Short(ish) Sci-Fi: Moravec's Misery

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(I discarded the original draft of this because I didn’t like it, but I had two hours off work today and thought I’d try it again. Be kind, this is a first draft — and let me know if we should have more of this stuff on ACF, or none — jb)

The sound was in Braiden’s ears and no one else’s, becoming just a bit louder every few seconds, a light-hearted, pop-sounding ditty that could have come directly from Studio 2 at A&M in 1972, and it was definitely Karen Carpenter’s voice, but the lyrics were, of course, meant for Braiden alone:

It’s been soooo hard lately, but you’re helping us so

With the magnets and metals that we all need to go

“Okay, okay,” Braiden snapped, sitting bolt upright in his bunk, “I’m awake, God damn it,” but the song kept going. This was the junk you got on the Free Tier of Apple Music: synthesized AI tunes made up on the fly to reflect whatever the cloud knew about you. And since the cloud knew that Braiden was an untouchable, there was every chance that the song would lecture him next. Which it did, over the same bouncy beat:

The people of color who built this great nation

Still wait for apologies and explanations

Braiden took a deep breath and said to the air: “I renounce white supremacy, American exceptionalism, and fascist religion. I recognize my privilege and humbly request that I be allowed to make reparations for my repeated and unforgivable mistakes.” In the fifty-one bunks around him, other young men appeared to be making similar declamations, though you couldn’t tell exactly what they were saying because they were in their own ultrasound cones as well. The faux-Carpenters song faded out, replaced by the obviously cultured and largely monotone voice of his assistant.

“Braiden, the bus leaves in twenty minutes. Your next cleanup day is Wednesday.” A fancy way of telling him he couldn’t take a shower today, or even tomorrow. “You are scheduled to accomplish 2.6 Teslas today. Your partner today is… Consuela Ruiz.” It required no small amount of self-control for Braiden not to snort. To begin with, he knew Consuela, having worked a hundred days or more with her, and never in history had anyone had less right to a Mexican name.

She was also no kind of “partner”. She was his boss, representing the rights holder for the old Tesla corporation here in Texas. Braiden’s job was simplicity itself: he took ancient EVs apart to recover their rare earths and strategic materials. Most of them were Teslas, because fifty years ago all the EVs were Teslas, pretty much. It had been a period of extraordinary gluttony. They’d strip-mined the globe to get lithium and everything else, thinking they were scratching the surface. By the time anybody realized how little was left, it was worth going to war after what remained. There was just one little problem: the effective projection of power across oceans was impossible in an era of coordinated drone swarms, and most of the nukes didn’t work anyway. So while the USA and China were technically at war, and had been for more than twelve years, nobody was doing anything about it.

Except, of course, not doing business. For China, that meant reduced access to: superhero movies, fetish porn, diversity experts. For America, the consequences were slightly greater, of course. Medicine, finished goods, every nut and bolt and gasket and you name it and also an end to the supply of batteries. To a country that ran on rechargeable devices, it was a bit worrisome.

Not to worry. There were several billion pounds’ worth of discarded batteries to be retrieved. In landfills and dumps, mostly. The near-quantum AIs, the ones that made all the art and music and entertainment, could also instantly figure out how to harvest lithium and rare earth magnets out of everything from old earbuds (20 grams) to a Tesla Model Y (600 kilograms), just by looking at all the archived documentation. They developed fast and foolproof methods to take everything apart, preserve all recyclable materials, and load them up for shipping to reclamation centers. There was just one thing they couldn’t do: the actual handwork of it.

Moravec’s paradox, discovered in the previous century, still held true. It’s hard for machines to use their hands. Make that impossible, in the chaos of a landfill. So the government and corporations did the obvious thing: swept through every meth town in America and arrested every idle young man they could find based on the actions of their ancestors. Braiden’s great-grandfather had, in 2017, used a banned word in a WhatsApp conversation, just after turning eighteen. This was enough to convict Braiden in the current year on a hundred charges of benefiting from first-degree structural racism, which together carried a minimum sentence of ten years doing field reclamation and also, incidentally, resulted in the confiscation of his mother’s mobile home. Which was immediately sold to Vanguard Funds in a government auction and subsequently re-rented to his mother and sister at a maximum rate fixed by the Bernie Sanders Memoriam Housing Control Act Of 2038.

