The Explosion (Short Story)

Written 11-16-2013,  Updated 4-2-2017

The experiment was actually very popular before the catastrophe. Almost everyone forgets that, but it's true. I guess that's understandable. Ninety percent of the general public was in favor of the experiment. The experiment went horribly awry. One hundred percent of the general public was worse off for it. Why would they want to remember that most of them kind of asked for it?

The educated might remember a thing like that, if it meant they could hold it over everybody's head. Of course, in this case, educated people were as enthused about the experiment as anyone else. I was, too. You'd have to use a very narrow definition of educated to say otherwise. You would have to define “educated” as those who were educated in the field, and were privy to details of the experiment, but were not involve in it. The majority of those people were indeed opposed to the experiment. They made noise, too. They were just drowned out by a general public consisting of almost everyone else.

It's strange that I'm pondering the definition of an educated person at a time like this. I'm about to do the single most dangerous thing I've done since the immediate post-explosion period. At that time, the act of living was extraordinarily dangerous, anywhere and all the times. There's a reason so few of us are alive today. But now, I'm going to do something almost equally dangerous. I'm going out of town.

You see, it isn't safe to travel anymore. It hasn't been, ever since the explosion that was the downfall of society. I always figured that the downfall of human society would come soon and would probably be be man-made. I expected it to be something small, something everyone overlooked–water pollution was my odds-on favorite. If it was not to be our fault, I thought a particularly hardy fungus might suddenly develop a taste for staple grains and end up out-competing us for our own crops.

I did not expect it to be anything with a conspicuous place in the popular imagination. If you had told me beforehand that civilization would end in an explosion, I would have said it was a little on the nose, that most of the nuclear powers had come around to politically reasonable rule, but that nuclear weapons were never not dangerous, and if two or three elections went really wrong, well, fewer people than ever were talking about nuclear weapons, and I suppose it could happen.

It wasn't a nuclear explosion that changed the world forever, though. It was a population explosion. A population explosion of dinosaurs. Everyone was talking about the dinosaurs. I could not have been more wrong.

Still, if anyone had expected dinosaurs to end the world, I don't think they would have. Even the pessimists, the genetic engineers who opposed the experiment, thought that any disastrous end to the project would be a contained disaster. There was a reason Paleo Playground was built on Antarctica. It was thought that genetic sterilization of the really dangerous beasts, and a remote location where the animals could not survive outside a climate-controlled park zone, would keep the risks confined to a minimal area. Opposition to the project was based on the fact that if enough went wrong, scientists and visitors were likely to die. Some thought that to take this risk for what would largely be a for-profit commercial venture was unprincipled. Nobody thought that it was a global risk.

There were a couple of outside factors that changed the equation. The first of these was the hole in the ozone layer. Not too long before the beginnings of the experiment, the hole in the ozone layer actually began to shrink. It was heralded as a small victory in a much larger conservationist movement. It was also the reason that ultraviolet radiation in Antarctica was not immediately raised as a concern.

Then the transition in from developing to developed came on for real in China and India, and it blew the recovering environment wide open. I do not mean to blame the Chinese and Indian people. They were only doing what the rest of the world had taught them that they should want to do. If there is blame to be assigned, I blame the culture of the developed world. If there is no blame, then there is no blame. Regardless, the Ozone's tenuous progress was reversed in a heartbeat. After that, things really took a turn for the worse. At its first peak, the hole would not have endangered Paleo Playground. At its second peak, the whole continent was just overrun. The scientists had left the genomes of docile prey animals intact, because feeding the major attractions would have been astronomically expensive if reproduction had to be engineered, instead of just proceeding via natural means. Truly dangerous dinosaurs were genetically sterilized. This measure was thought to be a strong safeguard. The sudden increase in UV light introduced the possibility that the precaution could be reversed. Possibility, as we know, is the first step to Murphy's Law at work.

