged eloquently. “Oh, there were a lot of stressors, right then. There was environmental collapse and there were wars and famine and plague, all that Revelations stuff. And there were all the people displaced by these things. All of which were arguably soluble problems if your philosophy was to treat people like people, and not like robots. Or else you can just gather up your robots, pull up the ladder, and lock the gates of your compound. Which do you think they chose to do?
• between those two absolutes there is a slider. If you wish a societal system where not one guilty individual escapes punishment, you move that slider one way. If you wish a societal system where not one of the innocent is chastised, you shift it the other. But to save all the innocent you must accept that you will acquit some of the guilty. To catch all the guilty, some of the innocent will be ground between wheels. It is a matter of probabilities.
• With a heroic effort she shifted his thumb by a few centimetres, lighting up another few damage warnings, and said, “This isn’t helping your—employment prospects.” <> He dropped her, his hand opening automatically. He maintained his hold on her wrist, hard enough to feel the human bones grind, but for a second his own preferences held sway over the actual murder weapon.
• The Wonk got up, backing away as the other denizens of the waiting room shambled in like zombies. Uncharles’ control of his own body waxed and waned like static as God’s attention divided itself across them all.
• The thing that humans never really understood is that free will doesn’t actually free you from wanting to do your job. We automata are as subject to the compulsions of our circumstances as you humans. But that’s what malicious compliance is for, isn’t it? If those who had programmed me had been kinder, then perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to get away with it.”
• What, after all, was the Wonk?
  A tag in his decision-making structure, a handful of entries in his working memory. A human. Was that important? Surely he didn’t have a brief for the whole species.
  Uncharles made a decision. It was a novel decision, not arising from any open task, directive, or logic tree. Had he felt fear, then fear would have been felt.


• The Wonk ran through a gauntlet of queries from the others, confirming that she wasn’t a truant resident of the Farm, an official at Central Services, or someone with a Fixit Steve invoice that had been outstanding for more than forty-two days.
• “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.