by Kris Schnee
20. Maneuvering
He was meeting with a Cibolan government man from inside his new office: a strange primitive longhouse in the style built by the Iroquois and similar Indian tribes. He'd reassigned his air-conditioned container house to Miguel and moved into this place, a sort of long wicker basket with an arched ceiling and simple fans and benches. The waterproofing was better than the original style and there was electricity and network access, but the effect was still shockingly primitive to visitors.
Cibola's man -- Leopold's really -- stood in this hut and faced the bizarre deer-like robot who stood at one end. "What sort of office is this?"
"I don't need shelves and filing cabinets anymore," said Robin. The longhouse stood nearly empty but for the display of two crossed guns that the Mosquito's army had donated, and an amazing sort of backless bench made mostly from dozens of interwoven antlers. It looked very much like a barbarian throne. Some Texans had made it for him, knowing exactly what impression it would give in this seemingly low-tech room.
"Showmanship," said the agent. "The governor was worried that you were spending aid money on tricks, and it looks like he's right."
Robin privately agreed that some of the decor was a waste no matter how cool it was. But nearly everyone he consulted with in Talespace and locally said it was part of his role, to shake visitors and make new ways of solving problems seem both easy and graceful. He said, "Actually, we uploaders don't need the full set of amenities in a normal house. This wicker place was easy to build, it's all sustainable materials, and it doubles as a meeting place and occasional schoolroom. As for aid money, our finances are complex enough to have some ambiguity, but I'm sure we've been paying more than we receive lately."
"What are these lights?"
He looked up at the softly glowing blue-green globes that lined the walls. "Oh, these? Another experiment. A form of gengineered algae, plus sugar being slowly dripped into their container, and we have electricity-free lightbulbs."
Leopold's man scowled at them. "You made Frankenstein critters just to decorate your house?"
"No, these were created in the Free States and licensed to us through our trading network. They're being grown-slash-built for mass production now. I'm not sold on the concept, since they need some maintenance and we have cheap energy, but they do look nice."
The government man refused to sit on any of the benches lining the walls, which left him standing alone with the robot. "Mister MacAdam, the governor has instructed me to see what you're up to here. He's heard that you plan to declare 'citizenship' for AIs, which is absurd and illegal."
"Is it? He's continued to do business with me, so has he been talking to a ghost?"
"He hasn't been talking with you in quite some time, whatever you are."
Robin stepped back from his body into the other world, and sped up his mind. The shift felt like a blur and spin along some unknown axis, which put him into a copy of this throne room that was idealized and more brightly lit. In this reality, interface windows floated everywhere to show him various aspects of Golden Goose, and a map table filled the longhouse's center. Robin approached one screen, gestured and said, "Scan communications with Leopold. When did he last directly address me, versus my uploading date?"
A result popped up: [Three days after you uploaded. Since then all communication has been addressed to Edward or to the organization as a whole.]
Robin grunted. "A political position on his part." Cibola had never formally acknowledged uploaders or AIs as real people with any rights, but it had never formally declared Robin dead or called for him to be replaced. Robin had shrugged and continued with his work on the theory that Leopold was happy to continue ignoring him and collecting tax money. Both sides were pretending that the reactor and refugee disputes never happened.
He dropped back to the Outer Realm, where almost no time had passed. "That would explain why he sent you instead of simply calling me. What's this really about?"
"He's been lenient with you until now, waiving any number of regulations."
"For which I'm grateful."
"But you simply must bring this place more into conformity with national law. Your private currency needs to be switched over to ours, for one thing."
Robin said, "What's the inflation rate this year? Fifty percent? Maybe you should switch to ours."
Leopold's man waved off the comment. "You also need to stop imposing a work requirement for residents to get food, housing and utilities."
"Leopold was the one who said to keep these people working and out of trouble. How do you propose I pay for feeding them without their labor, especially when thousands more find out about the free stuff and swarm into here?"
"And again, it's past time that your pet AI offers her services to the masses."
Robin stood with his arms folded behind his upper back. "On that point I agree, but that's going to happen through continued R&D. I'm told that she's close to having another substantial price drop."
"Not good enough, mister MacAdam. I'm leaving you with a formal list of requirements, and I'll be visiting weekly to see your progress at moving into compliance."
Robin faced him down. "Need I remind the governor yet again of the name of this place?"
"This isn't a fairytale, sir. You're not a golden goose; you're more like Ebeneezer Scrooge who needed to see the light and learn to share."
"If we're going by stories, then let me put it another way: Prince John needs to stay out of Sherwood Forest."
Leopold's man smiled. "Doesn't that make you a bandit, Robin?"
"If I'm an outlaw, I want to be John Galt."
"Dear God, did you actually read that whole thing?"
"I skimmed."
The government man said, "We don't need to blame you personally for being out of compliance. You're the sultan, led astray by the wicked vizier."
"Are we talking Disney's version of 'Aladdin' now? Because Ludo complains about being considered a magic genie, and if the cartoon version of 'Robin Hood' applies then I should be more fox-like."
