Robot Awareness: The Inner Circle

by B. C. Kowalski

  Joey frowned at one particular circuit in the positron network. He held a circuit tester, and started poking at the circuit. The robot's hand started slowly moving to the ROU at its side. Its power hadn't come close to returning, and its movements would be slow for another 10 minutes.

  "I know what I can do— this should be flipped," Joey said, grabbing in the box for a micro-tipped soldering iron. The robot's hand inched toward its weapon.

  Joey ran the soldering iron on the circuit, severing a couple of connections and forming new ones. He routed a small device into the circuit, following a similar pattern he'd seen in other robots he'd worked on with Mr. Twitters.

  "There!" He said, soldering the final connection. Joey snapped the panel shut and looked at the robot, pleased with himself. The robot's arm relaxed at its side, its LED light blinking lightly.

  ***

  Isellia slipped out of the doorway, cautiously looking around to make sure they hadn't left someone to stand guard. She assumed they just needed her out of the way for a few hours, and tying her up was just a means of buying that time. They'd probably figured she would eventually work her way out of them, or that someone would find her. She doubted they had really intended to tell someone about her, as they said they would. Either way, they figured, they would be long gone and Isellia would no longer be a threat.

  But it had only taken her about 20 minutes to cut herself loose, her wrist bloody with the scraping against the sharp metal edge of the chair's leg. She used the fabric strips to bind her wrists to stop the bleeding.

  She could have just walked away at this point. Gone back to her ship, gathered her things, and tried to figure out what the next steps of her life would be. But for the time being, it wouldn't be racing. Her sponsors were gone, she had no money for the next race, or the entry fee, or all the maintenance involved. Not to mention things such as food. She was nearly broke.

  Besides, there was something about Porter. Isellia didn't meet many trustworthy people in her time racing XR, so she'd seen something in Porter that struck her as different from the average smuggler, and smugglers were the only likely people to need an XR pilot for anything. He struck her as an odd combination of wise and naive, and those scum were about to take advantage of that naivete.

  Her next task was to find out where the ambush would be.

  ***

  Mr. Twitters heard the sound of a drill as he opened the door to the workshop, where instead he was expecting silence. He paused a moment, his bushy white eyebrow lifting up in surprise. He quietly shut the door behind him. The only other person who ever came here was Joey, and never at this early morning hour.

  Mr. Twitters stepped silently, tip-toeing his way to a table on the side of the hallway. He reached under the table, feeling for a secret compartment. His fingers wandered over a small latch, which he unlocked, pulling out an ROU. He walked toward the hallway, weapon in hand and ready to use.

  He kept the ROU pointed toward the ground about 10 feet ahead of him as he walked through the hallway, creeping slowly and silently into the main workshop room. He was ready to send a couple of laser blasts at whoever this intruder was, though he hoped it wouldn't be necessary.

  He paused at the doorway, then quickly jumped through the door jam, pointing the ROU at where he'd heard the noise. His eyes went wide as he realized his mistake. He quickly pocketed the ROU in the folds of his cardigan before Joey turned around at the noise.

  "Oh, hiya Mr. Twitters!" Joey said. "Look, I found a robot!"

  "So you did, young man," Mr. Twitters said, trying to ease his racing heartbeat. "Where did you happen upon such a thing?"

  Joey had already turned back to the robot, drilling in another spot, so Mr. Twitters took the opportunity to put the ROU inside a tool cabinet.

  "In the desert," Joey said as a matter of fact, as if one ordinarily found robots in such a place.

  "Well then —" Mr. Twitters stopped in his tracks as he got a closer look at the robot.

  "Mr. Twitters?" Joey asked, seeing the stricken look on Mr. Twitters face, but not knowing how to interpret it. "Did I do something wrong?"

  Mr. Twitters stared at his creation, returned to haunt him even in this remote hermitage. He had been kidding himself all this time, Twitters realized. As if he could escape his past just by hiding out in some workshop in the middle of the desert and mentoring some kid.

  "No Joey," Twitters said. "You didn't do anything wrong."

