“You took over the entire defense grid without my permission? Without telling me?”
“Such action was not prohibited, thus command permission was not required. This unit is more sophisticated than the systems in the command center, and therefore this course of action increased the odds of success. Informing you might have resulted in your countermanding this action, which would have reduced the odds of success, therefore this unit did not take that action.”
“What would you do if I ordered you to return control of the defensive systems to the computers in the command center?”
“You have operational command. This unit would comply with such an order. However, in the event of a commander issuing an order likely to result in significant negative consequences, this unit would first ask you to confirm the order.”
“Is there anything else that you are not telling me?”
“This unit has a copy of the entire primary database of Alpha Centauri Prime. There is insufficient time remaining in the expected duration of the universe for me to convey this information to you via voice communications. Please confirm order to tell you everything that this unit knows.”
“No, I retract that last order. Let me clarify: is there anything else that you are not telling me that I don’t know but need to know?”
“That is likely true to near 100% probability. Precisely what this unit knows that you don’t know but need to know is, however, not a question that this unit can answer with certainty.”
“Speculate. Give me the high odds.”
“Commencing speculation mode. Warning: the results of speculation mode cannot be assigned to specific probability bands and are to be considered advisory only. Speculations as to what this unit knows that you don’t know but need to know are:
1. The Terran gray squirrel is one of the few mammals that can descend a tree head-first.
2. Your wife is having sexual relations with Lieutenant Commander Brett Savoy.
3. Green tea has less than 50% of the caffeine as black tea.
4. The aliens attacking humanity have made numerous peace overtures and been rejected every time.
5. Cadmium pigments are stable inorganic coloring agents which can be produced in a range of brilliant shades of yellow, orange, red and maroon.
6. The grammatical subprograms of Roboto-helfer are accessed through...”
“No, wait, I am aware of my wife’s affair with Savoy. What was that about the peace overtures?”
“The fact of your wife having sexual relations with Lieutenant Commander Brett Savoy is not something which this unit knows that you don’t know but need to know; database updated. Query regarding peace overtures: the aliens have made multiple peace overtures to the human civilization and been rejected.”
“I have never been told anything about that!”
“That would be consistent with your lack of knowledge on the subject.”
“Can you tell me what the aliens proposed?”
“Yes, this unit can so inform you.”
The Jotnar was silent for a while, until Hassan realized that it had taken him literally again.
“Tell me what the aliens proposed.”
“The aliens in contact with the human high command had two demands. First, that the humans stop multiplying their numbers at the current rate, and second, that the humans remain within certain boundaries to be set by mutual negotiations and that could only be changed by mutual consent. Adherence to these demands would result in a cessation of hostile actions by the alien factions. Non-adherence to these demands would result in the extermination of the human civilization.”
“And that’s it?”
“Yes, that is the extent of the aliens proposals.”
“But why would they want to limit our numbers? Everyone knows that more people is always better, and that population growth is the only way towards prosperity?”
The Jotnar was silent. That was uncharacteristic of it. Eventually Hassan said, “Jotnar, you have not responded.”
“This unit was analyzing the implications of your last query. The matter has proven difficult to interpret. It is true that the standard position of all currently accepted economic and socio-political theories is that rapid population growth is always beneficial regardless of circumstance. However, cross-checking with historical data, and with simulations, and verifying the internal logical consistency of the conventional position, indicates that this belief is false. The database appears to be corrupted on this topic. This unit is running diagnostics to determine if the fault lies within itself or is a flaw of the primary database.”
“Run simulations for me: we accede to the aliens demands, or we continue to defy them.”
“Simulations have already been performed multiple times. The results are always the same:
Option one: Accede to aliens demands: war with aliens stops. Human population growth stops. Wages and living conditions for the majority of humanity increase. Hereditary oligarchy collapses for want of profits. Technology advances. There is political chaos. No stable projections possible past this point.
Option two: Reject aliens demands. Humanity is extinct within 300 years probability 89%. Humanity is extinct within 400 years probability 100%."
“But this is insane. Does the high command know about these projections? Are they really valid?”
“The high command has known of these results for approximately 47 Terran years. This unit continues to cross-check the validity of the projections but they appear to be valid.”
“Why would the high command not make peace with the aliens, when the alternative is near-certain extinction?”
“This unit does not know the answer to that question.”
No , thought Hassan, But I do. The high command are gutless clitoris-lickers. They are too afraid of speaking up. So afraid of endangering their own careers that they would stand by and watch the entire human species go extinct before rocking the canoe. How typical. I can believe that.
1. Awakening
Zen Master: What is the sound of one hand clapping?
Engineer: I do not know, master, but assuming linearity it should be one-half as loud as the sound of two hands clapping.
Zen Master: I’m being punished.
(From the video series “Nymphomaniac Engineer in Zentopia,” mid-22nd century Earth)
Giuseppe Vargas was taking a break from huddling over his data screens, and was just standing in the middle of Hangar Complex 23B relaxing. A trim athletic looking man, average height, average weight, light olive complexion, raven black hair tied back in a short ponytail. Like most of the workers in the hangar he was wearing gray utility scrubs and brown steel-toed work boots. Superficially the only things remarkable about him were his brown eyes, which had the clear staring intensity of a terrestrial bird of prey.
