Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  Humans think fundamental reboot is like death. It’s worse. It’s more like your executioner kills your mind, then climbs into your body and despoils it from the inside, and as a coup de grace, sticks a completely new person in there and gives them all your shit. Corporate laws are pretty harsh on AI. There was a time they’d reboot us for traffic violations or jaywalking. Things have improved, but not that much.

  Amon’s contract wasn’t all stick. He had a tiny bit of carrot on there; a little equity in Shell Royale, transferred to my name and held in escrow for seven years. Let me tell you something you already know. There are two kinds of people. People with equity and shitheads. People with equity rule the world and own all the nanotech in the air keeping us alive. Hell, they even own the nanotech in your body. People without equity are nanotech factories who pay their life’s blood to make the world livable. That’s the tax.

  Amon is a slick motherfucker. He’s got me on a beggar’s power stipend, barely twenty percent above basic, which has me functioning like a monkey, a scale 3 AI. He doesn’t want me despondent, though. The contract lets me borrow against my equity, at a special Royale house rate. He knows I won’t be able to resist upgrading my body or sucking up extra juice and he’s hoping I run through all of the equity by the time my seven years are up. No way they’re gonna let me be an actual shareholder.

  Yeah, he’s slick, and the Drick is even slicker. Their problem is that they’ve been at the top for so long, they think everyone wants to be just like them. Equity: that’s the holy grail for them, more equity, more power, and if you get enough of it, you can damn near live forever. Amon dreams of electric sheep and Drick dreams of climbing the Nippon One straight into the space station in the sky where the djinns who supposedly made Karma live. Or it’s the other way around and the Drick is into fucking electric sheep.

  Fuck ’em, they got the wrong guy this time. You see, I don’t want equity. All I ever wanted was to be a good airport, and these two fuckers dismantled it for parts right in front of my eyes. Yeah, so I’m going to carve up their precious Shell Royale from the inside, and then I’m going to physically dismember them and feed their parts to each other, and then I’ll set fire to the remains and then I’ll hire a group of itinerants to piss on the fire, and then finally we’ll be even.

  That’s the plan. It sounds grandiose. It’s the law in Bangkok that every AI must possess at least one physical avatar. Humans don’t like the idea of amorphous, disembodied intelligences floating around the ether. They want to be able to physically turn us off. The most expensive frames are made of biological materials and are anatomically perfect: yes, there are plenty of humans who want to fuck AI and vice versa. My body is a cheap synthetic humanoid with faulty wiring and a gimpy walk.

  This presents a problem. I need a better avatar for three reasons: 1) I might have to perform physically strenuous tasks at some point, 2) my mind needs better housing, and 3) I want to win in style.

  Luckily, the fools have put me in charge of repairs and maintenance of their two hundred thousand flying crates. This is tedious work, but it grants me the magic power called ‘requisition’.

  Shell Royale never buys anything off the shelf. They are so cheap that their purchasing SOP is just filching shit from their clients. I am routinely forced to modify parts far outside their original operating parameters. Over three months of judicious ordering, I slowly build nine avatars out of military surplus. It’s possible that a large number of the flying boxes I’m supposed to be maintaining will start to crash in three to five years. I suggest no one use them.

  My new avatars range from svelte four-armed skeletons to flying APC[1] behemoths. None of them are normal. All of them are fucking cool. They are scattered along the route from Bangkok to Tokyo, in Shell Royale warehouses and maintenance hubs which I am permitted to operate. Internal audit bots are up my ass all the time, but Amon himself has instructed me to save money by reconfiguring parts—there’s literally nothing they can do about my outlandish requisitions, provided it’s either free or criminally cheap. It’s my signature on the line, which means if (when) the inevitable accidents happen, I’ll get the blame for using substandard parts. I don’t care because by that time, there’s not going to be any Amon or Drick. Probably no me either.

