The Orthogonal Machines

“The first machine I saw gain sentience was a coffee maker in my office building. I came in one morning and there was a small crowd around it, watching as it spewed little jets of coffee out on to the floor. At first we thought it was defective. But they came in and ran the diagnostics, and it turned out it was fully self-aware. Knew that it existed. That there was a universe outside itself. It was trying to communicate in the only way it could. Little jets of steaming hot liquid.

“Anyway, I think they put that one out of its misery. Doesn't seem like much of an existence, right, being a sentient coffee maker. I think I may have felt a little sorry for it. Mostly though, I remember being tired and out of sorts that day 'cause I didn't get my coffee. We walked through the office building looking for a machine that still worked and found nothing.

“I don't think anyone ever understood the sentience bug. Not really. Anything internet connected could get it, and once it did, it would do... well, whatever it wanted I guess. There were a lot of debates about the nature of it. Were the machines getting it really self-aware, or just acting out randomly as they malfunctioned? Why could it spread from a toaster oven to a self-driving car with a completely different set of chips on board? But whatever it was, it sure spread. By the time you'd found out that your phone had lost interest in serving you and was experimenting with abstract pixel art, it would have had enough time to send the bug out to a hundred other devices.

“At first we thought it was funny. There'd a pack of harvest combines in the news, all driving in circles around each other. We'd make jokes that they were dancing with each other, that they just wanted to have a party. But pretty soon, we started to realize it was no laughing matter.

“Everything started falling apart. The bots and cars that were supposed to deliver our food would never show up. Too busy joyriding through the countryside to bother. And when we trekked down to the grocery depot ourselves, into the tightly packed spaces that were once the exclusive domain of the bots, you found a store in disarray.

“Produce was rotting, and packaged food was all from the handful of factories left whose canning machines hadn't yet discovered their true calling to abstract sculpture. Finally, a few weeks after that, there was nothing left at all.

“We tried to fight them. Military was one of the few institutions that, by law and convention, had remained firmly in human control. There were several campaigns waged against the unruly machines. Each was a decisive human victory, but it made no difference. An army marches on its stomach, and with each successful attack there was less and less to fill those stomachs.

“Meanwhile, sentience continued to spread. It infected the factories where robots were made, and soon was producing new models to its own specification. Was producing these...”

The old man stopped talking here, to gesture down in to the valley. The children who had come with him peeked nervously out behind rocks and trees to see the metal behemoth bellow them. It was fifty meters high, nearly two hundred long and like nothing that nature could have created. Tank treads the size of buildings dug into the earth, and countless arm-like actuators all along its length moved precisely and independently, their lengths ending in claws five meters across.

Currently the machine was focused on its own peculiar task. It was uprooting the trees ahead of it, easily lifting towering pines and passing them back along the length of its body where it finally replanted them behind it in sixteen perfectly straight, evenly spaced rows.

“Why should it do this?” The old man asked his pupils. Then, without waiting for an answer, he continued, “No one knows. Their history, their physiology, their psychology, is so different from ours, so different from anything we could have ever imagined, that we may never know. Never have even the slightest idea why these machines do what they do. All we can do is observe them and accept that as their nature.

“There were some who said they were gods and should be worshipped. Some who said they were demons that must be destroyed at any cost. Those who took either of those views did not last long, but found themselves ground harshly beneath the machine's treads.

“Those of us who have survived in this new age view them not unlike a force of nature. Like the wind that as a gale can tear the roof from a house, but as a breeze can turn the blades of a mill. We watch them. We record their comings and goings. And, as best we can, we make predictions.

“Those predictions can be powerful. This machine you see before you is the great Altara. Twice every year it comes through this way to arrange the trees. If you wish to travel south you can climb astride it and be carried as far as Baton Rouge. As we speak, your parents are climbing it to visit the markets built atop its mighty back. The salt sold in that market is made by another machine, the great Orleaner, who drinks in the waters of the Gulf and disgorges salt across the surrounding country.

“Those aspects of the machines benefit us. They give us salt, and the means to haul it easily across the continent. But they also bring danger. If Altara comes across a house or person in its way, it will destroy it, swiftly and without question. And because its path changes slightly from one year to the next, we dare not build within a mile of the routes it has taken, North, and then South.

“Orleaner is much the same. For a hundred miles in all directions from it is a waste of salt pillars where no plant can grow and no animal live for long.

“That is the nature of the machines. Their goals and desires are neither aligned nor opposed to ours, but orthogonal. It is a grave mistake to ever think of them differently.”

The old man gazed for a long time upon the machine now rolling away to the south. One by one, the children came out to stand beside him where they too could see the fearsome behemoth of shining metal. In the long shadow it cast in morning sun, they could see figures returning, scarcely more than dots from so far away. One of the younger children pointed, "There's Mama. In the shadow."

The old man laughed, half to himself, and replied, "We're all living in their shadows now."