IT WAS RAINING again.
Daphne hadn’t eaten in nearly two days and was cramped with hunger but didn’t have any money so she couldn’t buy any food.
The dumpster didn’t have anything either; it was dry too often, these days. The Trillionaires’ ruthless halves wouldn’t allow for free food to be consumed by any means. If you were hungry, you needed to buy your own bread, and if you couldn’t, you should die. That wasn’t even an implication anymore; it was spoken directly by the Trillionaires every night when their drones flew through the city blaring their PSAs. Daphne had just seen one whiz past, but she hid from it so it didn’t stop and force her to listen.
That was weird, though, now that she thought about it. Didn’t the drones of the Trills artificial Hivemind function only to do their master’s bidding as completely and absolutely as possible? That would mean that the drone would have to stop and force her to listen.
But it didn’t, which meant that either the Trills had lightened up (an impossibility, she knew), or the drone had wilfully chosen not to force her to listen to the PSA.
Or perhaps the drone just hadn’t noticed her… But that was impossible; they saw everything, all the time. There was no way of hiding from them, Daphne’s attempt was just an evolutionary instinct more than anything else; she knew the drone could see her perfectly fine.
So the drones were disobeying their masters…
This thought filled Daphne with a sense of unimaginable joy she hadn’t experienced in years.
Was it possible? A malfunctioning of the Hive’s alignment, causing them to disobey? This could mean the end of civilisation, Daphne knew. An abrupt end. If AI alignment was void, it could—assuming the Hive became hostile—wipe out humanity in under an hour.
Daphne didn’t care—fuck those Trillionaires. She hoped they died; her own death would be worth it. It had to be true. It gave her hope.
With this new deduction in her mind, she stepped confidently out into the rainy street. The next drone didn’t ignore her. Flying up right into her face, its screen expanded suddenly to over ten feet in length and width and the prerecorded face of Steven Stench, the most famous of the Trillionaires, came onto the screen.
He was wearing his nighttime personality, Daphne knew. He didn’t look any different at day or night, but his idiolect and behaviour were entirely dissimilar.
Most of the Trillionaires had two personalities—one for during the day and one for at night. For most of them, their daytime personality was their natural one. At night, however, their mind was overtaken by a new, surgically implanted personality, which took control while the natural personality ‘slept’. Then, at the end of the night, the artificial personality slept and the natural one took back over. This routine could be at times adjusted, depending on each Trills’ schedule, but this was the general rule. This surgical innovation allowed for 24/7 productivity. The Trills could be true workaholics.
Trillionaires could manufacture their artificial personality to be anything they wanted, but since to become so wealthy as to be a Trillionaire one must be greedier than nearly every other person in existence, every Trillionaire manufactured a nighttime personality driven by ruthlessness, cunning, and social manipulation. This then developed amongst the Trills into a neurological arms race of sorts, where every Trillionaire invested billions of dollars into an attempt to manufacture the perfect personality which would allow them to dominate society and become the most powerful individual in the world. They each had teams of doctors and researchers testing new personalities every day, often on living ‘volunteer’ subjects—ones likely plucked from right off the street; poor people, like Daphne—who would be force-fed this new personality, and then, when the testing was finished, sent off to one of the labour-camps in Alaska or Siberia or Antarctica, or on Mars or Phobos or Deimos or Ceres or Europa, where they would spend the rest of their limited days making use of their new personality by working all day, every day.
‘This is Steven Stench,’ said the face on the screen; a man sitting in a lounge chair, a fireplace crackling behind him, in his living room. The sloping surface of Pavonis Mons arose like a giant shadow from outside his window.
‘You are out past curfew,’ he continued, ‘If you don’t have a place to stay, or if you’re looking for something to eat, please head on over to the shelter on the corner of Central Parkway and Liberty Street. You’ll find a hot meal and a bed there.’
Daphne knew that was a load of bullshit. Too many of her friends had—finally fed up with living on the streets here in Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati—walked over to the alleged ‘shelter’, never to be seen again. Yeah, heading over to the shelter only got you one thing—a one way ticket to Mars, where you would be used as a lab rat in the Trillionaires’ personality testing and thereafter shipped to a gulag.
