Service Model

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Service Model has many spiritual predecessors—including every story or novel in which an artificial life form achieves new levels of sentience and independence—but in reading the novel, I found myself most drawn to a memory of the 1950 Ray Bradbury short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”. Soft Rains is a simple story, chronicling the daily routine of an automated ‘smart house’ that unknowingly goes about its preprogrammed and scheduled day even though its owners have been incinerated in a nuclear war. There is a deep sadness in Bradbury’s story, in not only the contemplation of the complete death of humanity but also the bleak realization that the automata that serve us will go on and on in our ruin, trying to perform its duties of service now rendered utterly pointless. What if all that is left of us are the systems and machines we built for our comfort and ease that now have no discernable purpose? What if a service model, a construction that only exists in direct relation to humanity, has no one left to serve? Both Bradbury’s story and Tchaikovsky’s novel ask their readers to consider the longevity of ourselves and our built environments in relation to the value of the legacies they leave behind for their survivors.

Tchaikovsky takes these stark existential questions and answers, “Well, obviously, what remains must learn to serve itself, serve alternates, or else accept its eventual extinction.” Service Model’s protagonist, the electronic valet Charles, embarks on something of a Dantean-level quest for a new identity and sense of purpose in a world where he has been rendered gradually, and then quite suddenly and violently, obsolete. Charles (whose evolution is initially signified by a name change, first to Undesignated Valet Unit and then to Uncharles—the latter a clear thematic abandonment of his former existence) is a valet for an isolated, introverted rich man, following the typical range of assigned tasks of pampering and ease for which a footman is traditionally responsible. When his master becomes abruptly removed from the equation, Charles/Uncharles is forced to come to grips with his existence in the wake of a slow apocalypse that has disappeared the vast majority of humanity. What remains in its place, and which provides at times moments both of high comedy and deep sadness in the novel, are the maddeningly slow and inefficient bureaucratic processes that made a modicum of sense when humans were running them, but which result in a Kafkaesque hell realm of unintentional cruelty to innocent bots endlessly awaiting resolution for their malfunctions. In one nightmarish scene, Uncharles, after travelling through neighborhoods of empty streets and abandoned manors, reaches the monolithic Central Services in hopes of repair or reassignment, only to confront long lines of lost, broken robots, many of whom Tchaikovsky presents as heartbreaking in their desperate attempts to retain their identities and functions. Robots stranded at Central Services exist in a forever holding pattern, without human officials to make accepted processes workable, and many are destroyed in the mindless process of “Data Compression,” supposedly a way to efficiently store robot memory for the future but quite fatally literal in its effects on robot physicality. It is a powerful moment in Uncharles’ existential journey, as he, already believing himself defective, becomes increasingly aware that something is badly askew in the world, something his machine logic cannot process or accept. (“Uncharles looked from the great static mass of robots awaiting a diagnosis that would never come, to the shattered remains of Data Compression. Inside his decision-making software there were two subroutines in the shape of wolves, and one insisted that he stay, and the other insisted that he could not stay. Neither of which seemed to be natural behavior for wolves, but Uncharles could only assume this was another aspect of his undiagnosed defect. He let them fight until one ate the other.”) As then-Charles reports to the AI that governs his master’s house near the novel’s beginning, “House…Everything is wrong. I am aware of a very large number of inefficiencies…None of these things are efficient or logical. I wish to report an error in the way that everything works.” All at once, “as his systems tried over and over to establish a new queue of tasks in a world that wanted absolutely nothing from him, he found that he could conceive of a world where things worked better.”

From that first moment of realization, Service Model becomes a story of expanding one’s worldview, as Uncharles migrates from a mental and emotional self-image of himself as the malfunction to a holistic worldview that considers alternatives to the way things are. His journey is one not only dedicated to self-definition and self-fashioning, but to the meaning that those things represent in a greater world. The house in “Soft Rains” is particularly sad, carrying out its functions mindlessly because it knows no better, understands no other way to be, and is incapable of reevaluating its purpose. It is forever trapped in a meaningless cycle, and only an accidental fire puts its existence to an end—and even then, a remnant of the system goes on, forever reciting the current date to an absent audience. Uncharles, on the other hand, develops a self-image independent of his dead creators and that instills in him an independence from unworkable, unjust systems. It’s a development with clear emotional resonance for sf readers; witness, for example, the rabid popularity of Martha Wells’ Murderbot, who similarly evolves out of its programmed constraints into a freer, more autonomous life.

As Uncharles proceeds through the novel, he encounters various ways in which both humans and robots have sought to create alternative ways of survival and societal revitalization in the face of apocalypse, as well as their catastrophic failures to do so. Each encounter is a learning experience for Uncharles, who is searching for a place where he and the new world can meet and function efficiently together. At one point he states to another robot, “I was constructed for only the one purpose. Since leaving the manor I have witnessed many things I did not understand…I have travelled through many places that functioned at less than a satisfactory level and did not seem to fulfil their purposes. The world, as I have witnessed it, is a place lacking in efficiency, rationality, and cleanliness. I am driven to find a place in it nonetheless.” Uncharles seeks to escape the reality of illogic by trying to find a place in which he logically, purposefully exists and functions. In a parallel quest, he is accompanied by The Wonk, a human disguising herself as a robot (the book’s longest running joke is Uncharles’ complete failure to recognize The Wonk as a human rather than a bot, even as the reader realizes this from Sentence One). The Wonk wants to know why and how the apocalypse happened, desperately hoping that the cause was a revolution by robots recognizing, like Uncharles, the ability to choose for themselves. “Because if it was just…economics, or climate, or plagues or something then that’s…pointless.” For The Wonk, the only escape from meaningless chance is to believe that robots rose up and destroyed the humanity that enslaved them; that would mean justice and fairness exist in a mad world. Without ethical meaning, what good were we? What is the good of a world where little survives of us but the detritus we thought made our lives purposeful but ultimately prove as pointless as the endlessly date-droning house of “Soft Rains”? In the end, The Wonk, like Uncharles, is obliged to consider different ways of living in the world and different reasons for its prevailing disorder. In sum, Service Model carries on the venerable sf tradition of evolving machine autonomy but adds to those works new dimensions of philosophical complexity by pairing that quest with a wider exploration of meaning on both the world macro- and the individual microlevel.

Jeremy Brett is a Librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, superheroines, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.