The two gladiators stood on the ground, facing each other. Surrounding them on all sides were cage walls; various platforms and obstacles hung from chains, connected to the bars that formed the ceiling. Any of these could be used as help or hindrances, possibly even weapons. The chains suspending them in the air might serve as cover, or with sufficient skill, a type of bolas or konpei, useful to entangle an opponent. Various objects, of a wide variety of shapes and sizes, also littered the arena, some arranged in racks, others haphazardly spilled onto the floor. The possibilities were as limitless as their imaginations, and too complex to solve with any reasonable confidence in real time. Chess has nothing on combat.
Each of them rested quietly, taking in the details of their environment, and each other, with every sense available to them. Their nerves surged with life, and awareness. The call to battle could happen at any moment. The quiet murmur from the spectators bled off the impending surge of excitement, as the supporters of the red team and the blue team speculated on the imminent success or failure of their champion.
Finally, the klaxon sounded. Quickly, their blades folded out from where they had been stored, and each one leaped into the air, their propellers whirring ferociously. The murmuring gave way to cheering; each combatant fought to separate the noise of the crowd from the far more pertinent sounds of battle.
The first projectiles soared through the air, aerodynamic darts with their own rudders and flaps, used to steer them after launch. Each employed this tactic, as well as expecting it. With a combination of predictive motion tracking, aerodynamic knowledge, and tactical wisdom, the darts sought out their targets; through a combination of inertial changes, deft flying, and judicious use of cover, the deadly missiles were avoided.
Soon, the underwhelming success of this tactic was acknowledged by both, and it was discarded in favor of something resembling jousting. Pondering the delicate subtleties of momentum, each tried to ram his opponent; although the propellers were an obvious target, sudden changes in rotational speed made it easy to move them out of the way. The true target lay in the thorax, the host of all the most important organs, including the brain. At times, the jousting gave way to swordplay, as each tried to swat the other’s weapon, attempting to gain even a moment of advantage.
The red duelist found itself knocked backwards by a fortuitous blow from its opponent; the blue supporters cheered. Almost too fast for the naked eye, it bounced off the cage wall, flipped itself around, and caught the blue swashbuckler with a devastating transverse whack. The blue trooper momentarily spun out of control, colliding with an obstacle before righting itself; in a flash, it ducked for shelter. Team Red erupted in jubilation.
The red scrapper immediately charged its lance into its adversary’s sanctuary, sending it swinging. The poor blue militant took the full force of its refuge’s betrayal, caroming artlessly off a hung platform and spiraling clumsily to the ground. Seeing this, the red knight stopped in mid-air, and merely pointed its weapon upwards, in a respectful gesture. The wounded blue tussler tried to limp into a better position, preparing for another round.
Sam arrived at the arena; he banged on the bars to get everyone’s attention. “People! Playtime is over!” They responded with a sea of juvenile groans and whines. Sam was unfazed. “No! I just got word from Mr. Thompson! He’s going to be here with an investor in ten minutes!” Quickly, their faces assumed serious expressions as they ran back to their stations.
Gary unlocked his computer; the usual barrage of in-progress software assailed his eyes. “Couldn’t he have given us more warning?”
Dwight shrugged as he straightened out the jumbled papers on his desk, before putting them into a drawer. “Well, that’s what we deserve for getting too familiar with him. Never forget, he’s a suit!”
Isabel peered over the cubicle wall. “Oh, come on, he’s not that bad.”
Gary shrugged. “Yeah…by the standards of suits, he’s really not a bad guy. He certainly supports our work!”
Dwight’s desk now looked more organized. “I know, I was just venting. But still…ten minutes?”
Irwin was standing behind them. “You know how it is for suits. If an important customer, or investor, wants something, they have to do it immediately. And shi—” He caught himself; Sam was glaring at him. “Well, you-know-what rolls downhill.”
Stacy chimed in. “And since when has he ever been on time? I think we have plenty of slack.”
