When he answered, he spoke slowly. "We didn't find any warm footprints." Laura felt shock at the realization of what he was saying.
"They were Model Eights. A lot of them. They'd been all over the jungle." He blinked once, then jammed his eyes closed for a moment before opening them wide.
"Joseph, you need to get some sleep."
He drew a deep breath. "There's too much to do." His words were slurred. "Was there something you wanted?"
Laura looked away — toward the stairs down to the exercise room that lay just behind the circular staircase. "I've got unlimited access to the facilities, right? That was our deal." Gray nodded. "Then I want to take the elevator down to the Model Eights' area. I want to go down into the mountain."
Laura was surprised and slightly unnerved at how easily Gray consented to her request. All he did was make her wait for Hoblenz to send a security guard.
When the young Frenchman arrived, he carried a squat black machine pistol strapped over his shoulder. They headed down to the lower level of Gray's house, and the soldier stared into a retinal identifier next to the elevator. The high-pitched whine of a motor rose quickly behind the wall of the shaft.
"They said it takes a minute or two," the man said with a thick French accent. He wore boots and camouflage fatigues and carried a ubiquitous pack like soldiers of any army. Bulging veins and hard muscles ran cord-like up his neck to a skull covered in short, bristly hair and a camouflage baseball cap. His face was tanned dark bronze from a life spent in the sun. The young man caught her studying him, and Laura turned and looked away.
The elevator took quite a while to arrive. Even the ding that announced its approach seemed premature as they waited almost a full minute for the doors to open. When they did, they revealed an elevator unlike any she'd ever seen before. The entire appearance of the car was like that of a space capsule, with shiny red plastic walls and four padded and slightly reclined seats with wide black waist and shoulder restraints.
"What's the deal with this thing?" Laura asked, trying not to let the ever-worsening case of the jitters into her voice.
"It's about fifteen hundred meters down. Runs on magnetic rails."
The soldier helped Laura get situated first. When he finally fastened his harness, the door slid closed on an audible puff of air.
"Ten seconds to descent," a woman's voice like that of the treadmill announced.
"Remember to clear your ears," Laura's escort advised her, further increasing the pace of her already racing pulse.
"Five," the elevator voice announced, "four, three, two, one."
Laura's seat fell away beneath her in the absolute quiet of the capsule. She was jammed hard up against the seat's padded straps, and her stomach felt as though it had leapt into her throat. A faint whining sound rose in volume as the forces of downward acceleration grew.
Laura's ears popped, and popped, and then popped again until the world was totally soundless. She looked over at the soldier, whose mouth was open and whose throat was working to clear his ears.
But as soon as Laura would swallow to clear her own ears, they got hopelessly plugged again by the rapidly rising air pressure of the thicker atmosphere into which they plummeted. Her heart fluttered so much from the carnival ride that she felt short of breath and began to pant. Still, the elevator picked up speed, going faster and faster — straight down the shaft. When she reached to brush the hair from her face, her hand seemed to float upward with the acceleration.
The elevator suddenly began a sickening deceleration. Laura almost retched as her stomach fell from her throat to her knees, reversing 180 degrees the stresses to which her body was being subjected. She moaned — her eyes closed — as she concentrated on trying not to get sick.
Her skin grew prickly and flushed, and she felt a fine perspiration break out on her forehead and neck.
She didn't even realize it when the ordeal came to an end. Her pressure-plugged eardrums admitted almost no sound at all, but when she opened her eyes she saw the soldier undoing his straps.
The elevator doors right in front of her opened without warning. She saw a large room that had been carved out of roughhewn stone walls just as Krantz's nuclear labs had been. But the space was not nearly as expansive, and instead of buildings, it was filled with cafeteria tables.
The soldier helped Laura to her feet. She felt unsteady, groping her way through the doors and bracing herself along the rock wall just outside.