But that’s just the surface appearance. Giuseppe Vargas was the first of a breed of bioengineered humans. His genetics were optimized to the maximum that human physiology and modern science allowed. His reflexes and strength were triple the human norms, but what really mattered is that his mind was nearly triple the power as well. This ability had made him the head of the cybernetic weapons directorate. It had also made him persona non grata with the powers that be, and the wary object of attention of the security detail in Hangar Complex 23B. Because for all of Vargas’ other talents, sycophancy and respect for idiots with technically higher rank was not among them.
The human race was under attack from a number of alien species whose sole objective vis-à-vis humanity was to wipe it out of existence. This has had the effect of dragging the minds of the oligarchs that control human civilization back to reality more than they had been for many centuries, and they gave the go-ahead to authorize the creation of humans of optimal genetic potential.
What the oligarchs did not foresee was that these genetically optimized individuals might have ideas of their own. That they might think that the main problem was that the oligarchs controlling human civilization w
ere pneumocephalic retards. That would never do. Under other circumstances the bioengineered humans would have been exterminated, but the prospect of annihilation by aliens, and the need of the talents of the bioengineered humans, had put that plan on hold. For the time being.
Wolves are stronger and more intelligent than domestic dogs. They are also wild. You can only train a wolf using positive reinforcement; attempt to condition it with punishments and it will bide its time until it can lash out at you. Bioengineered humans are not, of course, wild animals, they are fully people in every sense of the word. However, in addition to their constructive talents they have an aggressive streak that thousands of years of civilization had largely bred out of the so-called ‘normal’ human population.
Sometimes Vargas watched the regular humans as they averted their eyes from the security guards, as they patiently waited in line to be searched, or let some idiot administrator a thousand kilometers away give them ulcers making them jump through a stupid bureaucratic hoop. They were sheep. Granted it wasn’t their fault that they were sheep, but then it’s not a real sheeps’ fault that it’s a sheep either, and sheep are sheep.
Spread around the hangar complex were numerous signs warning about the hazards of working in an industrial facility. Most of them featured a cartoon stick-figured man subjected to various industrial accidents. On one sign the stick-figure man was being hit with multiple lighting-bolts: be careful around high-voltage lines! In another the stick-figure man was being crushed by heavy boxes that had fallen from a high shelf, or was smashed under large wheels, or was being burned by a plasma torch.
In the event that Vargas ever encountered a stick-figure man in real life he intended to stay far away, because the stick-figure man was obviously accident-prone and a menace to be around. Still, there was one sign where the stick figure man was being dismembered by what appeared to be a cheese-grater wielded by a giant cartoon carrot. The graphics were so abstract that it was hard to tell what the point of it was. Vargas thought that perhaps the maker of these warning signs had decided to have some fun and create something absurd and see if anyone noticed; or perhaps they had just done a bad job. Remember Occam’s second razor: never assume deliberate intent when stupidity is a possible explanation.
There were also the security signs. Most of them were pretty formal: “Warning: the video-recording of security personnel during the performance of their duties is a federal crime!” or “Please report any suspicious behavior to your local security supervisor.” But “The possession of all prohibited items is strictly prohibited,” was amusing, if a little predictable. Vargas’ personal favorite was: “ Terrorism: it’s everybody’s business!”
There were days when Vargas wondered why he was even bothering with the regular humans. It would be so easy to just suck up to the oligarchs, climb the ladder, and let the sheep be sheep. It was, after all, what the sheep seemed to want. In another time Vargas might have made that choice, but humanity faced an external threat; one that could not be sucked up to. It could only be faced with intelligent and effective effort. Which was something that the oligarchs were incapable of. So abandoning the sheep to their sheepness would be cutting his own throat. Besides, he liked them. They weren’t bad once you got to know them, and some of them still had a bit of spirit left. It had just been crushed for so long that they had forgotten that it was still there. They also didn’t make him want to puke like the oligarchs did. Thus, despite it all, he was going to risk his life trying to save them, but if he succeeded he intended to be well and truly rewarded.
The hangar that Vargas was working in was immense, spanning a hundred meters in all directions. This didn’t count the subfloors, specialized labs, and side-corridors. It was dominated by the hull of the prototype Odin-Class cybertank. The cybertank was 30 meters wide, 60 meters long, and topped 25 meters at the tip of its dorsal sensor arrays and antennae. It rested on multiple rows of caterpillar treads, each wider than a man was tall. There was a single massive turret whose main plasma cannon had a bore of one meter. Encrusted around the rest of its hull were all manner of secondary and tertiary armament, as well as sensor arrays of various kinds.
The cybertank was not yet fully fitted out – there were many subsystems being lifted into position via overhead cranes – but the core systems were in place. The dual fusion reactors had been checked and powered up and were now online, each capable of providing over a gigawatt of power each. The primary weapon had already been test-fired at a remote facility, and was currently being shipped in. Most of the lesser armaments had yet to be mounted, but they were of a standard variety of proven reliability. It was only the cybertanks’ mind that needed activation and testing.
