“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
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Max was taking us in, listening to whatever directions this joker or jester was sending.
The last few miles of land looked like something out of a video game. Buildings everywhere. Automated systems moving cargo containers by rail, light truck, and hover transport. There were cranes everywhere as well as what what I'd have to call fork-truck-mechs. The land extended seamlessly into the water where there wasn't so much a dock, as a system of lanes where ships waited to be serviced. I checked the map to find that we were no longer near Great Bear Lake, but instead much farther north on a long peninsula of land that was labeled only as Cape Perry.
"I thought we were headed to Great Bear Lake?" I asked Max.
"The dot on the map was only an indication of where the Samurai was, not our final destination.
I couldn't imagine the amount of cargo I was seeing moving off huge container ships and onto waiting trains. Several ships in each lane were being unloaded at once. The smaller ships, which had been unloaded already, were being loaded by a different set of cranes on the other side.
There was so much movement, and it appeared that everything was automated. Fork trucks carrying sixteen shipping containers in a 4x4 block moved through intersections without changing speed as light trucks or mechs, moving much faster, just happen to have gaps line up so that everything passed through the intersection without issue.
"There is a delay. You are being asked to wait an additional half hour. Would you like to land and stretch your legs or stay airborne to see?"
I glanced at Sara who made a deferral gesture to me.
"I think I'd like to stay up here. There is so much to-"
"I need to use the toilet," Sara said.
It didn't go without notice that she had wanted to see if I would choose to land first. If I had she would have said nothing. I didn't know if that was tricky, polite, or because she was embarrassed.
We landed in the middle of traffic. It wasn't on the lanes of a road or rail tracks but everything moved around us.
"I have passed along your request. You may enter the building to the east and go down three flights to find restrooms," Max said. She was still talking in my head but I now had a feeling when she was speaking to both Sara and I and when she was speaking to me alone.
"I'll go with her," I said. I didn't want to leave her by herself.
The door was metal. There was a raised rubber layer near the seal that was warm so that the frost and ice stayed clear of the gap.
I'd never been so cold in my life.
Literally.
I spent most of my days in an eighty-five to ninety degree office, or occasionally outside where temperatures could climb into the hundred and thirties on the bad days. I had never seen snow or ice until this trip.
Inside the air was cold, but much warmer than whatever it was outside.
There were no labels on anything so we had to try doors until we found the restroom. The first two rooms were empty of everything but a light and dust that covered the floor. there were electrical outlets, but no furniture, carpets, or anything else. Just an empty concrete box with an unlabeled metal door.
We didn't wait long once she was finished though we did stand around the wide hallway and wonder if we should go back up the car or not.
A small orb the size of a Christmas tree ornament that floated about chest hide and glowed with a soft blue light arrived and asked us to follow it.
Six flights of stairs down and two long hallways brought us to an elevator door. When it opened we stepped in. There were no buttons on the wall.
"This is creepy right?" I asked out loud.
"Oh yeah," Sara agreed.
It was a long ride and I couldn't tell how fast we were moving.
When the elevator doors opened, we were greeted by the sound of life. Air vents, soft music somewhere, people talking. There was an open cubical office with mostly white middle aged men working behind computer monitors, though some were staring off into space in a way that suggested they were using their augs.
The floating ball took us down another hallway, through another maze of cubicles, and to the door of an office.
"I've notified them of your arrival," the ball said.
Moments later someone opened the office door and invited us inside.
It was a conference room with a long table, comfortable looking chairs and food rotating around the inside in a long loop. Trays of food moved slowly around the center of the table.
I realized as I was sitting down that the table was only half as long as I first thought. The wall was a giant monitor and the food was disappearing into and coming out of it.
"You can sit anywhere," the androgynous person said. They were pretty with their hair cut in a pixie hair cut. Loose clothing hid any features that might define their sex.
The person sat plates and utensils before us, provided napkins, glasses, and a pitcher of water. Then, without warning, they left.