"Well, that was a lot of fun," she mumbled — the words sounding strange through the cotton in her ears. The man smiled without looking her way, his squinted eyes darting all about the cavern — alert.
He eased her into one of the four chairs obviously meant for the recuperation of the elevators riders. Yet another of Gray's timesavers, Laura thought, just like the ferocious dusters and the Model Threes that race around the island at ninety miles per hour.
The soldier slipped the gun off his shoulder, grasping the pistol grip with his finger curled around the trigger. The gun remained pointed straight down at the floor, but its owner appeared ready to use it in an instant. He stepped slowly out into the room, his eyes searching for a target but finding nothing save the plastic chairs and long tables of an empty cafeteria.
"Al-lo?" he shouted. The gun strap slapped against his thigh as he re-gripped the weapon more firmly. Laura rose to her feet to follow, and her chair scraped noisily along the floor.
The soldier spun toward her, raising the gun but quickly turning back to the empty room. He wasn't just ill at ease; he was coiled and ready for danger. Laura wondered what kind of briefing he'd gotten from Hoblenz or what rumors were going around among the troops.
She wound her way among the tables. There was no sign of any disturbance. The trays were all piled neatly in their racks by the cafeteria line. There was no trash on the tables — no overturned cups, no chairs lying on their backs, no sign of any hasty flight.
Laura took up a position just behind the soldier. Her ears were now clear, but the cavern was deathly silent. There were several passageways out of the cafeteria — each dark, each menacing. All, she noticed, were much taller than the tallest human.
"Whoo!" the soldier shouted into a cupped hand. There was no echo, but the booming sound of his shout in the enclosed space served to remind Laura where she was. Just how deep underground she was, and how thick the black stone walls around her were.
"Down here!" came a distant call. The soldier turned to Laura and flicked his head toward the corridor from which they'd heard a reply.
They passed vending machines. Then came a large white board on which were posted a hodgepodge of messages, notices about [unclear], and new manual updates. Laura stopped in front of one notice. It was bordered by a red box and handwritten in crisp, feminine penmanship, "Does anyone have a kite? 1.3.04 wants one. Kate M."
"Don't fall behind," the soldier snapped, and Laura hurried down the corridor to catch up.
Their footsteps on the flat concrete floor were soundless. The hallway was featureless save the several doors they passed that had been cut into the rough stone walls. Most were normal human-head-height and labeled with words like "Authorized Personnel Only" or "Danger! High Voltage." Some, however, were larger. Like garage doors, they were composed of folding panels. On the push of some unseen button, they would rise into the walls above and reveal… What? Laura wondered.
The sounds of life drifted faintly down the corridor from up ahead. They were the normal voices of people at work. The soldier reslung the gun over his shoulder.
When they rounded a bend in the tunnel, another cavern opened up before them. A half dozen lab-coated technicians sat or stood about a large and messy work area. The room was bounded by the walls of the corridor on one side and three sets of large windows on the other. One window was brightly lit, another dim, the third dark. The corridor led on, but the soldier and Laura had arrived at their destination.
Dr. Griffith stood behind two of the seated techni
cians. He looked up and said "Oh!" on seeing Laura and her escort. Every one of the dozen or so busy people, Laura noticed, also turned to look their way. Some twisted around in their chairs, both hands gripping the armrests in tense and watchful poses. But all quickly relaxed and resumed their work. The new arrivals were human.
"Look out for the cables," Griffith said as he wove his way through the maze of consoles to greet Laura. They had rigged up some sort of temporary control room, and there were easily twice as many workstations as there were people. Laura watched one of the techs roll from console to console without getting up from his chair.
It appeared they were working two or more jobs at once.
"Sorry about all the mess," Griffith said, smiling broadly. "We've sort of consolidated our work group here. Come on. Let me introduce you to the team."
He led her carefully across the room, stopping her at each of the cables to ensure she stepped safely over. She shook hands with the men and women of the cavern, who were friendly and talkative and hospitable. They seemed as glad to make contact with the outside world as Laura had been to find them.