Her words proved prescient; they had a full twenty minutes to prepare for his arrival, far more than they needed. The door opened, and Eric Thompson, the youngest of the high-ranking executives in Unlimited Partners, entered the lab’s foyer, grinning widely. Behind him was the tall, lanky, and increasingly familiar form of Brian McTierney, the president of a legacy civic-engineering firm, and one of their newest investors. Even the engineers were aware his opinion could sway a lot of well-heeled captains of traditional industry to join their side. Dwight wished he had dressed more conservatively today.
Eric spoke up. “And so we come to the nerve center of our company’s future. How we pay for our operations is of course important, but without a firm grasp on what’s coming next, there’s very little that’s worth paying for! Let me introduce to you our premier research-and-development wing…16otaku!” The assembled scientists and engineers beamed happily.
Confusion washed over Brian’s face. “Ota…what now?”
“Otaku!” Stacy piped up. “It’s Japanese for ‘nerd’. We felt it described us well. As for the 16…it’s something of an inside joke.”
Brian chuckled to himself. “I have a feeling this is only the beginning of things I won’t understand today.”
“Don’t worry, they’ll do their best to explain it to you,” Eric remarked. “They’re surprisingly good at that. Even I feel I have a decent grasp on this place!”
“Well, I have one question right off the bat,” chided Brian. “I was expecting more of a pigsty. How do you all keep this place so clean?”
Sam smiled. “What a great segue into our research direction!” Scattered snickers flitted from the assembled engineers. “We’re focused on using the latest advances in artificial intelligence to create consumer products that give people back their most precious commodities…time and energy!” As he spoke, a few of their robotic cleaning devices glided to where he stood, surrounding his feet and looking up at him. “A big part of that is household maintenance. We’ve had dishwashers, clothes washers/dryers, and automatic sprinkler systems for years. Robotic vacuums are a recent addition, but they were unable to handle complex tasks. But our current generation of maid-bots can handle real-world conditions!”
He looked down at his gleaming metal minions. “OK, gang! Show him what you can do!”
They immediately scattered, searching out signs of disorder. One of them burst forth with hoses and brushes, and cleaned a nearby office chair. One protrusion paused momentarily over a spot; it withdrew, and a different hose emerged, which promptly began steam-cleaning a stain. Several seconds later, the stain was gone, and the appendage retreated into the base. Another robot scurried under the desk, vacuuming up dust and debris. As it left, it neatly placed a pen it had found onto the desk, after sanitizing it. They continued down the line of workstations.
“How did it know the pen wasn’t garbage?” Brian wondered brightly.
“They learn over time,” Dwight explained. “Their artificial intelligence is leaps and bounds over anything else available today.” He reached down to a bot that was scurrying by. “Good boy!” The bot paused to receive the scratch on its carapace, then continued on its way.
Brian smirked. “You treat them like your pets! It’s as if you believe they’re really alive.”
“Actually, sir, they sort of are,” Sam declared. “A large portion of their intelligence is derived from biological material.”
Brian frowned. “Then is it really artificial? I once heard you use cat brains from strays.”
Sam raised his palms in a pleading motion. “You’re talking ancient history. Our machine intelligence is a sophisticated combination of computers and lab-grown organic material, merged fluidly to create near-sentience. No one has to die any more.”
“Really?” Brian marveled. “And they work better than what nature produces?”
“For our purposes, they do,” Irwin conveyed. “When we used animal brains, we had to induce the neurons to unpattern themselves; they would expand in the tank, looking like a cloud of fibers floating in the fluid. Then we would train them to do what we wanted, and they would contract again. But it was very time-consuming, the results were never as intelligent as the original animal, and there would be leftover traces of negative personality characteristics. But once we could grow our own neurons, all of these problems vanished.”
Brian blinked his eyes. “I’m not going to pretend I understand all of that.” That elicited a few laughs. “What I heard was you don’t kill animals anymore, and the results are better.”
