* * * * *
“I knew it,” Franklin exclaimed, and then immediately regretted saying it.
They were starting to make some good progress, finally. The last thing Franklin wanted was an ad homonym conversation about the morality of reanimating dead enemy combatants.
“What?” Anand asked, “You figured out that Warmbots are reanimated dead people?”
“Yes,” Franklin said quietly, and then he continued quietly, “Never mind, please continue. What did General Mueller say?”
“This is the part that amazes me,” Anand said, and then continued, “McKnight predicted it, planned for it, and executed it. Now here you are. You, Franklin, are a man who is part of a society that reanimates the dead and uses them as servants, and only recently you started to notice it. You live in a mad world, engineered by Al McKnight and Christopher Mark, and I helped them build it.”
Franklin unhappily wrote down a few notes into his notebook.
“Where did you think the Warmbots came from?” Anand asked, “Did you think we cloned them or grew the organics in a giant test tube?”
“I guess I never thought about it,” Franklin admitted, angry with himself for inviting this tangent and now seeing no way to avoid following it to its conclusion.
“No, you would not think about it.” Anand continued,
You didn’t think about it because Al McKnight did not want you to think about it. This was his greatest achievement. More than the technology or the industry, Al McKnight effectively changed the way our society thinks. He changed our perception of reality. He engineered a new world where we no longer notice the atrocities all around us. You grew up in a world where Warmbots are normal; they are around you every day. They drive the taxis, they work the fields, they clean our houses, and they take care of our young children. Warmbots are normal for you, like slaves were normal for the ancient Romans. The Romans did not stop to think that this man or this woman who is serving me used to be a free citizen of a state we conquered. They did not consider that the gladiators in the Coliseum, who fought and bled for their entertainment, were once free men.
Anand trailed off, and then restarted, saying, “I’m glad you figured it out. Yes, Warmbots are created from dead people.”
“How did he do it?” Franklin asked, hoping to get back to the narrative. “How did Al McKnight introduce Warmbots into a society without people recognizing them for what they really were?”
Anand answered,
“ He did it by creating a false opposition. He knew that the masses would protest. He knew that if he started marching reanimated dead soldiers down the streets during Veterans Day parades that the people would revolt against him. So, he introduced the concepts slowly, step by step, and more importantly, he organized the resistance. Al McKnight organized his own protesters.
At the beginning they were small and their cause seemed inconsequential. But, as the technology expanded and the adoption grew, the opposition polarized around the structure that was already in place. A structure that McKnight himself had built and continued to control. It was a brilliant long term strategy and the key was hiring the right guy to inspire the opposition. McKnight needed the right guy to lead the counter argument.
“So McKnight hired someone to create an opposition to his own technology?” Franklin asked.
“Correct,” Anand said. “Like an expert debater, he prepared his team to argue both sides of the matter. Remember the liberal anti-war lobbyists that General Mueller said were camping out around the capital, pushing for an Anti-Organic Robotics bill? They were all responding to the same guy who had been there leading the opposition to Organic Robotics from the very beginning. He was a young revolutionary student that Al McKnight handpicked to build the opposition case and lead the counter-argument. His job was to lead the argument against the introduction of organic robotics into society, and then ultimately fail.”
Anand paused a moment to recall the facts, then said, “He was a strange little fellow, the guy that McKnight hired for this job. His name was Hans Hoobler.”
“I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs”
- Mary Shelley