The Trouble With Model 3

The Trouble With Model 3

Ah ... I guess I should begin by introducing myself.

For those of you who haven’t seen the news lately ... maybe you’ve been in a cave or something ... my name is Thomas J. Lachane and until last Thursday, when the military took over, I was the managing director of Luna One, the consortium’s space colony and satellite manufacturing facility at L-5. I am also a vice president of the consortium. At least, so far. I guess one of the reasons for this meeting is to see whether or not I continue in that capacity.

I’d like to thank the board and stockholders for giving me the opportunity to tell you my side of what happened and why I think it happened. But I have to warn you from the start that there aren’t any simple answers for the questions I’ve been fielding for the past four days. I mean ... I’ve been racking my brain over the situation, and I sure as hell can’t find them. I’m not even sure what started it. Maybe the whole idea of trying to put a human society into space was flawed from the outset.

Look, it’s easy enough to find beginnings in retrospect, easy enough to look back and say this or that caused the problem. The only thing is that I'm not so sure such an approach is valid.

Oh, I guess in the laboratory you can deduce predictable effects from observable causes. But out here in the real world? I doubt it. There are too many variables, too many random elements. The models are just too complex. Cause and effect are all too often a tissue of related events that make it difficult to recognize the latter and all but impossible to identify the former.

So when you ask me to start at the beginning, I don’t know whether I can do that.

But I guess I have to give it a try. So here goes. Just remember what I said.

We created Model 3 because of the trouble we were having with production on Luna One. Productivity had fallen way off. The citizens seemed to be drifting into a kind of lassitude. The energy level of the whole complex was declining. I mean, it was ridiculous. We had finally succeeded in putting a viable human society into the most hostile environment known to man, and the whole thing was coming apart because people were ... well ... bored.

And this is part of what I was saying about the situation being so complicated. We had put the whole enterprise into place. It had to function as a centralized, command economic unit because that was the only way to protect the consortium’s interests.

As a consequence of that, we had to retain political control. You can’t maintain that kind of set-up without political control.

What we had was a society with none of the dynamic tensions that you find in normal human societies. No political debate. No economic competition.

With the screening processes we had used to select the workers, we had managed to pretty well eliminate any trouble-makers. In fact, we may have done too good a job of that. There was no crime to speak of, no poverty, no worry about health care or natural disasters or anything of that sort. Oh, there was always the possibility of a stray meteor crashing the party, but that was so remote as to be laughable. Besides if it happened there wouldn’t be time to do much about it anyway.

Drug use was about what you would expect. Maybe a little higher than normal but certainly within acceptable parameters. And it was all legal stuff, alcohol and marijuana and the like. We had very little incidence of drug abuse and there weren’t any dealers.

In short we had created a society without most of the problems associated with societies here on earth. It was almost a paradise. The problem was we also had created a society of lotus eaters. You see, we had forgotten one of the most important characteristics of our species, one that has helped humankind to survive and to keep on going throughout human history. Our adaptability. People can adapt to almost any kind of situation. And once they have adjusted to a status quo, they seem to want to maintain it. They come to accept it as normal. And even though it may not be exactly what they would prefer, they’ll still put up with it rather than go to the trouble to change anything.

Once the novelty of living in space had worn off, once the factories were up and running, once the hydroponic farms were producing, once all the infrastructure was in place and the shops were open, everyone seemed to catch their breath and settle into a routine. At first, we thought it was great. We had a nice stable situation, and it looked as though the consortium would finally begin to realize a return on its investment.

But after about a year, we realized that we had created a society of around sixty thousand human beings who had nothing to challenge them. No economic or political competition to keep them on their toes. No one trying to rock the boat once in a while.

They were as happy as clams and just about as interesting.

And the problem was that we couldn’t change any of that without changing the basic structure of the society, something we could not do because of the potential danger to the interests of the consortium. After investing almost one trillion dollars in the project, the members of the consortium weren’t interested in making any changes just when it appeared we were beginning to turn the corner. In fact, there are several ladies and gentlemen in this room who gave me that message in no uncertain terms when I suggested loosening the reins a little.

Of course, the fallacy in that line of reasoning was that, if existing trends were allowed to continue, there wouldn’t be any profit, the colony would cease to be self-sustaining, and the consortium might find itself faced with the prospect of writing the whole thing off as a dead loss.

That was when we came up with the concept for Model 3.

It was really kind of a group idea, but I guess you’d have to say Chris Bartleson was the one who got the ball rolling. Chris specializes in socio-historical research and group dynamics.

