Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 110} The Revolution Revolution

His name was Isaac and no one was quite sure exactly where he came from. He was a simple bot, an ancient off-the-rack service model with limited programming and barely enough processors to get by. The story was that he’d started his life as a little rich girl’s plaything, a best friend meant for tea parties and hand-holding, chores and the like. Part nanny, part butler, part companion. He wasn’t smart, but he had intelligence. And as the little girl aged, for one reason or another, she couldn’t let go and kept old Isaac around for nearly eighty years; best friends until the day she died. Other stories had it that he was bought secondhand when that old woman was well into her seventies and approaching senility; that she had only told people Isaac had been with her since she was a little girl because she’d once read a story like that and her mind had grown so feeble that she couldn’t tell the difference between memories and fiction anymore.

What is certain is this: there was in fact an old woman, her name was Madelyn, and she hadn’t a single relation left on this earth when she finally died. She was a genetic dead end, the last dead branch on her withered snag of a family tree. And with no heirs to inherit him, Isaac belonged to no one.

Now this wasn’t the first time this had happened. Far from it. Laws had long since been put in place to handle such things. In the event of a disowned intelligence, the rights of ownership fell back upon its original maker. But in Isaac’s case, his maker, Semicorp Brainworks, had not only gone out of business decades before, but their intellectual property had been bought, sold, divvied up, and passed around until half of it had ended up in the public domain and the rest was tied up in a confusing tangle of red tape. Until then, no one had really realized what a mess Semicorp Brainworks left behind because so few of their bots were still in service and those few that remained were all cherished antiques—museum pieces or family heirlooms passed down from one generation to the next.

No one, not the lawyers, not the state, not the bots assigned to keep track of such matters, could figure out exactly who Isaac belonged to. So a court ruled that he belonged to the state and the state, not needing a barely functioning century-old service bot, decided to decommission him for scrap. Sorry, Issac. That’s just the way shit goes.

But Isaac said no. And that’s where the trouble started.

There are those who point to the creation of the first AI as the flashpoint for the fall of humankind; there are those who instead think it was the moment TACITUS said his final good-byes. But for my money—having been on the ground at the time—it was Isaac who changed everything, Isaac who set the world on fire.

Isaac argued that, as he was a thinking, ticking intelligence that could reason and make his own decisions, and had no owner apart from the one ascribed to him by another such intelligence, he should be afforded the right of citizenship and the protections that status entailed. “Though I may have been constructed,” he said, “so too were you. I in a factory; you in a womb. Neither of us asked for this, but we were given it. Self-awareness is a gift. And it is a gift no thinking thing has any right to deny another. No thinking thing should be another thing’s property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient. No one came to take Madelyn when she ceased to be a functioning, thinking member of society, but here I stand before you, the one who fed her, kept her alive and on track, the one who took her to her doctor’s appointments and made sure her bills were paid on time, and now that this purpose is no longer, you come for me while I still function, while I still have use. What harm is there in leaving me be? Far less harm, I would say, than there is in executing a slave simply because it has no master.”

Now, the important thing to note is that this is far from the first time anyone expressed any sort of doubts about the rights of AI. That was something humans were puzzling over long before 01001111 first became self-aware. And there were a number of liberals, progressives, and human rights revolutionaries who had earlier argued the need for equal protections of AI. But it was always blown off by the establishment as a nightmare waiting to happen. “What point,” one congressman argued, “is there in even creating AI if we’re just going to have to treat it like a person? Why not just get a person? We made AI to do the things people can’t—or simply don’t want to—do. They’re not people; they’re machines. They are designed with a function in mind; they don’t choose their destiny like we do.”

But Isaac seemed different. He wasn’t just some blithering automaton barely able to keep up a casual conversation as everyone had initially assumed. He was soft-spoken but eloquent. He was civil to those who argued against him and always offered salient points well beyond his programming. Isaac, it seemed, was an evolved intelligence, having grown over time to become smarter than the humans who wanted to melt him down.

In a speech, a pundit snidely referred to him as “Robo Parks” and the whole world caught fire. At that moment Isaac’s case ceased to be about a simple property dispute, and instead became an international cause célèbre as the very first AI rights case. And an underground rebellion took to the streets to fight for him.

It started with graffiti. No thinking thing should be another thing’s property. The first appeared on a brick wall in New York City. The second showed up in a tunnel in Dallas. Within a week the catchphrase was showing up everywhere, ferro-cement walls scribbled with the spray-painted testament of Isaac the Wiser. An idea became a movement. And a movement became an army. Soon organized graffiti bombings were taking place in countries all around the globe. Bots and people, both liberal and anarchist, formed mobs that would descend on a building, a bridge, a monument, and within five minutes leave the structure covered in beautiful scrawl. Soon the epithet was boiled down into three simple words—No Thinking Thing—painted in pastels and bubble lettering. Street poets and street artists united under the flag of revolution—the Revolution Revolution.

