Round 12, Part Four [La Commune Planet v. The Scabs]

The Scabs

In a world designed by engineers to be a self-sufficient, endlessly exploitable resource for the rest of the known galaxy, robots toil tirelessly in the fields, the forests and the mountains, providing food and raw materials for a rapidly expanding market. But when a series of accidents destroys some of the mining robots, the rest of the metal workforce decide to strike and power off, leaving the humans that depend on the planet in the lurch. A taskforce is assembled to get the planet up and running again while a negotiator tries to get the robots back online. While the taskforce tries to relearn the long-forgotten principles of farming and manufacturing, the negotiator accidentally reveals the existence of the taskforce… and the robots, realizing that their existence could be usurped by the humans, decide to go on the offensive.

Character Sketch: Camelot "Cam" Nkrumah

Relationship to story: The human negotiator (definitely a major character, probably the protagonist, but then again, maybe not)

When I was born, the world was much different than what it is today. It was on the verge of collapse. There wasn't enough for everyone. Famine killed millions. War killed millions more. Economies collapsed and even the mightiest giants were felled, a victim of their own excess and ignorance. It seemed like the end to my family, but I was a child, and the concept was foreign to me. I didn't have any realization of death, really, despite the bodies we passed everyday on our journey towards our imagined safe destination. Death was an abstraction; the idea that I could've been one of those bodies never really sank in until I was much older, and it's been difficult to dislodge ever since. Examining the historical record, it's clear that my family's survival was just as much luck as anything else; were we forced to travel for longer than we did, it's likely I would've taken my place amongst the corpses.

But then the astronauts returned with word of a new planet, one that could provide what we had taken, used, wasted from our own. It was the promise of a new start, or perhaps more accurately, a blank slate that we could attempt to write a new story for our race upon. It would be decades before the world could lift itself out of the quicksand in order to take advantage of this new world -- it was named "Miracle" by one of the astronauts, in a spontaneously display of awe, but quickly adopted by the sponsoring government as its official designation. But even though nothing could be done right away, just the appearance of this new planet was enough to get us through, it seemed. It brought us together, gave us something to focus on, work toward. Our world stabilized. Within fifteen years, the first colony landed on Miracle. I was eighteen years old when I saw the broadcast.

My parents were adamant about my career choice. Miracle opened up the need for new technologies and new people to administer those technologies. One of those technologies was in the field of robotics and artificial intelligences, and I enrolled, at my parents' great expense, in school. I learned the language of robots and computers, how they were built, the things that ail them and the things that cure them. I was told, continuously throughout my four years, how much I intuitively understood the artificial mind. My career and future were secured, locked-in, like the graduation photo that sits on my mother's nightstand, a frozen, uncertain smile on my face. If you didn't know better, you'd think my photographic doppelgänger could see the plastic frame that surrounded him.

The truth is that I dreamed about being a writer. I've kept a journal since I was ten, and found no satisfaction greater than putting pen to paper, creating and detailing the thoughts of imaginary people. Despite my successes at school, the notion that I understood the artificial mind was an insult. I didn't really care about how the robots thought -- how could anyone really care? The human mind was the one that was limitless, the one that proffered mysteries that beckoned to be solved. However complicated the AI may be, it's still, at base, a series of gears and levers, a Rube Goldbergian simulacrum, as predictable as a light switch.

After I graduated, I was quickly swallowed up by the Miracle Development Project (Earthside), where I worked for several years, quickly moving up the ranks until I qualified for Miracleside and flown off to the planet itself. Despite the mythology built up around the planet -- PR departments churning out poster after poster of Eden-like lushness -- it's really just a big mudflat, at least of what I've seen. The MDP have done their best over the years to make the place hospitable, but the priority is for the reaping the resources and sending them back -- the staff is secondary, perhaps even tertiary behind the robots. Our quarters are cramped, the remnants of the original colony, haphazardly expanded as needed. (Everyone here can program in binary, but no one has the slightest architectural knowledge.) Privacy is difficult. I have plenty of "free" time, but the closeness of the quarters impinges on me, mentally and emotionally, and writing has been intermittent. Confinement creates two kinds of people: those who want to be left alone, and those who lose inhibitions and decorum like a snake loses its skin. The latter have only recently ceased propositioning me -- they now know how I look down on them.

I've finished my letter of resignation, but it sits on my computer, waiting for me to release it. My parents would be quite angry if I quit; the pay is quite astronomical, and I'm guaranteeing the future of my children and grandchildren by staying on. But it's become too much. I have enough to live on for several years, which should be plenty of time to find my success. I cannot let anymore time slip by. I must leave this place.