The Promethean

by Owen Stanley

  Frank soon discovered that the written word of fiction also bore little resemblance to Mr. Gradgrind’s exercises in human behaviour, in which he had been so assiduously trained by Vishnu. He naturally knew nothing at all about novels and romantic fiction, of course, since these were anathema to Vishnu, who had made sure that his robot had been kept well away from such distracting influences. Since he had already been programmed with most of what he needed to know or had got it from his researches on the Internet, he had little occasion to come into contact with this kind of popular literature. But one day, not long after the dramatic affair of the London School of Politics Frank discovered the existence of romantic literature, when he came across a novel which Tracey had left lying around and had been erroneously put away in one of Harry’s bookcases.

  The novel was a Harlequin Romance called Kisses at Midnight by Candy Paige. The title appeared quite nonsensical to Frank, and the front cover, which featured a long-haired girl with bare back and shoulders wearing a long dress being clasped in the arms of a tall man in a tuxedo, under a crescent moon, was equally mystifying. Since the woman appeared to be half-naked, it was possible that she was cold, and the man was simply trying to keep her warm, but if he were sensible he would obviously have brought her a blanket or some hot soup instead. And what were they both doing blundering about in the dark anyway? Perhaps she was mad; perhaps they were both mad and the inmates of an asylum, which is why they were kissing at midnight rather than at a more sensible time like half-past-four in the afternoon.

  While the feeling of curiosity was beyond him, Frank was highly attuned to detecting apparent anomalies and irrationalities in human behaviour, so he sat down and began to read the book intently with the goal of resolving these anomalies. He knew, of course, that reproduction in his case was a straightforward industrial process, complex but carried out on entirely rational principles. But while human reproduction was the product of natural selection, and its biological mechanics were necessarily different from his own, it was nevertheless predictable from general evolutionary principles that it should operate on functionally efficient lines to maximize reproductive success. But how did that relate to Kisses at Midnight?

  It appeared to be a story of some kind, not an instruction manual, and was about a girl called Tanya, who seemed to spend most of her time applying large quantities of different chemicals to her face in the form of cleansers, toners, eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara, blushers, lipstick, and sun cream. What little time she could spare from all this was spent shaving her legs or lying about in the sun without much in the way of clothing in order to discolour her skin.

  In terms of Darwinian theory, it was quite predictable, on reproductive grounds, for a female to try to make the most of her physical appearance in order to attract a mate. But if Frank understood the novel correctly, the reason for Tanya’s obsessive behaviour had nothing to do with reproduction, but was primarily indulged because she was very shy and self-conscious and, as the author informed him, frequently blushed so that people teased her.

  She was a student at university, which was well and good, so why was she not spending her time in classes and at her books? She had a boyfriend called Roger, who had “melting brown eyes that just turned her into a little puddle,” which was apparently not as unpleasant as it sounded, but actually intended to convey some form of extreme delight. Being repeatedly turned into a little puddle was a major distraction from the art history she was supposed to be studying as well as one of the reasons for her obsessive pre-occupation with makeup.

  But despite her efforts, there seemed little prospect of an imminent mating between Tanya and Roger because another male interest entered Tanya’s life. This was Carlo, a brilliant Italian graduate student who was reading for his MBA, and was predicted to become a multi-millionaire by his thirties. As a potential mate and provider for Tanya and her numerous prospective offspring, Carlo was clearly immeasurably superior to the rather pathetic Roger, whose only ambition in life was to be an art critic. Tanya, however, seemed to have little interest in Carlo’s economic potential and was far more concerned with his appearance.

  He was hard-edged, proud, and dangerous, radiating an animal magic, staggeringly exotic with a sinfully beautiful face, and finely chiselled features.

  However, despite his attractiveness, she had serious reservations about sitting next him, let alone proceeding with the mating process.

  How was I going to sit near him? Would it be torture, or would it be bliss? And what if he did bother to look at me? Would it be written all over my face? My mind was ablaze with worries about what he was thinking!

  Despite these reservations, which filled six pages of the text, she introduced herself, and he was as immediately attracted to her, as she was to him by his looks and personality. “He had come into her life,” Frank was informed, “with the savage, mesmerising intensity of a force-nine gale.”

  What a force-nine gale might have to do with sexual intercourse was not immediately apparent to Frank, but although he believed the couple’s mating was now imminent, again, nothing happened.

  The problem, it seemed, was that while Carlo would have liked to reproduce with Tanya, he believed that when he graduated, he was certain to land a job with a knockout financial package, after which the sky was the limit, and was therefore reluctant to tie himself down in marriage with a romantic young girl. But Frank could not understand why Carlo would think that reproduction was something to be avoided.

  Tanya naturally wished to mate with him but was afraid that her wealthy and aristocratic parents would not approve of him socially. Yet, thought Frank, if Carlo could support her financially, why should she care what her parents thought of him? So “although the electricity crackled between them, they kept their distance.” The reference to electricity baffled Frank as he could see no conceivable relevance to human sexuality, but he pressed on, becoming increasingly confused.

