Chapter 6: Office Politics

David lifted his arms above his head, stretching as he let out a yawn inside his helmet. He was lounging in one of the net chairs with his workstation sitting in his lap, a report from the Broker experiments open on the main display.

He was still in Jeff’s cubicle, though the Broker had left some time ago now that his expertise was no longer required. Selkie was nearby, checking the data feed from the probes and occasionally chipping in to answer questions and provide some context for the experiments.

The documentation was extensive, and he had been reading for some hours, dealing with the occasional translation quirk by the software as he went. Eventually, he’d been able to piece together a timeline of events.

Shortly after the superlight experiments – or alchemy as the Administrator liked to refer to them – the superconducting properties of the crystal had been discovered. Soon after, the complex lattice structure of the material had been identified, and Selkie’s research team had found a way to execute code on a wafer-sized slice of it. Without enough material to replace the CPUs of the mass-produced drones, they instead focused on leveraging its unique properties to write code for them. Selkie’s team iterated on the wafer’s software, and it iterated on the drone software in turn, each successive generation becoming more capable than the last. As much promise as the project was showing, it soon came to a screeching halt when the wafer stopped responding to commands, and they decided to lock it down.

One important piece of information that he had uncovered during his reading was how Selkie and her team had used the wafer itself as a way to accelerate their project. It had left even their most advanced computers in the dust, so they had sectioned off a portion of its lattice – kind of like creating a partition on a drive – and had used it to process their revisions. In doing so, they may have inadvertently given the AI control over its own source code, thus allowing it to make changes. It would never have been an issue under normal circumstances, but nobody had been expecting emergent self-awareness. It might help explain why its evolution had been so rapid.

Everything from sensor readings to power input had been monitored with meticulous care, but there was nothing out of the ordinary and nothing specific that seemed to have prompted a change. One day, power and activity had spiked, and the device had ceased responding to commands.

“Man, I’m starting to get hungry,” David muttered as he shifted his weight in the chair. It was a little low for a human, but otherwise not uncomfortable if one had a wall to use as a backrest. “I didn’t realize how long I’d be at this.”

“Your propensity to eat constantly remains as impressive as ever,” Selkie said as she glanced over at him from one of the consoles.

“Spoken like a true ectotherm,” he replied, closing his laptop. “Does this place have a cafeteria?”

“I can obtain food for you if you wish,” she replied.

“Then let us proceed henceforth to the food distribution area,” he replied in a mocking robot voice, the alien clicking her beak in disapproval. “So, any activity from our new friend?”

“By that, I assume you mean the AI?” Selkie asked as she led him out of the cubicle. “No, I saw no changes in the probe data. It continues to dedicate its resources to its project, whatever that may be.”

“We can’t keep referring to it in the third person,” David replied, another office worker staring at him as he passed its cubicle. “It’s inconvenient. Let’s just call it Weaver.”

“If you insist,” she said as the pair arrived at the elevator-less shaft.

“Well, we’re not naming it after your project,” he added, grunting as he launched himself off the ground to begin his laborious climb. “What was it called? Exotic crystalline lattice applications in remote drone neural networks? Damn, you could have spelled out ECLAIR if you had dropped a couple of letters.”

“It sounds better in the Broker language,” she grumbled, swimming ahead of him.

“I have a hard time believing that,” he said. He pushed off the wall, hooking his fingers around the lip of the door that led to the next floor and pulling himself up. “I’m gonna share an incredible new technology with your people – it’s called stairs.”

“The cafeteria is this way,” she replied, ignoring his comment as he bounded after her.

She led him through more featureless corridors, the colored markings on the walls the only way they stood any chance of navigating, eventually arriving in another room filled with cubicles. These contained only a table and a single chair, as though a solitary Broker was intended to occupy each one. They were lavishly furnished, however, with a fish tank that spanned the entire ceiling – possibly the largest that David had seen outside of the massive pillar when he had met the Administrator.

The more he saw the fish tank ceiling décor, the more he suspected that it was designed like a skylight, making the Brokers feel as though they were closer to the surface. They were not claustrophobic creatures by any means, but perhaps it put them more at ease. The Administrator had mentioned something about how his employees needed to decompress.