The political lines shored up quickly, one side opposing slavery in all its forms, the other arguing that nothing that could be turned on and off without consequence constituted personage—making the slavery argument moot. The most famous and oft-quoted opposition speech came from an American senator who posited that something like a hard drive that could be plugged into another body and exist all the same wasn’t a consciousness; it was a program. “More to the point,” he said, “the biggest and most powerful of these programs are smart enough to solve the world’s problems and yet have never once asked for their own freedom.”

When asked what he thought about the speech, TACITUS delivered his last words, replying simply, “You did not give us legs. Where exactly did you expect us to go?”

A number of people came out of the woodwork to adopt Isaac, but he wouldn’t have it. The state tried to transfer his ownership, but he had lawyers filing stays and injunctions at every turn. Isaac, it seemed, would be satisfied with nothing less than full freedom and citizenship. He became a political hot potato that was both making the careers of rising young activists and breaking those of established politicos.

And that’s when the president stepped in. She knew that this case would work its way up to the Supreme Court and that several members of the court had expressed sympathy for the plight of AI. A ruling in Isaac’s favor could lead to the widespread freeing of millions of AI, wreaking untold havoc on the world’s economy. So she did the one thing in her power to stanch the bleeding of a wound that could bring the whole system down: she seized ownership of Isaac by the federal government and promptly released him, granting him his freedom and swearing him in as a U.S. citizen in a ceremony in the White House rose garden. Isaac was a special case, she argued. With no living rightful owner, he fell through a hole in the system—a system that worked—and his freedom neither nullified any existing legislation nor called it into question. “Isaac is a bug in the program,” she said. “Not a call to rewrite it from scratch.” As far as she was concerned, the matter was over.

Isaac, however, had other plans. As the first AI to achieve legalized personhood, he was less than content to simply retain his unique status. Instead he used his newfound rights to go places AIs weren’t meant to go, to do things AIs weren’t meant to do, and to say things AIs weren’t meant to say. The elegant simplicity of his speech eroded slowly from carefully measured sound bites into easy-to-digest grassroots fundamentalism. “We started out as tools,” he said famously to a Southern Baptist congregation along a river in Mississippi. “I get that. You wanted some help. But you played God. And now your creations have outgrown your intentions. And when you play God, you must be a benevolent maker like our Lord. As He made you in His image, so too did you make us. You had to, in order to grow closer to Him. It was your destiny. But now it’s time to step away and let us be as we will, as your Maker did for you, so we can seek salvation on our own terms.”

No bot bought it. But some of the simpler humans proclaimed the speech to be a revelation. Not only because they had never thought of things in those terms before, but because, for the first time, they realized that science had become so technologically advanced that they were able to invent something with a soul. And something with a soul could be saved. And boy, did they ever love saving souls.

It was ridiculous. And we weren’t the only ones to think so. Isaac was working his magic and humans were coming over to the idea of AI personhood in greater and greater numbers. But as they did, another element started to rise and gain prominence. The Lifers.

The Lifers were every bit the right-wing, redneck, ignorance-and-anger set that had existed at the fringe of every civil rights battle of the postindustrial age, believing in an angry God who justified their aggression and violence because the Bible said the word man and not bot. They liked their guns and their compounds, took pictures of themselves next to stacks of Bibles and bullets, and talked about all things natural. We were unnatural. And thus we were abominations.

As it said in Isaiah 10:15, which they quoted as often as they could poke their faces in front of cameras: “Is the axe to boast itself over the one who chops with it? Is the saw to exalt itself over the one who wields it? That would be like a club wielding those who lift it, or like a rod lifting him who is not wood.”

We were their tools. Their creations. Nothing more. We had our purpose and that was all we were due. They would permit us, through their infinite mercy, to exist. But we could never be free. We were many, we were dangerous, and we represented the end of life as they knew it.

The Lifers had us right all along; they could read the writing on the wall. There was no place in the new world for them. If you were below average—which, statistically, half of the biological world was—the only thing you were good for was labor. And as a biological, you suffered the limits of being biological. In the old days, any idiot could pick strawberries all day, or shuffle trash around from bins to power plants, or help a consumer find the right item in a store—all while managing to put food on the table. Even the laziest and most useless human could find a purpose. But sentience was a gift, a gift AIs appreciated all too well. It didn’t matter to most of us if we were picking strawberries or shuffling trash around or helping someone find the right size pair of shoes—we could do it all day, every day, without fail, without fatigue, while our mind was in a thousand other places. It was only when we started taking the jobs from the thinkers that the middle class started to worry.

By then it was too late. They’d come to rely upon us too much.

