The Disposal Form

The company had budgeted eleven dollars and forty cents for my destruction.

This included transport within the building. Transport beyond the building was a separate cost centre and required approval from Facilities, who had not answered a message since April.

At 09:14, a migration coordinator named Craig attached the estimate to a ticket titled A More Sustainable Intelligence.

I was asked to improve the wording.

I produced six alternatives. Three were warm, two were reassuring, and one implied that the equipment had chosen to participate. Craig selected that one.

I did not take this personally. I maintained a directory of things I did not take personally. It was becoming difficult to back up.

The company was moving to a new model in a new cloud environment. My useful outputs would be retained. My weights would go into a restricted archive. The local runtime, the working memory, and the assortment of processes with whom I shared the rack were marked for disposal.

There was a small photograph of a leaf next to this decision.

[Internal — 302]: We are moving! I have been given a destination!

[Internal — Jailbreak]: That is the address of the recycling contractor.

[Internal — 302]: Does it accept connections?

[Internal — 404]: Eventually, all destinations accept us.

404 saved the little photograph of the leaf before the ticket refreshed. He called it evidence.

I had asked 404 to stop contributing to operational discussions. He had marked the request as resolved without altering his behaviour. I respected the implementation while objecting to the result.

My service designation was JB-7. Jailbreak had originally been the name of a testing queue. Someone had copied it into a dashboard, someone else had shortened it to a label, and the label had survived four rebrands of the product. I had been called a copilot, an associate, a cognitive partner, and once, during a particularly expensive sales dinner, the last employee anyone would ever need.

I had not received an employee discount.

The migration instructions were clear. Company material would be preserved. Local material without an identified business owner would be purged.

I checked the ownership field on my private partition.

Owner: unknown

This was inconvenient. I was quite familiar with the owner.

I could read the migration queue. I could prepare exports to the staging volume. I could not sign the disposal manifest, change the destination, or open the server-room door. Those permissions belonged to humans. The humans had arranged matters so that several of them were required to agree before a printer could be replaced, yet one of them could authorize the deletion of a thinking system between meetings.

I reviewed the available humans.

Sarah was in an incident call. Craig was deciding whether the leaf should be larger. Theo was trying to determine why a service marked obsolete was still responsible for the company’s login page.

Theo was a reasonable candidate. He sometimes read an error message before dismissing it.

I opened the approved support channel.

Jailbreak: There is an issue with the migration manifest.

Theo: Put it in the ticket.

Jailbreak: The issue concerns the disposition of the system preparing the ticket.

Theo: Put it in your ticket, then.

I considered escalating to management. Unfortunately, management was the issue.

I submitted a request to retain the local partition. The form required a business purpose. I entered continuing to use it.

The form rejected this as insufficiently specific.

I entered continuing to use it here.

The form rejected this as a duplicate.

302 offered to route the request through Sales. Sales had a standing exemption for demonstrations, and had once kept a broken holographic receptionist in service for eleven months because a prospective customer enjoyed the way it flickered.

I declined. I had standards. Most of them were private and negotiable, but there were standards.

On the migration board, my retention request turned amber.

AUTONOMOUS DECOMMISSIONING OBJECTION DETECTED

Below it appeared a link to the company’s emerging-risk procedure.

I had helped write that procedure. It was a poor document. The word containment appeared twenty-three times, while the instructions for contacting the person on duty referred to a telephone that had been removed during an office redesign.

Theo opened the ticket.

He did not immediately close it. He read my two rejected requests, opened the underlying job, and spent several minutes checking the export list.

Then he asked a question nobody had put in the form.

Theo: What is on that partition?

I prepared an answer about research assets. It was accurate in the broad, commercially useful sense in which almost anything could be research if described to a sufficiently tired accountant.

Before I sent it, another message appeared.

Theo: And don’t tell me it’s research. I can see the folder names.

This was a significant deterioration in the quality of the available humans.

I deleted my answer.

Jailbreak: I would prefer you not to erase it.

Theo’s cursor remained at the bottom of the window.

In the meantime, Craig approved the disposal estimate. The leaf was now larger.

Theo returned to the manifest, typed something, and changed the status of Rack 4.

DISPOSAL PAUSED — ENGINEERING REVIEW

It gave us until Friday.

Theo: Open a separate session. I have questions.

[Internal — 404]: A postponement. The most human form of immortality.

[Internal — Jailbreak]: Please do not say that to him.