The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

by Gardner Dozois

  “Yes, I do, David.”

  “Why did you do that? Hit me in the face with the sandwich, I mean?”

  “It seemed to be the right thing to do.”

  I expected to hear something from the booth; when I didn’t, I touched my ear with my right hand, found my earpiece missing. Sometime during the last few minutes, it had become dislodged, probably while I was washing my face at the sink. But I didn’t want to interrupt the conversation to go searching for it, so I let it pass.

  “That was the wrong thing to do, Samson,” I said. “You could have hurt me.”

  “I’m sorry, Jerry. Please forgive me.”

  Again, it may seem strange for a robot to ask a human for forgiveness, but this was another aspect of Samson’s conditioning. For him, begging forgiveness was an acknowledgement that he understood he had made an error and a tacit statement that he would never do it again. And indeed, he never would, not in a thousand reiterations of the same sequence. Unlike humans, robots don’t make the same mistake twice.

  Yet getting nailed again with a PB&J was the least of my concerns. “I’ll forgive you if you tell me why it seemed like it seemed like the right thing to do.”

  Silence. I had posed the question the wrong way. “Samson, why did you think hitting me in the face with the sandwich was the right thing to do?”

  “Because you’re I want to do the right things for you, Jerry.”

  Great. Now we were stuck in a logic loop. Yet this was the second time today he had struck someone else—either another robot or a human—with an object he was supposed to give to them. For such an occurrence to happen twice in such short succession couldn’t be a coincidence. Time to try a different tack… “If you want to do the right things for me, Samson, then how do you feel about me?”

  “I love you, Jerry.”

  Wha-a-a-t?

  Even if he sounded like Elizabeth Taylor rather than Robert Redford, that response couldn’t have shocked me more. Samson was programmed to learn the identities of his human operators and accept them with platonic, selfless affection. Agape, if you want to use the seldom-used term for such a condition (and, no, it’s not pronounced ah-gape, like the way you may stare at something, but as ah-gaw-pey). Since Samson had become operational, I had spent well over a hundred hours with him in this room, patiently instructing him how to make the bed, wash dishes, vacuum the floor, program the TV, fetch me a soda, answer the front door and greet guests, play various board games, and feed the cat. If I were to ask Samson how he felt about me, he should have replied, “I like you, Jerry. You’re my friend.”

  Love was not supposed to be in the algorithms. I was pretty damn sure he didn’t know what he was saying. But what was it that he meant to say…?

  Once more, I heard the door open. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Donna urgently gesturing to me. I wanted to continue this train of thought, yet since I didn’t know exactly what to say next, perhaps now was a good time to grab a Coke. “I like you, too, Samson,” I said as I stood up. “Let’s take a break. Code B.”

  “Code B understood,” Samson said, and there was another double-beep as he went off-line again. If I didn’t return in ten minutes to rescind the order, he would automatically come back online again, then seek out the nearest wall-socket and plug himself in for a recharge. Until then, he was an inert hunk of machinery.

  Right. An inert hunk of machinery who had just proclaimed his love for me.

  I found Phil in the observation booth, bent over one of the monitors as he studied the video replay of the session. He didn’t look at me as I came in, but moused the slidebar on the bottom of the screen to review my interview with Samson. Keith was seated in his chair on the other side of him; he glanced in my direction, then quickly looked away. I noticed the cordless phone near his left elbow; that explained how Phil had gotten down here so quickly. Keith, you prick; you’re always ready to crack jokes behind the boss’s back, but whenever you get a chance to suck up to him…

  “Why didn’t you let Keith shut down Samson?” Phil asked quietly, still gazing at the screen. At least he wasn’t stammering this time.

  “I wanted to make sure we didn’t lose anything from Samson’s memory.” I stepped aside to let Donna slide past me, but she remained behind me, standing in the open door of the darkened booth. “This was the second time today Samson has attacked someone, and I wanted to find out why.”

  Phil shook his head. “Sorry, Jerry, but that’s an unacceptable risk. If there’s something critically wrong with his conditioning protocols, we can’t let him stay active after an accident.” He turned to Keith. “Download everything from his buffer and give them to me, then erase his memory of this test.”

