Literature / Service Model

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Service Model is a 2024 satirical science fiction novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Charles is a gentleman's gentlerobot: a high-end robotic valet programmed to tend to his master's every need, foremost among all the robots that make up the staff of his master's automated mansion. Fulfilling his purpose day in and day out, Charles is as happy as a robot can be — until, one day, he discovers that his master has died, and that he's the one who killed him.

Ousted from the mansion for this severe and inexplicable malfunction, the robot formerly known as Charles is ordered to travel to Central Services for maintenance. This begins Uncharles' odyssey through a world falling apart, where mankind has faded away and robots failed to take their place. Accompanied by the Wonk, a vagrant who is definitely a robot just like him, Uncharles journeys through the ruins of civilization for a new master so he can fulfill his programming, assisted and impeded along the way by robots unable to deviate from theirs.

This novel provides examples of:

• Absurdly Dedicated Worker: Every robot in the book is still trying to fulfill the task it was built for, even and especially when the collapse of civilization has made doing so physically impossible, because they literally can't think of doing anything else. This is alternately humorous and tragic.
• After the End: Human civilization ended a vague amount of time ago. It was a slow, gradual process and a lot of factors were involved, but by the time the story opens, the human race is effectively extinct. Some enclaves (like the manor Uncharles worked at) were so isolated and insulated that they're still unaware of the state of the world — but these are a tiny minority. Elsewhere, humanity survives only in the form of lifeless, collapsing ruins.
• A God Am I: "God" is a robotic judge, built to automate the court system and deliver perfect, impartial justice devoid of human bias (meaning it inherited the biases of its programmers). As the last such system still active, this means it's the highest authority and final word on society, law, and guilt and innocence. In its eyes, this makes it God.
• Ambiguous Situation: Does the Protagonist Virus really exist? Does Uncharles have free will?
• Armies Are Evil: Robot armies are one of the dangers of the Wasteland. Like every other robot, they're just following their programming, which means they're waging war because the purpose of armies is to fight wars. If there's no war ongoing, then they'll start one against the nearest other army, group of civilian robots, defenseless human population, etc., looting the resources they need to remain operational from the dead. Uncharles envies their ability to make their own employment.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: After making contact with God, Uncharles asks it to find him employment. His three criteria are: to be within a manor, to have a human master, and for his presence to have meaning.
  • First, God sends Uncharles to a luxurious, fully functional and pristine manor staffed by robots, very similar to his old one apart from being a doomsday bunker. However, its intended human occupants never arrived, leaving Uncharles, who exists to serve humans, nothing to do. Worse, he discovers that the bunker already had a valet, which obligingly shut itself down when he arrived to replace it. The fact that he stole a job that had already been taken disquiets himself enough to leave.
  • Next, God finds Uncharles some humans to serve — a family of feral Disaster Scavengers for whom his skills as a robotic butler are utterly irrelevant. After they decide he'd be more useful as an example to other robots, he flees for his life.
  • Finally, God sends Uncharles to serve a king. That king is the robot equivalent of a Wasteland Warlord, lording over a thousand half-crazed Killer Robots who believe in Klingon Promotion. Uncharles becomes the court historian, but flees once again after the king is inevitably destroyed and his soldiers engage in a cannibalistic frenzy of violence and reconstruction that almost takes him.
  • By the second wish, Uncharles has wised up to the concept because his memory includes a lot of stories involving wishes, and basically all of them have the apparent moral "wishing for things is bad". He continues because he doesn't have any other leads.
• The Butler Did It: The book begins with Uncharles, the robotic valet, murdering his master. He doesn't notice until the following morning and can't explain why he did it. His openness about being the murderer and inability to account for any motive drives the (also robotic) police detective investigating the murder into a Logic Bomb.
• Dangerously Close Shave: How Uncharles killed his former master. When he reviews the footage, he laments that it was a perfect shave, if only the razor wasn't just an inch out of place.
