The End Has Come (45 page)

• • • •

Maddie made dinner that night. Her mother texted her that she was going to be late, first thirty minutes, then an hour, and then “not sure.” Maddie ended up eating alone and then spent the rest of the evening watching the clock and worrying.

“Sorry,” Mom said as she came in, close to midnight. “They kept me late.”

Maddie had seen some of the reports on TV. “Protestors?”

Mom sighed. “Yes. Not as bad as in New York, but hundreds showed up. I had to talk to them.”

“What are they mad about? It’s not like —” Maddie caught herself just as she was about to raise her voice. She was feeling protective of her mother, but her mother had probably had enough shouting for one day.

“They’re good people,” Mom said vaguely. She headed for the stairs without even glancing at the kitchen. “I’m tired. I think I’ll just go to bed.”

But Maddie was unwilling to just let it go. “Are we having supply issues again?” The recovery was jittery, and goods were still being rationed. It was a constant struggle to get people to stop hoarding.

Mom stopped. “No. The supplies are flowing smoothly again, maybe too smoothly.”

“I don’t understand,” said Maddie.

Mom sat down on the bottom of the stairs, and patted the space next to her. Maddie went over and sat down.

“Remember how during the crisis, when we were coming to Boston, I told you about layers of technology?”

Maddie nodded. Her mother, a historian, had told her the story behind the networks that connected people: the footpaths that grew into caravan routes that developed into roads that turned into railroad tracks that provided the right-of-way for the optical cables that carried the bits that made up the Internet that routed the thoughts of the gods.

“The history of the world is a process of speeding up, of becoming more efficient as well as more fragile. If a footpath is blocked, you just have to walk around it. But if a highway is blocked, you have to wait until specialized machinery can be brought to clear it. Just about anyone can figure out how to patch a cobblestone road, but only highly trained technicians can fix a fiberoptic cable. There’s a lot more redundancy with the older, inefficient technologies.”

“Your point is that keeping it simple technologically is more resilient,” said Maddie.

“But our history is also a history of growing needs, of more mouths to feed and more hands that need to be kept from idleness,” said Mom.

Mom told Maddie that America had been lucky during the crisis: very few bombs had struck her shores and relatively few people had died during the riots. But with much of the infrastructure paralyzed across the country, refugees flooded into the big cities. Boston’s own population had doubled from what it was before the crisis. With so many people came spiking needs: food, clothing, shelter, sanitation . . .

“On my advice, the governor and the mayor tried to rely on distributed, self-organizing groups of citizens with low-tech delivery methods, but we couldn’t get it to work because it was just too inefficient. Congestion and breakdowns were happening too frequently. Centillion’s automation proposal had to be considered.”

Maddie thought of how impatient Mist had been with her “slow cycles,” and she imagined the roads packed with self-driving trucks streaming bumper-to-bumper at a hundred miles an hour, without drivers who had to rest, without the traffic jams caused by human unpredictability, without the accidents from drifting attentions and exhausted bodies. She thought of tireless robots loading and unloading the supplies necessary to keep millions of people fed and warm and clothed. She thought of the borders patrolled by machines with precise algorithms designed to preserve precious supplies for the use of people with the right accents, the right skin colors, the luck to be born in the right places at the right times.

“All the big cities are doing the same thing,” said Mom, a trace of defensiveness in her voice. “It’s impossible for us to hold out. It would be irresponsible, as Centillion put it.”

“And the drivers and workers would be replaced,” said Maddie, understanding finally dawning on her.

“They showed up on Beacon Hill to protest, hoping to save their jobs. But an even bigger crowd showed up to protest against
them.”
Mom rubbed her temples.

“If everything is handed over to Centillion’s robots, wouldn’t another god — I mean a rogue AI — put us at even more risk?”

“We have grown to the point where we must depend on machines to survive,” said Mom. “The world has become too fragile for us to count on people, and so our only choice is to make it even more fragile.”

• • • •

With Centillion’s robots taking over the crucial work of maintaining the flow of goods into the city, a superficial calmness returned to life. The workers who lost their jobs were given new jobs invented by the government: correcting typos in old databases, sweeping corners of streets that Centillion’s robots couldn’t get to, greeting concerned citizens in the lobby of the State House and giving them tours — some grumbled that this was just a dressed-up form of welfare and what was the government going to do when Centillion and PerfectLogic and ThoughtfulBits and their ilk automated more jobs away?