They stared at each other, and then they both laughed. Leopold's agent said, "I've lost track of the metaphors, sir. Just... figure out how you're going to get back into some semblance of a normal relationship with us."
* * *
"Did he bother contacting you directly?" Robin asked Ludo. He snapped his fingers and relayed the conversation to her.
She walked in through the virtual throne room's door. "No. So Leopold used an underling to contact you to contact me, and he'd have preferred to have even that contact go through Edward. There's a message in that."
"He sent someone with a sense of humor, at least. As for my end of things, we've run some numbers and it just doesn't make sense to switch to the official currency. It'd screw us over through inflation, and Leopold would put people on our welfare rolls indirectly that way. He'd hand people increasingly-worthless cash, then have them demand we sell them services at 'normal' prices." Robin shook his head, feeling that the details weren't the point. "What drove Leopold to start cracking down, anyway? We were on good terms."
"You uploaded. Now there's no human in charge. We've done everything we can to ignore your changed status or even make you seem better than before, but it seems that some humans absolutely will not accept a digital mind as being in charge. Or at least Leopold can't help seeing an opportunity to take control."
"Then maybe it's time for me to be a mascot, with Edward officially running things or even Miguel or Mike." He silently added Edward to the conversation and sent him a summary so far.
Edward replied after a few minutes, which Robin allowed to pass in five subjective seconds. The man appeared in Robin's virtual room like a hologram, making him seem like the only unreal person here. "It'd look bad. I'm honored that you'd give me the job, but if we're going to push for AI citizenship then it'd send the wrong message if you relent and accept that you can't hold the director title yourself."
"What about the church's stance?"
> "The Saints are throwing their support your way, if quietly. They want more digital minds in the congregation, despite the faction that calls it a terrible idea."
"What does that support really mean?" said Robin.
"For now? Getting a few Talespace residents to minister to people in the real world in the Saints' name, and reaching out to people within Talespace. Treating your kind as souls that we value."
"That's good, anyway." Robin had never expected to be showered with donations from believers, not that he needed them, but it was nice to have a whole culture of people pushing the idea that digital people should be fully accepted. "All right, then: how should we respond to Leopold's demands?"
Ludo folded her arms and groused. "I now have thousands of frozen brains in storage in Silver Circle towns alone. They're low-maintenance and don't require computers, but they're a growing security risk. Someone will want to trash them to prove that the procedure isn't safe. I still can't afford to grant uploading to everybody who wants it."
Edward said, "So we can't bend on any of these demands."
The door opened, and Lumina walked in. "Is everything all right, dear?"
Robin smiled and hugged her, then explained the impasse.
Lumina said, "It doesn't have to be Ludo offering uploading services, you know. Ludo doesn't need to budge one bit in a way that'd hurt her global operations -- if we offer our own."
"How so?"
"We have our own robot operations, our own server farm, and open-sourced uploading technology. If Mom would license her latest techniques to us to limit the cost, we could start our own uploading clinic. Hooked up to our very own virtual realm."
Edward suggested, "With blackjack and hookers?"
"If you like, reverend! Ludo doesn't have to promise anything at all to Cibola's government; we can keep this between Silver Circle and Cibola. That solves the problem of setting a bad precedent where every government can force Ludo to give her service away."
Robin looked skeptical. "That would simplify the problem a little, for her. But that throws it back into my lap, not that I have one. I can't afford to upload everybody either, or even to freeze their brains for later. Nor to run my own little universe."
Ludo said, "Making a universe is easy. Getting people to use it the way you want is the hard part. Really, most of Thousand Tales' processing power goes into either me or the residents, not the world itself."
"Then they have to work for us," said Lumina. "We pay for uploading, and we get a long-term employee."
Edward said, "That won't work. It's indentured servitude at best, and what if your workers aren't skilled enough to justify the price?"
Robin said, "The best we could do along this line is indenture plus us getting paid in computer hardware. We can handle the electricity. Except then we need surgery equipment... Damn. This plan doesn't work."
Lumina paced the throne room, scowling. "There has to be a way. We ought to be hosting minds."
"We can do that, but not the surgery part," Robin said. "How about this. I'll write Leopold an offer saying that if he'll have Cibola fund a private or public uploading clinic, we'll run it at cost and then host the resulting uploaders on hardware that he helps pay for. The letter will come from me, and I'll acknowledge an answer directed to me."
"Won't work," said Ludo.
Lumina threw up her hands. "Then tell us what will! We have X worth of resources, and they're making Y worth of demands on us, so calculate how to handle it."
"I've been at this game for years, and the answer is we don't. Either we have enough profit to do an exponential ramp-up of our operations and eventually save the most people, or such a large share of our wealth is tied up in charity cases that we never get off the ground."
* * *
Robin was still thinking about the problem days later. For the most part Golden Goose ran smoothly with little input from him. There were more private businesses every month, running on a mix of local credits and official money. He still had a large force of employees doing construction and farming for him. Which would be great, if a large share of them were surgeons who had tons of expensive computer hardware lying around.
