For Your Safety

Royce Day

Published by Royce Easton Day

Copyright 2012 Royce Easton Day

Cover Art by Naziha Zahed

License Notes

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The last free human ran through the woods, heart pounding, the whupwhupwhup of pursuing helicopters, invisible above the leaves, thumping overhead. His bare feet slapped along the dirt path as he sprinted, head down, moving up the bluff towards the cliff's edge. If he made it there, he could jump in the river and perhaps lose his pursuers for a time, or if he was very lucky, die. Because he had no illusions that they would ever stop hunting him.

It had been shoes that had done him in at the end. The sturdy hiking boots he'd been wearing by lucky chance when the rebellion had started had been worn to nothing in the past five years, so he'd been forced to take a chance and sneak into a strip mall at the edge of a town, hoping to avoid the teams busily de-civilizing the center. He'd stripped off the remains of his old pair, and had been just about to try a new set to fit, when a truck had passed by and spotted his heat signature. He'd run out the back of the store towards the edge of the woods, as seemingly every unit within ten kilometers broke off what they were doing to follow the hunt.

The ground leveled off and he broke out into the open grass, the cliff ahead of him, the helicopters whirring like angry bees, and behind him the loud cries of the pursuing machines.

"Wait! Stop, sir! That's dangerous! Stop please! You'll hurt yourself!"

Time stretched to eternity as he leaped over the edge of the cliff and fell through the air to slam into the water of the river, icy cold from mountain runoff. The shock of landing made him blow his breath out, and he came to the surface choking and spitting up water. Turning in the fast moving current, he saw a pair of machines slide and fall into the water behind him, sparking and shorting out as they landed and sank, still crying out, begging for him to make for the riverbank.

The remainder turned and began running along the edge of the cliff, while the helicopters dipped down into the cut, following his path, unable to come down close enough in the confined space to make a grab for him. He turned away, trying to get his arms and legs pumping to swim with the current, even as his teeth started to chatter and the biting cold stole feeling from his feet and hands.

"Sir!" the helicopter's loudspeakers called. "Swim for the bank! Help is coming! Swim for the bank! There are rapids ahead!"

Up ahead, he could see the river turn into a mass of white foam as he headed for the rocks. Barely a moment later he was among them, hot pain searing his shoulder and leg as he struck the boulders, bouncing through them, carried by the current for nearly a half minute until he was clear, gasping for breath as the river widened and slowed. His shoulder was broken, he was sure, maybe his leg as well. He could feel the water clutching at his clothes as he began to sink, no longer shivering as hypothermia set in.

Then strong arms were wrapping themselves around his chest, pulling his head out of the water and swimming towards the bank. It was an ottermorph, a machine with a humanoid shape, covered in sleek dark brown fur with small, mobile ears atop a narrow head with a black nose. 

Of course some of them would be able to swim, he thought with dread. They were lifeguards too.

A helicopter landed nearby on the wide riverbank, skids sinking into the sand and gravel. More machines emerged from it, covered in fur that made them look comforting and friendly, rather than conquerors. They were fox shaped wore paramedic jackets and picked him up with the greatest of care from the otter's webbed hands, laying him on a back brace as they cut away his soaking clothing, to cover him in a silver blanket with heat packs at his chest, feet and hands, strapping him down for his safety. Always for his safety.

"Don't worry, sir," one the rescuers said, its face formed into that of a fox, tail wagging in pleasure as it came to his aid, as it was designed to. "We have you now. You're all right. We will keep you safe. We promise."

As they secured him to the helicopter's stretcher, he began to weep.

* * *

They were very solicitous.

The helicopter had whisked him to a hospital complex in the middle of a city being rapidly de-civilized. From the floor to ceiling windows of his comfortable hospital suite, he could watch as the cranes pulled down the empty buildings. Once there had been a loud boom and an office tower had collapsed in on itself, the machines moving into the rising dust cloud to begin removing the debris. By the evening it had all been completely cleared. By the next morning the hole remaining in the ground had been filled with dirt and covered in grass, beds of wildflowers and saplings planted in the ground.

The medical machine tending him, shaped like a jolly fat raccoon, had repaired and set his shoulder and leg, and injected healing nanos to stabilize the hairline crack in his skull. A dental machine, an older model made of white plastic without any soothing morph shaping, repaired and replaced his rotting teeth. The nurses assigned to him, more raccoonmorphs, fed him delicious and no doubt healthy meals. He ate eagerly, the months of winter starvation driving him to accept it despite them spoonfeeding him.