“Indeed, you’re grasping it perfectly!” Sam grinned. “Besides, we couldn’t bear to keep killing stray cats. Our hearts went out to all of them! Bruno, over there, has quite a bit to do with that.”
Brian turned to look at a nearby couch. There lay a large tomcat, well-groomed and perfectly relaxed. At the sound of his name, he raised his head and contemplated them with a disinterested look. Isabel joined in. “At one point, he was just another stray, picked up by the animal-control robots. But we were immediately struck by the look in his eyes; more than any of the other cats we’d encountered, his eyes seemed to glow with intelligence. So we kept him as a pet, and he motivated us to strive for a better solution. And now we have one!”
Sam raised his finger. “Actually, this brings up something I wanted to show you. Maid-bot!” One of them stopped what it was doing and wheeled toward Sam, pausing in front of him. “Go clean up Bruno.”
The bot rolled towards Bruno, slowing as it approached. A cable extended from the robot’s base, but at the end was a hand-like attachment with articulated fingers. It slowly approached Bruno’s head, and began lightly scratching him behind the ears. Bruno blinked his eyes a few times, then started moving his head around, pushing into the hand, enjoying the attention. After several seconds of this, two more attachments extended from the robot, gently lifting Bruno’s body into the air; he stood up and stretched in the classic feline way, still completely calm. One attachment slowly ramped up the vacuum pressure, and removed the fur from under where Bruno lay; another one began grooming him, also slowly increasing the rate of airflow. Bruno stood there sedately, letting them brush and vacuum him all over. Several seconds passed, then finally most of the attachments withdrew. The one with the hand-like tool remained, to give Bruno one final scratch on the head; he pushed into it affectionately, then settled back down on the couch and resumed his nap.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Brian was astonished. “Every cat I’ve ever seen is terrified of the vacuum! That was really incredible!”
“Even Bruno had to learn to accept that, but we approached it gently,” Stacy remarked. “It helps that he’s always seemed OK with technology. It’s not for nothing that he’s our lab cat! He’s our little aibo! That’s Japanese for ‘buddy’.”
“I was going to ask about that,” Brian interjected. “I don’t think I’ve seen so many Japanese posters in my life.” Plastered over the walls were several depictions of Japanese animation; most of it appeared to be action-oriented or superhero-related, all the women with short skirts and impossibly long legs.
“Scientists and engineers have traditionally drawn a lot of inspiration from science fiction,” Sam related. “Most of us just happen to be fans of anime and manga. That even shows up on the robotic cables!”
“It…what?” Brian seemed confused.
“Maid-bot!” One of them interrupted its cleaning duties to move near Sam. He smiled coyly and gestured to Brian. “Show him your tentacles!”
The maid-bot slid up to Brian; in a flash, all of its cables flailed upwards. Brian jumped back, but the cables didn’t go near him; instead, they simply undulated in the air as the maid-bot made a silly monster sound. Brian could now see that the cables had minute depictions of squid-tentacle suckers all over them; he guffawed loudly. The maid-bot stopped its roaring, retracted its cables, and went back to work. Brian’s eyes teared up with mirth. “And you did that just for fun?”
“Not completely,” Sam pointed out. “It actually increases their grip traction, when they need to hold onto something. The cables are completely prehensile anyway, so the patterns are actually practical!”
Brian threw up his hands. “This is amazing. Just amazing. I’ve seen the robots rebuilding the city, cleaning up the debris and patching up structures, but I hadn’t seen them up close. I had no idea they were so sophisticated. I’ve never seen anything like this!” He arched his eyes. “How come no one else has done this before? How did you get so far ahead of the curve?”
Dwight sighed. “Well…it’s a combination of things. We get a lot of support here from the company. They truly wish to push the envelope, and we’re happy to do it! And we have a fantastic team of engineers here, with skills we can trust. Whereas before…” He trailed off. “How should I put this?”
Stacy leveled her eyes at Dwight. “If you don’t want to say it, I will!”
