"Safety precaution!" Griffith said, and Laura watched as another of the Model Sixes hurried by — the claw at the end of its single mechanical arm replaced with a shiny silver piston about a foot in diameter. "Come this way!" Griffith said, motioning for her to follow. He stayed well away from the thick yellow line, she noted, which angled out onto the floor to allow access to a metal ladder.
The busy robots, for their part, also steered clear of the conspicuous boundary. That's when it hit her. It's a border, she thought, that separates man from the machine. A border between two lands at war.
Laura swam through a sea of novel thoughts, each sweeping her up in its powerful emotional crosscurrents. She grew lightheaded and firmly gripped the ladders' railing. She felt like an alien in a space suit behind her goggles, ear protectors, and hard hat.
New thoughts, new perspectives, hit her with dizzying rapidity.
A Stranger in a Strange Land, she recalled the title of the old book.
It described perfectly how she felt at that moment.
As they climbed to a catwalk suspended twenty feet above the main floor, Laura was again taken aback by the building's size. The full length of the facility was visible now except where obscured by the outcroppings of structures. The assembly line ran down the center of the building for as far as the eye could see. Smaller belts joined the main line or passed over or under the rolling stream of Gray's products in a maze of highways and byways. They led into and out of metal compartments and tanks and steel chambers wrapped in pipes coated in ice. And everywhere there moved machines — robots.
It was a beehive of continuous activity, and the hive queen lay immersed in nitrogen a thousand feet below sea level.
Griffith waited as Laura took it all in. "Is this where you build your TVs?" Laura shouted over the noise.
"No! This is where we build the robots that build our TVs! And our satellites, and our relays and switching stations, and our high-def cameras, and our spacecraft! And, of course, the new circuit boards for the computer — until yesterday, that is! All the consumer products are built in regional plants around the world."
At a distance, the robots looked little more exotic than a garden-variety forklift or backhoe. But there were no human drivers. There were no humans anywhere. They were all up in the Village enjoying their evening. This was a village of a different sort.
"Unbelievable," she mumbled. Griffith cocked and then shook his head — not having heard what she'd said. "I said it's unbelievable!"
Griffith nodded in exaggerated fashion, grinning with pride. "Welcome to the twenty-first century, Dr. Aldridge!"
"Come this way," Griffith said in a voice barely raised above a whisper. "I'd like you to meet some friends."
Griffith, Laura, and a young foreman with whom they'd hooked up made their way through one of the assembly building's larger structures. All wore hard hats, but their goggles and ear protectors dangled loosely around their necks. Outside the thick walls of the building-within-a-building, the rhythm of activity could be heard as a continuous thrum. But inside, all was hushed.
Griffith and the foreman waited beside an open pneumatic door.
Laura passed through into the large room beyond — her jaw dropping in awe. She stepped out onto a metal walkway suspended in air above nearly a hundred motionless Model Sixes. Their lone arms sagged in various states of repose like astronauts asleep in weightlessness.
They were all backed into "recharging stations," Griffith explained in a low voice.
The room was quiet. Even the lights were low.
"I don't see any Sevens," Griffith said to the young man, who looked down at a clipboard-sized pen computer.
Tapping at different icons on the screen, the foreman said; "Next Seven isn't due in here for half an hour yet."
"Where's the nearest one?" Again the foreman tapped at the board.
"Out in the side yard."
Griffith nodded, then turned to Laura. "These old Sixes," he said, waving a slack finger down the row of slumbering robots, "need to recharge for two hours after every two hours of operation. The Sevens only charge about once every three days in normal use, and charging time is about four hours."
She leaned out over the metal railing to look down at the robot immediately below.
"The Sixes have the same chassis as the Threes — the little cars that take you around the island," Griffith explained. He spoke in tones appropriate to a library, and without knowing why Laura felt his manner to be fitting. "Since they're wheeled, they can only negotiate flat terrain. They've got a single manipulator up front," he pointed to the dark, metallic claw protruding from the stall just beneath their feet.