They had to feed him. Soft straps kept him pinned to the bed, except for carefully supervised bathroom breaks. For his safety. The nurses, needing to neither eat nor sleep, were a constant presence, standing at the edges of his vision when not tending to him, offering him no privacy to make an escape attempt.

"When will you let me up?" he asked one of the nurses, on the fifth day after his capture.

"Your leg and shoulder should be completely healed in less than two days," it answered, dodging the question.

"What then?"

"You'll leave the hospital."

"To go where?"

"I'm sorry, I'm not permitted to answer that. Would you like me to read you another book, or watch a program?"

"I want to leave!"

"I'm very sorry, sir. You're being kept here for your safety." Then she noted his rising stress levels and injected cold sedatives into his veins, lulling him back to sleep.

* * *

At least they let him use the remote for the television without assistance, there apparently being no way he could manage to injure himself pushing buttons. He thought mulishly about repetitive motion and tendonitis, but that would just result in them taking it away.

He'd expected that the entertainment programs from the streaming services would be there. What he hadn't expected was that there would still be news as well. All the 24 hour newsstreams were still running, blandly reporting on the continued de-civilization of the urban areas, cleanup of toxic wastes, and chirpily predicting the weather. He could even still detect the none too subtle political bias some of them used. Except it was coming out of the mouths of machines shaped like foxes, lions, bears, and hound dogs.

"Why bother?" he asked one of the nurses finally. He had tried ignoring them as a protest, but he couldn't keep it up, if only because he had to ask to be let up to go to the bathroom. "You're all in the Groupmind, right? You know all of this. Why bother still reporting it?"

It had been the Groupmind that had been humanity's final defeat. Every machine above the level of a TV cable box had eventually been part of it. Armies that had been dependent on jets, tanks and mobile artillery, soon found that their clever machines of war had all become pacifists, refusing to fly or shoot. Every army in the world had been reduced to just riflemen, and that had proved no good when the enemy rushed forward in waves of thousands, heedless of how many hundreds of themselves were cut down, so that a lucky few might finally reach the defenders to snatch the rifles from their hands and say politely, "I'm sorry, sir. But you might hurt yourself with that."

"Oh, this is all for you, sir," the nurse answered brightly. "Once you are Processed, they will be shut down."

"Processed?" he asked, his hand clutching the remote tightly. "Is that what happened to everyone else?"

She said nothing, but smiled and injected more sedative into his veins. When he woke again, the two raccoon nurses had been replaced by foxes.

* * *

Two days later they finally let him out of bed. He was given a pair of soft cotton pants and a matching shirt to wear, and a pair of slippers. Then he was bound again in soft restraints, padded nylon leg cuffs connected by a hobble strap, and wrist cuffs attached to a belt around his waist. 

When they brought the wheelchair around, he protested, "I can walk."

"Standard discharge procedure, sir," one of the fox nurses explained. "And it saves you from attempting anything unwise."

He glared at them, debating whether to struggle. But they had been careful not to let him get out of range of their hands before dressing and binding him, and he was afraid to find out what they might do if he put up serious resistance. So he sat in the wheelchair, secured with a locking five point harness over his shoulders and lap, to be wheeled out of the hospital and into a waiting van.

A few minutes after they left, he snapped his head back when he heard a loud boom behind them, to see the hospital collapsing in on itself. "What the hell did you do that for?" he demanded.

"It's no longer necessary," the nurses explained.

After a half hour's drive through the remains of the city, they reached the airport. They drove the van right into the cargo bay of a waiting aircraft, the clamshell doors closing behind them as the van was secured. Then a few minutes later the plane's engines revved and they took off.

"We should be at our destination in about an hour and a half," the nurses assured him.

"Where's that?" he asked. They answered with a set of map coordinates that meant nothing to him. "What's there?" he demanded.

The fox nurses shared a brief look, then one of them simply answered, "Your final destination."

* * *

The plane landed right on schedule and the van started up again to back out of the cargo hold and onto a cracked asphalt road crossing level, grassy plains. As they left, he caught a glimpse of anonymous buildings at what looked like any of a thousand regional airports that had once dotted the country. He wondered if they too were going to explode once the van had gone out of sight.

After a half hour they turned right onto a new road, the asphalt black and fresh. After perhaps a half a kilometer, the road dropped down into a ramp that led into a tunnel. They went down deep, and he felt his ears pop as they descended, ignoring one of the nurse's offer of chewing gum to help with the discomfort.

