It had taken from him every reason for living.
He had no idea what was ahead of him, but in his mind there burned a
single decision that would cover anything that came up. He would do
everything in his power to obstruct the goals and purposes to which the
Machine assigned him. He would break, and destroy, and disobey until
they either crushed him or let him go back. And he had never heard of
any who went back.
With this decision clearly made, his mind was free to speculate on what
he might find. He knew the traditional stories that circulated among
the Agros regarding the Mech cities and their vast production centers.
He’d heard tales of the monstrous, unthinkable mechanical brain that
had finally brought order out of the chaos of human civilization.
The thinking machine, as the Agros called it, had direct control over
the life of every human being on the face of the Earth. At birth, a
tape of data based on brain and chromosome mapping was filed with the
central library which fed the machine. Here it was instantly available
for optimum meshing with similar data from all other men and women
currently alive.
In as much detail as the machine considered necessary then, the
subsequent lives of the people were planned. Their station, occupation,
matings, permission to reproduce--all of these activities and thousands
more, at the machine’s option, were precisely dictated and controlled.
Rick was vaguely aware of the history of the changeover from chaos and
war to order and peace. It had come about as a natural byproduct of the
Second Industrial Revolution. Men had been searching for the answer for
all the ages of history, and then suddenly they had it without even
looking for it.
Automation. Robots took the place of clerks and mechanics in the
factories. Machines could remember ten thousand times as many facts as
the most efficient human and apply those facts without error. There was
dislocation and unrest, but eventually the economy settled down just as
it had in the First Industrial Revolution.
And then the Great Idea that was so obvious and yet so long delayed.
Automation in government. Millions of accurate data on tape to
determine the need for a new law or change in the old one. No Senator
or Representative could hope to match knowledge with such a device. But
the one impregnable argument held for many years: This was mere machine
calculation. You couldn’t depend for lawmaking on an operation in which
no judgment was involved. Human beings had to be governed by human
beings. There was no other way.
But finally this limitation, too, was overcome. Marcroft’s invention of
the judgment circuit made it possible to construct a machine capable of
duplicating human thought. The chain was complete.
The changeover was almost painless. Automation, conscription, emergency
regulation had been with the world so long that it had become the
normal way of life. Here at last was a device that could, without
error, direct a man’s life in the most useful channels, and do it for
_all_ men on the globe, without favoritism or bias. Here at last was
the millennium for which all the prophets and seers had searched.
Only a few, like Rick Theron, felt, burning within them, aching
remnants of something that was not satisfied or taken into account by
the Machine.