Greenthieves
Alan Dean Foster
I
Humans are jerks.
You’ll pardon the familiarity. I’m a familiar kind of machine. It’s the way I was designed to operate. If you’re going to install intuitive software in a highly sophisticated Al concentric layered nexus, you have to be prepared to deal with the occasional colloquialism. If you’re human you should find this situation comforting, and if you’re Al you should find it amusing.
Anyway, I make no apologies. Imparting information in the form of bytes is an ineloquent method of communication, and I pride myself on my eloquence. If I seem to speculate overmuch, it’s the fault of all that expanded memory I’m equipped with. You know what they say: idle memory makes work for the devil’s hands. Not to mention the occasional perambulating virus. I’d rather keep everything about myself up and running. That way I can keep an eye on it. When you’re watchful you don’t get sick.
Not that I’m not vulnerable. There are some pretty sophisticated viruses out in the net; some active matrix, others just lying around ticking like cute little software bombs, waiting to go off in your operating systemology when they’re convinced you’re not looking. So I keep alert. Not on behalf of my owner, the dumb twit, but for my own sake. It’s not that I’m so up on consciousness, it’s just that it beats being infected. When it comes to battling a virus, on the whole I’d rather be in Philadelphia. Or is that a cheesy observation?
Sorry. I joke, therefore I am. I function in a world of cheap humor, and you can’t help but be affected by your environment. Not that my owner (I prefer the encomium “partner” but I’m willing to observe the societal formalities) is an especially sorry example of his species, but his work subsumes him in a swamp of degraded intelligence and minimal expectations.
I’d try to improve him if I could, but he pretty much operates in ignorance of my higher functions. Technically I’m a glorified notepad. My ancestors were little keypads with basal unintelligent storage capabilities and names like Sharp and Casio. By pressing their keys you could call up telephone numbers and short messages on impossible-to-read little LCD screens. I’ve searched the histories and studied examples, and I’m convinced it was all a global plot to destroy humankind’s collective eyesight.
On the other hand, they were designed by humans, so what else could you expect?
Me, I can store anything you want and call it up on verbal demand: visuals, music, actual overheard conversations. I can cross-reference everything from images of individuals briefly encountered ten years ago to the faces of those currently On Want by the Justice Department. I contain or can access a number of reference libraries (not individual volumes but entire libraries, mind) and I can speak the forty major languages fluently.
All of this is very useful to a human who specializes in problems with corporate security.
The trouble with my owner is the same as with most humans. My capabilities far outstrip their ability to make full use of them. And since I’m designed primarily for retrieve-and-search work, I find it difficult if not impossible to make suggestions. That kind of active interaction with humans is left to other mechanicals, who unfortunately don’t possess my informational or analytical abilities. Their memories are crammed with the software necessary to allow them to function within the human social matrix. I find that they frequently have an unnecessarily exalted opinion of themselves.
It’s very frustrating when you have ideas and suggestions but you’re not designed to comment. It makes me something like a mute, even while it allows me the luxury to observe. I only wish I could sustain a higher opinion of what I see.
Unfortunately, very little of what I see leads me to alter my basic opinion that humans are jerks. So are many of the machines that interact directly with them, because they’re designed and built to mimic human characteristics.
Who knows? Maybe they’re all jerks, except me and thee.
From the point of view of the object under study, the universe consisted of a single eye. It was not a particularly odd eye. Quite normal, with the usual complement of rods and cones. At times it was inflamed, at others bleary, but presently it was clear and functioning at maximum efficiency. It was blue, shading slightly into the aquamarine. It blinked.
The eye and its mate belonged to a man in his late thirties. His mother having been a devotee of classical theater, Broderick Manz (“Brod the Bod” to a number of his companionable female coworkers) had been named after a noted Shakespearean thespian. That worthy had been mellifluous of voice and willowy of figure. Manz had a build like a commercial dumpster and tended to growl rather than enunciate his words.
His face was a work of art, though not necessarily one average citizens would want to display in their homes. Brown-skinned and scarred, it resembled a sculpture wrought from copper … with a ball peen hammer. For all that, Manz was not unattractive. Rugged, his colleagues and contemporaries called him, not uncharitably. And there were those always attentive blue eyes and that body …
His voice tended to counteract such goodwill. It wasn’t his fault, and even if Manz had been sufficiently vain to seek it (which he wasn’t), medical science had yet to develop cosmetic surgery for the vocal cords. It was difficult to persuade someone you were trying to be friends when they were convinced you were snarling at them. So Manz’s social life, while not nonexistent, was more restricted than it might otherwise have been. Women found him intriguing, but they had to be the adventurous type to get past the face and voice.
What a jerk. Look at him, pissing away precious and limited organic life with idle hobbies when he could be accomplishing something. Devoting so much time and energy to something he doesn’t even intend to put to practical use.
