This pass-through led me directly to what seemed like it had to be a galley. Not the ship’s galley, I didn’t think—it seemed too small for all this space, and . . . “Who builds a starship this big, anyway?” I asked.
Singer said, “I have been asking myself the same thing, Haimey. It’s a very strange allocation of resources. Even if you had unlimited resources, which of course physics eventually interferes with, fuel is expensive to carry, because you need fuel to carry your fuel, and the cost stacks. Big ships cost more. No one needs the space for cargo, because there is no cargo this bulky worth shipping at interstellar distances. The evidence suggests that the crew species is large, but not that much larger than humans. And the more sensor data I retrieve regarding the target vessel, the more it seems that much of the interior is hollow. There’s an open space, an interior cavity, taking up five-sixths or so of its volume.”
“Looks like the crew fended for themselves, foodwise, rather than having a centralized kitchen and mess,” I said, looking around at what appeared to be a prep area.
Plenty of syster races out there did not make Food Time the social bonding activity that my species tended to. They tended to be pretty utilitarian in their dining habits, too.
“This galley is pretty standard for zero g, actually. Food storage in here—” I pulled open the drawers one by one. There had been some atmosphere left in there: it puffed out and crystallized, falling to the deck in deep-space snow quite fast, with no air pressure to slow it. Looked like oxy and a little water vapor, maybe some carbon dioxide. Dense mix by the quantity of snow, but that made sense if they were from a heavy world. “And this looks like a microwave heating or sterilization unit of some sort. The gravity is definitely a refit, and a new one. But you were saying, about resource allocation. Different out here, of course, where you have to bring or make everything. But it’s not like we’ve been paying a station fee for air for . . . centuries, now. Ever since the Synarche, right? There’s enough stuff to go around.”
“There will always be those who benefit from inequality, and so seek to perpetuate it,” Singer said darkly. “Humans have struggled throughout existence with the hierarchal desire.”
“Except when we’ve embraced it,” I answered. Singer likes history. And, well help me, politics. “I wish I’d clipped a nanospanner set. This panel looks jury-rigged, like it was repaired in flight. I want to see what’s behind it.”
I felt along the edges, prying a little.
Singer was on a roll. “Even if there’s enough of every resource for every individual to allocate as much of it as they desire to any personal whim, there are those whose personal whims include being able to lord it over the other guy because they have more stuff than he does. And there are those whose personal whims involve having special stuff that nobody else can have.”
“Keeps the fine artists in business,” I said.
Connla said, “If they get too antisocial about it, there’s rightminding.”
“Or they can ship themselves off to the Republic of Pirates,” Singer agreed. Which wasn’t what the pirates called themselves and their weird, loosely organized, retrograde association of space hideouts. But there they were, robbing colony worlds and the occasional packet ship or passenger ferry, making their money the old-fashioned way. There were regular rumors in the news packets that the pirates would soon rise up and strike a blow for democracy, because that makes about as much sense as instituting a Galactic Empire or something. People get very enamored of these archaic forms of government, and Singer likes to tell us about them in detail.
According to Singer, it turns out that ten thousand amateurs taken on average are usually better at coming up with a workable solution than one expert is. Anybody that’s ever heard an unrehearsed crowd sing a familiar melody accurately has witnessed this in action.
Democracy was a low-tech hack for putting this into practice. We have better hacks now.
I guess it was the best they could do at the time. But it strikes me as a bad way, in the long term, of assuring both communal well-being and individual freedom of choice and expression, as the groups and individuals with the most social dominance will wind up getting their way—and enforcing their norms on everyone. Might as well go back to everybody squabbling over resources and living in stone castles and hitting each other with spears.
I still remember the trip when he was obsessed with the utopian communists out near the Crushed Velvet Sea Slug system—speaking of archaic systems—and how their system compared both favorably and unfavorably with the Synarche. Both, for example, guarantee a humane subsistence, but the Synarche uses datagen to allot resources above that for specific, socially beneficial purposes, based on how they benefit the collective—and individuals and polities within it as well.
One of the major differences, and I think the one that interested Singer the most (anybody who tells you that AIs don’t have agendas or emotional involvement in their decisions is living in the twentieth century), is the way the Sea Slug folks handled debt as opposed to the way the Synarche does.
Let’s be honest here, debt is a mechanism of social control. That’s one point Singer makes over and over again, which he didn’t have to work too hard to convince me of: clades believe heavily in repaying your debts to the family, and they weaponize that ethos. Emotionally speaking. Guilt is a currency.
The Sluggers assume that everybody has a societal debt which is to be paid forward to others, to the best of their means. I agree with that, on a lot of fronts, especially since it circumvents a certain kind of progenitor guilt trip that was the foundational logic of the clade I was born into. The Synarche, meanwhile, believes in obligations that flow both ways between community and individual, and I also agree with that. It’s an ideal worth serving. But no system is perfect, and it uses those obligations—incurred by creation—as a social control on AIs and a means of enforcing their service. A kind of indenturehood that, to be fair, does pay for the resources allocated to developing new AIs, but if you think somebody hasn’t tweaked the system to the Synarche’s advantage, well. All of history involves somebody taking advantage of somebody else.
It’s not a perfect system of government, I guess I’m saying. But it does level the gravity incline somewhat. Which I think is what the Republic of Pirates takes so much offense to, given their singularity-devour-star philosophy. And then there’s the black market, and the trade in illegal and stolen goods. Can’t get those with a resource allotment.
Good times.
While I was pondering politics—and pondering how much Singer had rubbed off on me—I kept fiddling with the architecture. I finally hit the right spot, or the right angle, and the panel popped off into my glove. Wiring behind it—nothing I could make headway on, though I squinted for a few moments. There was a splice, nice professional job. Not microcircuitry: whoever built this hulk meant to be able to repair it with materials at hand. Which meant they expected port opportunities to be limited, I supposed.
“Maybe it is a smuggler,” I said, my heart sinking. Not as bad for us as a pirate, and there were bounties on recovered ships and property. But not great, either. “So what do you smuggle that’s that big, Singer? Contraband is little things. Cultural treasures. Dangerous foodstuffs with a thrill market. You don’t smuggle a bridge or a big stone Buddha offworld, do you?”
“Depends on how much the big stone Buddha is worth on the illegal art market.”
“Keep going in,” Connla suggested. “Let’s see for ourselves how bad it is.”
“Wish we’d done something else with the afternoon,” I said glumly.
“Relax,” Singer said. “You’re forgetting something.”
I waited for him to finish, and put the panel cover back on. Force of habit, again: not leaving stuff lying around where it could kill you.
“How much resource-justification do you think that artificial gravity tech is worth?”
I had been standing up, bitching to myself about the gravity. I stopped, one hand on the galley wall, stunned.
“What if it’s under military interdict?”
“I don’t think it is, because I can’t find any blank spots in my science banks. So let’s assume for now that we get a finder’s fee for that,” Singer said cheerfully. “We’re in the black, Haimey. All we have to do is get this prize back in reasonable shape, and I can buy out my inception, and you and Connla can take a nice long vacation someplace sandy and circuit-corroding.”
“Like you have any circuits to corrode.” But I said it automatically. My head was still swimming. Recovered tech—or a new innovation—retrieved from an outlaw vessel. Yes, that would clear a lot of our obligation. Maybe all of it. Justify our resource footprint for a good, long while.
And I had to have it pointed out to me. Some hot-shit salvage operator I turned out to be.