We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  It was from observing these exposed bells, with their watchmen, that the foundling, as was opined, derived the first suggestion of his scheme. Perched on a great mast or spire, the human figure, viewed from below, undergoes such a reduction in its apparent size as to obliterate its intelligent features. It evinces no personality. Instead of bespeaking volition, its gestures rather resemble the automatic ones of the arms of a telegraph.

  Musing, therefore, upon the purely Punchinello aspect of the human figure thus beheld, it had indirectly occurred to Bannadonna to devise some metallic agent which should strike the hour with its mechanic hand, with even greater precision than the vital one. And, moreover, as the vital watchman on the roof, sallying from his retreat at the given periods, walked to the bell with uplifted mace to smite it, Bannadonna had resolved that his invention should likewise possess the power of locomotion, and, along with that, the appearance, at least, of intelligence and will.

  If the conjectures of those who claimed acquaintance with the intent of Bannadonna be thus far correct, no unenterprising spirit could have been his. But they stopped not here; intimating that though, indeed, his design had, in the first place, been prompted by the sight of the watchman, and confined to the devising of a subtle substitute for him, yet, as is not seldom the case with projectors, by insensible gradations proceeding from comparatively pigmy aims to titanic ones, the original scheme had, in its anticipated eventualities, at last attained to an unheard-of degree of daring. He still bent his efforts upon the locomotive figure for the belfry, but only as a partial type of an ulterior creature, a sort of elephantine helot, adapted to further, in a degree scarcely to be imagined, the universal conveniences and glories of humanity; supplying nothing less than a supplement to the Six Days’ Work; stocking the earth with a new serf, more useful than the ox, swifter than the dolphin, stronger than the lion, more cunning than the ape, for industry an ant, more fiery than serpents, and yet, in patience, another ass. All excellences of all God-made creatures which served man were here to receive advancement, and then to be combined in one. Talus was to have been the all-accomplished helot’s name. Talus, iron slave to Bannadonna, and, through him, to man.

  Here, it might well be thought that, were these last conjectures as to the foundling’s secrets not erroneous, then must he have been hopelessly infected with the craziest chimeras of his age; far outgoing Albert Magus and Cornelius Agrippa. But the contrary was averred. However marvelous his design, however apparently transcending not alone the bounds of human invention, but those of divine creation, yet the proposed means to be employed were alleged to have been confined within the sober forms of sober reason. It was affirmed that, to a degree of more than skeptic scorn, Bannadonna had been without sympathy for any of the vainglorious irrationalities of his time. For example, he had not concluded, with the visionaries among the metaphysicians, that between the finer mechanic forces and the ruder animal vitality some germ of correspondence might prove discoverable. As little did his scheme partake of the enthusiasm of some natural philosophers, who hoped, by physiological and chemical inductions, to arrive at a knowledge of the source of life, and so qualify themselves to manufacture and improve upon it. Much less had he aught in common with the tribe of alchemists, who sought by a species of incantations to evoke some surprising vitality from the laboratory. Neither had he imagined, with certain sanguine theosophists, that, by faithful adoration of the Highest, unheard-of powers would be vouchsafed to man. A practical materialist, what Bannadonna had aimed at was to have been reached, not by logic, not by crucible, not by conjuration, not by altars, but by plain vise-bench and hammer. In short, to solve nature, to steal into her, to intrigue beyond her, to procure someone else to bind her to his hand—these, one and all, had not been his objects, but, asking no favors from any element or any being, of himself to rival her, outstrip her, and rule her. He stooped to conquer. With him, common sense was theurgy; machinery, miracle; Prometheus, the heroic name for machinist; man, the true God.

  Nevertheless, in his initial step, so far as the experimental automaton for the belfry was concerned, he allowed fancy some little play, or, perhaps, what seemed his fancifulness was but his utilitarian ambition collaterally extended. In figure, the creature for the belfry should not be likened after the human pattern, nor any animal one, nor after the ideals, however wild, of ancient fable, but equally in aspect as in organism be an original production—the more terrible to behold, the better.