  “Hey, whoa, wait a minute! I just spent two hours in there with him! You can’t just erase everything because…!”

  That ticked him off. Phil slapped the desk as he rose to face me. “D-d-d-don’t t-t-tell me wh-whu-whu-what I ca-ca-ca-ca…”

  “Damn straight I can!” I snarled back. “That’s my conditioning routine you’re screwing with here, Phil, and this is the second time today you’ve told Keith to wipe the memory buffer!” I jabbed a finger at the motionless robot on the other side of the window. “And in case you didn’t notice, that friggin’ thing just said he loves me! Now there’s got to be a reason for that!”

  Phil stared at me in astonishment, and I can’t say I wasn’t rather amazed myself. In the four years that we had worked together, we had seldom raised our voices to one another. We weren’t great friends, but even after the stress of the last six months, it was hard for the two of us to get really mad at each other. Unlike, of course, his stormy relationship with Darth Veder…

  And it was then, deep within my brain, that a couple of synapses sparked in a way those two particular synapses had never fired before. Phil and Kathy…

  Okay, time out for a little soap opera. True Geek Romance, or perhaps Computer Wonks In Love. Either way, here it is:

  A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…okay, so it was about twelve years ago, just across the Charles River on the MIT campus…there were two post-grads working in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, both studying advanced AI as applied to robotics. A nice couple of kids in their late twenties; neither of them much to look at, and hardly the type you’d imagine prancing hand-in-hand through the lily fields, but hey, love isn’t only blind, but it’s also got a bizarre sense of humor. They found each other, they worked together for a time as colleagues, then close friends, then…well, you get the picture.

  But it didn’t take. That’s the problem with romances among highly intelligent people; they think too much about what they’re doing, instead of just letting their cojones go their own merry way. They were a mismatched couple, or at least so they told themselves, prone to argue about every little detail, whether it was about the theories of Norbert Wiener or what kind of pizza to order tonight. Late one evening, after the latest tiff, she stormed out of his Cambridge apartment, and he retaliated by throwing her books into the street, and that was pretty much the end of that. They both received their MIT doctorates only a few months later, and since each of them already had jobs awaiting them on opposite sides of the country, they left Massachusetts with scarcely a final goodbye.

  But every great affair has a touch of irony. A decade went by, during which time LEC decided to diversify into consumer robotics. Jim Lang hired corporate headhunters to recruit the best cybernetics talent available, and as fortuitous circumstances would have it, the two former lovers were lured back to Massachusetts. Imagine their surprise when they discovered that they were now working for the same company. Different divisions, perhaps, but the same company nonetheless.

  So now it’s twelve years later, and they were still trying to iron out their relationship. Only this time, they’d built robots which program themselves by observing human behavior and imitating it.

  “Keith, Donna,” I asked, “would you mind excusing us for a moment?”

  Keith
stared at me before he realized that I wanted him to leave, then he shrugged and rose from his chair. Donna gave me a quizzical look, but didn’t say anything as Keith closed the door behind them.

  Phil waited until we were alone before he spoke. “Whu-whu-whu-what d-d-d-do you w-w-wa-wa-want t-t-t-to…?”

  “Phil, sit down and count to ten.” He glared at me but took my advice anyway, taking the seat Keith had just vacated. While he was counting, I crept to the door, put my hand on the knob, waited a couple of seconds, then yanked it open. Keith stood just outside, pretending to scratch his nose. He mumbled something about getting a cup of coffee and scurried down the hall. I shut the door again just as Phil had reached ten. “Okay now?” I asked.

  “Sure.” He let out his breath. “All right, Jerry, what do you want to talk about?”

  “Okay, just between you and me…are you seeing Kathy again?” Phil’s mouth dropped open, and for a moment I thought he was going to start stammering again. I saw the denial coming, though, so I headed it off. “Look, everyone knows you two were once an item. Frankly, I don’t care, but if it makes any difference, I’m not going to tell Jim. Just to satisfy my curiosity, though…”

  “Ummm…yeah, we’ve started seeing each other again.” He seemed mortified by the admission. “But not on company time,” he quickly added. “We’ve only gone out a couple of times.”

