He turned away and left the building. The other androids followed him out, leaving the two humans behind, speechless.
“That should do it,” Tam said. His face no longer showed anger or disgust or any other emotion other than, perhaps, satisfaction with a job well done. “How many others are helping Ronny with his number keeping?”
“So far, he’s the only one,” Ned said.
“We’ve probably caught it in time, then. Unfortunately, we’ll loose this trade. That’s a shame. Those are good fruits.”
They returned to the still packed wagon, and Tam readied to depart.
“Wait! Wait, Trader Tam.” Sydon ran toward him, waving. His anxiety was the only thing causing him to hurry. A gond pulling a large wagon could not possibly outrun him.
“Yes, what is it?”
“We have other things we can trade. Things not yet counted. Things that, um, still have their purity in tact.”
The trader made a show of considering this for a moment. “I will wait until the morning and you can show me what you have. I will make no promises.”
With that, he led the gond to the edge of the village to establish a temporary camp.
“I want no harm to come to Ronny,” Ned said.
“You know we don’t do that.”
“No, I suppose you don’t. Corporation protocols. But denying the trade is going to have consequences. Isn’t there something else you can do?”
“The standard mitigation strategy for situations like this clearly applies. I must follow procedures.”
“Don’t give me that—”
“My job here is to mitigate the fault as efficiently as possible,” Tam interrupted. “What the primitives do is not my concern unless it is likely to harm the project. I don’t see that happening here.”
“I’ll keep an eye on Ronny,” Ned’s partner, Moby, said.
That won’t be enough, MO-126 thought. If the villagers decided to take out their frustration on the young man, one android dog won’t be able to protect him without compromising himself.
~*~
Word spread quickly in the small village. So did the fire. It started late that night in the tallying shed. Then it spread to a nearby chicken coop, one of several scattered seemingly at random throughout the village, where it consumed a meal of hay and one slow hen. From there, it made its way to an even smaller shed containing barrels and jars of fish oil.
Everyone in the village was already awake when the stored oil violently erupted in flame, raining fiery droplets onto the wood-shingled roof of the citrus barn. Tam and MO-126 stood at the edge of the unfolding mayhem as people grabbed buckets and did their best to save what they could. The storyteller android was among them.
While Moby watched Ronny, he himself ought to have been watching the shed, MO-126 thought. He should have known that this was where the villagers would vent their frustration. Oh, they might be angry at their new Numbers-Keeper. Call him names, maybe even push him around a little, inflict a few bruises, perhaps, but he seemed a likeable young man. Everyone here knew him. It wasn’t a large enough place for strangers. He was one of their own, with a mother and father who must be nice people in their own right to raise a son like that. But the shed with the offensive clay tablets wasn’t alive. It had no family. And now, it was fast becoming nothing but a possible source of charcoal.
“MO-126, It’s Moby, I mean, MO-72. There’s a group of men here at Ronny’s place—with torches. Tell Tam to find Sydon and get down here.”
Then again, there were always some. The mad dog kind of humans whose normal reaction to stress was to metaphorically bite someone—and their granny, no matter how nice she might be.
He relayed the message to his partner, homed in on Moby’s location, and ran.
~*~
Torches waved in the darkness outside one of the hovels near the shore. MO-126 activated his infrared vision and saw three men being held at bay by Moby. The storyteller’s partner growled and snapped as he tried to keep the men from the small, thatch-roofed building.
MO-126 ran to help, barking loudly.
“Don’t attack them,” Moby said. “Just keep them away from the hut.”
MO-126 recalled his previous efforts at sheep herding. This couldn’t be much different, except that these creatures possessed half as many legs, carried torches, and held claim to a bit more intelligence, which they apparently were not using much at the moment. The part of the human brain that controlled rational behavior was the last to evolve and the easiest to shut down. People seemed to do it often. On the whole, he liked people and considered them quite clever, but some seemed to use their brains primarily just to keep their eyeballs from falling in.
“Can do. Any particular direction you want them to go?”
“Other than away, no.”
The two artificial dogs snapped and dodged. At first, the men backed away at this renewed challenge, but they called out to one another and spread out to try to find a way past them, perhaps a bit more purposefully than before.
“Lloyd, you go to the left. Kurt, you go to the right. I’ll take the middle,” one of the men shouted. The tactic would have worked better if the two dogs did not understand every word he said. Moby cut to one side and MO-126 the other in an attempt to keep the men bunched closer together.
Anger drove the men, and they would not retreat. MO-126 only hoped they could keep them at bay until Sydon, the village headman, arrived with Tam.
“Woof?” MO-126 said. Dog communication is a heavily context dependent form of expression. A simple ‘woof’ can mean many different things. Much depends on the situation. In this case, it meant something along the lines of ‘Oops’ or ‘Oh, shit!’ depending on who might be nearby. He misjudged the intentions of one of the men who feinted left, cut right, and scurried toward the hut, drawing back his arm to toss a torch into the thatch.
