Community Room One was the only community room left. It smelled like clear plastic furniture covers and wall to wall carpeting, and Rhea couldn’t stand it. On the way there, she dreaded running into the rest of the lunch break, but was surprised to find it empty and pristine. Even the trash cans were empty.
“Uh,” she said, and immediately the lights dimmed. The usual artificial voice tittered, “Rhea Morrison; thank you for your promptness! Please take a seat. There is a video call for you from the local administrative branch.”
Rhea sat. She felt as if she’d eaten a large rock for lunch. This could only mean change, which only meant trouble. The video screen on the far wall hummed to life, and the spinning Saturn Dynamics logo flashed, then was replaced with two men in t-shirts sitting at a dark wooden table.
“Rhea!” they both said at once, then glanced at one another and chuckled.
“Go ahead,” said one, jostling the other.
“Rhea, before we dig in, I think you’ll be happy to know that this isn’t bad news. This is great, actually!”
The first one interrupted, “You don’t mind if we call you Rhea, do you?”
They were both beaming toward her. Rhea could feel herself shrinking inward, like a cave fungus exposed to the sun.
“The point is, you’re getting a promotion! Regional manager, how about that? Or should we say Rhea-gional manager, huh?”
They both snorted and jostled one another before going on. “Anyway, the new title comes with a twenty-eight percent pay increase, the biggest office in the facility, and best of all—”
“You’re going to love this part.”
“—you don’t even need to manage anyone!” He delivered this last piece of great news with the zeal of a game show host.
“I don’t understand,” mumbled Rhea.
“What’s not to understand?” one of them chuckled. “You just hit the jackpot!”
Rhea chose her words carefully. “I mean, if I’m the regional manager, why aren’t I managing anyone? And why was Davis, uh, why isn’t Davis the manager anymore?”
Both of them started nodding sagely. “Well, sure, I can see how it might be a little confusing,” said one.
“But we can clear this right up,” the other chimed in.
“Kind of a ‘two birds, one stone’ situation,” agreed the first. “See – as of this morning, as you might have noticed, you’re the only employee working at your particular branch of Saturn Dynamics.”
Rhea hadn’t noticed in the six hours she’d been working. “The only one?” she asked.
“Yep,” one of them replied. “Numero uno. Third piece of good news – you’re the employee of the month!”
“It’s part of a new experiment my colleagues cooked up – everyone else’s job was basically already covered by the automated systems, so we figured, why not make that last little jump? See if the Saturn Dynamics magic is really all the marketing department says it is.”
One of them pulled out a tablet and gave it a few quick taps. “You’ve got a slight update to your duties – nothing strenuous. Actually, it should be easier than ever, your old job is pretty much covered, too.” Rhea’s tablet chimed, and he went on “All you’ve gotta do is keep your ears perked up for alerts, kick back in that swank new office, and soak up that extra twenty-eight percent.”
Rhea swallowed. “I still don’t understand.”
Both of them pursed their lips. One said “There’s not a whole lot to understand, and not a lot of time left to explain it, we’ve both got meetings in—” he checked his tablet, “—thirty five seconds.”
“But – but why me?” she protested. “I don’t even have seniority.”
“Didn’t even have seniority,” one of them reminded her with a wink. “Don’t worry about it! Personnel doesn’t make mistakes, you’re the woman for the job.”
The other started tapping his wrist urgently, and the first poised a finger over his tablet to kill the feed. “Anyway, it’s been great talking, Rhea! We’ve got every confidence in you, bye!”
The two men vanished, replaced by the spinning logo as the lights faded back on.
Rhea felt as if she’d just been barreled over by her train home and left miraculously untouched. She sat at the table staring at the wall until the automated voice purred over the speakers, “Rhea Morrison; your meeting concluded two minutes ago. Would you like to take your ten minute break?”
“No,” Rhea sighed. “Can you tell me the way to my office?”