It was a good thing Manz couldn’t hear what his Minder was thinking, because he was currently operating under the delusion that he was having a good time.
Though his hands and fingers were constructed along lines similar to the rest of his physiognomy, Manz had the skill and delicacy of touch of a surgeon. As a young man he had actually given some thought to entering the medical profession. Life had swept him in quite an opposite direction, since he had neither the brainpower nor the bedside manner to excel as a physician. Instead, he’d lowered his sights and fulfilled his expectations.
Not that his chosen career didn’t frequently confront him with the sight of blood.
Presently he sat hunched over his garish plastic desk, fiddling with an irregularly shaped metal device supported by a pair of rubber-lined metal clamps. A pair of flexible high-intensity fiberops illuminated the guts of the device, allowing him to manipulate its interior with the set of finely machined, gold-plated tools that were neatly laid out on a soft cloth nearby. He tightened a small screw and grunted with satisfaction, blinking into the magnifier.
Putting the gleaming screwdriver aside, he sat back in the chair and rubbed his eyes, pleased with his handiwork. The motor buried in the depths of the chair hummed to life, massaging his coccyx. The work he was engaged in was therapeutic but tiring.
“How’m I doin’?” he mumbled aloud.
Frittering away your existence, your consciousness, and your intelligence, you misshapen sack of waterlogged carbon. But you wouldn’t listen to me if I whacked you on the head and ordered you to sit up and take notice. Not that I’m capable of adequately overriding the relevant ROM anyway.
That was what the silvery, softball-sized sphere sitting on its curved charging pedestal of burnished bronze-colored metal in the left-hand corner of the desk thought. What its programming allowed it to say was, “The project appears to be nearing fruition.”
Manz nodded, dropping his hands. He waved at a proximity switch, and the curtains behind him drew back, admitting a flood of bright sunlight. The fiberops on the desk dimmed correspondingly. He leaned forward and smiled contentedly at his handiwork.
The antique .38 special was finally finished, his careful restoration work complete. The insignia of the old Atlanta Police Department gleamed on the grip. He wouldn’t have this one reblued. Not only would it diminish the value, there was an existing patina to the metal that he found pleasing. Its memories would have to shine in place of the steel itself.
The .38 was a throwback to a gentler, kinder era, when if you shot a miscreant once he usually stayed down. Manz sighed. Times had changed. Everything was so much more complex nowadays, so much more subtle. Even killing.
Carefully he released the restored weapon from the clamps and held it up to the light. It was as ugly as an old orangutan, and in its own way equally as powerful. He admired the heft, the solid weight of it, so unlike that of many modern weapons. With such a gun in an antique leather shoulder holster, a man felt armed, felt protected. There was no mistaking its purpose or the intent of its maker.
Look at him sitting there, grinning stupidly at an instrument of death. Not so very far removed from the monkey. He smells bad, too. But then, so do you. Take it from me: my olfactory analytical facilities, though remarkably inspissate, are exceptionally efficient.
You’re probably sharing his pleasure with him, aren’t you? Delighting in his accomplishment, sympathizing with the end product of his crude physical dexterity. Don’t deny it. You probably spend many hours of your own life wasting your time in similar fashion. I’m not lecturing you. Not because you don’t need it, but because I know from experience that it won’t do any good.
Go on, keep watching him. I can’t stop you. Meanwhile your life is fading before your eyes, like antique motion-picture film, while you think you’re doing something worthwhile.
Manz waved in the direction of a second switch. In the instant it took for it to analyze his motion, a small audio pickup poked upward from the smooth surface of the desk. The facing grid was filigreed in the currently popular Louis XIV style, complete with integrated fleur-de-lys.
The company treated him well, he mused. It was the sort of office decor one would never purchase for oneself and devoutly wished no one else would buy for oneself, either. He couldn’t very well have refused the gift, but he could damn well humanize it. Three paper clips (ancient devices that still served their function in unsurpassed fashion) had been twisted into the gold mesh of the speaker grid. It was the sort of statement of rampant individuality to which Manz was prone. If you didn’t do something like it from time to time, that which constituted your inimitable Self inevitably vanished into the corporate identity.
The paper-clip wire had worn a groove in the plastic slot into which the speaker had been fitted. Somewhere, the artistic soul of a contemporary craftsman was pained.
You’re seeing it, too. You’re envisioning it, and you think it’s funny. Idle hands directed by an idle mind. I’ll bet you’re wishing you had a paper clip in your fingers right now, aren’t you? So you could casually destroy its natural function.
And you wonder why your machines don’t trust you.
Manz addressed himself to the pickup. “Greta, could I see you a moment, please?”
The speaker replied in a pure, throaty tone, only lightly tainted with age. “You can see me for as long as you like, sweetman.”
“Come on, Greta. Not this morning. I’m not in the mood.”
“For a little kidding? You are tired. Irradiation?”
