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About BobsWorld
an overview of the BobsWorld universe
by Setcheti
Disclaimer: I do not own Bob the Builder, I just love him a
whole lot and want him to be happy – isn’t that how fic usually
happens? I don’t own any of the other characters who make special
guest appearances in this universe either, although the original characters
are mine. For more about everyone in this universe, check out the BobsWorld Cast Page.
Author’s Note: The BobsWorld universe is based on the premise
that the Bob the Builder characters are real people, living in a real
world. So obviously some liberties had to be taken with the original
show, deal with it. None of those liberties, however, will ever Ever
EVER be adult in nature or go above a young teen-appropriate rating.
So if you’re looking for adult content, please go look someplace else.
At some point not too far in the future from where we
are now, a brilliant scientist named Charlie concluded that AI technology was
never going to reach a point where it could be used for what the
governments of the world had been trying to develop it for: warfare.
Artificial intelligence, he argued, just didn’t grow in such a way that it
would ever be able to take on those particular tasks for its
creators.
And wonder of wonders, mainly because Charlie was such a
brilliant and well-respected scientist, he managed to convince all those
same governments that he was right.
But Charlie had never said that AI was useless, just that
it was never going to get where certain people wanted it to go. He
had different ideas about what could be done with AI, and he set about
putting together the top people working in the field – and since he’d
pretty much just seen them all put out of work, he had his pick of whoever
he wanted. Charlie was very picky. True artificial
intelligence, he contended, would eventually learn itself right into
self-awareness, which meant that one day you’d be working with a program
and the next day it could have blossomed into a personality. And that
meant that only thoughtful, conscientious people should be involved in the
research and development. But it also meant that those same
thoughtful, conscientious people needed to be aware that once it happened
that didn’t mean they were suddenly dealing with a human mind – because
they weren’t.
Hence the failure of the government researchers, who had
never been able to figure out that half their problem was coming from their
either treating the AI like a computer or like a person, but never like
what it actually was: a sentient being with a mechanical body and vastly
different psychology than a human’s. Charlie’s people at the Sol
Foundation delved deeply into that psychology, and after six months they
were able to tell him exactly what kind of machines could and couldn’t
house AI successfully. The right machines, they’d discovered, needed
to be capable of independent movement, designed to perform specific
functions rather than general ones, and equipped with the ability to sense
the world around them and to express themselves in multiple ways.
It took them two years after that discovery to figure
out how to make all those things happen, and then they ran into their next
problem: deciding who was going to work with the machines, and how
and where they were going to do it. People had to be specially
trained to work with an AI machine, and not everyone was able to.
Again, thoughtful, conscientious, smart people were needed – but this time,
those people didn’t necessarily need to be scientists. They just
needed to be people who needed particular machines in their day-to-day
work, and they needed to be able to work with that machine day-in and
day-out without being frustrated by the machine never emotionally growing
past the level of a ten-year-old human child.
They also needed to be people who were willing to
relocate in a big way. Charlie’s foundation may have been independent
of government or military control, but some of its projects were still
top-secret. And because not everyone could work with the machines –
in fact, their tests had shown that some people couldn’t even accept
the machines, much less interact with them – working with the machines
meant working someplace where everyone had been screened and trained.
But at the same time, in order to prove that the machines had a place in
society, the machines needed to be in society, which meant that a
society as functionally normal as possible had to be created for both
workers and machines to live in.
And so Project Sunflower was born. After much
deliberation the foundation purchased a large island, which was called Sol
Island, and a tiny town named Sunflower Valley was located there and
populated with Project scientists and their families. And the machines,
of course, although the machines weren’t normally brought to the island
until the person they’d been assigned to work with was ready to come
too. The Project headquarters on the mainland controlled access with
an iron fist through their heavily guarded dock, making sure that nothing
and no one who didn’t belong on Sol Island got on the ferry that was the
inhabitants’ single physical connection with the outside world.
That was important too. Top secret projects don’t
stay top secret if the flow of information in and out of them isn’t
strictly controlled. The island had a telephone system, but its range
was limited to the island and the mainland headquarters, from where
approved external communications could be routed if necessary. Likewise
internet transmissions were unrestricted coming into the system but
outgoing traffic was limited and monitored, and regular mail going both
ways passed under the watchful eye of the Project as well. Cell
phones were not allowed at all because their transmissions were not secure
and they posed an unjustifiable security risk – unjustifiable in the eyes
of Charlie and the Project because instant portable communication just
wasn’t deemed a necessity in a ten block wide town.
In any other community this sort of Big Brother
mentality would have eventually incited a rebellion, but the personnel
working on Project Sunflower had been hand-picked for their positions, many
of them by Charlie himself, and they not only understood but agreed with
the reasons behind the seemingly draconian rules that affected so many
aspects of their everyday lives. And the restrictions governing
communication with the outside world did not apply to their family members
who weren’t in the Project – or at least, they didn’t apply once those family
members had been screened and cleared by the Project, that was.
Someday, they all knew, such measures would not be necessary any more, but
until that time it was a price they had all agreed to pay.
