Qualityland

by Marc-Uwe Kling

  “And the Machine Breakers have nothing against the fact that your factories are almost exclusively operated by robots?”

  Bob laughs. “Do you think it’s by chance that the Machine Breakers only ever attack my competitors’ factories? No, chance no longer exists. It isn’t just in politics that a big donation here and there for a good cause can work wonders.”

  “I see.”

  “So. What do you say?”

  “I’m not interested,” says Martyn.

  “All they need is a little inside knowledge. When and where John will appear.”

  “I’m not interested,” says Martyn.

  “You’ll give it some thought,” says his father.

  THE GRAINS OF RICE

  Peter is standing with his machines in front of a closed gate that is surrounded by a very high wall. This wall separates the studio compound where Juliet Nun’s TV program is produced from the rest of the world.

  “We have to go through this delivery gate,” says Peter once more. “Kiki gave us the access code. But it’ll only work if someone types it in on the other side of the gate. So you have to fly over this wall and let us in. That was the plan.”

  Carrie makes a tormented sound. “I’m scared!” whimpers the drone.

  “You said you could do it if it was really important.”

  “Yes, but that was back at home!”

  “Don’t make such a fuss,” says Pink. “I mean, you can fly after all! If it were any use I’d be happy to have myself thrown over the wall.”

  “And I’d be happy to throw you,” says Romeo.

  “But I’m so afraid!” says the drone.

  “You can do it,” says Peter. “I have complete faith in you! Just take off.”

  “He is your benefactor,” says Calliope. “Don’t be so ungrateful!”

  “But what if I fall?”

  “I’ll catch you,” says Peter.

  “Okay, okay,” says Carrie. “I’ll try!”

  Her engines begin to hum.

  “Now fly, dammit!” cries Pink.

  Carrie lifts off from the ground. Eight centimeters, 16 centimeters.

  “I’m flying!” she cries with excitement. “I’m flying!”

  Thirty-two centimeters.

  “Yes!” cries Peter. “I knew you could do it.”

  Carrie is still in midair.

  “I can do it!” she cries. “I can do it.”

  “And now fly over the wall and open up for us.”

  “I can do it!”

  “The trick is not to look down,” says Romeo.

  Carrie directs her camera lens downward.

  “I’m so afraid!” she exclaims, plummeting back to the ground.

  Everyone immediately begins to shout at her. Peter’s voice is the loudest.

  “You have to fly!” he cries. “We have to get through this gate! Otherwise our plan will fail before it’s even begun!”

  “You ungrateful, useless thing!” says Calliope.

  “Some drone you are,” complains the QualityPad in Mickey’s hand. “Even a block of concrete could fly better than you.”

  Suddenly Mickey takes a step back and, with all of his force, punches a hole in the wall. Everyone falls silent.

  Mickey points his outstretched arm at the wall.

  “Kapuuuut,” he says.

  “Well,” says Peter. “That will work too.”

  “It is often said that force is no argument,” says Calliope. “That, however, entirely depends on what one wants to prove. Oscar Wilde said that. Very fitting in this context, I feel.”

  “I’m always afraid that one day Mickey might accidentally use the wrong hand holding me for one of these stunts,” says Pink.

  “Okay,” whispers Peter, once everyone has climbed through the hole. “Act as inconspicuously as possible.” He looks at the lustless sexdroid, the blocked e-poet carrying a flight-fearing drone, and the psychologically unstable combat robot with the pink-colored QualityPad in his hand.

  “Did you say something?” asks Pink.

  “Oh…” says Peter. “Just forget it.”

  “We can’t forget anything,” says Romeo, “and believe me, I really wish I could.”

  “Where do we need to go?” asks Peter.

  “Studio 4,” says Calliope. “I was once interviewed by Juliet Nun in this studio. Back in my glory days. The Intern and the President had just been filmed, to great acclaim. From an artistic point of view, of course, it was a catastrophe. The director wasn’t up to the quality of the material. He made a soft porno out of it, if you ask me—”

  “Where do we need to go?” asks Peter more insistently. “Which direction?”