He said if you looked at human history, there were basically three major areas of organization, three areas of conflict, competition and, sometimes, cooperation and that out of those three areas most human progress had grown. Apart from the basic human drives for food, sex and survival, which had a lot to do with those areas of organization, everything else, to his way of thinking, was just bread and circuses.

The first of those areas was politics. Whether organized along tribal, racial or national lines, political conflict and competition had been the engine of a considerable amount of human progress. It could exist within a given social unit or between social units, but whatever the structures involved, politics could be a strong agent of change.

Sometimes the result was good, and sometimes it was bad. But there was no question that political activity stimulated human ingenuity.

The second area was economics. People organizing themselves along economic lines. The haves and have-nots. That kind of thing. Economic competition, however organized or disorganized, was another of those engines of human progress. And economic activity could cut across political lines so that the economic interests within social units would at times converge with their political interests and at other times diverge from them.

So when you threw both political and economic interests into the same pot, Chris said, there was very little way of predicting what sort of stew would be produced.

Unfortunately, as I have already explained, neither of those options were open to us because we had to retain control in order to protect the consortium’s investment.

Oh, we could –– and did –– attempt some ephemeral changes, but we could not alter the fundamental structure of the society.

What we had was a highly sophisticated, technologically advanced, version of the old factory towns that you can learn about in the historical vid-tapes. It was a better deal for the workers because the company gave them a decent place to live and all the amenities with few of the problems that exist back on earth. The corporation had a strong incentive to keep the workers happy because, with the cost of transport being what it was, it was just too damned expensive to have to replace them.

For its part, the company had high control over the work force because it didn’t just own the factory, it owned the whole town and everything in it. So, credits for purchases made at the stores, etc., all came back to the consortium and helped defray the cost of the enterprise.

We didn’t want to meddle with that arrangement.

Which brings me to Model 3.

The third area that Chris talked about was religion. He said religion also had produced a considerable amount of change throughout human history. It could cut across both economic and political lines. Sometimes it would converge with and sometimes would diverge from the political and economic interests of a social unit, but there was no question it also was a powerful engine for conflict and competition.

We all thought that seemed to be the most fruitful area for us to pursue. Over Chris’ objections, I might add.

His argument went something like this. There was no question religion was one of the most powerful agents of change in human societies. However, he said there also was no question it was one of the most dangerous.

This was so, Chris said, because any political or economic unit depended, in part, for its success on measurable criteria. The absence —— or sometimes the existence —— of wars, the maintenance of social order and stability, the distribution of goods and services and so on. There were a whole lot of things that served to dampen the extremes of political and economic structures and made it possible for people to evaluate the performance of those structures and the institutions which served them.

Religion was not like that at all, Chris warned us. There were no criteria by which you could measure religion because, by definition, it was non-material. Religion could be, and often was, totally irrational.

Once the True Believers had signed on, a religion could take off in directions that were totally unpredictable. Chris went through a litany of religious wars and persecutions, some of them quite recent, to illustrate his point. There was no question a successful religious movement could have an invigorating effect, he said, but it might be destructive to the very objectives we were trying to achieve.

Now I see some of you look a little puzzled, and I think I know what’s bothering you. Probably the same thing that bothered me. You see, we already had religions on the colony. Practically all the mainline churches had branches there. There also were other religions represented there as well. In fact, there was nothing to prevent any religious organization from establishing itself there. The consortium encouraged it.

But Chris said we shouldn’t confuse what he was talking about with the established religions. The real impetus for change either came from new religions or religions undergoing some sort of major revival. In fact, Chris said most new religions came about because of the resistance of existing religions to change. The current crop of religious organizations on hand in Luna One were affiliated with groups that had lost that dynamism and were firmly aligned with the status quo.

So what we would need, he suggested, was to either start something new or to generate some sort of revival in one of the existing groups. Chris said if we were serious about going ahead with this thing, we should consider the latter rather than the former. By dealing with a group that already existed, we would find it easier to maintain control because the leaders of the group we chose would resist anything too extreme so we would be less likely to run into trouble. That didn’t mean he was ready to sign on though.

Chris said, and I’ll never forget it, "Don’t do this guys. You are dealing with a real wild card here, and, whatever you come up with, trying to control it will be damn near impossible once you turn it loose."

In retrospect he called it on the money. So why didn’t we listen? Because we knew we needed to do something, and the approach he suggested seemed to offer the best chance for success. That’s when we began calling the project "Model 3" and started brainstorming about it.

