Answer Man
Sylvio was on the electric tram heading to the exercise yard. There were fourteen other people on this tram, all with their minds in various states of occupation with the arcology’s entertainment network, several so involved in various induced-hallucinations—what was commonly known as ‘being in deep’—that they were rather slack-jawed, one even drooling steadily on the chest of his arcology-issued jumpsuit.
He never went deep in public, for fear of exactly that sort of thing happening to him. His embarrassment was considered strange among the arcology’s inhabitants. After all, a new jumpsuit was available anywhere, at any time, with no limit to the number of changes. It wasn’t about that for Sylvio, though—he just thought the droolers looked stupid and didn’t want to be one of them.
A subtle vibration at the side of his throat alerted him that Brachi was speaking to him. Brachi was his best friend, and they had a permanent link, such that as long as they were both within the arcology, they could sense each other’s presence in their mind at all times, and could shallowly access each other’s perceptions with the right sequence of thoughts—not enough to spy, just enough to get a sense of where the other person was and what they were up to.
“Any droolers this morning, Pal?” Brachi’s thoughts still took the form of his voice, even in Sylvio’s head, gravelly and short, clipping off the ends of words. “I’m on the three tram and there’s nobody good.” Brachi also didn’t deep-dive in public, and their self-awareness in this regard was part of what bonded them as friends.
“There’s one, so bad. He’s in deep. He’ll need the dress bot’s help before yard time for sure.” Sylvio looked at the drooler, and with a thought sent a detailed image into Brachi’s consciousness, producing a chuckle.
They were on their way to the same exercise yard. They typically attended this particular session, as it worked for both of their schedules, and took place late in the morning, which was important as neither of them was an early riser. Each resident of the arcology was required to attend one session every day, for reasons of physical fitness, neurological integrity, and socialization.
“You ever wonder…” Brachi trailed off. His perception sharpened in Sylvio’s mind as an emotion flared inside him. He was staring out at a vast, empty Wyoming landscape that was displayed on the view screen where the window would have been if the tram weren’t running underground. He continued, haltingly. “Even when we’re not in deep, we’re seeing what it chooses for us. You ever…”
“Wonder if we’re kidding ourselves with all this self-awareness?” Sylvio wasn’t sure if he was sensing his friend’s thought trying to surface, or if he’d just had the same thought himself, but Brachi’s hesitation and the tone of his response confirmed that was exactly what he’d been thinking.
“Wonder if we’d be better off as droolers. I feel like I’m stuck in between. Like I’m smart enough to know I’d be better off out there instead of in here, but I also know I’ll never actually go.”
“Out there like the Wild Towns? Easy talk when you’re in here, eating without fighting for it. I’ll live with a little tickle in the back of my head saying it’s all a big joke.”
“Hey, me either, Pal. I didn’t say I was leaving. I just wonder sometimes.”
“No, I get it. We’re lucky the A.I.s have this need we can fulfill, but also… is it sometimes better to have no choice but to be free?”
“Or is it better to just be a drooler and not even think these thoughts?”
Sylvio’s tram pulled in at the exercise yard station. Those in deep were gently awakened by the arcology, and the drooler shook out the front of his jumpsuit, sending spittle onto the tram’s floor with the assurance of a man who knows there are robots waiting to clean it up.
As Sylvio exited the tram, access to his extended consciousness slipped away. The vague, sub-awareness link to his apartment cameras and his mother and his sister and his robotic personal assistant winked out. He became aware of them as they left in a way he wasn’t outside the yard, where they were always with him. The signal never, ever went down anywhere else in the arcology, but there were metal plates in the walls of the yard, and in this space, he was only allowed his own brain inside of his own head.
Instead of extended consciousness, his actual ears heard the chanting already starting as he exited the tram into the transition room, a metal-walled box just large enough for a tram’s worth of people and several suit-change bots, who moved among the arrivals, making sure they were all clean enough to enter.
“Huh!” one group of people shouted, answered a moment later by a different group of voices, “Ha!” The voices rang through an open doorway at the far end of the transition room. “Ho!” And an answering “Ha!”
As he heard the chant, he could feel his heart rate start to drop, and a smile touched the corners of his mouth. It was an obvious and brute trick, but the yard *worked*. He could feel the chant in his chest, calling for him to join it, but he held off as the rules demanded until he was actually in the circle. “Hey!” “Ha!”