And speaking of pay…it was good. In fact it was very
good. Not that the Project personnel ever saw any of that money in
the usual sense, though, unless they went to the mainland. Sunflower
Valley – all of Sol Island, in fact – operated on a barter system similar
to one that had been attempted in one or two small cities in the United
States. Sol’s system, however, had the advantage of not being forced
to compete with an already established monetary economy, and it was
monitored by a computer that worked out fair exchange rates for goods and
services and then assigned or subtracted credits in the individual accounts
of the residents when transactions of those goods and services were
recorded. The paperless system was efficient, simple to use, and
accessible from any terminal on the island. And it was flexible
enough to allow casual bartering between the residents while still enabling
those exchanges to be tracked; in fact, the computer used those entries to
refine its own lists of set transactions, which meant the system could grow
and change like a natural economy.
As far as work went, just living on Sol wasn’t all the
residents did. There was a small industrial center located on the
northeast side of Sunflower Valley, and that was where the scientists spent
at least part of their days, working on a variety of projects – the Sol
Foundation was about a lot more than just Project Sunflower. Some of
the personnel split their time between the labs and side jobs in town,
everything from flower arranging to tech support, while other of the
non-scientific occupations that keep a community running were handled by
the husbands and/or wives of the working scientists or by specially chosen
professionals who lived in the Valley but served the entire island.
Sunflower Valley had a hairdresser, a café, a grocery store, a library and
a school – some of the residents had children, or were working on having
children. It also had postal service, a constable, and a
doctor. A committee of residents controlled the planning of public
works, and a building inspector oversaw their implementation. And
those projects were physically accomplished by a civil
engineer/contractor/handyman who ran the building yard where most of the AI
machines lived, a sturdy building located right in the center of town and
surrounded by a high concrete wall.
The wall, contrary to what a non-resident might have
thought, was not there to prevent theft or vandalism; it was for protecting
the nearby houses from accidental run-ins with the machines.
Scaled-down versions though they were, the AI machines were still made just
about the same way regular heavy equipment was – mostly steel with heavy
rubber treads and tires. And since the machines were AI, and
emotionally all young, accidents were a given. The wall kept those
accidents, as well as all the mess and noise of a working construction
yard, confined to a safe area. The lumber yard on the west side of
Sunflower Valley was set up the same way for the same reason, in spite of
the fact that it housed only one small forklift.
There were other AI machines outside of the town
limits, of course; the island’s recycling center had a skip-loader, two
farmers had tractors, and the rail yard nestled in the central mountain
foothills had a pair of snowmobiles. The trains themselves were
not AI equipped, nor would they ever be – that had been tried on an island
in Scotland with disturbing results that nobody on Sol wanted to risk
repeating. The AI trains, not function-specific enough or
independently mobile enough to stay sane, had developed their own
magic-laden belief system and then begun to question if not outright defy
their human creators in the name of serving a mysterious entity known only
as “The Conductor.” The religion had spread to the AI-equipped
tugboats and steamers that served the island, and once project heads had
realized how bad the situation could get the plug had been pulled on the
project.
Unfortunately for the people working on the Isle of
Sodor at the time, however, that plug was pulled too late – the same day
the initial report had been sent out, one of the station masters had
instructed their engineers to try to ‘reason’ with the trains about their
beliefs. Which led to the discovery that the permanent pathways
engraved in an AI ‘brain’ by each new experience happened to have the
effect of making the trains and tugs viciously, fanatically
intolerant. Charlie had temporarily put one of the Sodor project’s
surviving engineers on his payroll – temporarily, because the man couldn’t
stand the thought of so much as being in the same building as an AI
machine, much less interacting with one – and with his help the
psychologists had learned what not to expose the machines to if they wanted
them to stay sane.
That was the one part of the Project’s rulebook that had
garnered complaints before the community on Sol Island had even been
planned out. Because although the residents were free to practice
whatever religion they pleased behind closed doors, there couldn’t be,
would never be, any churches or other signs of institutionalized religion
on the island. Period. Ever. People protested that, some
of them vociferously…until Charlie forced them all to watch the bloody
video footage of what had happened on the Isle of Sodor. After that
there was no more argument, no more complaints. And the subsequent
inclusion of a ‘decency clause’ in the contracts signed by island-bound
employees was met with no comment at all. In fact, for those who were
considered for inclusion in the Project later, the clause came to be used
as a screening tool – people who objected to the provisions of the clause
without so much as asking for the reasons behind them were marked as unfit
for inclusion in the Sunflower Valley community and limited to working on
the mainland.
Not that working at headquarters was any sort of
hardship, especially since some people just wouldn’t have been happy in the
Valley’s small-town atmosphere anyway. As Charlie often took pains to
point out, the screening was as much about keeping the employees happy as
it was about keeping the machines safe and secure; in fact, he said it was
impossible to have one without the other. “It’s a town that happens
to be part of an experiment, not an experiment that sort of looks like a
town,” he reminded his staff on a regular basis. The last thing they
needed was for that experiment to fail because they’d forgotten to be as
careful with the thoughtful, conscientious, smart people they’d hired as
they were with the machines those people had been so carefully chosen to
work with.
And because they didn’t forget – and because they had
been so careful in the first place – Project Sunflower grew and blossomed
just like its name, and Sunflower Valley was a pleasant place to live and
work. The restrictions imposed by the decency clause kept public life
reminiscent of the setting for Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, there was no
real crime, and even though all the doors had locks nobody ever used
them. The scientists and other Project employees were happy, their
families were happy…and the machines were happy, which was more than anyone
had ever expected. By the time it had hit the six-month mark, Project
Sunflower was considered an unqualified success.
Charlie knew, however, that the true test of his
experiment was just beginning.
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