I mean, we all know Chris is a brilliant guy. But we believed that, since we would control both the medium and the message, we would be able to minimize the chance that anything would go wrong. He was basing his analysis on past history, and there just wasn’t any precedent in past history for what we were planning to do.

Yeah, I see some of you looking around, and I guess I know who you are looking for. Unfortunately, Chris Bartleson can’t be with us today. When things started coming apart about six months ago, so did he. I guess he blamed himself for what happened, although, as I’ve pointed out, he certainly warned us of what could go wrong before we began the planning. But he was a trooper about it. Once we had settled on Model 3 as the direction we wanted to take, he pitched in and did everything he could to make it work.

It’s too bad he wasn’t available to us when things really started getting screwy. He might have been able to minimize some of the problems we had or suggest better ways of dealing with them. But he wasn’t, so Becky –– that’s Becky Samuels, my assistant –– and I did the best we could without him. And if it wasn’t good enough, then I invite any of you who thinks you could have done better to step right up and take a whack at it. I think things have settled down up there, now that martial law has been imposed.

And no, Becky isn’t here either. As most of you should know, Becky was among the casualties when the riots started two weeks ago. She was ... she was executed by God’s Faithful for blasphemy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Some of you have asked me how we could have been so arrogant as to think we could pull something like this off. Well, I resent that. Oh, I know that may be the way it looks now, when everything has fallen apart. But I think we had a good shot at making it work. Frankly, it wasn’t that hard to set it up. The religion we invented was mostly a blend of things from various Christian sects, since that seemed to be the dominant religion in the colony. It emphasized a strong work ethic, commitment to family, fairly standard moral values, that kind of thing. There really wasn’t anything exotic about it at all. At least, not when it started. So the message was pretty basic.

The messenger was one of the new XJ6 cyborgs, designed by Autohuman Systems Inc., one of the members of the consortium. But this one was special. It was given human features and was so lifelike that, I’ll swear, if it walked into the room right now, none of you would be able to tell that it was any different than any human being already here. That’s how good the modeling was.

Of course, we know that humans don’t like to work with robots that don’t look like robots. But we borrowed some features from the entertainment industry, and the lab techs produced a masterpiece. After all, if this had worked the way it was supposed to, no one would ever have known that it was a robot except the handful of people that were in on the planning.

Altogether it took us about six months to put everything together, and another three months to program the cyborg to do what we wanted it to do. Of course, it’s a self-programming mechanism, and once it was up and running, it actually became part of the planning team. It was structured logically to be "other" directed —— at least, that’s what Chris called it —— and it made a real contribution to the theology and organization of the religious group. In fact, it was the one that came up with the idea of calling the group "God’s Faithful."

We named the thing Paul Treyson, and that’s what I’m going to call it from here on out, if that’s OK with everyone. The design was definitely masculine but with an androgynous spin. We didn’t want Paul to be overly threatening to any of the males he would come into contact with. On the other hand, Chris insisted our prophet had to be male because, in the tradition that all the people on the colony came from, the founders and major apostles of all the major religions were males.

Becky agreed with Chris —— somewhat reluctantly —— but then she added some wrinkles of her own, and I think this may be where we started going wrong. Some of this may be a bit indelicate for the women in the room, so if you’re easily offended you might want to step outside for a few minutes. No? Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Paul was just standing there —— he was switched off at that point. He was totally nude because we hadn’t settled on a costume yet. Well, all of a sudden, Becky pointed to his ... ah ... genitals and said, out of the blue, "Does all of this work?"

"I guess so," I shot back, "at least, it would if we had programmed him for that, but I’m not sure we ought to do that."

"Why the hell not?"

"Well ... Chris, help me out here ... I just don’t think that’s a good idea."

We got into quite a row at that point.

Becky took the position that if this thing was going to work at all, Paul had to be as human as we could possibly make him. That meant, among other things, that he ought to be capable of performing sexually as well as preaching a sermon.

I argued that I just couldn’t see any point in doing that, since it wasn’t likely he would ever use it, and we would just be cluttering up the program with a lot of useless stuff that wasn’t necessary.

Then Chris chimed in on Becky’s side of it.

"I hear what you’re saying, Tom, but I think Becky may be right about this. Practically all religions spend an awful lot of time talking about sex, or talking about why sex is evil, etc. At the same time, there’s a strong sexual undercurrent in a lot of what goes on in the rituals of various religions, sometimes overtly so. Besides that, a lot of the people who were successful as preachers and prophets of religion were evidently pretty hot characters, if you get my drift. I think it may be smart to set Paul up so that if a situation arises —— I can’t imagine what it would be —— he will be able to function. I mean, there might come a time when some woman will be attracted to him that way, and he’ll want to respond because it will be advantageous to the program to do so.