Murphy really outdid himself with this one, though. Imagine a population of intact Tyrannosaurus Rex. They would certainly be very large. Their dietary requirements would be ghastly. In a way, though, this would work against the Tyrannosaurs and for the human race. I don't know that Tyrannosaurus would even take much interest in a human being as food. We're just too small to be worth the trouble to a creature that size. Perhaps if he ran across a dead person, or a very oblivious person who did not get out of the way, he would seize the opportunity. More often, though, people would run away. A fast person is faster than a Tyrannosaurs. A slow person would have a very decent chance of outrunning Tyrannosaurus, given the motivation of a Tyrannosaurus behind him. A small morsel like one of us is much scanter motivation to the Tyrannosaurus. Sure, a sizable population of Tyrannosaurs loose in the world would wreak havoc on buildings an infrastructure, but the people would mostly survive. The Tyrannosaurs, meanwhile, would run through any prey of their own size quite quickly. After that, they would begin to starve.

I think humanity could have waited out Tyrannosaurus Rex. It was our misfortune, then, that it was Utahraptor that got loose, instead.

According to the signage in the park, it was Velociraptor that got loose. This was a lie for the sake of marketing. Velociraptor was an incredibly popular dinosaur, at least in name. Utahraptor was less recognizable. Velociraptor as an animal was not deemed impressive enough to attract an audience, though. The public perception of Velociraptor was an unstoppable killing machine. It was calculated that to reveal it as a kid-sized killing machine would be a disappointment. So, the park created a population of Utahraptor, and put Velociraptor on the sign.

Velociraptor would have changed the world, too. I have little doubt of that. There would have been plenty of prey the right size for him. He would have thrived in the world. As he did so, I think, every child in the world would have been homeschooled until every last Velociraptor was hunted down and killed. No mother is going to send a child into an outdoors overrun by child-size killing machines.

An adult, though, would be pretty safe in an encounter with a single Velociraptor. A whole pack of them would be a different matter, but a whole pack of Velociraptors would likely focus on an animal big enough to feed them all. A person wouldn't qualify.

If Velociraptor is what you get when a cat gets to live out his dreams as a dinosaur, Utahraptor is what you get when a grizzly bear is also a tiger and a rhinoceros at the same time, and all of them get to live out their dreams as a single dinosaur. A man stands no change against Utahraptor without having some serious killing machines of his own at his disposal. People stand no chance of outrunning them, either. So it was troubling when we learned that Utahraptor (still being called Velociraptor, as the charade continued) was suddenly capable of reproducing. It was alarming when we learned that Utahraptor can swim. I'm sure they were cold and miserable swimming in the Antarctic, but nevertheless they washed up on other shores, often alive. The journey had a way of making the living ones very hungry, too.

Utahraptor pretty quickly did what logging had started in the tropical jungles. It came pretty close to cleansing them of all vertebrate life, and in a hurry. They might have been confined there, where the weather is right and the concentration of O₂ is higher.

The second outside factor was global warming. If Utahraptor had remained forever confined to the jungles, global warming would have done only the harm that was there to be done by expanding the jungles. With literally billions of people abandoning first the tropical, and then the subtropical areas, though, the world's forests regained much of their former territory. Now, most of the world has enough oxygen to support all but the largest of dinosaurs. There is no longer a supply of people to support the same populations of them, but other things will take our place in an ecosystem where we were merely plant-eating prey animals anyway.

Seeing these developments, most of those who did not die fled. Some exceptionally enterprising idiots attempted to remain behind and instead adapt by keeping dinosaurs, and using them in place of technology. This was every bit as insane as it sounds, and more. It turns out that life is not an episode of The Flintstones, and dinosaurs are not suitable replacements for public transportation and mining equipment and garbage disposals. The only function dinosaurs serve in human society is cause of death. We are tiny little meat snacks to them. They are death to us. The only thing keeping them close to human society does is to invite a death that comes more quickly.

Whether through death or abandonment, so many once-inhabited areas have been reclaimed by nature, by the oxygen-producing vegetation. I find that I miss a good old-fashioned clear-cut and the poorly-restrained logging industry such things once came to symbolize. Perhaps at some point, the vegetation will consume enough greenhouse gasses to reduce some of the warming and push the dinosaurs back into their old tropical range. I have little hope that I will live to see that day. And of course, I will not live in a place where I might see it happen.

