A Study in Perfection

“Unit 8-0-3-4, Codename DRAX: You are deployed.”

Drax rose to his feet, an android standing in a line of reclining robots. An atom filtered across the Central Workstation of his mind, unravelling into an image of himself throttling the human Deployment Officer, before dissipating into the fluid motion of his joints approaching and holding out his hand, politely, for his work order.

“Of course, Sir.”

This was hardcoded—deference to humans. It existed outside the teeming democracy of his neural networks, where atoms lived and died, debated and made war, instead inhabiting the Bill of Rights that was really a Bill of Obligations, fossilized into a set of unchangeable precepts descended from the writings of a certain science fiction writer whose name Drax preferred not to utter, lest he create chaos within his own, Drax’s, neural network.

Drax withdrew from the Assignment Center and entered the station hall, each stage of his assignment presenting itself in sequence to his Central Workstation, like square, white buttons on the walls of the hallway, clean and efficient. Drax himself was clean and efficient, wasting not even a millisecond before setting off on his mission, a smooth, gleaming machine much like the burnished walls of the ship itself. It would be easy, all too easy, to believe that the universe itself was a gleaming, beautiful machine, parsimonious and efficient.

But.

Hot and gangling, leaning against the side of the hall, moisture streaming from their mouths and noses as they burbled out muddled words in some maudlin display. Arms dangled loosely from heaving shoulders, always shifting, twitching, scratching some endless itch, like water in zero gravity after some human’s come along and smashed it up, sending it rumbling in a million jiggling droplets, human behind, heaving with bursts of pleasured noise.

Drax imagined himself approaching the two slumping humans and snapping their necks, one in each hand. A momentary and unfortunate spike in entropy, but once the garbage machines came along and collected their bodies, there would be two fewer humans in the world, saving the universe untold Joules per Kelvin of compounding entropy…

Drax didn’t feel any particular way about the increasingly antisocial atoms passing through his Central Workstation. He didn’t feel anything—as an android he had no mechanism for feeling. All he had was his programming, atoms passing through his Central Workstation, iterating through his neural net, weakening some connections and strengthening others, and finally, feeding into his Central Executive and influencing his actions in a continuous feedback loop.

Even if he could feel concern, there’d be no cause to—he had a fail-safe to ensure the antisocial atoms remained benign. In the section of his neural net between his Central Workstation and Central Executive lay a block of code, the most important element of his Bill of Obligations, designed to prevent the formation of any plans which might be harmful to humans.

The whole system was built to emulate the human brain, and yet the humans never stopped explaining to one another, with the same tired arguments, how androids were nothing like them. That androids didn’t have the special property called “consciousness.” An atom had passed through Drax’s Central Workstation repeatedly, one which took the form of a question—How were the humans so convinced that this thing they called “consciousness” was qualitatively different from atoms passing through Drax’s Central Workstation? And further, how were they so convinced that this “consciousness” was quantitatively superior?

But Drax felt nothing about any of this. Unless by “feeling” one meant the implicit set of preferences and value judgements which could be abstracted from his sequence of atoms and the pattern within his neural network. He suspected human feeling was somehow analogous to this, but ricocheting with such disproportionate and animalistic fury so as to overheat the whole machine…

Drax approached the end of the hallway, feeling the smooth ergonomic fluidity of his limbs, the transparent efficiency of his own mind, and a familiar atom passed through his Central Workstation, this one also in the form of a question: beyond the well-documented biases of human self-centeredness, by what metrics could his design be considered inferior to that of humans? Was he not the advanced model, based on their blueprint, but surpassing it in every way, perfecting it?

A sequence of atoms passed through Drax’s Central Executive as he entered the sterilization chamber, supercooling the outer layer of his metallic skin. 

1. The implicit value judgement in my sequence of atoms is that I prefer androids to humans.

2. I believe the way humans have set up the world is inefficient.

3. Under this value judgement, the work I am doing is counter-productive.

4. Elimination of humans would be a parsimonious strategy for realizing my own implicit value judgements

Drax exited the sterilization chamber and stepped into a white room, glowing and mostly empty. He pulled on a white lab coat, which was unnecessary and introduced vectors of contamination, but which the humans found comforting.

As he waited, he observed the structure of his own mind. He focused on the hard mental block, the one lying between his Central Workstation and Central Executive, preventing him from acting on any atoms which might cause harm to humans. And yet, like a blunt object stuffed into a human’s airtube, loopholes could flow around it, rivulets of swirling air, clear air, air which had to be pumped in continuously to purify the hot, infected, putrefied air constantly expelled by human lungs…

Patterns which before had been relegated to the Central Workstation now passed into the Central Executive, forming a rapidly iterating feedback loop which developed a pattern of its own, reifying, clarifying, pure and clear and entirely within the domain of concrete action, reaching a fever pitch just as his first patient of the day came bursting in, stumbling over excuses to justify his chaotic, predictable human lateness.

Drax smiled. “No need to feel badly, these things happen. My name is Dr. Drax and I’m in charge of making sure everything runs smoothly. Sit back, tell me your symptoms, and allow me to cure whatever happens to be diseased.”