THE NANNY STATE!
Right at ten-pm local time the fusion rocket fired perfectly as the Em family in charge kept it operating at optimum levels. The ship began moving ponderously at first and then picking up speed and maneuvering to a course to take it directly away from the Federation ships. The course could later be corrected for Titan.
At first the Federation ships did not seem to respond to the movement of the Ikaros. Then one after the other the three Federation ships moved on an arc to intercept. Even at full speed the Ikaros was ten times slower than the Federation ships. The Federation ship Defiant started broadcasting a cease and desist order to the Ikaros. The Ikaros did not slow down. The Defiant issued a final warning that force would be used to stop the Ikaros if it did not stop on its own. The Ikaros finally responded that it did not recognize the authority of the Terran Federation and it would not shut down its engines.
At intercept all three Federation ships opened fire with high-powered laser weapons, aiming at the Ikaros' fusion engine. After several minutes of continuous firing the engine seemed to erupt, blowing apart the rear of the fusion ship. The entire structure began to tumble. The stress started to tear apart the spokes. The wheel was soon drifting and tumbling in one direction while what was left of the fusion ship was drifting and tumbling in another direction.
Just then one of the Federation ships which had a spheroidal front end followed by a long boom that held the fusion rocket somewhat separate from the rest of the ship began to tumble. The asteroid miners had opened up an attack with their mass-drivers. They were essentially throwing rocks at the Federation ships.
“Freedom From Want” is a story in the Future Chronology Series. This series of short stories published by Hiawassee Publishing ranges from near future stories to far millennial stories, from familiar Earth-based settings to distant worlds.
Stories in the series available now (or coming soon) include:
Whatsoever You Do (Near Future)
War Through the Pines (Near Future)
Vigilance (22nd Century)
To Tend and Watch Over (22nd Century)
Union (23rd Century)
Circle of Retribution (24th Century)
Freedom from Want (25th Century)
Breakup (25th Century)
Kuiper Station (28th Century)
The Cloud (29th Century)
First Interstellar (30th Century)
Freedom From Want
D.W. Patterson
Copyright © 2017 D.W. Patterson
All rights reserved
Cover - Copyright © Hiawassee Publishing
Cover Image – Copyright © Rolffimages | Electronic Man with Image Screens - Dreamstime.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission, except in the case of brief quotations for the purpose of review. For information please contact –
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events and people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
1
Billy had been biking this trail for two years, he knew every twist and turn. He knew when to catch air and when to dip the nose. He instinctively knew the proper speed for each section of the course. It was a perfect day to be outside riding just as the weather forecast had predicted.
Today he was trying to beat his old time on the trail. He had run the scrub board section perfectly. His speed just enough to keep the bike bounding from one ridge to the next without any undue delay. The series S curve he took a little high but came off the last turn with plenty of speed.
He was now in the seven hills section. Each hill was a little different but most bikers treated them as the same. Either catching air and landing on their back wheel or dipping the nose for each. But Billy knew which ones to catch and which ones to dip.
He was attacking the last hill and was just about to fly off the top when he heard something above him. Ignoring the noise for now Billy concentrated on his landing area. That's when his heart leapt. There exactly where he expected to land was a bike down. Off to one side was a biker tending a wound. How careless to leave your bike on the trail thought Billy just before he was launched over the handlebars when his front wheel caught the other bike.
Billy landed hard, his neck snapped which was fortunate because that was the last pain he felt as he blacked out. He tumbled, bones cracking with each slam of his body into the ground. Internal organs were punctured and crushed. Lacerations were relatively few as his clothing and helmet protected him as expected.
Billy wasn't one to introduce foreign substances into his body so there were no protective nanobots to immediately begin repairs. A few years before and he would have been pronounced dead at the scene.
________
Billy awoke with a sense of well-being. He was laying on his back by the side of the trail. He was surrounded by machinery. He saw the robotic crawlers scurrying from his legs. To one side were two quad-copter drones.
“You okay?” asked the other biker.
“I think so,” said Billy. “But I wish you had cleared your bike.”
“I'm sorry,” said the other biker. “I was just so preoccupied with checking myself for injury that I forgot. I'm surprised you didn't have your heads-up on, it would have shown you my bike.”
“I know,” said Billy. “But I hate to wear one of those when I'm biking, it can be so distracting.”
“Yeah,” said the other biker. “I know what you mean.”
“What's all this?” asked Billy as he sat up.
