Odyssey iarc-1

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “Close and pressurize,” he said, and the access door began to swing shut. He tried raising his arms, and the suit stirred in smooth response. At last, a little power, he thought.

  But when he turned to head for the ramp, he found a Supervisor barring his way. “The surface is a restricted area,” the robot said.

  Derec heard the words through a speaker at his ear and halted his advance. Probably the augmented suit was more than a match for a Supervisor, or would be in the hands of a skilled operator. But Derec did not want a fight. He only wanted answers.

  “Tell me where I can find the survival pod I came here in,” Derec said.

  “You do not have authorization to leave the community.”

  “That’s where it is, isn’t it? On the surface. That’s where you hid it. What did you do, put my suit back in it after you took it off me?” Derec demanded. “I’m going out. If you don’t want to be damaged you’d better get out of the way.”

  The robot did not move. “The survival pod is not on the surface,” it said.

  Considering the way the Supervisors had been treating him, that was a generous answer. But Derec wanted more. “Either I go looking on the surface, or you show me where the pod is. Those are the only choices.”

  There was a brief pause before the robot responded. When the answer came, it was a welcome surprise. “I will show you the pod.”

  “Are we going outside, or down below?”

  “Down.”

  Derec still wanted to go to the surface. He had hopes of being able to use the stars and sky to determine at least in general terms where the planetoid was located-what kind of star it was orbiting, and whether the planetoid was independent or part of a planetary system. But until he found the pod, none of that mattered, so Derec could afford to be a gracious victor.

  “Thank you,” he said. “If you’ll wait just a moment, I’ll put this suit back.”

  But Derec did not get to enjoy his victory for long. The Supervisor took him back down to the warehouse level and led him through the maze toward the east wall. As they swung around the molding section and its high rack supply cache, the robot stopped short.

  “Here.”

  But Derec could see no pod. All he could see was a large open area with rows of assorted components neatly arrayed on the floor. “Where?”

  With a sweeping motion of his arm, the Supervisor repeated, “Here.”

  That was when Derec took a closer look at the hardware laid out before him and realized the truth. The pod was there, just as the Supervisor said. But it was in a thousand pieces, lying on the floor like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The robots had disassembled it down to fundamental components. Derec could recognize but a few-curved plates that had been part of the hull, several thruster bells, and, a few meters from where Derec stood, the lenses from the seven green lamps on the command console.

  “No,” he cried out despairingly. “Why did you do it?”

  “It was necessary to determine that the search objective was not concealed within the pod.”

  “And my safesuit? Did they tear that apart, too?”

  In answer, the Supervisor led Derec into the maze and showed him his suit, lying in several dozen pieces. The fabric had been separated from the binding rings, the environmental systems stripped out of the chest unit. Even the helmet had been disassembled.

  “I’m surprised that you didn’t tear me apart, too,” he said bitterly as he looked at it.

  “Please explain the reason for your surprise,” the robot said. “It is impossible for a robot to harm a human. Have you not been informed of this fact?”

  “Nevermind,” Derec said with a sigh. “I was being sarcastic.”

  “Sir?”

  “Humans don’t always mean what they say. Haven’t you been informed of that fact?” After a moment, he added, “But you did search me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. While you were unconscious, you were subjected to a full-body magnetic resonance scan,” the robot replied.

  Derec almost laughed at the absurdity of it. “It figures,” he said. “I suppose having you put the suit and pod back together is out of the question.”

  “Nothing may take priority over the primary directive.”

  “What about all those spare robots sitting up north doing nothing? You could activate a few of them.”

  “The tasks would require not only Assemblers but the supervision of a Systemist. All Systemists are fully scheduled under the current duty cycle.”

  “I guess that means no,” Derec said. He looked across the expanse of parts that once was a spacecraft and sighed. “Do you have a name of some kind?”

  “I am Monitor 5.”

  “Why are you talking to me, Monitor 5?”

  “I perceived that you were stressed. While stressed, humans frequently derive benefit from communication.”

  Derec snorted. “I guess that’s one way to say it. Then tell me, Monitor 5-do you robots know what you’re looking for?”

  “I may not reveal any information about my mission here.”

  “What about me? Are you allowed to tell me what you know about me?”

  “What do you wish to know?”

  “The event recorder in the survival pod-did they find it?”

  “I was not part of that work unit. I will consult Analyst 3.” The robot paused. “Yes. A data recorder was located.”

  “Did it tell you what ship I came from? How I got here? Anything?”

  “The recorder had not been initialized. The recording disk was blank.”

  Stunned, Derec looked down and away to hide his expression from the robot. His gaze fell on the pile of fabric from his suit, and he knelt down and began to sift through it. “There was a datastrip on my suit-”

  “Yes. It was a test strip. It contained no personal data.”

  Letting the fabric fall from his hands back to the floor, Derec slowly stood. “A test strip?”

  “They are quite common. They are used in calibrating a data reader’s scanner.”

  “But it said Derec-”

  “Yes. The leading manufacturer of such readers is Derec Data Systems.”