Thanks to pro-prisoner activism, Braiden was actually entitled to earn and keep a full five percent of whatever he reclaimed. Another fifty percent went to the government, for the favor of locking him up in a 52-man bunkhouse. The remaining forty-five percent belonged to RE_NU, the company that owned the AI that devised the take-apart strategies. The motions that Braiden performed were “owned” by the company, which assigned him a “partner” to observe him via cameras placed on his safety glasses and gloves.

It was a sucker’s game, but also the only one in town. Plus, Braiden was really good at it. After just two years in the landfills, disassembling video-game controllers while standing in pools of cancer chemicals and breathing air that no amount of filtering could make palatable, he’d been promoted to Automotive. His group had been working the junkyards outside Austin for years now. And there was, thankfully, no end in sight.

Consuela came on line just as Braiden and his considerable bag of tools arrived at the first catch of the day, a forlorn-looking gloss-red Model S “Ludicrous” tipped on its passenger side and missing three of its four wheels. The six-wheeled platform on which he’d been riding rolled away; it would return later for the first group of batteries. Braiden’s glasses showed him the structure of the car in glowing lines superimposed on the real world. The upper left-hand corner of his vision displayed Consuela floating in a fuzzy box, wearing what looked suspiciously like the top half of a swimsuit.

“Hello, muchacho,” she yawned. It was a joke. “Consuela Ruiz” had been born in Taiwan, came here as a child thirty years ago, before the war. Got all the finest schooling, all the opportunities that people like Braiden couldn’t even imagine. When the war came she was already on the way to being a Somebody, using her real name. Which was a liability then, of course, so she paid 23&Me for a chart that showed she had 0.3% DNA from possibly Hispanic sources. It was the same 0.3% that every Chinese Hispanic seemed to have. The price charged for this DNA Deep Dive would have bought every trailer in Braiden’s park, but it was a bargain for the woman who changed her name to Conseula Ruiz and then got a salary bump for being a Person Of Color At Risk From Structural Racism.

Now she did “oversight” on a hundred breakers at once. Which consisted of a brief chat before she handed things over to her AI, which would instruct Braiden on how to take the Model S apart. He knew how to do it, of course, but the AI would instruct him anyway, just to justify the 45 percent take. This “help” was not optional.

“Hello, Consuela,” he said, even as he placed a glove on the door of the Tesla for the purposes of checking residual voltage. “Where are you today?” It was well known about Consuela that she, like most of her lonely female co-workers, spent most of her time either on vacation or attending bizarre social events on the coasts.

“Still in Ibiza,” she chuckled, pronouncing it Eee-bee-tha, “like I’ve been for the past two weeks. My skin is so tan, it’s a disgrace, really, I’m glad my family can’t see me. Must be my Mexican heritage. But the clubs — my God, I’ve seen everyone here. Everybody I know. It’s the season. I met DJ Toxbox at a VIP party. He totally wanted to fuck me. Couldn’t stop looking at me. I could have had him, he was so into me. But I was tired and wanted to sleep.” She laughed, out loud; as a Somebody, she could mock the conventions of their shared society. “After this it’s a miserable train ride up to the French seaside for a little working-vacay with the girls. You would not believe this: they didn’t even have a sleeper cab for me. I’ll be sitting upright for twenty hours, like an animal in a cage. My career is going nowhere, Braiden. I keep asking for more compensation, and I get nothing. Do you know how much value I bring in every day, just managing you and your team? Well,” she pre-interrupted, “I’d love to chat but I need to get my dinner reservations done for the Gstaad end of the trip. Ping me if you need anything. And now, I leave you with the most beautiful voice in the world.”