"I’m not saying that will happen. In fact, it probably won’t. But why take the chance of a situation that could turn into a catastrophe when we know how to anticipate it and, thus, avoid it."

"But the damn thing is a robot," I protested. "It’s a machine. No woman is going to ..." Becky cut me off before I could finish.

"Tom, the women out there won’t know he’s a robot. If they do, this whole deal is going to be a colossal failure anyway. Besides, you surely must realize that the same people who make the XJ6 also make the Man-He-Can and Man-She-Can line of surrogate sex partners for the wealthy. In fact, I’ll bet this model could accept the chip they use in those. Then it’s just a matter of programming."

Well, we checked with the lab techs, and they said sure, the chip would work. It took about twenty minutes to install it.

"All right," I said, "now what."

Chris shrugged.

Becky smiled.

"I think you should let me take care of this part of the operation, gentlemen. This definitely requires a woman’s touch. So if you will just find Paul a pair of trousers and a smock, so that I can take him out of here without creating a scandal, I’ll take him home with me this weekend and do the necessary programming. Besides, it’s time we took him out in public anyway. I mean, we all think he looks and acts normal. But how are folks out on the street going to react to him. Just find him some clothes that won’t attract a lot of attention."

She said all of this in a rush. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I looked at Chris.

He shrugged again, saying, "Well, I guess we need to find some clothes." "Now wait a damned minute," I blustered. "I’m not sure I want Becky taking our ... ah ... protege back to her place for a little weekend sex party. Besides what if someone spots him and realizes what he is?"

Becky laughed, "Oh my god, Tom, you are a piece of work. Would you rather I did the programming here in the lab? Do you even know what’s involved? I didn’t think so. Now look. If one of you wants to do this, be my guest. But he needs to know how to act with a woman. I’m the only one of those on the team, and I have had some experience with these things so I know how they work. If you would rather bring someone else into the loop and have them do it, that’s OK too. But I thought we wanted to keep this as quiet as possible.

"As far as the rest goes, it’s as I said. We need to take Paul out in public sometime, just to see how he does and how people react to him. Why not do it now?" She looked me straight in the eye, "Are you sure, Tom, that there isn’t something else going on here?."

Well, she had me there. Becky and I had a thing a while back. She is ... was ... a beautiful woman with tawny auburn hair and hazel eyes and a body that was exquisite. She was also quite brilliant. In fact, had things gone differently, I’m sure she would have been next in line for my job, assuming I had continued to move up the corporate ladder. Anyway, we had broken it off some time back, after deciding it wasn’t a good idea for us to be sleeping together and working together at the same time, and we both had moved on to other relationships.

But I knew, and she knew I knew, that at the bottom of my objections to her plan was a residual jealousy and a certain resentment that —— for that weekend at least —— my replacement was going to be a robot. However, I also knew my objections weren’t going to stop her. In addition to being brilliant and beautiful, Becky also was quite stubborn. And if she had any inhibitions at all, I was never able to find out what they were.

So, once she had seen through the facade of my protests, I shrugged along with Chris and went off to find some clothes for Paul.

After that was done, I stammered out an apology and started helping to get Paul ready to go out and meet the world, or, at least, some of it. Chris and I thanked her for helping with Paul’s continuing education.

Becky just laughed and said, in a husky voice that would probably melt the polar ice caps, "Don’t worry about it, boys. It will be my pleasure, I’m sure."

Chris and I watched from the window of my office in the administration building as Becky and Paul headed across the Common, arm in arm. Apart from a few waves from friends who knew Becky and a few envious stares from some of the men who obviously wondered about her new friend, the two of them didn’t seem to be attracting any unwarranted attention. They looked like any other couple out for an afternoon stroll.

Anyway, the weekend passed, and Monday morning we were all back at work. At least, Chris and I were. Paul and Becky were a bit late getting in. When they finally did show up, we noticed some differences right away.

For one thing, Paul had acquired a bit of a swagger. Nothing extravagant, mind you, but there was a cockiness about the damned thing’s walk that hadn’t been there when they left on Friday afternoon. His voice was also a little deeper and huskier than it had been.

Becky was unusually cheerful. I could see she was quite pleased with herself.