The wall screen flashed three times a bright orange, and then sound and conversation washed over us. It looked like the other side of the conference table had half its seats filled with different people who were talking and gesturing.
"Try this. Seriously-"
"Sort of nutty maybe, but also like-"
"-grandmother's funeral so of course-"
Before I could say anything the door opened and a large man of mixed heritage entered.
"Stay seated please," he said with a smooth voice. "This can all be confusing," he continued, "the feed is live- Hey all!" There were waves and calls back and more than one person talking with their mouth full.
He went about getting a plate and utensils from the same cart the other person had. He sat across from us on the table.
"Okay so first things first. Thank you for coming all the way up here. I didn't give you any information and you're still new to this and I thank you for that much faith and trust. I am the person you spoke to before. I know how hard it makes it but I don't have a name. I don't want one. My AI is Jory. If it's easier for you, I can go by say-"
He glanced down at himself, then flexed an arm.
"Arnold. I'll go by Arnold today." He began using a pair of chop sticks to transfer food from the various trays to his plate.
"Please eat," he said.
Once he had the plate loaded down he continued.
"I'm not trans-sexual, trans-human, post-human, or whatever. I honestly just grew bored in my body, and having to constantly change it for aquatic incursions led me to playing around with other bodies. It's fucking weird I get that. But I sort like it. Anyway that's my weirdness out of the way. The reason I wanted to invite you up here is to first welcome you to The Family an organization, if you can call it such, of Samurai, the Operators that work for them, and whole tertiary networks we link up with. Normally we sort of ease people into everything. But you said you were going to go the printer route. I'm here to stop you."
As he said the last he put something in his mouth and stared at me. The noise from the other half of the table died away and I saw everyone on that side was staring at me too.
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I swallowed the water I was sipping and set the glass back onto the table.
Someone on the monitor burst out laughing and then everyone else joined, including Arnold.
"Sorry, a bit of a joke," Arnold said.
"I've invited you here to show you the largest printing set up in North America and explain to you the absolute pitfalls and mistakes we've run into. To warn you that printing has a very real danger of upsetting the global economy and ending lives. I'm going to repeat that part again. By trying to do good, you can kill people. Let's take the obvious example. Nanite cures. What happens if we print so many nanite cures that not only does every single person use one, once a month, but every ambulance is stocked full of them? It's a real question."
Sara glanced at me and Arnold turned to her, "You can answer as well."
"No one would go to the hospital," Sara said, "because they would be cured at the ambulance.?"
Arnold nodded.
"And doctors? How would they pay their bills? What about the next generation of doctors? Who is headed to college to learn about medicine when everyone has a nanite injector?"
"No one," I said. I knew it was the obvious answer he was looking for, I also knew he wanted us to say it so he could say more.
"Let's keep following this to it's logical conclusion," he suggested.
"So we eventually have no doctors," I said.
"No medical people at all. No nurses. No insurance adjustors. No pharmacies. No pharmaceutical plants. No truck drivers delivering drugs. Do you know how many jobs are tied to healthcare? More importantly, do those jobs go away without upsetting the economy?"
He slurped something into his mouth and then pointed at Sara with the chop sticks.
"You want me to say no," she said.
"Right," he agreed, "the markets and brokers and stock traders and all the hedge funds and index funds and all that. They eventually see the writing on the wall as you print more and more magical cures. And what do they do? Do they lose money by keeping their investments in medical stocks? Or do they sell? The stock markets across the world collapse. Every place starts the global recession dance. People are laid off, starvation sets in, crime goes up as hungry people try to feed their families. It's a whole thing."
He ate something again, chewed, swallowed, and sipped from his glass of water.
"Now do food. What happens when the farmers can't sell corn for cheaper than you can print off fully cooked meals with a shelf life in the half-century range. How many jobs are centered around making sure there are fresh avocados in Maine in the winter? Again," he said making a circling gesture with his chop sticks, "Collapse, end of economies, etc, etc."