But at least everyone was getting a paycheck that they could use to buy the supplies brought into the city by the fleet of robots. And Centillion’s CEO swore up and down on TV that they weren’t developing anything that could be understood as “rogue AI,” like the old, dead gods.

That was good, wasn’t it?

Maddie and Mist continued to gather pieces of the old gods and studying them to see what Everlasting might want with them. Some of the fragments had belonged to her father, but there were too few of them to even dream of trying to resurrect him. Maddie wasn’t sure how she felt about it — in a way, her father had never fully reconciled to his existence as a disembodied consciousness, and she wasn’t sure he would want to “come back.”

Meanwhile, Maddie was working on a secret project. It would be her present to Mist.

She looked up everything she could online about robotics and electronics and sensor technology. She bought components online, which Centillion drones cheerfully and efficiently delivered to her house — straight to her room, even: she kept the window of her room open, and tiny drones with whirring rotors flitted in at all hours of the day and night, dropping off tiny packages.

<
> What are you doing?

Give me a minute. I’m almost done
.

<
> I’ll give you today’s headlines then.

• Hundreds Die in Attempt to Scale “Freedom Wall” near El Paso
  

• Think Tank Argues Coal Should be Reevaluated as Alternative Energy Fails to Meet Promise
  

• Deaths from Typhoons in Southeast Asia Exceed Historical Records
  

• Experts Warn of Further Regional Conflicts as Food Prices Soar and Drought Continues in Asia and Africa
  

• Unemployment Numbers Suggest Reconstruction Has Benefited Robots (and Their Owners) More Than People
  

• Rise of Religious Extremism Tied to Stagnating Developing Economies
  

• Is Your Job at Risk? Experts Explain How to Protect Yourself from Automation
  

Nothing from Everlasting?

<
> They’ve been quiet.

Maddie plugged her new creation into the computer.

The lights near the data port on the computer began to blink.

Maddie smiled to herself. For Mist, asking Maddie a question and waiting for her slow cycles to catch up and answer was probably like sending snail mail. It would be far faster for her to investigate the new contraption herself.

The motors in Maddie’s creation spun to life, and the three wheels in the base turned the four-foot-tall torso around. The wheels provided 360° of motion, much like those roving automatic vacuum cleaners.

At the top of the cylindrical torso was a spherical “head” to which were attached the best sensors that Maddie could scrounge up or buy: a pair of high-def cameras to give stereoscopic vision; a matched pair of microphones to act as ears, tuned for the range of human hearing; a sophisticated bundle of probes mounted at the ends of flexible antennae to act as noses and tongues that approximated the sensitivity of human counterparts; and numerous other tactile sensors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, and so on to give the robot the experience of touch, gravity, presence in space.

Away from the head, near the top of the cylindrical body, however, were the most expensive components of them all: a pair of multi-jointed arms with parallel-elastic actuators to recreate the freedom of motion of human arms that ended in a pair of the most advanced prosthetic hands covered in medical-grade plastiskin. The skin, embedded with sensors for temperature and force, were said to approach or even exceed the sensitivity of real skin, and the fingers modeled human hands so well that they could tighten a nut on a screw as well as pick up a strand of hair. Maddie watched as Mist tried them out, flexing and clenching the fingers, and without realizing it, she mirrored the movements with her own fingers.

“What do you think?” she said.

The screen mounted atop the head of the robot came to life, showing a cartoonish pair of eyes, a cute button nose, and a pair of abstract, wavy lines that mimicked the motion of lips. Maddie was proud of the design and programming of the face. She had modeled it on her own.

A voice came out of the speaker below the screen. “This is very well made.” It was a young girl’s voice, chirpy and mellifluous.

“Thank you,” said Maddie. She watched as Mist moved around the room, twisting her head this way and that, sweeping her camera-gaze over everything. “Do you like your new body?”

“It’s interesting,” said Mist. The tone was the same as before. Maddie couldn’t tell if that was because Mist was really pleased with the robotic body or that she hadn’t figured out how to modulate the voice to suit her emotional state.

“I can show you all the things you haven’t experienced before,” said Maddie hurriedly. “You’ll know what it’s like to move in the real world, not just as a ghost in a machine. You’ll be able to understand my stories, and I can take you on trips with me, introduce you to Mom and other people.”