Asimov’s Future History Volume 6

by Isaac Asimov

  The next morning, Ariel pointed out the table console to Derec in case he had a use for it. He really didn’t, finding that he was able to contact any branch of the computer system on the planet with his mind.

  This morning he started with the one in Dr. Avery’s kitchen.

  The entire group, including Mandelbrot, sat at the long table with a real breakfast served by two kitchen robots. It included fresh produce and dishes processed from produce instead of from limited nutrient tanks. Derec and Ariel shared their separate adventures with everyone, then Wolruf and Jeff gave their stories. Since Mandelbrot had been shut down for much of the time they had been separated, he had little to tell.

  When the anecdotes had ended, Derec sat at the head of the table in an upbeat mood, thinking over his new responsibilities.

  “I guess I can have the central computer worry about the particulars of what I have to do,” he mused. “If I instruct the central computer to return all the robots to their normal duties, it will do all the organization itself.”

  “But you can really control it with your mind?” Ariel asked. “And you can program robots mentally, too?”

  “Apparently I can. I’m still getting used to the idea myself.”

  “To all your human attributes,” said Mandelbrot, “you have now added some of the advantages of a robot.”

  Jeff laughed. “Without the liabilities, if you know what I mean.” He winked.

  While the others laughed, Derec was aware of a message in his mind from the central computer, answering a question he had posed.

  “NO EVIDENCE OF DR. AVERY ON THE PLANET HAS BEEN REPORTED,” said the central computer.

  If Dr. Avery was here at all, Derec realized, he now had all the disadvantages they had had while on the run from him. They now had all the resources he had used. Even more, considering that they were not burdened by insanity.

  Considering Dr. Avery’s paranoia, Derec felt certain that he had left the planet. Maybe he had gone home to Aurora. Perhaps he had returned to his apartment on Earth, or had other hideaways in reserve, as well.

  “Thank ‘u,” said Wolruf. “Good brreakfasst. Could sleep morr now.”

  “I believe we can locate comfortable sleeping rooms here,” said Mandelbrot. “The luxury of this room and this meal imply similar luxury elsewhere in this residence.”

  “I’ll find a way to shut down the booby-traps and riddles,” said Derec, grinning at Ariel.

  She laughed. “It’s hard to believe. For the first time, Robot City will be at peace, running smoothly, and no longer full of mystery.”

  “And you have plenty of Keys to Perihelion with which to travel,” said Mandelbrot. “Perhaps Wolruf can be sent home.”

  She shrugged her caninoid shoulders. “Resst first.”

  “I wonder what kind of shape the ship is in,” said Jeff. “I only rented it.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Derec. “I’ll have the Minneapolis fully repaired, cleaned, polished, and outfitted for you. We’re more than square for any debt you felt you owed us. But you’re welcome to stay as long as you want.”

  “Thanks,” said Jeff. He shook his head, grinning. “Robot City. It’s never been a dull town.”

  When everyone had finished breakfast, Jeff and Wolruf excused themselves to accompany Mandelbrot in further exploration of Dr. Avery’s immense quarters.

  Later, after function robots had cleared the table and Derec and Ariel were alone in the great hall, he stood gazing into the fire that continued to blaze. He still felt melancholy.

  “Is something wrong?” Ariel asked quietly.

  “Oh... I was just thinking about Dr. Avery. How his wonderful plans got all twisted. And how after researching cultures with Professor Leong and all, he just seemed to drop that subject after a certain point. He is obviously a brilliant man, yet he threw so much away.” He looked up at her. “I found out something, too.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure we stopped him in time after all. From what I can get out of the central computer, I think some of the robots may have launched themselves from their assembly points before I cancelled that instruction.”

  Ariel drew in a quick breath. “If that’s true, then they will be building more Robot Cities, just as Dr. Avery wanted. And who knows what precise orders he gave them?”

  “I may be able to find that out in the computer,” said Derec. “Maybe I can even call them back somehow; I won’t know till I spend some time on it. But there’s something else.”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “I have my identity back, but... I still have amnesia. I don’t have all my memory back.” He turned to look at her. “Finding my father wasn’t exactly constructive.”

  “Maybe you could... oh, I don’t know. Perhaps locating your mother would help. Or some of the Avery robots might know of a way to help. Just think how much help you might get from Robot City and even the robots that may have left.”

  Derec nodded. “I haven’t given up. Don’t worry about that.” He grinned. “That isn’t me. And from what I’ve seen, it isn’t you, either.”

  “It certainly isn’t... David.”

  Ariel laughed, looked into his eyes, and tossed her hair back. On an impulse, he slid his arms around her waist and drew her close. Then he kissed her waiting lips and felt her arms tighten around his neck.

  Changeling

  3605 A.D.

  Chapter 1

  BIRTH

  “I FEEL UNEASY about this, Dr. Anastasi.”

  Janet Anastasi glanced up with a half-smile. She brushed blond hair back from bright, hazel eyes cupped in smile lines. “And just how does a robot feel ‘uneasy,’ Basalom?” she asked with a laugh.