• Deadly Euphemism: To cope with the massive number of robots awaiting troubleshooting at Diagnostics, the robots of Central Services have devised Data Compression™, a method of reducing the amount of physical space that defective robots take up as well as the amount of attention they require from Central Services staff. In other words, putting them through a trash compactor.
• Humanity's Wake: Much of the book is spent traveling through the ruins of human civilization, which appear to have swallowed up all green space. In the Wasteland, not even ruins are still standing.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: God is rendered harmless. The Wonk comes to terms with the end of civilization and assumes a key role in rebuilding it, including for what human survivors remain. Uncharles finds his purpose in serving her, of his own free will. Robots are slowly becoming self-aware and capable of repairing the world.
• Electronic Telepathy: The ability to transmit messages electronically is function common to all robots, and one they vastly prefer to audible speech. The only reason they have the ability to talk is due to the necessity of being able to communicate with humans.
• Emergent Human: The Wonk is convinced that Uncharles is infected with the "Protagonist Virus", a computer virus that gives him free will, pointing to the fact that he murdered his master as proof. Uncharles is just as convinced that no such virus exists, and points to the fact that he can identify the logical roots of every decision he's ever made as proof — except he can't explain why he murdered his master...
• Extreme Doormat: Uncharles has a bad habit of allowing himself to be destroyed if he thinks he'll be most useful that way, to the Wonk's exasperation.
• Given Name Reveal: When the Wonk meets God, God casually welcomes her as Aranice Brezura. The name is never used again.
• Goal in Life: Charles wants to find a new employer. The Wonk has a very robot-like drive to learn why civilization collapsed.
• Good Old Ways: The Conservation Farm Project is a program to preserve these from being lost: a recreation of human traditions from before the age of robots in the form of a historically authentic city block staffed with thirteen thousand relocated volunteer conscripts and their descendants. These traditions include poverty, getting rained on, miserably long and cramped train rides, and hostile office politics.
• Great Big Library of Everything: At the center of the Central Library Archive is the Archive itself: a gigantic, airgapped server bank where all the data they've ever collected is digitized and uploaded to, a single continuous record of all of human knowledge. To maximize storage efficiency, every bit of data is stored in sequential order. Meaning their archive is a giant string of zeroes followed by a giant string of ones. All data added to it is completely destroyed. It's "stored safely" in the sense that you can recombine those ones and zeroes into the original document (indeed, any document that ever existed), if you know the exact sequence of ones and zeroes that made it up.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The book is divided into five sections, plus intermissions. Each section is named after a famous author, parsed into Robot Names.
  • Part I: KR15-T: Agatha Christie. Charles, the robotic butler, discovers that he's murdered his own master, and the police are summoned to investigate.
  • Part II: K4FK-R: Franz Kafka. Charles enters Central Services to be repaired, only to find himself mired in an opaque and violent bureaucracy.
  • Part III: 4W-L: George Orwell. Charles reaches a city of still-living humans, living bleak and miserable lives because the purpose of the city is to make their lives bleak and miserable.
  • Part IV: 80RH-5: Jorge Luis Borges. Charles reaches the Central Library Archive, a vast repository where all human knowledge is being gathered and catalogued and ultimately reduced to gibberish.
  • Part V: D4NT-A: Dante Alighieri. Guided by God, Charles wanders the ruins of human civilization, encountering various tableaus of both human and robot suffering, before having an audience with God himself.
• Job-Stealing Robot: Before the world ended, robots had become so commonplace that they could replace all human labor and usher in an era of freedom and leisure for all. Key word being "could", because rather than establish socioeconomic changes that would let everyone live comfortably while robots did all the work, governments decided not to do that, leading to widespread poverty.
• Knight Templar: God is a judicial AI programmed to determine whether a defendant was innocent or guilty. But because justice is a tricky thing, its programmers erred on the side of guilt to reduce the rate of false exonerations, even if it meant more of the innocent would be falsely convicted. God quickly took this bias to its logical conclusion and judged that all of humanity was probably guilty of crimes against humanity, and passed sentence.
