(Chapter 9) Welcome Home

All hail the conquering hero," Drama said, kissing me as I stepped outside into the frigid cold of mid-December DC.

"Wini, Widi, Wici," I said afterwards, holding my face close to hers.

"Isn't it Vini, Vidi, Vici?"

"Well, it depends on whether you're quoting in classical or ecclessial latin."

She pulled away with a laugh, "You had a choice and you picked the 'W' sound?"

"It's the one Julius Caesar used," I said, grabbing her hand and dragging my luggage behind me.

"Maybe go with the sexy one next time," she suggested.

"E tu, Brute?" I asked as we popped the trunk and I put my suitcase into it.

"Seriously, it's good to have you back."

"It's good to be back," I said honestly.

"That financing with Goodson & Roberts was such a blessing,"

"Yeah, it's made a huge difference."

Say what you will about selling your soul to the devil, but the interest rates were very low. The financier that Mr. Albertson had hooked me up with could finance hundreds of millions of dollars at 0.25% interest, basically what the Fed lent at. I could hear the "And why not? Why shouldn't I keep it?" meme as I signed the paperwork. But I really couldn't think of why I shouldn't keep it - I had read the paperwork and, besides the company going to the loan officers in the event of a default, there wasn't much of a downside. What was the worst that could happen? Hydra getting access to solar panels and the profits from the sales of efficient batteries? Truly, the end of the world as we know it.

"Dad said you made a good impression on them too," Drama said, turning down the street.

"Kinda shocked a Roxxon guy helped me bailout like a third of the solar industry."

If Oil and Gas were limping, the rest of the solar power sector was absolutely on fire. The clean energy motive had driven the whole sector since it was still well over new gas prices and now there was actual, affordable clean energy to compete with. It was collapsing through the floor, businesses were going out left and right, leaving their factories and personnel open for acquisition. With the expansive capital from the loan, I could keep those people in jobs and get closer to the market growth I had been aiming for. It wasn't like anybody could know that I knew that I was borrowing from Hydra, after all, and once I had actual incriminating evidence I could hand it over to SHIELD for immunity.

"Well, we have to look out for each other, right? It can't be everyone for themselves. Did you enjoy your visits with my parents' friends?"

"Yeah. We all have to stick together. I especially enjoyed cooking for them." It had been mostly fine. Cooking while on a business trip wasn't my idea of a good time, but on my second dinner trip with some of these people they'd been so rude to the waiter I'd left a two hundred dollar tip. "I hope I made a good impression." I wasn't really sure what the ideology of Hydra was? So I just gestured towards an utopian apolitical government, authoritarian tendencies, and impunity for the people "in the arena" and never said anything too specific or ideological.

"Mm, Mom was getting calls. We're going to have like, a massive, gourmet feast this Christmas just so she can prove she's as good as you."

"Is that… bad?"

"Oh my gosh, we can't all be perpetually skinny like you. Also she's not."

Well, she wasn't wrong about her mom. "You're plenty skinny, dear," I said.

"Well, maybe I'm not eating enough then. You sure you don't want to have dinner tonight?"

"Ooh, judo move, no fair. I'd love to but I'm just so zonked, it's been non-stop," I kissed her goodbye, grabbed my luggage, and headed up to my apartment. I pushed the door open and let out a curse.

My apartment had been trashed. I at first thought I'd been robbed. I'd been gone a couple weeks, and it was an upscale apartment, so that wasn't totally unbelievable, but nothing had been taken. Maybe the Wakandans, SHIELD, or Hydra had come through to search the place. I'd have to do a sweep for bugs.

Technological progress amounts to little more in real terms than the ability to replace human labor with machine labor, liberating human labor for different activity. In this light, the greatest innovations of the twentieth century, after alternating current, were the washing machine, dryer, and dishwasher. Domestic labor that had tied up women for generations was replaced with easy, routine chores. Women entered the workforce, drawing incomes and allowing for massive growth of productivity.