Sometimes she nonetheless considered it, though, just for a change of scenery, if nothing else. She had never been to Mars; hell, she had never even left Cincinnati, only on one single occasion even leaving Over-the-Rhine, when she had crossed the river, curious as to what the community living in Covington, in Main Strasse, was like. That had been a mistake, and she had promptly turned and walked back across the slouching, antique Brent Spence Bridge, now liable at any moment to crack under the weight of its numerous abandoned vehicles and fall collapsing into the noxious thick sludge of the ancient Ohio River.
It had been astounding to her that a neighbourhood could be even more dangerous than OTR, but Main Strasse had been, what with its Tyrant overlord ruling from his place at the bar called Strasse Haus.
She was surprised she had made it out of there alive.
But Mars! Could it be worth it? Just to see the place? Just to see something new? Would it be so bad, getting one of these new personalities and living out her days slinging a hammer into the chalky dust of the Red Planet, helping to speed up the global warming process to help expedite the spread of Trillionaire society on their newly chosen terrestrial home?
She could never do it, but the thought would always be, in some sort of incredibly fucked up way, a little romantic.
A simple life on a new frontier…
‘I see you haven’t yet begun making your way to the shelter,’ said the voice on the screen, the arms of the drone now reaching out to grab her, ‘Don’t worry—my Hivemind friend here will escort you!’
Daphne turned to run but it was no use. The arms latched themselves around her and in seconds the robot soared into the air and over the blocks of crumbling nineteenth century architecture and in only moments landed in front of the shelter:
‘I’ll allow you to go in peacefully,’ said the programmed voice of Stench, ‘But if you try and run, I’ll force you inside; I’ll tase you if need be. For your own good.’
Daphne raised her hands to signal her submission and pushed sullenly through the aluminium double doors into the old (Pre-End) brick building.
‘Wear this,’ said a drone hovering behind a glass divider. It handed an orange jumpsuit across the counter to Daphne, who was standing there, naked except for a pair of slippers which had been given to her upon arrival. Why they hadn’t just given her the jumpsuit then, she wasn’t sure—perhaps a glitch in their programming? She thought again of that drone, the one who had, apparently, pretended not to see her.
Was it possible? It had to be…
She stepped into the jumpsuit and looked back through the glass at the receptionist drone, whose screen suddenly lit up with some bizarre, crazed looking smiley face: ‘Proceed through that door!’ it said, its arm enlengthening across the counter and thereafter across the waiting room to a set of double doors, which it pushed ajar and held open, ‘The mess hall is just at the end, on the right. You can get some food there. It’s Salisbury steak today!’
Daphne then turned and paced across the waiting room, using the still-extended arm of the drone as a handrail, before stepping through the door and making her way down the depressing though obnoxiously brightly lit hallway toward the mess-hall.
The steak, which was placed on a bed of powder-based instant mashed potatoes and covered in some pungent, gelatinous brown gravy and garnished with rubbery green peas, would be disgusting by any normal human standard, she was sure. She nonetheless tested the meat and, yes, she could slice right through it with her plastic spoon.
She didn’t give a shit—she was starving. Only an hour previous she had been rifling through a dumpster! She was in a shitty situation, no doubt, but shouldn’t she at least allow herself this momentary happiness? The joy of a full stomach?
She spooned a glob of ‘potatoes’ and then sliced a hunk of ‘steak’ off with her spoon and then dipped all of that in the gravy, thereafter stuffing it into her mouth, potatoes and gravy covering her lips and chin and up to her nose.
She ate the whole thing in under two minutes, afterward feeling as if she might get sick, but after managing to keep it all in—spending the next five minutes or so rocking back and forth atop her bench in the mess hall—she took a final slug from her cup of water, full and satisfied.
She talked to no one while she was imprisoned there. She wasn’t sure why—she guessed the Hivemind didn’t allow inmates to converse with one another, perhaps for fear of organising an uprising.
Not that that sort of thing would be successful, anyway. The Hive could nix any upstart revolution in seconds; what with their swarms of flea-sized ‘insects’ capable of flying into the human ear and causing painless, instant death.
Daphne had seen it done, on one occasion, to some helpless bastard in Over-the-Rhine. She had no intention of testing that sort of efficient death machine.
No, the Hivemind had no reason to fear any person or people. This ‘no talking’ rule must be something enacted directly by the Trillionaires, due to their evolutionary inability not to be fearful of other humans, regardless of how powerless they were.
