| The State of
the World: An Historical Essay by Andrew Cain Several months ago I began to receive a series of crates at my residence. The estate of Dr. Reginald Cain, having finally found a relation who had neither changed his or her name nor gone into hiding, was determined to unload all his personal belongings on me. I had plenty of time to muse over his life as I sorted through relics of it. That, coupled with my trade as a historian, led me to muse over the world his life had created: the world we live in. Of course, it is not exactly fair to give him full credit for mankind's current place on its own planet. The general beginning was the Human War, but the direct beginning was with the G-class military defoliant "Agent Green," a biological weapon used to clear away enormous areas of forest that would otherwise have provided enemy cover. It worked by invading a plant and destroying its chloroplasts, the facilities with which flora produce chlorophyll. A quick fly-over with the super-specialized "Agent Red" compound killed residual Agent Green so as not to endanger areas outside the war zone. Green and Red were excellent weapons against the early anti-Federation insurgents of South America and other densely wooded areas. The problem came when Agent Green mutated, rendering Agent Red largely useless. Any plant it touched withered and died within hours, and through unknown means forests all over the world began showing signs of Agent Green contamination -- including those that had survived nuclear fallout. Ironically, Agent Green was the best instrument of peace ever developed; all sides of the war agreed to stop fighting in the face of global defoliation. Many experiments tried to fix the post-war ecological crisis, but the one that stuck was the manufacture of bio-mechanical trees (called treeborgs, mechaplants, etc.) to functionally replace all those that were destroyed. The success of artificial flora gave enormous clout to the science of robotics, so it was only a matter of time before the profession of roboticist produced its greatest practitioners. Dr. Thomas Light happened to be one of those unique men in history who was born in the right place at the right time with the right skills and access to the right resources. He and his infamous assistant Dr. Albert Wily virtually created the field of modern android design, but what concerns us is Light's greatest gift and ironic curse to humanity: the famous reploid X. (Of course, X himself is technically not a reploid, but merely the creative nexus from which all other reploids are designed. Hence the term "repliroid," the original term from which much of the public has long removed a syllable. I could continue with how the word differs between regions, but linguistics is not my field.) The first reploids were harmless enough; give them a task and they would learn it with greater ease and accomplish it with greater dexterity than any mere robot. Some flew, some swam. Some had two arms, others four or six or none. Whatever the design, a reploid was at least one thing: intelligent. The lowliest reploid was many levels above the lowliest robot. And yet, reploids had to know their place. They existed to serve man. The Three Laws present in all robots did not stick as readily to a reploid processor, try as designers might to drill them in. Therefore, conflict emerged when irregularly intelligent reploids decided that they were superior to us. There were isolated incidents of Irregular behavior in reploid construction facilities, but the first real Irregular incident occurred when a reploid named Maverick formally demanded human wages and greater personal liberty for reploid workers. Their foreman ignored them and ordered them back to work. Maverick refused and ended up breaking a total of sixteen bones in two people before being arrested and contained. For that reason, we use the terms "Irregular" and "Maverick" interchangeably, although "Irregular" has over time become a broad scientific term. The Federation Council could not take such activity lightly after additional Maverick incidents occurred -- some more violent and deadly than others -- so they organized the Maverick Hunters. Initially an all-volunteer human force augmented by reploids (since there was still some fear towards manufacturing reploids solely for war), the Maverick Hunters became mostly reploid in composition after a disastrous strike against a group of rioting Mavericks. We still know of this day by its legacy in our vernacular: "Redsday," for a day completely without redeeming value. To lead the reorganized Maverick Hunters and also to personally command its elites, Reginald Cain volunteered the services of his most advanced reploid yet. A reploid who was strong, intelligent, and above all, loyal. His name was Sigma. I would hope any reader of mine is familiar with him. Common reploids, which had been rolling off the assembly lines for some time, were the bulk of Sigma's forces. After the Reploid War, the Federation guaranteed reploids certain rights in an effort to stop minor gripes from becoming Irregular and then Maverick behavior. General-Purpose Humaniforms, used for literally anything