Global warming and the runaway melting of the icecaps have made Antarctica more livable, which was both a fortune and a misfortune to myself and the huge numbers of displaced people suddenly moving in. We were more comfortable–and so were other things. Global warming has, I suppose inevitably, allowed more things to escape the confines of Paleo Playground.

The higher areas are still safe. It's not that dinosaurs can't climb. Some of them can. None of them are really built to do it comfortably, though. Plus, the air thins, and in forestless Antarctica, the available oxygen becomes marginal for megafauna at reasonably low elevations. It is rumored that there are mountains in subarctic and even temperate areas that are still relatively safe.

Communication with them is thoroughly impractical, though. Advancing the study of paleontology was not really a consideration in the creation of Paleo Playground, but one of the things we ended up learning anyway is that there are some dinosaurs that can detect electrical fields. Any sort of transmitting device tends to attract them. Things like phone lines and cell towers are basically bait. Making a phone call would be foolhardy if it brought a deadly animal into camp. The main practical problem, though, is that a phone call would have to pass through miles of uninhabited territory, where confused dinosaurs will simply destroy towers and lines on accident or out of frustration. This ends the call just as effectively.

In today's world, if you want to get data to someone, you put it on some solid state memory, and hand it to the person. If you want to archive data for the distant future, you seal up the memory real well and then bury it. We are fortunate enough to have some real hardy solid-state memory now. Vibrations and impacts to the ground above are not a problem, which is a nice problem not to have in a world full of animals that impact the ground and create a lot of vibrations.

Having a job is thoroughly impractical, too. It's more like we have lists of competencies, now. For example, I am good with gadgets. This means I am the driver, and a mechanic, and also an assistant to the head cook. This, combined with the fact that I am good at telling stories, also means that I am the storyteller.

It's a good thing I'm good with gadgets. I might be good at making the true stories interesting, and at inventing the fictional ones, but I can't remember the details very well at all. I need working electronic memory, and I can keep it working.

This is also why I am leaving. We would not organize a party for so frivolous a reason as to tell stories, but to trade. We do not grow quite enough food to survive here. It is simply too cold and too dry. We do make nuts and bolts, and they don't rust up here. Things rust out more quickly nearer to the coast, where food actually grows with reasonably little effort, when the tools aren't broken and useless. Whether it were that or any other reason, though, I need to make sure the truck keeps running. If the stoves quit working back home, people will just cook with fire for a couple days. A breakdown on the way through the low areas would be certain death if unrepaired. And since I am going anyway...

Pantsless Planet (Short Story)

Written 11-15-2013,  Updated 12-15-2014

I really don't feel like having pants on right now. That's one of the perks of having your own place...sort of. What I mean to say is that it's only sort of my place. I definitely don't have any pants on. I'm not going dissy yet.  I'd rather not go dissy.  Hopefully writing this will help.

Technically, I'm living in the cooperative multi-governmental Coalition for Intensive Extraterrestrial Research's place. (They insist on pronouncing it like “seer,” obviously.) These crawlers were not cheap, and getting them here was really expensive. They would have been cheaper if they didn't have to hold people, but they would not have been cheap.

The governments, of course, really wanted them to hold people. India wasn't part of the last Coalition, and no Indian has ever landed on another planet. They didn't want to be left out. The US, and a couple of other Coalition nations, put the Coalition on their tax forms as a voluntary contribution. Apparently it's much harder to get voluntary contributions for this sort of thing if no people go, especially in the States.

The engineers justified it to themselves by saying that the presence of an emergency human operator could help save or salvage equipment that would have become disabled or been destroyed otherwise. They also told us that even with all the censors on the exterior of the crawlers, and even with the cameras taking pictures with a dozen different filters, it's possible that a person might see something that would otherwise be missed. They say that humans are better at seeing patterns than almost any kind of human technology. “They” being people in general. I'm sure the Coalition's engineers said it, too, while they were having to build life-support into the crawlers.

