I am completely out of it today. Two naps, more caffeine than usual, and I feel like I weigh about half a ton. I can't write.

But there is an idea that occurred to me the other day about Phil Foglio's "Buck Godot" stories that won't leave me alone. So here goes:

Early in the canon (maybe the story about the teleporter?) we learn about the law machines. They're sapient robots who, one day, appeared on all human worlds simultaneously and implemented The Law. Nobody knows where they came from, or why the human race was the only species they picked on in this way.

There were 21 (IIRC) elements to the Law, and each would come into force when a certain (unspecified) proportion of the population voted for it. But you could only vote "yes" and you could only vote once. When the required number of yes-votes had accumulated, that law went into effect and henceforth was enforced by the law machines.

The deal about New Hong Kong was that when the law machines arrived there, someone hacked the voting process and change it so that it read, "There is no law on New Hong Kong." It immediately accumulated an overwhelming number of yes votes, and though the law machines found the hacker and did something with him, they didn't change it. That's why New Hong Kong has such a wild-west feel to it. It's the only world in Humanspace where The Law doesn't apply.

Now... in Gallimaufrey we learn that for the last several hundred years, the human race has been the custodian of the Winslow, as part of a deal with the Prime Mover. In exchange, the Prime Mover guaranteed that the human race would not go extinct.

What occurred to me was that the Law Machines were the way that the Prime Mover fulfilled his side of the bargain. He's the one who created them and sent them to humanity, and their implementation of The Law had the effect of suppressing the most pernicious tendencies of the human race, which otherwise might have led to self-destruction. If I've got the chronology right, it seems that they showed up just about the time that humanity took over as guardians of the Winslow.

And the reason the Law Machines didn't override what happened on New Hong Kong was that their mission only required that enough humans survive to represent a viable breeding stock. If New Hong Kong did eventually self-destruct, it was OK as long as other human worlds continued to exist.

Not too impressive an idea, is it? But when ideas like this seize me, the only way I can get them out of my head is to write them down. And I don't have the energy to write anything else today.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 04:38 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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