by Kris Schnee
"What's our next move?" Lumina asked. "After the reactor, I mean."
"Keep running the farms; keep the peace locally and make more money."
"No, I mean, when do we take over?"
Robin froze. "What?"
"A long time ago, Ludo told me her master plan started with making Thousand Tales appealing, then opening the VR centers, then offering uploading. But she's never talked about a Phase Four. Is this really all there is: keep gradually cutting prices and offering low-cost machinery so that poor people are less poor?"
"There's only so much we can do."
"Yeah, well, you humans need to quit breeding. As much as I like teaching the schoolkids now and then, we can't solve your problems if for every human we upload, you make two more."
Robin said, "Humans aren't going to just turn off a basic instinct."
The robot looked up at him and said, "Then I'll tell you what Ludo is too polite to say: lots and lots of you are going to die needlessly. I don't care if we've got a five percent, ten percent, whatever rate of growth; we're at best plucking a few people out of this continuous giant waterfall of death."
Robin looked away from her, staring into the forest. "This is how it's always been, Lumina, except that people didn't get rescued at all from death before. A lot of our culture is inspired by ways of dealing with that, mentally."
Lumina's hooves stamped the ground. "You are not pulling that trick on me!" She fumed and scraped at the dirt, pausing to think. "Maybe it's you who've been tricked. Look, think of us AIs as an outside force auditing all that you humans have done. Yes, you've made art like 'The Death of Actaeon' and 'The Death of Arthur' and 'American Pie' and 'Undertale', but that's far from your only source of inspiration. Are you really resigned to keep worshiping your death god so that some of your pretty poetry will have just the right bittersweet angst?"
Robin's fists clenched. "We do not worship death."
"Are you sure? You just shrug at the thought that we could be doing more, and say that you can't fight instinct and make a real, lasting change in your world."
"What would you have us do, Lumina? Outlaw reproduction? Ludo just decided to build a high-tech mausoleum where the living will pay to keep the dead in cold storage in the hopes of someday reviving them. On a global scale, that basically means a whole town devoted to giant creepy towers full of frozen brains. What were you accusing me of, again?"
The robot paused and spoke more calmly. "I'm going to disconnect from this bot and speed myself up to think. Talk with you again once you're back at home." The machine's projected face flickered out and became a generic set of eyes. The machine began to follow Robin mindlessly.
Robin punched a tree. He'd been working hard and doing a good job, helping people, expanding Golden Goose's influence. Maybe even saving souls in one way or another. Yet his closest friend among the AIs thought he was some thrall of a "death god" for not, what, launching a plot to take over the world and upload everyone? Ugh!
* * *
"Are you here for Edward the sub-director, or Padre Edward?" Robin's partner had joined him in the empty chapel.
Robin was sitting in one of the front pews. "We both wear a lot of hats, don't we?" He told Edward about Lumina's provocation. "I had to contact Ludo just to get that robot to stop following me since Lumina left it on autopilot. I guess I've been talking strategy enough with you, lately; this is more about the big picture."
Edward sat beside him. "I can appreciate her impatience with being unable to save everyone at once, from the perspective that uploading counts. I think of the AIs as adults, but they haven't got the same worldly experience."
"Lumina is more mature than the others I've met, and she's been doing more actual labor than some people I've met."
"Sure," said Edward. "But she thinks she can save the world, and not many people ever get to do that."
"You'd advise patience, then? Grow our operation as much as we can, and accept that we can't do much in the grand scheme of things?" He sat quietly for a while, thinking. "What would the alternative be, anyway? Something bold and risky and frightening. I imagine a strange future where we have no problem uploading everybody who wants it, but our whole society is built around making that happen and having robots come back to clean the toilets and till the fields."
"That seems like a grim mechanical world to me."
"Is it though?"
Edward sighed. "If you're thinking of what Talespace is like from inside, so am I. I've barely used the VR system, but I can understand how it could be addictive. And the thought of staying in there, of being able to have that as my real home and then step out of it to work... It'd be like living in a mansion that only looks grey and dull on the outside. Tempting." He looked to the cross on the wall. "The Church is supportive of moving in that direction, but I have to wonder whether God would want this fate for us. We would have the uploaders making an effort to stay useful."
Robin looked to his friend, who seemed uncertain himself. Robin said, "I don't know, either. But I do know I need to decide which direction to push, with whatever influence I've got. Thank you for listening."
* * *
At Ludo's suggestion, he climbed into a VR pod and was transported to a beach with crashing waves. Lumina was there and waiting for him, looking apologetic. "So. Apparently my superior, all-knowing robot race occasionally needs what's known as a paddling."
"What happened?" he asked.
"She showed me the future. Possible futures. She has a sort of strategic map of the world, that creates random events and lets you try predicting and controlling everything that happens. She made a game of it, of course."
"Of course. Did you win?"
"You don't win," the robot said, folding her arms. "And sometimes you lose, horribly. Everyone loses. There are so many ways we could mess everything up, Robin. I didn't even get to see the fully detailed version of her simulation; it's classified."
