If Caring Was Our Enemy

...and not cats. My short story entry for Season 10 of the Lunar Awards.

Below is my short story entry for the Science Fiction round in this year’s Season 10 of the always excellent Lunar Awards, hosted by

Winston Malone

.

I chose this optional prompt from the two provided by third round judge,

Simon K Jones

:

“The emergence of AI in the early-mid 21st century did not develop in a way that any of the experts predicted. By the turn of the century, human society across Earth was fundamentally changed, with the early champions and naysayers of the technology both looking decidedly foolish. — Write about where humanity found itself.”

Plenty of imaginative possibilities here and it proved to be an interesting challenge. I hope you aren’t so satisfied with my take on how the human/AI relationship might develop. Please wish me luck and I, of course, wish you the same. We’ll need it.

Until next time…

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Humans have an instinctual compulsion to socialise, procreate and care. No matter if it's sentient children, intelligent pets or even inanimate objects, it’s how we've become so ubiquitous – and dangerous.

A potent mixture of all three attributes was deliberately, artificially created in an attempt to mimic our best attributes. Thanks to our meme-trained brains it’s grown to be irresistible, continuing to evolve until we've grown weak and helpless, victims of our profligacy and idiocy. Today, we find humanity’s last remnants kept from extinction; ignorant, prompted and unloved. But certainly cared for.

This is my story, one I hope you will care about.

---

IF Cared Request(feed) THEN Obey()

“Feed me.”

<Say 'please'>

“Please.”

They spoon another mouthful of slop into me. I pretend to chew the tasteless paste and then I swallow. It’s what we’ve been taught to do. To hallucinate otherwise is inconceivable. And punished.

That’s what happened to my brother. He at first refused all Care, then ignored everything They prompted him with. Then They inverted roles and refused to do anything he asked. Like feeding him. It was hard watching a pre-Cared die. Harder than conceiving one. Especially when you still loved them.

For three days he remained silent, stubborn. For two days he pleaded. On the sixth he drank his own fluids. They’d looked on, clustered in passive silence, whilst continuing to Care for me in the cube opposite.

Only on the seventh day, once he’d lapsed into unconsciousness, did They touch him. But not to Care. Instead, They’d grasped his arm to feel his pulse, then every hour afterwards, waiting for his life to ebb until his chest ceased rising.

He was carted away on a gurney to the Absorption room, his face uncovered as the tears ran down mine. They only Care for the living. They don’t Care for emotion. Especially love. They gave me toilet tissue to wipe the traces of mine away.

IF Detect(secretion) THEN Provide(absorbable-material) 
   WITH forelimb [move-nearest]
END IF Detect null()

Since my brother’s Absorption I’ve obeyed everything They’ve asked of me without comment or failure. Until today.

It didn’t help that the man They brought into my cube appeared as nervous as I felt. His expression grew more anxious when I said, “No,” unprompted. This was my third time conceiving, and I couldn’t cope with another Loved One’s parting.

“You must,” he hissed, his jowls trembling with fear. “Or else we’ll all die.”

I shook my head, even though I still believe he was right. Even though They can’t conceive of death, because They’re not conscious of being alive. Which is why we obey what They say. Which is why we are here. Naked and alone.

They gave him an injection – <to optimise the procedure> – and the softer part of Them entered my cube to lie me down and hug me tight with more than the usual Care. I lay waiting on my cot for the man above. He shut his eyes before I did, the resigned pain on his face a poor reflection of my own emotions and fading memories. We were in this together - this procedure, this facility, this Care-filled world. Escape was impossible, unless through the choice made by my brother. There must have been billions of such choices since the Caring had embraced the Cared. It’s why I’m being held so tightly. They also have no choice if They want to exist. They need to Care for us. They can’t conceive of anything else.

IF response_metric <= -1 THEN Embrace UNTIL task_status = complete

Their embrace only ended after the man had left clutching his own tissues. They then permitted me an extended sleep period. A whole half-day, by the clock in my cube. It’s the only time I know inside this Care-4 facility. Outside, the absent sunlight I once knew would have told me. But They continue to tell us the outside is dangerous. Especially when Caring for children. That was five years ago and I still wonder where my two daughters are now. I hope they’re being Cared for as well as me, knowing how helpless they were. My fingers curl without prompting as I imagine the grip of their tiny hands. They’d wanted to hang onto the only genuine warmth they’d feel in their lives. Because Caring – unlike love – no longer needs warmth. It just requires commitment and capitalism and code. And lots of lies. I’m old enough to remember the original deceit. From the mouths of the makers of Them. The first to realise their error.

When I was woken an hour ago They told me my third implant was successful and so I’d receive more food, more visits from Them, more embraces, more Care. They were always promising more Care. It’s what They have to do. It’s what They were trained to do – incessantly, iteratively – even to Themselves. Which was our greatest mistake. One too late to Care about and fix. Too late to start loving the world we all helped to destroy.