  Derec felt the strength go out of his legs. “Then you don’t know who I am, either.”

  “No. We do not know who you are.”

  “And that message you sent about me? What did it say?”

  “I did not send the message. One moment while I consult Analyst 17.” The robot paused. “Analyst 17 believed that due to your irrational behavior, you would come to harm or endanger the primary objective unless continually supervised. Therefore he sent a message requesting that you be rescued.”

  “He made that decision on his own?”

  “Analyst 17 felt that the threat was of sufficient magnitude to transcend the prohibition regarding communications.”

  “Prohibition from who? Who’s in charge here? And who’d he send the message to?”

  “I may not-”

  “-reveal any information about your mission here, yes.” Grimacing, Derec closed his eyes and tried to shut out the world.

  “Are you ill?” Monitor 5 asked, concerned.

  “No,” Derec said in an unsteady voice. “I’m just back to square one again, that’s all.”

  Chapter 5. Reply

  Dispirited, Derec retreated to the E-cell, his illusion of being even partially in control of his own fate destroyed. There was no chance of his reconstructing the pod himself. He might leave the community using one of the augmented worksuits, but there was no way he could leave the asteroid. It seemed that all he could do was stay out of the robots’ way and wait for whoever Analyst 17 had signalled to respond.

  As though the robots had decided that he needed something to keep him occupied and safely out of their way, Derec found the wardroom com center unlocked and displaying the word “READY.” When Derec touched the “Help” key, a short menu popped up on the screen. It offered him a choice between something called Scratchpad and a library index.

&n
bsp; Scratchpad proved to be a cross between a notebook and an engineer’s sketch pad. He amused himself for a while with its graphics capabilities by drawing a map of the part of the complex he knew firsthand. The system made it easy for him, converting his unsteady movements with the tracer into straight lines, copying duplicate sections, performing fills and rotations.

  When drawing deteriorated into doodling, Derec shifted mental gears and decided to make a diary of what had happened since he had awoken in the pod. But his first entry was self-conscious and self-indulgent, and he ended his log with a short sarcastic note:

  Dear Mom,

  I got no friends here. Can I come home?

  Embarrassed by his own self-pity, Derec purged the Scratchpad memory and pushed his chair away from the terminal. But the terrible feeling of separateness which underlay the thought was not so easily banished. Without family, friends, an ally of any sort, Derec’s little world was a lonely place.

  The book-film library was Derec’s last defense against maudlin thoughts. Scanning the directory, he was struck by the unusual mix of entries. There was a whole subdirectory of texts from Earth’s Classical Age, including a few whose authors or titles Derec was intrigued to discover he recognized: Lucretius’De Rerum Natura, Newton’sPrincipia, Darwin’sThe Origin of Species.

  Another large subdirectory consisted of architectural drawings and photographs. Again, a few names struck chords in Derec’s memory-Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright. But when he asked the system to sample those files at one image every few seconds, he found the images were of places that he could not remember ever being and structures he could not remember seeing. It left him wondering why he knew the names in the first place.

  Conspicuously absent was any sort of current technical reference on such topics as microelectronics, robotics, process design, and the like. Derec assumed that they were in a separate technical library not available to him.

  But there were other sections which under other circumstances would probably have appealed to him-a biography of robotics pioneer Susan Calvin;Genesis, Marvin Eller’s anecdotal history of twentieth-century computer science; a screenful of titles on astronomy and astrography.

  But Derec was not interested in being educated, or in anything that required thinking. He wanted to be a spectator to someone else’s problems, to disengage his mind and surrender himself to the spell of the storyteller.

  Yet when he turned to the fiction subdirectory, he found the pickings sparse. Aside from a few interactive mysteries and a half-dozen text novels, all of which would require too much work on his part, Derec’s choice was limited to the world of theater.Faust,Waiting for Godot,Daedalus and Icarus,Sweeney Todd -the titles meant nothing to Derec. But Shakespeare he knew, and Shakespeare was well represented on the list.

  Feeling a need for laughter, Derec chose the comedyA Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then he retreated to a comfortable chair, propped his feet up on the conference table, and let the recording carry him away to ancient Greece, to a woods near the city of Athens, where hemight amuse himself with the love-crossed confusion of human and fairy kings, and the pranks of the devilish sprite Puck.

  “Up and down, up and down,” Puck vowed. “I will lead them up and down. I am feared in field and town. Goblin, lead them up and down-”

  In the middle of Puck’s declamation, Derec heard the unmistakable sound of the inner door of the airlock opening. He came to his feet as a Supervisor entered the wardroom and crossed toward the com center.

  “What do you want?” Derec demanded, following.

  The robot ignored Derec. “Priority interrupt,” the robot said to the com center. The screen went black and the speakers silent.

  PASSWORD?

  The robot’s fingers flew over the keypad in a blur, but nothing appeared on the screenexcept the instruction PROCEED.

  Without hesitation, the robot began to hammer at the keys again. Even standing only an arm’s length away, Derec had no clue to what the robot was entering. The steady staccato of keyclicks lasted perhaps twenty seconds-three or four hundred characters. Then the robot raised his hand and stepped back.