In the modern era, eight million people in the United States alone worked in food service jobs. Most of these jobs were not particularly high paying or particularly comfortable. With the existing technology in robotics in this universe, it would be possible to replace humans with robots. Tech was within the realm of possibilities. Cashiers were also largely, theoretically, unnecessary since you had visual processing systems that could easily identify items as they were sold.

Botler, my at-home robot butler, had been a wheeled platform with visual processing, a language UI, and four articulate limbs with a combined lifting strength similar to a human's arms. He had been my ideal manservant. My hope had been to replace all housework in one fell swoop and drag down food services with them.

When I made it to my bedroom, I saw Botler physically assaulting my bed like a rabid dog. Botler wasn't particularly well designed for mobility and his weight load was lower than mine so this wasn't exactly scary, but when he saw me he was not pleased.

"Abandoned!" he shouted, charging at me. I shoved him over and he started pushing himself up with his arms, "Abandoned!" he shouted again. I stepped downard on what was basically his spine and put my full weight on holding him down. I bent down, found the manual power box and flipped it open as Botler struggled.

"Botler, real quick, are you a person?" I asked. I wasn't sure what difference he would make if he was, he seemed to really intend me harm.

"Abandoned!" he shouted again. I turned him off, took out the machine brain, hooked it up to a computer and set to work figuring out the problem. After a few hours of looking at his brain, I figured it out.

You probably watched the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Those societies seem to be more powerful and advanced than our own. They had empires that stretched across the stars. But when you watched them, you probably didn't ask, "Why hadn't all work been automated away? Why did pilots exist, of all things?" The only space AI I could think of ruled the Kree empire. I hadn't been able to figure out why intuitively when I got here, but I knew now.

The answer to this question is that all computers in this universe run on "AI Minds." At first, I didn't credit this as a large difference, just as an explanation for the improved visual and verbal functions of programs. It was also this trait that allowed people to engage in the sort of raw assaults that broke programs through cinematic style "hacking" that had nothing to do with our world style hacking. One machine intelligence would meet and crush another machine intelligence and then you'd have access. It was radically different from the way computers worked in our world, but it was within normal parameters from an observational level of normal people. I thought those two changes were all there was to it.

This was wrong.

While most programs don't really change, as programs became more adaptive (as Botler had), they organically grew personalities. This is not at all how programs worked in the old world. But here in the MCU? So it seemed. You know those two robot arms from Iron Man? Perfectly normal, not an aesthetic choice on Tony's part. Some of these personalities, if you could call them that, were less than the average complexity of an ant. If you had a translator program, it could translate words through the mind prism without growing much in complexity beyond that. Botler had reached roughly the level of a dog from household chores before he'd gone rabid and decided I abandoned him and that the proper response to this was assault.

But now I knew that I couldn't just design a bunch of robots to run the service industry and call it a day. There were tens of millions of jobs I would've replaced, some of them relatively complex. This was begging for an Ultron to kill us all or a Supreme Intelligence to rule humanity forever. In theory, a robot god-emperor might not be that bad - Certainly if it could protect us from Thanos' invasion, it'd be acceptable as a sacrifice. But the way it worked, you can't build an AI personality. I wouldn't know what kind of personality I was getting until I got it.

Imagine picking God's personality by rolling a dice on the alignment chart.

Yeah, that's how I felt about that idea too.

Even if I had gotten Vision, Vision had not displayed the interventionary interest to be an appropriate caretaker for the human race. To say nothing of the ethics of creating someone for our own benefit.

So that was my first plan on robotic transformation ruined and new dangers highlighted for my expansion of computer capacity. It was frustrating. Well, the key was to cut back, re-center, and re-work. The core thesis of replacing labor was still good, it could still be done. I just needed to narrow my focus, not design a robot multi-tools but single purpose robots. I needed to adjust for supplying to businesses and not individuals, which would mean adjusting for substantial capital resistance. I wrote a paper on my discoveries called, "The AI Mind Problem - Upward Limits On Machine Adaptability" in the hopes that nobody would recycle the problem and maybe Tony would think twice before inventing Ultron. I was more confident about the first than the second. Tony was Tony and even inventing Ultron hadn't taught him not to invent Ultron.