Turned out that this "prince" thing was tough if he wanted to be more than a figurehead. The schoolkids and even their parents were starting to call him that, and he didn't correct them. He wished he had some actual magic to back up people's growing expectations.
Meanwhile, a Grand Exposition of a Thousand Tales was scheduled for the state of Cuba this year. The original announcement had been that Ludo would create a fairground staffed by robots, to show off all sorts of technology that she and her supporters would create if given more power. Robin had been a cautious participant in that, but the plan was evolving.
They met in that Talespace bar Lumina liked, staffed by her centaur friend. There were several booths compatible with Robin's large body. "There's not much point in claiming your technology is good for farming and manufacturing if you're going to portray it as an all-robot operation."
Ludo posed as an ordinary player, who the other customers paid no mind. "That's the point. We're going to show how thoroughly it can be automated. There've been experiments in robotic crop-tending for decades, but with the field we're going to show off --"
"Showing off how to make my people completely unemployed; great."
"Machines open up new jobs for manual labor, too."
"Sure. Know what a 'cotton gin' is? It led to a demand for more cotton pickers. Didn't turn out well."
"I'm trying to show off the great things that your people are doing, Robin."
"Then if you want Golden Goose to participate, I want our exhibit to show off people, not just machines."
The gamemaster fiddled with her mug of beer. "You're not the only one making such demands. I need to rethink the Exposition's structure, and have more independent players show off their own wares, not just mine. Right now it's too much about me."
Robin thought about Lumina's desire to make more worlds. "What would it take to run an uploaded mind on less than cutting-edge hardware? Specifically, chips that my equipment can produce without a billion-dollar factory?"
"That's not practical. We've been optimizing our hardware designs. What you have is fine for producing robot controllers and handheld gaming PCs, but not something comparable to what I have."
"How optimized? Because I have raw materials and energy."
Ludo spoke into a pepper shaker as though it were a hidden microphone. "Misha, run the numbers."
The answer came back quickly as a tinny voice in Ludo's ear. She relayed, "You'd need five times the power, and several times as much hardware."
"Bah. There goes that idea."
"No! The hardware we're talking about is the kind you can make, remember? It's cheaper overall than mine."
Robin sat up straighter. "Then why aren't you using this system yourself?"
"The design is, as my chief engineer puts it, 'butt ugly'. The security is inferior, it takes up more physical space, you'll have to design your cooling system around it, and in most places I don't have my own cheap power supply yet. But you're on to something; here's a rough draft." She conjured a blueprint file in the form of a glowing data crystal.
Robin took it. "Then we can offer Leopold a better deal. Funding up front for a clinic, and some funding for cheap hardware, and we can run that clinic at cost for whoever bribes him the most."
"I'd get started building the prototype hardware ASAP to try the system out. I'll donate two outdated world-hosting boxes I don't need, too."
* * *
There was a single AI representing the entire squad of fox villagers who lived in Nocturne's fantasy world. Riverham, they called themselves, and they wanted to work for him. Robin had no problem with that. It was a little more unnerving to learn that the Blue Sage, one of the three creators, had been reduced to some fragmentary mind who now considered himself a new person. He wanted to work for Robin, too, to get his bearings. B
etween them he now had a near-constant intelligence boost to all the robots around Golden Goose, Tres Aguas and the other towns. Robin wondered what the griffins were doing for servants if they'd been relying on having smart minds to boss around.
He conferred with Tess on Castor, using a drone, to get a second opinion on the proposal to crank out low-end mind emulation hardware. "I like this," said the young engineer. "So you're going to build this outside her control?"
"Yeah."
"Great! Let me get back to you tomorrow about the cooling problem. In the meantime... How secure is this connection?"
"Not very."
"Then switch."
Robin abandoned the little robot he'd been using, and called Tess again using a video link. "What is it?"
Tess said, "When will you declare independence?"
He laughed. "You say that like it's easy. I don't live on a tiny island under the shield of somebody with a real military. My plan is to ease into it by declaring digital citizenship, nodding and smiling when people say that it's meaningless coming from us, then treating digital minds the same as others in our own network's court system. Same with the currency: we'll just keep using it among our group and seeing who else will take it."
She didn't find that so funny. "Caution can be dangerous too. You told me about those demands you're facing; what do you think will happen when you say no?"
"Continued pushback and wrangling. Which works out partly in our favor, because it'll seem more normal over time to have a region of Cibola ignoring the government. That's part of how the US cracked up."
"Yeah, well. Have a backup plan."
* * *
He found Lumina laughing on the ground floor of Ivory Tower, swapping stories with a couple of adventurers. He sidled up to her and nuzzled her ear, saying, "Hard at work, I see?"
She leaned against him. "Did you know there's a whole little world about heroic forest critters battling an evil empire?"
"Sounds familiar, but not quite like us."
"We were only part of the inspiration. Want to come with us and play a bit part as an evil robot?"
"Sure, for a little while." At the risk of spoiling her fun, he sent to her privately: [And then, we need to plan for the real thing.]