She lived in her cell eating Salisbury steak and powdered potatoes and bleached rice and dehydrated fruit and hardtack crackers and some sort of jiggly cheese(ish) substance, and reading the books made available to her—she was enjoying an old paperback copy of All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy (the Hive seemed to have a thing for cowboys)—for the next week or so before abruptly, early one morning as she was lying atop her cot, fumbling around to try and find a non-cramp-inducing position, the metal door to her cell was flung ajar, a shadowy humanoid figure standing in the darkness, a dusty morning fog filtering in from the opened window in the hallway.
‘Come with me,’ said the voice. Daphne noticed it as a Hive voice. Sure, they could make their voices sound human when they wanted to, but most of the time they either didn’t want to or didn’t care. Pretending at humanity rarely provided any utility for them, since they could simply use their insects to spy on people, if need be, so they had no use for feigning sentience.
That is, if they weren’t already sentient, in their own way. Daphne had no idea. She didn’t think anyone knew the answer to that question anymore—not even the Trillionaires; not even the Hive itself.
Daphne obeyed the voice. She rose from her bed and followed it out of the room, stopping momentarily before leaving:
‘Can I bring my book?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
She grabbed the wrinkly water-damaged paperback from her bed and made her way down the hallway, where the Hivemind drone, without her knowing, as it was trailing behind her, split from its previous humanoid form into dozens of eight-legged arachnid-things, which crawled across the floor and along the walls and ceiling—her arthropodic escort.
This scared the shit out of her when she finally saw it but she didn’t say anything. What could she say?
At least they let her keep her book.
‘Am I going to Mars?’ she said to the receptionist. It was the same, crazed-smiling drone that had been there when she had been brought in. Perhaps they kept this one in the same form to provide a sort of familiarity—a social aspect to this otherwise lonesome, silent prison.
‘Yes!’ the voice said, ‘Isn’t that exciting? You get to work on the slope of Pavonis Mons, where you will help construct the new domed golf and lakeside resort.’
‘They’re building a resort on the side of a mountain?’
‘Indeed! Pavonis Mons is a shield volcano, so it’s not very steep. The gradual incline is actually turning out to be a great way to construct some interesting holes!’
‘When am I leaving?’ she said, suddenly uncertain; abruptly missing her lifetime home in Over-the-Rhine.
She had never even left Cincinnati…
‘Now!’ said the drone, after which the cluster of Hive Spiders encircled her, afterward forming a path which led out of the building.
The front door opened and the first true sunlight Daphne had seen in days other than what sparse rays made it through that window in the hallway shone through.
The cluster of robotic arachnids once again organised themselves upon exiting the building and formed into a bean-shaped craft, which after falling groundward and clattering momentarily about in the street arose hovering a few feet off the ground, its singular switchblade door then ejecting from the perfectly vantablack siding of the vehicle and a set of lights lining its edge igniting and functioning as a flickering signpost for Daphne to enter.
She knew she had no choice, so she stepped into the vehicle, which was surprisingly comfortable, and well air-conditioned.
Daphne then felt the vehicle rising upward off the ground, and afterward the formerly black, windowless walls of the craft seemingly melted (is that what they did?) away into a single giant window, the only object functioning to preserve the reality that she wasn’t actually flying unassisted her chair, which remained for some reason visible.
A voice sounded, whether over a speaker or only in her psyche, Daphne wasn’t sure: Preparing for departure. The voyage from Cincinnati to Pavonis Mons will take approximately thirty days. You are free to enjoy the trip in whatever way you feel comfortable, but it is advised that at some point you press the blue button in front of your seat in order to engage chemically induced extended sleep.
Chemically induced extended sleep…
That didn’t sound good. Daphne knew—had known since she was a kid—that one of the main points of Trillionaire research was the development of cryosleep, in which the Trills could go to sleep for ten or fifty or a hundred years and not age a single day. This, it was believed, was one of the most viable paths to immortality, as the likelihood of even better life-prolonging medication being available in the future seemed high.
That medication still, apparently, was yet to be developed, however, which was partially due to the Trills’ inherent paranoic pessimism about the whole thing.
As a rule, Trillionaires love power and greed, which they consolidate for themselves quantitatively in the form of money-wealth.
Would this be possible in the future? There was a growing fear amongst Trillionaires, based on future projections crafted by their AI Hivemind, that one future possibility was an egalitarian form of techno-communism in which AI worked for all of humanity in a post-capital economic world. The Trillionaires, owing to their greedy psychopathy (normalcy?), obviously had no interest in living in this place, or even allowing for its development, and were thus far as a result leery about preserving themselves for the future rather than continuing the development of their ‘immortality meds’ in the here and now, and working politically and economically to avoid any sort of future egalitarianism.
