Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (12 page)

Then, when the speeches were over, she stood up with her row, filed forward, received her diploma and her handshake from the dean, passing within ten feet of John Praxis, and went back to her seat. Sometime later, after more ceremonial foofaraw, they all swung their tassels across on command. They were all certified graduates, if not yet registered, state licensed, or exactly employable engineers. Then they all stood up and filed out.

Susannah fought through the crowd to get next to the stage as the august old men came down. She pressed close to her great-grandfather and reached for his sleeve.

“Gee-Daddy!” she called out. “Howza! I bin meanin’ ta-talkya!”

Before she could get any farther, an unsmiling young woman with broad shoulders and strong arms, her blonde hair lacquered down until it resembled a football helmet, swiftly interposed herself between them. Without visible effort the woman intercepted Susannah’s reaching hand, put pressure on the ball of her thumb, and curled her hand back, followed by her wrist and forearm. Susannah never got within six inches of the old man.

“Wait, ma’am! Heeza mah gee-daddy!”

The young woman looked uncertain.

“Pamela,” Praxis said. “Let her go.”

The woman released her and stood back. The old man studied Susannah, nodded, and took her arm himself, more gently than Pamela had. He led her into a side corridor. When they had found a quiet space, he turned to face her.

“You’re Jeffrey’s daughter, aren’t you? Yes, I remember he said you would be graduating this year. You’re …”

“Susannah,” she supplied.

“Yes. I’m sorry. I should have looked you up.”

“We ’n me gotta talk serious-like, Gee-Daddy. Whah choo said back dere, ’bout d’importanza tech’nal educ’n, dat not be troot. Ya know I bin makin’ ta grade down yeer, ta Stanford, but da jobs fo’ me ’n mine, even by mechan’al ’gineer, trudát, day be none.”

As she talked, she could see his face grow longer and more serious. He was frowning by the end, and Susannah was sure she had gotten through to him. But then he turned to the hard-faced young woman and asked, “Do you understand any of this, Pamela?”

The woman grinned. “Some of it. You have to coast along on the high points.”

He turned back to Susannah. “Speak Standard English, girl—not that patois your generation uses.”

“Um, yes—sir,” she answered.

“I’m not surprised you can’t find job, not if that’s how you interview.”

“But there’s no jobs to be found, Gee—um, Great-Grandfather. No interviews to go on. Not even a nibble.”

“You’re in mechanical engineering, right? Well, that’s not exactly high demand in the construction business, but I suppose if you applied at the firm—”

“But I
did
apply, sir. Three weeks ago! The Human Resources intelligence talked to your resource databases and turned me down. Fifteen seconds. Flat.”

“Your name didn’t ring a bell?” he asked.

Of course, she had expected it would—and grant her royal-gut treatment and all. But to mention it now, to him, would sound like whining. “No, sir. But I don’t want any special favors.”

“That’s praiseworthy. What
do
you want?”

“There’s four hundred of us with bachelor’s degrees, going after two or three—not even that many—human jobs out there this year, and even those jobs want doctorates or some kind of cross-specialization. All I’ve got for four years of hard work is a piece of paper. My friends call it a hunting license. They be jokin’ of course.”

John Praxis put his head down, eyes closed in thought. When he raised them, he looked sad.

“Finding work has never been easy. Even in the boom times—”

“These
are
boom times … sir.” She heard the whine creep into her voice.

“Yes, I suppose they are.” He paused. “Maybe you could branch out, go afield, look for a different line of work. You have to be creative and find some way to add value to society.”

“Everything is done by machines these days,” she insisted.

“Oh, come now! There are still personal services.” He glanced at Pamela.

“Yes, I could become a masseuse. Or a prostitute.” Susannah was getting angry now. “My dad says you keep her—” She pointed at Pamela. “—only for sentimental reasons. Most executives now have Rovers follow them around as bodyguards. They’ve got faster reflexes.”

Pamela looked at her employer and grinned—some kind of private joke.