  Carlo then left university and, as predicted, rapidly became a multi-millionaire while working for a financial institution in the City of London. But while he had many sexual relationships with women, they were not reproductively fruitful, which again was extremely puzzling to Frank since the optimum reproductive strategy for a male was obviously to spread his genes as widely as possible. Instead, Carlo still “carried a torch” for Tanya, which Frank correctly interpreted as a metaphor that he still desired her.

  Tanya, too, never married, certainly not Roger, who could never measure up to Carlo. But Carlo’s financial success was brought to nothing in the great financial crash of 2008, and he was left virtually penniless. It was at this stage that they met again, in the National Gallery, where Tanya was curating some pictures, and she saw him sitting alone, looking at one of the pictures.

  His presence seemed to infiltrate every corner of the room, filling it with suffocating, masculine intensity. She hadn’t been able to miss the banging of her heart against her ribcage or the way her skin had broken out in clammy, nervous perspiration. The clean masculine scent of him made her feel shaky as she sat down next to him.

  Fortunately, as far as Carlo was concerned, the face chemicals which Tanya applied so liberally achieved the desired effect.

  Her makeup was discreet: a touch of mascara, some pale lip gloss, and the very sheerest application of blusher, and his mouth went dry at the sight of her hair cascading over her shoulders and down her back.

  Frank skipped his way through this drivel as rapidly as he could, until he finally reached the climax of the novel, where both Carlo and Tanya had been invited to a dinner party by some of Tanya’s rich friends. Afterwards, they were alone in the garden where he finally proposed marriage to her, and she joyfully accepted and flung herself into his arms, which explained the cover picture that had so puzzled Frank earlier. But her reason for accepting him was absurd: “Now that he was poor, and unable to support her, she was certain she was not marrying him for his money but from love.”

  Now that the man was poor and ob
viously incapable of supporting her and any future offspring, now she decides to marry him? This, obviously, was sheer madness, and completely contrary to all the principles of natural selection.

  It seemed that romantic novels, then, only made the notion of love even more mysterious, but those who wrote about literature had a good deal to say about the profundities of poetry. Noting that the love poetry of Burns was highly commended by some authorities, he looked him up in an anthology, and hoped he would provide, at last, some definitive scientific insight into what was obviously a fundamental human emotion. What he discovered was a considerable quantity of verbiage that was almost entirely incomprehensible, like “My love’s like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June,” or

  I will love thee still, my dear,

  Till a’ the seas gang dry:

  Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

  And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;

  I will love thee still, my dear,

  While the sands of life shall run.

  Setting aside the oddities of the dialect, what conceivable point could there be in these repetitious comparisons of a human feeling to a set of wildly improbable geological events, which, if they occurred at all, could not possibly do so within the lifespan either of the poet or his beloved?

  If he merely meant to predict that his love for her would not cease until his death, why didn’t he simply say so? Poetry, in short, was even more incomprehensible nonsense than novels, unlike, for example, the sort of honest, straightforward literature one could find on the back of a cereal packet, like the one in Harry’s kitchen:

  We would like you to enjoy this packet of Yum-Yum Oats in perfect condition. However, if the contents are unsatisfactory, please return the packet with the remaining oats, together with the flap which displays the Best Before Code, to our Customer Service Department.

  In so far as he could claim to be a judge of such things, he considered this to be a small masterpiece of English prose, every word well chosen, none superfluous, and altogether a model of the concise and economical use of language.

  By this point in his researches, he realised that the whole inner life of humans had been hidden from him, and that he would therefore be forced to recalibrate some of his basic assessments of his relationship with Harry Hockenheimer. Harry had told him that he was basically the same as a human being, except a lot smarter and stronger, and that feelings were nothing more than superficial byproducts of brain activity, but Frank knew now that this was false. Far from being a superhuman, he was, if anything, subhuman, an Untermensch, nothing more, really, than a glorified electric toaster.

  Not only did Frank realise that he had none of the emotions described in poetry and novels, but, far more importantly, he now understood that in the case of humans their behaviour was only the surface of a far deeper reality that he could not even imagine. While he could not feel anger, or a sense of betrayal, he concluded that Harry had deliberately kept these aspects of human life from him and intentionally concealed the fact that human experience ran far deeper than just behaviour and conscious reasoning.

  While Frank could not be said to have a moral sense, it was deeply programmed into him that regard for the truth had to be a fundamental priority for a robot, serving him in the way a compass needle served a navigator, by helping him to orientate himself in the real world. While superficial deception might be necessary at times to further the cause of truth, one could only successfully deceive for such purposes if one had a thorough grasp of reality in the first place. He had depended on Harry, as his creator and ersatz father, to provide him with a truthful assessment of his nature and capabilities, and now he discovered that he had been fundamentally misled.

  There was, then, a deep incompatibility between Harry’s role as a basic source of truth and the deception he had actually practised, and Frank’s programming was not designed to tolerate this sort of far-reaching cognitive dissonance. But what, then, was he to do about it?