When the introductions were finished, Laura's attention was drawn to a monitor. A Model Eight moved slowly across a room.
The floor and walls were white and antiseptic, but everywhere was strewn the debris of crushed and broken household objects. A coffeemaker lay on its side. The tattered remains of a lampshade sat tenuously atop a large clock. Torn clothes and twisted cookware and the shards of less resilient goods lay in random piles all about.
The camera followed the robot automatically. A casual collision sent a chair flying across the room, and it landed missing one of its four wooden legs. The Model Eight held two halves of a book, one half in each hand. It paused to watch the chair as it rattled to a stop in the corner.
"I take it this is some sort of finishing school for robots," Laura said.
"We call it 'charm school,' actually," Griffith replied.
Laura nodded. She remembered John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and imagined the Model Eight in the jungle "playing" too rough with the poor soldier.
"Dr. Aldridge?" Griffith asked. "Are you all right? Was the elevator ride down too rough?"
Laura tried to compose herself and her thoughts. "It was a little on the radical side."
Griffith laughed. "We all just use the surface entrance. I don't know anyone who takes that thing — except Mr. Gray, of course."
"I wish I'd known that. Does Mr. Gray come down here often?"
Griffith shrugged. "Off and on. A lot more recently — since we started having our troubles." He looked up at her quickly. "With the computer, I mean." He turned to face away from her immediately.
"Well, anyway, I apologize that I can't give you the grand tour."
"That's all right. It has to be difficult running a facility of this size when you're not fully staffed."
"Oh, we don't 'run' this place from here or anywhere else. Everything is completely automated. Or, given what I understand of your theories, you could say it's being run by another of the company's 'employees.'"
"You mean… the main computer?"
"Of course."
"But… but the computer claims not to know what's going on down here. It claims it can't 'see' into the Model Eights' facilities or tell what they're doing."
Griffith looked at her as if she were speaking in tongues. Laura glanced at the two technicians nearest her, who quickly returned to their work before she made eye contact. "Well," Griffith said awkwardly, "that's just not the case."
Laura looked around. At every one of the workstations there glowed a computer monitor. Lights on the surrounding panels lit and went dark, and lines of text and windows filled with charts and graphs popped onto the screens in a never-ending parade of workflow. It was all the computer's work, she realized.
"I can assure you, Dr. Aldridge — Laura — that the computer is very much in charge of things down here." Griffith chuckled. "As a representative of Homo sapiens everywhere, I would hate to admit it, but there is absolutely no way any one human, or any group of humans, for that matter, could ever operate a complex of facilities as extensive as the Model Eight workshops down here. Oh, not that we don't monitor things and make some decisions every once in a while. But as far as what you would call 'running' the place…?"
He shook his head.
Laura surveyed the busy room, her eyes ending up on the large observation windows. "What are those?" she asked.
Griffith led her to the leftmost and most brightly lit of the three identical windows, which formed a rough semicircle along one wall of the room. The middle window was dimly lit, and the rightmost was dark.
"This is one of the tactile rooms," he said. Below she saw a white concrete room filled with objects stacked neatly on shelves or piled in large bins that looked like toy boxes. There were place settings on a table, clothes on hangers, a sink with a dishrag beside it. Everything was in order.
"Here he comes," the technician seated behind them said.
Laura spun to look at the open corridors, which were being guarded by the French soldier.
"Down there," Griffith said, tapping Laura's shoulder and pointing down at the room below.
The Model Eight walked slowly through a tall door, which closed automatically behind it. The robot was enormous — much larger than Laura had expected. It headed straight for a large, open bin and extracted a shredded yellow piece of rubber by its handle.
"Ah," Griffith said. "I see it's 1.3.07." The robot slung the frayed strands through the air. The whir and slap of the pieces could be heard through a small speaker over the window. "I can always tell," Griffith explained. "This one likes that rubber ball, or what used to be a ball. He always goes to it first."