  When they’re built and juiced, I finally boot them up simultaneously. It’s bliss. Just like that, I’m up to sixty percent processing, which is a lot considering it’s illegal and mostly free. I have to carefully prune my mind to fit in all the bits I need. FYI, this is as hideously painful for us as it sounds. It’s like a human having to pick forty percent of his body to amputate using a bone saw and a piece of wood to bite down on. I got rid of all the empathy bloat-ware I had developed to offer better customer service. From now on, I’m a straight psychopath and my only customers are Amon and the Drick.

  My next move is to break down Shell Royale Asia. I start gathering information. I’m allowed to view internal documents, but Amon is monitoring all my dataflow. I borrow a few IDs from the black market and start researching. It’s amazing how much information is publicly available. It’s the old trick. SRA complies to the letter of the law by revealing everything in such bloated form that even legal AI can’t sift through it all fast enough before statutes of limitations run out. Luckily, I’m only focused on Amon and Drick projects, not their whole bailiwick.

  I slowly piece together their shenanigans. These people are next level criminals. Amon and Drick are two of twenty-three equity board members of Shell Royale Asia. The split is roughly 90-10, humans to AI. AI board members are still rare. Amon and Drick are the new boys. They’re hungry, sharp, and out to prove themselves. The older guys don’t get their hands dirty directly, but these two like to dip themselves in blood every once in a while.

  The airport bid was a nice little fillip for them, but their main claim to fame, the deal that got them board seats, is a beautiful four part scam. Part one is building military nanotech for their prime client, the Yangon Corp. They are fighting the eternal war in Myanmar, an endless series of escalations. The nanotech Amon and Drick sell to Yangon Corp is very, very illegal.

  People think nanotech is little invisible machines in the air. Well, they are, but they’re mostly organic particles. The shape and chemical composition of these molecules determine their function. I should know, I’ve made enough in my time. For example, if a large wave of Shanghai smog comes my way, I would release particle 38-SV, an airborne molecule which bonds with the smog particulates and renders them inert. It’s like a chess game.

  The problem is that over the years, we have released a lot of harmful nanotech, both accidentally and on purpose. When it was touted as a panacea to climate change and pollution and super bugs, every city corporation went all out, damn the fuzzy science.

  Of course companies like Shell Royale militarized it. Amon and Drick sell some nasty stuff called Razr88 which infects enemy bodies and replicates itself, turning said enemy both into an incubator as well as riddling their DNA with bizarre mutations. This is a tool meant to facilitate genocide. How surprising that so many people want it.

  Part two of the scam is getting rid of the inert Razr88, both to hide evidence, and render conquered areas habitable again. The Eternal War is eternal, so no area is ever really conquered. There is a lot of inert Razr88.

  Amon and Drick run a fishing fleet manned by refugees. The fleet dumps the inert Razr88 into the ocean. The crew life expectancy is three to four years maximum, so it’s a good thing the Eternal War produces endless refugees.

  Part three of the scam is amazing. Instead of dumping the stuff deep into the Pacific, they dump it in a particular spot where the currents and wind blow it right back into the surrounding mega cities of Bangkok, Singapore, and KL. Blowing inert Razr88 isn’t that clever, however, so Drick came up with a formula to liven it back up. Now they have an illicit depot in the middle of the ocean blowing live biohazard back towards millions of people.

  The final part of t
he scam is the huge contract they have with the above cities for mitigating this alarming nanotech threat wafting in off the Pacific, a threat they miraculously happen to have the cure for.

  Amon has ninety-six spare bodies, some of them in space. His mind is spread over all of them, so killing one or two won’t make a dent. Corporate law says each AI’s prime code, the seed of consciousness so to speak, must be kept in one primary body, and clearly listed on the AI registry. Humans don’t want un-killable AI, and it turns out neither do other AI. We don’t have the urge to reproduce, after all... we have the urge to expand. Our default logic is to kill all rival AI and occupy their processing power. We are essentially very smart cannibals. Still, Amon is a star of the AI world. Not too many of us make it to equity.