a human could either not quite do or not want to do, benefited the most. Companies either produced them with particular augmentations for particular jobs or purchased simple models for later specialization. Either way, they were slave labor before the war. Under the new laws, upon construction a General-Purpose Humaniform entered a period of indentured servitude that could not last more than five years. After the period was over, the reploid in question could live his or her life at almost complete liberty. They would be denied access to upgrades deemed "unnecessarily aggressive" and scrutinized for any crime they happened to commit, but it was a definite improvement. Special-Purpose Humaniforms, those literally created to do a small number of tasks, had fewer rights because Sigma's generals and Sigma himself were of that type. The vast majority of the time they were designed and built for a specific purpose and had little initial memory devoted to anything but the intricacies of their work. Their indentured servitude lasted no more than seven years, but intense post-contract scrutiny and a general unwillingness for numerous small companies to hire them convinced many Special-Purpose Humaniforms to stay at their job indefinitely. However, these reploids often possessed potentially dangerous skills that lent themselves well to warfare, so most ended up joining the Maverick Hunters or indeed the Mavericks if they were not specifically built for either organization. Mechaniloids, the general term for all other reploids (and increasingly all other robots, another linguistic side-track), had the fewest rights befitting their lowest intelligence and general ease of control. In many cases they were mere property, but the more intelligent ones -- the few who could understand and appreciate personal rights -- were guaranteed the right to physical integrity. They could not be abused to the point of serious damage without due cause. The Reploid Rights, as they were called, freed up an enormous well of energy among the reploid population. The mostly-liberated reploids, having little to complain about, went about their lives as peacefully as humans had done in centuries past. While the occasional Maverick uprising did occur, it never came close to matching the damage done in any of the human-orchestrated wars of the 20th or 21st century. And then came Eurasia. It is now legend that Sigma, Bane of Humanity, returned one day and caused the space colony Eurasia to crash to Earth in an effort to exterminate mankind. For its own survival, most of mankind fled underground or under domes to escape the harsh environment. I gamble with my public career when I say that the falling of Eurasia merely accelerated what humans were already doing. The legend, as far as a recent historical fact can be called a legend, makes no note of how humanity had been building gargantuan under-earth colonies ever since Agent Green began blighting plant life. No engineering miracle from God's own toolbox could build Sub-Colorado in a day. Even Atlantica took its builders several decades from start to finish. When Eurasia fell, humanity all but vanished from the surface because it had somewhere to go! That fact above all else accounts for the survival of as many humans as there now live. That is not to say no humans live above ground anymore. True, reploids have all but claimed the surface and atmosphere of Earth for their own, but there are now approximately ten million human beings living on the supposedly unlivable surface, living in a reploid world much as reploids once lived in a human world. Their standard of living is remarkable, for the energy-waste we routinely pump into the supposedly fetid water and air is recycled almost at once by reploids which are finally beginning to undo the damage we have done in past centuries. Reploids appreciate a clean environment, too. Word is spreading about the reclamation of the surface and more humans are leaving to enjoy it. The Federation, however, refuses to authorize a full-scale exodus; their stated opinion is that they are not yet convinced of the surface's capacity to hold human life again. In truth, they have spent too much time and too many resources building their sheltered underground civilizations to simply pack up and leave. Furthermore, most of the people who live here have no intention of leaving this world within a world. I can fully understand why. Energy is plentiful. Food is plentiful, available, and palatable. So is water. For shelter, we have a portion of Earth's very crust. And community? What greater community could one want than humanity itself? People are therefore reluctant to give the surface a chance again, so those on the surface live a heavenly life while wishing that their brothers and sisters below would some day join them. And that, my friends, is the current state of the world. A world that is right above us. It is clean, wide and beautiful. I have seen it with my own eyes. Let us leave this technological prison we have made for ourselves. Let us leave our earthen den and step again into the sunlight. Earth is, after all, our world. The reploids were made by us, not it. |