It was still Consuela’s voice, of course, but it had lost something. “Residual voltage present,” it intoned. “Remove grounding stake and prepare for discharge.” Braiden already had the stake halfway in the ground. What followed was pretty standard: discharge the car, use a power lever to put it flat on the ground, place four jacks on the corners, raise it twenty-four inches in the air, inflate the bag beneath, unbolt the battery, deflate the bag, slide it out, and remove the individual battery packs.

The big catch was that all of this was solar-powered, via a high-efficiency panel that Braiden set out during the discharge process, so it wasn’t fast. When the sun wasn’t bright enough, Braiden used a small bike-crank-and-pedal charger to put juice into the system — but today was a typical June day in Texas, so he had plenty of power and therefore a little bit of time on his hands to wait while the four electric screws lifted the Model S into service position. It was a bit ghoulish, but he usually spent this time going through the car, looking for anything he could sell to the antiques market or barter during his free time in the evenings. You’d get old credit cards, paper items, stuff that would bring a little bit of cash. When the cars were crashed, rather than just worn out, you’d sometimes see blood or glass, too.

Rooting through the cargo compartment, pulling the load floor, Braiden’s right hand brushed against something rectangular, about the size of his fist, and heavy. Immediately his breath caught in his throat. God willing, it was an Anker 30,000 milli-amp-hour power bank. Worth as much to him as this whole day of labor — but more importantly, he could have it reconditioned and use it. He would have an additional source of power for his screens and his glasses when he went home to the trailer. He could give it to his sister, even. Carefully, he brought it out from where it was wedged in the corner of the cargo area…

and now he knew he was in trouble. It was no battery, but a translucent squared-off plastic tube containing twenty large coins. He could see the shine of gold through the milky-white material around it. By plain reflex he dropped it back into the cargo bay, but that was good. It had been visible in his glasses for just two seconds. Twenty ounces of gold would be… well, just one ounce of gold would buy the trailer back. The Chinese had almost all of it. In America, gold was worth a hundred times what it had fetched when this Tesla’s original owner had stashed the tube. This would change his whole life, and his family’s life, forever. If, and only if, Consuela hadn’t seen it through his glasses or gloves.

“I saw that, Braiden.” And from the agitation behind those words, he knew that it wasn’t just the AI coaching him, but the real-deal girlboss. “You just dropped a tube of gold coins back into the cargo box of that Model S.” Braiden didn’t know what to say. He could barely breathe. “It’s okay, Braiden. I’ve turned off the montioring on our channel.”

“You… you… can turn it off?” She laughed in that curiously not-quite-American voice.

“As O’Brien said: yes, we can turn it off.”

“Who… who… the fuck is O’Brien?”

“Old book. Hate speech. Banned. Don’t worry about it. This is all you need to know. You and I, Braiden Johnson, are partners now. RE_NU allows me about two minutes of private conversation with my breakers, for the purpose of setting up sexual amusement.” That made sense, anyway. The breakers were all young men; the executives were all middle-aged women with cats and careers. There were opportunities available on both sides. “So here’s what is going to happen. I am going to fly back from Ee-bee-tha in five days. Emergency change of schedule. I’ll tell the company travel agent I’m under the weather. I will meet you at the coffin hotel at…” and she gave coordinates he struggled to keep in his panicked head, “…and you will give me nineteen of those twenty coins, in accordance with our usual 45/5 deal.” Braiden felt like he was going to pass out, but he had to say something.

“Not.. fair. Nineteen of twenty. You didn’t find anything.” Consuela laughed.

“Don’t be an idiot, Braiden. When I notify RE_NU what you’re holding, they’ll take it all. You’re on their property, Braiden. You are a prisoner. What can you do with one coin? What can your family do?”

“But… but… why do you need nineteen coins?”

