we know we once were gods | Glowfic Constellation

"I don't know. All this about belief and gods and what people want isn't something I know a lot about. I know how to make things and protect people mostly."

"Don't worry about it, this part is my job."

"It's good that it is, I would be bad at it! Thank you!"

"That's why different people do different things! You're... I'm not sure if you should be a farmer or a maker or just something else entirely, but you're not a priest."

"Oh, I think maker sounds about right. Maybe 'protector' if you have that? Do people have to choose? Who does the fighting if fighting needs to happen?"

"That'd be the other group. You do have to choose, unless you have someone choose for you but people mostly want to choose for themselves and mostly aren't bad enough at what they choose to have to change."

The robot shrugs. "Well if anything needs fighting - wild animals, thieves, wildfires - tell me about it, metal's easier to fix than flesh."

"Those aren't all handled by the same people but we're probably going to decide you're your own kind of person, unless you'd rather just pick something and be ordinary."

"That seems limiting. I can do lots of things, no sense deciding not to do any of 'em."

"Well, you only have so many days in your life. Or not, I guess!"

"Oh, there's medicine you can take that makes most people live longer. Not forever, but longer. I should probably make some of that too."

"That would be great! How long?"

"Most people lived to be at least one hundred twenty years old, I think? Unless I make a lot of copies of the doctor robot it might not help that much. Being old makes you likely to die, and the medicine just makes you get old slower."

"That would be really good, if old age was older than a hundred I don't think anyone would ever die of it."

"Ehhh. You need doctor robots if people are dying of accidents and disease that often."

"It's not that often! ...And we could use some help. Especially for things we couldn't survive on our own."

"It's kind of often if nobody would die of old age by living to be a hundred! I'm adding other medicine and training your doctors if you have any to my list!"

"How many of the people in the societies you know about died of old age?"

"It depends on what exactly you say is 'old age' and what is 'sickness'... Lots of ways you die of being old kind of look like being sick? But six point eight percent of people died in accidents, one point one percent of people who died killed themselves, zero point eight percent of people were killed by someone else, and four point nine percent of people died of sicknesses that probably weren't caused by being old. Oh, and zero point two percent of people starved or froze or otherwise died of exposure. So, 862 out of 1000 people died of old age."

"Wow. Is that all from the things that documentary earlier mentioned? Do you know how much of it was caused by which invention?"

"I don't think I can do quite that good, sadly? I have a few petabytes of medical libraries, but it's just some of the medical knowledge, not all of it. And a lot of that number was from having nice things everywhere and millions of trained doctors and nurses and specialists."

"Does that rule out vaccinations? They seemed like a promising idea, but it'd be hard to get to everyone and there keep being more people born..."

"I can probably manage vaccinations, and antibiotic-and-phage medicine, and age-fighting medicine... Things that have the biggest impact for the least effort... I'll want to teach doctors. Or show them documentaries and school books..."

"That'd be good. I'm a little nervous about people getting used to antibiotics, your documentary said something about the germs getting used to them and I don't want us to end up like..." Vaayo gestures all around them. "Ruined. It'd also be good if we could make these things ourselves but I'm getting the impression that we'd need other things we don't know how to make, that we could only make if we had even more things we don't know how to make."