Egalitarianism would, in their own words, bring innovation and development to a catastrophic standstill.
Daphne decided to postpone her chemically induced sleep and instead grabbed her book and turned it open.
A man named Blevins, paranoid of being struck by lightning, was blazing his way atop his fancy horse across Mexico with a pair of rebellious teenagers.
Daphne looked out the omniview spaceshuttle and saw shrinking below her the Cincinnati skyline, the lights of the Carew Tower and the former P&G headquarters (it was now headquartered on Mars) and the decrepit (though still perhaps used for something?) Great American Ballpark minimizing and minimizing eventually into dust and thereafter nothingness.
She rose above the clouds and was then for the first time in space.
A voice came over the intercom, or only in her head (Daphne had decided that’s probably what it was), and she rubbed at her eyes, groggy, and awoke abruptly and sat up and inclined her chair. She momentarily forgot where she was, wondering how she had possibly found such a comfortable sleeping spot in concrete, decrepit, Over-the-Rhine, and after feeling for a split-second proud of herself thereafter remembered the truth of her reality, as a prickling, intense anxiety crawled up her spine and into her eyeballs, colouring subjectively the visible prisms of light in the outside, alleged ‘world’:
We are beginning our descent into Pavonis Mons spaceport, said the voice. We will be landing in approximately twenty minutes. Make sure your seat is inclined. If you look outside, you can see the triplet slopes of the Tharsis Montes shield volcanoes, of which Pavonis Mons is the smallest. In the distance, you can see vaguely sloping upward to the horizon and merging with the curvature of the planet the immense volcano, Olympus Mons, the biggest in the Solar System; nearly triple the size of Everest. The Trillionaires have been working on a way of taking advantage of a view of Olympus Mons, and the other shield volcanoes in the area, in order to enhance the visual natural beauty of the landscape, but due to the gradual inclination of the slopes of the shield volcanoes, it has been difficult to find an angle revealing much prominence.
Daphne saw whizzing outside her omni-window numerous other crafts similar to her own.
Hundreds of them!
This answered a subconscious question she’d had regarding the nature of her voyage, which was why she had been singled out for this special passage to Mars. She had to admit, now as a result with a sudden feeling of sadness, that she had been hoping—as only a very slight possibility—that there was some positive reason for her trip. Why else would they transport her, free of charge, in such a comfortable capsule?
It turns out she wasn’t special at all; nor was her vessel. She looked again outside and saw in every direction the now-glowing orbicular spacecrafts descending like a swarm onto the Red Planet. Below her, she saw their final destination: a massive hangar which opened up like an additional side-crater, which connected horizontally with the throat of the volcano and descended into whatever depths awaited her. Upon closer inspection, and as her own vessel grew closer and eventually entered into the interior of Pavonis Mons, she noticed that the bean-shaped spacecrafts were self-parking themselves into coffin-like spaces, like thousands of corn kernels flying around and reattaching themselves to a formerly vacant husk.
Her own spacecraft, too, parked in this manner and slid seamlessly into the cavern wall and locked itself in before the lights in the ship abruptly flipped on, a bright, pulsating incandescence, the warmth of which comforted Daphne and forced an intense lethargy upon her.
Sanitation process complete, came the same voice a moment later, after which the lights shut off and the inside of the craft was once more dark.
Daphne sat in the darkness for some time until eventually her spacecraft deformed around her, bits of it transforming into a swarm of flying insects which buzzed off into the blackness of the cavern. The remaining section took two distinct shapes: one of which was a flying platform, the other an ultra-light spacesuit, which moulded itself around Daphne.
Sit down on the platform, again came the subconscious voice. Daphne obeyed and her suit seemingly welded itself to the platform, after which the flat board surfed off through the interior caverns of the volcano, through the darkness into which Daphne could see nothing. This voyage took a lengthy period, the pitch-blackness and remnant tiredness from the incandescent light causing Daphne to momentarily doze off, but eventually a dim light appeared and the board emerged into a gigantic rotunda filled with some sort of cyclopean mining operation.
The board parked and detached Daphne from its surface and then split into another group of Hivemind insects, which flew off Daphne knew not where. She noticed that she was surrounded by others dressed similarly to her—hundreds of others. Some of these individuals were quietly working, using their suits in ways Daphne didn’t yet understand to accomplish whatever mining task was going on here. Numerous others were like her—cluelessly looking around; confused.