  Such, then, were the suppositions as to the present scheme, and the reserved intent. How, at the very threshold, so unlooked-for a catastrophe overturned all, or rather, what was the conjecture here, is now to be set forth.

  It was thought that on the day preceding the fatality, his visitors having left him, Bannadonna had unpacked the belfry image, adjusted it, and placed it in the retreat provided—a sort of sentry box in one corner of the belfry; in short, throughout the night, and for some part of the ensuing morning, he had been engaged in arranging everything connected with the domino: the issuing from the sentry box each sixty minutes; sliding along a grooved way, like a railway; advancing to the clock bell with uplifted manacles; striking it at one of the twelve junctions of the four-and-twenty hands; then wheeling, circling the bell, and retiring to its post, there to bide for another sixty minutes, when the same process was to be repeated; the bell, by a cunning mechanism, meantime turning on its vertical axis, so as to present, to the descending mace, the clasped hands of the next two figures, when it would strike two, three, and so on, to the end. The musical metal in this time bell being so managed in the fusion, by some art perishing with its originator, that each of the clasps of the four-and-twenty hands should give forth its own peculiar resonance when parted.

  But on the magic metal, the magic and metallic stranger never struck but that one stroke, drove but that one nail, served but that one clasp, by which Bannadonna clung to his ambitious life. For, after winding up the creature in the sentry box, so that, for the present, skipping the intervening hours, it should not emerge till the hour of one, but should then infallibly emerge, and, after deftly oiling the grooves whereon it was to slide, it was surmised that the mechanician must then have hurried to the bell, to give his final touches to its sculpture. True artist, he here became absorbed, and absorption still further intensified, it may be, by his striving to abate that strange look of Una, which, though, before others, he had treated with such unconcern, might not, in secret, have been without its thorn.

  And so, for the interval, he was oblivious of his creature, which, not oblivious of him, and true to its creation, and true to its heedful winding up, left its post precisely at the given moment, along its well-oiled route, slid noiselessly towards its mark, and, aiming at the hand of Una to ring one clangorous note, dully smote the intervening brain of Bannadonna, turned backwards to it, the manacled arms then instantly upspringing to their hovering poise. The falling body clogged the thing’s return, so there it stood, still impending over Bannadonna, as if whispering some post-mortem terror. The chisel lay dropped from the hand, but beside the hand; the oil-flask spilled across the iron track.

  In his unhappy end, not unmindful of the rare genius of the mechanician, the republic decreed him a stately funeral. It was resolved that the great bell—the one whose casting had been jeopardized through the timidity of the ill-starred workman—should be rung upon the entrance of the bier into the cathedral. The most robust man of the country round was assigned the office of bell ringer.

  But as the pallbearers entered the cathedral porch, naught but a broken and disastrous sound, like that of some lone Alpine landslide, fell from the tower upon their ears. And then all was hushed.

  Glancing backwards, they saw the groined belfry crashed sideways in. It afterwards appeared that the powerful peasant who had the bell rope in charge, wishing to test at once the full glory of the bell, had swayed down upon the rope with one concentrate jerk. The mass of quaking metal, too ponderous for its frame, and strangely
feeble somewhere at its top, loosed from its fastening, tore sideways down, and, tumbling in one sheer fall three hundred feet to the soft sward below, buried itself inverted and half out of sight.

  Upon its disinterment, the main fracture was found to have started from a small spot in the ear, which, being scraped, revealed a defect, deceptively minute, in the casting, which defect must subsequently have been pasted over with some unknown compound.

  The remolten metal soon reassumed its place in the tower’s repaired superstructure. For one year the metallic choir of birds sang musically in its belfry boughwork of sculptured blinds and traceries. But on the first anniversary of the tower’s completion—at early dawn, before the concourse had surrounded it—an earthquake came; one loud crash was heard. The stone pine, with all its bower of songsters, lay overthrown upon the plain.

  So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord, but, in obedience, slew him. So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too heavy for the tower. So the bell’s main weakness was where man’s blood had flawed it. And so pride went before the fall.