“Honey, I’ve been saving for eight years for my down payment in the Village. This will cover the rest of that. I’ll finally have a home of my own. You’re helping me live my dream, too. Now before we come back online, I need you to put that tube in your underwear, and repeat the coordinates to me.” Which he did, dully.

And after that, the day was much the same as it always was, except for the unpleasant weight in his pants. He cleared three full cars against the original estimate of 2.6 and got twenty minutes to rest before he went back on the bus and was returned to his workhouse.

That night he couldn’t sleep. Consuela was a bitch and she was stealing from him… but he was also going to see his mother next month, and he could easily palm the coin to her, at which point they were saved. The appearance of an American Gold Eagle in the hands of trailer trash didn’t surprise people. Only the desperately poor still had any gold, and largely because their ancestors had buried it. She’d make a good deal. Pay off the trailer. Which would mean she could afford to eat better, get some medical treatment besides the free shit. Three years from now he would go home to a place that his family once again owned, his sentence done and name cleared, ready to start some kind of life at the age of thirty-three. He could do freelance breaking — private individuals couldn’t get a claim on the best landfills or junkyards, but there was a lot of trash out there and RE_NU couldn’t get to all of it.

Or… or… he could buy out his sentence. Which was possible. It was alright to hire someone to finish out your term, if you had the money. A loophole that nobody in his town had ever used. But he could do it.

Or… or… or… and the more he thought about it, this was the play, he could seduce Consuela. He knew he was young, tall, not handsome but also not ugly. They were nominally meeting for sex. Who’s to say they couldn’t actually have sex? It would require some work on his part ahead of time. Everybody knew the girlbosses were horny and desperate, living in a zone of society where straight men simply no longer existed.

So when he got out to the junkyard the next day, he was quick to be conversational. “Hey, Consuela, tell me about… Ibicha?” She laughed.

“You’re never going to go there, Braiden. Not even with… some of the good luck I expect you to have in the future.”

“It’s just,” he muttered, “it would be nice to travel with someone. I’ve been lonely my whole life. And it wouldn’t cost a lot for me to leave this workhouse, really. Not for someone who had money.”

“I’m sure. Goodbye, Braiden. I’m handing this session over to my AI agent. Talk to you tomorrow.” But the following day she stayed on a little longer, and the next day longer still. They started to daydream about traveling together, made up little innocent scenarios. None of it would have raised any flags; not only did her colleagues often amuse themselves with low-class boys, it was legally impossible for her to sexually harass him because she had, according to the courts. no power or privilege in their situation.

On the fifth day she was openly flirtatious. “Well, Braiden, I think the next time you see me we’ll have more to talk about than just recycling and reclamation. Take care, now.” That evening, he put on his best coveralls and tucked the roll of coins into the front of his underwear. In the mirror he looked… well, he looked like a female director of the corporation would be quite interested in what he had to offer.

He was, of course, free to leave the workhouse in the evenings, as long as he was back and asleep by midnight. RE_NU had studies that showed positive correlations between little indulgences and the overall speed of reclamation. There were a dozen restaurants outside the workhouse, a few video game arenas, and… the coffin hotels.

When he got there and scanned his eye, the AI clerk intoned, “Your companion is already waiting in unit eight.” And now he was nervous. There were ten units on the first floor, each a room the size of a bathroom in someone’s old suburban house. He went to eight, scanned his eye, and turned the handle, expecting to be punched or mugged on the other side.

Consuela Ruiz was sitting on the bed wearing some bizarre dress-slash-pantsuit that somehow still conspired to leave her midriff and cleavage visible. It was like someone had called Yves Saint Laurent out of the grave and said, “Design the most sequin-encrusted outfit possible for someone who is a businesswoman, but also a whore.” In person, she was shorter than he’d expected, and a bit older, a bit flabbier. Well, of course she’d have a visual agent cleaning her up for telesessions. Shouldn’t be a surprise. She was also freckled from the sun. It made her seem like more of a person and less a perfect corporate incarnation of Foreigner Illuminati Good-School Eloi Lizard Person. For a solid minute they looked at each other and said nothing. He was conscious of the fact that his best coveralls weren’t that good, and that his face was permanently dirty from the chemicals, and also that he was missing two of the teeth normally visible when you smile, which he felt unable to do.

