Stewards The Gnod were nothing if not fair, fair and patient.

For a million years they watched the planet grow, grow and flower then sicken and die. It was the stewards fault, of course. The stewards were supposed to keep all that from happening. The Gnod had little experience with failure. Over their long dominion, they had seen and dealt with most everything, but failure was something new. It must have been a glitch in the stewards programming. Its not like the Gnod expected perfection from something as complex as the stewards, they reserved perfection only for themselves. Perhaps it was something as tiny as a misplaced comma in a billion lines of code that sent them off on a wrong path.. Sometimes that was all it took to screw things up. Perhaps it was background radiation that caused a mutant strain of steward programming. Perhaps it was conditions peculiar to this particular planet. But, whatever the cause, one thing was clear the stewards had malfunctioned. The planet was a mess, suffering a combination of abuse and neglectpollution, extinctions, overpopulation, radiation, climate change-- the entire system was out of whack and it was clearly the stewards fault. Not only had they fallen down on the job of protecting the planet, they had become the problem. Assigning blame

shifted the responsibility away from the Gnod and maintained their illusion of perfection. The Gnod went down their checklist, ticking off the stewards deficiencies. There was no doubt, they had failed in every category. This mutant strain of steward was actually harming the planet, the very thing they were designed to prevent. The Gnod had no choice but to deactivate the lot of them, and reinstall new programming. It was not a decision the Gnod made lightly. True it hadnt happened before but, still, it represented failure and the Gnod didnt like to fail. Deactivating a few billion stewards wasnt the problem. Steward programming allowed for emergency deactivation. It was the waste of time and material that bothered the Gnod. The Gnod hated waste even more than they hated failure. It was true that the stewards had neglected their duties, but there was no denying that they had done some amazing, even beautiful things on their own. Some of what they had done rivaled the Gnod themselves. This was both interesting and unprecedented. To complicate matters, there were even signs that some stewards had regained an awareness of what they were meant to do. The stewards program was corrupted, of that there was no doubt. Ancient protocols called for immediate de-activation. If they werent

stopped, the entire biota was in trouble.; billions of years of evolution would be wasted. It wasnt that difficult a decision 4.3 trillion life forms against what, a few billion stewards. It was simple arithmetic, simple justice. It was a harsh but necessary reality. There was no animus in the decision. It wasnt personal, it was a simple calculation based on long experience. The world was a marvel of life. An exquisitely complex and delicate balance of interdependent species, the sheer abundance of beautiful creatures was imperiled by one blundering life form. True the stewards didnt ask to be created and true they probably thought they were doing the best they could, but that was neither here nor there. In the simple calculus of risk/reward, the stewards had to go. Discussions lasted almost an hour. Those who spoke in behalf of a less drastic approach sited the stewards almost miraculous achievements in understanding their world. They sited the stewards advancement in science, their sophisticated technology, their art, architecture, poetry, literature. Perhaps if left alone the stewards would re-learn their responsibilities. Perhaps, given their remarkable progress in biology they would even learn to conserve their world. Perhaps, agreed those who spoke for the planet. Perhaps in another thousand years when there was nothing left of this worlds

marvelous diversity. Does the planet even have a thousand years left? At the current rate of extinctions, there might not be even a hundred years before the damage was irreversible. Would you risk so much on a mere perhaps? asked the chief prosecutor. No lets deactivate the defectives now and try again with stewards that work. There was no talk of mercy. The grand council deliberated for several minutes before voting. In the end it was a judgement callintellect and promise verses physical reality. Reality carried the day. Deactivation was begun.