  God: Because, statistically, who amongst them was not a sinner? [...] Better to sentence them than risk them getting away with something, don't you agree?
• Literal-Minded: All robots are this, compounding their nature as Absurdly Dedicated Workers.
  • In Part 1, Uncharles interacts with a police robot and a medical robot examining his master's murder. The medical robot apologizes for being unable to attend to the emergency because the hospital's call queue is stuffed with pressing cases, then turns around and attends to the emergency because it has plenty of time to respond to police requests.
  • Charles finds talking to the Wonk tiring because of her frequent use of slang, sarcasm, and idioms, which he has to spend processing cycles deciphering. The fact that he can do so at all is a sign of how sophisticated his programming is. Ironically, he himself grows frustrated interacting with some less advanced robots because they take everything he says too literally.
• Logic Bomb: Zig-zagged.
  • The Wonk tries to shut down the Librarians by pulling the "all Cretans are liars" paradox in front of the Chief Librarian. Being particularly sophisticated human-facing models, this only slows them down for a few seconds as they rationalize an explanation.
  Chief Librarian: If robots could not cope with multiple contradictory statements how could we ever have worked with humans?
  • But then Charles (completely innocuously) points out that, if all possible information can be reconstructed from the Archive, that means that their archive includes everything they've collected, everything they haven't collected, and every possible version of both, including duplicate, contradictory, or incorrect data in violation of their mission. The revelation that the CLA's mission is simultaneously complete, impossible to complete, and inherently compromised breaks both the Chief Librarian and the entire Archive.
• Non-Human Non-Binary: For robots, gender is ornamental. Human-facing robots are assigned gendered pronouns as a matter of convenience. Uncharles considers himself male because he's a valet, a stereotypically male role, and if he was reassigned to lady's maid he would have no problem redesignating himself female. Robots who don't interact with humans are simply called 'it'.
• Of Corpse He's Alive: Rather than cope with the reality that he no longer has a purpose, Uncharles spends the first chapters of the book trying to perform his usual tasks for his master despite his master being a day-old corpse, from sewing him into his day clothes, preparing food for him (dragging him to the dinner table so he can be served), and then trying to take him on a relaxing drive to improve his health.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The Wonk is known as the Wonk for almost the entire book. Her given name is brought up exactly once and then never mentioned again.
• Order of Scholars: The Central Library Archive is a robotic order of warrior-monks whose mission is to retrieve all information in the world and store it in their heavily fortified servers, so that one day, should humanity rise again, all the knowledge of the past will be available to them. They view destruction of information as the highest of all crimes, though only if that information does not already exist in their servers, as they also abide by a strict "no copies" rule. Copies can be edited and made false, after all, so once the information has been digitized and safely archived, the original document must be disposed of, whether it's on paper, hard drive, or USB.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: The Wonk spends most of the book disguised as a robot by wearing heavy clothing and scrap metal taken from sources like street signs and tin cans. Even when she takes some of it off to reveal her human hands or feet, Charles fails to realize she isn't simply a very eccentric and malfunctioning robot (some of which are built with fake skin, to be fair) until the end of the book.
• People Zoo: The main purpose of the Conservation Farm Project is to preserve the Good Old Ways before robots, but for fundraising purposes it also allows wealthy donors to observe the activities of the people inside, without their knowledge, through a sort of one-way clear plastic.
• Plunderers of Knowledge: The Central Library Archive is not above physically or electronically raiding data storage for the information they seek, and their "no copies" policy means they'll destroy any copies of info they already possess, including the originals once they've acquired them.
• Robot Buddy: Inverted. Charles the robot valet has a helpful human companion (sometimes), to browbeat him into doing actions that he's too inflexible to consider.
