Anna stretched under the blanket and opened her eyes. She was still in her room, the sun was still shining outside the curtains, and she had overslept as usual. The girl got out of bed, went to the window, and pulled back the curtain. Her face and body suddenly felt the warmth of the sun's rays. Drops of yesterday's rain still glistened on the glass, but the asphalt had already dried, and the foliage of the old linden trees opposite the house, refreshed by the downpour, looked young, as if it were spring now, not the end of summer. Her downstairs neighbor, a businesslike and serious young man in a strict suit, left the house on time as usual and got into a driverless taxi. And, as usual, he was too absorbed in his smartphone to notice the almost completely naked girl looking out the window a few meters away from him. No, the world hadn't changed.
"There is no red pill after all," Anna thought sadly, turning away from the window. Everything that had happened last night seemed like some kind of strange nightmare to her. However, it was not surprising. Judging by the several empty bottles on the floor, she had stayed up late watching movies and drinking alone again, so she did not even remember how she had undressed and gone to bed.
The girl pulled on a pair of denim shorts, put on a T-shirt, and was about to leave the apartment when a message from Alexei came to her smartphone:
"Still at home? Are you asleep?"
"I'm leaving now!!! :)" Anna replied, adding a smiley face to the message.
"Don't rush. I'll pick you up today," came the strange reply.
Fifteen minutes later, the same standard driverless taxi that Anna's perpetually busy neighbor had left in a little earlier stopped in front of the house. Alexei was sitting in the back seat in a relaxed, casual pose. The girl easily ran down the stairs, opened the car door, plopped down next to the guy, and the car moved silently from its spot.
"Is today a special day?" Anna asked with a smile.
"Yes," Alexei replied calmly.
"So you decided to ask me out on a date after all?" the girl continued in the same playful manner.
"Well, you could say that," the programmer smiled, but immediately got down to business. "Have you heard about the latest incident with the drones?"
"Of course."
"In connection with it, we decided to expand the group that deals with security. I decided that you would be a good fit for this."
"Me?!" Anna pretended to be surprised and, it seemed, even overplayed it a little. "What about Svetik? She knows a lot more about drones."
"I've always felt that you two don't like each other very much," Alexei understood the exaggeration in her voice in his own way. "But I don't mind a little rivalry in the team. And don't worry, this time the choice is obvious not only to the neural network, but also to me. After all, it was the drones that proved vulnerable, while the buses, for which you developed the program, didn't experience a single malfunction. Excellent programming.
"Thank you," the girl responded, this time completely sincerely, and even blushed a little.
The taxi pulled onto the highway and picked up speed, moving confidently in the flow of traffic.
"Aren't we going to work?" the girl asked, noticing that the car had left the buildings and parks of G.A. far behind.
"To work... Consider this a job interview before a promotion."
The taxi stopped in the parking lot of the shopping center where Anna had been just a moment ago. Alexei hesitantly offered her his hand to help her out of the car. It was clear that this gallantry was unusual for him. Then they both entered the gigantic building, where the air was cool as usual, and a pleasant mist hung over the green-covered galleries.
In the glass elevator, gliding silently through all the floors, they went up to the top floor, where, under a vaulted ceiling decorated in the style of an interactive animated sky, there was a bookstore, a small quiet coffee shop, and a movie theater box office, where, judging by the colorful posters, they were showing another animated action movie about robots. The screening had just begun, so the floor was quiet and deserted.
"You know how to choose places for interviews," said the girl, but the programmer did not answer her.
Anna looked toward the coffee shop, assuming that Alexei would invite her to sit down at a table, but he stopped at the railing surrounding the huge circular opening between the floors, along the edges of which elevators scurried up and down, and from where the entire shopping center looked like the mouth of a huge volcano.
"Look at them..." said the programmer, looking down thoughtfully, leaning slightly on the railing with his hands.
"Whom?" Anna didn't understand, coming up and standing next to him.
"People... I often like to watch them from here. They seem like ants..." Although each one is unique, each one is immersed in their own thoughts, desires, and concerns. Just like you and me. And what are we all busy with? For the last thirty years, we have not experienced hunger, we have not suffered from disease, we have been provided with housing and receive an unconditional income. And if we don't have enough, we can easily find a job we like so that we can earn extra money without putting in a lot of physical effort. All this has been given to us by the digital age, the robotization of production, and the digitization of society, ultimately by the GlobalAutomation corporation...
"That's all well and good," Anna remarked casually.
