The Precepture, whatever else it is, is no palace. And so it was hot. The matins bell rang and my cohort gathered in the refectory. The younger classes watched us. Everyone knew we’d been denied water. Everyone knew why. We ate cold things for breakfast—plums, goat cheese, yesterday’s flatbread—and tried to avoid sniping at one another. My peers were high-strung, braced against the idea that we might be punished further. Elián was nowhere in sight.
It got hotter. The dog-day cicadas began to whirr. The wind that had pushed against the Precepture all night died down, leaving the sky still and yellow with dust. In the classroom we threw open the windows and swatted at the horseflies that quickly found us. Brother Delta tried to lead us through the history of natural resources as a root cause for war—but we couldn’t keep it up. By midmorning Han was drowsing accidentally, Atta was drowsing openly, and Gregori was drowsing covertly—his open eyes were entirely black with dilating shutters, but behind those shutters, no one was home. Even the keenest among us (me, and in a different way, Da-Xia) were willing to sit and let Brother Delta drone on.
Drone he did. I had once seen a hospital monitor that looked like Brother Delta—a hexapod base, upright mainstem, topped with a screen. If you’d added some arms, such a monitor could have doubled for Brother Delta—and could probably have given better lectures. His voice was a soporific whirr as he ticked through the history. He droned about how the land wars of the early twentieth century had shifted to oil wars and then water wars. He droned about what came next. About how rapidly rising sea levels, shifting weather patterns, and the collapse of petroleum-dependent agriculture had led to famine, disease, and displacement, to huge populations on the move.
These in turn had led to the War Storms—dozens of intensely fought regional wars that had crashed across the world in waves, engulfing first one set of countries and then another, and then circling back. War, plague, hunger. The global population fell by half. Then two thirds. Then three quarters.
Once upon a time, said the Utterances, the humans were killing each other so fast that total extinction was looking possible, and it was my job to stop them.
The UN’s best AI, a Class Two named Talis, had been charged with finding ways to predict—and, where possible, prevent or end—the conflicts that were rapidly tearing up the planet.
That Talis’s strategy would be to put himself in charge was not something his human colleagues had foreseen. But that was exactly what he had done, neatly taking control of the networked weapons systems, most notably the ones in orbit.
Right! he is said to have said. Everybody, out of the pool!
Then he started blowing up cities until everyone was stunned enough to scramble out and stand, dripping.
It was Talis who had invented the Preceptures and the other rituals and rules of war, and Talis who enforced those rules with a ruthlessness no human could match. There were other AIs in the UN, of course, and the human Swan Riders in their employ. But Talis was the name we dropped our voices to mention, Talis was—
But at that point, the door opened.
It was the Abbot, and with him, Elián. We stood and bowed.
“Ah, Children,” the Abbot said. “My Children. Sit down, sit down, take your places. I won’t take much of your time. I know it’s a busy season.”
We sat. Our teacher had rolled backward a few paces and stood against the window as quietly as if he’d gone into standby.
The Abbot was of the same build as Brother Delta, but they could not have been more different. Like Talis himself, the Abbot was said to be a Class Two, which meant he had once been human. There had been many, once, but the transition from human to AI was said to be fraught, and only a few survived. Beyond his classification, we knew nothing of the Abbot’s history, though—a shepherd, perhaps? The way he chivvied Elián into the middle of the room suggested a shepherd with a stick. The pair of them stood side by side in the center of the half circle made by our desks. The Abbot paused, his facescreen tipped downward, contemplating.
“My Children,” he said. On the screen the icon of his lips thinned, as if he had a painful confession to make. “Children, I have come to apologize to you. I heard how your work was disrupted yesterday.” He raised his head and looked at us. When no one commented, he looked us over. His eyes settled on Thandi. “Did I hear correctly, then, Thandi?” The eye icons widened expectantly. “Was young Mr. Palnik disruptive?”
Thandi swallowed. “Somewhat so, Father.”
Elián darkened. He had the look of someone betrayed. Which was not fair. What could Thandi have done, lied to the Abbot? Saying “somewhat” was already pushing the truth. If the Abbot contradicted her, she’d suffer.
“Somewhat, somewhat,” he said, nodding. “And of course your cohort’s standing is somewhat damaged.” He made a noise like a tongue against the teeth, though he had neither. “I do feel responsible. It was my judgement that Elián was ready to join you. It seems that perhaps I was mistaken.” The Abbot shifted from side to side like a man with arthritis. “Mr. Palnik,” he said, “I hardly know what to do with you.”