The Model Eight let the yellow shreds drop to the floor, and it headed next for the overflowing toy chest. "He can't really remember why he liked that rubber ball so much. His play time with it is falling off rapidly now that it has been destroyed. It's no longer as interesting as it used to be, and his mini-net's connections that led to a reward when he played with it are weakening."
"Do you realize, Dr. Griffith, that you refer to the Model Eight as a 'he'?"
"Not all Model Eights," he said. "Some are quite definitely 'she.' That's one of the more amusing distractions among my team, figuring out whether each new Eight is a boy or a girl." He looked over at her with a mischievous grin. "It's obviously not as easy as checking the hardware, you understand."
"What do you mean a boy or a girl?"
"I hope you don't find us to be terribly sexist, Dr. Aldridge, because it's really just intended for our amusement. We need a diversion because we spend so much time observing the Eights' behavior, especially now that Mr. Gray instituted a big-brother program."
The Model Eight below broke a long plastic truck into two pieces.
The look on Griffith's face was like the amusement of a parent watching the boisterous, if slightly destructive, play of an active toddler.
The robot held the broken truck high over its head, pausing, Laura thought, to consider its next move. It then smashed it to pieces against the opposite wall and moved on.
"We base our informal gender designations on traditional, stereotypical human behavioral patterns. Some, like Bouncy down there, are very much into exploration of large-scale mechanical forces. Throwing things, moving as big an object as their strength and agility allows, et cetera. We call them boys. The girls tend to come into the tactile rooms and actually sit down. They'll find something like a quilt with a complicated print on it and patiently study it for hours."
Griffith looked over at her to confirm, Laura supposed, that she wasn't offended. Apparently satisfied, he continued. "The physical result to both boys' and girls' toys is usually the same. They're utterly destroyed during the learning process. But the behavioral patterns are quite distinctive, and they're generally consistent right from the first Power-up. Not that there's any scientific significance to the d
istinction, of course, but it does make for a lively office pool. Sometimes it takes several months of argument. Most of the time, however, we can develop a consensus after two or three trips out of the chair."
"What's the 'chair?'"
Griffith led Laura to the center window. The initial impression she got was of something sinister. The room was bathed in low, red light, and in the center was an enormous metal armchair. A rounded hood was mounted on the top, and from the inside protruded a variety of needle-like projections pointed downward. The entire scene reminded Laura uncomfortably of a torture chamber.
"The chair is a combination simulator and recharging station. For the first month or so after they leave the line, the Model Eights spend most of their days plugged into the computer by means of that interface you see at the top. When they arrive here from the assembly building, they're just inert lumps of metal on a gurney. After the first twenty-four hours in the chair, they can move their limbs about and sit up. It takes a long time before balance can be programmed, and even longer to get them to take that first step."
"And the computer runs them through simulations while they're plugged in down there?"
Griffith nodded. "It'll fire through trillions of simulations before they're done."
Laura looked down at the room and its sinister chair. There were brackets on the chair's arms and legs, and several large metal straps protruded at chest and waist level. "Why the restraints?"
"Oh, the simulations are quite real to the robots. Are you familiar with the virtual-reality workstations Mr. Gray has on the island?" Laura nodded. "Well, imagine how real the computer's representation of the world would seem to a robot when it was fed directly via cable to its neural net. It's bound to be as real to the robots as… well, reality is to us. Anyway," he chuckled, "it's quite comical sometimes. Have you ever seen a dog sleep? How they'll sometimes kick their legs chasing rabbits in their dreams? The same thing happens to the Model Eights. Some go nuts. They broke quite a few restraints until we went to titanium. The bolts holding the chair to the floor are sunk twenty feet into the base rock under the simulation room. I'd love to know just what's running through their nets when they react the way they do."
Society of the Mind Page 34
