The Candle That Burns

The terminal quietly beeped twice to alert the operator that its latest process had been completed. Although barely distinguishable from the various other noises in the research station, the entire crew leapt up as if it was an ear-piercing critical alarm.

“The results are in, lads!”

“Stop calling us lads. You’re the only man here.”

“I call everyone lads! Now’s not the time. Look!”

The three researchers huddled around the terminal, bug-eyed. There was life in the ice core samples they had. Confirmed non-Earth life. On a non-Earth moon.

“Three hundred and fifty-seventh time lucky, eh!” cried Andrew, dancing a jig. “We’ve hit the jackpot!”

The next few hours passed in a blur as Catriona set about the task of programming the station AI to isolate and analyse the bacterial life they had extracted.

Flopping back in her seat, Isla fetched her tablet and saw the blinking blue envelope icon she had been avoiding. It was from Osiris PMG, the extrasolar corporation that had contracted them to find promising new mining locations. They needed an update. She didn’t have one. Until now.

Decommisioned

    The AI lifeform was already sitting in Blake’s office when he arrived. They always were. He was purposefully late every time he had to meet with one, as a show of dominance. It was his way of demonstrating that he had full free will and that the AI lifeforms he had to interact with were stunted and flawed in this regard. Not that it made any difference to the AI lifeforms.

    Regardless, he wasn’t interested in how they felt about it. Pettiness was also a uniquely human trait. He did it to make himself feel better. More powerful.

    Treating AI lifeforms cruelly and with disdain was pretty common, so Blake was not an outlier in this regard. In fact, the majority of the population in most towns and cities across the country had decided to see the lifeforms that had replaced human labour in almost all production and manufacturing jobs as subhuman and treated them accordingly.

    Early 21st-century thought around the proliferation of bots was that people would be likely to treat them as they would other people. Early experiments also demonstrated that even non-humanoid bots elicited empathetic reactions from people when they were knocked over or blown up.

    These small-scale experiments proved useless at predicting how that feeling would change when the first wave of general-purpose bots caused mass unemployment all across the globe before Justinian proposals were made legislation.