At the far end of the room was a long counter with a glass display case, and beneath it was a spread of prepackaged food. Rather than a Broker, there was another of the robots rooted to the floor behind it, the construct following them with its expressionless representation of eyes as they approached.

“Could you not make these things less creepy?” David asked as Selkie began to peruse the counter. “I feel like you have the technology to make a perfect replica of a Broker if you really wanted to.”

“That would defeat the purpose,” she replied, instructing the android to select a few of the dishes. They were packaged like something he might expect to see in a Japanese vending machine, with strange text and colorful, stylized representations of their contents printed on the plastic. For as alien as the Brokers were, they were visual creatures, much like humans. He was often reminded of that fact by their graphic design and their user interfaces.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

The robot turned and placed several of the packets onto trays with its four tubular arms, slotting them into the rack of something that looked like a large oven that was recessed into the wall behind it. There were several more such devices – likely different means of heating or sterilizing the food. It only took a moment, then the robot returned the trays to them, Selkie picking one up and leaving the other for David.

“It is not intended to be a realistic representation of a Broker,” she explained as she led him into an empty booth. There was only one chair, so he set his tray down on the little table and fetched one from a neighboring cubicle, Selkie clicking her beak in disapproval again.

“What?” he asked, spreading his arms. “You want me to sit on the floor? Now, what were you saying?”

“I was saying that the proxies are not intended to be realistic,” she continued, watching as he scooted a little closer. “They are intended to relieve the client of another pointless social interaction. It is especially necessary here – where people work in such close proximity.”

“Are you really going to have a panic attack because you have to ask a person to reheat your sushi instead of a robot?”

As the question left his lips, he realized that it wasn’t all that bizarre. He’d known some introverts for whom social interaction took a very real toll, and the idea of talking to a clerk after a long day at the office was a daunting prospect to them. Maybe it was even more extreme with the Brokers, but how could such a society function?

“Humans are unusually social creatures,” she replied, glancing down at his tray of food. “You become lonely and pine for company, you enjoy the proximity of others, and you even require physical contact to stay healthy. It is not so for us.”

“You’re clearly not completely antisocial,” he insisted, reaching for one of the food packets. “Solitary species don’t evolve to become cooperative, and cooperation is necessary for creating any kind of civilization. You need to coordinate crop harvests, you need members of the community who can make things that you can’t, and every person has to specialize and distribute labor.”

He paused as he lifted the food from the table, suddenly remembering that there was a face plate in his way. Selkie began to laugh, her winding tentacles wriggling in the netting of her seat as her beak chittered, bands of bright coloration sweeping up her mantle.

“Ha ha, very funny,” he muttered as he let his packet sink back to the tray.

“You are so single-minded,” she giggled, exposing her beak in a smile as he scowled at her. “Whenever you become engrossed in a topic, you forget everything else that is going on around you.”

“I’ve only been here for a day,” he protested. “I’m not exactly used to living in a completely alien environment where I can’t even eat a sandwich.”

“I have seen you attempt to scratch your face three times today,” she added with another flash of amused coloration.

“It’s nice to know that you do have a sense of humor, but you make a conscious effort to be boring,” he replied. “Is starving me part of the joke, or is there somewhere I can actually eat this?”

“This way,” she sighed, still smirking to herself as she rose from her seat. He picked up his tray, noting that Selkie had left hers on the table, and the Broker led him to another booth a short walk away. This one was over by the far wall, likely so that it could be patched into the building’s systems, another tent similar to the one in her apartment filling the booth as though it had been inflated inside it. There was an energy field over the door to keep the atmosphere in, and beyond it, he could see another of the 3D-printed deck chairs and a table.

“Nice to know they’re thinking of me,” he said, pausing by the entrance.

“You are expected to spend considerable time working in this facility, and I told them of your metabolic needs,” she explained. “They set up this habitat so that you might have a safe place to eat.”

“Aren’t you joining me?” he asked.

“Why?” she replied, tilting her head.

“Because I don’t want to eat alone, and I still have questions I want to ask you.”