“Then develop a talent,” the old man said. “Sing, dance, tell stories …”

“None of those things pay—not a living wage. I don’t want a
hobby.
”

“And it’s not just you? Your whole generation has no kind of work?”

“That’s what I’m
saying.
Trudát.” She closed her mouth on the word.

“All right.” Praxis sighed. “This seems to be my week for handing out special assignments. I gave your father a new job. So now I’ll give you one.”

“Yes?” She waited eagerly

“Document this,” he said.

“Um… sir?”

“Prove to me you’re not just too lazy to scratch for a living. Show that something real is going on here. And then give me a solution. Not just a make-work job for yourself, but a solution for your generation. Show me how we fix this.”

“I see—I think. A new kind of employment?”

“Think bigger. A new kind of social contract. If the machines are doing all the work, then what comes after, for people? What do we do? How do we organize it? How do we
sustain
it? Give me a scope and a plan.”

“That may be more than one person can do,” she said hesitantly.

“Not a problem.” He waved the objection away with his hand. “Hire the talent and resources you need. We’ll set you up in a subsidiary—call it ‘Praxis Human Engineering.’ Pay yourself a salary commensurate with the scale of your thinking. And then … go create a roadmap for your generation.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“And happy graduation!”

* * *

Antigone Wells finished the intricate movements of the seventh
kata,
called Su’unsu, with a block-and-kick combination, a one-eighty reversal, another block-and-kick, a guard position, another guard, and the final bow. The moves were perfectly formed and executed—or as perfect as her understanding allowed—given that she had not been inside an actual
dojo
filled with students and advanced-class teachers in more than a quarter century. But at least her moves looked good in the floor-length mirror of her private workout space.

Not having partners to train with, Wells realized she was probably losing ground. She could practice the stretching exercises, basic punches, blocks, and kicks, and she could perform the
kata
s of her style. But timing, range, and precision in an actual encounter came from sparring with a partner. She had lost her edge after Angela grew bored with the karate exercises and went on to other things.

Now Wells’s life was busy but empty. She had her work and its limited contact with human beings—mostly through video and voice transmissions, without invading her personal space and her self-inflicted isolation. She had her exercises to keep her body trim and limber. She had online services and parcel delivery to supply her with everything she needed. And she had household ’bots to pick up after her, cook, and keep the apartment spotless.

But she felt that she was just marking time. She was growing older without the pains and griefs—or the grievances—of old age. But she was not growing
toward
anything, either. She felt like an insect stuck in amber, unchanging, permanent.

It occurred to her that she might start, in a limited way, to do something for the community. Early in her slow and painful recovery from that botched face implant, Wells had done a study of similar surgical mistakes. She had even toyed with the idea of representing the victims of such negligence in court,
pro bono,
as they sued to get their lives back. But Wells had never felt comfortable with personal-injury torts; they whispered too loudly the phrase “ambulance chaser.” And over time the practice of implant medicine had improved until such cases diminished below the threshold of a viable practice.

But the people with previously fragmented bodies and shattered lives were still out there, needing assistance. Perhaps she could bring to them the strength and confidence she drew from her karate exercises. It would mean going out in public again, setting up a public
dojo,
seeking the right kind of students, and … putting her own face with its frozen glare on display for them. It would mean suggesting that karate had made her strong enough to overcome her own self-consciousness … and it hadn’t. Not at all. Yes, she was strong: she could dominate almost anyone in a street brawl; she could, as the saying went, “kill with either hand.” But she could not stand up to the sullen mask that looked out of her bathroom mirror every morning.

Even though her face was mostly healed—with limited mobility above the cheekbones, and sensation pretty much all over, except for certain dead spots that would never come back—she was still self-conscious. It was stupid for anyone, even a once-beautiful woman, to put so much store in mere physical appearance. But there it was.

She was still ashamed to go out in public. And that made her a recluse by choice, through her own social immobility, when she still retained full use of her body and mind. To feel and act that way was stupid, petty, childish—everything against which the Eastern wisdom and Zen meditation connected with her karate warned her. But it was still, essentially, her nature.