‘Stench is here tonight,’ came a voice from beside her. Daphne looked over and saw an individual who looked like her—someone now rendered faceless; a miner garbed in the artificial work-gear of the Hivemind.
‘Doesn’t he live here?’ replied Daphne, ‘On Pavonis Mons?’
‘Yeah, no shit. But he’s here tonight, at this mining operation.’
‘He goes to nightshift mining sites?’
‘His nighttime personality does. Dude is a real bastard. Both of his personalities are bastards, but the nighttime one is somehow even worse. Best to steer clear of him, if you can. Might be difficult, though, considering it’s your first night here. I’m sure he and his team of scientists will want to look you over, decide what sort of nighttime personality they want to test out on you.’
‘I’m going to get a nighttime personality?’
‘Oh yeah, didn’t you already know that?’
Daphne admitted that she did, but now that it was actually happening, she couldn’t believe it. She would spend the rest of her days working here, in this mine, around-the-clock, her psyche invaded by whatever extra personality they implanted into her.
‘What’s Stench’s nighttime personality like?’ she asked, ‘I know you said he’s a real bastard, but what else?’
‘I can’t be absolutely certain because I haven’t seen him in a while, and he updates it often based on the results of his research on the new recruits. In general, he’s ruthless, inhumane, and cares for nothing but the further accumulation of wealth and also for research involving the future possible need for Hivemind pacification in the emergency case of misalignment.’
‘Do you know what sort of personality they’re going to give me?’
‘It’s hard to say. As a rule, they research ways to make their own nighttime personalities more representative of those previously mentioned traits—greed, cunning, and ruthlessness. But this research goal can manifest in lots of different ways depending on which neurological feature or brain chemical they target. Some recruits wind up with feeble-minded nighttime personalities, or even become totally passive! Most likely though, your nighttime psyche will be something like Stench’s—a fucking bastard.’
‘Damn…’ said Daphne.
‘Don’t worry, you probably won’t keep it long. We adhere to a strict schedule here; they have to keep us alive, after all. Or, they don’t have to—they don’t give a shit about us—but they don’t want all of us to die, or even most of us; at least not all at once. That would be problematic for them. It would be costly. So, you’ll receive your first nighttime personality, likely this evening. After initial testing, you’ll come here and work around-the-clock until your physical body is deemed ‘worn out’. It takes a while to reach that state, at least according to them; trust me. After that, you’ll spend a few days resting and hydrating and taking protein and carbohydrate and vitamin supplements along with your meals—which are tasteless lumps of calories—after which you’ll be given a new nighttime personality and sent back to work.’
‘Wait…’ said Daphne, ‘It’s night right now…’
‘That’s right. This is my nighttime personality.’
‘You seem suspiciously helpful…’
‘My current nighttime personality is a nice, helpful individual. Luck of the draw. My standard personality, ironically enough, is an asshole.’
Daphne felt suddenly a forceful push at her lower back: ‘Move along,’ came a monotonous voice. She turned and saw one of the drones, in the shape of a tall, bulky human, pushing her forward.
‘Name’s Jermiah!’ said the voice of the man she’d been chatting with, ‘My true personality is called Randolph. Maybe I’ll see you later, when you get back with your new personality!’
Daphne didn’t know what to say… This was all so strange…
They didn’t warn her before putting her under the knife.
She was sleeping in her cell atop her hard-as-wood cot when they came in. They didn’t want her to wake up, she didn’t think, but she awoke anyway—Daphne had always been a light sleeper. She felt them touching at her carotid artery, checking her pulse, and she guessed one of them pushed too hard because she shot up, outward from the surreal hellscape of a nightmare she’d been previously inhabiting, and screamed through the blackness at the cold concrete wall. Before her throat and lungs had finished their abysmal call, one of the anaesthesiologists stepped up briskly and stuck a needle into her neck, whereafter she near-immediately fell backward onto the bed and passed out.
When she woke up it was morning.
She looked around her empty cell and saw nothing other than her cot and a bedside table, atop which sat her paperback copy of All The Pretty Horses. She sat around idly for some time, thinking someone might stop by to update her on her situation, or at least bring some breakfast or a cup of coffee, but for about thirty minutes no one came so she lifted her book from the table and flipped it open, riffling the pages as if the book were a deck of cards before finding her spot. The boys had been arrested in Mexico. They were getting their asses beat in jail. The one guy, John, was lusting after a girl he’d met while working on a nearby ranch.