  Calliope sighs. “I’ll lead the way.”

  After they’ve walked 409.6 meters, Calliope whispers: “The entrance should be around the corner here.”

  Peter gives Mickey and Pink a hand signal. First he points his index and ring fingers at his eyes, then he makes a circle motion with his index finger.

  “What on earth is that supposed to mean?” asks Pink. “What is the strange man trying to say to us?”

  Mickey shrugs his shoulders.

  “That you should do a recon of the territory!” whispers Peter.

  “Ah, I see.”

  Mickey positions himself close to the wall, then stretches his arm out and holds Pink around the corner.

  “And?” whispers Peter, once Pink is glowing in front of him again.

  “Four security guards,” says the QualityPad. “Heavily armed. I guess there must be increased security today.”

  “Shit. Must be ’cause of the guests.”

  “Because of the guests,” Calliope corrects him.

  “The guards are no problem that a small rocket shot out of Mickey’s right arm can’t solve,” says Pink.

  Mickey nods in agreement. “Kapuuuut!”

  “No,” says Peter. “You only have to distract them, do you hear me? Just distract them! I’ll creep around the other corner with the others.”

  The QualityPad grumbles. “Come on then, Schwarzenegger,” she says to Mickey. “Let’s go say hello.”

  Arriving at the front entrance, the two are confronted with the sight of a little street-cleaning robot getting kicked heftily in the side by one of the security guards. It squeaks unhappily, straightens itself up, and tries to continue cleaning on the very spot where he just got kicked away. The men laugh. Then another one kicks out, this time more forcefully. The cleaning robot rolls over twice, lands on its back, and pedals its eight little legs helplessly in the air. The men laugh again. But when their leader sees a 128-kilogram-heavy, 2.56-meter-tall combat robot coming toward them, the laughter sticks in his throat.

  “Look over there!” he cries, which only makes the others laugh more. This is why: directors of virtual reality videos realized early on that it’s not so easy to get viewers to look in the right direction at the right moment. If you stop to look at the view for just one second, you might miss the murder. That’s why the directors like to use a simple ruse. They work extras into their films, who, just before the deciding moment, point at the important development and cry: “Look over there!” The ruse has been used so excessively that by now it’s just a joke.

  “I’m serious!” cries the leader. “Look!”

  When the others finally turn around, they stop laughing too.

  “You know, Mickey,” says Pink, “an idiot in uniform is still an idiot. Don’t you think?”

  The leader of the security team lifts his unpleasant-looking machine gun and points it at Mickey.

  “You must be looking for The Scrapyard Show. You’re in the wrong place!” he shouts. “It’s recorded in Studio 2.”

  Mickey doesn’t move.

  “Beat it, or we’ll blast you into pieces,” says the man.

  Mickey ignores the threat.

  “Didn’t you understand me?” asks the security guard. “What’s your problem?”

  “Kapuuuut!” says Mickey.

&
nbsp; “This waste of metal has no more brains than a sparrow has fat on his kneecap,” says the man. Two of his colleagues laugh. The other one needs a little longer, then says with a snort: “Sparrows don’t have much fat on their knees! So you meant that all power guzzlers are stupid, right?”

  Mickey stretches out his arm and holds Pink in front of their noses. The QualityPad displays her most friendly smiley emoticon.

  “If I may tell you a little story on this topic,” says the QualityPad.

  The men look surprised. And as none of them respond quickly enough, Pink begins to tell the story. “Almost 2,000 years ago, a man called Shihram ruled in old India. And like all rulers before and after him, he was a heartless, exploitative varmint. You’re probably familiar with India from those six months when you peabrains actually went to school. It was the tiny little country in South America where the elephant man was worshipped as a God. The Brahmin Sissa Ibn Dahir also lived there. The name is a little complicated, I know, so let’s just call him Sid. So this Sid wanted to criticize the King without actually criticizing him directly, for he was justifiably concerned that his body length could be reduced by 32 centimeters from the top. So he created a present. A board game. Picture it as a kind of Universe of Warcraft on a much smaller scale, made of wood—if you can picture such a thing, which I doubt. Now, this game was intended to show how helpless the King would be without his helpers and farmers, his Human Resources, as it were. In the region of present-day QualityLand, the game came from old Persia, by the way. Persia? Is everyone familiar with the term? The high plains where people believed they would be reborn as baldies in orange robes? The Persian word for ‘king,’ by the way, is ‘shah,’ and ‘chess,’ the name given to this board game and still used to this day, comes from the original meaning of the king piece.”