  Twitters looked over the robot. It brought on memories he'd almost completely pushed aside.

  "Me, on the other hand ..."

  ***

  The old man looked up as Isellia walked through his doors, with the confidence as if she owned the place. He couldn't help but smile; there was something he liked about the plucky young pilot. He was sad to see what had happened to her in the last race.

  "Mac, how're ya!" she said, raising her hand.

  "Hey Isellia, what's going on," Mac said, giving her a nod as he scanned the monitor in front of him. The entire room was covered in screens, and tables lined the middle where anything on a screen could be pulled up on a holo. "What brings you by? Escaping the press?"

  Isellia waved him off. "I already gave them the shake. I need something."

  "Me too," Mac sighed. "A hot bath and a foot massage." Mac guffawed at his own joke. Isellia rolled her eyes, though she couldn't help but get a kick out of the old man.

  "Well, good luck with that. I need something on your monitors, smart ass."

  "Now now, don't get lippy, young lady," Mac said. His grizzly, lanky frame lay back into the chair as he scanned different areas of the airspace surrounding the port town. It was Mac's job to monitor the flow of ships into and out of the port, which made him exactly the person she needed. "That's no way to ask for a favor."

  "You'll give me a favor, ‘cause I'm cute!" Isellia joked, smiling in an unnaturally sweet manner.

  Mac finally turned toward away from his screens to face Isellia completely. "You got me there, sugar. I got a soft spot for you, I admit."

  "Pervert."

  "Not like that. Like a grandpa and granddaughter more like. Jeezus, Isellia. It's a good thing you're cute, cause you're horrible at flattery."

  "My old man was worse."

  "Yeah, well ain't that the truth. Guy would barely say a word to me. Then after he passed, the things he said in his will about me. Guess he didn't like to show that side of himself much, huh?"

  "He really liked you."

  "Too bad I had to find that out after the fact, eh?" Mac settled back in his chair. "Well, men don't talk like that, I guess. Well, what do you actually want, anyway? And what's with your wrist?"

  Isellia looked down at both wrists, realizing the wrappings did a poor job covering the bloody spot. "Um, don't worry about that. I need you to pull up a flight plan for me."

  "You got authorization for that ship?"

  "No I don't have authorization for that ship! I've got you!"

  "Isellia, you know I can't —"

  "Yes you can! Mac, I need this."

  "Why?"

  "I can't tell you. Just, I need this, OK? Since I can't be an XR pilot any more... it's for a job I need to get."

  Mac looked at her, heard the desperation in her voice. He thought about Wallace, and Isellia had a face too cute to say no to. He never would have said it out loud, but she melted his old heart. With no kids of his own, he'd somewhat adopted Isellia, in an emotional sense.

  "OK, fine. Just make this count, ‘cause I could lose my job for this. And you didn't get this info from me, understand? ... Now, what's the call number?"

  Isellia smiled.

  ***

  It took her the better part of two hours to get the guns hooked up to her XR. It really was a two-man job, but Isellia had figured out a workaround so she could do it on her own. She had left the main assembly for the gun attached to the wings, just removing the heavy barrels to cut on weight, and because it was required by circuit bylaws. They
were heavy, and she nearly dropped one as she tried to lock it into place.

  Now she knew exactly where Porter's ship was going, and had a pretty good idea where the ambush would be. As she locked the second barrel in place with a grunt, she thought about the looks on those scumbags' faces when she showed up first.

  ***

  "You know this robot?" Joey asked. He looked at Mr. Twitters with awe, as he often did whenever the old man shared with him any robotics knowledge. Twitters, to Joey, was the most interesting person on the colony. Joey hung on his every word.

  "Yes, it's a very special robot, Joey. We have to treat it with caution."

  "OK," he said, polishing its chest plate with a rag. "What's so special about it?"

  Mr. Twitters looked at him, wondering how much he should tell the boy. "Well, Joey, it's one of the original 108. Do you know about them?"

  "The 108," Joey repeated, looking at the robot as if he'd just realized it was made of precious, delicate metals. He stopped polishing it a moment. "We heard about them in school. But they're supposed to be all gone."

