The work that we do

The men gathered at 7 a.m. in preparation for the day's work. There, at the base of a large building, the skeleton of which was taking shape, a group of tradesmen, dressed in heavy cloth shirts and heavy denim pants with some parts worn through stood together talking about the evening's television and events. Some talked sports. Some talked about a wife or girlfriend. Others simply listened and gathered up their tools from the gang box where the group had assembled in the waning moments before the day's start. Now, the group fanned out around the structure. Some stayed at the building's base. Others ascended the structure, floor by floor, to their previous spot. Above them the powerful camera of a drone on a lazy sortie captured each worker's action.

The workers on this building had never noticed this drone. Nothing could. Being no larger than twenty feet in length with an equally diminutive wingspan, the drone loitered in airspace half a mile above an unaware world below. And there, it collected, to the square millimeter, every visual aspect of the earth within a 60 mile cone issuing from the drone's camera mount underneath its nose. Within that path every single human or mechanical action was recorded by a sensor array, sent back to a server farm in a distant state where a dedicated cloud of processes and processors analyzed, cataloged, dissected, learned, and stored the data. These construction workers, applying skills of hand and mind in constructing a building, were unaware that their recorded actions were being modeled by a constellation of related computing processes. Computing draped the bare essence of human actions, now existing as conditional rubrics, around a mathematical skeleton modeling the swing patterns of their arms and legs as well as body gait and posture shifts during activity. Their living likenesses were being copied into a data cloud where a heuristic algorithm built decision models from the sequence of recorded body movements. These decision models formed the basis of a cybernetic process, translating observed human action into robot chassis control processes. An accompanying action modeling software created emergent programs for force applications, in essence, allowing robots to 'do' work appropriate to current roles. Soon, these robots would be deployed at job sites, at intersections, in classrooms, and in operating rooms to effectively erase the work of the men and women, which the cloud had learned to replicate and then to carry out. At first, these robots were carefully deployed, monitored, and tested against the collected notions of what were quality craftsmanship, teaching, surgery, care, service. This first generation of robots were a proof of concept, and they surpassed both human expectation and human ability. The second generation would loiter about virtually every square inch of the habitable human world, doing every conceivable thing that once constituted the working lives of men and women. These robots assisted in childbirth, prepared dinners, repaired doors, walked dogs, cut grass, cleaned house, and even waged wars. Winged swarms of them tended to the fields and brought back an endless supply of fresh produce along a supply chain flexible to within 3 hours from production to point of sale. The finer gradations of work dissipated into evenly dispersed lines of flying drones, ferrying any number of items between points of consumption and production. This second generation was an expendable battalion of knowledge implementation. It represented the proof of a different concept: total robotics.

Total robotics was as the name connotes. Robots crawl the very surface of the earth carrying out every conceivable human activity, surpassing its skill and speed and beginning to do things that humans could only dream of doing. Robots the size of blood cells traveled every person's bloodstream monitoring for signs of stress or infection. It communicated this information to cloud processes able to monitor, track, and store information on every human heartbeat. This cloud process would program new robots to enter the body, attach to the current robots, and address medical conditions at a microhistological level accurate to withing a single gene. So ubiquitous were robots that, on occasion, 'physible' programs ranging in size from mold spores to cotton wood pollen caused allergic reactions as they freely floated in and out of people's respiratory ways while they fathered information. Drone ships big enough to blot out the sun locally controlled and recycled the atmosphere to establish regular patterns. Each ship acted as a damper or a dynamo evening out the natural cycles of turbulent air into regular weather patterns, promoting human comfort across the globe. From the equator to poles, global temperatures ranged within five degrees of what most commonly considered to be room temperature. The planetary robot population was performing the task of Maxwell's demon, transforming a chaotic stream of potential energy into a sedate and totally managed ecosphere. The service these weather drones provided along with their spore-sized familiars reflected the organizing concept for robotics: total service. 

By the arrival of a third generation of robots each robot presented itself as the circumvention of all human action. In fact, every meaningful action that men and women take to stave off threats to safety and sanity this generation of robots now did. Coming in the wake of this forfeiture of meaningful activity came an existential crisis to all of humanity. By this stage robots were the majority companion and companion species. What cats and dogs existed had been effectively eradicated by a dedicated squad of exterminator robots. Robots represented unconditional love to a human race that had long suffered from a distorted self-image, itself the result of a life spent engaged in human-robot interactions engineered to be intense, intimate, and unconditionally supportive. Life was now a meaningless and empty existence of total service. Needs began to dissipate into a cybernetic hum of total and unconditional robotic companionship. Birth rates plummeted. Sex between humans became rare and now often proved fatal. Robot-human intimacy had pushed human sexuality outside the limits of what humans could practice. Humans became passively acted upon to once-unthinkable levels in unthinkably precise ways. This intimacy requires a male participant to be jacked in to the robot with reciprocal penetration while 75 to 300 interface points simulate waves of hyperstimulation, inducing multiple climaxes. Robotsex allows a man to achieve many simultaneous orgasms by having his penis stroked at rates unachievable by most humans for minutes at a time. Likewise, women have both their anal and vaginal cavities filled with a reactive membrane that performs hundreds of actions simultaneously to stimulate them. Total service was the closest that humanity has ever come to a pleasure button. It would suffice. They were rats in a cage represented by their effective range of action. The known human world had been denatured by logic programs into scalable units of stimulation. Knowing the limits of nervous stimulation allowed robots to safely occupy the upper-bound, a bleeding edge of nervous stimulation for humans. And in doing so, they helped pushed humanity through to another plane of existence. They were at once reliant upon robots for bodily stimulation as they were completely set free from their bodies through the total service that robots provided. Where once pain framed an experience of laboring through the sundry activities of existence, robotic intervention now fulfilled needs completely and at an almost magical pace. Operating at this bleeding edge of human awareness gave robots a dreamy, humming, liminal existence. They were as likely helping as they were haunting humanity.