  Basalom’s eyes blinked, a shutter membrane flickering momentarily over the optical circuits. Janet had deliberately built in that random quirk. She built idiosyncrasies into all her robots-eccentricities of speech, of mannerisms. The foibles seemed to make Basalom and the rest less mechanically predictable. To her, they lent the robots individual personalities they otherwise lacked.

  “The term is simply an approximation, Doctor.”

  “Hmm.” She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and wiped it on the leg of her pants. “Give me a hand with this, will you, my friend?”

  The two were in the cargo hold of a small ship. A viewscreen on one wall showed the mottled blue-and-white curve of the planet they were orbiting. Twin moons peered over the shoulder of the world, and the land mass directly below them was green with foliage. It seemed a pastoral land from this distance, no matter what the reality might actually be. Janet knew that the atmosphere of the world was within terran norms, that the earth was fertile, and that there was life, though without any signs of technology: the ship’s instruments had told her that much. The world, whatever the inhabitants might call it, fit her needs. Beyond that, she didn’t care.

  Her husband of many years ago, Wendell Avery, had said during their breakup that she didn’t care about anything made of simple flesh — not him, not their son. “You’re afraid to love something that might love you back,” he’d raged.

  “Which makes us exactly the same, doesn’t it?” she’d shouted back at him. “Or can’t the genius admit that he has faults? Maybe it’s just because you don’t like the fact that I’m the one who’s considered the robotic expert? That’s it, isn’t it, Wendell? You can’t love anyone else because your own self-worship takes up all the space in your heart.”

  His remark had made her furious at the time, but time had softened the edges of her anger. Avery might be a conceited, egocentric ass, but there had been some truth in what he’d said. She’d looked in that mirror too often and seen herself backing away from contact with other people to be with her robots. Surely she’d been content here on this ship for the last few years, with only Basalom and a few other robots for company.

  Avery she missed not at all; her son sometimes she missed terribly. Basalom and the others had become her su
rrogate children.

  “Gently,” she cautioned Basalom. A spheroid of silvery-gray metal approximately two meters in diameter sat on the workbench before her, its gleaming surface composed of tiny dodecahedral segments. She’d just finished placing the delicate, platinum-iridium sponge of a positronic brain into a casing within the lumpy sphere. Now Basalom draped the sticky lace of the neural connections over the brain and sealed the top half of the casing. The geometric segments molded together seamlessly.

  “You can put it in the probe,” Janet told the robot, then added: “What’s this about being uneasy?”

  “You have built me very well, Doctor; that is the only reason I sense anything at all. I am aware of a millisecond pause in my positronic relays due to possible First Law conflicts,” Basalom replied as he carefully lifted the sphere and moved it to the launching tube. “While there is no imminent danger of lock-up, nor is this sufficient to cause any danger of malfunction or loss of effectiveness, it’s my understanding that humans feel a similar effect when presented with an action that presents a moral conflict. Thus, my use of the human term.”

  Janet grinned, deepening the lines netting her eyes. “Longwinded, but logical enough, I suppose.”

  Basalom blinked again. “Brevity is more desired than accuracy when speaking of human emotions?”

  That elicited a quick laugh. “Sometimes, Basalom. Sometimes. It’s a judgment call, I’m afraid. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you say so long as you just talk.”

  “I am not a good judge when it comes to human emotions, Doctor.”

  “Which puts you in company with most of us, I’m afraid.” Janet clamped the seals on the probe’s surface and patted it affectionately. LEDs glowed emerald on the launching tube’s panel as she closed the access.

  “What does a human being do when he or she is uneasy, Doctor Anastasi?”

  Janet shrugged, stepping back. “It depends. If you believe in something, you go ahead with it. You trust your judgment and ignore the feeling. If you never have any doubts, you’re either mad or not thinking things through.”

  “Then you have reservations about your experiment as well, but you will still launch the probe.”

  “Yes,” she answered. “If people were so paralyzed by doubt that they never did anything without being certain of the outcome, there’d never be children, after all.”

  As Janet watched, Basalom seemed to ponder that. The robot moved a step closer to the controls for the launching tube; its hand twitched — another idiosyncrasy. The robot seemed to be on the verge of wanting to say more. The glimmer of a thought struck her. “Basalom?”

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “Would you care to launch this probe?”

  Blink. Twitch. For a moment, the robot didn’t move. Janet thought perhaps it would not, then the hand reached out and touched the contact. “Thank you, Doctor,” Basalom said, and pressed.

  Serried lights flashed; there was a chuff of escaping air, and the probe was flung into the airless void beyond. Basalom turned to watch it on the viewscreen; Janet watched him.

  “You never said what your reservations were exactly, Basalom,” she noted.

  “These new robots — with your programming, so much is left for them to decide. Yes, the Three Laws are imbedded in the positronic matrix, but you have given them no definition of ‘human.” ‘

  “You wonder what will happen?”

  “If they one day encounter human beings, will they recognize them? Will they respond as they are supposed to respond?”

  Janet shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s the beauty of it, Basalom. I don’t know.”

  “If you say so, Doctor. But I don’t understand that concept.”

