“If anything happens just make it go away. Get rid of anything suspicious. I don’t care what you do. Make it look like an accident or whatever if you can’t clean up the mess.”
Sir Jared’s remote instructions to his robot servants in the field were acknowledged as the screen’s moving dots all signaled in sync.

(His father tasked him with preserving their precious ancient real-estate and all the land their family amassed over the past centuries. It was practically given to them by those who could not afford to pay the fees for owning their own.)

It was a bit of an organizing feat but after many meetings with GAME’s AI advisors the control mechanism was online and any authorized person could interface with it with their level of clearance. Jared was using level “D” (for Daedalus), which was also known as God mode.

So far there were a few hiccups, but without repercussions for the family of course. No, it was just a matter of fine tuning the AI instructions, so he learned. If one leaves too much room for the AI to interpret, it seems to fall back to its military training, which is not very stealth and does not care about the mess it leaves behind. Luckily the biggest incident with land dwellers that came in its way so far involved just one family, and Jared’s instructions to make it look like a dramatic family affair were executed satisfactorily.

But the inevitable could not be stopped, and the family was preparing for an influx of bodies from other sites. Since the global attempt to bring UBI and guarantee basic human rights never came to fruition, the predicted statistics were starting to play out. Masses of displaced people started roaming for food and shelter. The Family Traditions Alliance was well aware of these outcomes even before these last years of socioeconomic disintegration. They simply chose to strengthen their control, instead of backing the AI Governance movement (which would dilute their statue to mere cultural artifacts), and used their AI network to sabotage any effort that would threaten their hegemony. It would be pointless they thought, as the sheep need to be herded by the families, as they always have been. “Surely no AI could be expected to do that as gracefully as the families always have?”, Jared thought smugly, convinced this was true.

He was looking forward to meeting his father tonight, who was advising congress today how to handle these growing groups of uncontrollable masses that were scrambling to get their basic needs met. He was chosen by the heads to present the plan of The Families (as the alliance is also known to go by). This revolved around the idea to establish HEALTH areas where anybody’s basic needs were met, and then some: education, entertainment, cooperation, whatever one wishes to do within its perimeter. Of course all this would work in a controllable fashion, as laid out in the all encompassing vision of The Families’ eNET AI. The Families were not sure about the potential of supporting this large number of bodies, but they supported eNET’s conclusion to keep them around for potential future benefit. (And to let sleeping dogs lie of course.)