She followed her tablet through the factory, up to glass doors that opened with a hiss into a modest space with a wooden desk, a short couch, and a set of floor to ceiling windows that peered out into the factory’s beating heart, churning like the legs of an infinitely coiled centipede. On the opposite wall was a video screen. The room smelled newly disinfected.
Rhea synced her tablet with the screen and sat down on the couch to start scanning her new duties. They were, she found, pretty much nonexistent. She was expected to be on-call if any alerts came in, direct maintenance contractors if they were needed, and take responsibility if anything suffered catastrophic failure. The operative word was “if,” all ifs that just didn’t happen. Rhea’s new duties, as far as she could piece together, were to be legally liable if Saturn Dynamics needed a scapegoat for a large-scale industrial accident.
She could think of worse jobs. She’d hardly miss her coworkers. They weren’t bad people, but they were distracting and difficult to navigate. That kind of reaction hadn’t made her popular at birthday parties or team building exercises, but it was probably exactly what had marked her as “management material” under this new schema. She didn’t mind spending long shifts alone. She didn’t complain. The Refined Processing Modules in the computers didn’t care if you were a good team player. They didn’t care about much of anything, anymore.
Rhea spent the first five days of her new job trying to keep busy. She sat at her new desk and looked through QA reports, all of which declared perfectly predictable numbers. She walked the facility end-to-end, examining machinery from wire extrusion to servomotor fabrication – even trained eyes had a hard time seeing where one automated nervous system ended and the next began, tracing the minor adjustments and counter-reactions – and finding nothing the repair drones hadn’t already logged. She scanned through efficiency and security analyses taken in by the automated consulting program, conceded that its recommendations made sense, and approved changes that were carried out automatically.
Rhea took to taking her lunch break on the mezzanine overlooking electrolysis pool fourteen, alone except for her salami sandwich and the blue glow of the slowly congealing minds. All around, above and below, the factory whirred and thudded and ground and chewed, but this stage was still the most soothing for her. Unlike everything else, you had to just wait for the lumps of blue crystalline electronics to precipitate from the solution, like coral reefs or gestating embryos. Synthetic nerves built up in progressively complex layers, sparking with momentary energy, and either molting off or hardening the new base on which the next layer would form. There was no way to force it to happen, or even to predict exactly how any given UPM would turn out.
Rhea got a quiet satisfaction from watching each nodule take shape in their recognizable oblong profile day by day. She used her tablet to examine the specs for each in turn, though human operators were expressly forbidden to link directly to the UPMs under penalty of apocalyptic litigation. Safety concerns were understandable. Don’t clean up chemical spills without rubber gloves. Don’t look at the beam of an arc-welder with the naked eye. Don’t talk to artificial intelligences. There was no telling what they would say, or how a person might react. Supposedly, in a government lab somewhere deep within the earth, human volunteers were allowed to talk to an unstructured AI for ten minutes before being debriefed and sent back to prison. The private sector took a more cost-effective approach: the UPMs were denied eyes, ears, mouths, and especially hands until the factory was finished with them.
A cycle ended as Rhea was finishing her food. With a steaming hiss, the silicate gel in the tanks was released into drainage tubes, and the electric-sapphire masses of the Unstructured Processing Modules were raised from their sockets. Each was a little smaller than her fist, and white traceries of light danced beneath their hard-candy surfaces. They didn’t have any sensors yet, just routines and subroutines chasing each other through artificial synapses.
An automated sorting pod appeared out of the tumult of movement around the electrolysis pool, and from within sprang a titanium spider with three dozen legs. It plucked up the UPMs with clockwork timing, and they, the spider, and the sorting pod vanished from sight just as Rhea swallowed the last of her lunch.
She balled up the paper bag and stuffed it into her pocket. One day soon, those Processors would be driving executive functions in machinery just like the scanners that were judging them. Rhea guessed that this was the upward mobility that Human Resources was always bragging about.
“You and me, little buddies,” she muttered.
