Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.2      Taking Control

1.2.6    An Assumed Role

1.2.6.4  A sufficiently advanced mechanic

After a bit, Daris had his son perform a 3-point turn and declared himself satisfied when no resulting *crunch* could be heard. Heather led the procession over to her new pavilion. She’d earlier handed some of her glowing wooden stakes to Bahrudin, along with a sketch on a napkin marked out in the number of his strides needed, and asked him to pick a suitable area. While Heather had been looking at the tractor, drones had flown in coloured tarps with precisely picked grommet holes and spiked them into the grounds inside the stakes. A procession of bots and supplies had been delivered to the tarp designated for receiving, and the new bots had proceeded to erect a pavilion, signs, a table at which villagers could hand over items to be repaired, many strange and mysterious machines, and a throne at which Heather could sit and hand back the repaired items to people.

Nadine stood to the right of the throne and watched as an unending succession of broken toys, bent tools and worn implements were handed over at the desk, each with an accompanying story delivered to a bot which spoke in a mournful voice and looked a bit like a donkey with long hanging ears. Heather’s role seemed to mainly involve keeping an eye on things and signing off upon decisions that Tink, her expert system, brought to her attention, although occasionally she got a gleeful expression and then froze as she dived into full velife mode, supported by her throne, to deal with a problem personally.

The rest of the time she chatted with Nadine, or one of the waiting villagers. If gratitude was a currency, Heather was going to end the day rich in it, especially among the children who received back improved toys and among the hard working who really relied upon the tools Heather fixed for them. If Heather were some faceless donor it wouldn’t have worked, but because she was right there, face to face with them and addressing them by name, they could see how much effort she’d put in on their behalf. It was a personal relationship, like when a guest entered a home - something treated with great ceremony in the village.

After a while, Nadine started to notice a pattern, and she asked Heather about it.

Nadine: “Why do you spend longer talking, when you’re handing back big items rather than small ones? Is it because they’re more expensive so you’ve done them a bigger favour?”

Heather: “Eh? No, not at all. Often the big models are simpler and cheaper. So simple that a user can be expected to take them apart and replace bits or refill things. That’s the problem - as soon as you start relying upon a human to notice something and then take an appropriate action, you introduce the possibility of them forgetting or getting it wrong.”

Heather: “Also, small items are usually constructed by companies with a tight control over their supply chain, and many are designed to become obsolete before they wear out. Whereas big items assembled from third party parts can end up with the wrong part, substandard materials, mis-aligned screws, and so forth.”

Nadine: “So the small complex items are better designed?”

Heather: “Not necessarily. They’re fragile. If something goes wrong, and it isn’t designed to be repairable, you might as well chuck the whole thing. The simpler items assembled from modular parts can have things go wrong yet still be salvageable. Under tough conditions it lasts longer, so I need to talk to the owner about how to look after it.”

David, who’d brought along his old surgical bot for maintenance, nodded in agreement.

David: “Near the end of my profession, more than half the annual training time went into getting certification for maintaining medical bots, rather than learning about new medicines and studies of treatments. Finally they gave up, and had the maintenance of the bots and the monitoring of bot performance being done by yet more expert system controlled bots nominally overseen by Bodyline’s remote velife operators.”

Heather sounded sympathetic. “What happened then?”

David: “A year later I received my severance pay, along with the on-site GPs at every other surgery. Bodyline replaced us with high street barber-surgeon shops that also performed haircuts, tattoos and implants. Apparently people find it easier to talk about their mental and physical problems while receiving a haircut than they do across a desk or on a couch.”

Bahrudin: “Ah, just the ticket, David! We need someone who knows about bots to drive over to the Hajduk Republic and become our village’s overt expert upon these new Mythoi, to explain how our village acquired some, in order that the epicentre of their spread not get traced back to Ms MacQuarrie.”

David: “Err…”

Bahrudin: “Good, that’s settled then. You are grateful to her for fixing your bot, are you not? Of course you are! Well volunteered.”

Bahrudin, despite his leg, could move at quite a spritely pace when he put his mind to it, and he was off back supervising the queue of people, turning away some fool who’d brought along a sick duck to be fixed, before David could get a word in edgeways.

David: “Blessed are those whose patience is tested, for they have an opportunity to please Adonai.” he sighed, then added more quietly, “and I am exceedingly blessed today, it seems.”

Nadine: “Perhaps Vedad?”

David thought about it: “No, alas Bahrudin, as usual, is right. Vedad is a good Catholic and would be free to go today; but, he is very energetic, and is likely to proclaim loudly that he is just innocently passing by. There is a Franciscan monastery nearby, with a collection of old documents, that I have visited before. My presence there will not stand out as unusual to anybody.”