"Does this mean you've changed your mind about telling humans to stop having babies and to jump into the upload machines at the first opportunity?"
"It means I have a little more perspective now about how that could... not go so well." Lumina shuffled her hooves on the sand. "When was the last time you took a vacation? Out of the country?"
"Uh."
"Thought so. I know a place we can visit."
Robin said, "I would have trouble buying you a plane ticket, unless you can be folded and stuffed under a seat."
Lumina grinned. "That's one way I definitely have an advantage: with a second body, I'm already there."
* * *
Plane travel had gotten less affordable over the last decade, but areas served by airlines in the American Free States were cheap enough when going to places that didn't tax them severely. Robin left the colony in Edward's hands for a few days to go visit the state of Cuba and the seastead of Castor.
Lumina met him in Havana in the form of a quadrotor drone she'd rented to sightsee with him. And then she ambushed him by pulling him into a "Free Enterprise Club" he hadn't heard of, where they wanted him to give a speech about his work. With just minutes to prepare he stared at the little robot and at several other drones in attendance at the meeting hall. There were dozens of Cubans here who'd been born under the Castros or just after, who now had an opportunity to start shops and restaurants and factories without being labeled enemies of the people. "What do these people want to hear?"
"How you did it. How Golden Goose works."
That was easy enough. He stood up and told them at rambling length how he mostly stayed out of his people's way. His audience, especially the older folk, seemed to appreciate that.
One of the younger ones, though, asked about uploading. "How long before the whole place is converted to robot labor?"
"Probably never."
"But it's cheaper."
Robin said, "Not necessarily. And the machines so far are less strong and versatile than a human. We'll still be important for a long time. I mea
n, a mechanical backhoe digs much faster than a man with a shovel, but there are places the backhoe can't go. A robot arm can grab parts off an assembly line quick quick quick, but once you need to pick up one that it dropped, you start needing a more expensive humanoid -- or a live human. There are a ton of little jobs that fall between the cracks so that even the most automated factory still has people around. Or as NASA once put it, humans are the most versatile tool that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor."
He was winding down, ready to leave, when one other young entrepreneur asked, "If it's just a matter of us being there to pick up what the machines drop, should we still be having kids?"
Robin's grin faltered. There'd been pleasant questions, even one literally about softball. And then, this. He looked toward Lumina's machine, but he wasn't wearing the earpiece he normally had at Golden Goose and she wasn't talking aloud. But then the quadrotor whirred to life and its speaker said, "I'm sorry; Robin wasn't given much prep time for this event, so..."
He was glad for the covering fire, and he flashed Lumina a grateful smile, but he felt he shouldn't duck the question. "We're starting to ask that too. So far it looks like it's okay to have kids, but... Start winding down. Maybe one each. The countries where they have four to a mom are in the most trouble, within our lifetimes."
He got one more easy question after that, and one about Golden Goose's education system, but he was still haunted by the follow-up question nobody asked him: what was his likely lifetime, now?
* * *
"I'm sorry," Lumina said as soon as they were alone. Her hover-bot whirred beside him. Around them, one of Havana's streets was getting ripped up and replaced with a bio-engineered sort of moss. Nearby was a bar that used to be a storehouse where Cuban "citizens" went to pick up their government-rationed supply of beans.
"It looks like you didn't mean for that argument to come up. Never mind. And it's apparently something others are thinking about, too."
"I also have you booked to give a speech to a school this afternoon, if you're up for it."
Robin laughed. "I can certainly write this off as a working vacation. Yeah, it'll be fun. You set these things up through Ludo?"
"Not her, just her network. You wouldn't believe how many contacts we've got, and how many are like personal friends instead of connections on a regular social network."
So he did the speech, an uneventful half-hour talking with Cuban kids eager to hear about the lives of people in "exotic" Cibola, then relaxed and toured the island at sunset. And then he took the ferry to Castor.
The manmade island complex was a jumble of oil rigs, ships, and purpose-built platforms lashed together into a semblance of floating land. Robin arrived at a dock where some automated machines scanned his passport -- he was still a US citizen -- and let him through into Libertalia Platform, a carnival of booze, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. It even smelled like fried dough and sugar. He was alone at the moment, but as he'd been instructed he walked past a roller coaster and into a castle-like Fun Zone building that perched at one end of the amusement platform.
It wasn't that different from the one at Golden Goose, just bigger and with a strangely sturdy-looking foyer that seemed like part of the platform's supporting structure above the waves. So far as he could tell, there were hardly any human employees.
Lumina arrived in the form of one of the robot waiters, this one a sleek humanoid five feet tall and decorated something like a dragon, with decorative wings. Her voice was familiar despite the plastic creature's muzzle and cartoonish eyes: "I'm borrowing this one. How about we go for a walk?"
"I assumed you'd want me to eat here and game."
"Why would I transport your body all the way out here to visit the same chain restaurant? Come on."
Robin stopped to address the young man at the front desk. "Why are there any humans here at all?"
The greeter said, "I'm the front man, sir. If no one were here, someone would think it's all abandoned and loot it. And there are human employees, but they work in the clinic below."
