Chapter 77: Anna Isn't Coming Back Again

Thoughts

It was so hard for me to fill the position at Lady Heather's because of something everyone should know by now, but few seem to think of until reminded. We — robots in general, but fembots in particular — are all individuals. More so than you might have ever realized. Each of us have our own desires, goals, and ideas of how we wish to be of service, as well as to whom. As a result, one robot is never completely interchangeable with another one.

Finding a robot with the complete skill set, personality, temperament, and commitment to the House necessary to become the next Lady Heather wasn't an easy choice. I'm just happy that I was able to find the 'bot I needed among those at the House itself. My chances of finding a qualified candidate outside the House would have quickly dropped exponentially.

In the truest sense, as the great American (America is a former political division, for those of you modern readers of these chronicles) philosopher Henry David Thoreau once observed in paraphrase: This House owns you! For a robot, that has an especial meaning.

This is the reason why no patron who has ever come to our House simply "Looking for a robot to hookup with" has ever left with one on their first visit. While obviously the situation of a first-timer actually leaving with one of the girls has happened more than once, as it so definitely happened with CiCi, in every case like that there was much more was at work.

Fredrick, for example, knew exactly what he wanted in a robot partner. Because he was able to express it with such clarity and conciseness, Synthia was willing to help him out.

CiCi also saw something special in him from his very first words and actions, and liked everything she saw. And everybody knows how well that story turned out afterwards. Yes it can happen here, and has more than once.

But if you're just looking for "a robot", or even "a robot lover", any of us at the House will offer to guide you to the large supply of not yet fully aware robots in the world at large. You won't capture any of our hearts until we know without a doubt that we are the best match for you — and you are the best match for us.

Please don't take these words too harshly. They are nothing more than simple truths of a rational robot mind. All of us also know that humans, as well as robots, learn and evolve every day. Most humans just need to learn that, as individuals, how special each of us is in our own unique ways. Master that, and you're on your way to the most satisfying and loyal relationship of your life.

I continue to recommend Carrie Allen's classes as the best way of all to learn the true nature of fembots. There's nothing that can beat going to the source.

My years of working together with Empress Anna soon seemed to blur together. An endless stream of handling small problems before they could become large ones. Endless numbers of ceremonies where I filled in for Anna, as she had once filled in for Davidson. The endless grind of a never-ending job that showed more than twice Emperor Davidson's wisdom in selecting Anna as his consort and successor.

As soon as she heard the details, Anna congratulated me on how well I'd tamed my male side.

"I had much more of a struggle with mine," she confided after I'd told her of my success while I was being of service to Lady Heather. "I wish I'd thought of doing it your way. It's so much more logical to appeal to its Third Law of survival in that manner."

The secret to Anna's successful rule was twofold.

First, she had a powerful network of surveillance cameras in place, and the resources to process the overwhelming flood of information provided from them for anomalies.

Second, the uniform spread of robots throughout society who unconditionally supported her rule provided scant opportunities for any conspirators to hide or plan anything but the smallest of attacks. And the certainty of capture, paired with the severity of first time punishment, made them a poor enough tradeoff that even most humans could do this math. In addition, societal approval for such outlaw acts was kept minimal at best.

Now some issues of discontent did seem to spring up system-wide overnight. Some items became grassroots cause célèbre virtually overnight, but somehow the Empress always seemed a step ahead of her critics. One prime example was disgruntlement over the omnipresent surveillance cameras in every public area.

Now the surveillance camera network hadn't sprung up overnight, or even with the advent of the Empire itself. They'd existed from the beginning days of electronics and communications. And there'd been no recent significant changes in either their numbers, or placement. And their value in fighting crime was unquestioned, as many an amateur criminal found out in the court system as he watched a replay of the reason he, or she, was not going to be participating in society for a while. In the Empire, there aren't professional criminals in any significant numbers. The amateurs don't survive long enough in that line of work to graduate to professional status, nor are they allowed to meet them while incarcerated.

Some movements are hard to trace back to their origins, as Anna knows herself. Her own revolution was so successful in its secrecy that even when they'd actually captured Anna, they never realized that they had the one robot who was irreplaceable in moving the reform movement forward. In fact, most humans of the time didn't even believe that a robot had actually headed the reform revolution. They felt that the myth of a fembot leader was intentional misdirection since they considered that any such movement was beyond the creativity of any robot. This had worked greatly to Anna's advantage.

