The Machine Starts

A woman was running down the middle of the road, screaming. Every few paces she’d turn around to see if they were still chasing her. They were. It didn’t seem to be an issue for them to keep pace with her. They were a bee-like cloud of tiny robots. Alone they were pretty much harmless, you could trap one under a jar and watch it bounce off the sides. Together, equipped with a variety of tools, they were lethal.

A young girl was standing out on the porch with her grandmother, drinking a glass of milk before bed. “Can’t we help her poppy? She doesn’t look happy.” he asked, troubled by what he was seeing.

“Nope.” said the grandmother firmly. “Not unless you want to get yourself turned into grey goo.”

“But what did she do?”

“Ah heck knows, probably littering or something. It’s not what we want to happen to her, but that’s what the Technocrats wanted, so that’s what’s happening.”

The Technocrats was a name that everyone knew and cursed. They were long dead and it was possible to speak openly about their flaws. In fact many people did and there were nightly reports and documentaries about their failings.

The grandmother was just old enough to recall their beginnings, before they died. There had been a lot of excitement back then about the new regime. The Technocrats posited that the problem with politics was that there was too much change. What a country needed was stability. Rules that couldn’t simply be taken away again by the next party in power. Laws that had scientific backing.

So they fed all the known data about crime and civility from all around the world into the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm ever built. It took into account all the patterns of crime that occurred, how one small offence could lead to a larger offence if the individual had a specific set of characteristics. Punishments were modulated for maximum effect. After a few hours of number crunching a set of laws were created. They didn’t necessarily make sense to everyone, but hey they must know what they’re doing right.

Along with the laws came the enforcer robots. Billions of fingernail and smaller sized robots that would enforce these laws. At the time everyone was happy. Politics had become so corrupt and the people felt that perhaps science was the answer. In the age of the connected world the nerds were taking over and it seemed natural that they would disrupt the running of the state as well.

It did go ok for a while. As long as everything stayed the same and people held exactly the same values. Not long after that last Technocrat died though, the problems started to emerge. TV was the first. People started watching broadcast television less and it was proposed that the spare frequency bandwidth could be returned to private use. When a man vas vaporised for using it to connect up his home security system the public mood started to turn.

The efficiency of rubbish collection became so great that bins were actually unnecessary by that point. You could toss a crisp packet on the ground and it would be collected in seconds by an automated collector. Opinions about equality of race and gender had changed. It was ok for three people to get married together now. The law didn’t agree though and it was etched onto a billion circuit boards. Which takes us back to the scene in the street.

“No! Nooo!” she screamed. She had turned now, realising that running was impossible. Already they had surrounded her and her clothing was starting to disintegrate. People had come out into the street to shake their heads and take photos to share online. It didn’t matter what people thought though, it was happening now and the solar powered robots would make it happen forever.

A few streets away another young woman was scrubbing at an image of the technocrats painted on a wall. She had managed to scrub off the nose of one of them before a swarm arrived to paint it back in again. Unauthorised alterations to municipal works were treated less severely than littering. It was simply restored to its previous state. The woman screamed in frustration as she scrubbed harder and watched it return at the same rate it disappeared.