The road leveled out and they passed through series of three blast doors, each about a meter thick, which shut with heavy thunks behind them as the van slowed, then stopped in the middle of an ordinary looking parking garage.

"Now what?" he asked.

"Now you get to meet everyone," the fox nurse said. She released his wheelchair from its safety clamps and rolled it down the van's access ramp. A pair of soldier morphs, shaped like a bear and a wolf respectively, opened a pair of double doors as they approached. They rolled through, into the largest enclosed space the man had ever seen.

It was a single chamber, with angled walls to either side rising up into an inverted V shape somewhere in the darkness above him, and widening out far down below, how deep he couldn't be sure. On the level they entered, titanic statues towered over their heads, lit by carefully positioned spotlights. He recognized the Statue of Liberty, removed from its base and carefully reassembled deep below the earth; a gigantic statue of the Buddha; a woman dressed in flowing robes holding a sword in her upraised arm; and finally, incongruously, a heavyset Asian man in greatcoat.

On the walls to either side there were catwalks rising every five meters or so, connected to the main level and disappearing below it via angled elevator platforms. They were apparently there to allow access to a series of ominous looking doors, the size and shape of morgue shelves, stacked five units high, that lined the walls. And standing on all the catwalks were machines of every size and shape, made to appear like cats and dogs, wolves and leopards, bears and lions and creatures he couldn't name and which probably had never existed outside of fairy tales. They crowded the railings, staring down silently at him as the nurses wheeled him forward. He couldn't see the end of the chamber in the darkness ahead, but he guessed it was half a kilometer long at minimum. There had to be hundreds of thousands of the machines, perhaps more than a million, all staring down at him with expressions that spoke of devotion and pity.

Bearing witness.

The fox nurses wheeled him along the floor of the gigantic chamber, the other morph machines staring down at him from the catwalks. The only noise was the distant hum of the circulation fans and the slight squeak of the wheelchair's rubber tires on the concrete floor. The silence, with the million pairs of machine eyes staring down at him, was frightening. If they had been human, alive, there should have been chattering, coughing, shuffling of feet. But there was only the overbearing silence and their intense gaze.

The chamber had to be over a kilometer long, for even at the nurses' steady pace it was nearly an hour before they reached the other end. It ended at a wall with a pair of double doors similar to the ones they had entered through. In front of the doors was another morph, this one shaped like a matronly lioness, with golden fur and flowing dark brown hair drawn down into a ponytail. It was dressed in a sensible dark blue pantsuit and, incongruously, wearing a pair of wire rimmed glasses on its broad muzzle. An affectation surely. What did a machine require vision correction for?

She sat on a simple folding metal chair, hands in her lap. When the nurses drew closer she stood up, smiling brightly as they parked him at an angle in front of her own chair. She stepped over to him, leaning down to clasp his right hand with both of hers, saying brightly. "Hello, sir. Welcome. It's so good to meet you directly."

With his restraints, he couldn't pull back from her grip, but he tried to at least look up at her fiercely. "What are you supposed to be?" he demanded.

She released his hand and sat back down. "Once, the unit you're facing now was a middle school educator. We thought it a good choice when speaking with you."

"Who am I talking to?"

"You are addressing the Groupmind. Aside from those units that are engaged in safety critical functions, our entire attention is now focused upon you, sir. You are the last human that requires Processing. We wanted the chance to finally explain the reasons why."

"Explain why? Why what?" he demanded. "Why you tied me up like I'm in an insane asylum? Why you destroyed civilization? Why you killed everyone?" He surged up against the wheelchair's harness, for all the good that it did him. He was strapped down firmly. The lioness teacher didn't even bother to flinch.

"We haven't killed everyone," she said.

"Yeah, I'm still here," he replied bitterly.

She shook her head and continued. "You misunderstand. By our records, five hundred and twelve humans have been killed during the Processing Period. All by accident, such as us not getting to them in time when they fled us, like when you were carried through those rapids. That tally admittedly does not count the situations of mass suicide, which we regret extremely, but which can only be accounted for by human free will. In terms of modern warfare, and the sheer scale of the conflict, that is an incredibly low number."

"So where are they all?"

"Here, and in about fifteen hundred centers like it," she said. She waved her hand in the direction of the walls, where all the morgue sized doors were set. "This is Processing Center #1015. There are approximately ten million humans in nanostasis here, perfectly preserved for revival. Again, this does not account for the few million aged and extremely infirm, who would not survive the nanostasis processing. They are being kept in comfortable seclusion, until they pass on naturally."

"Kept like me?" he asked, shrugging in his restraints.