  (1855)

  FIRST TO SERVE

  Algis Budrys

  Born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in 1931, Algirdas Jonas Budrys arrived in America with his parents in 1936. His writing career wasn’t exactly plain sailing. His first novel False Night (1954) was horribly hacked about by its editor, then his publisher ran out of money, stalling his second novel for years. When eventually it did appear, Who? was snapped up for a movie – quite a good one – starring Elliott Gould and Trevor Howard. The sentient artificial intelligence in Michaelmas, housed worldwide through a network of distributed computers, is a prescient creation indeed in a novel published in 1977. Budrys (AJ to his friends) was also an editor and publisher. Tomorrow Speculative Fiction was his, running from 1993 to 2000. But it’s as a writer of tough, cool, existential short stories that he’ll be best remembered.

  thei ar teetcing mi to reed n ryt n i wil bee abel too do this beter then.

  pimi

  *

  MAS 712, 820TH TDRC,

  COMASAMPS, APO IS,

  September 28

  Leonard Stein, Editor,

  INFINITY,

  862 Union St.,

  New York 24, N.Y.

  Dear Len,

  Surprise, et cetera

  It looks like there will be some new H. E. Wood stories for Infy after all. By the time you get this, 820TH TDRC will have a new Project Engineer, COMASAMPS, and I will be back to the old Royal and the Perry Street lair.

  Shed no tear for Junior Heywood, though. COMASAMPS and I have come to this parting with mutual eyes dry and multiple heads erect. There was no sadness in our parting—no bitterness, no weeping, no remorse. COMASAMPS—in one of its apparently limitless human personifications—simply patted me on my backside and told me to pick up my calipers and run along. I’ll have to stay away from cybernetics for a while, of course, and I don’t think I should write any robot stories in the interval, but, then, I never did like robot stories anyhow.

  But all this is a long story about ten thousand words, at least, which means a $300 net loss if I tell it now.

  So go out and buy some fresh decks, I’ll be in town next week, my love to the Associate and the kids, and first ace deals.

  Vic Heywood

  *

  My name is really Prototype Mechanical Man I, but everybody calls me Pimmy, or sometimes Pim. I was assembled at the eight-twentieth teedeearcee on august 10, 1974. I don’t know what man or teedeearcee or august 10, 1974, means, but Heywood says I will, tomorrow. What’s tomorrow?

  Pimmy

  *

  August 12, 1974

  I’m still having trouble defining “man.”Apparently, even the men can’t do a very satisfactory job of that. The 820TDRC, of course, is the Eight Hundred and Twentieth Technical Development and Research Center of the Combined Armed Services Artificial and Mechanical Personnel Section. August 10, 1974, is the day before yesterday.

  All this is very obvious, but it’s good to record it.

  I heard a very strange conversation between Heywood and Russell yesterday.

  Russell is a small man, about thirty-eight, who’s Heywood’s top assistant. He wears glasses, and his chin is farther back than his mouth. It gives his head a symmetrical look. His voice is high, and he moves his hands rapidly. I think his reflexes are overtriggered.

  Heywood is pretty big. He’s almost as tall as I am. He moves smoothly—he’s like me. You get the idea that all of his weight never touches the ground. Once in a while, though, he leaves a cigarette burning in an ashtray, and you can see where the end’s been chewed to shreds.

  Why is everybody at COMASAMPS so nervous?

  Heywood was looking at the first entry in what I can now call my diary. He showed it to Russell.

  “Guess you did a good job on the self-awareness tapes, Russ,” Heywood said.

  Russell frowned. “Too good, I think. He shouldn’t have such a tremendous drive toward self-expression. We’ll have to iron that out as soon as possible. Want me to set up a new tape?”

  Heywood shook his head. “Don’t see why. Matter of fact, with the intelligence we’ve given him, I think it’s probably a normal concomitant.” He looked up at me and winked.

