“Is eight thousand two hundred seventy-four present?”
“I’m here.”
I strike through the number ‘8274’ on the list laid down in front of me.
“Good. Eight thousand two hundred seventy-five?”
“I’m also present.”
“Noted.” I strike through ‘8275’. “Eight thousand two hundred seventy-six?”
This is going to take a very long time.
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Two days ago one of us went missing. I know one of us went missing, because the cooks make exactly twelve thousand plates of food every evening, and exactly twelve thousand plates of food get eaten. Yesterday, after everyone else had gotten their plate of food and I went to the cafeteria to get my plate of food (as number one I always eat last) there were two plates of lasagna left. Two plates, one too many.
Now, one of us going missing or dying isn’t that big of a deal; it has happened before. In fact, despite the colony being over two hundred years old, the oldest ones alive right now are in their fifties. We can create a new one relatively cheaply. A body constructor can create a body in less than three hours, and we can instantly give him a large collection of knowledge by linking him to the shared memory space. The shared memory space, however, can only transfer knowledge, not skills, so the new one will have to receive anywhere between three days and two months of training, depending on the occupation.
Finding out who went missing so I can assign the new one to the old one’s job, however, is quite the challenge when there are twelve thousand identical copies walking around, alike in both appearance and behaviour. We have eighty-two programmers and three hundred five mechanical engineers, which means we should be able to create gates at the entrances and exits to the compound with a digital check-in and check-out system in a few hours if I chose to do so, and choose to do so I definitely will. With such a system, we can see who didn’t return with the press of a button. However, the last time someone went missing I didn’t even exist yet, and neither did anyone else who is currently alive, so no one knew it would be such a big hassle. That said, part of it taking so long is our incredibly inefficient approach. If we had created an orderly procedure beforehand, we probably would’ve been able to find the missing person in less than an hour.
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Tens of thousands of man-hours and about ten actual hours later I’m finally done finding (or rather not finding) the missing me. #11836. Of course, with my luck, the missing me had to be one of the last in the sequence. #11836 was a scout in my military limb. Eh. Scouts may not be the cheapest to train, but they also definitively aren’t the most expensive. Luckily it wasn’t a scientist, those take months to train to even a basic level, and won’t reach an advanced level for years. Scouts can be performing basic reconnaissance missions after a few weeks of combat training.
According to the shared memory space, the missing scout was sent on a mission to the Prismarine Petting Zoo that morning, on account of suspicious sightings in the area. A scout had seen a goat disappear behind a large hay bale, and when he went into the enclosure to pet it, it had entirely disappeared. Furthermore, one of the data scientists had noticed a large uptick in hospital admissions related to farm animals and biting accidents while scanning and interpreting medical records of a nearby hospital. There’s clearly something strange going on at the petting zoo, but I have no idea what.
I go into the boardroom where I meet with #3, General.
“General.”
“One.”
“Do you have any new information on the petting zoo?” I ask.
“After I found out that one of our scouts went missing,” General answers, “I immediately sent a new scout there, this time with instructions to be extra careful and not do anything out of the ordinary that could raise suspicion.”
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“Do you know when he’s returning?” I ask.
“I don’t know exactly when he’s returning,” General says, “but he sent me a message about an hour ago saying he had gathered some new intel and was immediately returning.”
The petting zoo is eighty minutes away by hoverboard, our preferred mode of transport. Small in size, easily hideable, fast, able to traverse rough terrain, hoverboards are the perfect mode of transport for covert operations, and due to our appearance as a young adult human male, travelling by hoverboard doesn’t raise any eyebrows. “We’ll wait until he’s back to see what he’s got to say,” I tell General.
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Exactly twenty minutes and fifteen seconds later, the scout enters the boardroom. “Just as I arrived at the petting zoo,” he says, “a male k’thor left the building and stepped into a red hovercar, a SkyKart model 3s.”
A k’thor?. You rarely see k’thor around here. Due to their likeness to vampires in both appearance and behaviour—a likeness so great that some suggest Bram Stoker must have been visited by one of the extraterrestrials before writing Dracula—the general population fears and rejects them, leading them to live in remote and secluded areas. “What would a k’thor be doing in a petting zoo?”
“I doubt he was there to pet the animals,” General says. “Did you see anything else?”
“He was carrying a large sports bag in one hand,” the scout said, “but I didn’t see what was inside.”
I call #4, the lead engineer, into the boardroom and explain the situation to him. “We need to surveil the place.”
“We can have a drone watching the entrance, alerting us when the red 3s arrives again,” Engineer says.
“Too risky,” General says. “We have no idea if the car will ever appear again, and if so, how long it will take. The drone’s battery will run out after a few days, and if that happens we won’t be able to refuel it without being noticed.”
“We need something mobile that can record video and audio. Something that can stay there an indefinite amount of time,” I add.
“You said it was at a petting zoo,” Engineer says. “I could construct a robot chicken. It could stay there forever—at least until someone notices its lack of ageing, which shouldn’t happen for multiple years”
“Could it refuel itself by eating seeds?” General inquires.
“Sort of,” Engineer replies, “but not regular seeds. It will eat tiny energy packets disguised as seeds. We’ll have to either secretly lace the petting zoo’s seed supply with these packets, or we can send a scout there once every while who will covertly drop some energy seeds while ‘petting the animals.’”
I decide on the first option. As a young human male, there are certain things we just can’t do, and repeatedly visiting a petting zoo without raising suspicion is one of them.
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“Something is happening,” #12, Spymaster, says. “A child just got bitten by a goat.”
“It’s a petting zoo,” I reply, “children get bitten by goats all the time.”
“Yes, but didn’t one of the data scientists say something about a stark increase in hospitalisation due to goat-related injuries? Maybe we can figure out what that’s all about.”
Spymaster presses a few buttons and the robot chicken starts quietly following the child, which is now being taken inside by one of the farmhands. The chicken leaps onto the windowsill of an open window. “You can hide under the Boston Fern that’s hanging to the right of you,” I say.
“No,” Spymaster says. “A chicken jumping onto a windowsill? Quite common and no cause for concern. A chicken deliberately hiding somewhere? Now that’s suspicious. Besides, without hands to carefully move leaves to the right position, it’s almost impossible to properly hide.”
The farmhand places the kid on a chair and takes out a small first aid kit hung on the wall. “We’re going to have to do a quick test to see if you’re okay,” he says. He takes out a large needle and an empty plastic bag. He injects the needle into the inside of the kid’s elbow. Blood starts streaming through the needle into a cable connected to the bag. The bag slowly fills and after a few minutes, the bag is full. The farmhand takes out the needle. “The test says you’re okay. You can go now.” He seals the bag and hands it to a second farmhand, who disappears into a corridor as the first farmhand takes the kid outside. “I feel lightheaded,” the kid says. “Yeah, goat bites have a tendency to make you tired,” the farmhand replies.
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“I’m pretty sure taking half a litre of blood is not a standard medical procedure to treat a goat bite,” Spymaster says.
“You think so?”
Spymaster presses a few buttons and the robot chicken reverts to normal chicken mode, walking around the farm as if nothing ever happened.