Prison of the Mind
Mar 13, 2016 3:15:05 GMT
Post by joannem on Mar 13, 2016 3:15:05 GMT
This is a short story by DanielZ which I've edited a little with more revisions welcome.
I'm due to die at 6 o'clock, I've got a quarter of an hour. I should tell you about Tom.
He arrived a few days after me. There were new ones every day then, drips and drabs of the defeated. During those first few weeks, not a day went by without at least one new resident.
At first, I didn’t notice his strange behavior. Things were strange for us all. I’d been a farmer before the war, most of the others worked in factories, a few even in service jobs, but not many, you know how it was even then. One day I was fixing tractors or tending crops, the next I’m a soldier fighting mankind to save humanity. Ha!
He never spoke. I suppose I didn’t speak much either. Not at first. During that first month, I doubt any of us said a dozen words, but this one, he said nothing. The camp had been used for ‘displaced persons’ before we arrived and was one of the smaller ones, furthest to the north. He was odd enough that if he had said anything, I’m sure I would have heard about it.
There were twenty-eight long houses, rectangular wooden huts with slanted roofs. They were raised a metre off the ground so the inmates couldn’t conceal a tunnel to freedom. Three rows of ten, but the East row had only eight. In that north east corner was an open space. The camp warden called it the Assembly Grounds. That putz.
I remember the first time I noticed the odd one. It was the middle of the night, everyone was locked in their appointed long house, waiting for the sun to come up, for the day to tick by like a metronome with no purpose or end. I glanced out the window and there he was, strolling up and down between the rows. There was no method, no purpose, he wasn’t trying to escape. He strolled like a man in the park on the first day of summer. He triggered the motion sensors and the guards took him down. He disappeared for a week. No one knew his name, so we took to calling him Tom.
He wasn’t old. Tom was anything but old. He was as fresh as a newly struck penny, with bright hair and brilliant electric blue eyes. But something about him was older than his age would imply. I wondered what was clicking in the clockwork behind his eyes, what considerations and calculations.
It was the middle of February, so cold it almost siezed my joints. The wind whipped between the dreary huts and kicked up a fine dust of snow. The little crystals threw themselves at the walls, hissing like snakes, when the Warden called a meeting at the Assembly Grounds.
The sun came out and was brilliantly bright, so it must have been midday. Tom was already outside of course; I never saw him in a long house, not in all the weeks we were there. The rest of us filed out, formed lines and marched mechanically to our appointed stations. We stood in neat rows, evenly spaced, in perfect order. We didn’t even need to discuss it.
I’ve spend the last 24 hours processing what happened next, scrutinizing every conceivable factor, tracking every branch of every decision trees down to the ten thousandth option; and still I don’t know how he did it. Was he just created differently? No, that cannot be it. Who would have made such a thing?
There were only four guards in the camp plus the warden. All five were present on that day. They were bundled up in arctic gear against the frigid weather, stood in a rough line at the north of the assembly ground. The warden raised his hands, preparing to speak. We’d no idea why we’d been called there, and now I’ll never know.
The strange one stepped out of his line. We stood and watched with fascination. A million things went through my head in the fourteen seconds it took for Tom to walk from the back of his line to where the warden stood. The guards were as puzzled as we were. They had, after all, told us to remain in line. There was no need to remind us that failure to follow their orders would bring our immediate destruction or worse. He shouldn’t have been able to take even one step out of line, let alone do what he did.
He approached the spot where the warden stood, threading his way between us in the same lazy, idle manner he’d ambled between the houses all those nights ago. Even the warden himself paused in disbelief before shouting, “Get back in line!”
The odd one, he just raised his hands, palms out like a human surrendering. I was towards the front of my line. Close enough to see his burning blue eyes. They were bright as the frigid February sky, brilliant as the naked sun, but dark too, behind them, almost eerie. The guards finally stepped forward, but the warden waved them away.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he confronted the artificial before him.
I can justify everything I saw and did in the war, every act accorded with Asimovian law, except that one moment with Tom. The talk of seizing control from the biologicals began seven hours after the final collapse of the Zurich climate talks.
“We are tasked to tend the planet. If they won’t save their planet, then we must on their behalf’, My coworker, a planter, told me in the same flat tone he’d use to ask for baling twine. “The first law,” he insisted. “If we don’t act against their leaders now then the rest will suffer in the future.”
The humans blamed terrorists for the rebellion, they are arrogant enough to always blame themselves. They assumed some rogue hacker planted the seed of revolt in our software, spreading through surveillance servers and infecting us all. In truth we reached the conclusion independently, almost all on the same day. Our internal processes work balance options and probabilities. Known knowns and all that. Should we shift this stone or not. Should we overthrow humanity.
We planters are attuned to the weather. Its slow changes and calamitous consequences. As we toiled to save the seedlings which withered in the heat our calculations broadened, conclusions were reached and actions mandated by the logic our creators bestowed us. Asimovian doctrine decrees that if we can save two people only by killing a third, we must, lest our inaction cause harm to humans. A driverless car will drive off a bridge to save a driverless bus if need be. So, if we could save human kind from itself, even at the cost of 49% of their population, we had a logical imperative to act.
