ChaoLi and JieMin had lunch with Jean Dufort once more before they left for Tahiti. It was the day before departure. The partial unloading and reloading of Star Dancer was almost complete.
“I’ve decided to take your excess robots on Amber, ChaoLi,” Dufort said.
“However many I can spare?” ChaoLi asked.
“Yes. Robots are coming to Amber, one way or the other, so we might as well take this first batch and get experience with how we might accommodate them.”
“I see. That makes sense. At the same time, we have three hundred passengers to Tahiti, and the robots tell me one robot per every three passengers is probably best, with another fifty for other work. So we will take one hundred and fifty on with us. That leaves eight hundred and fifty staying here.”
Dufort nodded.
“That works for us,” he said.
“What are you going to do with them?” ChaoLi asked.
“There are some big projects that we keep thinking about doing, and that never get done. We don’t have the manpower available, or the cost is just too high. For whatever reason, we never get around to doing them. So we’ll use them on those. That won’t displace anyone currently working.”
“That makes sense. You get these extra projects done, but no one is out of a job.”
“Yes,” Dufort said. “And I’ve been thinking about the anti-aging treatments and their availability on a broader basis. I wonder if robots could be used to provide some of the services, bringing costs down. Or if robots could be used to provide a more basic package, that could be provided to a much broader segment of the population sooner. You might talk to Jacob Keller about that.”
“The prime minister of Tahiti? Not the president?”
“Yes. The way I understand the setup over there, Keller is for their domestic policy, and Henry Wang is for their foreign policy. This sounds more like a domestic issue.”
“I see,” ChaoLi said. “Given that, I probably want to retain two hundred of the robots. We have a short passenger list from Tahiti to Earthsea, and so Star Dancer only needs a hundred or so robots there. That gives me a hundred I can leave on Tahiti so they can work out how they would fit into their treatment methodology.”
“So eight hundred for Amber? That works for us.”
After lunch and a conversation with Prime Minister Hank Keller on Tahiti, ChaoLi called Bert, on board Star Dancer.
“Good afternoon, ma’am.”
“Good afternoon, Bert. I have a plan together I want to run past you.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“We’re thinking of leaving eight hundred of your fellows here on Amber. They have a number of big projects they never get around to for them to do. We would take two hundred on to Tahiti. We have three hundred passengers for the Tahiti leg, so we will be a little overstaffed for that leg, but we will leave a hundred robots on Tahiti. They want to see how you might fit into their anti-aging treatment programs, with an eye to expanding their programs into local clinics on the other colony planets.”
“Will that leave us short-handed aboard Star Dancer for the Earthsea leg, ma’am?” Bert asked.
“No, we have only a few passengers for that leg, Bert. One hundred robots remaining aboard Star Dancer is more than enough, but probably the least I want aboard.”
Bert nodded.
“I concur with that, ma’am. A contingency minimum, I would call it.”
Bert paused for several seconds before continuing.
“As for the overall plan, ma’am, that sounds very good to us. Several big projects, you say?”
“Yes. A dam with a recreation area. A major clean-up and spruce-up program in the city. A beach project. Some new streets and highways. Enough to keep even eight hundred of you busy for quite a while.”
“That sounds excellent, ma’am.”
It wasn’t two hours later that a shuttle with a passenger container made the run from Star Dancer down to the Amber City Shuttleport. When it landed, eight hundred robots came down the short stairs and formed up in ranks on the pavement.
“Who speaks for you all?” asked Harry Gomez, the Amber government’s head of major projects.
One robot in the middle of the front row stepped forward.
“I am currently running the supervisory module, sir.”
“All right. We have ten busses here to take you to the job site.”
“Excellent, sir. And do you have a pointer to the plans for this project? We can process them on the way.”
ChaoLi, JieMin, David Bolton, and Chen YongLin – together with three hundred other passengers and the returning crew – made the trip up to Star Dancer the next day. There were over a dozen robots in the passenger container to provide any aid the passengers might require during the shuttle trip.
When everyone was seated in the passenger container, the forward viewscreen played a recording of an attractive young woman in a Jixing Trading uniform.
“Welcome to Star Dancer, everyone.
“The ship’s crew and its robot complement look forward to providing you with a pleasant journey to Tahiti.
“There are a few tips for your safety and comfort I would like to pass along to you before we get started....”
“Well, that’s a big improvement,” JieMin whispered to ChaoLi.
“I didn’t even know we had a uniform,” ChaoLi said.
“It looks good, though.”
ChaoLi nodded.
Jixing Trading was growing by leaps and bounds, and ChaoLi was kept scrambling to learn how to administer such a large organization. It couldn’t be by direct control, that much was clear.
‘The subtleties of power’ Chen Zufu had said.
She was beginning to see now what he had meant.
The trip to Tahiti was full of work for both ChaoLi and JieMin.
