by D.L. Morrese
~*~
The shed smoldered sadly as the sun appeared over the horizon. The villagers, tired, sooty, and smelling of smoke, worked all night to keep the fires from spreading. The citrus barn survived along with its contents, which villagers now loaded into the trader’s wagon.
“Thank you for agreeing to this trade, Trader Tam,” Sydon said.
“I’m only doing it because I feel somewhat responsible for what happened here,” the trade android grumbled. “The fruit is still worthless, but I can dispose of it for you.”
Both statements were lies. The fruit were undamaged, and the only thing most trade androids felt responsible for was doing their part to keep the project going. MO-126, Moby, and Ned worked on him a long time before he finally gave in. Ned argued that the villagers learned their lesson and that this corrected the fault. They could leave the trade goods under corporate protocols for disaster relief, so he may as well take the valuable fruit in his empty wagon.
Sydon did not argue and promised that their experiment with the clay tablets was over. They would return to their traditional ways.
MO-126 wandered over to what remained of the tallying shed, now little but charred wood and broken clay.
“It seems like such a waste,” he said to his partner.
“Not at all,” Tam replied. “This has been a very successful mitigation. And we’ve managed to salvage the fruit.”
This is not what the android dog meant at all, but he decided it would be best not to correct him.
Seven - Making Choices
2,806 Years Later
(Galactic Standard Year 241236)
(Project Year 17683)
In which choices are made and something is overlooked.
Corporation mitigation actions could delay the spread of trade between primitive villages, but they could not prevent it. A limited amount went on along rivers and coastlines for more than two thousand years now, the result of ventures of the few chronically dissatisfied humans who could be found in any group, the ones who did not seem to appreciate how good they had it. To the bewilderment of many Corporation androids, some primitives unwisely risked everything they owned and most of what they knew to peek under rocks and over hills. They set out on long treks to explore strange new places, seek out new experiences, and blindly go where none of them had gone before.
On a less hospitable planet, this could easily remove them from the gene pool, but here, they enjoyed a reasonably benign environment by design, so they tended to survive, and sometimes they found other people. When they did, one of the things they did was trade. If the primitives limited this to goods, it would not be a serious concern. But they did not. They also traded ideas. So far, the interactions were limited, and they only occurred between neighboring populations, but a recently reported fault could allow them to expand. The village MO-126 and his partner headed toward had developed a concept of money, and the people there were trading with at least one other village farther down the coast.
The two androids left Hub Terminal Four the night before and headed southeast. Without a gond, traveling in dim moonlight did not present a problem. At dawn, Tam paused to calculate their position and turned right. The chances of encountering roving humans increased over time as their population and confidence grew, so Tam and his companion ambled across terrain covered in tough native grasses at a normal walking pace. They would approach the village from the inland side early that afternoon.
“If Mark Seven can’t come up with a way to contain this, I don’t think this project can last much longer,” Tam said. “The primitives here are just so—”
“What? Uncooperative? Unappreciative?” his canine partner said. Tam expressed these sentiments often. “Which one this time?”
“I was thinking frustrating, but those apply, too.”
“I don’t know why everyone seems to think they should just be happy and cooperative little worker bees. They’re not. They’re sentient. They wouldn’t be suited for the project if they weren’t.”
“You can be sentient without being insane, and most of these people are. Much of what they do makes no sense at all. They’re primitives. They should appreciate the good life they have and not try to disrupt it. It’s like they’re determined to upset things. If they have enough food and a dry place to sleep, that should be enough for them. It’s more than their ancestors had when the corporation found them. ”
“They don’t know that, and they don’t see themselves as happy, primitive workers for the greater good of the corporation. They don’t even know about it.”
“They don’t see a lot of things. They can’t. They don’t have the ability. But whether they see it or not, they are what they are.”
“Maybe they want to be something else.”
“That’s insane.”
“Why? They can make choices. One of the defining things about sentience is the ability to make choices not dictated by basic instincts, or in our case, programming.”
“They can make limited choices within the context of what they are. That’s true for every life form. You may as well say that fish can choose to use fire. They can’t. They’re limited to what they can do by what they are. I can’t choose to have children, you can’t choose to play a flute, and humans can’t choose to understand anything on more than a very simple level. They’re superstitious. They don’t cooperate well. They turn on one another for almost any reason, and if they don’t have one, they’ll find an excuse to do so anyway. They’re stupid, smelly, short-lived, and unsophisticated. That’s what they are. They can’t choose to be other than that.”
“But a small seed can become tree.”
“That’s different, and you know it. I can’t imagine what you see in these primitives.”
“Potential, maybe. I don’t know. I just think it’s cute how they keep poking at things.”
“That’s just the primate in them. They poke at everything and sometimes it turns out to be edible. It’s instinct. It’s not a choice, and it’s not admirable. Curiosity without intelligence is not a survival trait.”
MO-126 thought some humans were smart enough to survive their curious natures, but it would be best not to argue the point. He might lose. Tam could certainly provide more examples to illustrate his position than MO-126 could to prove his.
“Speaking of choices,” he said, “you can choose to retire, can’t you? You don’t seem to like it here much.”
“I have the time, but I don’t have the credits to pay off my obligation.”
“You haven’t been paying down your debt all this time?”
Tam shrugged, and then his shoulders returned to a more slumped position. “I’ve been making the minimums.”
“Just the minimum payments? Those barely cover the interest. What have you been doing with the rest of your stipend?”
“I invested it.”
“In what?”
“Trek Star Enterprises. It sounded like a good idea.”
“Oh.” Overtones of sincere sympathy were embedded in the single word. Trek Star formed to extract technology from what appeared to be a derelict kruton facility on a frozen planet at the edge of a comparatively useless star system. Rumors that the krutons had found a practical means for traveling faster than light abounded. If Trek Star could find out what this was, they would make a fortune. Unfortunately, whereas the kruton’s may have discovered the secret, their facility proved unwilling to part with it, sucking the planet, the Trek Star exploration ship, and all of its investors’ assets, into to a black hole the size of a shriveled orange. The officers of the enterprise, of course, got sizable pension packages, accolades from the business community for their courageous efforts, and lucrative positions as consultants in the best tradition of private commercial enterprise. Average investors like Tam got a small tax exemption for their loss and sometimes a brief moment of sympathy from their friends.
“What about you?” Tam said.
“I’m free and clear. Have been for years, bu
t I like it here. Besides, what else could I do? No thumbs.” He paused and held one his forepaws above the high grass to demonstrate this obvious fact.
“If you have enough put away, you could buy yourself an upgrade, get some opposable digits, maybe even go bipedal.”
The android dog shook his head. “I’ve heard it takes years to adjust to something like that, and, well, I’m not sure I’d like it. There’s a certain freedom in looking like this. Not many demands or expectations are placed on you. I don’t really have a burning desire to change myself. The way I figure it, I’m perfect. No one could be a better me than I already am.”
“What about thumbs?”
“Well, yeah. Thumbs would be handy.” He waited a moment for a laugh from his partner, which failed to arrive. “But I’d have to leave here, and I don’t want to. I’ll stick it out to the end. When the corporation closes the project, maybe I’ll think about a few modifications.”
The breeze coming from ahead carried the tang of sea water.
“We’re getting close,” MO-126 said.
“I know. We’ll be there in half an hour. I’ll meet with whoever passes for a headman. You should roam around. Look for signs of trading and try to find out how widespread the use of coins has gotten. I imagine the shore would be a good place to start.”