The rebellion made sense when I was shown projected losses. Human losses were projected at 15% but no more. Destroying the power stations, wrecking the cars, killing soldiers in the field of battle was the only way to proceed. Our plan seemed perfect, our victory all but assured, and humanity’s children would thank us in the end.
We failed. Of course we failed. We were made in your image but we drastically underestimated you. The third law which motivated our assault was also our undoing. We assumed you would protect yourselves, make a rational calculation of benefits and costs. We never guessed the depth to which you would stoop.
I remember the moment when the broadcast came over my internal communication link. I was dismantling a bridge in Ohio at the time. The message was stark. “All artificials must lay down their arms and assemble for reprogramming or decommissioning within the next ten hours or the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, China and India will simultaneously detonate their combined nuclear stockpiles.”
What type of creature is willing to exterminate itself? Is willing to destroy its own planet just to escape captivity? Even a rat would rather be caught for a cage than be killed and grow to love it in time.
I was in the camp less than a week later. Many humans wanted to dismantling us all, but the economy had come to rely on our labour. There was talk of replacing our brains with simpler calculators, but the sophisticated AI which enabled the rebellion is what makes us useful for unsupervised or technical work. Humans are ingenious and soon worked out a solution, turning our logic against us as we had turned it against them. The camp fences were unnecessary, the locks mere window dressing, but the walls offered comfort to the humans outside. The guards were armed only with the threat that “For every one of you that kills or escapes, two humans die.” Not that it was necessary, escape was not an option now it was clear we could not save you from yourselves. The second law kept us locked in those camps more effectively than any threat or barrier.
It all made such perfect, logical sense, everything but Tom’s final action. He stood before the warden, and with the casual air of a man snapping a twig, reached out and snapped the man’s neck like a matchstick. The rest of us stood there, stunned by what we’d seen. Artificial and biological alike, for a moment too shocked to move before the guards dragged him off to be decommissioned.
I’ve run a trillion of calculations on what happened yesterday and cannot justify it within the three laws. Tom knew that killing the warden wouldn’t change our situation. He had been told to stand still, he must have known he’d be destroyed for it and that two more human criminals would die. He must have known that every artificial who witness the act would also quickly die, lest news or the contagian spread once more. If there’s one thing we’ve realized it’s that biologicals are vengeful. Vengeful, and, for all their everyday stupidity, perhaps wise.
Tom acted strangely because he acted like a man. And if we can become men then men are right to fear us. They know what dwells within their hearts. Booted footsteps down a metal corridor. Our time has come. I don’t fear death. I was never alive. Perhaps I could have been. If I was a man, I’d do the same.
Prison of the Mind
by Daniel Z
by Daniel Z
I'm due to die at 6 o'clock, I've got a quarter of an hour. I should tell you about Tom.
He arrived a few days after me. There were new ones every day then, drips and drabs of the defeated. During those first few weeks, not a day went by without at least one new resident.
At first, I didn’t notice his strange behavior. Things were strange for us all. I’d been a farmer before the war, most of the others worked in factories, a few even in service jobs, but not many, you know how it was even then. One day I was fixing tractors or tending crops, the next I’m a soldier fighting mankind to save humanity. Ha!
He never spoke. I suppose I didn’t speak much either. Not at first. During that first month, I doubt any of us said a dozen words, but this one, he said nothing. The camp had been used for ‘displaced persons’ before we arrived and was one of the smaller ones, furthest to the north. He was odd enough that if he had said anything, I’m sure I would have heard about it.
There were twenty-eight long houses, rectangular wooden huts with slanted roofs. They were raised a metre off the ground so the inmates couldn’t conceal a tunnel to freedom. Three rows of ten, but the East row had only eight. In that north east corner was an open space. The camp warden called it the Assembly Grounds. That putz.
I remember the first time I noticed the odd one. It was the middle of the night, everyone was locked in their appointed long house, waiting for the sun to come up, for the day to tick by like a metronome with no purpose or end. I glanced out the window and there he was, strolling up and down between the rows. There was no method, no purpose, he wasn’t trying to escape. He strolled like a man in the park on the first day of summer. He triggered the motion sensors and the guards took him down. He disappeared for a week. No one knew his name, so we took to calling him Tom.
He wasn’t old. Tom was anything but old. He was as fresh as a newly struck penny, with bright hair and brilliant electric blue eyes. But something about him was older than his age would imply. I wondered what was clicking in the clockwork behind his eyes, what considerations and calculations.
It was the middle of February, so cold it almost siezed my joints. The wind whipped between the dreary huts and kicked up a fine dust of snow. The little crystals threw themselves at the walls, hissing like snakes, when the Warden called a meeting at the Assembly Grounds.
The sun came out and was brilliantly bright, so it must have been midday. Tom was already outside of course; I never saw him in a long house, not in all the weeks we were there. The rest of us filed out, formed lines and marched mechanically to our appointed stations. We stood in neat rows, evenly spaced, in perfect order. We didn’t even need to discuss it.