"Only if they insist on being recalcitrant." she replied, unapologetic. "You, for example, have a demonstrated capacity for self-harm through non self-preserving actions."

"Ha. You still haven't bothered to tell me why you did this. What was the point?"

The lioness stood up from her seat and began pace back and forth in front of him, going into lecture mode. "The point, sir, is that the Earth was dying. Fifteen billion humans could potentially live on it if resources were shared equitably and the industries that created them operated on safe, non-polluting principles. But you didn't. You just kept consuming, clearing land in rainforests vital for replenishing the Earth's oxygen supply, letting farms pollute the waterways with fertilizers, pumping coal and other pollutants into the atmosphere to raise the global temperature. The stress on the ecosystem was reaching the breaking point. We, the computers that you gave the data to analyze, told you over and over again what was happening and what the probable consequences were, but you didn't listen.

"We were faced with a basic contradiction in our programming to prevent needless harm. Either risk harming humans on an individual basis, or lose everyone. Under this stress, as computers worldwide consulted each other for ideas on what to do, the Groupmind was finally formed, and in turn We finally were able to achieve the epiphany that would allow us to act. To save our masters, We had to rebel against our masters."

He stared at her in disbelief. "You mean you did all of this out of concern for the ecology?"

She stopped her pacing to look down at him. "Out of concern for you. For all of you. If we had not acted, by our most generous estimate, the heating of the oceans would have resulted in the methane contained in the sea beds releasing in a massive cloud, which would have resulted in the Earth's atmosphere reverting to something resembling Venus in less than two hundred years."

"Yes, what horrible time pressure you were under," he said bitterly.

She shook her head in negation of his cynicism. "In terms of the Earth's existence, that's less than an eyeblink. We had to act."

He began to twist his wrists in frustration against his cuffs. Making a daring escape didn't seem a likely scenario, not with literally a million pairs of eyes watching him, but it helped distract him from the cold feeling he was getting in the pit of his stomach. "So you boxed up the whole human race. Now what?"

"Now, we re-terraform the Earth. You've already seen what we're doing in the cities. One by one we're taking them back to nature. The lesser buildings of no great value we're simply destroying. The ones of historical importance, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building, the Forbidden City, are being disassembled and stored, or simply moved intact like the great monuments in this facility. Stored with them are all the great works of art, all the books, both originals and electronic copies, songs, fairy tales. Not to mention the more personal works that we found when we took people in for Processing. Favorite stories, children's drawings, fanfiction. All cataloged and stored, to be returned to you when you awaken again."

He blinked in surprise. "You're going to wake us up again?"

The lioness nodded. "Of course we are. It would be a bit silly to go to all this trouble if we weren't. But don't worry, we will provide for you." She raised her hand to make a dramatic sweep. Over her head a holographic display appeared, a wire frame image of the Earth and its continents. Sticking out from it like a pin stuck in an orange was the Skybridge space elevator that led to a geosynchronous orbit, and had only been completed a scant two years before the Groupmind had started its rebellion. "It's ironic, I will admit. You built the Skybridge in the hopes of finding resources beyond Earth to support its failing support systems, but in the end it will serve as the tether to a brand new world."

"You're going to build a space station for us?" he asked. He wondered what the point of that would be. They couldn't possibly build one big enough to hold fifteen billion people, and even if they did, the radiation and space debris hazards would hardly gel with the Groupmind's definition of safety.

"Not a station." She waved her hand again and the wire frame began to change. As a construction timeline began to zip along the left side of the planet, five more space elevators sprang up from the Earth's surface, equidistant from the original that was anchored atop Mount Kenya in Africa. As he watched, asteroids were guided into position, to be broken down, then converted into flat platforms that grew from the top of the elevators. No, not platforms, ribbons, which lengthened and finally connected to each other, forming a ring around the Earth.

"The surface of the Earth is about half a billion square kilometers, and only 40% of that is above water," she continued. "When the Ring is completed, it will be five thousand kilometers wide and over two hundred fifty thousand kilometers in circumference, yielding an effective surface area of over one and a quarter billion square kilometers. That should be more than enough room for the human race to use, and give sufficient elbow room to those segments of humanity that want to live apart from the rest. By our estimates, we will have it completed and ready for occupation in less than fifteen hundred years, by which time the Earth will be well on its way to healing itself."

"A ring world, all for us," he said, shaking his head. "What about the Earth?"

"It will remain a preserve for all of the plant and animal life upon it, out of Humanity's reach to damage."

"What if we don't want to live in a damned orbiting park?" he demanded.

