Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

George snapped at the robot, “What do you want?”

“Well, George, you aren’t following your routines. Normally you take a walk to the shops this time of day. I wondered if you’d forgotten.” The robot’s voice was comically melodramatic, intended to intone interplanetary dangers, devoted to domestic trivia.

George said to me, “You see what I mean? They turn your home into a nursery.” He barked at the robot, “No, I hadn’t forgotten. I’m just not a chuffing robot like you. I have free will.”

The robot said, “Well, so do I, George, but we can discuss philosophy later. Wouldn’t you like to take your walk? Perhaps your new friend could go with you.”

“It’s not a friend, it’s a nephew. And we’re drinking beer and talking. So clear off.” He aimed a kick at the robot. His foot passed clean through it, scattering it to pixels that quickly coalesced. The robot, grumbling, rattled out of the room. “Little prick,” said George.

The design turned out to be a VR copy of a toy from George’s long-gone childhood, a representation of a robot from some forgotten TV show.

“I never imagined you as a nostalgia buff, George.”

“Well, you have to have a personal care assistant, ” George said, spitting out the words. “You should have seen the other designs. But if it didn’t play a mean game of chess I’d have scrambled it long ago. Little prick.”

As we talked, and George made me lunch — a light Italian dish of pasta with baked fish, good if a little heavy on the garlic — the house and its contents continued to fuss around him. George responded to most of this with a cheery curse, but he took his pills and obeyed the rules.

He only had to live like this because the family, I, wasn’t around to look after him any better.

The population of the elderly had hugely expanded during George’s lifetime. He liked to say that the commuters who had once journeyed daily out of here had all come back in their old age, “like a flock of elderly gulls returning to their nesting cliff.” But there weren’t enough youngsters around to look after them all, even if our hearts had been in it. So it was up to the robots. Without artificial sentience, if the machines hadn’t been able to fulfill the state’s duty of care to its citizens, George said he didn’t know how we would all have coped. “Maybe put us all to work, in the Sunny Vales Gulag of the Twilight Years. Although euthanasia would be simpler.”

I was silently thankful for the empathetic intelligence of the designers who had made George’s mandatory companion a chess-playing, bickering toy robot rather than a bland, soulless nurse.

After lunch we took a walk. George said he would show me the new managed forest that was growing up on the outskirts of town. “Off the Stockport Road,” he said. “Only a mile or so. Used to be a golf course. Nobody plays golf anymore.”

So we walked. The day was mild, the sunlight hazy and washed out. The air seemed reasonably fresh, with only a faintly polluted tinge to it, an acidic smell like crushed ants.

The hike wasn’t that easy. The road surface was mostly silvertop to allow the pod buses and rickshaws to pass, but the sidewalks, or pavements, as George called them, were little used: cracked and weed-infested, you had to watch where you stepped. George had been supplied with exoskeletal supports, but he said he had locked the “clanking splinty things” in a spare bedroom. He walked with a stick well enough, however.

That robot tailed us, grumbling to itself.

As we walked our talk gradually spiraled out from my work on Kuiper. I began to tell George about Tom and his accident. Actually George had known all about it. He used his house’s resources to follow news about Tom and other family members; in a wired-up world nobody is far from a camera.

I tried to tell him how we’d got together in that dismal hotel in Heathrow. George listened, and though he didn’t say much he seemed to understand.

He dug into the issue of the waterspout and the gas hydrates. “How are these gases stored? Is there a critical temperature at which they will be released? How much is there exactly?…”

He asked smart questions, having once been an engineer himself. He had worked in software, until he had been made redundant by Moore’s Law, he liked to say, the relentless expansion of computer capacity. His career had spanned the milestone time when the first human-level sentience systems came on the market at a budget an average household could afford. Now, nobody designed software anymore; for many of its generations it had designed itself. And there were no more analysts, programmers, or software engineers; instead there were “animists” and “therapists” who sought to understand the strange new kinds of minds that permeated the world. George had been too old for any of that. But there had been plenty of work for him to see out his career on the “legacy suites,” some decades old, that still lay at the heart of many major systems, and were now threatening us with the digital millennium. As George said, the present is built on the past, even in software; he said he finished his career feeling more like an archaeologist than an engineer.

Soon his questioning about the hydrates exposed the limits of my knowledge. But he agreed with me that Tom’s experience might be a bellwether warning about more serious dangers.

“Michael, if you’re concerned about this, you should go find out what the implications are. I find it hard to believe nobody’s thought of this before.”

“Find out from who?”

He could be sarcastic sometimes. “Forgive me for stating the obvious. But maybe you could start with the Center for Climate Modeling. You’d think they would have some handle on it all since it is their job. They’re based in Oklahoma, aren’t they? We can check it out back at the house.”

“They’ll never listen to me.”

“Oh, I bet I can find a way in. I still have contacts with the Slan(t)ers.” This was a dubious old conspiracy-theory organization, scattered around the planet like a terrorist network, with whom George had had dealings long ago. “Small-world networks,” he would say. “Whoever you’re trying to reach, there is a Slan(t)er who knows another who knows somebody, and so forth. The Slan(t)ers are a bunch of old nuts. But then so am I.”

“But even if the climate modelers are mapping the hydrate issue, if the whole polar ocean is going to blow its lid, what is there to do about it?”

He snorted. “You design chuffing starships. Can’t you think of anything?”

“Not offhand,” I said heavily, “no.”

“Then start thinking. If you do dig into this business of the gas hydrates, if there’s a significant threat and if there is some way to stop it, you might do some good.” He winked at me. “And of course you will be building up a connection between you and Tom. But, you know, I think you ought to find some way of talking to your son other than through mega-engineering… In here.”

We had come to a gate in an iron fence. Beyond lay a park, with trees scattered over a lawnlike expanse.

We walked in, stepping onto the grass. George sighed with a stiff pleasure at the softness of the ground.

Small black shapes moved purposefully through the grass at my feet. They looked like ants, but I saw the flash of metal jaws and even the spark of tiny lasers; they were miniature bots, nano-gardeners, patiently tending the forest of grass around them.

I pointed them out to George. “Nobody cuts the lawn nowadays,” he said. “Pity. I always enjoyed the smell of freshly cut grass…”

We came to the shade of a tree, a sycamore. I helped George to the ground so we could sit for a while, leaning on the bark. George was breathing hard, and I realized with a pang of guilt that the kilometer or so we had walked was a long journey, for him. My feeling wasn’t lightened by the accusing glare of the robot.