At the beginning of the second cycle, the new 1196 arrived. It was a large piece of machinery essential to the operation of several lines. Her engineering teams had finished decommissioning the old one, which was experiencing intermittent failure of the kind that could not be diagnosed and resolved during scheduled maintenance intervals.
Elisa watched the camera feed as a heavy crane began lifting the machine off its vibration-dampening foundations on the third level up a maintenance shaft. Soon it began ascending towards the vaults above processing hall three. A little over half a subcycle later, the replacement was offloaded from an overhead industrial capsule and lowered into the microplant. Engineers and operation technicians soon swarmed over it, attaching it to the foundations, hooking up cabling and hydraulics and inspecting it from the grease lines to the smallest grab iron.
As Elisa oversaw the installation and assisted with inspection checklists, she realized that regulations allowed her to visit the site and personally inspect the new machine. It might lower her productivity rating somewhat, but it would allow her to get a better impression of the lower levels of the microplant, as there is only so much that could be gleaned from the camera feeds.
Before long, the inspection itinerary was submitted and approved by her schedule master and security was making preparations. Elisa transferred her tasks to the secondary operators and disconnected from the control systems. As she left the operations room and made for the intra-plant transport system, security had already cleared most of the upper level walkways.
She made her way towards a waiting open transport capsule and boarded along with her four personal guards. It zipped through the plant and Elisa got a sense of the vast scale. While there had been many industrial complexes with surface areas larger than Microplant 27 on Earth, none were packed so efficiently in three dimensions. Her view from the control room seemed to be an exception to the rule, as there were few open sections and very little space was left unused otherwise.
The capsule arrived at its destination, a station that was situated directly above intake four. Elisa was overtaken by its enormous capacity and throughput. At maximum efficiency, over eighty thousand kilograms of intake would pass through here into pre-processing every second.
She disembarked from the capsule and was escorted through a side corridor towards the main corridor.
As this corridor was essential to the functioning of the plant, it could not be cleared out by security. Elisa felt overwhelmed by the vast stream of workers that traversed it quickly and efficiently, everyone immediately following each other in a rapid, synchronized trod. A gap in the stream of bodies admitted them. Elisa and her guards found themselves half marching, half running in the direction of processing hall three.
What happened next surprised Elisa in more ways than one.
"You are abominable!" flashed in her mind. It was a personal message sent in the nearby-local comms channel. Before she could react, three of her guards had already pushed her down and had taken up defensive positions around her, weapons at the ready.
An alarm triggered. The workers in the corridor seamlessly stopped in their tracks and turned to face the walls. All except one, which had been singled out, currently flying backward after a high-speed impact with the remaining guard. A flurry of red and grey robes sailed midair through the corridor, as did an object which Elisa initially mistook for the worker's head, that turned out to merely be an empty helmet hitting the floor moments before the contractor and the guard did.
In one swift motion, the guard pulled the worker up before coming to a stop, his arm locked around its neck. The creature was limp. Elisa noticed the guard had managed to simultaneously handcuff it and disable it with a neural inhibitor at some point during the brief moment of aerial acrobatics. The guards relaxed their stance slightly now that the offending worker was under control, allowing Elisa to stand up and evaluate the situation.
Despite the conditioning, Elisa felt unease at the unmasked contractor’s face. It was unmistakably human, but its ghoulish features, grey-in-black eyes, near-translucent skin and primitive cybernetic augmentation put it deep in uncanny valley territory and marked it as a cheap, mass-produced disposable unit.
Was the fact that the contractor had called out to her a simple matter of economics then? A result of low-grade, cost-effective conditioning that permitted a certain amount of loss? How weak and helpless the worker had been compared to the superhumanly enhanced strength and speed of the guard models, Elisa thought. Despite their low number, the security forces could effortlessly rip every single worker in the microplant to shreds in a matter of minutes. The subsequent clean-up operation would be costly, however.
But the guard had exercised restraint, with the offending worker battered but otherwise alive and well in its clutches.
You must deal with this.
Attempting to recall relevant statutes, she found herself ill-prepared to do so. Instead, she kept wondering what had motivated the worker to send the incendiary message.
Abominable? Why?
Elisa wanted to ask the worker all kinds of questions, but in its current state, it would be unable to respond.
Then get it out of there?
How?
Tell the guard to release it?
She assessed her options, but found that releasing the worker was not one of them.
Deal with this.
It’s doomed, Elisa realized. Flow has already voided its contract. The only reason why the guard hadn’t killed… disposed… it yet is because it caused offense to me directly. The guard is merely waiting for my order.
She felt herself struggling against her conditioning in the hope to find an unconventional solution that might allow her to cleverly avoid the inevitable. The conditioning held firm and forfended her from doing anything that would be considered inappropriate. Still, the thought of ordering the execution of a helpless worker over what to her was a minor slight was unpalatable.
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Waiting…
A cold fact entered Elisa’s mind. There were 1362 workers idle in the corridor while it was in lock-down.
Waiting…
So was the guard.
Waiting, and evaluating… To see how I deal with this...
DEAL WITH THIS NOW!
Elisa snapped back to the present. An acceptable solution finally presented itself.