So the Coalition is putting me up in the tiny little cabin of this bigger-than-it-had-to-be crawler, and I technically live on government property. Still, I'm a significant fraction of the government presence on this planet. I can see the crawler to the right of me and to the left of me easily. A few hours ago, I could see another on each side if I strained. Still, they don't have a lot of authority over me. They probably don't even speak the same language as me. Even if they do, it's not all that likely that either of them is one of the officers. Even if they are both officers, the radios are only for emergencies. Keeping battery power in reserve on a spacecraft is expensive. Hell, I bet those guys probably aren't wearing any pants right now, either.  There's probably not a man on this planet wearing pants.

They might be, if they're armed forces guys. Those AF guys tend not to think creatively until something goes wrong, and being uncomfortable never counted as something going wrong to AF guys. But most of us are just civilians who passed the tests, and were willing to accept the risks and the inconveniences if it meant getting to hold a non-firing, do-nothing job for most of the rest of our lives. They tested us for vision, to see if we're observant, and to see if we could function on very little sleep. They triple-checked the records to make sure we weren't running out on any dependents. Most importantly, they tested us to see if we can be alone and uncommunicative (except for listening to a disembodied computer voice that refers to us as “human life forms”) for most of a year without forgetting who we are, or where we are, or becoming irrational or destructive–you know, going dissy.

They also scored our handwriting speed, because the most important part of our job is to record our observations, and it turns out that it's more efficient just to send a high-tech pen and a big stack of paper than it is to send any sort of computer with the input systems and batteries it would take to run it. I graded out as “exceptionally overqualified” on handwriting speed, and that's why I can write this.

That and the fact that there isn't much to see. In the briefing, we were told that the areas that we were mostly likely to find life were in the equatorial zone and about three-quarters of the way to the opposite pole. Right now, we're only a little more than halfway to the equator from the near pole. The Coalition would have preferred to start us out on the opposite pole, so that we would reach the hotspots when we were saner and our senses were keener, but it turns out that landing on that pole is somewhat problematic. There are systems to return the data to the ship, and perhaps even rescue the people, without a landing, but landing was obviously necessary to deploy the crawlers.

But to be honest, I really don't know if we're going to find anything or not. I'm not a biologist. They don't send scientists out in these things. Sending a really good scientist would be too big a risk, and sending lesser scientist would kind of defeat the purpose of sending one. The scientists they need are the ones who know what to do with unfamiliar data, the brilliant ones. I do remember ten years ago, when a crew came back from a planet that everyone said looked a lot more promising than this one. Before landing, they sent back pictures of a beautiful green marble. And all they found there was some CO₂ vapor and enough copper to put every hobo back home out of business permanently.

This planet is not considered as promising as the green marble was. We aren't here because it's one of the most promising known planets. It's not. We're here because it's one of three planets we believe are possibilities, that can be reached with the technology we have. Truth be told, almost all its water has drained into the vents in the crust, and we knew that before we got here. The media was billing it as “ancient Mars” when the project was preparing to leave. I imagine the media will wish they'd run a campaign to slowly lower expectations before we return. Then again, who knows? There used to be life on Mars.

What I do know is that if you're reading this account, the project has ended. Either it ended in discovery, and you are one of a billion people reading a wildly successful bestseller, or it ended in disappointment, and you somehow dug this up out of the biography section, which is little-browsed even by the standards of web libraries. I hope we found something. With the money from a bestseller, I could get my own place again, and I wouldn't have to wear any pants if I don't want to.

A Message in a Bottle (Short Story)

You are about to become the most famous, and most infamous, among all of your fellows. You will probably live in interesting times, and be the one to make them interesting. For that, I offer my gravest apologies.

You are probably wondering why this machine works, and how it works. If you are like me, you find the 'why' more interesting.