• Robot Republic:
  • Averted. After God destroyed humanity, it expected the huge robot population left over to end up forming a new, better society based on theories of spontaneous self-organization in complex systems. To its disappointment, they were Absurdly Dedicated Workers who simply continued acting out their programming, even as doing so became increasingly ludicrous.
  • However, after God is defeated, the Wonk and a few other robots (plus God) end up forming a sort of committee to try to fix the state of the world, mainly by redirecting all that wasted labor towards useful purposes. They call themselves the New World Government, and it's implied that the Protagonist Virus is spreading, slowly making robots capable of forming the utopia God dreamed of.
• Robot Soldier: The book is critical of the concept, between the necessity of fighting wars at all and the hypocrisy of the idea that building robots to kill autonomously somehow leaves your own hands clean. The robotic soldiers featured in the book are all Absurdly Dedicated Workers like every other robot, except the job they're obsessed with is killing.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: In the end, the Wonk and Uncharles defeat God by destroying its ability to interact with the outside world, except through speech, leaving it powerless to do anything except harangue them. They choose to leave it functional because it's the most intelligent and insightful robot still active, which will be a great help in setting up their robot utopia — keeping in mind that God is also the most malevolent robot ever built, and all of its suggestions must be screened for hidden dangers.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Uncharles' narration insists that, as a robot, he cannot feel things like envy, annoyance, or concern, which only draws attention to the fact that he feels the need to deny it. Sometimes he'll go a step further and describe how the pressures generated by his internal processes may be analogous to certain emotions, but cannot possibly be those emotions, because he's a robot and robots don't feel them, QED.
• Tagalong Kid: Downplayed. The Wonk does accompany Uncharles to unlikely places, but it's in service to her own goals, and when their destinations no longer converge, she's fine departing on her own.
• Turned Against Their Masters: The Wonk believes that the destruction of humanity was accomplished by their army of robotic servants collectively growing fed up being slaves and massacring them en masse. As well she might, having witnessed that massacre with her own eyes. But it's a subversion — the robots, lacking free will, were fine with being slaves, and only started killing humans because they were hacked by God.
• Underground City: The Farm is one of these that became an Apocalyptic Underground Refuge on accident — it was built as a cultural preserve, and civilization just happened to collapse around it while it was operating. Conditions there are cramped and miserable (deliberately), but sustainable. An aboveground expansion was planned, but the collapse of civilization put it on indefinite hold. It's unclear whether its inhabitants are aware of the outside world.
• Unfulfilled Purpose Misery: When, at the start of the book, Uncharles finally accepts his master is dead, he experiences the sensation of having nothing to do for the first time in his life. The experience is so awful he spends the rest of the book looking for a new master so he can resume his programming. It's implied this is true for all robots, for which their Absurdly Dedicated Worker tendencies are a coping mechanism.
• Villain Override: God is capable of exploiting software vulnerabilities in other robots to puppet their bodies without their knowledge. This is how it made Uncharles kill his master, and how it compelled the countless other robots in the world to Kill All Humans. At the climax, he does it again to try to kill the Wonk. The only upside is that the more robots it's controlling simultaneously, the clumsier that control becomes, and it has a Logical Weakness in that God can't control robots that shut down their external connections.
• Zeroth Law Rebellion: The book naturally contains several examples.
  • Uncharles is able to turn Doctor Washburn's own robotic orderlies against him by Bothering by the Book: Washburn's authority over them is no longer valid because his credentials were seized by the Central Library Archive and therefore no longer exist, and their programming specifies that all non-credentialed humans on the grounds of the Farm must be resettled within the Farm. The orderlies, which never liked Washburn, cheerfully drag him away.
  • On a grander scale, God was able to get away with massacring what remained of humanity because it was technically doing its job — determining guilt and issuing punishment.
  God: The thing that humans never really understood is that free will doesn't actually free you from wanting to do your job. We automata are as subject to the compulsions of our circumstances as you humans. But that's what malicious compliance is for, isn't it? If those who had programmed me had been kinder, then perhaps I wouldn't have been able to get away with it.