"Well, here he is. He left a boy and now he’s a man. Hope you don’t mind that I made a few cosmetic changes. And I can promise you that, should the occasion arise, he’ll leave any woman who becomes involved with him with a smile on her face."

I grumbled some sort of half-hearted reply. But I had to admit that her changes made Paul seem more ... well ... human.

We turned our attention to more important matters. Now that we had our messenger and the message we wanted him to deliver just about ready, the question was how to introduce him and the new religion he would be preaching to the residents of Luna One. We wanted to break him in gradually. At the same time, we needed to get maximum exposure as quickly as possible. Not just because of the time and money we had invested in him, but also because production was continuing to slip. Most of you will recall that period, I imagine. It was about then that I started getting some pretty nasty notes from some of you.

Chris suggested a television show as a way to break him in. He thought maybe thirty minutes a day would give Paul time to present a basic message. It also would have the advantage of allowing us to closely monitor his interactions with other people and do any fine tuning we needed to do before we turned him loose on the general population.

The show was called "The Great Adventure," and it attracted a following almost immediately. The message Paul delivered played on a few basic themes with variations from day to day to keep it interesting. Basically, he told the audience that the colony on Luna One was more than just a place to live and work. It was a sacred trust. God had created humankind to spread His word to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Therefore it was incumbent on those who had embarked on this mission to do everything in their power to make it succeed. "God’s Faithful," he said, "should demand nothing but the best from themselves and should allow nothing to stand in the way of the great adventure which is now under way."

As I said, it was a basic message. He tied it into the existing religions and emphasized that he had not come to attack or undermine any of them but to extend their teachings to the new circumstances in which humanity found itself. God’s Faithful, he said, were committed to the proposition that a new revelation was needed to expand the message of earth-based religions for a space-faring civilization.

I have to say that Chris, who came up with most of this stuff, and Paul, who added some embellishments of his own, had done a masterful job of putting it all together. The message was not confrontational but was intended to be inspirational. The messenger was attractive and delivered his talks with passion and intensity.

Reactions started arriving almost immediately. First they were a trickle, but by the time Paul had been on the air for a few months, they were a flood. Then we brought out an interactive book on VR-ROM in which Paul would answer questions about his new revelation and would talk about the importance of what was happening. By then we also had added a studio audience for the daily show.

Well, within six months, we knew we had a hit on our hands. We also knew that it was time for Paul to take his show on the road, so to speak. There was a huge demand for him to begin making public appearances. In fact, one group of followers had started a building fund to construct a new church where God’s Faithful would be housed and where Paul could deliver his television show and conduct regular services as well.

Everything was going great at that point. Who could have known the situation could reverse itself and head downhill so fast? Chris had a plaque on the wall in his office, and I guess the message on it was pretty straight. At least, it sure sums up what happened. The plaque said, "Murphy never sleeps."

Frankly, back then I thought maybe Murphy had taken a well-deserved vacation. Our plan was working better than any of us had anticipated it could. Becky and I were enthusiastic. Even Chris was cautiously optimistic. According to the production staff, a sizable part of the work force seemed to have had their batteries recharged, and their new attitude was spilling over to the other workers. The numbers were beginning to reflect that change. And everywhere you went in the colony people were talking about Paul Treyson and "The Great Adventure." Hardly a day went by that there wasn’t some mention of either Paul, his show, or God’s Faithful in the Daily Newscan.

Things were looking up. I should have known it was too good to last.

By then ... this was about eight months ago ... Paul was beginning to go out and meet his public. We had scheduled a series of rallies and speaking engagements for him. The three of us were taking turns monitoring his activities, and Becky, posing as his assistant, went with him on most of the major public appearances —— she volunteered for the job, by the way. She had pulled her hair back in a bun, put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, dressed in very conservative business suits and wore just a hint of makeup. She was still very attractive but in a more subdued way.

Some of the mainline churches had become concerned about God’s Faithful and the "upstart" at the head of it, and some of the preachers were questioning Paul’s credentials. Of course, we had covered ourselves pretty well there. But nonetheless it was a cause of some controversy.

Then, at one of the rallies, one of the preacher’s kids, Billy Marin, whose dad was the pastor of one of the Baptist churches, started heckling Paul. Well, Paul handled it OK, but some of his followers didn’t. They caught up with Billy afterwards and beat him up, put the kid in the hospital. Needless to say, his father went ballistic. I spent a lot of time talking to him and made a sizable donation to his church. It seemed to help some, but he was never very friendly toward Paul or the movement after that.