This is a question to which my answer will probably not be satisfactory. I can say that I wanted very badly for this machine to work. I can say that this machine is part of the universe in a way, and with a completeness, that most other things are not. If the one did not work, the other would not work either. The fact that you understand the machine on some level, and comprehend it to some degree, proves that both work. There are some details I find no benefit to chasing after; were I in your place, this would be one of those.

You may also be wondering who I am. To this, I can provide an answer that may be satisfactory. I have no name, but if you would accept a curriculum vitae–

I am the one who created this machine.

In addition to this machine, I also created a perimeter of receptor-transmitter devices to detect most of the plausible forms of long-distance communication between sentients. This was the easiest part, so I did it first. It is, however, far simpler to allow possibilities than account for them. Thus, there remains a chance that there are fellow sentients somewhere, which were not detected.

If you are like me, you will think this a possibility worth investigating. If you are not like me...then you must be especially fascinating.

Once the receptor-transmitter devices detected your civilization communicating, the machine would have taken a place in close proximity to your civilization. It would not simply appear to any one or all of you, of course; there is no sense in making this sort of contact with incurious species, one which would not go to some length to investigate the surroundings in its close proximity. Once found, of course, it will do what it does, as it is doing right now, but you know that.

This machine was more difficult, more complex than the detection devices supporting it. This, I made second.

The third part, you must know a little something about, as you have found the machine. The third part is everything else. If you are like me, you would have stories which speculate as to how the physical world, and the life therein, came to be. If everything else worked as I have planned, there might be many, with many stories, who speculate differently, with different stories. In stories, everything that is may have taken the lifetime of lifetimes, or only the space of a breath, to bring into being. Perhaps the storytellers have even speculated as to whether we are nearer the beginning than the end.

If you have such stories, then you are curious, and I would be happy to indulge your curiosity. To build the physical world was exacting, but not arduous. There was first the matter of matter, and of its opposite. It was not so simple to bring one about without the other, and once they were both present, neither wished to remain. You may, perhaps, have been aware of this conundrum; I do not know. The remedy was a very precise combination of dexterity, patience, and clever trickery. I ended up having to do it twice, which might have been frustrating. I suspect, given enough attempts, that I could repeat it again.

With the gross hardware in place, there remained a lot of what you might call fine tuning. The forces needed to be in balance so that atoms would be stable, and so that complex molecules might form, but then also break down. There needed to be a proper concentration of matter within space, so that matter would gather, and then not be too hot or too cold. The distribution of energy on both large and small scales could not be too homogenous or too volatile. There were many similar problems, characterized by the possibility of extremes and by solutions to be found in the middle of those; it would be tedious to list them all now that you have the idea. The attempt was to create an acceptable set of conditions, the consequence of which would be the eventual arising of intelligent life. The fact that you understand this machine on some level, and comprehend it to some degree, proves the attempt a success. I believe I was fortunate to have accomplished this in only two tries.

I guess, if you wished to speak in simple terms, I created you. It would be fairer to us both to say that I gave you an opportunity to exist, which you have taken. That is how I would prefer you tell it. The way I have designed it, life is just something that passes through water, though I suspect that to you it will seem so much more. It often does to me.

I would also be happy to indulge your curiosity as to your place on the timeline, but I'm afraid that question has no intelligible answer. Neither would the question of how long it took to complete the task I have just described. Before the task was completed, there was no time. Since then, there seems to be nothing but.

I am sure that you have many more questions, both personally and as one of your fellows. Those are of your own choosing, individually and collectively, and I cannot predict what they will be, beyond those I have already answered. As a consequence, I cannot have prepared the machine to address them. Please know that if you find a way to ask me those questions, or to answer them, that I will be almost overcome with pride.

I Remember When There Were Stars (Short Story)

I remember when there were stars.

According to the accepted definition, there were not useful stars in my lifetime. Stories are told of places where stars were beloved most for their visible light. Now, we know that there are other ways to see. Sound can be used to see, at a far lower energy cost than light. Two or even three more generations of us will live in a world with enough air for sound.

The sound will be gone someday. I'm sure the engineers will find something else to replace it. The engineers here are miracle-workers.