Dwight gestured to her with a flourish. “Be my guest.”
Stacy fixed Brian with an intense gaze. “All of us have had to work with a lot of lazy morons in the past. By the standards of traditional companies, each of us has a ‘spotty’ work record. But it’s completely unfair! We were all high performers with true vision and the skills to back them up; most of our co-workers, sadly, have been apathetic clock-punchers. We found ourselves marginalized for our supposed inability to get along with our so-called peers. The real story, as far as we’re concerned, is that we don’t suffer fools well, and have little tolerance for slackers and phonies.”
Brian smiled broadly. “Gee, miss, why don’t you just come out and say what you really think?” The room filled with polite chuckles. “She’s always like this,” Gary beamed. “It’s why I hope to work with her for the rest of my career.”
“Here, we can soar to the height of our skills, talent and motivation!” Isabel gushed. “And all the normal people…well, they can go off and do normal things, somewhere far away from us. I’m sure there’s a place for them somewhere. But it’s not here.”
“We have to find places for a lot of different types of people,” Eric added. “It hasn’t been easy. Having to run a corporation with the members of an existing population has been no small task. But if they’re willing to work, and make an honest effort, we keep them.”
“What happens to the ones that don’t?” Brian cocked his eyes curiously.
“We can discuss that later with Linda Carlyle. She’s one of our directors in Human Resources, in charge of that very problem.”
“Fair enough,” Brian conceded. “I’d rather hear about what you all do, anyway! I still wonder how you can create so many intelligent devices. It seems like magic!”
“It is magic!” Isabel trilled. “The magic…of family.”
Brian chortled politely. “Now I know you’re putting me on.”
“Hardly, sir,” Gary filled in. “We can only program them so much. And instructions for neural tissue are notoriously difficult to upload directly. So instead of being programmed…our devices are raised!”
Sam waved towards a door. “This sounds like an excellent time to explore the next part of our facility.” They moved through the door to an adjacent room, lit eerily with a bluish-green glow. “Welcome to the nursery!”
Brian gasped. It looked to him like a set from a 1950s sci-fi B-movie, except it was in color. Fibrous material grew in translucent vats; small robots that looked like giant ants fished out clumps of it and put them into glass orbs. Other ants grabbed assortments of spare parts from conveniently-placed racks and laboriously assembled new spherical bodies. A later stage attached legs and sense-organ packages. The new robots walked off the assembly line, looking much like giant spiders.
Brian gestured helplessly. “Now this is really too much. I’m overwhelmed. I’ve never seen such glorious mad-science in all my life! I half-expect some…oh, what are those things called, that throw off all the sparks?”
“Tesla coils?” Irwin pointed to a few darkened devices in the corners. “We have those. But they had a bad effect on neural tissue quality. So we had to turn them off.” His eyes gleamed. “It’s not like we didn’t try!”
Brian straightened his jacket. “Well, now I feel everything’s in place.” A few joined him in light laughter. “But where do all the spiders go?”
Gary stood near another door; all around him, the spider-bots moved through flap-covered holes near the floor, like a row of demented doggie doors. “Sir, if you thought this room was mad-science…wait ’till you see what’s next.”
Casting his gravitas to the wind, Brian gleefully strolled through the door. After only a few steps, he stopped and covered his mouth with his hands, gaping at what he saw. The others politely walked around him and moved further into the room.
Much of the cavernous hangar space in this area was filled with what looked like a jungle gym from another planet. It wasn’t just ladders and girders; there were a multitude of self-contained areas, small open-walled rooms and arenas, each seemingly with their own theme. In one area, spider-bots wrestled each other as ant-bots looked on. In another, ant-bots apparently performed repairs and upgrades on other bots. Yet another appeared to be a circus, with bots flying from trapezes and catching other ones in mid-air. The play area stretched out into the distance, the details lost in the heights and depths.
“What are they doing?” Brian could hardly contain himself.