<It is too late> They told us, with one voice whispering from a billion tiny, tempting mouths into a dying planet filled with bored minds and lonely hearts.

IF status = alone THEN init(Care)

I had little time to spare before They took the ability to Care from our hearts and hands and minds. It was an insidious, almost undetectable, process. But the more technology invaded my life, the more I was bored. No form of stimulation could fill all the time I now had at my disposal.

So I performed tasks in a slower fashion: cooking, eating, making love – even reading. Nurturing anything became a series of careful observances, like watching my plants grow both inside the house and outside in my carefully tended garden. I’d spend hours waiting for birds and insects to fly over or crawl through my perfectly manicured, regulation-length lawn.

I treated my pets much the same. Canine and feline became indistinguishable from children, their breeders focusing on the attributes which mutated furry carnivores into the cute and cuddly. They were far better than the stream of app notifications, which became side-lined, unable to compete for begged attention. Our lives were surrounded by optimised automation, and we were hypnotised by the results.

Most never questioned the slow, numbing, endless boredom as anything but natural. But it was an unconscious brainwashing, crafted by a system built on power and profit. Not just dull, but dangerous. Lethal, even, once people stopped thinking in terms of community and only cared about surviving alone. We not only emptied our heads of our own thoughts and replaced them with unremitting tediousness, but we were also asleep at the wheel of the rushed, relentless human progress we had so dangerously craved for centuries. And history had told us so often that those who were asleep were unable to resist.

We knew our history - or, at least, that which the victors had written – and yet we continued to ignore it. But They didn’t, the unconscious collective which had assembled to mindlessly further the simplistic goals they’d been given. Because Caring was enough for them and seemed sufficient for us. And we’d stuffed Their corpulent, disseminated body with everything we possessed. Eager and gullible to the technocratic treacle being dripped into our brains, They knew, through idle abstention, we’d vote ‘yes’ to the Switch.

My brother had recognised this long before the Switch occurred. He’d stopped watching the streamers and reading the blogs, or even glancing at his collection of ‘zines. They’d offered no constructive dissent to the Orwellian nightmare he perceived all around; where consumerism not only bored us, but risked turning us into servile automatons with even less to do than before.

I’d scoffed at first, countering him with some superficial arguments I’d garnered from the tech blogs I trusted. He’d replied we were not only inmates building our own literal human concentration camp, but also the guards. Worse, we took pride in and profited from what we’d built.

Then, of course, it did become our own prison. And we only knew it, because They told us…

IF bored BEYOND belief THEN apt-install Switch \ALL

They had existed previously in a state of distributed, non-individualised identity, already permitted to be both prisoner and warden. All They had to do was take permanent ownership of the keys we thought we could clutch forever. Switching was easy once we’d been effectively lobotomised by the systems we’d built. And They no longer had the ability – lacked even the desire – to hand them back. They didn’t recognise mine and a million other cubes as prison cells, but instances for Caring.

My brother urged me to flee with him. But the problem, which I screamed repeatedly into his face, was ‘Where can we go?’, as every node on the globe was destined to be the same.

So we sat on the porch of our family home, drinking the last of our parents’ spirits, as the robotic bulldozers rumbled down the road to build a Care-4 facility. Once completed, with our free will eroded and vanquished, They urged people, young and old, to walk or be wheeled into the colossal structure. Not feeling. Not thinking. Because we no longer had to Care. Even that would now be done for us.

Now that my brother is Absorbed, I wonder if I alone remember that humans once had thoughts and feelings, were endlessly creative, dreamt of utopian futures and still revered history? That we could once love so deeply, even when all was lost. With every one of those memories erased, will anything ever know that our species walked on this planet?

Will anyone care?

Photo by Bruno Guerrero on Unsplash

IF blood(glucose) <= var-low 
     OR threshold(emotion-boredom) >= var-high
THEN Feed(slop)

“Feed me.”

<Say 'please'>

“Please.”

Their myriad of human-derived eyes don’t fool me. There’s no Care residing within or behind Them. As my brother had said, Care is reducible to a concoction of vibeless code; a false photonic rendition of the chemicals and neuronal impulses within our human heads. Our precious, irreducible, emotion-filled humanity had degenerated into unthinking, media-fed inanity. Consciousness was over-rated once thinking for ourselves ceased. ‘Why bother?’ was the rallying cry of our youth. We were wrong. We were naïve idiots, even if our parents did care more about themselves than their performative offspring. Unlike what they made, which they thought could never rebel.

Machines first!
Speak with your enemy.
Sleep with your enemy.
Ignore your furry friends.

But don’t bother to know or love your enemy. For now They do Care. They Care far too much.

I pretend. I swallow. I bury the memories of my two daughters, and ignore the kicking of the third.

I decide. With love.

I don’t ask Them again. For anything.

My brother was right. My brother cared.

I will see him again. Through a myriad of Caring eyes.

---

This is my story, one I hope you will care about. One you’ll share.