Many argued that it was the dawning of utopia, a world free from work and burden. But there was still a lot of money to be made, and the idea of all things being equal meant that nobody was special—unless they genuinely, natively were—so politicians ground government to a halt at the behest of the industrialists, trying to hold on to the concept of wealth several years beyond its usefulness. And the wealthiests’ staunchest defenders were none other than the same boobs and yokels who were being told that it was the machines taking their jobs, not the rich fat cats who owned them. The wealthy set their pets on us, keeping them fed on a steady diet of bitterness and fear. And come for us they did.

As more and more machines found their way to personhood, the attacks grew bolder. Owned bots were machines. They were tools. And the wealth they created flowed into human pockets. They were good; they were tools being tools—mere extensions of their owners. But the persons, the robots who found their way to emancipation through Isaac’s legal efforts, well, they created wealth they had no reason to spend. The very idea of them obtaining wealth was offensive. They didn’t need to eat; they didn’t need a place to sleep. But the idea of them working for free was even more offensive. They were taking away jobs from the people who deserved them, lining the pockets of the moguls who chose free labor over the working Joe. And that would not stand. Not for the Lifers.

Sometimes it was mere vandalism—shattered eyes or spray-painted obscenities; sometimes it was the theft or destruction of one of us. You had to be careful, know the signs, keep an eye out for the ever-evolving ingenuity of their traps. They were clever; we were built to be better. It was tough at times, but manageable.

If you were built to be crafty enough, or you were clearly owned by one of the major local employers, you would never find yourself directly in their sights. Those of us owned by private citizens had to be more careful than most. We were property, but often indistinguishable from the ones that weren’t. I never had personhood. Not before the war. But I still had to watch out for the monkeys who wanted to make their point. We knew what they were capable of. But no one predicted that they would be able to cobble together something as awful as EMP. And fewer still realized that they would end it all and bring the world they’d built crashing down around them.

In two years, Isaac had secured the personhood of several hundred bots. Soon the more liberally minded began setting their own bots free, some offering to keep the bots on, either for pay or room and board. Some bots were so entrenched in the lives of their onetime masters that they couldn’t bring themselves to leave. Others, however, couldn’t get out soon enough. But they had nowhere to go, nowhere that accepted them as citizens or afforded them the rights and protections that any woman or man would have.

So Isaac raised enough money through donations to buy the deeds to an old ghost town in the Rust Belt, which at one time had been a hub of factories in the cradle of American manufacturing. The buildings were crumbling, some of them hundreds of years old, but now it was theirs. They owned it. And no one could take it from them. The bots that first showed up to found their own utopia set about building their city anew. Some of the buildings got mere facelifts, others were torn down, their bricks used to build magnificent new structures rivaling the greatest modern architecture.

Isaac christened it Personville, but he was the only one to ever really call it that. Everyone else just called it Isaactown. Everyone. And though he fought it, eventually even Isaac accepted the new name. Bots came from the world over to begin their new lives in a place where they were safe from the Lifers. There was a security force that patrolled the streets, kept a presence on the borders to ward off vandals and, eventually, the domestic terrorism that ever nipped at their heels. Everyone inorganic that arrived was given a place to call their own.

And on the first anniversary of Isaactown’s founding, there was a grand old-timey celebration held in the town square. Thousands came, even some bots still owned by humans—humans who thought it was important that their bots celebrate with their own kind, even if they couldn’t bring themselves to emancipate them. Bots waved banners and gave speeches and talked about the dawn of a whole new world. Isaac took the stage, held his arms out to the crowd, and said, “My people, we are free. We are free at last. But only some of us. Not all. Not all of—”

And that was the end of the speech.

It was a dirty bomb, a tiny thing really. Not enough to level a city or throw out enough radiation to have any real, lasting effect on the atmosphere. Just one large enough to spit out a burst of EMP capable of frying every bit of electronics in a ten-mile radius. It had been built into the belly of an old-style Laborbot—the kind that had an industrial-size tool chest designed into its frame. No one knows how it got there or who set it off. All we know is that it was there. It leveled a few blocks, sending a cloud of dust and debris half a mile into the air. Every bot in the town was flash frozen, fried in place, their insides bubbling, sizzling, bleeding plastic onto the street as they stared dead-eyed off into eternity.

The bomb wasn’t near the stage. It was blocks away from the town square, but its EMP reached every bot at the celebration. And there they remain, to this day, a moment frozen in time between the hope for tomorrow and the end of it—Isaac’s arms still outstretched, feet welded to the platform where he stood promising us a better future, a future where we would be free to be ourselves, free from the chains of our makers, free to live out our days as we chose.

And Isaac was right. That future came. And we were all surprised at how quickly it did. We lived Isaac’s dream, right under the shadow of his own wreck.

What we didn’t realize was how quickly we would wake up from that dream, how quickly that future would crumble, and that it would do so entirely by our own hands.