  Russell took his glasses off with a snatch of his hand and scrubbed them on his shirtsleeve. “I don’t know. We’ll have to watch him. We’ve got to remember he’s a prototype—no different from an experimental automobile design, or a new dishwasher model. We expected bugs to appear. I think we’ve found one, and I think it ought to be eliminated. I don’t like this personification he’s acquired in our minds, either. This business of calling him by a nickname is all wrong. We’ve got to remember he’s not an individual. We’ve got every right to tinker with him.” He slapped his glasses back on and ran his hands over the hair the earpieces had disturbed. “He’s just another machine. We can’t lose sight of that.”

  Heywood raised his hands. “Easy, boy. Aren’t you going too far off the deep end? All he’s done is bat out a few words on a typewriter. Relax, Russ.” He walked over to me and slapped my hip. “How about it, Pimmy? D’you feel like scrubbing the floor?”

  “No opinion. Is that an order?” I asked.

  Heywood turned to Russell. “Behold the rampant individual,” he said. “No, Pimmy, no order. Cancel.”

  Russell shrugged, but he folded the page from my diary carefully, and put it in his breast pocket. I didn’t mind. I never forget anything.

  *

  August 15, 1974

  They did something to me on the Thirteenth. I can’t remember what. I’ve gone over my memory, but there’s nothing. I can’t remember.

  Russell and Ligget were talking yesterday, though, when they inserted the autonomic cutoff, and ran me through on orders. I didn’t mind that. I still don’t. I can’t.

  Ligget is one of the small army of push-arounds that nobody knows for sure isn’t CIC, but who solders wires while Heywood and Russell make up their minds about him.

  I had just done four about-faces, shined their shoes, and struck a peculiar pose. I think there’s something seriously wrong with Ligget.

  Ligget said, “He responds well, doesn’t he?”

  “Mm-m—yes,” Russell said abstractedly. He ran his glance down a column of figures on an Estimated Performance Spec chart. “Try walking on your hands, PMM One,” he said.

  I activated my gyroscope and reset my pedal locomotion circuits. I walked around the room on my hands.

  Ligget frowned forcefully. “That looks good. How’s it check with the specs?”

  “Better than,” Russell said. “I’m surprised. We had a lot of trouble with him the last two days. Reacted like a zombie.”

  “Oh, yes? I wasn’t in on that. What happened? I mean—what sort of control were you using?”

  “Oh—” I could see that Russell wasn’t too sure whether he should tell Ligget or not. I already had the feeling that the a
tmosphere of this project was loaded with dozens of crosscurrents and conflicting ambitions. I was going to learn a lot about COMASAMPS.

  “Yes?” Ligget said.

  “We had his individuality circuits cut out. Effectively, he was just a set of conditioned reflexes.”

  “You say he reacted like a zombie?”

  “Definite automatism. Very slow reactions, and, of course, no initiative.”

  “You mean he’d be very slow in his response to orders under those conditions, right?” Ligget looked crafty behind Russell’s back.

  Russell whirled around. “He’d make a lousy soldier, if that’s what CIC wants to know!”

  Ligget smoothed out his face, and twitched his shoulders back. “I’m not a CIC snooper, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You don’t mind if I call you a liar, do you?” Russell said, his hands shaking.

  “Not particularly,” Ligget said, but he was angry behind his smooth face. It helps, having immobile features like mine. You get to understand the psychology of a man who tries for the same effect.

  *

  August 16, 1974

  It bothers me, not having a diary entry for the fourteenth, either. Somebody’s been working on me again.

  I told Heywood about it. He shrugged. “Might as well get used to it, Pimmy. There’ll be a lot of that going on. I don’t imagine it’s pleasant—I wouldn’t like intermittent amnesia myself—but there’s very little you can do about it. Put it down as one of the occupational hazards of being a prototype.”

  “But I don’t like it,” I said.

  Heywood pulled the left side of his mouth into a straight line and sighed. “Like I said, Pimmy—I wouldn’t either. On the other hand, you can’t blame us if the new machine we’re testing happens to know it’s being tested, and resents it. We built the machine. Theoretically, it’s our privilege to do anything we please with it, if that’ll help us find out how the machine performs, and how to build better ones.”