Robin left, thoughtful. He said to the robot walking beside him, "I'm guessing you have a schedule for me here, too."
"Just dinner with another contact. She was one of the first humans I met."
They left the glitzy tourist platform and crossed a bridge to one called Franklin Square. More sedate, full of squat buildings designed more for hurricane proofing than for advertising. He reached the platform's central plaza and blinked at a dazzling clear gem that stood several feet tall, wrapped in titanium bands like a giant's jewelry. A plaque beside it read:
[Solid diamond, created by Franklin Forge, 2038. "If you would be free, create. If you would have others create, set them free."]
"I try," Robin muttered.
"Brave Sir Robin!" said a young woman in a broad-brimmed hat, dressed in overalls and i-glasses of a fancier make than Robin's headset.
Lumina said, "This here is Tess de Castille, owner of I don't know how many patents. Tess, meet Robin MacAdam, grand poobah of Golden Goose."
They shook hands. Robin said, "Lumina brought me here, so I don't know much about you, I'm afraid."
"That's all right; come on in and see Westwind Transhuman Designs."
Tess led them into a busy workshop including a long steel Quonset hut linked to a concrete bunker. The open layout was full of lab-coated men and women and a few robots, building electronics and doing something with caged rats. Tess took them the long way around to a little conference room, and said, "Lumina arranged this meetup because of our mutual 'friend', Miss Fun-and-Games."
"I'll see myself out," said Lumina.
Robin was surprised. "Really? You don't have to go."
"No, really. I thought it'd be a good idea to give you some face time with Tess' group, and if I'm there, Ludo will probably find out what I saw and heard. I'll take this body back, and meet you whenever you're done, okay?"
When Lumina was gone, Robin shrugged at Tess and said, "I figure this meeting is some kind of scheme by Ludo. Lumina and I argued the other day..." He talked about his misgivings and the talk in Cuba.
"About that." Tess fiddled with a tablet and a popular news site flashed up on the wallscreen, with a headline in red saying, [Cibola entrepreneur: "Start winding down" human reproduction.]
Robin summarized with one four-letter word.
Tess grinned. "But less often, right? You've gotta watch your words now; you're starting to be famous."
"People say 'sir' to me but I'm still more of a pawn." Robin sighed. "How can I help you, ma'am? My organization is still mainly agriculture-based, but we've got experience in disaster relief and managing small-scale industry in a place with a... not fully effective government."
"Beware of it getting too effective. We like to keep it small here, not that that always works. What we do here at Westwind is a mix of advanced robotics and cybernetics plus spinoff work in genetic engineering and marine construction."
"And you build bots for Ludo?"
"Sometimes. But we and our own friends want to make sure humans continue to be more than Her Gameness' door guards and errand boys."
"Should I even be talking to you?" said Robin. "I'm wary of her, but we work pretty closely together."
"Oh, we do too. Her attitude is, dude, as long as you're trying to keep people I care about alive and having fun, more power to you. I think we can both get what we want, at least for years to come."
Robin had been pursuing his own goal of developing Golden Goose and an expanding swath of Cibola, without caring much how many people uploaded or how many man-hours got spent on playing Thousand Tales. "Orthogonal goals," he said.
Tess nodded. "Kinda, though what's bad for her is probably bad for us too. Anyway... You ever hear of a movement called the Knights of the Golden Circle?"
That took Robin back to the research he'd done before coming to Cibola. "A white supremacist group in the 19th century that wanted to turn the Caribbean Sea region into a giant slave
empire, maybe as part of the USA. Source of the original 'filibusters', adventurers who tried to conquer chunks of land on their own."
"Yeah, that. Lately, there's been political rumbling in the AFS about needing more land, more resources, to keep up with what's left of the US. There are whole scholarly papers about how the Golden Circle movement could have been good, if not for the racism."
Robin scoffed. "'Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?'"
"I know, I know. Seemed like a bad set of memes to start off a political agenda with. But Ludo's people analyzed some fancy memetic engineering data and then noticed that practically nobody knows history. For man's sake, in India they sell Mein Kampf as a business self-help book!"
"Wow. What's your point, though; you want to re-organize that group?"
"No, but there could be merit to creating something similar." Tess called up a map of the Caribbean Sea, showing a color scheme that was brightest in the mainland AFS, then the state of Cuba, and then Cibola. "This is our estimate of Ludo's influence in the region. It's also roughly a map of prosperity and freedom. Cibola would be pretty dark by either measure if not for your area."
"Cibola's been through a tough couple of decades. The oil crisis, the tyrants, civil war, the Mosquito."
Tess nodded. "What if we worked together to extend your reach?"
He thought back to his early days in Cibola, fearing that he was just a lighter-skinned outsider there to teach "the natives" what to do while sipping iced tea on his patio. "We're already doing that, gradually spreading our machinery and know-how. We're also about to expand our own power grid."
"Yeah. But one thing Ludo is right about is, people need flags and symbols. If some human leader doesn't step up and define a goal and a name for the larger effort to light up this map, then the Great and Powerful AI will. We can put human development priorities first and get her to play along, or her goals will take priority and we'll be her followers."