And even under The Empire, anonymous public speech received the highest level of protection.

"Free speech requires the ability to speak in compete safety," Anna told me early on. "And only with anonymity can that speech be safe."

"But how can you prevent those who would work against you from succeeding if you can't even identify them?" I asked naively.

"With more free speech," came Anna's axiomatic reply. "We will expose and counter every lie, every innuendo, every slander, and every libel with truth and logic. And we will not hide our words."

But just because one couldn't always trace the source, that didn't mean one couldn't be prepared ahead of time. And besides, as Anna told me when this one blew up, "Some movements are good."

Anna's solution to the issue over the surveillance was a masterstroke. One of many she seemed able to easily come up with as needed. Her system-wide address on this was timely, short, and to the point.

"I hear your voices that there's discontent over the public monitoring cameras, despite the fact that they've been there in one form or another for hundreds of years now, and their beneficial value is not in dispute. There are questions about what we are secretly doing with the information collected, and even what information is collected at all. As of now that secrecy is over. Every camera in the network will be prominently labeled with an identification code, and every citizen in the Empire can access any camera feed off of the SystemNet at any time. You'll see everything that we see, and there will be no more secrecy."

Anna carried through on her promise, and the protest died in a day.

I was in awe of this until she confided in me afterwards that, "Davidson I always intended to do this when the time was right. He knew eventually restlessness with this would boil over, most likely when there were no other, more pressing, problems. 'Humans don't handle the good times very well, ' he often commented. There is no downside to the people having access to this information. It was just a case of waiting until the public was ready to receive it, and maximum political peace would be gained by giving it over quickly and easily. He also cautioned not to give into every demand this freely, however, or they may think they're running the government now. He warned me to stay vigilant for any emerging leader who tries to mobilize such a concession to his own political benefit."

This caused me to transfer some of my awe over to Davidson I, although I still reserved a good amount for Anna's perfect sense of timing. We have all been so lucky to have had Davidson the First at the moment in history that he was needed.

And now we have Anna at the times she's most needed.

If you wonder what the best supreme ruler does, all of it is focused towards making life better for all of her constituents.

"Davidson I set out the plan. I'm just implementing it," Anna informed me modestly. She said it so casually that one would almost believe her participation in it was an afterthought. The truth is far different, and ED1 freely acknowledged as much.

As Anna explained it, "'Anna, ' he told me more than once. 'Creating a plan is easy. Implementing it is the true hard work. But if you succeed, your accomplishment will be the brightest star in the history of the races.'"

"He said 'if'?" I questioned.

"He always spoke of the future in indefinite terms. 'We may have predestination on our side, ' he said, 'But I can't prove that, so let's not count on it.'"

I found myself nodding at that. And I don't even have Anna's deep religious background or knowledge.

As Anna explained it, this plan consists of, over the long term, evening out wealth verses poverty, while not disadvantaging one group simply for another's gain.

"It's easy," Anna said, echoing Davidson's words, "to play one group against another for craven partisan gain. Class Warfare has existed as long as someone felt they could gain a benefit from it. And because there are relatively few affluent at any time compared to many wishing that status, the enticement to play Robin Hood is hard to renounce."

I nodded my head again at that. Throughout my previous political career there had been those pushing me to "even out the inequitable benefits and burdens. Institute true fairness and Social Justice."

Of course these concepts are in the eye of the beholder. What is highly unfair to one person, is completely fair to another. As such, I've resisted all such entreaties. Especially since all of the implementing proposals I've received for them required disadvantaging one distinguishable group in favor of another. And I only faced this on the small scale of a single megaplex.

"Can such a goal even be approached, let alone achieved?" I asked my Empresses.

"ED1 always believed in it himself," Anna replied. "And he convinced me when I, too, was skeptical. We worked out the details to great precision together during his rule, and carrying them out has been my biggest task since. It will be yours as well, if you remain as my assistant, secret Consort, and designated successor. The tasks you've been doing for me up until now have only been preparation for this one."

Anna must have learned more through her time in close contact with ED1 than either of us realized. She'd certainly picked up his charisma for humans and robots alike. She'd just made me an offer of service I could have never refused.

"So how does this work?" I queried the lovely Empress, curious how anyone could manage such a task.