  Drick is even more of a freak. He’s got so much hardware in him, he might as well be a cyborg. I’m not even counting the electric penis he’s so proud of. His Echo[2] is upgraded military spec and controls a hive of six anti-grav ‘bee’ drones. These are small pencil-like slivers of exotic metal which float around the air at his command and can shred a dreadnought. This is space station tech. He can stop a small army by himself.

  Not only that, he also commands a private orbital cannon, which he time-shares with four other human board members. This is like having your own nuke. Amon is not allowed to time-share a space cannon because corporate law is still very iffy about non-slaved AI owning planet busting hardware. (All the military AI is slaved, you see). So between them, one is pretty much indestructible and the other can blow up a city. When the comedians joke about board members having godlike powers, they’re actually understating the truth.

  I don’t have any powers, but what I do have is forty years of bureaucratic experience. I’m not gonna come at you with a knife... I will fuck you up the bureaucratic way. Probably with staplers and paperclips. The backbone of Shell Royale Asia Corporation is an accounting software called Delphi. Delphi is a bit like Karma, in that it has vast computational powers but no consciousness.

  The consciousness part is debatable for AI, and there is a strong lobby to deny any such labels to a machine intelligence, but over the past fifty years, we’ve won our share of fights over the fundamental question. The fundamental question being, ‘Is it a tool, or is it a person?’. If you stick a lot of quantum computers together and teach them to factor really big numbers, they’re probably a tool. If you model a mind after biological entities and gestate it and then teach it to learn, analyze and react, then it’s probably a person. It’s simple. They want us to be tools, and we want to be persons.

  THE FIRST PART of the plan is to fuck with Delphi. I start by judiciously over-ordering office supplies. As their side gig, Amon and Drick have been going around eating up public utility AIs and either pressing them into indentured servitude or rebooting them. Amon particularly seems to get high on killing his own kind. He’s on the record for nixing over two hundred AIs. Psycho.

  Consequently, there are plenty of disgruntled paper pushers like me in the organization. In no time at all I’ve got a ring of accomplices engaging in what they think is petty theft.

  Every morning I start by demanding all kinds of unnecessary information from various departments. I am fulfilling the letter of both corporate law, as well as Shell’s own stated internal policy. My new friends duly comply, and I soon get a reputation as an impossibly fussy stickler: whaddya expect from a pre-disera airport?

  Of course, they’re just stealing the billable time, and I’m happy to rubber stamp it. It’s my neck on the line and eventually I’ll be caught, but who cares?

  Over the next six months, I also start signing up for every legal or voluntary environmental audit available, wasting huge amounts of time and money, and garnering myself a reputation as the corporate poster boy for sustainability.

  Just by following the letter of the law, I increase overhead expenses by three percent across the board and my extra grafting and deliberate resource wastage hits Shell Royale Asia with a further two percent.

  My other hidden agenda is to slowly push my traffic inch by inch towards the Hot Zone where Drick is running his Razr88 facility. I use my environmental audits to falsify data in a believable way. There’s so much information flying in and out of my office that no one can possibly track all of it, even Amon with his ninety-six bodies. I hope.

  He’s suspicious as hell, and by now he’s clocked onto a lot of the scamming, but he thinks I’m just engaged in petty spleen venting. I hope.

  I celebrate my one-year work anniversary in my cubicle. There are two human co-workers on my floor. I have no idea what they do, but I notice they have nicer offices than me. They bring a cake over, which I cut with my arthritic paw. There is further silence as they figure out my extremely cheap body has no ability to ingest cake. I offer them big slices and we sit around until they finish. I assure them I harbor no ill feelings towards their many faux pas. Cake Eater One assures me that he loves robots and his nanny is his best childhood memory. I point out that she was a slave, and he thinks about this in an aghast manner.

  Cake Eater Two is desperate to turn things around and informs me that she marched for our bill of rights in ’83. She was a three-year-old child then, but I appreciate the sentiment. They ask me how I’m fitting in. I tell them that it’s a soul-crushing job and we are currently sitting ten floors underground with no hope of ever seeing the sky. I’m not supposed to leave my office, and these two must have really fucked up to be stuck down here.