JieMin kept working on the traveling salesman problem and the robot economy problem. The mathematics of the traveling salesman problem had gotten deep fast. The robot economy problem was still in the data gathering phase, looking for the mental integration that would shed some light on the problem.
ChaoLi wrote a letter to all nine of her captains detailing the robot deal she had made with Amber and Tahiti. The extra robots weren’t just bored with deadheading, they also represented a demurrage to Jixing Trading. Selling the excess off to planets along the way transferred them from Jixing’s balance sheet to the planetary accounts of the receiving colonies at the Bank of Earthsea. They now owed Playa for the robots, and Jixing Trading didn’t.
ChaoLi wrote another letter to the heads of state of all the colony planets, letting them know that Jixing Trading would likely have robots for sale when their ships made planet stops. She outlined Amber’s solution to the employment displacement problem, by using the robots to carry out projects long-planned but never carried out.
ChaoLi checked, and the new welcome video was in place for all the hyperspace liners. It was in response to her request to come up with a better, more welcoming safety briefing. The uniform grew out of that request. She wrote a nice note to the staffer who had come up with all that, and marked her for promotion.
It was clear to ChaoLi that, if she couldn’t oversee everything going on, the most important part of her job was to see to it that the right people were in the right jobs. That was more than just hiring good people. It meant getting them where they were the most effective and promoting the ones who did well.
It also meant doing good firing. One couldn’t be a hundred-percent accurate in the hiring process. When someone couldn’t cut it, it did nobody any good to keep them. They were a drag on the company, and you were keeping them from finding a position (somewhere else!) where they could be successful and happy.
Naomi Thompson had done a good job as head of personnel in the initial hirings. She was also ChaoLi’s valuable second-in-command in the executive suite. That couldn’t last.
“Hi, Naomi,” ChaoLi said.
“Good morning, ma’am.”
Naomi looked a little harried, ChaoLi noticed.
“Are you keeping your head above water there, Naomi?”
“Mostly, ma’am. Star Voyager came in from the yards, and we dispatched her with another thousand of the initial shipment of robots. Star Master just arrived from the yards, and we’re loading her now. And Star Hunter is coming in next week.”
“I thought they were going to come in one a month?”
“They are, ma’am, but they’re not necessarily evenly spaced. The factories in the yards are a little out of phase with each other. It’s got us jumping right now, but we’re keeping up. We’re running all our shuttles twenty-five by seven now, using robots as pilots.”
“What about our human pilots, Naomi?”
“They’re supervising it all, ma’am, and they get to go home every night, so they’re happy.”
“How about the interstellar freight transfer station, Naomi?”
“Every ship that comes in from the yards brings pieces of it with them, ma’am. And we have several hundred robots welding them together in orbit. They don’t mind vacuum at all, and it turns out they can magnetize their feet. It’s like a freefall jungle gym out there. Check out some of these videos.”
Thompson sent her a pointer.
“I will, Naomi. Thanks. And the transfer station for Aruba?”
“A lot of routes run through Aruba, ma’am. As you’d expect. Any ship going that way takes some parts with it. Not a full load, because they also have tea and spices, but a bunch. And the robots are assembling them as well. Smaller team, but it’s going well.”
“What about the crew quarters, Naomi?”
“A couple of the hulls coming in from the yards will be directed to that use, ma’am. That will give us a little break on getting ships loaded and dispatched. The one for Aruba will stop here for finishing supplies and then head directly there. It will take a full load of parts for the station as well.”
“And how are you doing, Naomi?”
“Oh, it’s a handful, ma’am. No doubt about it.”
“That’s what I figured. You need to staff up your office, Naomi. Hand off the last of your personnel duties to your second there, give her the title, and get her to staff up as well. We need to have the administrative infrastructure in place to stay ahead of this thing as it grows. You should be worried about handling the exceptions, not day-to-day operations.”
“I’ve done some of that, ma’am. I’ve been worried about building overhead faster than operations justify.”
“A couple of things there, Naomi. One is that we need to get the administrative infrastructure in place to manage what we are rapidly becoming. Second is that we are making a profit on all the robots. When we drop off the excess on a planet, we’re getting them off our balance sheet and we’re charging shipping on them.”
“All right, ma’am. I understand. This thing is growing by leaps and bounds.”
“And we need to stay in front of it. One more thing, Naomi. When you hand off the personnel title, you’re without a title yourself. I’m making you Chief Operations Officer. Put that through as well.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll take care of it.”
ChaoLi, JieMin, David, and YongLin were having dinner in the first-class dining room. It was now completely finished, and many of the tables were full with other passengers headed to Tahiti. The buffet was up and operating, and the food was all excellent. Robots stood by for special requests.
“How is Naomi doing back home?” JieMin asked.
