He sat me at his small breakfast table and began to fuss with a kettle. “So what do you want, tea, coffee? A beer? Have a beer. Go crazy.”
“A beer will be fine.”
He rubbed his hands and cackled, his open mouth revealing even white teeth, probably regrown from buds. He bent stiffly, opened his refrigerator, and hauled out a couple of brown bottles.
The refrigerator protested in a soft whisper. “George, are you sure that’s wise? It’s a little early, don’t you think?”
“Chuff off,” he said cheerfully, and slammed the door shut.
The beer was strong and gritty. I asked, “Wheat beer?”
“The only kind I can afford. The hop harvest never recovered after that milt in the 2030s. Shame. But it’s five percent proof.” He took a long pull. “So,” he said, “tell me about your Kuiper project.”
That was what I always liked about George, even when I was a kid. He never acted like an uncle, never like family. He wouldn’t ask you polite, bored questions about how you were getting on at school. Over the years he developed common interests with us — with me it was spaceflight and all things extraterrestrial — and so when he visited we always had something real to talk about.
Not that my mother appreciated that, I don’t think. “You treat Michael as the son you never had,” she once yelled at him. “Bollocks,” George had replied succinctly, to my huge pleasure.
George always said he was pleased I was working on Kuiper, even if it was just a small-scale design study. He found the Anomaly particularly fascinating, because, he told me, its discovery in the first decade of the century had come at a strange time in his own life. His father had just died, he had gone looking for a sister he had never known he had, and the discovery of Kuiper and the great philosophical transformation it had brought had seemed to him to parallel the upheavals going on in his own heart.
Also, he told me once, it was particularly appropriate that I should work on Kuiper. He didn’t elaborate. George could be a bit mysterious at times. Well, he was a Poole.
As we sat there talking about Kuiper a toy robot came rolling into the room. It was a real antique, all shaped tin and plastic and little glass eyes, and as it rolled along a flywheel sent friction sparks shooting from a grill in its belly.
George snapped at the robot, “What do you want?”
“Well, George, you aren’t following your routines. Normally you take a walk to the shops this time of day. I wondered if you’d forgotten.” The robot’s voice was comically melodramatic, intended to intone interplanetary dangers, devoted to domestic trivia.
George said to me, “You see what I mean? They turn your home into a nursery.” He barked at the robot, “No, I hadn’t forgotten. I’m just not a chuffing robot like you. I have free will.”
The robot said, “Well, so do I, George, but we can discuss philosophy later. Wouldn’t you like to take your walk? Perhaps your new friend could go with you.”
“It’s not a friend, it’s a nephew. And we’re drinking beer and talking. So clear off.” He aimed a kick at the robot. His foot passed clean through it, scattering it to pixels that quickly coalesced. The robot, grumbling, rattled out of the room. “Little prick,” said George.
The design turned out to be a VR copy of a toy from George’s long-gone childhood, a representation of a robot from some forgotten TV show.
“I never imagined you as a nostalgia buff, George.”
“Well, you have to have a personal care assistant, ” George said, spitting out the words. “You should have seen the other designs. But if it didn’t play a mean game of chess I’d have scrambled it long ago. Little prick.”
As we talked, and George made me lunch — a light Italian dish of pasta with baked fish, good if a little heavy on the garlic — the house and its contents continued to fuss around him. George responded to most of this with a cheery curse, but he took his pills and obeyed the rules.
He only had to live like this because the family, I, wasn’t around to look after him any better.
The population of the elderly had hugely expanded during George’s lifetime. He liked to say that the commuters who had once journeyed daily out of here had all come back in their old age, “like a flock of elderly gulls returning to their nesting cliff.” But there weren’t enough youngsters around to look after them all, even if our hearts had been in it. So it was up to the robots. Without artificial sentience, if the machines hadn’t been able to fulfill the state’s duty of care to its citizens, George said he didn’t know how we would all have coped. “Maybe put us all to work, in the Sunny Vales Gulag of the Twilight Years. Although euthanasia would be simpler.”
I was silently thankful for the empathetic intelligence of the designers who had made George’s mandatory companion a chess-playing, bickering toy robot rather than a bland, soulless nurse.
After lunch we took a walk. George said he would show me the new managed forest that was growing up on the outskirts of town. “Off the Stockport Road,” he said. “Only a mile or so. Used to be a golf course. Nobody plays golf anymore.”
So we walked. The day was mild, the sunlight hazy and washed out. The air seemed reasonably fresh, with only a faintly polluted tinge to it, an acidic smell like crushed ants.
The hike wasn’t that easy. The road surface was mostly silvertop to allow the pod buses and rickshaws to pass, but the sidewalks, or pavements, as George called them, were little used: cracked and weed-infested, you had to watch where you stepped. George had been supplied with exoskeletal supports, but he said he had locked the “clanking splinty things” in a spare bedroom. He walked with a stick well enough, however.
That robot tailed us, grumbling to itself.
As we walked our talk gradually spiraled out from my work on Kuiper. I began to tell George about Tom and his accident. Actually George had known all about it. He used his house’s resources to follow news about Tom and other family members; in a wired-up world nobody is far from a camera.
I tried to tell him how we’d got together in that dismal hotel in Heathrow. George listened, and though he didn’t say much he seemed to understand.
He dug into the issue of the waterspout and the gas hydrates. “How are these gases stored? Is there a critical temperature at which they will be released? How much is there exactly?…”
He asked smart questions, having once been an engineer himself. He had worked in software, until he had been made redundant by Moore’s Law, he liked to say, the relentless expansion of computer capacity. His career had spanned the milestone time when the first human-level sentience systems came on the market at a budget an average household could afford. Now, nobody designed software anymore; for many of its generations it had designed itself. And there were no more analysts, programmers, or software engineers; instead there were “animists” and “therapists” who sought to understand the strange new kinds of minds that permeated the world. George had been too old for any of that. But there had been plenty of work for him to see out his career on the “legacy suites,” some decades old, that still lay at the heart of many major systems, and were now threatening us with the digital millennium. As George said, the present is built on the past, even in software; he said he finished his career feeling more like an archaeologist than an engineer.
Soon his questioning about the hydrates exposed the limits of my knowledge. But he agreed with me that Tom’s experience might be a bellwether warning about more serious dangers.
“Michael, if you’re concerned about this, you should go find out what the implications are. I find it hard to believe nobody’s thought of this before.”