The tongs of the robot's claw looked like the teeth on a pair of pliers. Four inches wide, their deep grooves ran the full width of the claw and were worn shiny from use. Griffith pointed out the long tubes on either side of the two teeth, which provided hydraulic power to the robot's grip. The steel paw, Laura guessed, could easily crush anything soft. The macabre picture which sprung up in Laura's mind did nothing to endear the technology to her.
A robot across the room jerked. Laura jumped back from the rail, and Griffith and the foreman both laughed. As Laura watched, the robot raised its claw and reached slowly toward the rear of its chassis.
Atop the central trunk that rose from the robot's carriage, what looked like twin security cameras turned to follow the claw.
The gripper seized in its firm grasp a fat black plug that protruded from its socket in the wall. A cable ran from the plug into a box at the rear bumper of the Model Six. They all watched as the claw rocked the plug back and forth and back again.
The plug flew from the wall and smashed into the robot with a resounding bang. Again Laura's heart skipped a beat.
"It's a little groggy," the foreman said. The robot tried three times before successfully returning the plug to its compartment. The claw then casually backhanded the compartment's lid, tapping it for insurance before returning to its more comfortable station in front.
"Their mini-nets are inside the superstructure," Griffith said, pointing at the box-shaped housing that rose dead-center from the chassis. "They lose some of their virtual connections — the links that are programmed [missing] rather than during recharging. It only takes a minute or two for the Sixes to relearn their fine motor skills, but the Sevens are another story. They make more extensive use of virtual connections and have larger nets. The Sevens stumble around like drunken sailors for five or ten minutes before they get it together."
The Model Six rolled slowly out of its berth. High atop its superstructure sat its two "eyes" — the "security cameras" — shifting soundlessly in tandem from one object to the next. As Laura watched, the cameras grew more and more asynchronous, their movements finally totally uncoordinated as the two cameras flitted this way and that. The robot turned down the row of its resting compatriots and headed past Laura's vantage for the door.
"See its eyes turning from side to side?" Griffith asked, and Laura nodded. "Those are its principal sensory nodes. Its eyes and ears, plus infrared and thermal. It also has ultrasonic collision-avoidance range finders down around the chassis, and pressure-sensitive pads at the tips of its single end effect or — its 'arm.' That, plus what the main computer tells it about its surroundings, constitute its world — what it sees and knows."
As the robot passed, its twin sensors snapped in sudden unison to lock onto the three humans. Laura gripped the railing tightly, ready to recoil as the slack claw passed by her feet. She didn't know why, but she felt like backing away — giving the strange new creature room to pass.
"It's telling on us," the foreman said.
"It's reporting in," Griffith translated. "You can tell when it fixes on you like that." The two eyes returned to their seemingly agitated, uncoordinated search of the path ahead. "It saw us in here and called up the main computer to report."
"They sure are into spying," Laura said.
Griffith shrugg
ed. "The robots are the computer's mobile eyes and ears. They can update the computer's world model with what we call a 'refresh scan.' But when they're in a place where the computer maintains a fairly complete representation like the restricted area, they typically only report things of special interest to the computer like when somebody steps over the work envelope line — just in case the computer missed it."
Laura looked down at the edges of the catwalk. The yellow lines ran the length of the metal span to a door on the opposite end of the room. They were well within the all-important border that separated man from machine.
"Well… why did it report on us then?" Laura asked.
Griffith looked back down at the receding machine. All he could do was shrug.
"We ceased production of the Sixes last year!" Griffith shouted as they walked down the constantly moving assembly line. Their goggles and ear protectors were back on. There were so many active machines — so much brute force at work on the floor — that the yellow line they honored so scrupulously seemed trifling and unworthy of deference.
The only thing that prevented one of those thick metal arms from swinging wildly their way was a concept — a law.
