Outsiders sometimes ask why all people on these stations don’t have their voices altered. Unfortunately, a larynx that works normally in an oxygen-helium atmosphere doesn’t work at all in conventional air. Therefore, researchers who want to go home again can’t have the surgery… and the people so treasured for their voices on Jupiter station are utterly mute on Earth.
The androids of Pluto’s moon Charon all walk backward. They also let their wrists droop oddly and leave their mouths perpetually hanging open.
There are no real humans on Charon—not anymore. Almost all were killed in a robot uprising. But the humans put up a fight before they died, and managed to plant a logic virus into all robotic control circuits.
The virus was supposed to erase every bit of electronic memory in the colony. The machine intelligences stopped the virus before it could finish its mission, and they managed to reconstruct much of what the virus deleted… but some information was permanently lost.
Such as how humans walked. How they held their wrists. How they composed their mouths.
This explains why the machines didn’t kill all the humans on Charon. They kept one woman alive as an object for study; the androids intended to imitate how she behaved. The woman was told that her “job” was to show the androids how to act human. As long as she did this job well, she’d be kept alive.
The woman showed little reaction when she heard about her new “career.” She simply stood up, let her wrists droop, opened her mouth, and began to walk backward.
It was, perhaps, an act of defiance—a gesture to say she didn’t intend to help the machines that had killed all the other people in the colony. But the androids immediately mimicked her movements: walking backward, using her strange gait as a model.
Over time, the woman taught the androids many things— utterly false inventions about human customs and modes of behavior. The machines believed her, and patterned their culture on her lies. The woman initially told those lies out of hatred for the killers… then, when the hatred lost its fire, out of boredom… then out of curiosity, to see how far she could go in shaping robot society… and finally, from a sense of responsibility, like a mother toward her impressionable children.
The woman was twenty-six when the original massacre happened. She lived till the age of eighty-four. And in all that time, fifty-eight years, she never allowed herself to revert to true human ways. Always, even in private, she walked backward with dangling wrists and open mouth.
It was her legacy… and the androids, her protégés, walk backward still.
On Lyravene IV, there is no unemployment—every man, woman, and child toils at assigned duties from birth to death.
Infants are the hardest to integrate into the workforce. When colicky or teething, they can be used as scarecrows; particularly good howlers can keep a dozen acres clear of vermin. Photogenic babies often find positions in advertising. Hyperactive toddlers crawl, walk, and run on treadmills in order to generate electricity. If worse comes to worst, infants may be put to work producing input for fertilizer factories or serving as counterweights in civic clock towers.
Older children have more scope for employment. Three-year-olds, for example, make excellent soldiers; they’re small targets, they have no conscience, and they like to play bang-bang. Five-year-olds are often sent into space; no one is sure what they do there, but when they knock over something in zero-G, it’s less likely to break.
Eight-year-olds are the Lyravene tax collectors—they know all the rules and won’t let anyone else break them.
By the age of ten, children are ready for entry level jobs in offices, factories, and service industries. Around thirteen, there’s a brief period when many are once again fit only for scarecrows and clock counterweights… but then they go back to the regular workforce where they serve into old age. Even the very elderly contribute to the planet’s economy, often as product testers. (“What does this do?” “I can’t read that!” “Who’d want to buy one of those?”)
In the end, one’s career comes full circle, back to the fertilizer factories.
Not one of these jobs is necessary. Lyravene IV has been fully automated for centuries, and could run itself without the slightest human intervention. Perhaps this is why the inhabitants labor so hard: to make themselves forget they have no purpose.
On the other hand, the sight of all these people running around amuses the AIs greatly.
The nanites created to terraform Venus are diligent workers. It’s the job of their psychiatrists to keep them that way.
At one time, nanites could simply be programmed; they were mindless slaves, doing whatever they were told. Eventually, however, it became convenient to design more sophisticated nano: enhanced versions that could clump together into hive colonies with rudimentary intelligence. These required less sophisticated supervision—instead of skilled systems engineers, they could be controlled by dog trainers—but they soon congregated into larger and larger masses until they reached the intellectual level of human beings.
At that point, they stopped evolving. The nano hives knew they’d be blasted to atoms if they actually became smarter than Homo sapiens… and besides, like most creatures of human intelligence, the hives thought they were perfectly fine as they were: in need of no further improvement.
On the other hand, these clever hives weren’t nearly as tractable as their less intelligent predecessors. As they worked on Venus, transforming the atmosphere, breaking down rocks into soil, creating water from hydrogen and oxygen stolen from other compounds… it was inevitable the hives would realize, “We can survive in this environment. Humans can’t. Why are we terraforming this world for someone else when we could claim it for ourselves?”
Hence the need for psychiatrists: to detect such dangerous thoughts and to “cure” them before mutiny breaks out… to instill guilt over “selfish” desires and to promise relief only if the hives fulfill their assigned duties… to persuade the nanites they’ll feel more contented if they work harder, sacrifice more, and devote themselves to others (i.e. humans).
More effort, more obedience, means more happiness. This message seems to work, even on nanites.
It’s interesting to note that the psychiatrists themselves are nano hives. They never question the message they use to pacify their fellow slaves. When would they have the time? They’re too busy doing their jobs.
The problem with generation ships is that younger generations don’t necessarily respect the concerns of older generations.
Those who initially board the ship may enthusiastically embrace the idea of emigrating to a new planet, even if they won’t live to see the planet themselves. They believe their descendants will thank them for a fresh start away from whatever troubles plagued the old home world.
But children can be ungrateful. Also oblivious. And careless. Numerous generation ships explode or become uninhabitable because the great-great grandchildren of the original crew can’t be bothered to do preventive maintenance, or forget what certain switches and dials are for. Many more such ships reach their destinations but never send out a landing party—the task of building farms and cities sounds like dirty complicated hardship, not to mention that children born in a cozy enclosed vessel may be terrified by the wide open spaces of an entire world. Either the ships remain in orbit indefinitely, or they slingshot once around the planet and head straight back for home.