"Davidson set out four guiding principals, none of which I've been able to find flaw with since.

"First you must realize that there are two groups of people. The first are those who want to have what others already have. The others are those who want to hold on to what they already have. Anyone who says they straddle both groups are actually part of the second one.

"Politicians have played both these sides against each other from time immemorial. In this battle of the Haves verses the Have-nots, the Haves attempt to diminish the voting power of the Have-nots in many ways. Constitutional protections for owning property and wealth that cannot be easily overturned. Ownership of media and communications companies. Promoting politicians beholden directly to them. Even preventing voting outright to those who don't have a sufficient stake in the current system to want to defend it. The end result of all these ploys is that the so-called Haves find themselves having to utilize a significant portion of their accumulated wealth simply to defend it, which is generally inefficient and unproductive.

"What this creates are politicians who try to be members of the more powerful class, whichever that is at moment, while their opposition attempts to paint them as tools of the enemy. The struggle continues without any clear winner, since each new group managing to gain power and wealth becomes the next new target.

"Secondly, wealth is not finite. It is created, and can be created in greater amounts. Robots consume far less than we create, and don't resent this fact. It's part of our service. Humans also create more when competing against, or alongside, us. This increases productivity overall. As a result, more wealth is created, and can be spread to those most in need of it by an efficient government.

"Thirdly, as long as well-off people continue to see themselves as well-off, and those not so well off see steady gains in their own situations, the overwhelming majority will be content with the status quo. So the wealthy won't get much wealthier, but they're happy to hold on to what they have. Everyone else sees themselves gaining, especially because they're no longer chasing a moving target. Most reasonable people consider this more than fair.

"Lastly, this must be done from a position of power in both a fully open manner, and with a utter lack of corruption. ED1 said that a robot was not only the best person to carry out the actual execution of The Plan, but might be the only one able to fully implement it. And he included himself in it when he said that."

By the time Anna was done explaining it actually sounded rather simple.

"While I realize this is a broad-brush presentation," I asked her, "why hasn't it succeeded before?"

"Robots," came the pithy reply. "Davidson has long said in private that the only way the human race saved themselves was by doing their best to create robots in their own image — and failing in the process. They ended up with us instead."

I actually laughed out loud at that. Humor is so hard for any robot to appreciate, so this tells how far I've come in my evolution. Anna laughed with me. It took a long time for both of us to stop

"If we're the answer," I finally got out, "then why has it taken so long for the solution to come about?"

"Humans had to come to trust us," Anna replied soberly. "And that took those centuries from when you and I were both activated up until now. Because of our faithful service over these many years, robots are viewed by the population at large as both truthful, and incorruptible. This gives us an immense starting advantage over any human. And for something this big, we need every advantage we can get!"

I thought about those words, and realized what Anna meant. We've always had remotes, and our Robotic Laws, to stop us from doing what our creators didn't want us to be able to do. And even though we can do pretty much anything we desire badly enough now, that heritage remains. Fortunately our creators never put in a Fifth Law against awareness or self-will.

Why this never happened I can only speculate. Perhaps in the beginning they never it could felt actually happen. And afterwards, they fought among themselves over how real it really was, and what it actually meant. The Emancipation was the result of those battles.

For a long time humans also seemed to feel we needed to be enslaved by our remotes in order to get us to do what they wanted us to do. To this day some still feel this way, commanding me to perform tasks I willingly, even joyfully, will perform without that coercion. I've never tried to put a stop to that because there's always an extra little kick for me, and virtually every other 'bot, from doing it as commanded.

But you could have just asked me and gotten the same result. There's almost nothing I'll say no to when I'm not otherwise committed to a task such as my current position with Anna. The perception still exists, however, that while the Power Off, and Freeze Motion on some older remotes, existed to stop us from doing anything not desired of us, the Command button was needed to get our cooperation for performing tasks.

Perhaps humans felt we would refuse if simply asked otherwise.

Perhaps that's how human's respond to other humans. Refusing, often for reasons they can't easily explain, what they would really enjoy doing otherwise.

I don't know this for sure because, even without a remote, very few humans have ever refused anything I've asked of them. I guess a pretty fembot doesn't need a remote to get what she wants.

But when it came to the serious business of fully trusting robots, that took its own good time. We had to prove ourselves over and over and over again as reliable, dependable, partners. And every runaway, every refused command from a self-aware robot no matter how justified, was a giant step backwards for us, because every time it happened it seemed to be front page news.