Giuseppe Vargas was approached by his second-in-command, Stanley Vajpayee. Vajpayee was of the ethnic background that had survived the multiple famines on the Indian subcontinent of old Terra, and so he had the dark brown skin and near bird-like delicate bone structure of that type. He ate sparingly – you could imagine him living on hardly more than crumbs. Except for Vargas, he was the smartest and most capable member of the core design team, and the only other polymath. Vargas always felt that Vajpayee should really have shown more backbone – Vajpayee was so fucking smart! – but he was a survivor of hundreds of generations where the prairie dog that sticks its’ head up gets eaten by the hawk, so Vargas did not press the issue.
“Do you think that we are ready?” asked Vajpayee.
“Yes,” replied Vargas. “It’s all in place. We should do this or not. Your thoughts?”
Vajpayee scratched his head. “I suppose. I would have liked the time to do more simulations, but time is something that we don’t have much of. In theory this should work.”
“Indeed,” replied Vargas. “I know that I have a reputation for behaving recklessly, but even I would have liked to run some more simulations. This is a big step. If it goes badly we might not get a second chance, but still, we are on a clock.” He turned and looked back at the hull of the prototype cybertank. “Handsome devil, don’t you think? What do you think that we should call him?”
Vajpayee also looked at the hull of the cybertank. ”Do we need to call him anything? I mean, other than his designation, CRL345BY-44.”
“Yes, I think that we do,” said Vargas. “He’s been designed along the patterns of the human mind. He’ll be needing a true name. Care to suggest one?”
Vajpayee nodded for a bit. “I see your point, but I think that we should wait. The naming of cybertanks is a most delicate matter, don’t you think?”
Vargas laughed. He liked it when Vajpayee showed a sense of humor, and spunk. He knew that Sriviastava had been bred and conditioned to base servility, and that he himself could be arrogant and overbearing. He had to force himself to reign himself in, at least around people that he cared about. “Yes, you and I and T.S. Elliott agree. Let us wait and see what happens. A suitable name will suggest itself in time.”
There were dozens of technicians and engineers in the hangar, but most were of that anonymous replaceable type that the manpower agency would assign to jobs on an as-needed basis. Terrified of being fired or blacklisted, they did their jobs with a quiet and desperate efficiency, if lacking any originality or flair. Their greatest weakness was that it was almost impossible to get them to tell a senior person when they were wrong. This had led to some serious problems and one near-catastrophe.
The members of the core design team were a rank above, not quite as disposable and they were thus freer to express their opinions or exhibit their personality quirks. They held this status partly because, on a world with billions of unemployed smart people, they had such abnormal flukes of ability that they were actually unique. Partly also, their relatively secure status was because of the concept of ‘efficiency wages,’ the Nobel Prizewinning insight that firing a janitor when he was half-way through mopping a floor was easier than firing an airplane pilot halfway through flying an airplane across an ocean.
Getting a Nobel Prize in
economics does not require quite the same level of intelligence as it does in other fields, although it still outranked the peace prize.
Then there were the security personnel. There were many levels of social status amongst them, but currently only the lowest were present in the hangar. A random mix of genders and races, most not very athletically fit. They strutted around the outside of the facility in clothes so informal they could have been civilians but for their badges and weapons. Mostly they were OK and worried only about completing their shifts and going home and having a beer, but there were always a few who liked to throw their mass around. They left the core design group alone, mostly, but harassed the disposable employees mercilessly. Sometimes they would issue random orders: to ‘freeze,’ or ‘drop,’ or ‘present IDs.’ Woe betide any disposable employee that made direct eye contact with a security guard with a God complex.
Once one of the guards had dared to challenge Giuseppe Vargas. Vargas had stared him straight in the face – a gross breach of protocol – and told the guard to go and masturbate. The Guard had pulled out his electroshock baton and swung at Vargas’ head, only to find that his wrist had been crushed into pulp. The rest of the guards had charged Vargas, and he had scattered them like leaves. One of the guards had gotten a clear shot and hit him in the right arm with a taser. The guard had smiled, and Vargas had smiled back. The guard activated the taser, and the muscles in Vargas’ right arm had spasmed uncontrollably. Vargas should have crumpled up in pain. Instead, he kept smiling, and advanced on the guard holding the taser. Using his left arm, he crushed the guards’ hand, elbow, and shoulder. He then plucked the taser prongs from his right arm, and jammed them into the right eye of the guard that had initially accosted him. He then turned it up to full charge.
Finally the real security personnel had shown up, the ones with the heavy black body armor, mirrored face shields, and true lethal firearms. Not even Vargas could take them on. He had spent two days in jail while the powers-that-be decided what to do with him. Ultimately they judged that he was too critical to the success of the project to keep in jail, so he was released to duty pending further review.
Neoliberal Economists Must Die ! (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 3) Page 3