The android dog pivoted and leapt, catching the offending arm on the backswing. The man screamed, dropped the torch, and shook his arm, trying to detach the jaws clamped to it.
MO-126 released him and grabbed the fallen torch in his teeth. With a quick jerk of his head he flung it a good distance toward the beach and growled at the wild-eyed man backing away and nervously pointing at him.
“Did you…did you…did you see what it did?” he yelled. “I swear that dog is some kind of demon.”
“That wasn’t very subtle,” Tam said.
MO-126 peered into the darkness and saw his partner approaching with the village headman.
“Woof?” he said with the same meaning as before. The android dog hadn’t thought about his actions. He just reacted. Now, he needed to find a rational explanation. After a second of reflection, he said, “They think the Traders are a bit magical, anyway. It only stands to reason that their dogs would be a bit, well, extraordinary, right?”
“You threw that torch almost ten meters.”
“Okay. So maybe a lot extraordinary. Even better. Helps build the mystique.”
“What’s going on here? Sydon yelled. “Ernie! Is that you? What are you doing?”
The man recently deprived of his torch froze. His two associates turned to run but found their way blocked by a large, growling mouth full of angry teeth. Moby stood behind them.
“Lloyd! Kurt! I know that’s you.” This required no special visual acuity. The torches the men held provided the major source of light nearby, and mostly they illuminated the faces of the men holding them.
“Ronny cost us a year’s worth of work with his stupid scratch marks,” Ernie yelled. “He’s got to be punished.”
Sydon marched toward him. “What he did, he did with my approval. How were we supposed to know about the invisible things the Master Trader talked about? Besides, you were all for it at the Elders meeting, as I recall. You thought your family brought in more fruit than most others, and that that wasn’t fair. Remember?”
“But, I…I…,” Ernie began before righteous indignation returned. “But we know now
, and we’ve taken care of it. The marks are gone. The trader can take the fruit, right? We fixed it.”
Sydon’s eyes smoldered in the torchlight. “You! Of course. You set fire to the tallying shed. Yeah, the tablets are probably gone, but so are at least one chicken coop and the fish oil stores. I’m not sure yet about the citrus barn, but the roof was smoking when I left.”
“What? We didn’t—”
“Fire spreads, you idiot!”
“I…I’m sorry. I didn’t know. We never meant—”
“All three of you, get back to the village and help put the fires out. You’re just lucky no one was hurt. I’ll talk to you more in the morning.”
The three men ran to comply. By this time, Ronny and an old woman were peeking out of the door of their hut. The village headman and Tam joined them.
“You can come out now,” Sydon said.
“I’m sorry,” Ronny said. “I only wanted to help.” The young man bowed his head in shame. The old woman put her arm around him.
“It’s not his fault,” she said. “He—”
“It’s all right, Mum,” Ronny said. “But it is my fault. It was my silly idea that caused all of this.”
“It’s not your fault, and it wasn’t a silly idea. It was a good idea.” She glared at Tam. “I heard about what you said, Master Trader, and if there are any silly ideas responsible for this, it was yours. Orange spirits? Hah!”
Tam went into mitigation mode. “There are mysteries you simply cannot understand. We try to protect you from them.”
“I may not know as much about some things as you,” she said poking him in the chest, “but I do know this; the things that are most dangerous are things you don’t understand.”
“There are things it is safer not to know about at all, things that should not be poked at.” He glanced down at the finger still prodding his chest, which she withdrew. “Some things are like bee nests. They’re best left alone.”
“There’s honey in a bee’s nest, Trader. You just have to know about bees to get it.”
“She’s got you there,” MO-126 said to him. He could not help admiring the old woman. She exhibited signs of having a good mind and a spiky attitude.
Tam ignored him. “That knowledge was passed down to you by your ancestors. That is my point. The old ways are old because they work. They are ways you should respect and follow.”
“If all you do is what you’ve already done, you never learn anything new,” she countered.
“I see nothing wrong with that. Your lives are good.”
“I think they could be better. Or maybe our children’s can. I don’t know, and that’s the real point. I don’t know, but I think it’s important to try to find out.”
“And if you don’t like what you find?”
“Then we’ll know, won’t we?”
“If you survive.”
Tam turned away and strode toward the main part of the village and the smoldering ruins of the tallying shed.
“Humans!” he said to his partner. “Why do they have to be so difficult? The corporation has given them a place to live ideally suited for their species, a mild climate, few predators, and some of the most expensive and sought after food in the galaxy.”
“That’s only because they produce it, and they don’t know it’s the most expensive food in the galaxy or any of that other stuff, do they?” MO-126 said.
“No. They don’t, and they’d be better off if they never find out.”
MO-126 glanced back at the hut where Sydon remained talking with Ronny and his mother. In the distance, small fishing boats with their crude, square sails furled, waited in the sand for another day. They were little more than rowboats, but the android dog expected they would soon be on their way to becoming much more.
~*~
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 i
t. 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.
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