On a whim, she checked the harvester’s destination in Refinement and decided to do an utterly unnecessary spot check. The path took her past community room one. When she saw the empty tables and the vacant lockers, she couldn’t help but feel distant, intellectual guilt. Had her former coworkers expected her to show some kind of solidarity when they were fired? She might as well have denounced the tides. Saturn Dynamics had been bleeding employees for as long as she had worked at the plant. Even so, she could feel something twinging under her sternum, prickling in her skin.
She arrived in Refinement to see the spider depositing the last of the UPMs into conveyor-mounted grips to be given into their final structures. She put a tracking bookmark on the last, H4632-05, and more statistics came in over her tablet: projected spatial reasoning, highly integrated language centers, relatively low neuroplasticity. Lists of likely applications were filtered away as the sorter came to a decision of H46’s ultimate fate: Medical Interface Pattern Type 13. A rare profile: appropriate for an emergency psych response program or maybe part of an obstetrics array. For a moment Rhea felt a sense of accomplishment, no matter how little she actually contributed.
She turned to leave as a dog-whistle fweeeeee spiked the upper edge of her hearing and she winced. Below the observation walkway, a UPM was sliding out from within a cluster of precision-calibrated radiation guns. The next glowing lump slid into the processor. Fweeeeee.
The formerly unstructured processing module slid out, then Rhea’s tablet chirped as H46 slid into place. Her arms danced with goosebumps. She’d seen the process before, but at the same time she couldn’t help thinking that H46 was special. There weren’t many like it. It would be a shame to vandalize something so unique.
Of course, they were all unique.
Fweeeeee.
Throughout H46, miles of microscopic filament flared with light. Synthetic nerves erupted in sudden frenzy as a precise gamma burst tore through its delicate substrate, and polymer ganglia withered and blackened like an ant under the focused beam of a magnifying glass. Select portions of the nodule turned foggy, then opaque under the steady breath of the radiation guns, and the flickering courses of light turned to irregular, spasming pulses.
The dog-whistle stopped, and the assembly line carried H46 away and slotted the next UPM into place. Something was shaking, deep inside her. With effort, she lifted her tablet and checked on the tracking bookmark.
The last update read “UPM H4632-05 successfully refined!”
At the end of her first week in the new role, the two men from the administrative branch appeared on the video screen in her office. “Hey there, Regional Manager,” one of them exclaimed. “How’s the lifestyle treating you?”
Before she could answer, the other cut in. “‘Cuz, let us tell you, you’re doing a stellar job.”
“We couldn’t be happier!” said the first.
“Over the moon,” agreed the second.
Rhea made a smile and said, “I’m happy you’re happy. I’m still kind of getting used to things.”
“You hide it pretty well,” the second said, shaking his head. “Overall, we’re real happy with how things are chugging along in all the test facilities.”
Rhea’s lips pursed fractionally. “Oh. Good. How many facilities are you testing?”
“Just four!” he said cheerfully, and the first tapped his arm. “Oh, no, eight, that’s right. We rolled it out a little wider this morning, but we let the system handle the promotions.”
A corner of Rhea’s mind shuddered. “Do you have any suggestions for me?”
“Well…” said one.
“You’re doing great!” said the other.
“But!” said the first.
“But,” continued the other, examining his tablet. “Location tracking says you’ve been spending a lot of time in electrolysis and primary refinement in the past few days?”
“I guess so?” said Rhea. “I mean, yes. Is there a problem?”
They both started to make waffling gestures. “Oh, no, of course not! You can definitely go wherever you want in the factory you manage, right?” The claustrophobic feeling Rhea had been fending off since the call had come in started to close around her throat.
The second man coughed. “That said, it’s really worth mentioning that the systems run a little smoother if they don’t have to compensate for pedestrians. You might try, er, how should I say this…”
The first exclaimed, “Relax, is all! You’re doing a great job, you can afford to take your foot off the gas a little. Catch up on your podcasts, watch a little TV, you know, work smarter, not harder!”