  “They’re seeds. Formless, waiting seeds coded only with the laws. They don’t even know they’re robots. I’m curious to see what they grow up to be, my friend.”

  Janet turned and watched the hurtling probe wink in sunlight as it tumbled away from the ship. It dwindled as it fell into the embrace of the world’s gravity and was finally lost in atmospheric glare. Janet sighed.

  “This one’s planted,” she said. She took a deep breath. “Now let’s get out of here,” she said.

  Chapter 2

  THE DOPPLEGANGER

  THE PROBE LAY encased in mud halfway down a hillside. The once-silvery sides were battered and scorched from the long fall through the atmosphere; drying streamers of black earth coated the dented sides. Ghostly heat waves shimmered, and the metallic hull ticked as it cooled and contracted. The echoes of its landing reverberated for a long time among the hills.

  Inside the abused shell, timed relays opened and fed power to the positronic circuitry of the robot nestled in its protective cradle. The neophyte mind found itself in total darkness. Had it been a living creature, its birth instincts would have taken over like a sea turtle burrowing from the wet sand to find the shimmering sea. The robot had its own instinct-analogue — the Three Laws of Robotics. Knowledge of these basic rules flooded the robot’s brightening awareness.

  First Law: A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not interfere with the First or Second Laws.

  This was the manner in which most of known human space defined the Laws. Any schoolchild of Aurora or Earth or Solaris could have recited them by rote. But to the fledgling, there was one important, essential difference. To the fledgling, there were no words involved, only deep, core compulsions. The fledgling had no sense that it had been built or that it was merely a constructed machine.

  It didn’t think of itself as a robot.

  It only knew that it had certain instructions it must obey.

  As survival instincts, the Laws were enough to spark a response. Second Law governed the fledgling’s first reactions, enhanced by Third Law resonance. There were imperious voices in its mind: inbuilt programming, speaking a language it knew instinctively. The robot followed the instructions given it, and more circuits opened.

  An opening appeared in the probe’s hull, and the fledgling allowed itself to rollout. The skin of its body shimmered, the myriad dodecahedral segments flexing and shifting as it stretched like warm putty. The robot extruded pseudopods to stabilize the round body. Sensory input was taken in through the skin: optical, auditory, tactile, scent. At the same time, a larger store of basic files was released into the receptive mind: a heavily edited encyclopedia of carefully chosen knowledge. It paused, searching the programming as it absorbed impressions of its surroundings.

  A voice whispered.

  Move away from the landing site. Beings may come to investigate; they may be aggressive and dangerous. Hide.

  Which left the problem: how to move? The positronic brain searched the files and found an answer. The skin molded itself further, the pseudopods becoming muscular legs. The robot scuttled away quickly, moving uphill to a stand of coarse, tall grass. Its round body flattened, the legs retracted; it hunkered down, patient.

  As it waited, it inventoried itself dispassionately. The Three Laws overlaid everything else in its mind, but there was more. Most of its programming, and indeed this very self-evaluation, seemed to be manifestations of the Third Law. It must protect its own existence; to survive, it must learn as much as possible.

  Underneath the Laws was the layer of initial programming, most of which the fledgling had already followed in the first few minutes of life. Beneath that was a substrate of complex if/then branches. The robot ignored most of those — they all fed back into the Laws in any case.

  Only one set of impulses was immediately needed, and that flowed directly from the Laws. A robot may not harm a human being. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, the Laws insisted. But what was a human being?

  The programmi
ng gave an answer, not a definition but a description: A human being is an intelligent lifeform. So the fledgling, not knowing what a “robot” was other than a term that applied to itself, knew it had to find human beings, to protect and serve them. It had to search out an intelligent lifeform.

  It began to formulate a strategy.

  The fledgling didn’t move; it continued to wait. Intelligence of necessity implied curiosity. An intelligent lifeform in the immediate area would have seen the fiery, noisy descent. It would come to investigate the fall. If no life that met the criterion arrived, then the fledgling would look elsewhere.

  The area in which the probe had landed was heavily forested. Tightly packed trees with large, blue-green fronds huddled nearby and surrounded the grassy, hillside meadow. The area was alive with sound now, and the robot could see movement in the twilight under the swaying canopy of leaves. The air was temperate and fragrant with damp earth; the sound of running water trilled not far away. This was a good place, the robot decided. Human beings — whatever they might be — would probably find this location pleasant. Had they come here, they might well have stayed.

  Afternoon faded to evening. The robot saw several creatures on the hillside, but none displayed any undue interest in the pod. Once, something with a thin, furred body approached. On muscular hind legs, it stretched out a long, four-fingered hand to touch the pod, and the robot saw a marsupial pouch on its stomach. Though the versatile hand made the robot watch closely, the creature did nothing to reveal more than animal intelligence. It wore no clothing, had no tools, and the robot’s sensitive hearing recorded only meaningless grunts from the beast. The marsupial glanced around with wide, scarlet-pupiled eyes, nostril slits flapping on its wide, flat head. Then it went back down on all fours and bounded off. The fledgling decided not to follow. Not yet.