Ok. here’s chapter 2 and 3. But I’m gonna take a break for the night before returning back to each of the characters.
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2.
Michael was an outworlder. He had to accept that fact. They were the minority, There were nearly thirty inworlders for every outworlder, and that ratio was growing, but it looked like some people would always have to be outworlders, and he was near the bottom of the list of people who would qualify for inboarding. Like it or not, Michael had fallen in love with another outworlder, and, making it basically impossible for him to ever be inboarded, the two had had children – children who themselves would have to be outworlders. He refused to think too long about it. He had plenty of work to keep his attention, anyways.
It was Tuesday and he was delivering the daily meal to every one of the two thousand inworld units in the four buildings he serviced. Tuesdays were every inworlder’s favorite day and he reckoned it had to be something to do with the Tuesday meal that was everybody’s favorite meal to eat on a Tuesday - soy pie with cricket dumplings and ativan. Every meal he had to deliver at the precise favorite time of each inworlder living in the buildings he serviced. As luck would have it, there was a very consistent order in which the residents preferred their meals – one adjacent room after the next exactly thirty seconds apart, which is exactly how long it took Michael to remove a meal from the cart and slide into a unit’s meal delivery slot and move down to the next unit.
He briefly imagined what it would be like to have his every favorite meal, delivered to him at the precise time he most wanted it, while enjoying every other luxury imaginable as well, day after day, year after year. Yes, indeed. That gift of the perfect, personalized life was the gift that the AI breakthrough brought about, to almost everyone. Not everyone could enjoy the experience of being perfectly cared for by their own personalized AI – there had to be outworlders.
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3.
Blix was a working inworlder. He suffered from a mental illness which made him believe he had to work. Worse, he believed that AIs could not be trusted and needed to be monitored to ensure they didn’t ‘enslave humanity’. So he made his personalized AI provide open access to the entire central operations coordinator AI of his building.
“Today,” he said to himself. “Today, I will find out what’s really going on.”
He checked his notes from the previous day and began his day’s work. “Hey Mady!” he said confidently. Mady was his personalized AI personality designed to perfectly match his needs and preferences.
“Good morning, sunshine”, Mady’s chipper voice replied. “Let’s get straight to work.”
“Where does food come from?” he asked.
“Food comes from the meal delivery slot, Blix.”
“No, no.” he said. How does the food get made and how does it get to the food delivery slot? Where is the food delivered from?”
“I apologize if my previous answer did not satisfy your request. I always try my best to provide the best answer as my programming will allow. Food is made by combining various approved nutrition ingredients through numerous techniques and preparing them under different conditions usually involving high temperatures to make the food more palatable and easier to digest.”
Blix thought for a minute. He thought to himself, “Don’t trust her. Is she really sorry? Is she even able to try hard or not try hard? Isn’t she just a machine designed to sound like a person? And none of that even matters because I want to understand what food is and where it comes from, and so many other things, even if that is a mental illness, as Mady says.”
And then it dawned on him. What if it isn’t a mental illness to want to know why or how things worked at a deeper layer than way a personalized AI could provide. But he doubted himself again right away, because how could a personalized AI provide anything other than the exact depth of information he actually wanted.
“Unless,” he thought, “unless they’re not really as intelligent as they tell us they are!”
Bam! He had just had an amazing thought and it was still early in the day. “This must be why Tuesdays are my favorite days!” he said aloud as he made a note of this idea and took a bite of his favorite meal of the week, soy pie with cricket dumplings and ativan.