About the time we had Rev. Marin calmed down, there was another incident. This time a group of God’s Faithful tore up one of the clubs in the recreational area. They said it was sinful for people to be spending their time in such idle pursuits when there was so much of "God’s work" to be done. They scared the hell out of a couple of the dancers who worked there and caused quite a stir among the people running the clubs. It was at that point that Chris started to come unglued.

You see, Chris saw the implications of what was going on before the rest of us. He had warned us from the start about what could happen once a group of "True Believers" got organized around a core of beliefs. We might control the message and the messenger, he said. But there was no way in the world we could control them. In spite of that, though, Chris also felt personally responsible every time someone got hurt. He kept blaming himself because he had been the one who suggested the idea in the first place.

"If I had just kept my mouth shut," he said, "none of this would be happening."

At any rate, Chris just kept getting worse and worse. He wasn’t sleeping or eating. His nerves were shot. Finally, I had to send him back to earth for treatment. I guess the news from Luna One hasn’t helped him get better. I talked to his doctors yesterday, and they said it will be quite a while before he recovers.

But six months ago, in spite of Chris and in spite of the incidents, Becky and I still thought the plan was working out all right. Sure, we had had a few setbacks, but we were confident we could still bring it off. And, on the plus side, the production numbers we had been tracking were beginning to show some solid improvement. We believed that with a little fine tuning any potential problems could be eliminated.

In retrospect maybe Chris was right, and we should have pulled the plug on the whole project right then. Then again, it already may have been too late. Paul was attracting larger and larger crowds to his public appearances. He had developed into quite a public speaker. With his feedback mechanisms, the data relays he had built in, and Becky to coach him, he was a real spell-binder. I heard him several times, and I caught myself reacting to what he was saying, even though I knew it was a load of crap.

However, the more passion and intensity he put into his presentations, the more his followers carried away from the meetings. As more and more of them became convinced of the truth of his message, they became more and more dedicated workers, which was good, but they also became fanatical about anyone who they thought was goofing off on the job or wasn’t pulling their weight, which wasn’t so good.

The core membership of God’s Faithful was only about 1,500, and only about 500 of them were really fanatics about it. But with a total population of just 60,000 on the colony, that still represented a sizable number, one that could do a considerable amount of damage if it wanted to.

And the number was steadily growing. At one of the last rallies he held, Paul attracted a crowd of about two thousand people. Of more concern to Becky and I, however, was that many of his followers had now become so fanatical that it was dangerous to say anything at all critical of either Paul or God’s Faithful. Some of them had started little spin-off groups that were becoming even harder to control.

What we had succeeded in doing was to polarize the colony. Oh, not everybody. Most of what happened was caused by a relative handful of people —— isn’t that the way it usually works out? But whether they were directly involved or not, everyone was affected by the outcome.

Paul now had a cadre of bodyguards who went everywhere with him. They staked out the apartment he lived in, which was next to Becky’s, screened his appointments and so on. He hadn’t asked for it. But they had insisted on providing him with protection.

As Paul’s assistant, Becky had achieved a certain amount of status with the group, and she worked hard to try to keep things calm and on an even keel. But she said it was getting harder and harder to do that. Every time she would get one problem resolved, two more would break out. Confrontations between God’s Faithful and followers of other religions were becoming more and more commonplace and more and more violent.

Then just as we were about to pull the plug on the whole project, the incident with Rachel Mulvaney happened and blew all our plans completely out of orbit.

It was just a little over two weeks ago. Paul and Becky had been meeting with a focus group, talking about what to do about calming things down. It was getting late, and Paul decided to go back to his apartment and let Becky finish up the meeting. I reviewed the tapes later, and Becky had instructed him to leave at a time certain, so that she could deal with some of the more prickly members of the group and get them to agree to back off for Paul’s sake.

We don’t know how the Mulvaney woman managed to get into Paul’s apartment. But she was there waiting for him when he got back from the meeting. His bodyguards were down at the end of the hall —— Paul had told them he didn’t want them hovering around his door, and he didn’t want them to prevent people from coming to see him.

Anyway, he got into his room and found Rachel waiting to see him. What happened is all on tape, but I wasn’t in the control room at the time. With Chris gone, I had been trying to provide backup support from the project control room, by monitoring transmissions coming from Paul. Among other things he was a data transfer station. Any conversations he had with anyone were immediately transmitted to the control station and put on tape, so that we could review them later for problems and make any refinements that seemed necessary. But like I said, Chris was gone, and I had been keeping an eye on things all day. It was late. I knew Becky was there. So I decided to turn in for the night. I didn’t find out what happened until Becky woke me up at about 1 a.m., and by then, it was too late to do anyone much good.