“I guess this is a triage unit,” said the other biker. “It was working on you before you even stopped bouncing.”
“Yeah, I was out of it from the first hit, I thought I had broken my neck.”
“You probably did,” said the other biker. “That was the first area they focused on. The robots were all over your neck. You've probably got a billion nanobots in your body. It'll take some time to flush all of them out.”
“Help me up,” said Billy.
The other biker reached down to help. Billy got to his feet and walked to where his bike had come to rest. The wheel and front frame were smashed beyond repair. The rest of the frame had reformed itself and looked brand new.
“Too bad they can't fix my bike too,” he said.
“Yeah,” said the other biker. “But I bet they got some great video of your accident. Let's check my Annie and see if we can pull it up.”
________
George Levin had run the company his way all his life. But lately his way wasn't working so well. People just weren't insuring themselves or their belongings like they used to.
George could understand.
Those damn Aggies, he thought, the new Artificial General Intelligence's. Since they had taken over the duties of the government his business had suffered. They had increased life expectancy greatly. Accidents had been reduced to almost nothing. Their engineering had improved materials to the point that material failure was rare. What was there to insure against?
His Whole Life and Term Life insurance businesses had been hit first. Why insure against an early death when there were almost no early deaths? Home insurance had almost disappeared as the Aggies replaced older housing with newer that repaired itself and could stand up to almost anything that nature could throw at it.
And nature, thought George. Was th
ere really any natural environment anymore? Storms of any consequence were relics of the past. Earthquakes were only tremors now. Even California had dropped its requirement for disaster insurance last year.
People just weren't renewing their policies when they expired and George hadn't sold a new policy in months. He would be out of business soon although he didn't have to worry about survival. The robotic made stuff was so cheap that George had enough savings to last himself for many years. His house cost almost nothing to maintain anymore as he had had it refitted with the new Aggie materials. Even government taxes had dropped. George really didn't understand the new system.
So he would retire when the last of his policies matured and was canceled. He would relax for a few years and maybe find something else to do. But he would miss the office and the insurance game.
________
Darvon agreed with the latest meme, Do What You Can Do!. But Darvon wasn't exactly sure what he could do. Once upon a time he had thought of himself as an artist. But then he discovered an Aggie that could draw or paint anything he asked for and with a better technique than Darvon's.
What was the point of making art when it could be done better by a program and robot? In many ways this was what happened as Darvon was growing up, he would get interested in something only to have it pointed out to him that Aggies and robots were already doing that something better.
Darvon ended up on a public allowance and spent most of his days watching vids or playing games online. But it was shortly after his sixteenth birthday that he ran across an article online while searching for something else. The headline of the article caught his eye: Are You Waiting to Die?
He thought it would be an article about despair and in a way it was but it was also inspiring to Darvon. There he read about a nineteenth century painter named Vincent Van Gogh. The name sounded familiar to Darvon, he was sure he had seen some paintings by the guy.
He continued to read and found that Van Gogh, although almost completely ignored in his lifetime, had painted over twenty-one hundred pieces in just over a decade. Eight-hundred sixty were oil paintings and many were completed in the last two years of Van Gogh's life.
Imagine that, thought Darvon, two thousand drawings and paintings and he didn't stop because he had no encouragement. Now he's famous and his paintings are treasured and inspiring.
And Van Gogh had lived in poverty while Darvon knew he wouldn't have to suffer anywhere near what van Gogh suffered, no matter what I do with my life, he thought. And if I'm going to do something I might as well enjoy it. Maybe I'll try art again, I know it's more fun than playing games all day.
Darvon was just about to close his Annie when he saw an advertisement on the side offering cheap art supplies. Free to persons under eighteen. Darvon immediately applied for the supplies.
The Aggie filled Darvon's order and had it on a drone to Darvon's house before Darvon could close his Annie. The Aggie knew that it was important to act fast when motivating a human.
2
Illiad Jackson was surprised at how fast the changes were happening. In his ninety-seven years in the Asteroid Belt and then on Titan he had seen huge changes but nothing like this. He knew that Aggies had been developed over the past forty years but it was only in the last few years that the changes on Earth had increased exponentially. They were very different from the Artificial Narrow Intelligence (colloquially called Annie) devices that most people carried with them to access the net and the Em-based intelligence's (emulated brains running in hardware) that had managed the tower complexes for so long, these were the ones that Illiad had experience with.
