The End Has Come

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.