Helen was with us, sitting on the spare couch. She wasn’t strapped in, merely holding herself in place… but she was an android, and acceleration really didn’t seem to bother her.
She was twisting her hands together so hard the golden material of her fingers creaked. It surprised me that an android could manage to register that much anxiety. A lot of people don’t realize that AIs aren’t built to register emotion only in order to make the evolved types feel more comfortable around them. They’re built to feel because, as far as anyone can tell, emotion is a critical part of cognition, and trying to build A-life without it never results in emergent sapience.
So her having emotions didn’t surprise me, antique though her design was. What surprised me was that she was as deregulated as I would expect an unrightminded human to be.
I guess the expectations of reasonable behavior were different back then?
A tug came out and relieved us of Afar, pulling him around toward the chill and dark of the methane section, which was located behind the bulk of the hospital, relative to the Saga-star and the Core. We zoomed along on another vector, toward our assigned ox airlock in the Emergency Department. It was all so terribly, weirdly routine.
A private ambulance zipped past us on a priority course. Sally changed vector to accommodate. Tsosie made an irritated noise.
“It could be a critical patient,” I said.
“I suppose that happens occasionally,” he replied, with a significant expression.
It happened more often than not, but I didn’t feel like arguing with him. We were currently nonemergency traffic, which meant other traffic took priority. Though Tsosie wasn’t wrong that some nonemergency traffic was more equal than others: the Synarche guaranteed everybody a humane subsistence, care, and an income, but it didn’t promise to allocate resources beyond that unless you could show societal benefit for that allocation, potential or real.
If you had a needed skill, you might be required to enter service for a while—but if that happened, any debts or resource obligations you might have accrued from additional allocated resources would be forgiven at the end. If you hadn’t accrued an obligation, the Synarche would assume one toward you that you could claim at a future date.
Say you were a pilot, and you wanted to operate a private ambulance, for example, like the one whose taillights were glowing blue as it turned into dock ahead of us. If you had served, your obligation for the resources—the equipment—would be paid off in advance. At least some of the equipment, anyway. A private ambulance was probably a lot of resources.
And if you had a private ambulance, that counted as a needed resource, and the Synarche might call you back into service on a short-term emergency basis fairly frequently. The sleek silver ship with the massive white coils that was nuzzling up to the hospital’s spinning flank might be full of plague victims, or running vaccines under government contract.
The Synarche governed itself by datagen and simulation: game theory and models, run by both AI specialists and us slowbrains. Some people made playing the simulators a full-time service position, though I didn’t think it ranked very high on the resource-allotment scale. Those models, when compared, led to governance by emergent consensus.
The Synarche mandated a certain return on its investment in society and infrastructure from those who isolated a significant amount of personal resources from the community. My species hadn’t quite been there on its own, though before we’d connected with the Synarche we’d already largely adapted ourselves to a more commensal lifestyle than the one we’d developed in the Before. This process was helped along by the fact that the lifestyle we’d developed in the Before had led to the Eschaton, and to people fleeing Terra en masse in glorified soap bubbles like Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Rightminding, like the concepts of Right Thought, Right Action, and Right Speech that had preceded it, wasn’t such a bad system for correcting some of evolution’s kludges. A lot of kludges were trivial to fix now, such as shoulder joints and spines that didn’t cause constant pain after the age of thirty-five, and so on. But despite rightminding, some Synizens still managed—through ingenuity, drive, or uncorrected sophipathology—to hoard more resources than they had any imaginable use for. But some of that also came back to the Synarche in the form of assessments, and those assessments went to bolster the public good. The resources from those assessments built things like—ta-da—Core General.
And my exo, for that matter, which benefits me and my quality of life almost exclusively. Although it also makes me capable in my chosen career.
As you can probably tell, I’ve had this argument with Tsosie often enough to manage both sides of it quite fluently by now.
So if a rich person was cutting us off, well, we weren’t in a hurry right now anyway. And if we had been, we would have had priority. They might have a legitimate medical emergency on board all the same, something that a routine flight could make way for.
I kept sneaking sideways glances at Helen. This wasn’t routine. She wasn’t routine. We were bringing home a piece of history. Nothing in the human galaxy would ever be quite the same again.
Sally and Loese didn’t bother the rest of us with the coms chatter, leaving me free to look down on the hospital with all my usual feelings of awe and appreciation. Core General had been built by the combined resources of the entire Synarche, all the thousands of syster species. Well, fewer than that, I guessed, because it was built decans ago and was constantly being updated. But that didn’t stop the sheer scale of the project from flatly amazing me.
It was a gobsmacking accomplishment. Not only was it huge, it was intricate. Different systers had different environmental and gravitational needs, and environments were stacked from hub to rim of the spinning station to accommodate them. The apex
