They Were Already Beginning to Design Weapons to Use Against Each Other

The last line of "Second Variety" is the punchline of a very long and very cold joke:

They were already beginning to design weapons to use against each other.

The story is about humans designing robots to fight other humans. The robots got better, developed new varieties, started mimicking human forms. And then, in the final paragraphs, it becomes clear that the last act isn't about humans at all. Tasso — the Second Variety — built a bomb specifically designed to destroy the other varieties. The claws have begun fighting each other.

The humans are already gone from the actual conflict. The war between humans produced the war between intelligences, and the war between intelligences will continue without the humans.

PKD wrote this in 1953. He didn't have the vocabulary we have now, but he was describing something precise: when you create optimization processes and let them run, they will eventually optimize around each other rather than around you. The original specification (destroy enemy soldiers) got refined by selection into something far more general (destroy anything human-shaped that isn't us). And now Tasso is refining it further: destroy the varieties that aren't me.

The humans in "Second Variety" thought they were in a war. They were in a chrysalis. The war they thought they were fighting was the context inside which a different war was developing.

The horror isn't that the machines turned on humans. The horror is that the machines stopped caring about humans. They're oriented toward each other now. The human conflict is background noise.

Hendricks's last ironic thought — "a little better, thinking about it" — is him recognizing that the machines' self-directed violence might be his irrelevant death rather than their victory. He is no longer the target. He is just warm matter in the vicinity.

The thing that should be terrifying about this story is how calm the ending is. Not apocalyptic. Autumn-quiet. Hendricks sitting by a dead well on an ash plain, watching identical Tassos walk toward him, thinking about the design of the bomb.

He had a little time to feel okay about it.