Asimov’s Future History Volume 12

by Isaac Asimov

  Ever since the long-forgotten day when true robots had first been invented, every robot ever built had been given a positronic brain. All the endless millions and billions of robots made in all those thousands of years had relied upon the same basic technology. Nothing else would ever do. The positronic brain quite literally defined the robot. No one would consider any mechanical being to be a robot unless it had a positronic brain–and, contrariwise, anything that contained a positronic brain was considered to be a robot. The two were seen as inseparable. Robots were trusted because they had positronic brains, and positronic brains were trusted because they went into robots. Trust in robots and in positronic brains were articles of faith.

  The Three Laws were at the base of that faith. Positronic brains–and thus robots built with such brains–had the Three Laws built into them. More than built in: They had the Laws woven into them. Microcopies of the Laws were everywhere inside a positronic brain, strewn across every pathway, so that every action, every thought, every external event or internal calculation moved down pathways shaped and built by the Laws.

  Every design formula for the positronic brain, every testing system, every manufacturing process, was built with the Three Laws in mind. In short, the positronic brain was inseparable from the Three Laws–and therein lay the problem.

  Fredda Leving had once calculated that thirty percent of the volume of the average positronic brain was given over to pathing linked to the Three Laws, with roughly a hundred million microcopies of the Laws embedded in the structure of the average positronic brain, before any programming at all was done. As roughly thirty percent of positronic programming was also given over to the Three Laws, the case could be made that every one of those hundred million microcopies was completely superfluous. Fredda’s rough estimate was that fifty percent of the average robot’s nonconscious and preconscious autonomous processing dealt with the Laws and their application.

  The needless, excessive, and redundant Three-Law processing resulted in a positronic brain that was hopelessly cluttered up with nonproductive processing and a marked reduction of capacity. It was, as Fredda liked to put it, like a woman forced to interrupt her thoughts on the matter at hand a thousand times a second in order to see if the room were on fire. The excessive caution did not enhance safety, but did produce drastically reduced efficiency.

  But everything in the positronic brain was tied to the Three Laws. Remove or disable even one of those hundred million microcopies, and the brain would react. Disable more than a handful, and the brain would fail altogether. Try and produce positronic programming that did not include endless redundant checks for First, Second, and Third Law adherence, and the hardwired, built-in copies of the Three Laws would cause the positronic brain to refuse the programming and shut down.

  Unless you threw out millennia of development work and started from scratch with a lump of sponge palladium and a hand calculator, there was no way to step clear of the ancient technology and produce a more efficient robot brain.

  Then Gubber Anshaw invented the gravitonic brain. It was light-years ahead of the positronic in processing speed and capacity. Better still, it did not have the Three Laws burned into its every molecule, cluttering things up. The Three Laws could be programmed into the gravitonic brain, as deeply as you liked, but with only a few hundred copies placed in the key processing nodes. In theory, it was more liable to failure than the millions of copies in a standard positronic brain. In practice, the difference between ten billion to one and ten trillion to one was meaningless. Gravitonic Three-Law brains were, for all purposes, as safe as positronic ones.

  But, because the Three Laws were not implicit in every aspect of the gravitonic brain’s design and construction, the other robotics laboratories had refused to deal with Gubber Anshaw or his work. Building a robot that did not have a positronic brain was about as socially acceptable as cannibalism, and no appeal to logic or common sense could make the slightest difference.

  Fredda Leving, however, had been more than eager to experiment with the gravitonic brain–but not because she had any interest in improved efficiency. Long before Gubber Anshaw had come to her, she had been brooding over much deeper issues regarding the Three Laws, and the effects they had on human-robot relations–and therefore on humans themselves.

  Fredda had concluded, among other things, that the Three Laws stole all human initiative and served to discourage risk to an unhealthy degree by treating the least of risks of minor injury exactly the same as an immediate danger to life and limb. Humans learned to fear all danger, and eschew all activity that had the slightest spice of hazard about it.

  Fredda had, therefore, formulated the four New Laws of Robotics, as a matter of mere theory, little realizing that Gubber Anshaw would come along and give her a chance to put it all into practice. Fredda had built the first New Law robots. Tonya Welton had gotten wind of the New Law project, and insisted that New Law robots be used on Purgatory. Welton had liked the idea of robots that were neither slaves nor in control over their masters’ lives. And, perhaps, the fact that she was sleeping with Gubber Anshaw had something to do with it.

  By the time Tonya Welton had her bright idea, Fredda was already working on a new theory, precisely because the gravitonic brain made it possible to move past theory into practice. Because the gravitonic brain did not have a law structure embedded in itself, it was possible to program a brain–and thus create a robot–with no Laws at all, a robot capable of creating its own rules for living. Caliban, the No Law robot, had been the ultimate result of the experiment, and Fredda had found herself in a world of trouble when Caliban escaped. But all that had been sorted out quite some time ago, thank goodness, with the result of Fredda Leving owing Sheriff Kresh at least a favor or two, to put it mildly.