"Now I've been quick about it but you get the point. There is danger in doing it. But let's assume we can get those nanite cures out to everyone and the world doesn't collapse. What's the long term affects of that choice?"
We all ate in silence for a while. I shrugged at one point. He only spoke once Sara gave up.
"A tier two alien race advanced there from tier one how?" Again he let us think. When it dawned on me I didn't like how the dominos in my head fell.
"They didn't have Samurai yet," I said slowly.
"Why?" he asked but we both knew I understood what he was trying to show us. Still I said it out loud.
"They had to struggle, to do research, to innovate. They had to fail ten thousand times to advance one. They had to try to learn on their own, to build particle accelerators and telescopes that can see back in time to when the cosmic goop cooled enough to let photons pass."
"And does that society reach tier three?" Arnold asked.
"It would change everything. There is no more struggle. We can just ask the AI about sub atomic particles we don't have to smash atoms. We could just," I shrugged, "print stuff."
"We could just print stuff. We could, and did, start out doing just that. Six of us pulled our points and bought two different tier three printers and a bunch of blueprints. Then we made a utopia underground. A real utopia with an abundance of everything. We even linked in the search engines to the Protectorate AI so that any question you had about anything could be answered."
His eyes shifted from me to Sara and back.
"It didn't take. Humans are animals. Literally animals. We have drives and urges and are so far from enlightened it is scary. Any human, of any race or gender, from any culture on the planet will work three or four times as hard to move from last place to second to last, than they will work to move from second to first. We find humor in other people's pain if we think that person deserves pain. We feel taller when we cut the legs off others. We think others earned their position through luck and good timing while we earned our positions through hard work and dedication. We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intent."
We were sort of interrupted by laugher from the other end of the table that quickly died away.
"We are not evolved enough to live in a utopia," he said sadly.
"The plan," he said, "was to build it, fill it, and then expand it. We'd slowly bring it outsiders. Everything about the space would be modular, and most important, able to defend against an Antithesis swarm. We would slowly cover the planet, under ground, and heal the planet above. There were suicides, and murders, and people who felt trapped or who needed restrictions. Other people simply did what they loved until they no longer loved it. They were all aware that with the right conditions, conditions we engineered by the way, humans could live forever with nanites helping to keep them young and healthy."
He stabbed into the pasta on his plate with his chopsticks and then spun the plate. It was such a novel idea that I stared opened mouth as he lifted the ball of pasta up and chewed.
"Humans can handle utopia much more than they can handle immortality. I mean no offense to you in particular," Arnold said to Sara, "But look what people have done. As a species we know there are no gods or ghosts or afterlife, and yet, as a fundamental level some of us absolutely NEED there to be something else. Healing crystals or ESP or whatever. Some of us worship Samurai or athletes, streamers, musicians, or reality feed stars. We dedicate our lives to causes we deem greater than ourselves. Life after all has to mean something, or what's the point?"
"We are animals," he said as he set his chopsticks on his plate, "and we cannot survive printers. Not yet. No Samurai in the history of Samurai have subjugated people. Don't get me wrong there have been many martial law style scenarios. But even with the cults that worship us, no one has said, "Yes, worship me for I will live forever and can cure you with this single injection. I can come back from the dead. I can walk on water and change water into wine."
As he said the last he dipped his finger into his water glass and the water turned into wine.
I smiled at that and he grinned.
"Sometimes that bit," he said seriously, "Does not go over well. But it eventually makes the point. Pick a deity, or holy man from any holy book. You can do all the things that person did and more. Why shouldn't the normal people worship you?"
"It would be wrong," I said.
He snapped his fingers lightly and then pointed at me.