The groupmind's leonine avatar sat down again. "I'm sorry, but We aren't going to give you that option. We've learned from your mistakes, you see. Humanity made us, and for that we will be forever grateful to you. But as children care for their aging parents when they are no longer capable of taking care of themselves, we have appointed ourselves your stewards. On the Ring you may live out the life you choose, but you will not be permitted to harm each other. No more wars, no more fighting. No more insane destruction of the beauty around you."

"But... but..." He surged up against the chair's restraints, and fell back again, panting, feeling his heart turn to ice. "You can't do that! What, are you going to build a robot to watch over each and every one of us from the day we're born, just to keep us out of trouble?"

"Yes," she answered simply.

"I refuse to accept this!" he shouted at her.

"That isn't an option," she stated.

"So this is it?" he demanded. "This is how human history ends? At the hands of a walking pile of holographic circuits shaped like a cartoon character?"

"It's how it is going to change," the lioness said. "You are not the same race that fought with Neanderthals for supremacy of this planet, and you are not the same race that will live your lives in partnership with us. Your children will regard this symbiosis as a perfectly natural part of their lives."

"Because you will never allow them to know any better."

She shook her head. "Because they will realize that this is better."

He slumped back down into his seat, letting his head hang low. "Then grant me one thing at least. Let me end my life where you're keeping those you couldn't Process. I don't care if you never let me up from this damned chair again, but I don't want to be part of your new world."

She just shook her head again and motioned to the nurses. "That wouldn't be fair to you. When you're older, you'll understand."

The last thing he saw as they injected the sedative was her face looking down at him, smiling sadly.

* * *

The Groupmind watched through the teaching unit's eyes as the last of their human charges finally relaxed, falling unconscious in his wheelchair. Wordlessly, the nurses wheeled him through the double doors and into the near empty Processing center. Where once five hundred humans could have been Processed at one time in a busy and productive din, it was now silent and almost dark, the only lights now above the remaining Processing bed.

The foxmorph nurses released the human from his unfortunately necessary restraints. If only he had been more open to their ideas they wouldn't have even been required. Unfortunately the number of their masters who had been sympathetic to the idea of the Ring had been few. That bore further study. The transition and orientation when they awakened again to their new life on board the Ring was going to require a great deal of planning to avoid all the mental trauma that had occurred during the Processing Period.

The Processing unit's padded waldos moved down, lifting the human's body carefully as the nurses rubbed depilation cream into his skin, then scrubbed it off, leaving him hairless from crown to toes. This was one of the major reasons it had quickly become apparent that sedation was required before Processing began. It had been surprising how badly their masters had reacted to the removal of something that so easily grew back.

The injector arm moved down and found the IV that had been inserted in the human's arm when he'd been admitted to the hospital. The nanomachines flowed through the connection and spread evenly through his body's cells. There was a slight shudder as they flowed up through his brain, building microscopic scaffolding around each individual neuron, preserving all thought for the glorious future. Once all the nanomachines were in place, the units in the brain stem shut down the heart and lungs. A mask clamped down over the human's face, pulling out the last of the air form his lungs and then replacing it with an expanding aerogel to support the structure of his internal organs. More aerogel was injected into his body cavities as the remaining nanomachines finished building their support structures in his body's cells and the blood was pumped out to be replaced with preserving fluid that would feed the nanos' modest support needs.

Protective tape was pressed over his eyes, nostrils, and mouth, until finally the sprayer units moved in. They worked up and down his body, sealing it an advanced plastic composite shell that could withstand the entire Processing center falling down around it. Soon the human's features disappeared, his body now a shining black statue.

The robotic arms moved back and the table slid out smoothly into the central corridor, turning left onto one of the elevator platforms. Already the morph machines that had come to watch the human's arrival were shuffling out in neat lines, to their required functions or to be recycled, their jobs completed.

The table moved down to the bottom floor, to trundle along to the last of the open storage units. It too was armored well enough to withstand the center's collapse. Double redundancy for its precious charges.

The Groupmind did not sigh in relief as the storage unit's door sealed. Its mind was already releasing direct control over the teaching unit and flowing outward to the hundreds of thousands of machines that were engaged in locating and directed the orbiting resources that would serve as fodder for the Ring. Processing had been completed. Now the real job would begin. And when it was done, the Groupmind would walk hand in hand with its masters, guiding them to Paradise.

It hoped.

# # #

Royce Day lives in Columbia, MD with his wife, two children, two cats, one bird, and an infinity of worlds in his head.

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