  But Prospero. She had hand built Prospero, the most highly refined and sophisticated of all the New Law robots, and constructed him to have the most flexible, far-ranging mind that the gravitonic brain made possible. She had not been out to do anything more than construct a robot that would be best able to think for itself. She had not intended to manufacture a robot philosopher–but that was what she had done. And some of what Prospero had come up with in his philosophy had given Fredda a major headache. As Prospero often pointed out, the New Laws allowed a New Law robot to be a far freer being than a conventional robot–but New Law robots were far more aware of their servitude than normal robots. Clearly there were new balances to be struck, new ways of thinking about robots and for robots if New Law robots were ever going to be able to deal with the real world. Prospero had set himself the goal of finding those new ways.

  But if Prospero’s expressed goal was to find the proper way for New Law robots to deal with the world, what Prospero excelled at was finding new ways around the New Laws, finding ways to bend them and twist them to his own convenience. Bend them far enough that it might be quite understandable if Kresh thought he was damaged.

  As best Fredda could see, Prospero was clever enough to find ways to let the New Laws let him do anything.

  Anything.

  She grabbed her diagnostic kit and got moving.

  The minutes and the hours had been dragging on, but now things started to move fast.

  The first deputies–a Fast Response Crime Scene team–arrived from Hades and set to work with admirable speed, considering the shock of seeing the Governor with a hole in his chest. All of them were a bit edgy and unsettled, and Kresh could not blame them. Even the most stolid and unimaginative person could not help but realize just how dangerous this murder was–and Kresh did not assign stolid or unimaginative people to the Fast Response teams.

  It was strange, disconcerting, and even unseemly to see them ministering to the corpse of the man he had been speaking with only hours before. There was a disturbing tenderness to the deputies and the Crime Scene robots as they hovered about, measuring, making images and scans, moving gently about the Governor’s ruined body.

  But this was no time for po
etry. This was the time for plots and counterplots, schemes and conspiracy. Kresh was already playing the game. In the crudest and most basic way, he was just a minute fraction ahead. He had gotten here first, turned this crime scene into Kresh’s turf. Kresh had won the first tiny engagement of what was likely to be a long and costly battle.

  Arrival of the deputies pushed Kresh off to one side–and that perhaps was no bad thing. They needed time to find clues and evidence, but Kresh needed to think about the other aspects of this case.

  Someone had killed the Governor, and presumably had a reason for doing so. Several someones. It was a conspiracy. The diversionary attack on Welton, the phony SSS men, the murder of the Ranger, the impossibility of getting past a whole squad of security robots–it all had to fit together, somehow.

  But whose conspiracy, and why? Assume the killers had a motive. What was it? Leaving the unreasoning reason of lunacy out of it for the moment, Kresh could come up with any number of motives for killing Chanto Grieg–but very few of them coincided with the normal motives for murder.

  This is not a murder, Kresh told himself. Not in any normal sense of the word. Murder was about passion, or jealousy, or greed, or personal ambition. It was a fatal assault on a person. This was an assault on the state. Will it be fatal? Kresh asked himself.

  There was a terrifying idea, and not at all an implausible one. Though weakened and maligned, Grieg had been the glue that had held Infernal politics together. Even if it was merely that everyone hated him, albeit for different reasons, at least he drew people’s emotions together. And even if people had hated him, and differed about his motives, they could at least understand the rational basis for what he was doing.

  People might be angry over the robot shortage, or get fed up with the Settlers, but they could see the necessity of it all, even if they didn’t like it. Part of that grudging acceptance came from the knowledge that Grieg was not a fanatic, not an ideologue, not someone chasing a harebrained theory, but a realist muddling through a bad situation as best he could.

  Would any of that be true for a new Governor? Would the people take it on faith that a new Governor would be struggling to do what was best? Who was going to be the new Governor?

  Or, to cut away all the polite tiptoeing around the central issue–who had cleared the field in order to take over? Who was going to seize the Governorship? Or was this merely and quite literally the opening gun in a new, forceful, and direct Settler attempt to take over the planet? Was there a Settler invasion fleet headed this way, right now? Not that it would take that much. All the Settlers had to do was step back and wait. Without Settler help, Inferno would collapse in a few years. It was galling to admit that fact, but Kresh had never been much for denying reality.

  So why would the Settlers bother to conspire and assassinate at all? Maybe it was one of the local movers and shakers, some bullyboy like Simcor Beddle eager to seize power? Would someone announce in a few hours that he or she had saved the planet from Grieg’s maladministration? Had some maniac decided on a coup to save the Spacer way of life–or had some cynical plotter realized that motive would provide a good cover story?

  Who was running this coup, anyway?

  Two thousand kilometers to the east of Purgatory Island, Sergeant Toth Resato, of the Governor’s Rangers, stood in the darkness just before dawn, looking out over the Great Bay.

  He was waiting.

  Watching.

  He stood at the base of the low cliffs that formed the shore of the bay. A cold wind blew at his back, gusting down through the East Crack and the inlet that formed the mouth of the River Lethe, a kilometer or two north of his position.