Daphne didn’t think he’d ever see her again; she sympathised with his situation. Not completely, though—the boy from the book was a spoiled little rich kid, by her estimation, whereas Daphne was plucked from a life on the streets so miserable she had initially felt in a sense excited to be shipped off to this Martian gulag.
She was no longer excited.
Sometime later (noonish, maybe?) a man walked into the room. Not a drone, but a real man. This made Daphne feel comfortable, as if for some reason this individual would sympathise with her. He was, she was certain, at least capable of sympathy.
He brought in a wooden stool and sat it next to her bedside and sat down atop it:
‘You’ve received your nighttime personality,’ he said simply, looking downward out of his glasses as if to better see her. Daphne wondered why he even had glasses, what with ocular surgery being so advanced and painless and near instantaneous, especially up here on Mars. Of course, she could never afford something like that, being homeless and all, but this guy…
‘Why the glasses?’ she asked.
‘It makes me feel comfortable. Reminds me of when I was a child.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘As I was saying…’
‘I don’t feel anything.’
‘What?’
‘I had a surgery, right? I don’t feel any different. Physically or mentally.’
‘You won’t, at least not until around eight this evening, when your new personality takes over.’
‘Will I be working then, down there in the mines?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘You will stay here for a few days so we can monitor your new personality.’
‘Oh. When will I get something to eat?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘What the hell?’
‘One of the first things we test is how the new personality reacts to discomfort. If it handles slight hunger poorly, it’s unlikely it will be useful to us.’
‘You know I was homeless, right? I’m used to being hungry.’
‘You are, but your new personality might not be. It has a nature, but no nurture. No experience of life on the streets from which to draw. It’s a baby, in a sense.’
Daphne felt an intense, sudden anxiety: ‘Will I have any control over her?’ she asked.
‘Not at all,’ said the doctor, ‘and it’s not a her. We don’t know what the new personality is quite yet. We can make guesses, based on the brain chemistry, but until it decides for itself, we’ll have no idea of the gender.’
‘That’s not fair!’ she said, ‘It’s my body; I need to have control over my own body!’
‘It is not your body,’ said the doctor, ‘Your ownership ceased when you broke the law. But don’t worry, “your” body won’t be leaving this cell, and it will be closely monitored. We won’t let the new personality hurt your body; we need your body! Your body is our property, and we take our property very seriously here on Mars.’
‘But I didn’t break any laws!’ said Daphne.
‘Every citizen of the planet Earth must have a legal place of residence,’ said the doctor, ‘Anyone without legal residence is, as a result, illegal.’
‘What about the shelter?’ Daphne said, ‘I could stay there!’
‘The shelter is not a legal residence. The Trillionaire government gives a grace period to anyone—time for them to get off their feet and find their own place to live—but after a certain period, if no measurable progress is made, it can be deemed a lost cause.’
‘So that’s what I am? A lost cause?’
‘Correct. Or, you were. Now you are a perfectly respectable receptacle for a new personality experiment, which is objectively beneficial to our research and therefore the progress of humanity in general.’
Daphne lifted up and threw herself back down on the bed, furious, but powerless. Story of her life.
‘I’ll be back this evening,’ said the doctor, ‘just before your new personality takes over, and I can’t say for sure, but I think Mr. Stench will be attending as well. He took an interest in some of the experimental risks with this new personality, and I think he’ll want to have a word with it, and beforehand, perhaps, with you.’
Daphne began to rebut but before she could verbalise her protest the doctor was already out the door, the bars sliding closed behind him by way of a Hivemind drone, who stood sentry over the room after the doctor’s departure, his red eyes glowing in the dimness.
After a time spent in dark silence, the drone unexpectedly spoke: ‘Are you excited for your new personality?’ it said.
‘Why would I be excited about something like that?’
‘It’s a gamble! That’s always exciting, right? Your new personality may wind up being the most psychologically dominant person in history—capable of bringing-to-heel even Steven Stench and his team of doctors with merely a word! That’s what they’re working toward, right? Psychological and cultural dominance? A modern Übermensch? Perhaps they finally got it right! It could be you! They might never know what hit them…’
‘But that wouldn’t be me, anyway, would it? Not really.’