The drums started, signaling the official start of the yard session, keeping everyone in time. Sylvio removed his jumpsuit’s shoes and stood on the metal floor in his bare feet. Ten seconds later, a bell sounded, and his tram’s cohort moved as one towards the door and the chant.
Just before he exited the transition room into the yard, Sylvio glanced over his shoulder, through the window of the next tram as it arrived, and saw Brachi smiling at him. Then he was through and into the circling throng.
The yard was a square, a hundred yards on a side, and several stories tall, filled with trees and plants, except for a well-worn dirt track around the outside and a dirt clearing in the center that was at least partially visible from anywhere on the track. The center clearing was where the drums played, filtering out through the trees to touch every corner of the track without sounding overwhelming at any particular place. There were four drummers today, real humans playing drums made of real animal skins, playing expertly but not perfectly, looking at each other and catching eyes when someone needed to speed up or slow down or wanted to change rhythm.
In the middle space were the gardeners, again real humans, who kept up the yard with hand tools. The arcology provided the light, the supplies, and the seeds, but every plant was worked by a bare human consciousness wielding unaugmented hands. The position of gardener was the most prestigious and sought after of any the arcology offered. People had been known to weep when encountering one in the physical hallways or shared mindspaces.
And around the outside, flowing the same direction along the track, slower walkers to the inside and faster walkers outside, were Sylvio’s fellow Answerers. Some were already sweating. People shouted and whooped spontaneously, and nobody gave them looks for it—such behavior was expressly allowed in this space.
Sylvio’s cohort approached the path, and found places among the ring, melting into the crowd, ceasing to be a group apart as they spotted friends and focused on the chant.
“Ho!” The shout came from half the people around him, and Sylvio found himself joining the “Ha!” answer without even deciding to. As always he just picked it up from inside himself somewhere, as everyone seemed to, and somehow without any assignment by machine about half the people were on each side.
Sylvio gazed up at the trees. They were waving in a pumped-in breeze, but their leaves didn’t know the difference, and they danced before his eyes and felt like outside to his wrung out synapses. They refilled him in a way that mere sleep couldn’t.
“Huh!” he heard and “Ha!” he shouted, already lost in it. The arcology definitely pumped some drugs in on that breeze as well, to maximize the neurotransmitter recovery that was the point of the mandatory yard-visits. Exactly what it dosed them with was a hotly debated, highly protected secret, but whatever it was, it felt great and there was no hangover.
“Ho-ho-ho-ho—ho-ho! Ho-ho-ho-ho—ho-ho! Ho-ho-ho-ho—ho-ho!” A second layer of the chant started on the opposite side of the ring from where he was. It took the same rhythm from the drums but filled more of the available space with a lower, thrummier, less staccato sound. Sylvio considered picking up the sound, but the energy on this side of the circle didn’t feel in tune to it, so he let that pass and waited for his next turn. There wasn’t any stress or uncertainty to this decision, it was more a recognition like telling colors apart.
Brachi came up behind him, looking for him, and tapped him on the shoulder. He hugged his friend and fell into step beside him. Brachi was in the other half of the chant, so he added a “Hey!” when that energy came around, and Sylvio responded with a “Ha!”.
More chanters joined the circle, and the chant became more complex, adding parts that played off each other yet arose spontaneously. Parts also dropped off as more urgent layers arose and drew energy and chanters away. Sylvio was into his third lap around the yard now, his feet connected to the dirt below him, his legs thrumming with blood flow, his chest heavy with the effort of walking and chanting. His mind was empty.
An hour later he was in the recovery room, eating a honeyed cake and sipping electrolyte water with 5HTP and some other recovery-promoting chemicals in it. A suit-change robot fitted him for new clothing. He undressed without embarrassment, as everyone of all genders was around him, and put on a fresh jumpsuit. Everyone was smiling.
As he stepped out of the room and into the tram back to his residential pod, his extended consciousness returned. His mother was in her apartment receiving a hair treatment. His sister was also an Answerer and she was laying in her workstation, deep in answer-mode. She always went to yard first thing in the morning and returned with a brain full of neurotransmitters, so this was almost always how he found her when he finished.
He sat back in the tram as it pulled away, and closed his eyes for a moment, basking in the best he would feel all day. He could still feel the trees waving inside of him, and calling back the sight of it was effortless. The drums were still echoing. The chant had not faded away. He opened his eyes and saw that some of his new tram cohort were already in deep hallucination again, including a pair of droolers towards the front.