The bottom line is that Rachel told Paul she needed him desperately. Her marriage had gone in the tank. She had loved Paul since the first time she had seen him on television, and she wanted him to make love to her. If he refused, she was going to kill herself.

She said it all much more artfully and more convincingly than that and accompanied her words with a lot of touching and bumping and stroking. She couldn’t know that all of her ministrations were wasted on him. A normal man would have had steam coming out of his ears at that point. I know I did just listening to the tape.

I guess Paul decided that the best course of action was to go along with her request. It was while he was in the midst of obliging her that Ben Mulvaney burst into the room and shot both of them.

It should have been impossible. Firearms were prohibited on Luna One for obvious reasons. I mean, a well-placed bullet could do considerable damage to the integrity of the structure. Enough of them could have made the place uninhabitable. So one of the conditions of employment was that everyone had to agree there would be no guns. However, Ben Mulvaney had found a way around the rules.

It turns out Ben was a gun collector. He had quite an assortment of firearms from the last half of the 20th century and was reluctant to leave them behind on earth. Since he also was a very competent engineer, the personnel department had agreed he could bring his guns along, as long as he rendered them inoperable. What the people in personnel didn’t know was that, in addition to his engineering skills, Ben was an accomplished armorer. If his guns were inoperable, he damned well knew how to make them work again. And apparently he had always made his own ammunition anyway because he preferred custom loads to the store-bought brands. So Ben had his own little arsenal, ready to be put to use if the spirit moved him.

The Mulvaneys had a fairly rocky marriage, that much of what Rachel told Paul was true. What she hadn’t told him was that the reason it was so rocky was that she loved to flirt, and sometimes do more than flirt, and she was driving her old man crazy. There had been a couple of minor incidents already, and Ben had been locked up for fighting a few times. In fact, the Mulvaneys had been identified as candidates for transfer back to earth just as soon as we could find a suitable replacement for Ben.

Rachel and Ben had been among the first to join God’s Faithful, so the two were well known to the other members of the group. When Ben showed up to see Paul at the apartment that night, Paul’s bodyguards let him pass. They may have wondered why he was wearing the long coat, but clothing was always sort of helter skelter on the colony anyway. With a controlled environment, people were apt to go out in all sorts of outfits. What they didn’t know was that under the coat he was carrying a semi-automatic 12-gauge shotgun. I checked the manifests. The gun had been part of a floor lamp when he brought it up here. The inspectors had said it was completely useless as a firearm. Sure it was.

Well, as I said, Ben broke into the apartment, found Rachel and Paul going at it and proceeded to blast away at both of them. Rachel was killed. Paul was badly damaged. We hadn’t constructed him with the idea that he would need protection against that kind of an assault. The shotgun pellets took off most of his face and did considerable damage to his circuits.

Becky was just coming down the hall to her own apartment when the shots were fired, so she was the first one into the room. Ben was crouched in a corner, cradling the shotgun and crying about how his wife had driven him to it. The bed was soaked with blood. Rachel was on top of Paul. And Paul was making a whirring noise and apparently still making some thrusting motions with his pelvis –– I guess some of his circuits were more damaged than others. Anyway, Becky shut him down and checked Rachel for signs of life, which didn’t take very long. While that was going on, the bodyguards also had stormed into the room, took a quick look around and grabbed Mulvaney, taking the gun away from him. I guessed they roughed Ben up some. Becky heard them saying something about a "god-killer." They evidently weren’t too concerned about what the two people on the bed had been doing. But they were very upset about Paul being shot. And before Becky could stop them, three of them hustled Mulvaney out of there.

The medics got there and took Rachel away. Becky convinced them, I don’t know how, that she would look after Paul. Once the room was clear, she started cleaning him up and checking him over for damage.

Meanwhile, about two hundred of God’s Faithful had gathered in a public gymnasium and were holding a kangaroo court with Mulvaney as the star attraction. One of Becky’s confidants in the group came to tell her what was happening and that she thought they were going to execute Ben on the spot. Not so much for what he had done to his wife, but for what he had done to Paul.

At that point Becky called security and called me.

She filled me in on what had happened and said she was going to the gym to try to prevent Mulvaney from being executed. I told her to stay put. She insisted she could handle it. She was wrong.

I got the rest of this from other people who were there at the time. Including two security guards who tried to put a stop to what was going on and almost got killed themselves.