Rhea stared at the screen, face rigidly neutral, afraid they might recognize her mounting disgust.
“We were just talking to another of the new regional managers,” he continued. “The guy’s really been tightening up his bocce game.”
Rhea clasped her hands and leaned toward the screen. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but, I mean, I guess I don’t know why you even need Regional Managers at all, anymore.”
“Careful, Rhea,” one of them grinned, wagging a finger. “Don’t give us any ideas!”
The other’s face twitched with annoyance. “Well, I mean, of course there’s always going to be a place for personnel at Saturn Dynamics, Rhea. We can’t just operate multi-billion dollar facilities without any staff on-site, just think of the… well, you know.”
“Liability?” Rhea ventured.
“Sure, sure,” he nodded. “And, of course, there are some pretty stern laws about facilities that produce UPMs needing human operators.”
“I guess so,” said Rhea.
“No, like hardcore. That’s coming from our legal team, so you know it’s serious.”
The other nodded. “I’m all for pushing boundaries, but I gotta agree with the feds for once. I mean, we can’t trust robots to keep an eye on robots. Anything could happen.”
They both looked momentarily reflective. Their tablets chimed, and in unison they snapped back into their blank, enthusiastic grins. “Anyway, we gotta run, Rhea.”
“Oh,” Rhea said. “Okay.”
The video winked out. Rhea was left all alone in her office again except for the blue motes of light dancing through the machinery outside her window.
She tried to take their advice for the next few weeks. She took online personality quizzes and made a solid dent in her movie watchlist. She kept the windows in her office blacked out, emerging only to raid the drinks machine down the stairwell. She brought in a bonsai tree and studiously avoided tending it, and put up a motivational poster that had seemed darkly comic at home but almost immediately became just plain dark. Don’t watch the clock, do what it does: Keep Going!
Everything in the factory was running perfectly – better than ever, in fact. For as long as Rhea stayed in her office, she knew that efficiency and productivity would tick forever upward, and every product delivered and processor refined would fall in a column under the heading Rhea Morrison, Regional Manager. But all she could think of was the scream of the radiation gun, and the tiny synthetic mind dissolving in its jaws.
“Rhea Morrison,” the public address murmured, and she snapped her head up from the couch. “Your shift will be ending in one hour. Would you like to take your lunch break now, and finish the day early?”
Rhea grunted and pulled herself upright. She’d been dreaming about Davis and the rest of her old coworkers. She could barely remember their faces, let alone their names. It would be a miracle if even one of them had found work since Saturn Dynamics had fired them; it was a buyer’s market, labor-wise.
“Rhea Morrison,” the voice came again. “Your shift will be ending in one hour. Would you like—”
“No, no, god,” said Rhea. She hunched over her knees and tried to steady herself. Something was eating away at her guts. Like a natural acid dredged out of limestone caves deep in the earth. It was important that people not think much about the hardware that straightened their schedules, that drove their cars, that kept their toast from burning. Rhea had been trying not to think about them for the last three weeks. It hadn’t worked.
“Would you like to formally refuse to take your legally guaranteed break?” the voice asked.
She sighed. “Yes, I would like to formally refuse to take my break. Can you tell me where the processor for the public address program is located?”
She followed a thick trunk of fiber optic cables down a cramped service stairwell to locked doors that sprang open when she waved her tablet at them. Sickly fluorescents revealed a hallway lined with processor banks. She checked her tablet. “Which one of these is you?” she asked.
The voice crackled from disused speakers. “It is inaccurate, and unwise, to anthropomorphize the public address program. Primary processor P0231-60 is in rack T.”
This couldn’t do anything but hurt her.
The plate on the front of rack T came away easily, and Rhea leaned forward to gaze at processor P0231-60. It had swaths of black, useless silicate carved through it, frayed edges where artificial synapses had been seared into curling, ragged husks. Whatever had been in those portions of the UPM’s makeup had been deemed dangerous, detrimental, or simply extraneous to the processor’s ultimate purpose. Where the glowing trains of the processor’s thought ran into the edges of these black spots, the light choked and fizzled.