A few minutes later, after she’d finished going over maintenance procedures with David and he’d left, Heather complained: “I hate that people just assume they will be watched all the time. They don’t question it or fight back. They just try to work out how not to be noticed, how not to stand out. It grinds their individuality down, makes them stick to doing the expected.”

Nadine: “Most of us are watched all the time. The areas not inside the surveillance net grow smaller and smaller every year.”

Heather: “It isn’t just the watching. It is the fear and uncertainty of who is watching and what they’ll do with the data once they link it to everything else they know about you. It is like if lions became so afraid of a whip that the tamer could leave it on a chair in the middle of the ring while he walked off to get a snack, and the lions kept running in circles as trained, even nipping the one ahead if it slowed down too much. Absurd.”

Nadine: “The lions know who the tamer is. Even if they choose not to, they know how to attack the tamer. He’s right in front of them, and just a man. It’s instinct.”

Heather: “Fighting back is easy! Boycott the areas and businesses with cameras. Wear hoodies or balaclavas or masks. Regularly change your clothing, your style, your makeup. Have lots of different interests, be hard to profile. Who do we think would notice if Vedad suddenly becomes interested in a new type of bot? It no longer matters if there’s a hand holding the whip or not. Just the fear that there might be is enough. This situation, this new blandism, is something that we’ve done to ourselves!”

Heather paused to hand Omar back a much upgraded personal computing system and tiara, to his great delight.

Omar: “Is that a Fundim XL42?? I was just hoping to not have to use gaffer tape to keep my tiara in place, but this is… Ms MacQuarrie, I am beyond words.”

Nadine: “Everyone has something to hide. Someone they don’t want to discover their secrets. Even if that’s just a new imam that they hope won’t learn about their taste for drinking alcohol.”

Omar: “Allah is all merciful, Miss Sabanagic. It is just his followers who fail to achieve such perfection. I’m sure Imam Begg will learn Bosnian tolerance eventually.”

Heather: “Don’t worry, Imam Begg won’t hear anything from us. And, um, it’s possible that tax may not have been paid upon that Fundim XL42, so I’d appreciate it if news of my visit and activities here didn’t spread too widely, lest some busybody take it upon themselves to investigate the village.”

Omar: “You may rely upon me, Ms MacQuarrie. I’ll make sure nobody says a thing. We all owe you.”

When Omar had left, Nadine caught a smug expression on Heather’s face again. How much use was Heather making of the social predictive model her expert system had made of the village? Did she have a model of Nadine? The potential to manipulate people wasn’t just frightening - it sowed distrust. In fact pretty much the only place you could trust someone now wasn’t face to face - it was in The Burrow, or when using a truth spell in the game.

Nadine: “Heather, I’m going to take a break, wander back to the kafana, if you’re ok here? I didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

Heather: “No problem, I’ve got this. I’ve got a few items on my list that are too big to conveniently bring here, so I’ll be zipping around the village later. Want to meet up at Bahrudin’s? I’ve scheduled his fridge as the last item.”

Nadine waved. “Fare you well, your Wizardliness. We’ll meet up at Bahrudin’s, and then you can show me behind your curtain.”

She couldn’t sleep, but did manage to nap a little, day dreaming of economic revolutions, currencies, gratitude and what she’d realised about the shortage of trust. It seemed like there was an idea in there somewhere, but it refused to form. So, rather than rushing it, she sat up in bed and spoke about it to Minion on her bedroom wall screen, before her thoughts vanished, and asked him to send a query to Wellington.

Then, since she was now up, she went downstairs to do a bit of baking. Generally she made her bread dough once a week, letting it rise for 3 hours before shaping and freezing it. Then during the week she just set her freezer to eject what she’d need in time for it to thaw for when she wanted it, and she could head straight into baking without having to get up too early. Some said it was cheating, but it was the way her mother had taught her, so to Nadine it felt like the right way to do things.

Or possibly that was just her laziness making excuses. She grinned, and carried on kneading, too happy to care. Maybe she should make some lucky cream-stuffed cornicelli too? She could prepare the layered pastry and butter and chill it to roll out later.

No, it wasn’t laziness. Being efficient at the routine parts of her cooking allowed her more time to spend on being creative, adding details or experimenting. Deadlines were the enemy of perfection and of enjoyment. Imagine having to watch the second hand on a clock while savouring a feast or making love? No, worry and punctuality had their place in life, but so did staying in the now and enjoying the journey, enjoying what was right there in front of you, rather than rushing towards the end goal. She preferred ‘village time’, with fewer clocks and more human interactions.