In the past few years the Aggies had taken over their own development from the programmers. They had improved their programming at a speed that only an Aggie could keep up with. And that's when the changes in technology and society on Earth started accelerating. It wasn't long until Aggies were displacing the Ems that had managed the Earth's tower complexes for three hundred years.
The tower complexes were the successors to old Earth cities but managed to house many more people in a much smaller area. The Em managers had brought order and security to the huge complexes that housed most of Earth's population.
Ems were very similar to humans in the way they thought, only with extraordinary capabilities in speed of thought and memory capacity. They could still be dealt with and motivated by many of the same things that motivated biological humans. They excelled at security and any activity that was amenable to fast decision making.
But Illiad had been told that Aggies were completely different. Their origin was in computer science. They hadn't any affinities to share with human society. And that became even more true when they started optimizing their own programming.
Aggies were as far advanced from Ems as Ems were from humans. No human could really talk to an Aggie as they could to an Em. While the Aggie was perfectly capable of communicating at a human level it chose not to for doing so was a subjective eternity for an Aggie and decidedly something to be avoided.
No Aggie had made its way beyond Earth yet. But Illiad Jackson knew from some relatives left on Earth that people there quickly adapted when the Aggies took over.
His relatives had described to Illiad how the appearance of authority seemed to disappear yet authority was more prevalent than ever. The billions on Earth were constantly reminded, politely, encouragingly and unobtrusively, to follow the directions of the New Earth management. New Earth was advertised as a more efficient, pleasanter place than Old Earth, and it was true.
But the advertisements were unrelenting in their promotion. They weren't only relegated to New Earth boosterism but also to other matters. Production requirements or overages were advertised, job vacancies (for humans and robots owned by humans), labor market imbalances, housing, transportation needs, in effect everything that was necessary to run the New Earth economy efficiently was advertised with transparency.
A person might receive a personal missive from an Aggie manager to view the latest advertisement for jobs for himself or his robots, production requirements, housing needs and any other thing the Aggies deemed important. In this way everyone was nudged in the direction the Aggies wished. There was no recrimination should a person not accept an opportunity but it was made clear that that person was losing out.
Illiad's relatives had reported to him that for the most part people appreciated the new ways although there were some who chaffed at the constant nudging.
With relatives on Earth and a son, Donner Illiad Jackson on Mars, Illiad was well informed of the societies there. Donner represented Titan Industries on Mars and he was adamant in asserting to his dad that the Mars Republic, unlike Earth, would never willingly allow itself to be managed by an Aggie.
Titan supplied most of the Helium 3 (He3) fuel for Mars, Earth and the rest of the solar system's fusion power plants and fusion rockets. Illiad Jackson knew that the He3 gave Titan leverage over Mars and Earth but he didn't know how the new Aggie management 'felt' about that. He would soon find out.
3
Illiad Jackson was in the common area of his settlement watching the robots walk or roll past when his grandson John Donner Jackson called to him.
“Hello John,” said Illiad. “How are you today?”
“Fine grandfather. But I came to see you because I have some interesting news.”
“Yeah, what's that?” said Illiad.
“Dad just sent the latest order up. There is a twenty percent cut,” said John.
“Twenty percent,” said Illiad. “That is the first time we've encountered that, isn't it?”
“Yes,” said John. “What do you think it means?”
“Well,” said Illiad. “We know the Aggies have been increasing the efficiency of power usage on Earth. But that seems like too large a cut back to ascribe it all to energy efficiency.”
“That's what I thought also,” said John. “I'll tell you what I think it's about, but I have to warn you it's just speculation.”
“Okay son,” said Illiad. “What do you think is going on?”
“You know the rumors about Earth developing its own He3 supply chain. Well, I think they are no longer rumors. I think the Aggies on Earth have accomplished it. I would suspect they have a mission already returning from Jupiter with a load of He3.”
“Jupiter,” said Illiad. “You think they braved the radiation regions around Jupiter to mine He3?”
“It was all automated grandfather. The mission was flown by an Em with Aggie backup.”
“How do you know that?” asked Illiad. “Many of the Ems left on Earth have been fleeing the Aggies' control. Donner tells me Mars has received asylum requests from many of them. Even we've received a few way out here.”
“I know grandfather,” said John. “But remember Ems are amenable to rewards, just like humans. I imagine that at least a few of them have sold their services to the Aggies.”
Freedom From Want: A Future Chronology Short Story (Future Chronology Series Book 7) Page 1