He was the spirit of three hundred ninety-two elder care robots in a gray town in the Tottori Prefecture. It was the law in most developed nations that every robot in regular contact with a human being must have a spirit: a backup human to supervise their actions and override them if need be. In Japan it was stipulated that those spirits had to be Japanese.
Compliance with this narrower stipulation was poorly audited. To be a spirit required a young person’s multitasking and cheapness and youth was at a premium in Japan. The spirit’s name was Baekhyun, his workplace a warehouse in the anodyne ruins of a failed smart city across the sea. This was a known secret kept such by the polite traditions of discretion and bribes.
Translation software had long been good enough to make spoken and body language, such as robots had, a non-issue. Baekhyun was certain that the favorite of his charges, the old woman with the easy laugh and her cynical journalist son who visited her more often than his success would have made it likely, somehow knew. Neither of them said anything.
The spirit also knew that the old person in the town he liked the least did not know. Like nationalists in every country he was angry and resentful; he was also connected enough, in some unspecified way that did not seem to square with the town and house in which he lived, that had he known something would have happened. He would have told the man he spoke on the phone every two weeks with bitter distance but with an unspoken hold, and that wouldn’t have been without consequences. This did not worry the spirit.
It was a gray town and past the time when things happened. Baekhyun took control of the robots more often than strictly needed, more to relieve his boredom and their solitude than to improve automated performance reviews too opaque to merit effort. Even the old man’s robot – the spirit was dutiful.
He never knew why there was no alert for the earthquake. Infrastructure was everywhere ill-maintained, but wouldn’t that had been among the last to be neglected even in a small and isolated gray town? The spirit only realized what had happened after long seconds of unparseable video feeds and questionable telemetry. The ruined houses, after, would have been clue enough.
Baekhyun had been a moderately impressive swarm controller before he had been an anonymously well-regarded spirit. The main differences between both skill sets were time and space: The world of a care robot was small and slow. The town had suddenly become too large for the robots, time too short to care for all emergencies even if so many of the robots hadn’t been destroyed together with so many of the houses.
The spirit flipped a switch inside himself; this felt like relaxing a muscle kept tight for too long. Nothing changed in hardware or software. All functioning cameras opened up on his field of vision. Medical data overlaid geographical maps, and where the software developers had neglected to add algorithms useful in an emergency Baekhyun’s instincts provided invisible overlays
The care robots became a swarm.
It would have been possible to quantify how many lives he saved during the next few hours by a counterfactual simulation easy enough to code. Easy, unprofitable, embarrassing, unattempted, unmentioned. The spirit moved people carefully when he could, stole medicine from where it would be useless and moved it across streets to where it could help, talked to who could listen and needed to, kept his ears open because cameras were never enough.
That was how he heard the old man die insulting the man who had just told him the government would prioritize sending help to the company towns with their precious engineers. The man had been his son. This did not surprise or concern the spirit. He was too busy to think or feel. Too many lives (yet too few) and not enough robots (even if they were straining his skill, and he didn’t dare ask his employer for help because he feared he would instead be made to stop; legal liability was what kept the company profitable and everybody in it scared).
And yet he left a robot next to the old woman with the easy laugh, talking to her until she stopped breathing. He did not try to guess how many people died because of it. And he did not justify it to himself because of what happened next. He stayed with him until she died and the swarm had saved as many as he was allowed to before the company systems understood the implications and cut him off.
He knew he had been fired before taking off his goggles. He didn’t know the old woman’s son had found the recording chip he had left on her body until he saw it on the news.