Gray's law, she found herself thinking, wondering just how much force the creator's word would carry.
"We entered full production of the Sevens ten months ago," Griffith shouted, turning to the foreman. "Let's go find that Seven in the side yard." The three of them climbed several flights of stairs and headed across a catwalk suspended high above the main floor. Down below, parts of every imaginable shape and design were transported by the broad conveyer belt like flotsam down a relentless man-made river.
Flat sheets of inert metal and plastic went into the great building at one end, and at the other there emerged animate beings who looked left and right before crossing the road. Laura observed the process from dead-center.
Totally amazing, she thought, shaking her head.
The belt itself was at least twenty feet wide and looked to be a complete mess. Its basic black was discolored in countless places by spots and stains and burn marks. And the components it carried were scattered about in nearly random fashion like scrap on the way to a pit.
Laura paused directly above the belt to take in the sights and sounds of the assembly building. In the far distance, Laura saw the blunt noses of not one but two of Gray's strange, flat-sided rockets.
They rose like steep pyramids nearly all the way to the ceiling. Up and down the long line in between, the forest of robotic arms was an incessant blur of activity. They turned parts over, picked them up, held them to the light, moved them from the main belt to adjoining ones. They riveted and welded, sanded and ground, painted and measured, and assembled and discarded. All the while, Model Sixes plied the lanes parallel to the belt, stopping to receive a part from or deliver a part to their immobile brethren.
This was not a plant conceived in the mind of man, Laura realized. It wasn't a factory built by humans that had been turned over to more worthy mechanical replacements. This was a factory designed by a computer exclusively for robots. This was the world as it should be according to the mind of a machine. As Laura stood there, that conclusion was reinforced by one quite telling fact.
Nowhere in that sea of motion were any humans to be seen. Laura headed across the catwalk for the exit, her companions following in her wake down to the main floor. They passed through another "airlock," then stepped out into the warm night air.
An expansive concrete pad the width and breadth of a stadium parking lot dominated the far side of the assembly building. In the distance, the three rocket gantries marked the fringes of the island's north shore like brightly beaming lighthouses.
Laura's skin tingled. She was missing something about what she had just witnessed — some important conclusion. It was right there on the periphery of her understanding, but the feeling slowly faded. The silent visitor stepped back into the shadows. Back into the "gray" area, she thought with amusement. And then it was gone.
Laura shook her head.
The side yard was covered with small sheds underneath which sat mounds of materials — some exposed, others covered in tarpaulins. "Side yard" was a misnomer, Laura thought. "Junkyard" described it better.
"This isn't the pretty side of the building, obviously," Griffith said. "We've actually run out of room in the assembly building, if you can believe that. There's another facility under construction right over there." Griffith pointed toward a thick wall of gnarled tropical trees. Light glowed from the jungle over the treetops, but no structure as yet could be seen. Laura imagined the mechanical night crew working uninterrupted as their human coworkers rested.
The foreman led the group out among the slowly moving Model Sixes.
Laura frowned as she surveyed the disorder. A twentieth-century dump, Laura thought, hidden behind the façade of Gray's twenty-first-century wonder.
"It should be this way," the foreman said, his pen board glowing brightly in the dimmer outdoor lighting. As they turned a corner, Laura noticed that the map on the foreman's pen board turned also — maintaining a correct orientation no matter which way the small computer was pointed. The portable pen board must be plugged into the main computer's "world model," she realized. That main computer led them out through the ever-darker maze of sheds and piles of scraps.
They passed robots that sifted through twisted strips of metal, their twin searchlights shining brightly on the tangled mess. Others opened cardboard boxes or dumped containers of garbage into trailers already piled high with similar refuse. All were Model Sixes, differing only, it appeared, in what they had attached to the ends of their long arms.
"What is this stuff?" Laura asked as they wound their way deeper into the labyrinth.