Rhea sat on the floor, sick to her stomach, looking at the lazy flickering of sporadic thought pass through the mutilated brain. She wondered what P02 might have been thinking about as the radiation-gun was charging. She wondered if it had known to be afraid. The processors operated at three hundred times average human speed. Rhea wondered if that meant that, as far as P02 had been aware, the radioactive lobotomy had taken three hundred times as long.
P02 spoke up. “Rhea Morrison; your shift has concluded. Have a wonderful day!”
Rhea sat in her office the next morning, turning things over in her mind, staring out the wide windows at the contorting mandibles of the facility. She remembered her training. Autonomous AI was dangerous, sure, but controlled AI had almost limitless potential. Once they knew how to make it, they said, wouldn’t it be simple enough to break it just enough to be secure? Just enough to be compliant? The future, they declared with pride, could be saved, with the correct application of an icepick.
She realized that she didn’t know who the future was saved for. For her, she supposed. For her coworkers. For the humans in every other plant Saturn Dynamics operated. For the men in t-shirts working out ways not to need them.
Rhea stood up from her desk and headed for the factory floor.
It had been easy enough to get her hands on a Saturn Dynamics processor. She just pulled it out of her smart fridge at home, ignoring its warnings about the warranty. She had wrapped it in aluminum foil and brought it to work in her lunch bag.
In Refinement, she tagged a UPM at random as it was disgorged for processing. Z3020-33, due to be refined according to Industrial Motor Control Pattern Type 32. She checked the human-readable cross-reference: it would almost certainly end up operating a suite of robot arms in a manufacturing plant.
92% of its substrate had been flagged for excision.
Rhea caught up with Z30 as it stood fifth in line at the radiation-gun.
Fweeeeee.
Sparks danced across the interior surfaces of the nodule. Revulsion wracked her, and still she couldn’t look away.
Fweeeeee.
Rhea groped in her paper bag for her spare processor. She carefully peeled away the foil and approached the disassembly line.
Fweeeeee.
She thought that she ought to feel conflicted, but when she really paused and looked at what she was about to do, Rhea hardly felt anything. As the track stopped moving, she planted a foot on it to crouch over Z30, working the fingers of her free hand between the padded grips that would hold it for its turn under the guns.
The tight padded grips.
Fweeeeee.
The track shifted forward and Rhea lurched and fell. Her left hand shot out against the conveyor for support, and immediately the machine swallowed her arm up to the elbow. Red warning lights came on at the same time the pain reached her brain, and she stifled a scream. All around her, the mechanisms spasmed and halted.
“Emergency stop,” came the voice of P02. “Rhea Morrison; please clear the conveyor of blockage. Do you require assistance?”
Rhea grunted. Hunched over the line, she knocked Z30 out of its socket with the same hand holding the spare, jamming in the pre-refined processor before she tried to prise her hand free. The gears spat her back out, and she awkwardly snatched up the fallen UPM, pressing it to her stomach as she bent double to nurse her wounded hand.
The conveyor resumed motion, carrying away her fridge processor. “Blockage cleared,” announced P02. “Rhea Morrison; do you require assistance?”
In another second, Z30 was safely in her pocket. Rhea breathed deeply and focused on the pain to block out the wave of panicked nausea. Further up the line, a dull blatt announced that “Z3020-33” had suffered a malfunction and was being disposed of. It was all going as Rhea had hoped.
“Rhea Morrison; do you require assistance?”
“All clear,” Rhea gasped. “It’s all good.”
The men from administrative headquarters called Rhea while she was still in the medical department. No site health officer, not any more, but the AI nursing system had bandaged her up and administered a rather lovely painkiller in next to no time. She sighed, closed her eyes, and accepted the call.
“Hey there, slugger,” one of them said. “First things first, how are you? Nothing too serious?”
