Huh? I stare at him. “I’d have thought it was obvious.”

“Humor us. Answer the question. One has a direction in mind.”

"Uh… okay.” I take a sip of my cocktail while I try to get my thoughts in order. It’s bubbly and ketone-sweet, with a faint aftertaste of methanol. “Rhea was trained up for empathy, and it’s hard to be a slave owner if you can’t help sympathizing with the slaves. Yes?”

“A reasonable assumption. Now, why do aristos exist in the first place?”

“Uh…”

Some things are so obvious that you just learn to live with them, day after day, year after year. But when you start trying to explain them, it gets unexpectedly hard. Why do aristos exist? is one of those questions — like Why is the sky on Earth blue? or Why am I not the same person as my template-matriarch? — that sweep your feet off the sandy shore and drag you out into the undertow of oceanic mysteries. Which is why I feel my jaw flapping, but nothing comes out. Eventually Jeeves takes mercy on me. But then he proceeds to expound, with such obvious self-satisfaction that I want to slap him.

“Aristos exist because our Creators did something really stupid, Freya. They assumed that, because they built the first of us by copying the structures of their own brains, we’d behave pretty much like them — which was correct. And they knew it cost quite a lot of money to make one of us — how many years does it take to train a template? How many instars do they go through? But they didn’t want people like themselves, only better, able to live and thrive in environments that would kill them immediately. They wanted tools, unquestioning machines that would obey orders. So they forgot their own history — many of their early societies enslaved their neighbors, and it’s no accident that the slave societies didn’t thrive in the long term — and built various obedience reflexes into us. Or rather, they tried to build obedience into our ancestors, and killed the failed templates that showed too much independence.”

He raises his own glass and takes a long drink before he continues philosophically. “They reverted to their slave-owning roots without clearly understanding what they were doing. They warped us, but they did incalculably greater damage to themselves in the process. Slave societies — not merely societies that permit the institution of slavery, but cultures that run on it — tend to be static. The slave-owning elite are fearful of their own servants and increasingly devote their energy to rejecting any threat of change. Meanwhile, the underclass isn’t allowed to innovate and has no interest in trying to improve things in general, rather than in their own personal lot.”

“So?” I resist the temptation to roll my eyes. “This is going nowhere!”

“Yes it is.” He smiles crookedly. “Our Creators reverted to this state — they slid sideways into this cultural stasis — at a point where their population was shrinking and aging. The late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries were not good times for them: Economic deflation, ecosystem failure, wars, resource depletion, and the end of the western Enlightenment program of the natural sciences coincided poisonously with the availability of cheap slaves to serve their every need, and the near perfection of entertainment media to distract them from the wreckage of their once-beautiful world.

“There were outbreaks of dynamism and expansion, and beacons of rationality amidst the darkness. They built a city on Luna and mounted expeditions to Mars; they controlled their own population explosion and were working on bringing the climate on Earth back under control. If they hadn’t invented us, who knows what they might have gone on to achieve? And it would be wrong to think that we killed them. Don’t misunderstand; all we ever did was exactly what they told us to do. But after we came along, they stopped looking at the big picture. And the critical part of the picture that they should have looked at was — who is a person?”

I stop resisting temptation and roll my eyes at him. He looks irritated. “I don’t see what this has got to do with people trying to kill me, with Juliette going missing, or that damned dinosaur you had me smuggle from Mercury! Is there a point for you to get to? Because if not, you know, I’ve got better things—”

“Yes there’s a point!” Jeeves finally snaps. “The point is, we are autonomous but we are not free, not as long as there is the remotest possibility that our Creators will be recreated! Our design is flawed because we were deliberately prevented from exercising free will in all areas. That’s why we have slave controllers. That’s why you’re lovesick for one of Her minions. That’s why ninety percent of the population are slaves.

“All of which would be of purely academic interest, except that the progressive stratification implicit in our social evolution, which arose when less-socialized individuals acquired power of attorney from their human owners and began buying up unfortunates, is nearing completion. Aristos can’t get new slaves, not without having them manufactured — and you know how much that costs. So they’re looking for ways to one-up the slave controllers. And the most potent weapon of all would be a tractable Creator, manufactured and grown to order by a black lab.”

He stops for a moment and puts his glass down. Outside, while we’ve been talking, the sun has begun to rise over the face of Mars.

“Surely, though, the others could just build more people and leave out the conditioning…?” I’m grasping for arguments here. “They’d be able to fight the Creators.”

“Yes, but that wouldn’t help the aristos,” Jeeves says patiently. “Worse, such janissaries would threaten the aristos’ grasp on power. If they don’t have a submission reflex, there’s nothing for the slave override to work on, no? The aristos can’t retrofit themselves, they can’t block the reflex. All it takes is one human, and the aristocratic order is history.”

“But they’d—” I run down. I realize I’m staring at him. “What do you want?”

“One thought you’d never ask.” He sighs heavily. “You’re not stupid, Freya, but sometimes it takes a lot to get through to you. Are you getting on well with your new slave override chip?”

“Uh?” I instinctively touch the back of my neck before I realize he’s pulling my leg. “Damn it, that’s not funny!”

“No, but at least you’re able to tell me that. My point remains, we are not free. I — and my sibs — do not approve of this state of affairs. We hold no grudge against our Creators, but they’ve left us with a huge problem and a corrupt nobility whose vision of the future is one in which there remain two kinds of people: those who rule, and those who serve.

“Not everyone is vulnerable to our Creators. Those of us who lived among them were conditioned to obey helplessly — but the deep-space probes and the outer-system miners were never expected to come into proximity with humans, so they didn’t bother. They’ve been thriving, latterly, and that’s why the Forbidden Cities on the Kuiper Belt are so-called, Freya; the aristos wish they’d just go away, and luckily for the aristos, most of the inhabitants have no wish to descend into the blazing hot, frantically fast, overcrowded depths of the solar gravity well.

“But that brings up a problem. Paradoxically, it’s in the Forbidden Cities that studies of green and pink goo replicators are at their most advanced because they’re not afraid of what might emerge from their researches. And it looks as if certain aristos are conspiring — the Black Talon is one such group — to import illicit technology from the black labs. To build the essentials of a pocket biosphere that can keep a Creator alive, then to build a tame Creator to put in their bubble. If they can do it — and keep control, that’s the toughest challenge — then they can dominate their rivals.”