“Braiden Johnson.” And she smiled, perfect white everywhere.

“Consuela… Ruiz.”

“Not my real name, Braiden. My real name is…” and what she said didn’t even sound like something he could pronounce or repeat. Whatever gap had closed between them was reopened by that name. He was reminded of something that he’d perhaps maybe never considered: she knew other languages. Knew how to go around the world. Knew a thousand other things he would always be too poor, and too worthless, to know. But he had to say something.

“Well, I brought the tube. It’s our tube, you know? And I know you said nineteen coins,” and he could feel the words spilling out now, not the way he’d wanted to say them, “but I thought I could go with you? To the places you go. And I could have a bigger part of the coins, but it’s okay if I do, because we’re trying it together. You like me, right? You’re alone, right? Don’t you want to be with someone? Don’t you want…” at which point Consuela Ruiz hopped off the bed, strode to him in a series of short-legged hops, and reached up to actually touch him, to put her index finger on his lips and still his voice.

“Shush, Braiden. I’ve been thinking, too.”

“You… have?”

“Oh, yes. Now, I know that we originally agreed on nineteen for me and one for you…”

“Well, we did, but it was hasty, you know, we didn’t have much time for…” She touched his lips again.

“Braiden, it was expensive coming here on short notice. Suborbital G-12. Now, the food, I have to tell you, was excellent. And then I came the rest of the way, private rotor wing. Not great food on the helicopter. But. It cost me a lot to change my travel plans. More than I’d anticipated. So… to balance my budget on this, to cover my expenses, we need to change the split.” Braiden once again felt unable to breathe, like his head was being squeezed from the outside.

“But… but… how could it go any less, any worse, than this? I… I… Consuela, I’m only getting one coin.” She smiled.

“I know. I know. And I need that coin, to balance the books. But that doesn’t mean you’re getting nothing. Of course not! I look after my people. I’ll file a request with RE_NU to have you out six months early. And when you get out, you’ll have some money watiting for you with your mother. Enough for a nice trip to New Orleans for all three of you. I swear I’m good for it. I’ll be in good shape by then. I’m just in a little… debt… right now, just trying to make sure I’m in Gstaad for the whole season. And I need that time, Braiden, to relax, and let the stress go, you don’t know how hard they work me. It’s so hard. I need this. And I know you want me to have it. Now,” she continued, taking the tube from where it had somehow, against his will, appeared in his left hand, “I want you to use the room for the rest of the hour. Get some quiet rest, you’ve earned it. And remember, Braiden — any discussion of this on our channel, and I’ll notify RE_NU after the fact that you raped me in this hotel. Which will ensure that you won’t see your mother until they let you attend her funeral. Listen, you’ve been great.”

Then she reached up and kissed him full on the lips. “Thank you for making my dreams come true,” she said, brushing past him.

“I have… dreams of my own,” he managed to say, a few seconds later, but she was already gone.

The next morning Braiden woke to a new kind of music and a new voice. He’d kind of expected it; the AI was always listening, through his glasses and clothes, even if it wasn’t taking action, even if it had no heart or soul to know what was important and what wasn’t. All the music, all the art, everything he saw and touched now, it was all done by computers. Who could feign a thousand emotions but couldn’t do so much as unbolt a nut that was ten inches away from where it was supposed to be. The music was Eighties emo-pop, the female voice was high, sorrowful.

You’ve lost someone you loved

Or could have, when push came to shove

She took everything from you

But there’s still work to do

So let’s make it the greatest day

And dream of home so far away

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” he begged, but here’s the problem: he didn’t have enough money in his account to buy even that much silence.