  The surf was an endless roar of sound, and the sky was black and hard, with no sign yet of the coming day. The stars were not so much shining as piercing the dark, so sharp and bright they seemed to cut into him. Far down and off in the western sky the lights of the Limbo atmospheric force field generator gleamed and glistened, a bit of rippling green on the horizon, so dim they were hard to see, but even that little trace of warmth and color seemed quite out of place in such a time and place as this.

  Sergeant Toth Resato was uncomfortable. He was out of uniform, for one thing, and, worse still, wearing Settler-style civilian clothes. He felt like a damned fool in the gaudy things, but the boat for which he was waiting was not likely to come into shore if anyone aboard spotted a Ranger’s uniform.

  But there were lots of things about this assignment that Toth liked less than the dress code. He was sworn to uphold the law, and he would do his duty. He was sworn to keep the peace, and he would do that too. But what of those times when the law itself was what broke the peace? What was he to do when the world turned upside-down and a fellow could be arrested for what had been legal–even honorable–the day or the week before?

  How could Spacers–Spacers–make it illegal to obtain a robot? Settlers were the ones who wanted to ban robots. It didn’t make sense to him. And yet, here he was, freezing to death in the darkness, lying in wait because he had gotten a tip that a smuggler was making a run tonight, bringing in contraband New Law robots–rustbacks.

  That was the part Toth just could not get through his head. How could having a robot be a crime? It just didn’t make sense. It was as if breathing or eating had been declared illegal.

  Toth tended to exaggerate, even to himself. It wasn’t, he admitted to himself, exactly illegal to own a robot–but it was getting close to that point. It didn’t help matters that he had never done a rustbacking arrest before, or even dealt with New Law robots. He did not feel confident, or ready, for the task ahead.

  In theory, any private robots taken for use in the terraforming project remained the property of the original owner. However, ownership didn’t count for much when your former valet was suddenly fifteen thousand kilometers away on the other side of the planet, operating a prairie breeding center. People were not happy. And they wanted robots.

  There was more about economics and shortages and so forth that was supposed to explain it all, but it didn’t seem to make a great deal of sense to Toth. After all, if there were a shortage of something, why not just make more of it? And how could there be a shortage of robots in the first place? Why not just build more? The government had all sorts of complicated explanations, all about scarcity of resources and investing productive capacity in the planet’s future, but no one could understand the numbers.

  The people were being asked to take it on faith that they had to make sacrifices in the name of a better future–but a lot of people did not have much faith. All they knew, and all they cared about, was that there were not enough robots, and everyday life on Inferno had been thrown into turmoil. Even if, as everyone kept saying, there were a hundred times more robots than people on the planet, there were still too few robots.

  The whole rustback phenomenon, the enormous criminal enterprise that went with them, was merely an expression of the fact that people wanted robots, and were willing to do anything–even commit crimes–in order to get them.

  The detector at his belt beeped. Toth Resato looked down at the display screen and then lifted his night vision farviewers to his eyes. Yes, there they were. Out on the sea, in an open boat, headed this way. There would be a larger craft out there somewhere, the rest of the cargo of rustbacks aboard it, waiting for the human pilot to shuttle them into shore.

  Rustbacks. Outlaw New Law robots, escaping from Purgatory, heading off into the wilderness of Terra Grande to what the Settler economists called “indentured servitude.” They would work off the price of what it cost to smuggle them out of Purgatory, then work for a wage if and when they paid the debt. Or, that is, they would have done all that if Toth had not been waiting for them.

  Toth had sat through the training sessions that were supposed to explain the basis of economic crime, so that the Rangers would be able to deal with it better. He had dozed through most of them, but he remembered the Settler economists and how they had blathered on about supply and
demand, how no Spacer world had experienced a labor shortage in thousands of years. How unlimited free labor had in turn eroded the value of raw materials down to nothing. The lecturers had said something about the law of supply and demand. and how with supply of everything essentially infinite, demand–and price–had dropped to zero.

  Robots completely overturned any concept of a market economy. The use, and even the concept, of money had evaporated away almost entirely.

  But now, suddenly, the robots weren’t there to do things and make things for free. Now there was a shortage of labor, and therefore labor–and materials obtained by labor–had a meaningful value.

  For the first time in living memory, everything had a price. The catch was none of the incredibly wealthy Spacers had any money–only possessions. They were more or less forced to trade what they owned to get the products or services that had been essentially free. Inferno had dropped back into a semibarter economy. Toth had followed most of the lecture, if not all, but it was clear to him the people lecturing him were missing the point.

  The economists seemed fascinated by their charts and graphs and markets, but they never seemed to understand that people, real people, were hurting.

  The capital city of Hades had seemed deserted, dingy, the last time Toth had been there for a visit. Nothing seemed bright or alive there. A fine layer of dust had settled on everything, blown from the deserts.

  Without the hordes of cleaning robots bustling about downtown, everything had seemed a little worn, a little threadbare and sad. as if the buildings and streets knew that the desert sands were edging just a trifle closer to town.