* * *

Jeffrey took his grandfather’s requests seriously. But before he traveled to the mountains to look over the ground of the former Stanislaus National Forest, he wanted to have an idea. To start with, he was pretty sure John Praxis didn’t mean to send teams of men into the area to log deadwood by hand and dig test pits in the sandy soil. So Jeffrey needed some expert advice on what was possible. These days, that meant talking to an intelligence.

The company’s tame expert on automation technology—at least the one best natured to talk and explain things, rather than just stepping in and doing—was a four-year-old program christened Socrates Melanogaster, although no one knew why. Informally, and when the machine was not listening, they just called him “Black Belly.”

“What about using von Neumann machines?” Jeffrey asked, after he had stated the general nature of the problem into the microphone at his desk console.

“That sounds promising,” the intelligence replied politely. “And what are the properties of these machines?”

“Really? Oh, well, self-replicating robots. Turn them loose and they forage for a certain kind of materials, which just happen to be the same things they’re made of. When each one gets enough, it sits down and makes a copy of itself. Then the copies go out and forage and make more copies. Sooner or later, after so many generations, the machines are programmed to return to base, and you have a whole bunch of useful materials, refined and on the hoof. Like sending cows out to graze, breed, and build up a herd of meat for market.”

“Remarkable,” Black Belly said—after one of those pauses that left Jeffrey wondering if it had gone off mentally, between bursts of human-speed conversation with him, to compose a symphony or write a history of the left-handed screwdriver in popular literature. “Have you actually seen these machines?”

“No, they’re just a concept.”

“What is their power source?”

“I don’t know—it’s just an idea.”

“Not a bad one.” Another pause. “We could find sufficient aluminum oxide for a chassis in the common clay distributed throughout the area. The quartz in common sand would provide silicon for electronic circuits.” Another pause. “It would be surprising, however, to find iron deposits for the magnets in the machine’s motors, or copper for their windings. But perhaps we could develop some kind of kinetic tensioning device using cables made of cellulose fibers, which would contract and expand under some unknown chemical reaction.” Pause. “I would have to consult a materials specialist.”

“Do you think such a machine is actually possible?”

“Yes.” A longer pause—and Jeffrey began to wonder how many terabytes of scholarly articles in online physics and chemistry journals Black Belly was mentally scanning and sorting. “But conversion of the metals and the silicon would require large amounts of direct heat, and the molecular synthesis of cellulose would entail complicated endothermic reactions. With present technology, these conditions are beyond the capability of a conveniently sized autobot.”

“You’re saying a machine the size of a rabbit or a beaver doesn’t have room in its belly for a high-temperature smelting apparatus,” Jeffrey interpreted for his own human understanding.

“Yes … um …” That
um
was always a bad sign, hiding a mountain of reservations. “Essentially.”

“Suppose it didn’t have to copy itself? How about we send the beavers out to gather bits of wood pulp, sand, and clay, and send robot moles digging underground for the metals they can find and mine—then they take it all back to a, well, to a big old mama bear who
does
have a smelter in her belly. She can refine the ingots of iron, copper, gold, and whatever, and do the other chemical reactions to produce raw materials for making more beavers and moles.”

“This ‘bear,’ would it be … some kind of loading pad or buffering device?”

“I don’t understand you.” Jeffrey was confused. “Explain, please.”

“Your word, ‘bear.’ Would it be acting as a thermocouple?”

“No, no, it would look like a big mammal, a bear,
Ursus americanus.
” Jeffrey was still learning the limits of machine intelligence, especially with descriptive metaphors. “It would function as a kind of home base or mother ship to all the little autobots, the beavers.”

“How would the little ones be powered?”

“Solar energy, I guess. Or something simple.”

“And the robot moles then? How are they powered?”

“A nuclear reactor, using isotopes. We put one inside each of them.”

Black Belly ruminated for a while. “So … it would not be a closed system.”

“No, not completely. Not necessarily. Not a limiting factor.”