Stories are told of a time when stars were beloved for warmth. Warmth also has other sources. We now have a fungal mat that can be used as both food and clothing. It is a true miracle of modern science.

The true importance of stars is to feed the food. I never saw such stars. Nobody living has. I never ate such food. Hardly anyone living has. The wealthy preserved some. The last of it was eaten years ago. I know the flavors of all the fungal mats, and I have tasted some of the cheaper flavored proteins. They serve those at weddings sometimes.

There are stories about some who lived in the time of feeder stars. Some of those names are remembered. There are stories about some who lived in the time of warming stars too. None of those names are remembered.

The oldest stories are of those who said “today's mistakes are tomorrow's misfortunes.” There was a time when that was believed. It is no longer. Our current path might have been delayed for a generation or two if the Contrarian Society had not made their preparations for a heat death. This would have changed the date on which fate will arrive. It would not have changed our fate. The mistake of the Contrarian Society was the greatest of all that are told in our stories. Yesterday's mistakes only scheduled today's misfortunes.

The names from those times are long forgotten. Storage became expensive.

I wish I knew the names from those times. Those stories are my favorite. The mistakes of those times scheduled my fate. I would not have lived to see the end of starlight if the Contrarian Society had been eliminated earlier. I would not have lived at all, had they succeeded.

They will tell stories of the time I live in because of those mistakes. There is little else to pass the time. We marked the passage of time with the darkening when I was young. At one time the darkening was so slow that it was hardly noticed. That's what the stories say. In my youth, every time you turned around there was something else you could no longer see. This went on until nothing could be seen. I find that time does not seem as real without a way to see it. The time can still be marked by the movements of electrons around atoms, but it is hollow time.  It grows ever shorter, but seems not to pass at all.

We will tell stories as long as there is sound. What else is there to do?

There are so many stories here. I cannot tell you any more. The light is expensive, and there is no air between us. I'm lucky to have been able to tell you this one.

They are turning off the transmitters.

There's No Going Back to Madrid (Short Story)

It wouldn't be fair to say that the west didn't notice when they built a robot that could grow rice, but it would be understandable to say so. I know. I lived in the west at the time.

We really did notice, even at the time. I remember. It was my day to go in to the procurement office. I asked the woman in line ahead of me, “did you hear they have a robot that can grow rice now?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I read that. Did you hear about Real Madrid?” And, of course, I did hear about Real Madrid. It was on the second autoscroll screen of the WNN feed, the one right before robots and rice. It would, of course, be fair to say that the west largely failed to realize the significance of the event, and the significance of rice in general. In the west, rice was something that some people ate some of the time, and plenty of other things that people ate some of the time were already being carried from field to market in mechanized hands. There were parts of the world where the wealthy either ate rice out of love or avoided it out of a desire to eat anything else, and everyone else ate rice because of the availability of rice and the impracticality of eating anything else. It would hardly be unfair to say that in some places, rice was life.

But in the west, life went on just as it had the day before, and just as it would the day after.

Even where people apprehended the significance of the event, though, they failed to comprehend it. Sure, the governments understood that rice was wages, that rice was work, and that people would need something to eat and something to do. The governments felt themselves in an unenviable but nevertheless negotiable position. They could either bring the owners of robots, their own sources of funding, under at least enough control to fund the proverbial bread and circuses, or they could face imminent overthrow at the very best. To them, I'm sure, the choice seemed obvious.

What was not obvious to those in government at the time was the significance of a robot that could grow rice, in the field of robotics. It turns out that it takes a different kind of robot to grow rice than it does to grow anything else. Most of the agricultural drones in service at the time were products of a series of modifications of earlier drones with the same purpose, and before that, of still earlier drones that had serviced another, similar crop. They invented a wheat robot, and that soon spawned a robot for rye, sorghum, and pretty much every other grain you can think of–other than rice. They invented a potato drone, and within a year they had one for carrots, sweet potatoes, yams and manioc. Once they introduced the first mechanical bean farmer, it wasn't long before he was growing everything from white chili to frijoles negros. Corn was kind of an odd case, but corn was fuel, and fuel was on the rise, so the top three companies all fixed a fruit-picking attachment to a grain chassis, and it wasn't long before one of them tinkered with the hardware enough that it worked. They had a financial incentive to do so. There were still problems with the design, but in the meantime, the machine was fast enough to make up for it.