Brachi popped back into his mind as his friend’s extended consciousness returned upon exiting the recovery room. The voice in his mind was less clipped than before. Either its accent or Sylvio’s perception of its accent had been mellowed by the neurochemical bath.
“I’m going to Answer through dinner tonight, I have some hours to make up. How about a drink and a game late night if you’re up?” Sylvio sent back an affirmative response without actually voicing one, and Brachi fell silent, still there, still accessible, but not intruding any longer on his tram-ride.
Sylvio stretched his arms and legs, still feeling the increased blood flow. He was seventy two years old, but nothing in his body was much different than it had been at thirty. He had no pains or aches, no injuries, no motions he had to be careful before doing. He craned his neck left and then right, and the muscles stretched and turned him, uncramping, still supple. He had decades yet before age really started to show. Try to get that result in the Wild Cities.
The Wild Cities. Strange he had even thought of them again. Just before yard was always the worst time, when you were low on chemicals, burned out by too much Answering, and it made sense then to think of other possibilities, but on his way home, it almost never occurred to him to think of much at all. He decided that it must be because Brachi had brought it up in such strong terms just before they entered. Nobody left, not really. Surely not him.
Sylvio exited the tram onto the main hallway of his residential pod, walked the fifty paces to his own door, and reentered his apartment to find it immaculate, as always. His assistant was in the corner, shut down after doing his dishes and no doubt scouring for any speck of dust that might need cleaning.
Hardly anyone put anything on their walls in the arcology, no decoration or storage, and to this Sylvio was no exception. There was no point, no need for it. Instead the whole place was centered around his Answer Couch, a box made especially his length with a cable that snaked into the floor beside it to feed information back and forth from his brain to the arcology through a neural scanning array built into the couch’s inside.
Sylvio got a protein bar from a kitchen drawer, drew a glass of water from his sink, and stood in the kitchen, methodically eating and drinking as was his schedule. The robot sprang to life and he handed it the glass and wrapper without looking at it. It took them without acknowledging him, as it was programmed to do.
He approached the Answer Couch and laid down on it without ceremony. He didn’t treat this work with any special reverence. It was just what he did—helping generate human data to train the next generation of A.I. And now that he had recovered his brain fuel in the yard, he was ready for eight to ten more high-intensity hours of reacting to content and responding to nonsense and free-associating his thoughts, so that some computer somewhere could digest the contents of his brain and excrete a new language model or image model or programming model.
The thought struck him how strange it was that such a small thing as “an A.I. cannot effectively train itself on data created by another A.I. without eventually reverting to an uninteresting and universal blandness” had come to so dominate the structure of human society. From that one fact had come arcologies and Wild Towns and a shifting equilibrium of Answerers and required data. The market demanded A.I. output so aggressively that the underlying political system had been shifted by the incentives. The culture had even produced prestige for people like him, laying on couches and lending their human randomness and fuzzy consciousness to the cutting edge of A.I. training data so that machines he did not understand could use him as raw material to sculpt their descendants, like Michaelangelo dragging blocks of marble from the quarry to central Florence so that he could carve them.
Sylvio closed the top of the couch over him and was plunged into momentary darkness. Then light. Then shapes popped up all around him, complex shapes folded and recurved in on themselves, and he was supposed to pick the one that most appealed to him. A hundred sets of shapes and then a hundred more, and he had the patience and the neural wherewithal to treat the hundredth set with the same care and delicacy as the first.
After the shapes there were colors, tests of how different shades of the same color needed to be for him to reliably tell them apart. The same picture colored in dozens of different ways he was asked to describe in a single word. Then there were hand gestures done in slightly varying ways by slightly varying people. Faces inspired either attraction or revulsion. Songs with melodies that either stayed within their key or broke it. The chant was still with him, still a part of him. He felt Hey and Ha and Ho in his bones and it was not fake.
Thought of the Wild Towns was far from him, then. This was the vast bulk of his life, these choices, these reactions. Except for sleep, feeding, and recovery, this is who he was and what he did. There were only the choices within the system, never the choice of the system itself. He was an Answer Man, and that was that.
END
Thanks for reading! As always, if you enjoyed this story, please help me out by liking, commenting, or sharing with friends. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
Let's hope this is always sci-fi, not nonfiction.
“Or is it better to just be a drooler and not even think these thoughts?” It’s easier to be a drooler. Not better.
Not to imply that this feels incomplete (it doesn’t) but this reads like the beginning of a book. Though I’m not sure where you could go with this that wouldn’t just default to a stereotypical “rebelling against robot overlords” story.