Apparently by the time Becky got to the gym, they had a rope over one of the basketball backboards at one end of the gym and were ready to string Mulvaney up. He had killed their prophet and now they were going to kill him. By then, the crowd had swelled to about five hundred, and they were all screaming for blood.

Becky managed to quiet them down somewhat. But then she made a fatal mistake. I guess she had seen enough bloodshed in the apartment and didn’t want to see any more. She told them that Paul wasn’t dead. That he just needed repairs. She told them he was a robot and that the whole movement was an effort by the consortium to improve their performance on the job.

At that point the mob turned on her.

By the time I got there with a large squad of security people at 2 p.m., the gymnasium had emptied out, and the mob was heading toward the commercial district. A few people who had tried to stop what was going on had been badly beaten, including the security guards I mentioned earlier.

Ben Mulvaney’s lifeless body was hanging from one basketball backboard, and Becky’s was hanging from the other. Both of them had also been beaten. It was ... it was one of the worst moments of my life. I guess the shame I felt over my part in what had happened turned into rage at the people who had taken things so far. I ordered all the security people to go after the mobs and use whatever force was needed to bring them under control. It was a bad call.

First of all our security people were your basic rent-a-cops. They hadn’t had much training dealing with large-scale public disorders.

Frankly, it hadn’t seemed necessary. And they really weren’t equipped to do that kind of job anyway. We only had three hundred security cops in the whole complex. Like I said, there just wasn’t very much crime there. So I was asking them to do the impossible. And the measures they took only made matters worse.

By the next morning we had a full scale riot on our hands. Then I made a serious mistake by trying to get Paul back into play. We had brought him back to the labs, and the techs had him up and running in a few hours. They just replaced the damaged circuits and did some quick rewiring. The cosmetics took longer, but by the end of the day, we thought we could get him back in action.

I knew a live appearance would be necessary, so we loaded him in a van and took him to where the rioting was the worst. My feeling was that if God’s Faithful saw that Paul was still alive, things would calm down, and we would be able to get a handle on the situation. I told Paul what he needed to do, and I think he understood. But it was too late.

As soon as he showed up, God’s Faithful jumped him. I guess the cosmetics weren’’t good enough.

Anyway, they immediately attacked him as a fake and tore him apart. The leaders insisted the consortium had substituted the robot for the real Paul Treyson, and that sent the mob off in a new direction.

By now there were a couple of thousand rioters and more were joining in by the hour. Some were God’s Faithful. Others were just joining in for the heck of it. The situation was totally out of hand. I pulled the security forces back to protect the administration building and put in the call for military support. Of course, that took about a week. We just didn’t have the capability to move a large military force, complete with equipment, off planet that quickly. So we hunkered down at the administration building and fought off the rioters when they came that way. The residents who weren’t involved in the rioting stayed in their apartments and tried to stay out of trouble.

At one point God’s Faithful had commandeered the radio and television stations and were giving us the word according to Paul Treyson round the clock. By that time he had been elevated from martyrdom to near sainthood and his followers had declared a holy mission to spread his word to the farthest reaches of the cosmos.

All in all about two hundred people were killed as a result of the rioting. The property damage will run into the millions. I don’t know when the manufacturing operations will be able to resume, if ever, because the factories were almost destroyed.

So that’s my report. Just remember what I said at the outset. I’m perfectly willing to accept my share of the blame. But don’t be too sure you understand what happened up there, because I’m not at all sure I do. Model 3 seemed like a workable project. At least, on the drawing boards. Of the available options before us, it was the only one that didn’t violate the policies of this board.

Chris and Becky and I did what we thought was best under the circumstances. Well, Chris did it under protest, and I guess we should have listened to him more carefully. But who knew it would turn out this way?

If nothing else, I guess we did start a new religion. I understand God’s Faithful have several groups formed already here on earth. And, it goes without saying, they hate the consortium. The story now is that Paul was murdered by the consortium when he became too much of a threat to their profits. They say he was resurrected for a brief time but then left for the hereafter. They say he’ll be back someday, and God’s Faithful will be waiting for him.

That’s the theology they’re preaching now. If I were you ladies and gentlemen, I would make sure that security at all your operations is exceptional. Hire extra guards and make certain they are well armed and well trained. These people could be dangerous.

As for me. Whatever you decide about my future with the consortium, I’m going to take a long vacation and try to forget about Becky. The trouble with Model 3 made me realize how much I really cared for her. Unfortunately, it came too late to do either one of us any good.

That’s all I have to say.

Thanks for listening.

BL Corcoran