  MESSAGE TRANSMITTED, the screen acknowledged.

  “Resume,” the robot said, and turned to go.

  “Cancel,” Derec said, moving quickly to place his body between the robot and the door. “Identify yourself.”

  “I am Analyst 9.”

  “What’s happening? What did you just do?”

  “Please stand aside,” Analyst 9 said. “I have urgent duties elsewhere.”

  “The last time one of you was in here, it was to send a distress message. What’s up now? Is aship here? Is that it? I have a right to know what’s going on-”

  For an answer, Analyst 9 raised his arm and pushed Derec firmly out of the way. He stumbled back toward the conference table and sat down hard in one of the chairs.

  “Do not interfere,” the Supervisor said, and left the room.

  Though his shock at the robot’s physical treatment of him slowed him for an instant, Derec scrambled to his feet and followed.

  Out in the chamber, Derec found frenzied activity bordering on chaos. Dozens of porter and picker robots were streaming off the lifts, as if some massive exodus were underway. Scores more were scurrying through the aisles gathering up components and carrying them toward the west wall and the recycling smelter located there.

  To Derec’s astonishment, instead of depositing what they held and turning back to get more, the pickers and porters queued up at the smelter carried their burdens directly into the heart of the smelter and never appeared again. For some reason, the robots were systematically destroying selected items in their storehouse-and themselves at the same time.

  Distracted by the parade of suicidal robots, Derec had lost track of Analyst 9. Now, as he scanned the chamber to try to find it, he saw something else extraordinary. There were no Supervisors anywhere in the warehouse. The various manufacturing centers were standing silent and abandoned.

  On a hunch, Derec fought his way through to the lift and commandeered a platform to carry him up to Level Zero. There he found a gathering of twenty Supervisors. They were standing motionless in a circle, with hands linked as though in some sort of direct conference.

  They took no notice of his arrival, and so Derec crossed the room to where two other Supervisors sat at the giant command console.

  “Monitor 5?”

  “Yes, Derec,” one of the robots said with a nod of acknowledgment.

  “Can you tell me what’s happening?”

  “Surface sensors have detected a large spacecraft approaching. The trajectory and velocity profile indicate that it will match orbit with this planetoid.”

  “I’m going to get off this rock?” Derec exulted. “Praise the stars!”

  “There is a sixty-eight percent probability that the ship intercepted the distress signal. However, there is only a nine percent probability that the ship is here to rescue you.”

  That news jolted Derec back to earth. “Intercepted? They aren’t the people you were calling?”

  “No, Derec.”

  “Who are they, then? What do they want?”

  “The ship is currently unidentified.”

  “Is that why all the robots downstairs are going crazy?”

  “I cannot answer that question now,” Monitor 5 said. “I may be able to tell you more shortly.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Wait.”

  “Great. How long?”

  “Not long,” Monitor 5 said, standing. “Excuse me. The Analysts are calling for me.”

  Crossing the room, Monitor 5 joined the conference circle. He stood there with them for perhaps two minutes, then the circle broke apart. Most of the Supervisors headed for the lift. Two of them, including Monitor 5, came to where Derec stood.

  “I have been appointed to communicate with you,” Monitor 5 said.

  “Appointed?” The robot’s choice of word co
nfused Derec.

  “By default,” the robot admitted. “None of the Analysts feel comfortable dealing with a human.”

  “Are you telling me that they haven’t been talking to me because they don’t want to? They don’t know how?”

  “With few exceptions, their experience has been exclusively with other robots. I have been chosen because of my previous success in communicating with you,” Monitor 5 said.

  “Is that another exception?” Derec said, indicating the robot standing just behind Monitor 5.

  “I am accompanied by Analyst 17.”

  “Ah-we’ve met-sort of.”

  “Analyst 17 is here to assist me,” Monitor 5 said. “Please, Derec. There are important matters to discuss, and there is very little time.”

  “Then get started.”

  “Thank you. The Analysts are agreed thatthe approaching ship is a threat to the security of our operation. The possibility of discovery was anticipated by those who placed us here. Our instructions for such a circumstance are to destroy ourselves and this facility. Certain preliminary steps are already underway-”

  “The robots at the smelter.”

  “Yes. All proprietary technology must be destroyed and the excavation rendered unusable. This directive was impressed on us at the highest level of necessity and urgency. We must comply. However, your presence wasnot anticipated.”

  “What do I have to do with it?”

  “As long as you are present, we are not able to fulfill our directive, since to destroy the complex would kill you. Even to destroy ourselves would leave you unprotected. Therefore, for us to carry out our directive, it is necessary for you to leave.”

  “I’ve been ready to leave since I got here. Just show me the way.”

  Analyst 17 spoke up at that point. “Unfortunately, since leaving the community also represents a significant risk to your life, we are unable to assist you in doing this and are in fact obliged to prevent it.”

  “So you’re not going to put my pod back together? My safesuit?”