Gazelle
Dana looked down at the herd. They scattered as the shadow of the airship passed over them. They were doing well, their numbers were up and they looked healthy. The long days didn’t seem to affect them at all. The grass savanna they lived on stretched to the snow capped mountains at the horizon. Sixty years ago it wouldn’t have seemed possible that anything could live here in Antarctica. But then, there had been ice on the poles and 10 billion humans alive back then. The most prominent instrument on the airships bridge was the life clock. In 20 centimeter high numerals it displayed an accurate count of living humans. Dana remembered the day it has dropped below ten million. She knew she’d be alive to see it drop below five.
Kyle arrived on the bridge. Kyle was a robot. When Dana was a kid the embodied artilects had looked like humans, but it turned out that didn’t work. Kyle was a newer model, his outer shell engineered from marble and gold. His face was a greek sculpture. The earlier models were almost indistinguishable from humans but people hated that. They were more comfortable with robots that looked like robots, talked like robots, acted like robots.
Why am I thinking of this machine as a He? She mused. The machines didn’t have sex, they iterated, building faster, stronger, better versions of themselves at an ever increasing rate. They weren’t trying to be like people, they’d surpassed human capabilities generations ago. One day artificial intelligence was an idea in a lab, the next day it was smarter than humans. The day after that, it was a god. For any problem twenty first century man could dream up, the artilect could supply a simple, elegant and carbon neutral solution in milliseconds.
Given the climate crunch and the oil wars, humans should have been grateful. In many ways they were, but then something unexpected happened. People were obsolete, and they knew it. They could have gone into space, conquered the galaxy, done anything aided by their artificial progeny but instead they stayed home, shut themselves in and most critically, stopped breeding. The big sulk, the last of the sociologists had called it. For the most part the artilects were happy to go off into space, visit other dimensions, travel back in time and whatever else they did without humans, but still they cared for and worried about their creators, like frail senile gandparents in a carehome or monkeys in cages. The compassion was real enough, but then maybe so was the condescension. Dana studied the gazelle, Kyle studied Dana, she thought.
A pinging alarm broke her reverie. The giant airship began to slowly turn, plotting its own course back to McMurdo. Kyle looked at her. His head tilted slightly to the side. His face a mask, yet perhaps not that inscrutable.
“Marshall is back from Mars today, you’ll be glad to see him I’m sure” he said. It was true. She was excited to see her husband, to smell him, to hear his stories of the red planet, to tell him about her successes with the gazelle, but she’d been trying to keep that from Kyle. Damn machine, he can probably read my pulse and blood pressure from across the room. She suddenly wondered if he could detect arousal, was she even now emitting hormones or pheromones or something? It made her cheeks burn, she turned to the window to cover the embarrassment, watching the herd disappear from sight. “Kyle we’ve talked about it a lot. We aren’t going to have children. I know that’s what you want, but nothing’s changed.”
November 2019, Milford Haven
Kyle arrived on the bridge. Kyle was a robot. When Dana was a kid the embodied artilects had looked like humans, but it turned out that didn’t work. Kyle was a newer model, his outer shell engineered from marble and gold. His face was a greek sculpture. The earlier models were almost indistinguishable from humans but people hated that. They were more comfortable with robots that looked like robots, talked like robots, acted like robots.
Why am I thinking of this machine as a He? She mused. The machines didn’t have sex, they iterated, building faster, stronger, better versions of themselves at an ever increasing rate. They weren’t trying to be like people, they’d surpassed human capabilities generations ago. One day artificial intelligence was an idea in a lab, the next day it was smarter than humans. The day after that, it was a god. For any problem twenty first century man could dream up, the artilect could supply a simple, elegant and carbon neutral solution in milliseconds.
Given the climate crunch and the oil wars, humans should have been grateful. In many ways they were, but then something unexpected happened. People were obsolete, and they knew it. They could have gone into space, conquered the galaxy, done anything aided by their artificial progeny but instead they stayed home, shut themselves in and most critically, stopped breeding. The big sulk, the last of the sociologists had called it. For the most part the artilects were happy to go off into space, visit other dimensions, travel back in time and whatever else they did without humans, but still they cared for and worried about their creators, like frail senile gandparents in a carehome or monkeys in cages. The compassion was real enough, but then maybe so was the condescension. Dana studied the gazelle, Kyle studied Dana, she thought.
A pinging alarm broke her reverie. The giant airship began to slowly turn, plotting its own course back to McMurdo. Kyle looked at her. His head tilted slightly to the side. His face a mask, yet perhaps not that inscrutable.
“Marshall is back from Mars today, you’ll be glad to see him I’m sure” he said. It was true. She was excited to see her husband, to smell him, to hear his stories of the red planet, to tell him about her successes with the gazelle, but she’d been trying to keep that from Kyle. Damn machine, he can probably read my pulse and blood pressure from across the room. She suddenly wondered if he could detect arousal, was she even now emitting hormones or pheromones or something? It made her cheeks burn, she turned to the window to cover the embarrassment, watching the herd disappear from sight. “Kyle we’ve talked about it a lot. We aren’t going to have children. I know that’s what you want, but nothing’s changed.”
November 2019, Milford Haven