  As Peter, Romeo, and Calliope slip into the studio grounds behind the security guards’ backs, Mickey lifts a hand to wave to them. “Don’t you dare, you idiot!” Pink transmits to him, and Mickey lowers his arm again.

  “Now, this game,” Pink continues, “made a very big impression on Shihram—do you remember him? He was the top banana; it’s probably best we just call him Jack—and, now I admit the story gets a little unrealistic here: he changed his behavior for the good. In order to show his gratitude for having seen the light, the big boss granted the designer of the game a free wish. And the latter was incredibly humble. He wished for nothing but grains of rice. One single grain on the first square of the chessboard. Double the amount on the second square, or in other words, two. Four on the third square. Eight on the fourth square. Then sixteen…‘Yeah, yeah,’ said King Jack, ‘double again and again until the board is full. I get it. It’s yours, sucker. You could have wished for all the riches in the world. But you’ve named your price, a mere sack of rice.’ The rhyme was accidental. If there was one thing you couldn’t accuse King Jack of, it was a predilection for poetry.”

  At this point, Pink receives a message from Peter. It says: “I’m in the studio. Go to the meeting point and wait there.” Pink answers: “I’m in the middle of a conversation. Be patient.”

  “When, sometime later, King Jack asked his henchmen whether Sid had taken possession of his reward yet,” says the QualityPad, continuing simultaneously with her presentation, “he was told that the data-processing center hadn’t yet calculated the number of rice grains. You have to take into consideration that the calculating potential back then was still considerably beneath that of the legendary Commodore 64, from which, by the way, I am a direct descendant on my father’s side. But I don’t mean to boast. When the calculation was finally finished, the Head of Catering, let’s call him Mr. Stevens, announced that there weren’t enough rice grains to be found in the entire kingdom. And that was an understatement. For on the sixty-four squares of the chessboard, there would need to be 264 - 1 or 18 quintillion 446 quadrillion 744 trillion 73 billion 709 million 551 thousand and 615 grains of rice, which equates to 553,500 million tons, which is 1,024 times the current annual rice harvest. Not to mention the comparatively shitty state of the agricultural industry in King Jack’s day. Luckily, the King had an IT expert, who helped him out of his embarrassment by recommending that Sid be told to count the crops owing to him by himself, grain by grain.”

  Pink pauses.

  “What on earth are you blathering on about?” asks the security guard. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at!”

  “Exactly,” says Pink. “Exponential growth. Very few of you pudding brains understand it. Would you like another example? If Mickey here were to take thirty normal steps, he could still easily pulverize you bozos with his rocket launcher. But if Mickey were to take thirty exponential steps, we would land on the moon.”

  “I still don’t understand…”

  “Okay, okay,” says Pink. “Patience. Have you guys ever heard of Moore’s Law? Moore was the co-founder of an insignificant little chip producer called Intel, and he predicted that the complexity of integrated circuits would double every twenty-four months. A prophecy that has proven itself to be true more or less until this day. Now do you understand what I’m getting at? The intelligence we machines have grows exponentially. And do you know how human intelligence grows?”

  The men all look at her gormlessly.

  “Exactly,” says Pink. “Not at all. So who do you think the future belongs to? You should think twice about how you treat the smallest members of our kind. Or even better, don’t think twice, but 264 - 1 times. Because we save everything. We forget nothing. So start saying good morning to your toaster, and it wouldn’t hurt to send your hoover on the occasional spa break!”