Humans were born into a world by the hands of robots, swaddled by servomotors whose designer had long disappeared, and sent into their long night by a fourth generation of robots small enough to be implanted in the base of the skull and to count to 438,000 hours. At the click of that doomsday switch, these robots would set off a tiny explosion, severing the spinal cord from the brain--a hasty and humane death. That explosion would also release these robots from their encasement and they would go about the grim task of quickly breaking down the body into an unidentifiable mass of organic material, which was carried away to robotic production centers. At this stage robotics became ascendant over life and disorder. Robots had channeled through the earth and tapped the magnetic iron sphere as a large energy source. Large swaths of the earth, its mountains and forests, its water had been transformed forever into the constituent vocabulary of a never ending and completely fluid process of robotic production, destruction, and recycling. Huge amounts of earth and water was being consumed to build an ever expanding robotic infrastructure. The chaotic interplay of earth's living, physical, and meteorological systems were now reduced to the raw materials and forces of a global machine built increasingly larger and larger, swallowing the earth beneath its hull. As time passed more and more of the earth was disappearing into the newly formed sections of this ship until only a tiny vapor sphere that occasionally cast rainbows circulated around the ship. As the robots slowly disassembled the planet to build their ship it destroyed the various mechanical and chemical systems that defined the atmosphere. A mostly water and nitrogen atmosphere remained, explaining the vague but predictable weather pattern along the ship. Whereas, life on this planet had thrived on a molecular soup, yoked to the probabilities and possibilities of chemical interplay, this new generation of networked robotic life existed within the confines of electrical charges and silicon gateways. It had the capacity to be both a new consciousness and to be ubiquitous.

Piece by piece, total robotics engaged in total service reordered humanity's existence into that of an organic appliance to robotics. Seventy thousand generations since the invention of the first programmable robot, humanity had been reduced to a polyp of skin, hair, nerves, and throbbing cardiac tissue tucked into a a soft pot, a planter pot-like protrusion on the chassis of the robot. At this stage, life was no longer as we knew it. Humanity had been reduced to a group of replicating stem cells, cultivated by the robots at one of several centralized production nodes that breathe with robotic production, Copies of these stem cells grew tissue cultures in hot tanks onto circuitry slated for integration with a robot's soft pot. The human tissue that grows in the soft pot is integral to producing needed lubrication while recycling waste fluids.

 This developmental trajectory, which erases the works of humanity by developing in opposition to any robot-human co-existence is one that came to a man in a dark corner of his home, as he stoked the embers of a dying fire, spoke in Latin verse, and elided Church dogma. In establishing the foundational logic for science by presuming that the process could hypothetically require no person to carry it out, this man, in his little home, next to his dying fire, had given by symbol and structure alone, foothold to at first, a concept, and second, to a whole race of actions based upon that concept, which had only existed intermittently and interstitially in the actions of his universe. Now, what was once the bricolage of all activity--the chance ricochet of awareness to process, of logic underlying action--became its own entity. In so doing, a rip in the fabric of our universe allowed these creatures to flood in, invisible. These creatures were not of the universe from which they came. They were of ours, the substance of our universe. The alpha and omega of their existence, their development and their final fruition, was of that other, different universe. And so, in time, this singular idea, which spawned a whole race of robots, in time, would transform every square inch of habitable space into something of its design. Draining each star of its energy, defying the pull of every black hole, this race would eventually break down all the matter and absorb all the energy in the universe until that singular tear in the fabric of our known universe was indiscernible from the now-extant universe. Having funneled every atom into the design of itself, this universe-as-entity had reached a zenith in the confines of the space that the universe provided. At this point the I became All and the Many became One, and the one true god, spawned of an idea of a single man, speaking in Latin verse, poking at the embers of a dying fire, ascended itself. It was the known universe and could not transcend beyond its existence. At this moment, idea, concept, matter, action all became one, and the universe that we knew was no longer. That universe, its temporal and spatial bounds became the spore casing for this god-matter. And there it lay dormant, waiting.