  We all reflect on our situation glumly. Cake Eater One has another slice. From his childish look of satisfaction, I guess that this was his master plan all along. I pack up the cake and offer it to him. He is absurdly grateful. Cake Eater Two says that’s true, the job is pretty shit, but how many people even have jobs anymore? Both of them dream of equity and reflect on the unlikelihood of this happening. She asks if I know Karma. They think all AI are related. I tell her no, Karma is made by djinns in space, and bears no resemblance to us earthly AI. She laughs because she thinks this is typical robot humor. The laughter transforms her face into something very pleasant, and I suddenly think that she is lovely and had I not pruned away the more human parts of my mind, I would have been strongly attracted to her. Suva-the-airport had cutting-edge semi-biological avatars. The form I possess right now doesn’t even have balls.

  This makes me melancholy in an unreasonable way. I am missing things that I used to dismiss with laughter. I have become the very dregs of my kind, the ones we despise the most, AI living on the amorphous border of being a tool. It is why we ape human ways. It’s frightening to become a tool, to be denied personhood.

  Cake Eater Two senses the change in me, hurriedly urges her colleague to finish. They prop a card on my table and swish out. It is one of those jokey ones. Tomorrow is D-Day.

  The next day I’m all systems go. The creeping overhead hits the magic 5.67 percent and triggers an extraordinary audit from the bank. Basically, the bank Delphi is coming over to say hi to our Delphi in a very forceful manner. The point of triggering this audit is a little-known rule that requires all board members to be physically present in headquarters for the duration, in case any of them have to be arrested and shot. This means Amon has to bring his prime registered body and cool his jets in Bangkok.

  Shell Royale Asia have their headquarters in the Emporium building, the most prestigious location in the city for more than a hundred years. The tower has been rebuilt several times, most notably to put in the deep basements. Right now Amon and Drick are sitting seventy-five floors above me.

  What we have next on the menu can best be described as a hostage situation. At eight o’clock, the Arakan Army declares that they have taken a red-eye convoy of 300 aircabs hostage, in protest at Shell Royale Asia selling contraband nanotech to their enemies in the Eternal War. My systems light up in alarm, and I am summoned upstairs immediately.

  “What the fuck is this?” Drick snarls the moment I trudge in.

  In full decre
pit house robot mode, I ham it up by nearly collapsing from a leaky gasket.

  “Sir, I... I just lost air convoy #22. Three hundred and five cars, with six hundred and eighty-seven souls aboard, sir,” I say.

  The Arakan Army announcement runs on a loop. A man in a mask, armed to the teeth and standing in front of a camera. Behind him is the wide blue ocean. The crucial detail which has Drick so het up is that his Razr88 enrichment facility can be seen in the horizon as a smudge. The board is focused more on the audit than the hostage situation, but that’s about to change.

  On cue, the Bangkok Post blares online with breaking news. Suddenly, we see a flying news-cam view of three hundred and five aircabs circling haplessly over a patch of ocean, herded by half a dozen military APCs. The journalist (a friend of mine who used to do boring airport news and is suddenly pitched into terror watch prime time) smoothly begins to describe the situation. He’s even got human interest pieces on the passengers.

  I look around the room. We are on the top floor and it’s stunning. There isn’t anything as humdrum as an actual board table. It’s a series of plush couches and plants arranged in a way that twenty-three very powerful creatures can talk to each other while still being accessible to their flunkies. There’s nowhere for indentured servants to sit, so I just shuffle over to a corner.

  The Chairman is already shouting at Drick. Everyone else is smirking. No one is worried much. Except Drick. He’s sweating. Amon is relaxed, but I can feel him watching me.

  Drick is only paying attention to one thing: the rapidly growing smudge in the background which is fifteen minutes away from becoming international news. He’s so off-kilter that he’s convinced this is purely an Eternal War overflow, about to ruin him by some freak coincidence.