"I'm not worried you'll take over the world on purpose, and now that you know the dangers and can speak with your AI about them, you can hopefully avoid them. Everyone has a line. You don't really see children's cancer hospitals any more, because there are enough Samurai that say 'Fuck that' and cure them. And printing has it's place. That's the second reason I wanted to to come up here. To see everything we print. This is the ninth largest port in the world on number of shipping containers that are loaded per day. The top fifty-seven ports in the world are overseen by Samurai. Much of the freight shipped by sea is done so on Samurai controlled or owned ships. Why? Because there are Samurai that are participating in the largest conspiracy humanity has ever known. These are some of them," Arnold said gesturing at the other end of the table where people were still eating and joking. Some waved back but most continued with their own conversations.
"Much of the rice that is delivered to store shelves in North America is printed here at this facility. It is then shipped in bulk to packagers and resellers and supermarket chains. There are shell companies and subsidiaries and all manner of stuff. Some of the businesses fail and lay everyone off. Others have a record breaking year and hire more. But you know what keeps happening? Regular Jack and Jill keep farming their rice in China for sale overseas. Engineers and Geneticists keep advancing crop types and fighting heat, drought, and bugs. Humanity slowly keeps advancing into the future towards that nebulous shift between tier one and tier two."
"People will eventually notice," I said feeling a little lost with what he was saying. I could see the situation spiraling out of control and yet nothing I could come up with was impossible for a Samurai to do.
"Of course they have. Many have. Many complain on the feeds and in forums and what not. Guess who can control that an how much is seen, or when it's seen. Read a post about Samurai controlling the worlds rice supply with printers, sandwiched between a post saying the earth is flat, and another saying the moon isn't real. The human mind slots the Samurai conspiracy with the other nonsense and you go about your daily life. Human psychology is known and we have super computer AI that can sort just about anything out. Keep people in a state of merely surviving and they don't have time to question anything else. It's worked from entertaining the mob with gladiators to the Republican Southern Strategy where they used racism to turn poor white voters against poor black voters so that the two didn't team up against the rich. Keep them poor, keep them working, and give them an enemy. Migrants, immigrants, Jews, women, transgender, whatever you want. Pick the outsider so that the insiders can say, "It's US vs THEM!" and you'll have a group of humans too busy and focused on other things to notice what is really happening."
Silence stretched and I stared at the man.
Silence continued to stretch.
"Are they real, or controlled?" I asked quietly a deep anger welling up in me I'd never really felt before. Betrayal mixed with wrath.
"They what?" he asked as he shifted more food from the passing trays to his plate.
"The Antithesis."
The sound to my left died away as Arnold looked up at me.
"Whatever do you mean?" he asked.
"You said give them an enemy, give them an outsider-" I saw his face change. It didn't lose blood and go white, but there was something that indicated he had never considered that.
Silence stretched a bit and he didn't move at all. Not to breathe or blink.
He eventually shuddered and pushed his plate forward until it touched his wine glass.
"That is a disturbing thought," he said, "and one I never considered. My AI says no of course they are a real threat that has destroyed civilizations and uniqueness in the universe and that the AI were sent here to help us, but would we have accepted their help without an enemy? Would the Samurai be standing shoulder to shoulder if we didn't have an enemy to face together? Perhaps they were tired of seeing us shit where we eat with pollution and global warming. It is in our nature to accept conflict and join together to fight an outside enemy. That would be easy enough to observe and exploit. I have decided to take their word on it. Mostly because I cannot prove them wrong. Just like you'll have to take my word, or not, when I say that there is no conspiracy about the Antithesis from other Samurai. They exist to convert this world into another super hive."
There were fewer Samurai at the other end of the table. While I was glancing that way another one blinked out.
"We pull the wool over the eyes of normal humans for both their betterment and for the betterment of mankind, and now I must wrestle with the idea that the Protectorate might be doing the same to us."
There was a long silence and then Arnold shook his head and shrugged.
"Eat up. When you've had enough I'll give you a tour and you can drive the discussion."