"Yes... It's good," Alexei nodded. "But has it made people better? We rest, relax, experience joy, choose, consume, engage in self-development if we want to... But even in such favorable, almost ideal conditions, we continue to lie, steal, rape, and kill."
"But..." the girl wanted to object.
"Look... Look down. How many people do you see? Five hundred? A thousand? According to statistics, which you've never been interested in, every thousandth person is a potential murderer, every five hundredth is a potential rapist. They're down there somewhere... Even if they haven't committed their crimes yet. If you could, you would easily see them. But you don't see them. And those around you don't see them either. And that's why everyone is calm. Everyone is confident that they are surrounded by good, law-abiding citizens, that crime is minimized, that nothing threatens them...
"Isn't that the case?"
"Yes... And not because people have become better, but because technology has become better... Let's go!" Alexei suddenly took Anna's hand decisively and pulled her toward the elevator.
They quickly rushed through all the floors of the shopping center and came out on the lower level of the underground parking lot. Here, among the frozen cars, there was silence and basement dampness. One of the fluorescent lights, already on the verge of failing, flickered alarmingly. Alexei looked around and decisively approached an inconspicuous door in the wall, which apparently led to some small utility room, and swiped his card through the slot of a standard electronic lock.
"And now you'll find out how deep the rabbit hole goes..." the programmer said meaningfully as he opened the door.
However, instead of a storage room with mops, there was a concrete staircase leading down, similar to those connecting floors in typical entrances of typical high-rise buildings. The dim lights illuminating the flights of this underground stairwell created the feeling of some kind of cartoonish post-apocalypse.
"This is an old bomb shelter," Alexei explained, as if reading the girl's thoughts, "three more floors down..."
"Why are we here?"
"You'll see," replied the guy, opening another door with an electronic lock.
Behind this door was a bright and modern server room, divided by transparent partitions and densely packed with racks of network connectors with continuously flashing indicators.
"Welcome!" Alexei smiled, sitting down in a chair and turning on the monitors in front of him.
On them, endless miniature screens flashed images of the city, cars moving along the road, the faces of passersby, and the interiors of apartments.
"This is the center of the security system of our quiet and peaceful metropolis. An observation post, so to speak. Our 'Dark Tower'. From here you can see everything... Street cameras, drone cameras, car video recorders, private home security cameras, and even the camera in your mobile phone are all accessible...
"But isn't that an invasion of privacy?"
"Formally, no. After all, it's not people who are watching people, but it..." The programmer pointed toward the server racks. "Once we entrusted computers with managing our transportation, finances, and personnel policies, it was only a matter of time before we entrusted them with law enforcement..."
"Is it AI? "
"Almost... True, it can't express friendliness and concern in its voice and can't talk to you at all, but it understands what friendliness and concern are. It also understands what pain, violence, cruelty, and lies are... It has studied these things very well by observing people. Sometimes it almost feels it. It is familiar with the concepts of good and evil, crime and punishment, justice..."
"But how...?"
"At first, I thought I would just put all criminal and administrative law into the system, but I quickly realized that this was not rational. There are too many laws, they change frequently, and most importantly, they do not reflect the very essence of the law enforcement system — the preservation and restoration of justice. Laws are dry, they cannot convey the full diversity of real-life situations... So I introduced just three simple rules... And Voland figured out the rest himself...
Alexei entered a few short commands, and the following text appeared in the main window on the central monitor:
Rule No. 1: Any person cannot restrict human rights.
Rule No. 2: Any person can exercise his rights to the extent and degree that does not contradict Rule No. 1.
Rule No. 3: Human rights may be restricted to the extent and degree necessary and sufficient to implement Rules No. 1 and No. 2.
"Almost like Asimov..." Anna remarked.
"Only the other way around..." The laws of robotics applied to humanity," Mikhail's cheerful voice rang out behind Anna. "I was thrilled when I saw it for the first time..."
"You're late," the programmer remarked, glancing at his watch. "I thought you were going to help with the presentation of our project."
"Sorry. The power went out in my whole neighborhood, and my Segway didn't have time to charge... I had to take public transportation," the robotics engineer apologized in the same cheerful voice. "But if you're done with the moral and legal aspects, I'll talk about the technical part."
"Great! Then continue without me, because I have a date at this time. Alexei glanced at his watch again, winked at Anna for some reason, and left the server room.
"A date..." Mikhail smiled. "Well, well... It turns out that nothing human is alien to our Lyokha. Do you know anything about it?"
Anna just shrugged, mesmerized as she watched the constantly switching and analyzed videos flash across the screens at breakneck speed. Everything that had previously seemed like a feverish paranoid fantasy now took on sinister and very real features.