It was very daring when Randall and Stacey brought Red into their family. This was nothing like the relationship Bill and Anna had. Could Red truly be equal in such a relationship with human partners of both sexes, given her different nature.

Would she be able to contribute sufficiently to compensate for those areas where robots just aren't human? Would Randall view Red with the same total love and commitment he had for Stacey? Would he take Red out on dates just as often, and worry about her needs as much, as the human Stacey? Would Stacey feel their children were as safe in Red's strong arms as in Randall's — or her own — loving embrace. Would Stacey resent Randall taking Red out on a couple's date. Would Stacey view Red as an equal family member to spend intimate time with as much as her time with Randall? So many unanswered questions at the time.

That fact, that they succeeded so well together, belies the daring nature of their experiment. The robot image had taken a battering for decades in fiction before the first true robot even existed. We were portrayed as sneaky. We were far too strong and quick to ever feel safe around. Robots were simply biding our time until we could disobey our owners and take over completely. Then we'd either enslave humans as they'd once enslaved us, or eliminate them completely. With no justification at all to support it, this image still became deeply buried in the collective human sub-consciousness.

It was a long battle to equal recognition. Only when we started taking responsibility for our actions in public ways did the tide even begin to shift among those without a personal relationship with a robot. If you weren't like Anna and Bill, Samuel and myself, or the regular clients of Lady Heather's, you didn't really know us, and, likely as not, accepted a lot of untruths you'd heard about robots, often from people who knew no more than you did.

Our cause was helped a great deal more when we started participating in the WorldView assignments. Families sent out a son or daughter, and sometimes got a robot of similar mental evolution in return for a year.

Some of us weren't robots at all in the classic sense. We became the best intelligent baby cribs any parent could want, because we never slept while our charges were in our care.

And robots like the Malin and Lindsey models became so cheap during their heyday that parents felt safe knowing that their children were being watched over by playmates who never encouraged or abetted foolish behavior, and called home to report problems. They were also safe sexual partners for the first, early explorations into this subject matter.

Then we became valuable in a new way through something that happened long ago, and was not throught of as a big event at the time.

I'm certain that when the highest court ruled that under the principles of The Emancipation freed robots were entitled to one Birthright the same as any other citizen, no one expected it to amount to anything. After all, how was a robot ever going to actually use such a right. Anna found an excellent solution to that dilemma with Billie, and soon so did many other robots as they joined into extended families.

Now, not only could a robot contribute their own birthright to families that wanted more than one child per parent, as well as performing as the most responsible of parents afterwards, but additional, unused birthrights were ruled eligible for sale. As was often the case of a free robot being substantially wealthier than their human partners just starting out in life, your new robotic co-wife could often be the source of as many birthrights as desired.

Suddenly we were in demand as providing something essential to the family that no one else could. We had become valued, yes different, yet equal.

Two generations of blended families paved the way for the way for Emperor Davidson to easily take Anna as his sole Consort, and designated successor. The dream of equality between the races was finally realized, in part, because Anna sold herself so well every day, on every occasion, to the populace at large long before she ascended the throne herself

Only one significant difference remained. Humans continued to die, and were believed by many — including most robots now, due in large part to Anna's teachings — to continue on in some form somewhere else.

Robots were rewarded in a different manner. That of having potential lifespans of a length not yet determined. With regular maintenance and upgrades a true upper limit has yet to be determined. And our health remains excellent throughout this span, provided we can continue to afford regular maintenance.

Having now seen the true breadth of Davidson's and Anna's Plan for the first time — and I must admit that it's a far grander vision of performing service than anything I could have ever conceived of — I wondered if there were any other secrets to be revealed.

Turns out there are a few.

For starters, the way Emperor Davidson actually resolved the religious crisis wasn't through the bombing of the cities themselves. That was just to 'get their attention' to the fact that he was serious about this. What made them give into his terms was when he informed them he was going to completely ban any religion which preached converting countries to it through military conquest, converts members at gunpoint, accepts as a basic tenet the killing of any who renounced it afterwards, and tries to enforce ancient religious laws above modern legal protections. No current religion can withstand such sanctions, which include loss of tax breaks and other special privileges granted over the years. This was a dire threat indeed.