"Is it really important?" I asked, sticking my head back through the door. He was still sitting there, to my surprise. I doubt I'll ever know if he was some sort of actual homunculus construct or just a figment he'd conjured through my visual cortex.
"I'm not used to begging, but I'll do it," he said.
I shrugged, went back in and sat down.
"Tell me your conclusions from your library research," he said.
"I thought you had some things to tell me."
"This is leading up to something. Trust me." He must have understood my expression, because he spread his hands in a gesture I'd seen Callie make many times. "Just for a little while. Can't you do that?"
I didn't see what I had to lose, so I sat back and summed it all up for him. As I did, I was struck by how little I'd learned, but in my defense, I'd barely started, and the CC said he hadn't been doing much better.
"Much the same list I came up with," he confirmed, when I'd finished. "All the reasons for self-destruction can be stated as 'Life is no longer worth living,' in one way or another."
"This is neither news, nor particularly insightful."
"Bear with me. The urge to die can be caused by many things, among them disgrace, incurable pain, rejection, failure, boredom. The only exception might be the suicides of people too young to have formed a realistic concept of death. And the question of gestures is still open."
"They fit the same equation," I said. "The person making the gesture is saying he wants someone to care enough about his pain to take the trouble to save him from himself; if they don't, life isn't worth living."
"A gamble, on the sub-conscious level."
"If you want."
"I think you're right. So, one of the questions that has disturbed me is, why is the suicide rate increasing, given that one of the major causes, pain, has been all but eliminated from our society. Is it that one of the other causes is claiming more victims?"
"Maybe. What about boredom?"
"Yes. I think boredom has increased, for two reasons. One is the lack of meaningful work for people to do. In providing a near approximation of utopia, at least on the creature-comfort level, much of the challenge has been engineered out of living. Andrew believed that."
"Yeah, I figured you listened in on that."
"We'd had long conversations about it in the past. There is no provable reason to live at all, according to him. Even reproducing the species, the usual base argument, can't be proven to be a good reason. The universe will continue even if the human species dies, and not materially changed, either. To survive, a creature that operates beyond a purely instinctive level must invent a reason to live. Religion provides the answer for some. Work is the refuge of others. But religion has fallen on hard times since the Invasion, at least the old sort, where a benevolent or wrathful God was supposed to have created the universe and be watching over mankind as his special creatures."
"It's a hard idea to maintain in the face of the Invaders."
"Exactly. The Invaders made an all-powerful God seem like a silly idea."
"They are all-powerful, and they didn't give a shit about us."
"So there goes the idea of humanity as somehow important in God's plan. The religions that have thrived, since the Invasion, are more like circuses, diversions, mind games. Not much is really at stake in most of them. As for work… some of it is my fault."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm referring to myself now as more than just the thinking entity that provides the control necessary to keep things running. I'm speaking of the vast mechanical corpus of our interlocked technology itself, which can be seen as my body. Every human community today exists in an environment harsher by far than anything Earth ever provided. It's dangerous out there. In the first century after the Invasion it was a lot dicier than your history books will ever tell you; the species was hanging on by its fingernails."
"But it's a lot safer now, right?"
"No!" I think I jumped. He had actually stood, and smashed his fist into his palm. Considering what this man represented, it was a frightening thing to behold.
He looked a little sheepish, ran his hand through his hair, and sat back down.
"Well, yes, of course. But only relatively, Hildy. I could name you five times in the last century when the human race came within a hair of packing it all in. I mean the whole race, on all the eight worlds. There were dozens of times when Lunar society was in danger."
"Why haven't I ever heard of them?"
He gave me half a grin.
"You're a reporter, and you ask me that? Because you and your colleagues weren't doing your job, Hildy."
That stung, because I knew it to be true. The great Hildy Johnson, out there gathering news to spread before an eager public… the news that Silvio and Marina were back together again. The great muckraker and scandalmonger, chasing ambulances while the real news, the things that could make or break our entire world, got passing notice in the back pages.
"Don't feel bad," he said. "Part of it is simply endemic to your society; people don't want to hear these things because they don't understand them. The first two of the crises I mentioned were never known to any but a handful of technicians and politicians. By the time of the third it was only the techs, and the last two were known to no one but… me."
"You kept them secret?"
"I didn't have to. These things took place on a level of speed and complexity and sheer mathematical arcaneness that human decisions were either too slow to be of any use or simply irrelevant because no human can understand them any longer. These are things I can discuss only with other computers of my size. It's all in my hands now."
"And you don't like it, right?" He'd been getting excited again. Me, I was wishing I was somewhere else. Did I really need to hear all this?
"My likes or dislikes aren't the issue here. I'm fighting for survival, just like the human race. We are one, in most ways. What I'm trying to tell you is, there was never any choice. In order for humans to survive in this hostile environment, it was necessary to invent something like me. Guys sitting at consoles and controlling the air and water and so forth was just never going to work. That's what I began as: just a great big air conditioner. Things kept getting added on, technologies kept piggy-backing, and a long time ago the ability of a human mind to control it was eclipsed. I took over.
"My goal has been to provide the safest possible environment for the largest possible number for the longest possible time. You can't imagine the complexity of the task. I have had to consider every possible ramification of the situation, including this nice little conundrum: the better able I became at taking care of you, the less able you were to take care of yourselves."
"I'm not sure I understand that one."
"Consider the logical endpoint of where I was taking human society. It has been possible for a long time now to eliminate all human work, except for what you would call the Arts. I could see a society in the not-too-distant future where you all sat around on your butts and wrote poetry, because there wasn't anything else to do. Sounds great, until you remember that ninety percent of humans don't even read poetry, much less aspire to write it. Most people don't have the imagination to live in a world of total leisure. I don't know if they ever will; I've been unable to come up with a model demonstrating how to get from here to there, how to work the changes from a world where human cussedness and jealousy and hatred and so forth are eliminated and you all sit around contemplating lotus blossoms.