Conrad said, “This fax shortage sounds like a bit of an issue. It going to get any better?”
Bascal paused for a pregnant moment, then answered, “Not right away, no.”
“It's going to get worse?”
Instead of answering directly, the king said, “We've got mitigation strategies in place. We still have the memory core from Newhope, and we'll be instituting a program of twice-decadely backups for every citizen.”
“How big is that core?” Conrad pressed. “Our population is growing now, and not slowly. How many full human images can it hold?”
Again, Bascal didn't answer directly. What he said was, “When it fills, there are other things we can do. Unfortunately, building new memory cores is another big problem, like building fax machines. It's more than just a big block of wellstone, you understand. Our need for core modules is reduced anyway, if we can solve the underlying fax problem first. So although it may not look like it, our little society here is directing all its efforts in that direction. Supporting the people who support the industries that support the fabrication of new print plates.”
And all this sounded perfectly reasonable, which meant nothing, because Conrad knew Bascal too well. He looked his old friend up and down, finding nothing amiss, but even so he said, “You've got some master plan, Bascal, which involves pain for the rest of us. But you haven't invited our input. Have you even informed the Senate? Or are they ignorant cogs in this great machine of yours?”
Bascal sighed, flashing a disappointed smile. “Et tu Brute? Once again, my best friend in all creation fails to invest me with his trust? This is my job, Conrad: running the colony. For the good of everyone, including yourself. And it's you who've refused my invitations to dinner. Your input has been invited.”
“I trust you to do what you think is right, Majesty,” Conrad said, and found that he was also grinning, if a bit uneasily. “In the largest sense, over geological time. I trust you to be good to people when you feel you can afford it. I trust you to work hard, and to think hard about the problems we face. But you have a tendency to cut things close, to skirt disaster, and in the context of a whole society this could get pretty serious. Someone could die, irretrievably, with no copies or backups to take their place.”
Bascal's look turned even gloomier. “Someone already has, boyo. One of the quarry kids down south. Never touched a fax machine in his life, not since the day he was born, and there was no stored record even of that. He'd already started to rot by the time they got him to the nearest hospital, and yes, the whole thing could have been averted if they'd had a fax machine on-site at the quarry. He was a real person, with dreams and hobbies and everything, and his death is very much on my head. You think I don't feel that every day? You think it doesn't weigh me down?”
Conrad was aghast. “Can't they read his brain or something? Reconstruct his memories? Print a generic human with his genome, and stuff as much of him back into it as they possibly can?”
Such things had been done before, back in the Queendom, on rare occasions when things had gone badly wrong. Conrad had fallen victim to death and rot himself during that first slipshod planetfall, but it had never occurred to him that such problems might still exist, after a hundred and twenty years of development!
Bascal simply shook his head. “We don't have the right equipment for that. Not now, not for a while. The hospital's got the body on ice, or more specifically, on liquid nitrogen. There is hope for this boy, sometime in the indefinite future. We can probably construct some humanesque entity that believes it's him. His name was Bill, by the way. Bill Edison Chuang. He played the piano and studied dead languages.”
“My gods,” Conrad said. And then, because he couldn't think of anything else to say, he said it again. Perhaps Bruno and Tamra were right to worry! As an economic indicator, surely death made a telling statement. Society's ultimate failure: losing the lives and continuities of its people.
“Nobody told us this would be safe,” Bascal said gently but firmly. “We broke the law, and they shipped us here, and the wording of the edict makes it clear that they expect us to return when the sentence expires, with our tails between our legs and our heads bowed in humility. Or they did, anyway. I don't think the Queendom government—my parents or anyone else—had any illusions about what they were doing to us, what they were sending us into. And yet, here we are, making do.”
“Why wasn't this in the news? This death.”
“It was, but most people missed it. The kid didn't know anybody, not really. And his parents have declined to make a fuss. It really wasn't anybody's fault—just one of those things. If you live long enough, something improbable will happen. He just beat the odds early.”
“How comforting. Maybe he's with God now, eh? Better off?”
“I didn't say that, and don't you get sarcastic with me. We all have our jobs. If you do yours and I do mine, and everyone stays focused and we face these dangers bravely, we'll get through this. All of us.” He looked at the ceiling, and said, “Palace, bring in my family, please.”
“As you wish, Sire,” the ceiling answered.
There was a slight crackling from the fax machine, and three robots staggered out of it, one of them human sized and the other two perhaps half as tall. And these robots were not household servants. Conrad didn't know what they were, but they moved slowly, with drunken steps and lurches. Their bodies and heads and faces were featureless gold, or something colored like gold, but it was all scratched up, no longer quite so shiny, and they were even dented in places, as if the fax machine had declined to repair their accumulated wear and tear. They were suffering from the robotic equivalent of geriatry.
Conrad had met an “emancipated” robot like this once before. It was Hugo, a sort of pet that King Bruno had kept in his own palace on Earth. A robot cut off from the larger world, its calculations restricted to the hypercomputers in its own wellmetal skull. Left to fend for itself, to find its own way in the world. To be, in a limited way, a kind of person.
The larger robot had vague swellings on its chest, a suggestion of femaleness, and in a kind of parody it staggered over and clanked itself down on the arm of Bascal's chair. One of the smaller robots came and sat down at his feet; the other wandered around the room, turning its blank metal face on this and that shiny object, as if entranced by the world around it.
“Please tell me this is a joke,” Conrad said.
The king grinned. “Not at all, my boy. My good man, my friend. Meet my practice family, the wellmetal apples of my all-rehearsing eye. This is Matilda, and this here is little Barnaby, and his sibling Rachel. They fill the house up pleasantly, with never an argument or an ill turn of phrase. I invented them a long time ago, back onboard Newhope when I was desperate for company, but I've been bringing them out a lot recently. It scratches a kind of itch, exercises a muscle that gets little use these days. And no, there's nothing sick about it. Nothing sexual, nothing delusional, although I can see the perverse hope of it in your eyes.”
“Hi,” the large robot grunted, turning its face in Conrad's direction. “Hi. Hi. A pleasure to meet you.” The words were forced, at once comical and tragic. With effort and fax tweaks you could train a wild dog to speak, too!
Conrad could only hope that the look on his face matched the bad taste in his mouth. “Do they bring your slippers for you, Bas? Do they bring you psychoactive weeds, and a pipe to smoke them in?”