"Oh, low-priority things like reusable scrap, plastic sheeting for the morphing units, other raw materials that weather well."
"Morphing units?" Laura asked.
Griffith reached out to restrain Laura as a Model Six backed out of a shed carrying a pallet. The robot stopped, and the electronic chirping of its reverse gear fell silent. Its searchlights turned in tandem to find the small group.
The three human sightseers proceeded on, and Laura wondered whether Griffith was always that careful or whether the computer's errors were the cause of new concern.
"Morphing," Griffith answered, long after Laura had forgotten her question, "is the way we fabricate plastic, and now some metal components. You used to have to design and build a prototype part, construct a mold around it, and pour molten plastic or metal into the mold. Now, we go straight from computer design to the morphing unit, which presses a superheated form straight into a big flat sheet. The key is in the rapid shaping of the form. If you watch the unit work, this flat surface pops up in the blink of an eye into the exact shape that the computer designed. The sheet on top gets melted around it and hardens instantly. The great benefit is that using morphing units, you can implement a manufacturing design change literally in milliseconds. Once the computer designs the component, it just" — Griffith snapped his fingers—"boom — punches it out. And it can switch from part A to part B to part C with absolutely no retooling — no delay whatsoever in production. We just keep feeding it the sheeting, or at least the robots do."
They turned down a different row, following the foreman with his pen board and paying no attention to the ever-lengthening shadows thrown by the lights on the assembly building's walls.
"It should be around here somewhere," the foreman said, and Laura saw that the two blinking dots on the map — one green, the other red were very close. They walked farther into the growing darkness in search of yet another of Gray's new species.
The width of the aisle through the mounds of supplies had grown irregular, and the passage itself began to twist and turn. Up ahead, an island of tenting covered ubiquitous dark shapes and split the aisle down which they searched in two. Stocks of black tires lined the walls. They wandered ever more slowly through the ink
y maze, and the foreman stopped to get his bearings by reference to the assembly building.
"It should be right here," he said, holding the board up for Griffith and Laura to see. The green and red dots glowed steadily now and completely overlapped. "I mean, like, right…"
A dark shape descended into the narrow canyon of tires, and Laura's heart leapt straight into her throat. It was a long, black leg not ten feet in front of them. She threw her arm out, striking the surprised foreman in the chest. Another leg soundlessly joined the first, and the large body of the giant metal spider crested the top of the wall and crept down into the hollows ahead, blocking their path.
Laura turned and fled, crashing hard into the wall of tires just behind her.
Her companions instinctively took flight, but stopped beside Laura after just a couple of steps. "It's all right!" Griffith said testily.
"Jesus, Laura." Griffith held his chest and seemed suddenly out of breath.
Laura turned with dread to watch the enormous mechanical creature lowering the last of its slender legs to the pavement.
"You scared the hell out of me," Griffith said to Laura, but she couldn't help noticing that both he and the foreman kept their eyes on the robot.
It now stood motionless, its four spidery legs resting firmly on the ground. The legs were thin, and their inner workings were exposed.
Black metal bones were aligned with silvery hydraulic muscles. The pristine apparatuses appeared too straightforward, too simplistic to work as they did.
The dark machine had two slender arms of a design similar to its legs. At the end of the arms, which grew straight out of its thorax, were four long fingers wrapped tightly around a large tire. The robot stood motionless as its rounded, roughly triangular head remained trained on the human trio. Its face consisted of two large, flat lenses mounted side by side above a series of perforated black membranes. The robot looked light and wiry, but the head atop its refrigerator-sized torso stood nearly twice the height of a human.
"There it is," Griffith said, walking casually up to the robot. "A Model Seven." As Laura stared at the robot's unblinking eyes, the foreman turned his flashlight on with a click. A flinch — just the tiniest hint of movement of the robot's head as it recoiled from the light — signaled that the machine was awake. It was alert. "Come on over here," Griffith said, waving to her. "There's nothing to be afraid of."
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