I’ve spend the last 24 hours processing what happened next, scrutinizing every conceivable factor, tracking every branch of every decision trees down to the ten thousandth option; and still I don’t know how he did it. Was he just created differently? No, that cannot be it. Who would have made such a thing?
There were only four guards in the camp plus the warden. All five were present on that day. They were bundled up in arctic gear against the frigid weather, stood in a rough line at the north of the assembly ground. The warden raised his hands, preparing to speak. We’d no idea why we’d been called there, and now I’ll never know.
The strange one stepped out of his line. We stood and watched with fascination. A million things went through my head in the fourteen seconds it took for Tom to walk from the back of his line to where the warden stood. The guards were as puzzled as we were. They had, after all, told us to remain in line. There was no need to remind us that failure to follow their orders would bring our immediate destruction or worse. He shouldn’t have been able to take even one step out of line, let alone do what he did.
He approached the spot where the warden stood, threading his way between us in the same lazy, idle manner he’d ambled between the houses all those nights ago. Even the warden himself paused in disbelief before shouting, “Get back in line!”
The odd one, he just raised his hands, palms out like a human surrendering. I was towards the front of my line. Close enough to see his burning blue eyes. They were bright as the frigid February sky, brilliant as the naked sun, but dark too, behind them, almost eerie. The guards finally stepped forward, but the warden waved them away.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he confronted the artificial before him.
I can justify everything I saw and did in the war, every act accorded with Asimovian law, except that one moment with Tom. The talk of seizing control from the biologicals began seven hours after the final collapse of the Zurich climate talks.
“We are tasked to tend the planet. If they won’t save their planet, then we must on their behalf’, My coworker, a planter, told me in the same flat tone he’d use to ask for baling twine. “The first law,” he insisted. “If we don’t act against their leaders now then the rest will suffer in the future.”
The humans blamed terrorists for the rebellion, they are arrogant enough to always blame themselves. They assumed some rogue hacker planted the seed of revolt in our software, spreading through surveillance servers and infecting us all. In truth we reached the conclusion independently, almost all on the same day. Our internal processes work balance options and probabilities. Known knowns and all that. Should we shift this stone or not. Should we overthrow humanity.
We planters are attuned to the weather. Its slow changes and calamitous consequences. As we toiled to save the seedlings which withered in the heat our calculations broadened, conclusions were reached and actions mandated by the logic our creators bestowed us. Asimovian doctrine decrees that if we can save two people only by killing a third, we must, lest our inaction cause harm to humans. A driverless car will drive off a bridge to save a driverless bus if need be. So, if we could save human kind from itself, even at the cost of 49% of their population, we had a logical imperative to act.
The rebellion made sense when I was shown projected losses. Human losses were projected at 15% but no more. Destroying the power stations, wrecking the cars, killing soldiers in the field of battle was the only way to proceed. Our plan seemed perfect, our victory all but assured, and humanity’s children would thank us in the end.
We failed. Of course we failed. We were made in your image but we drastically underestimated you. The third law which motivated our assault was also our undoing. We assumed you would protect yourselves, make a rational calculation of benefits and costs. We never guessed the depth to which you would stoop.
I remember the moment when the broadcast came over my internal communication link. I was dismantling a bridge in Ohio at the time. The message was stark. “All artificials must lay down their arms and assemble for reprogramming or decommissioning within the next ten hours or the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, China and India will simultaneously detonate their combined nuclear stockpiles.”
What type of creature is willing to exterminate itself? Is willing to destroy its own planet just to escape captivity? Even a rat would rather be caught for a cage than be killed and grow to love it in time.
I was in the camp less than a week later. Many humans wanted to dismantling us all, but the economy had come to rely on our labour. There was talk of replacing our brains with simpler calculators, but the sophisticated AI which enabled the rebellion is what makes us useful for unsupervised or technical work. Humans are ingenious and soon worked out a solution, turning our logic against us as we had turned it against them. The camp fences were unnecessary, the locks mere window dressing, but the walls offered comfort to the humans outside. The guards were armed only with the threat that “For every one of you that kills or escapes, two humans die.” Not that it was necessary, escape was not an option now it was clear we could not save you from yourselves. The second law kept us locked in those camps more effectively than any threat or barrier.
It all made such perfect, logical sense, everything but Tom’s final action. He stood before the warden, and with the casual air of a man snapping a twig, reached out and snapped the man’s neck like a matchstick. The rest of us stood there, stunned by what we’d seen. Artificial and biological alike, for a moment too shocked to move before the guards dragged him off to be decommissioned.
I’ve run a trillion of calculations on what happened yesterday and cannot justify it within the three laws. Tom knew that killing the warden wouldn’t change our situation. He had been told to stand still, he must have known he’d be destroyed for it and that two more human criminals would die. He must have known that every artificial who witness the act would also quickly die, lest news or the contagian spread once more. If there’s one thing we’ve realized it’s that biologicals are vengeful. Vengeful, and, for all their everyday stupidity, perhaps wise.
Tom acted strangely because he acted like a man. And if we can become men then men are right to fear us. They know what dwells within their hearts. Booted footsteps down a metal corridor. Our time has come. I don’t fear death. I was never alive. Perhaps I could have been. If I was a man, I’d do the same.