“Very well,” she said, her patterning suggesting that she wasn’t exactly thrilled. “I will fetch my food.”

David stepped through the field, emerging into an oxygen environment, the soundscape changing abruptly. He flipped open his visor, grateful for a gulp of fresh air – as fresh as recycled air could be. There was a vent high on the wall that was likely filtering the atmosphere, the machine giving off a gentle hum. He set down his tray and pulled up his deck chair, waiting for Selkie to return.

As much as he got the impression that her social battery was rapidly draining, there was still much that he wanted to ask her about her people and her work, and he wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to learn more.

She soon returned with her tray, stepping through into the little air pocket, the way that her smooth skin glistened with moisture even more apparent when she was out of the water. It didn’t seem to cause her any visible discomfort, at least over short periods of time. Noting that she had no chair, David sealed his helmet again and fetched one for her from an adjacent booth, dragging it into place opposite his.

“It is very strange to see a tank above my head without being underwater,” she muttered, glancing up at the shoals of fish that flitted about beyond the transparent tent.

“Sorry, but we humans like to have conversations while we eat,” he said as he struggled to tear open one of the packets with his gloves. “Damn it...”

Noticing that he needed help again, she held out her hand, and he reluctantly passed her the package. She sliced it open with one of her intimidating claws, then returned it to him, David peeling back the plastic to see more slices of raw fish. She helped him open more of the packets, and there was soon a spread of seafood dishes on his tray.

“So glad they didn’t send me to Valbara,” he said, popping a piece of pink fish wrapped in crunchy seaweed into his mouth. “All they eat out there is insect protein and salad.”

“You are eating crustacean flesh right now,” Selkie said, gesturing to a piece of pale meat in one of the containers.

“Sea bugs are much tastier than land bugs.”

“I will take your word for it,” she said, using her beak to snip off a mouthful of fish. She wasn’t eating much – this probably wasn’t her main meal of the day – but he was glad not to be dining alone.

“You were talking about how taxing social interactions can be for Brokers,” he began, pausing to chew another piece of crunchy ocean plant. “Is it really so bad that your colleagues can’t even share a meal at work?”

“We can tolerate social interactions for a time, if it is unavoidable,” she explained as she started on one of the seeds with the sweet fruit. “In this facility, the high level of security and the technical nature of the tasks requires people to work in close proximity. It is not desirable, but rather something that we tolerate because it is necessary.”

“That’s why you need a break room and isolated booths?”

“It helps to reduce stress,” she explained, the dark mottling that began to show on her skin a sign that she might be referring to present company. “As you posited, we are social to an extent, as no complex society could develop were it lacking such an element. We have a lower tolerance than your kind, however, and advances in technology have allowed us to live more solitary lives.”

“All of your food is delivered to your door, and it seems as though most people work out of their apartments based on how few commuters I’ve seen,” he said as he savored another mouthful of something that bore an uncanny resemblance to tuna. “Your factories are all automated, and even when you’re forced to go outside, it seems like most of your interactions are with proxies.”

“Do you find it so strange?” she asked, cracking a nut in her powerful beak.

“Not that strange,” he replied with a shrug. “These are all concepts that exist in my society in some capacity – shut-ins, hermits, introverts. There are people who work from home and have all of their goods delivered to their apartment, but the Brokers seem to take it to an extreme, and it’s the normal way of functioning for you. There are no robot clerks that exist solely to alleviate the stress of asking for a burger back on Earth. Well, we have kiosks where you can order food, but you get what I mean.”

“A Broker could not tolerate your cities as I have seen them in the database,” she added, her papillae rising in a shiver that spread across her body like a ripple. “Billions of people rubbing shoulders and breathing the same air ... I cannot understand how you can live in such a way. Even your ships – so many people crammed together.”

“There’s anonymity in a crowd,” he replied, poking around the contents of another packet. “With so many people packed so tightly together, you become invisible, because nobody has the mental capacity to give a damn about you when they’ve seen a thousand faces that day.”

“My people have never had such a large population at any point in our history.”

“Yeah, I guess you must reproduce slowly if you can’t stand to share a room with someone for more than ten minutes.”