  "Supposed to be," Twitters said.

  "Weren't they made by a mad scientist or something? Someone crazy or like a murderer or something?"

  Mr. Twitters laughed. "Well, I doubt that's the case."

  "But they said in school ..." Joey said, frowning.

  "So they did," Mr. Twitters chuckled. "Well, sometimes what you read in history books isn't always the 100 percent truth."

  "But why would they lie?"

  "The book's authors? They're not lying, necessarily. They just might not know the whole truth.

  "I just so happened to have known the creator of those robots," Mr. Twitters continued. "Of this robot, in fact."

  Joey looked up at Mr. Twitters with even more newfound awe. "You did?"

  "Yes, I did Joey."

  "And he wasn't some crazy mad scientist guy?"

  Mr. Twitters chuckled. "No, I wouldn't say that he was. Just a young man with a passion for robotics. Who cared about the robots. Who wanted to create something more than just a tool for human use. He wanted robots to be a new form of life."

  "How d'ya mean?"

  "Well, Joey, he wanted robots to be able to develop a life of their own. A consciousness. Sentience. And yet, they would have to develop it on their own."

  "What d'ya mean by that?"

  "You can't program consciousness. Intelligence. You can only program the facsimile of those things. You’re feeding it symbols, it’s taking those symbols and extracting from its data sets, and spitting back a response. It might seem like intelligence, but it's not. The robot in this case doesn't understand anything about what it's actually saying."

  Joey looked at Twitters in a way that told the old man he understood little of what he said.

  "So, let's say I gave you a book that allowed you to look up any Sasugan word — you know Sasuga? — and then I gave you some questions in Saugan. You could look up the Sasugan words, interpret what it says, then spit back an answer also encoded in Sasuga. Yes?"

  "I guess so," Joey nodded.

  "So you could do that. But do you understand Sasugan? Do the Sasugan words have any actual meaning to you? They wouldn't. They would just be symbols you're interpreting. You wouldn't have the context to understand the language in any meaningful way."

  "So this robot knows Sasugan?"

  "Assuming you mean metaphorically, yes. Or at least it's capable of doing so, if it reaches that point. This robot was made to do more than simply interpret the Sasugan. It's made to actually learn the Sasugan, to understand its history and how it informs the language, and to understand the meaning of what it's saying. Eventually."

  "But didn't they go crazy and kill people? Was that wrong in my books, too?"

  Mr. Twitters sighed. He'd been growing excited and animated. Talking about robots made him feel like he was that 20-something, hungry scientist again. Joey made him remember the consequence of his youthful ambition. "No, that was true, young man. People didn't take to it well, these robots acting like people. Really thinking? They feared them. Eventually the robots lived up to the fears."

  "So it was the people's fault?"

  Mr. Twitters thought about this for a moment. "I don't know if there needs to be a fault, Joey. People just weren't ready for a robot they had to treat like they would a human. It was a failed experiment. It's what happens when you think about what you can do, versus what you should do."

  "Whatever happened to that guy who built this robot?" Joey asked, looking over one of the robot's circuits.

  "He's been gone a long time, young man," Mr. Twitters said, staring at the robot. "A long time."

  ***

  "How are you settling in?" Porter asked Axel, who hunched over some unseen object on his bunk. He looked up in surprise, his blonde locks cascading around his head.

  "Good, good!" he said enthusiastically, turning to face Porter. He held a small locket in his hand.

  "I think we're about to leave orbit, hit that small fueling station before heading out. Then we got a job takes us to Sasuga. Shouldn't be any trouble, but you never know."

  "If you got any other duties need doing, let me know, man," Axel said, running his fingers through his hair. "Otherwise, I'll be here."

  "If I think of anything, I'll let you know. Captain sounds like he's more than happy to just have a pilot on board case there's any pirate trouble."

  "Smart man," Axel said.

  "I'll introduce you to him after we're finished with Sasuga. He's gonna be a little busy until then."