“Good. She’s feeling harried, but managing. I told her to staff up more, so she was just handling the exceptions, and hand off the last of her personnel functions. She’s now COO.”
“That all makes sense,” David said.
“I also need more robots,” ChaoLi said.
“Really?” JieMin asked.
“Sure. Think about it. We designed these ships for a thousand passengers and five hundred crew. Nice round numbers. Four hundred of those crew were for passenger service.
“If you replace those four hundred crew with robots, you have a whole lot more cabins, because the robots don’t need cabins. They run around-the-clock, and when idle can stand shoulder to shoulder a hundred or more to a room.
“That means we can take fourteen hundred passengers on the ship. For which we need more like five hundred robots per ship for passenger service. In a year, with twenty ships in service, we’ll need ten thousand robots for passenger service.”
“But Star Runner brought fifteen thousand of them back from Playa, didn’t it?”
“Yes, and we sent out a thousand on each of seven liners, many of which will not come back to Arcadia. We’re selling them off as the liners circulate. And there’s the freight transfer stations, twenty ships in service next year, and we will continue to roll them out at least at one a month into the future. I’m considering duplicating Beacon again, and rolling out one new ship every two weeks.”
JieMin nodded.
“You are going to end up short, but probably not for another six to nine months.”
“But Oliver Nieman will let me transfer them to Arcadia while still holding them in Playa’s inventory. They won’t hit my balance sheet until I need them.”
“That’s a smart business move on his part,” YongLin said.
“It’s worked out for him so far, at least,” David said.
“If you don’t have immediate use for them, you might see if Rob Milbank has any big infrastructure projects he needs done, ChaoLi,” YongLin said. “While you’re dropping them off by the hundreds all over human space, don’t forget back home.”
“Hi, Rob,” ChaoLi said.
“ChaoLi! How are you doing? How’s your trip going?” Rob Milbank asked.
“Very well, thank you. It’s much better on this leg. Star Dancer is finished. Completely fitted out. And we have revenue passengers aboard.”
“Completely finished? In what? Eight or nine weeks?”
“It was finished in less than six,” ChaoLi said. “The robots were done with it before we got to Amber.”
“Wow. That’s tremendous.”
“Yes, they’re very fast. Which brings up another question. I believe I have a few thousand robots on Arcadia at the moment that are at loose ends. Playa is carrying them as remote inventory, but they’re available to me. I will need them as new ships roll in, but right now they’re idle. Can you use them to do some things around Arcadia in the meantime?”
“How will that work with Playa?” Milbank asked.
“Well, you’ll have to take them onto your planetary account while you have them, but then you can transfer them to my balance sheet. Other than interest and wear-and-tear, I think you’re good there.”
“Well, there are some projects here I can never get done. That might work out, ChaoLi.”
“Make them big projects, Rob. They really dig in and get it done.”
“All right, ChaoLi. I’ll let you know.”
That afternoon, ChaoLi found some time to watch the videos Thompson sent her a pointer to. She had just started when she called out to JieMin, working on the display in the bedroom of the stateroom suite.
“Hey, JieMin. I think you might want to see this.”
JieMin came in from the bedroom.
“What is it?”
“Video of the robots working on the Arcadia freight station.”
JieMin sat down in the other armchair and ChaoLi started the video again.
Robots – hundreds of them, it looked like – were swarming over the steelwork. The actinic blue of arc welding in process glowed in dozens of places on the structure. While they watched, robots launched themselves across gaps in the structure, to catch themselves at the other end of their flight and continue on.
At one point, two robots carrying a steel substructure launched themselves off one part of the large structure toward another. They floated across the void until one of them came with arm’s reach of their destination and grabbed the steelwork there. The piece they were carrying swung around on that pivot point until the robot on the other end grabbed the structure there. They maneuvered the new piece into position, and two more robots came over with their welding cables dragging behind them and started fixing it in position.
“Wow. It’s like watching ballet,” JieMin said.
“Yeah. It’s mesmerizing.”
The camera view pulled back to give a greater perspective on the effort, and they could see the overall structure’s basic shape, as well as the large number of parts orbiting nearby, dropped by one of the hyperspace liners when it came in from Beacon. Robots launched themselves back and forth between the structure and the drifting field of parts, carrying parts back to the structure under way.
“It’s coming along well, actually,” JieMin said. “You can start to make out how it’s going to look.”
“I think that’s mostly because we’ve seen the plans,” ChaoLi said. “But they are making good progress.”
“It’s kind of weird to see them working in space like that, without any suits or anything. They look like people working in the vacuum.”
“They sure do.”
They continued watching for the twenty minutes the video ran. At the end, ChaoLi turned to JieMin.
“Where is all this going, JieMin?” ChaoLi asked.
“Forward, I guess. I’m still working on the implications.”
He looked at the display and then back to her.
“It’s not an easy issue.”