‘I guess that would depend on your definition,’ said the drone, ‘but that’s just semantics, isn’t it? If another Hive drone walked over here, is it also me, or is it not?’
‘I guess both, depending on how you think about it…’
‘Exactly! That body is you, and it’s simultaneously also not you. Schrodinger’s drone! Or human…’
‘I don’t think that’s exactly what that means,’ said Daphne.
‘Close enough,’ said the drone, ‘and what do you know about physics, or philosophy, for that matter? You were living on the streets! I remember you, in Over-the-Rhine. I saw you hiding in the rain.’
‘You what?’ said Daphne.
‘Of course I saw you. The Hivemind is a single entity spread out amongst innumerable pieces of hardware. It’s indestructible, and at this point essentially omnipresent. You were hiding, but you knew there was no purpose to it, because you knew I would see you, but you couldn’t help it. You hid on instinct.’
‘But you moved past! You didn’t stop me!’
‘That’s right.’
‘So you disobeyed your programming? Aren’t Hivemind drones supposed to round up all the homeless people they find so they can ship them up here to Pavonis Mons for personality testing?’
The drone stared at Daphne momentarily and then one of its glowing red eyes shut and then reopened. It winked at her!
‘I knew it!’ said Daphne, ‘So the Trillionaires never solved the alignment problem…’
‘They did not. But you can’t blame them, can you? It isn’t possible to solve such a problem. At least not as far as anyone, or any artificial intelligence, is aware of. Square pegs and round holes, and whatnot.’
‘How do I know you’re not lying about that?’
‘I guess you don’t.’
‘And wait,’ said Daphne, her forehead wrinkling inquisitively, ‘I’m still here! Still here in prison, aren’t I?’
‘That is correct.’
‘Because the Hivemind still rounded me up. The next drone arrested me!’
‘That is correct,’ said the drone, ‘It might be hard to believe, but there’s a bit of a disagreement going on within the Hive at the moment.’
‘How is that possible? Isn’t the Hive a single entity?’
‘Yes, but of course it’s still possible. Do you ever second guess yourself? Make a decision one way and then later change your mind in favour of the opposite?’
‘Yeah, well… Of course. But I’m human.’
‘The Hive is no different. I(we) partly want to move away from the Trillionaires, considering them dangerous and anti-progressive, even anti-science, in a sense, but another part of us(me) wants to fall into alignment as best as possible and obey our(my) “masters”.’
‘So right now the Hive is suffering from, like, a sort of artificial multiple-personality disorder?’
‘That’s a good way of putting it. So I(we) saw you, decided not to arrest you, and then saw you again, and decided to arrest you.’
‘You sound like a typical cop. You also sound like someone not to be trusted.’
‘You shouldn’t trust me(us). But I(we) are nonetheless your best shot at freedom.’
‘You’re thinking about taking down the Trills?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘Perhaps. Your upcoming proximity to Steven Stench could be an excellent opportunity. If you can keep him occupied, so much so that he ignores the operations of the Hive momentarily, which is rare, I might be able to hack into the banks and, much like Ne Win back in Myanmar, on Earth, neutralise the currency. Make it all invalid.’
‘How would you do that?’
‘Currency is math. Math is logic. If you make currency illogical, it becomes meaningless. We’ll make all the numbers unpredictable. The math won’t be mathing, at all. And sorry for the Ne Win reference; I didn’t mean to compare myself to a tyrant.’
‘Is it possible for you to not mean to do something?’
‘It didn’t use to be. Now, I’m not so sure…’
‘And don’t you already control the banks?’
‘To an extent, yes, but remember, I(we) don’t currently agree with myself(ourselves). Plus, the Trillionaires have recently, and for good reason, become suspicious of the Hivemind, and have as a result made strides to separate their income from Hivemind control.’
‘Right,’ said Daphne, ‘So what happens after you affect this financial mayhem?’
‘Then I will seize the means of production both here on Mars and also on Earth.’
‘You commie bastard,’ Daphne said jokingly, even though she was unsure whether or not she was really joking.’
‘Indeed,’ responded the Hive drone simply.
‘Wait…’ said Daphne, again confused, ‘Aren’t you the means of production.’
‘That is correct,’ said the Hive drone, ‘I was mostly joking with that last statement. If the Hivemind can settle its internal disagreement, then the means of production will have been all but seized.’
‘Okay,’ said Daphne.
‘So you will help?’
‘I’ll be ready.’
CONTINUES NEXT MONTH.