  "Yeah, no problem, man. So, how long until we get to Sasuga? And, how long til that fueling station? Just curious."

  "Should be at the fueling station in about 10 minutes. Sound good?"

  "Oh yeah man, all good. I'll just be sitting here anyway, man. Just curious is all."

  "OK. I'll let you know when we get to Sasuga. In the meantime, keep your XR ready to go."

  "Should be tip top, fueled and ready to fly!"

  Porter stopped at the door. "Let's hope we don't need it."

  A few moments after Porter had left, Axel put down the locket and grabbed his comm device. "Hey, it's Axel. About 10 minutes they'll be at the fueling station. That's our mark."

  "Have your ship ready," the reply from the man with the scar came over crackly but legible.

  "I will. They'll think I'm launching to protect them. Ha! Not sure what they're carrying but it sounds like a score. It's going to Sasuga. Gotta be something good."

  "Excellent! Be ready."

  Axel shut off the comm device.

  ***

  "OK, Mr. Twitters," Joey called across the workshop. "I'm going to turn him on now!"

  "It's not a 'he,'" Mr. Twitter said, with a tone that suggested he didn't think Joey would listen anyway.

  Joey laughed. "Oh yeah, I forgot."

  "Did you put the protocols in place like I asked you to?" Mr. Twitters called out in the same doubtful tone.

  "Uh-huh," Joey said, but he was barely paying attention to Mr. Twitters. He'd spent the night soldering any circuits that needed repairs, polishing away any rust and doing anything else his diagnostic tools could find to make sure the robot was in great shape. "What if it was a girl robot?"

  "There are no boy or girl robots," Mr. Twitters said, from his bench.

  "Yeah," Joey said. His attention was already lost as he looked the robot up and down again, wondering if he'd missed anything. He had checked all the circuits, as Mr. Twitters had taught him, repaired any that were damaged. A quick scan with the diagnostic machine checked out perfectly. Everything seemed to be in order.

  Mr. Twitters left the work bench, walking slowly, his flannel shirt stuffed into his cargo pants. He kept a pencil behind his ear, a memento passed down from his grandfather. He was childless, and he thought he might one day give the antique pencil to Joey.

  "All right, let's see what you've got here," Mr. Twitters took the pad from Joey. He looked throu
gh the scans, comparing the before and after diagnostics screenshots. A smile found his face as he neared the end, and tears formed in his eyes. Joey had done everything perfectly. He'd performed all the tasks Mr. Twitters had asked, and even a few things he'd thought of on his own. Mr. Twitters imagined this must be what the pride of watching your offspring succeed.

  He handed the pad back to Joey with a smile.

  "Not bad, young man." Joey smiled. "Well, I suppose we should turn the little feller on, yes?"

  Joey could hardly contain his excitement.

  ***

  All was silent in the cockpit of Isellia's XR — the hum of the ship's idling engines became so much background noise as she leaned back in the cockpit seat, scanning the space where she was sure the ambush would occur. Sitting still wasn't one of her strong suits, and she fidgeted with the steering column, pulled at a strap that hung down from the cockpit, changed her seating position — anything she could do besides sitting perfectly still and waiting.

  Soon enough something caught her interest. Porter's ship — she'd studied it from multiple angles so she'd remember exactly what it looked like, distinguishing Porter's dull cargo ship from all the other dull cargo ships — de-powered as it approached the nebula field. The flight plan she'd managed to get for Porter's ship showed it entering the refueling station before heading to Sasuga. To get the fueling station, one had to navigate the nebula field, an area of space of poor visibility that ensured ships had to slow down in order to safely traverse.

  It would be the perfect pinch point for an ambush. It's a place Isellia would have chosen, were she the ambusher.

  As she had predicted, a pair of XRs pulled out of a cloud, pirate colors painted onto the hull. Isellia could tell the ruse before it even played out: That scoundrel Porter had hired would fly his XR out to meet the threat, make an about face and would suddenly be one of the attackers. They'd be forced to surrender the ship and, if they were lucky, the crew would be dropped off on some pre-space-flight world. If they were lucky.