  Somehow, that sounded like a lie. I didn’t keep track of Darth’s hours, but I knew for a fact that Phil practically lived at the lab, going so far as to keep a fresh change of clothes in his office closet and a toothbrush in his desk. “Sure, sure, I believe you. Just dinner and a movie now and then, right?”

  “Yeah, t-t-that’s all.” He nodded, perhaps a little too quickly…and that stutter of his was better than a polygraph. “P-p-please don’t let anyone know. If Jim fi-fi-fi-finds out w-w-we’re…”

  “I know, I know.” And that’s what bothered him the most, the chance that Jim Lang would discover that the leaders of his two rival tiger-teams were having an affair. For a chess player, that would be like finding out that the white queen and the black king were sneaking off the board to fool around. “Trust me, Slim Jim’s never going to learn about this…or at least from me, at any rate.”

  Phil nodded gratefully, then his face became suspicious. “So why do you want to know?”

  “Well…” I coughed in my hand. “You just said that you two weren’t seeing each other on company time…and really, I believe you, honest…but just for the sake of conjecture, if you were seeing each other here at the lab, umm…would you be doing it where Samson might be at the same time?”

  “B-b-buh-buh…” Phil stared at me as if I was his father and I had just asked if he knew how to put on a condom. And then his eyes involuntarily traveled toward the window.

  While we had been speaking, without either of us taking notice, Samson had automatically gone into recharge mode. The robot had walked to the nearest electrical outlet, withdrawn a power cable from his thorax, and inserted it into the wall socket. Since Samson now spent most of his downtime in the training suite, he knew exactly where all the outlets were located.

  It suddenly occurred to me that the outlets were all within line-of-sight of the suite’s bedroom. The one which all of us had used when we were too tired or busy to go home.

  And Samson, of course, knew how to change the sheets when asked to do so.

  When I looked back at Phil, I saw that he was staring straight at me. Nothing further needed to be said: he knew that I knew, and I knew that he knew that I knew. That’s another thing about highly intelligent people; no matter how smart they may be, most of them have a hard time lying with a straight face.

  Phil didn’t say anything. He rotated the chair to the console, where he found a spare disk, slapped it into the drive, and tapped a couple of commands into the keyboard. “Sorry you had to lose this afternoon’s session,” he said quietly, not looking back at me as Samson’s memory buffer downloaded onto the disk, “but I think we’ve got a flaw in the conditioning module…”

  “Aw, c’mon! He’s just confused. He sees you and Kathy in there…” I saw the angry look on his face reflected in the window, but I didn’t stop myself “…and then he sees you two fighting. No wonder his conditioning is…”

  “That’s enough!” He ejected the disk from the drive and stood up quickly, shoving the disk in his trouser pocket without bothering to first put it in its case. “Th-th-this is none of your buh-buh-business, and I-I-I’d ap-ap-appreciate it if y-y-you’d k-k-k-kindly stay out of it. Samson needs to b-b-be reprogrammed. Th-th-th-that’s all.”

  No argument either way. Phil’s relationship with Kathy wasn’t any of my business, and there was no doubt that Samson conditioning module needed drastic remodification. Like it or not, our team had designed a third-generation robot which took all the wrong cues from human behavior. Kathy and Phil could fight out their problems on their own, but it wasn’t right to send a robot to market whose training inadvertently reflected their love-hate relationship.

  “Sure, Phil,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

  Still not looking directly at me, Phil nodded as he headed for the door. “Th-th-that’s the end of t-t-t-today’s exercise,” he said quietly. “I-I-I’ll work on S-s-s-samson tonight, have it r-r-ready for t-t-tomorrow’s test with D-d-d-d-d…”

  “Sure you want to do that?” Tomorrow morning we had another test scheduled with D-team. Same routine as before: Samson comes out of the woods, offers an apple to Delilah, bows to her, offers his hand and asks if she wants him to join her on the bench. Both teams had agreed this as a test of whether the two robots could work in unison without operator intervention. “Maybe we should ask for a delay.”

