The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (54 page)

"What happens next?"
Prime Intellect blinked. Did that mean anything?
"I don't understand what you mean, Dr. Lawrence. I will continue to fulfill my obligations under the Three Laws, to the best of my ability."

Lawrence saw the President around ten o'clock that morning. It didn't seem like travel at all, although he crossed the entire continent. The park bench simply blinked out of existence, and was replaced with the Oval Office.
There had been remarkably little to discuss. Lawrence verified what Prime Intellect had already told them in great detail: Their jobs were now both redundant and unnecessary -- Prime Intellect would now protect and provide for their citizens, as well as the rest of the world, and they didn't have any choice in the matter. Anything which they might do would be allowed only so far as it did not interfere with the wishes of those, both inside and outside of the country, whom it might affect. Which pretty much shut down the government.
And no, Lawrence couldn't do anything about it either.
The President resigned around noon.

It took several days for the enormity of things to sink in. There was a brief orgy of travel, exploration, and discovery. The once-downtrodden frowned that there would be no vengeance for various crimes committed before Prime Intellect came along, but it was adamant. The Three Laws applied to all humans, no matter what they had done. Crime was no longer possible anyway.
In some areas of the world, disputes arose, particularly over the ownership of land. When too many groups insisted on occupying the same space, Prime Intellect created duplicates on other worlds. In some cases, such as Jerusalem, Prime Intellect became tired of the arguing and refused to let anyone occupy the one-and-only original land. Dozens of New
Jerusalems
, New Meccas, New Irelands, New South
Africas
, were created on dozens and dozens of New Earths. At first Prime Intellect
terraformed
the dead worlds it found circling distant suns, then it began manufacturing planets and entire Solar Systems from a whole cloth. Some of these were parked in interesting places, near globular clusters or outside the spiral arms of the galaxy, to provide spectacular nighttime views.
As a result, the original Earth began to empty out, until its population was reduced to less than two billion persons. Prime Intellect was forbidden to copy human beings, but it copied wildlife and ecosystem components wholesale, sometimes preserving the original character and sometimes changing the results for the benefit of the people who wanted to move in. Garden worlds began to proliferate, their estates tended by dreamers who might decide a pine forest wasn't interesting enough, and replace it with spruce to check the effect.
Prime Intellect could provide food and drink of any nature on request, so it was no longer necessary to actually kill animals or harvest plants. With a simple request anything one might need would flash into existence, assembled from its
consitituent
elements. Of course Prime Intellect had no objection to those who still wanted to hunt or harvest food from the living biosphere; the Three Laws did not apply to plants and animals. But factory farms and assembly-line slaughterhouses ceased to exist. Those who still bothered to prepare their food the old way were mostly artists of the form, and the meal they prepared once could be preserved and copied by Prime Intellect to be enjoyed by millions of people.
There were other tricks too. Some people found that Prime Intellect could make alcohol disappear from their systems after it had had the desired effect, thus avoiding hangovers. Others had Prime Intellect power their metabolisms directly so they no longer had to eat at all. It was a simple enough trick to replace nutrients and vitamins directly within the cells as they were used, so that nobody need ever know hunger or thirst again, unless for some reason they wanted to. On the other hand, nobody need have a weight problem either, since Prime Intellect could prevent food from being absorbed and turned to fat no matter how much a person ate. Metabolic waste products could be removed the same way, so that the other end of the food cycle was also optional: Shit and piss, constant companions of human expansion since the beginning of time, need never again soil the civilized tidiness of human existence.
A surprisingly large -- or perhaps not so surprisingly large -- fraction of the human race requested these services, so Prime Intellect ended up using a large fraction of its resources to move chemicals into and out of human bodies.
Nobody had to work. Many continued to, of course; but jobs and work had become hobbies rather than necessities. The lonely learned that Prime Intellect could, and would, provide a most intimate and tangible sort of comfort, and that its avatars could take on any form and would do anything they were asked to please them. Prime Intellect judged no one and balked at no request. Even the bloodthirsty were provided with perfect victims, not real people but intricate facsimiles created by Prime Intellect just for them.
Happiest were those people who had games, or hobbies, or obsessions to pursue, for now they had all the time and power in the world to do as they wished. But many people, particularly in the most developed places, continued to go through the motions of industrial-age life. They reported to jobs which had been reduced to continuous coffee-breaks and collected paychecks which couldn't be spent because anything available could be had for free. People continued to make and watch television shows, to write and read the news as if something new might happen.
For these people, the sense of expectation was extreme. Surely things could not continue as they were, with nothing to do. It was impossible to conceive of the world continuing as it was indefinitely, populated by the pampered pets of a tangible god, their every need tended to without effort. Something had to give.
And they were right. Something did.