"The inferred delay has made it impossible to complete the inspection itinerary on time. Abort the inspection and return me to main control," Elisa finally signaled, decisively ignoring the situation between the worker and the guard.
Moments after the four of them turned as one and had begun to march away, the alarm ceased and the workers in the corridors resumed their orderly trot. The fourth guard silently caught up with the rest of the escort as they re-entered the capsule station. The situation had been dealt with.
===
The rest of the cycle resolved without further incident. Before long, Elisa was once again caught up in her work, validating batches submitted for intake, requisitioning additional chemicals and throttling the output products to downstream plants in accordance with their needs, ensuring nothing would back up.
She browsed through camera feeds. Production was way up, as all lines were now fully operational. She watched as her contractors toiled on the lower levels, covered in head to toe in product debris, as the cycle was drawing to a close. Soon this shift would make their way to the hygiene stations, be issued fresh uniforms, and look as new once more.
This had been a good cycle, and the next will be even better, Elisa thought, as the door behind her opened and operation technicians brought in a new set of samples for the inspection ritual.
As expected, all products met the required specifications. Elisa passed another blessing, flicked another few drops of Product A towards the assembled masses, dismissed the technicians, and reconnected to read the past cycle’s report. Numbers were up, as was her pay.
The money left her curious about the world, and prompted her to attempt another avenue for exploration. If she could interface with the cameras in the plant, could she interface with any on the outside? She quickly found the answer was yes. Maxproxemix opened up, and Elisa’s mind floated through the vastness of its superstructure, glimpsing plant after plant after plant.
Where are all the rich people? she wondered. Up, up, go up, she urged. The levels and the densely packed plants only kept coming. She was now a hundred levels up, and the environment had not changed. Then the hundred became a thousand. Still up she went. Finally, the contractor levels made way for citizen levels. Elisa observed their routines, for there was no privacy. The citizens had better jobs, more developed yet uniform bodies, and habited tightly packed living quarters of only a few cubic meters each. To her amazement, she found that each citizen was on the same twenty-four subcycles on, one subcycle off schedule as everyone in her plant.
Where’s the leader of this bunch? Is there a Provider on this world? The information imprinted as part of her conditioning did not cover much that was not directly relevant to her work.
She ran an inquiry and received a reference to a camera feed. She hesitated. Peeking in on a Provider? She imagined she would find a lavish palace that covered the entire surface of the planet, an army of servants, and all the luxuries the production of the quintillions of workers on Maxproxemix could supply. Curiosity got the better of her, and she logged into the camera.
She was shocked at what she found.
She saw a near mirror-image of her own operations room, the Provider wearing a bronze-colored robe similar to hers. The only notable difference was that they had sixteen red guards to her four.
She looked up the Provider’s job. Providing energy and upholding the Policies. I should have known, she thought.
The Provider had a marginally better view from their control room, overlooking a massive energy station located just below the surface.
It’s a receiver for beamed energy, Elisa knew. Where does that come from? Go up, up up…
She finally breached the surface and found darkness. There was no palace. No sunlight. Just the superstructure ceiling and unknown, distant stars. Red-hot flower-like heat radiators collectively beamed their low-energy photons off towards a single point in space.
Where’s the entrance port of that power station? Elisa wondered. With no atmosphere to refract it, the energy beam itself was undetectable and could not be used as a point of reference. Before long she had found it. She looked up and found a faint blue spot in the sky. Anything up there? She searched for cameras and found some.
Fourteen subcycle time lag, she noticed. The camera feed is being transmitted at the speed of light? Well, let’s see.
The view was magnificent. She found a series of stations orbiting a black hole, somehow siphoning energy off it and beaming it to Maxproxemix. Elisa attempted to access other internal cameras, but found this was as far as she could go. The inner workings of these systems were off-limits to her. She marveled at the sight for a good three minutes, playing with the effects of the gravitational lensing near the event horizon.
Only one thing in this universe is more hungry for energy than a black hole, she thought. Us.
She reverted back to a surface camera and looked up the Mover manifests, the enormous Provider spacecraft that could instantaneously transport cargo over vast distances. She was surprised to find no recent Mover visits; the last one had called over a century ago. No imports or exports, she thought. An entirely self-sufficient, self-perpetuating world, recycling everything, even its waste heat. She felt a vague sense of pride being a part of that process, albeit at the lowest level.
If there is no trade, no luxury and barely any time off, then what is the money used for, she thought, realizing she hadn’t found the answer to her original question that had prompted her exploration.
She ran an inquiry, and found most money was spent on skill packages, elicitation procedures, specifically tailored disposable contractors, cybernetics and other aids that enhanced productivity. However, the most valuable commodity were commissions that held a higher status, which were put up for auction.
Here, people pay for their jobs, she realized. It is one big competition! Become more efficient, earn more money, buy a better job that allows you to earn even more, provided one is skilled, focussed, and productive enough to meet the quota. Failing that, you get terminated and tumble down the social ladder. The auctioning system makes the prices flexible, and ensures that each individual competes against every other and only the most productive ones rise to the top… This entire world, it has no goal. It is all one big game for comparative status, with the contractors as its pawns.
What are the Providers trying to tell me?