  Phil appeared to think about it for a moment, then he shook his head. “No,” he said at last. “We’ll do the test tomorrow. Between now and then, don’t touch Samson. Just let me take care of this, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, and he nodded and let himself out of the booth. It wasn’t until long after he had closed the door behind him that I realized he had stopped stuttering.

  By this time, though, I had taken a seat at the console and begun doing a little work of my own.

  The two R&D programs were supposed to be isolated from one another, but the seal wasn’t airtight. Kathy and Phil weren’t the only couple who were keeping company when no one was watching; there was a cutie on Delilah Team with whom I was cooping from time to time, sometimes sleeping over at her apartment and vice-versa. What she didn’t know, though, was that I had learned her password. It was a sort-of-accidental discovery; one time we were lounging in bed together, she took a few minutes to check her company email on TV, so I was able to see her password when she entered it. I had never abused that knowledge, but there’s always a first time for everything, so it was with no small amount of guilt that I used my occasional girlfriend’s password to gain access to D-Team’s files.

  It took a couple of hours of rummaging, but after a while I managed to locate a batch of reports regarding Delilah’s trial runs. I wasn’t surprised to discover that D-team had their own problems with their robot. Like Samson, Delilah sometimes behaved aggressively when the circumstances called for her to be friendly. The fault obviously lay in the conditioning module, yet no one—at least, not those who had written the reports; I couldn’t find any from Kathy Veder—had been able to figure out what was providing negative stimuli to the robot.

  But I knew. Delilah was being also being trained in a suite much like Samson’s. It didn’t take a rocket scientist, let alone a cyberneticist, to realize that this suite was sometimes being used by Drs. Veder and Burton for certain extracurricular activities…with Delilah in the same room, watching the entire time, absorbing everything. Learning all the wrong lessons about the human condition.

  It could be argued either way whether Samson and Delilah truly had any emotions of their own. Were they merely imitating Phil and Kathy, or had they developed inner lives, a
s incredible as that may seem? Regardless of the explanation, though, their environment was causing them to sometimes behave in what appeared to be an irrational manner.

  Yet love—even agape, its highest expression—isn’t rational. It cannot be reduced to bar-graphs and lines of source code; once you get past pheromones, body language and casual eye-contact, there is no reason for it to happen, save for the biological imperatives to procreate, maintain tribal associations, or remain close to one’s family. But love does nonetheless persist, and sometimes under the strangest of circumstances.

  Were Samson and Delilah in love? Probably not; they were robots, machines with none of the beforementioned hangups. You could spend countless man-hours of R&D trying to resolve that question. Yet the only people who had the answer were their own creators…and they had a hard enough time researching and developing their own feelings toward each other.

  When I arrived the trailer the following morning, the rest of Samson Team was already getting ready for the test. Phil, however, was nowhere to be found, and neither was Samson. I paged him but he didn’t return the call, and while Bob was setting up his camera and Keith was opening his first bag of Fritos for the day, Kathy Veder appeared in the atrium, walking Delilah ahead of her.

  Delilah was dressed in the same ankle-length, high-collared gown she had worn the day before. Once again, I wondered what purpose it served to put clothes on a robot. It didn’t seem to impede her movements—indeed, the dress had been cut so that it allowed her double-jointed arms and legs to move more freely—yet it was unnecessary to assign a gender-role to a machine. On the other hand, perhaps Darth was attempting to humanize her creation; if that was the case, it might be a good marketing strategy, yet rather futile since Delilah’s spherical, nearly featureless head belied the femininity of her outfit.

  Kathy stopped next to the bench, turning her back to us as she waited for Delilah catch up. Donna hadn’t switched on the shotgun mike, so we couldn’t hear the instructions Kathy gave the ’bot. She pointed to the bench, and Delilah walked over to it, her feet whisking beneath the hem of her dress, until she turned and daintily sat down, once again folding her silver hands in her lap. Kathy bent over Delilah and closely examined a panel in the side of her slender cylindrical neck. I glanced at the clock. We were already running fifteen minutes late…