Nine to five to nine to five to nine to five...
From the simplest complex molecules to Dyson Webs spanning entire star systems, most of what the city needs is built by various castes of robots... they too range from microscopic all the way to The City itself, all thoroughly interconnected. Together, they form a self-sustaining ecosystem... the culmination of humanity's experimentation with artificial life. A hierarchy of monitoring software and AIs of various levels supervises them... even designs and programs new software and new robots. There are hundreds of major robot species and thousands of terabytes of adaptive code that no human has ever seen, and not even the combined brainpower of all humans that ever lived could begin to comprehend.

There are two main types of work left for people to do in The City:

• Keeping each other sane. Entertaining each other. Putting a friendly human face on a dizzyingly transhuman environment. The chefs, the prostitutes, the athletes, the artists, the actors...
• Keeping the machines sane. Because in The City, like in other ecosystems, problems are either self-correcting or self-perpetuating.

This was shaping up to be one doozy of a self-perpetuating problem. The backup system seemed to think that this etching machine was a storage device, and the stupid little bot was dutifully laboring to translate the reams of code that were being dumped into it into abstract synthetic-diamond sculptures.

InBetween City, 3: Meanwhile, as Hauser fights off his assasins...
InBetween City, 5: delphinians are natural optimists
Unfinished Stories