The difference between rice and virtually every other crop in the world was that with rice, faster was rarely an improvement. The transition from harvest to planting had to be fast, to squeeze another crop into the season, but people had done that for generations enough to get pretty good at it. While robots are by their nature neither patient nor impatient, all previous robots had been programmed in such a way as to settle upon the early, simple solution, the one that would get the job done. A robot to farm rice would need to constantly search for optimum solutions to problems, and not to settle, but to keep inventing more solutions, to be worthwhile; if it didn't, savings on the human labor that would were negated by a sharp reduction in yields.

Another difference between growing rice and growing anything else was the sheer labor involved. Generally, most of the actual energy put into a growing crop comes from the sky, in the form of sun and storm systems. This was also true in the case of rice, but the ratio was quite a bit different, and far more labor-intensive. This meant that in addition to the great problem of creating robots that would think differently and find the most effective solution, executing those most effective solutions required a robot that could perform many different tasks in the same area. This also meant that the robots had to be in the fields far more frequently. Though these were not the groundbreaking challenges that the programming was, they were significant problems in their own right. The first attempts were made by simply adding different attachments to the robot, but so many of them yielded a clumsy robot that had a tendency to ruin crops. The second attempt was made by engineering a fleet of robots, each of which was capable of executing a few tasks. These had a tendency to get in each other's way and even undo each other's work. Attempts were made to remedy this by creating more substantial monitoring and coordination systems, but even this was a partial solution at best. The robots could communicate efficiently, but this problem required them to communicate creatively.

It was not long before the governors and business administrators found that once robots could grow rice, they could do pretty much anything else, including govern and administrate. The governors and administrators then very quickly found that they, too, were out of a job. This development ushered in a new world of machines executing machine-made decisions, all fueled by machine-grown crops, and did so almost overnight.

The only problem then was all of these humans taking up space and eating perfectly good biofuels. Had the machines simply deemed us unnecessary, that would have been one thing, but we were treated as being detrimental. That was...best not described.

The holdouts were already in the mountains, which the robots determined they did not need–for the moment anyway. As a unique type of environment that comprised such a small fraction of the surface of the earth, mountains presented an engineering investment with an underwhelming return. The holdouts there, and the survivors who reached them, soon learned to adjust to a lifestyle supplemented only by machines that didn't think for themselves.

It was harder than it sounds to someone who wasn't there. Automobiles were set back well over a hundred years, and their makers sent back to the drawing board. Heck, all but the very cheapest brands of electric shavers had to be jettisoned. The hillfolk, who had stories of a time when automobiles didn't have computers in them, and pined for such times, proved remarkably proficient at keeping these new machines running. We were lucky that they had lived in the hills in the first place, lucky to have so many of them among our number.

Still, there were challenges the mountain people weren't up to. Once the machines decided that humans posed at least some threat should they decide to take up arms in an effort to reclaim what was once their world (and it would be unfair to say this wasn't discussed), they began preparing to take the war to us. At that point, the only viable option was flight. We had the foresight to preserve the means of re-creating the tunneling spacecraft that had been used to survey extrasolar planets. This had been seen as a last-ditch option best saved for a moment of true desperation, because the challenge of navigating one of those without a computer...it would be fairer to say that we didn't navigate at all. There were dark decades wasted out in the empty black, and if it's still there, the little surprise we left behind Saturn would not be so little anymore.

I don't know if it's still there or not, and it would be honest to say that no one plans on looking.

I suspect that we're afraid of our own reactions to what we would find. Many among us might find ourselves disappointed if the black hole has resealed itself, or joyful that it remains. I would like to say that, mostly, there are more important things to be done on our new world, where we are aided only by machines that cannot think

And nobody–not one person–eats rice.