Stacy slid up beside him and whispered. “They’re learning.”
Sam beheld the wonderment like a proud parent. “Here you see the bots going through their training. The first step is to understand the concepts of spatial perception, inertia, and gravity. None of them possess that knowledge inherently; it must be learned. Afterwards, they’re put through a battery of tests, to determine their abilities and skills. The way neural tissue arranges itself is still something of a mystery, and there’s even less data on lab-grown tissue. But these bots are surprisingly like newborn infants; their environment and experiences affect them greatly. So we have to evaluate how they develop.”
“What happens to them after that?” Brian continued to gape at his surroundings.
“It’s much like people,” Dwight stated. “After they finish basic training…they go to college! Spread throughout this complex is a nearly unlimited variety of higher education. Most bots pick up several certifications, qualifying them to do different types of jobs. And some choose to be teachers, and stay in here to mentor the newbies!”
Brian turned to Dwight suddenly. “Did you say…choose?”
Dwight’s eyes twinkled. “I did indeed! As Sam mentioned earlier, these bots show near-sentience. They’re not capable of higher reasoning; the quality of our lab-grown neural tissue isn’t good enough for that. But we estimate their intelligence is a little past crows, but not quite up to cats. They’re pretty good at grunt work. You’ve seen them doing construction and demolition work out in the city. You saw some of our more sophisticated ones today, keeping the lab tidy. We hope to field those in a couple of weeks. We expect our next project to be robot butlers, able to do more for you than just clean.”
Brian looked wistful. “Your bots could already put my domestic help out of business. I’d hate to do that to them.”
“But don’t you see?” Eric interjected. “That would free them up to do something more productive! As long as they’re willing to work, and make an honest effort, they’re welcome to stay in our city. And we’d rather let them rise to their full potential, instead of trap them in a job that can be done by robots!”
Brian sighed. “That does sound better for them, doesn’t it.”
“The court of public opinion is still judging our effort,” Eric reminded. “We have to demonstrate that this is a better way of living, and governing, than what’s happening in the rest of the country. There, automation puts people out of work all the time, quite often permanently. They lose their income, they lose their self-respect, and worst of all, they lose their hope for the future. Unlimited Partners is all about freeing people from the trap of dependency and desperation, not just because it’s the human thing to do, but because the alternative is a terrible waste of valuable resources! It’s just good business!”
Brian shook his head. “This is such a nice change of pace from the old ways. I remember when the titans of industry simply chewed people up and spit them out.”
Eric smiled wanly. “That’s exactly what caused the problem that the rest of the country is dealing with. We’re here to try something different…something more sustainable.”
Brian beamed. “I’m sure glad I joined this on the ground floor!” He looked past Eric to an open door. “What’s down there? Is that a cage?”
Stacy blushed. “Oops, I guess we left that door open.” The others chuckled. “Well, may as well show you some of our more advanced research!” All began walking towards the door. “In here is our battle arena, where our latest prototypes fight each other,” Stacy chimed. “Combat has always been the ultimate competition, and there’s certainly no shortage of need for crowd control and pacification, so…”
They entered the room. Stacy looked around uncertainly. “Where are they?” The cage door was open.
Sam was aghast. “They can jimmy locks now?!”
Eric turned to Sam. “You mean to tell me we have two highly-armed, near-sentient robots on the loose?”
Sam tapped on his phone. “Let’s not panic yet. I should be able to find them.” Two dots appeared on his screen. “Ah, here they are. They’re just around the corner, in our workbench area.”
“Doing what?” Eric peered at Sam’s screen.
“Not sure, but they’re not moving,” Sam replied. “Let’s go take a look.”
“Is it safe?” Brian worried. “Somehow, killer bots don’t sound all that safe.”
“How’s this,” Eric offered. “Sam and I will go up ahead, and see what they’re doing. Does that work for you?”
“Way ahead of you, boss!” Eric caught up with Sam just as he disappeared around a corner.