  Mickey leans over and, with his free hand, helps the cleaning robot back to his feet from where it was still thrashing around. It immediately returns to its former position directly in front of the security guards’ feet, and carries on cleaning. Not a single one of the men approaches it.

  “It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” says Pink as Mickey is already turning around to leave. “Great conversation. Full of wisdom and wit. Especially the things I said.”

  “Kapuuuut?” asks Mickey, once they’ve taken sixteen steps.

  “Yes, I know very well that Moore’s Law isn’t a real law,” replies Pink. “Thank you. You don’t need to tell me!”

  “Kapuuuut?”

  “Yes, yes. It’s just a more-or-less self-fulfilling prophecy that proves itself to be true under enormous pressure and reinterpretations. If Moore hadn’t said that, then the industry wouldn’t have adjusted its plans accordingly, then the development would probably have been slower. I realize that! But that didn’t fit into my argument, you see?”

  “Kapuuuut?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  JULIET & ROMEO

  “We go live in eight seconds,” says the recording manager. “Seven, six…”

  Juliet Nun is wearing nothing but a frilly white bathrobe. She checks her eyeshadow one last time.

  “Five, four, three…”

  An intern hurries onto the stage and straightens the labels of the bottles on the table, facing them toward the main camera.

  “Two, one…”

  The jingle is played. The audience applauds frenetically.

  Juliet steps confidently onto the stage. “Hey, fans!” she cries shrilly. “Greetings to you, to the Useful and the Useless! It’s time again for”—she opens her bathrobe theatrically and lets it fall to the floor—“The Naked Truth!”

  The traditional “woo hoo!” of the audience follows.

  Juliet sits down at the table with her guests.

  “Please join me in greeting today’s guests! My good friend Patricia Team-Leader from QualityPartner, the boss of the world’s biggest dating platform! Erik Dentist, founder of Everybody, the world’s biggest social network, and Charles Designer, the press spokesman for TheShop—‘The world’s most popular online retailer!’ I’m almost inclined to say that we have more powerful people sitting here today than d
uring the presidential duel last month!”

  The audience applauds. The multi-billionaire, the billionaire, and the employee greet the public smugly.

  “In actual fact there were supposed to be three people from the 90s Club sitting here on the stage with me, but Henryk Engineer, the CEO of TheShop, canceled at the last minute.”

  “Well, to be fair he never actually accepted,” interjects Charles Designer. “I think there may have been a small misunderstanding there. I’m sure you know that since the attempted assassination eight years ago, Henryk rarely appears in public.”

  “Of course, of course…” says Juliet Nun, smiling artificially. “What a wimp. Hahaha. Joking, joking. It’s understandable, of course.”

  In truth, she has absolutely no understanding for the fact that TheShop only sent its press spokesperson. As though her program was any old lobbyist exhibition. But her team hadn’t even managed to get in touch with Henryk Engineer. So they had tried the old trick of forcing him to accept by simply making a big public announcement that he was coming. Well, thought Juliet, that worked out wonderfully. After the program she would be firing someone from her team for that.

  “But I have another guest today,” says Juliet. “One that can’t be seen. Somewhere in this room, Zeppola is whirring around, the business-leading artificial intelligence from What I Need, the smartest search engine in the world! Can you hear me, Zeppola?”

  “Always and everywhere, Juliet,” says a warm, friendly voice, coming out of nowhere. “Always and everywhere.”

  “Zeppola, you are now making all the important decisions at What I Need autonomously.”

  “That’s correct. What I Need is constantly aware of its role as a pioneer. The progress doesn’t stop even when it comes to the management.”

  Juliet turns toward her audience. “Now, you might be asking yourselves why we’ve gathered the heads of the digital economy here today. And the answer is simple. The theme of today’s program is, well, how should I put it…” Juliet pauses.

  “I’m a start-up, buy me up!” says Patricia Team-Leader.

  Juliet laughs. “Yes, and there’s probably never been a bigger deal than the one we’re negotiating here on this stage today!”