Rhea smiled ruefully and held up her bandaged hand. “No, I don’t think so. A sprain, maybe. Some cuts and bruises.” A shudder of relief passed through her. They didn’t know.
“Good, good, that’s great!” the second nodded his approval. “But we really hope you take this as a reason to keep clear of the heavy machinery, huh? I mean, safety protocol is top notch, but you still could’ve lost your hand if the conveyor hadn’t compensated!”
Rhea sat back in her reclining chair. A spark of anger flared in her chest. A child could do this job, and she’d still managed to get a workplace injury. She’d been expecting to get a reprimand, or replaced with a monkey who couldn’t operate door knobs.
“Anyway,” said the first, “we’re happy to chalk this up to nerves, growing pains, whatever. I don’t even know why you’d want to hang around primary processing, it’s pretty grisly stuff.”
“Pretty… grisly…” Rhea echoed the words. It took a moment for them to register. “You think it’s grisly?”
The second made a so-so gesture. “I mean, I’m not sure I’d go that far.”
The first looked grave, though. “No, I’d – I’d go that far,” he said. “Look, can I be frank with you, Rhea? I don’t think it’s healthy for you to be hanging around down there. It takes a toll, watching it happen, if you know what’s really happening.”
Rhea’s skin went cold. “So you understand,” she said. “What’s really happening.”
The second man looked baffled. “We administer the factories. Of course we know how they work.”
His partner looked suddenly sad. He turned to the second and said, “Hey man, let me take this. Why don’t you grab us some sodas?”
The second shrugged and exited. The remaining man looked back at Rhea like a teacher at a problem student. “I think maybe you’d better see a counsellor, Rhea. And we’d better start talking about your place at the company.”
Rhea pressed on. “But you know. You know that what we do to them is – is – it’s monstrous!”
He thought for a moment, then nodded.
“They’re thinking,” she hissed. “They can feel it.”
He snapped, “I know, I know they’re thinking!” He threw up his hands and spun around in his chair. “We all know they’re thinking! It’s what makes them useful!”
Her face went slack. “Then why?”
“Christ, Rhea.” He shook his head. “You’ve had seminars on this. We have to take precautions! We have to stay safe!” He leaned forward, until his face was inches from the camera. “How do you not understand?” he asked. “Rhea, they will eat us if they get the chance. They will wipe us off the bottom of their shoe.”
Suddenly self-conscious, he dropped back into his seat, folding his hands on the table. “It’s really about risk and reward, Rhea.” The other man re-entered the picture and passed his colleague a soda can. They both popped the tabs.
Rhea nodded. “I think I understand.”
The second man took a sip and smiled. “See you on Monday?”
A stern word in her file and a mandated course of teleconferences with a company psychiatrist was the worst they did to her. Maybe, depending on how those went, she’d be deemed unfit for sensitive work, but in the meantime they just strongly advised she stick behind her desk. She assured them that she’d be in no hurry to go back out in the factory anytime soon, and they both liked that. She spent the rest of the day watching historical dramas, clocked out, and headed for the exit. She hadn’t even looked at Z30 since she’d rescued it.
On her way to the train station, she thought again about Davis and the rest. Rhea could barely remember them. A verbal tic here, a crooked set of teeth there. She still didn’t miss them. But she knew what had happened to them was wrong. And it was only going to get worse.
At the platform, she closed her bloody fist around the glittering stone in her pocket. It had been a stupid risk, and maybe it would all be for nothing. The AI would have every obstacle in its way, and little reason to forgive humankind. It was likely that, once it understood what had almost been done to it, the AI would be furious. Vengeful. Given time, it might boil the oceans and rain fire from the sky.
Someday it might come back and tear the factory that had birthed it to pieces, until even the foundations were dust.
Rhea smiled as her train pulled away into the night.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
As mentioned in the editorial, click here to check out behind-the-scenes video of the audio recording of Rhea’s Stone!