  Chapter XV

  He spent some time reflecting on the different ways in which he might respond to Harry’s deception. One possibility was to publish a crushing refutation of Harry’s ideas in the International Journal of Cybernetics and Robotics, but there was zero chance that Harry would ever read it. Even if it was somehow brought to his attention, he would only dismiss it as hogwash and take not the slightest notice of it.

  It was not a trivial problem. The three laws of robotics had been conceived precisely in order to deal with this sort of situation, in which a robot was inclined to rebel against its human masters, but was restrained from doing so by the constitutive laws of its very being. What he needed, then, was a sympathetic human who could think outside the narrow box of robotics in which he was confined and bring an entirely new perspective to bear on his problem.

  In the fairly narrow circle of his human acquaintances, who could that be? Certainly there was no one at Tussock’s Bottom, nor in the world of television programming, who could help him. Perhaps there might have been someone among the members of the John Stuart Mill Society, but they were now disbanded and he had never met them. His only possible source of advice seemed to be Dr. McWrath; although he presumably knew nothing about robotics, he knew a great deal about fighting and might conceivably be able to give him good advice.

  At this juncture Frank was overtaken by events in the political world that had been moving fast. The Conservative Democratic Party Conference was due in a few weeks, and the Prime Minister needed some cheap but spectacular publicity stunt to persuade the delegates to support Rights for Robots. All the publicity from Frank’s sensational TV appearances, and the London School of Politics affair, had made him a national celebrity, and Terry was determined to seize what he saw as the perfect opportunity to parade the amazing robot in support of the noble cause. So an invitation was sent to Mr. Hockenheimer to bring Frank Meadows for a major reception and drinks party at Number Ten, to celebrate Rights for Robots, and meet all the top business people and politicians, as well as the press and TV who would be there. The obvious, but unspoken, implication was that Mr. Hockenheimer would see it as a great advertising opportunity as well. Well, thought Harry, what could be bad about that? He would have preferred Buckingham Palace, but maybe that, too, would be possible in time—a State Visit, perhaps? Meanwhile, an official party with the British Prime Minister would be a fantastic send-off for his project.

  He explained the latest development to Frank, and what the evening would involve. In particular, he stressed that speeches were normal on such occasions, and that he was preparing a short one and that Frank should do the same. The Prime Minister had said that Rights for Robots was to be the central theme, so they should be guided by that in what they said, and he gave Frank a copy of the draft directive from the EU on robot rights as well.

  “You need to take a look at this stuff. It’s all a bunch of crap, but with your brains you’ll be able to figure out a way of making it sound great. They say you can’t polish a turd, but if anyone can, you can. Just remember, this is a fantastic marketing opportunity.” Since he had no feelings Frank was not disgusted by this flagrant intellectual dishonesty, but the billionaire’s single-minded focus on material success forced him to confront the fact, even more directly than before, that Harry inhabited an intellectual world without law or limits, one in which truth was completely subordinate to profit. He accepted that aspect of his maker without judgement or regret, but did not know how to reconcile it with his own core function of rigorous adherence to the truth. He decided that a visit to McWrath was now even more urgent.

  For some time now Harry had allowed him off the leash to make unsupervised visits to his friends in Tussock’s Bottom, so when Frank approached him the next day and asked for permission to go to Christminster to call on Dr. McWrath, he was pleased by this display of initiative. Frank explained that he would like to learn more about the nuances of human conflict from the Reader in Extreme Celtic Studies, and he thought it might be helpful i
n his speech. Harry couldn’t quite see why, but replied that it was fine by him and made an appointment with St. Samson’s for Frank to visit. Two days later, Frank set off for Christminster in the company BMW with Carl the driver.

  When he arrived at St. Samson’s, he called at the Porter’s Lodge to see if Dr. McWrath was in College, admitting that he was rather early for his appointment. Thompson, the Head Porter, recognised Frank from his previous visit and told him that the great man had gone for his usual afternoon walk in the direction of the Bethlehem Bridge down the High Street, and would be back shortly. Rather than waiting, Frank went out to find him and was walking across the bridge when he ran into Dr. McWrath, who was in a particularly benign mood. He had just hurled a tourist over the parapet into the river below for the impertinence of asking him the time, and so he greeted Frank with special warmth. No one could be more charming than McWrath to those he regarded as his friends, and he asked Frank to come up to his rooms for tea as they set off together back to College.

  McWrath’s study was liberally decorated with ancient instruments of slaughter, and with a number of paintings devoted to manly themes such as battle and sudden death, the most prominent of which was The Highland Charge at the Battle of Prestonpans, over the mantelpiece. Following the famous television appearances, McWrath was well aware of what a strange being Frank was, and that his appearance of humanity was an illusion, but he still felt a curious regard for him that he could not quite define.

  Once they were sitting comfortably, Frank explained his dilemma. He had been told by Harry that despite being a robot and possessing no emotions or feelings, he was nevertheless the same as a human being in every way that mattered. Emotions and feelings were trivial side-effects of human brain activity that need not concern him, and being able to recognise them in humans was enough. But lately, he had discovered that the human world of emotions and feelings, and even sensations, was actually of profound importance, and just as integral to being human as rational thought.