Asimov’s Future History Volume 8

by Isaac Asimov

  “That information is not available,” the computer responded.

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t tell him,” Janet warned.

  “That information is not available.”

  Derec’s eyes flicked left and right as he took in the formula. Janet watched his brows furrow at the nonstandard notation — notation she had devised herself to describe a nonstandard idea.

  A shadow darkened the doorway behind his head, and a thin, dark-haired girl entered the room. Ariel Burgess. Janet had known she was traveling with Derec, but it was intuitive knowledge only. She wasn’t prepared for the shock of actually seeing her son’s lover so casually enter the picture.

  “Wipe that off his desk!” Janet ordered, snatching her memcube from the reader in the same motion. She watched Derec’s face slip from puzzlement to frustration, then he heard Ariel and turned to ask her, “Did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Put that formula on my desk?”

  She came up behind him and looked over his shoulders. “What formula?”

  “It disappeared when you came in. I don’t mean on the computer, either; it was molded right into the desktop.”

  Ariel looked just as puzzled as he had. “No, I didn’t do anything like that. I was out in the living room reading. I heard you talking with someone and I came in to see what you were doing.”

  Derec nodded. He looked at the desk, then up at Ariel again. “I’ve been trying to find Avery and the robots. I think he’s hiding out with them, probably trying to take them apart now that they’re locked up again. I think I’ve tracked them down, though. Want to come along and see?”

  Ariel shook her head. “Doesn’t sound like it’s going to be much fun if that’s what’s really going on. You’ll probably just get in a fight with him.”

  “Probably will.” Derec sighed. He turned back toward the desk, looking one last time for the phantom formula, and switched off the computer. Janet’s view didn’t even flicker; she watched Derec stand, put his arms around Ariel, and hug her tightly. She nearly ordered the computer to stop watching when they kissed, but her curiosity was too strong.

  She wished she had, though, when Derec murmured softly, “Frost, why couldn’t I have had normal parents?”

  Avery was watching the microscope monitor when the alarm went off. Someone had stopped in front of his laboratory door. He cursed at the interruption, cursed that it had happened now, of all times. He was just beginning to understand the changes Janet had made in the robot cell morphology and how those changes might affect the way they combined to make macroscopic structures. He didn’t want to deal with Derec just now, Derec and his whining about ruining his mother’s experiment. He knew that’s what Derec would say. He knew what he would say in return, that between them he and his mother and her stupid experiment had ruined just about everything he, Wendell Avery, had ever done, and that it was about time he turned the tables; but he wished he didn’t have to get into all that just now. He had better things to be doing.

  Well, he supposed he didn’t have to stick around for it if he didn’t want to. It would take Derec a few minutes to get through the locked door; by then he could be long gone.

  He picked up the sphere of undifferentiated robot material that had formerly been Lucius’s right leg, switched off the microscope, pocketed the memcube he’d been storing data in, and strode to the wall adjacent to the one with the door in it. “Make another doorway here,” he said, and as soon as it formed he stepped through into the next room beyond his lab. “Remove the doorway,” he ordered.

  The room was an empty box with a single door opening out onto the slidewalks. Avery went to that door, eased it open a crack, and peered out to see if it was, indeed, Derec. The door made no noise that Avery could hear, but the figure in front of his lab turned as if startled by a sound, then immediately turned away and rushed off down the slidewalk, running at a speed that took him to the intersection with a cross-corridor in less time than it took Avery to shout, “Hey! Stop!” The figure turned left without slowing and vanished from sight.

  It was a robot, then, one with prior orders. But the glimpse Avery had gotten of its face hadn’t suggested a robot at all. It had looked quite human.

  Had Derec reprogrammed one of the city robots to take on a human appearance? They could do it if ordered to. But why would he have done that? Avery knew Derec; if he had found Avery’s lab he would have simply come here himself.

  Who else could it have been, though? Neither Wolruf nor Ariel would have sent a robot to scout for them, either, and that exhausted the possibilities. There was nobody else on the planet.

  Unless...

  He shuddered at the thought. It made sense, though. She’d been on the other two planets they had visited, planets that had each been home to one of her infernal robots. She had left one of them here as well — it wouldn’t be surprising if she had come to check up on it.

  Avery looked down at the lump of robot material in his hand. He felt a twinge of guilt steal over him, but he fought it off, scowling. She’d disrupted his experiment; he had every right to disrupt hers.

  But it wouldn’t do to have her running around loose while he was doing it. Avery turned to the blank wall beside him, said, “Give me a comlink with Central.”

  “Link established,” the wall replied.

  “There’s a humaniform robot on the slideways somewhere near this location. I want you to find it, track it, and report its destination to me.”

  “I have already received instructions not to reveal that information.”

  Avery’s scowl deepened, then slowly twisted to a grin. “Were those instructions given by Janet Anastasi?”

  “I cannot reveal that information either.”

  Bingo. If they hadn’t been, it would have said “No.”

  “Refuse all further orders from her,” Avery said. Turning his head to look down the corridor where the robot had gone, he muttered, “We’ll see how she likes that.”

  Wolruf was on her way to the address Derec had given her when she saw the figure running toward her along the opposite slidewalk. It looked like a human, but no human could run that fast. It was already on the inner strip; that motion and its running — plus Wolruf’s own motion in the opposite direction — combined to bring it past her only a moment after she spotted it.

  Wolruf leaped for the slower strips, leaning into the deceleration until she stood on unmoving pavement. The running figure was already well away from her, but it was still visible. Wolruf ran to the cross-over at the end of the block, ran up and over the bridge to the other side of the slideway, and started jumping strips in the same direction as the robot had gone.

  It had to be a robot, despite the face. Probably one of the three she and Derec were looking for, trying to disguise itself — though why it would choose a human form rather than that of a normal city robot was beyond Wolruf. She didn’t particularly care, though, so long as she didn’t let it get away.

  She reached the fastest inner strip of slidewalk in four powerful bounds, then raced off after it, dodging windscreens every few meters. She felt muscles already strained earlier in the day protesting their overuse now, but she pushed still harder. This was the sort of exercise she needed.

  Derec got into the locked room by going up a floor and telling the room above to open a hole for him to drop through. Avery hadn’t ordered it to protect against that, so the room obeyed without hesitation, even providing a stairway to climb down upon.

  He descended into a humming, brightly lit robotics laboratory. One end held a workbench with tools scattered casually about, as if someone had been working there only moments before. Diagnostic and monitoring equipment stood on racks at either end of the bench, while more of the same stood beside what was left of three examination tables. The exam tables had each been sliced off at the base, leaving behind a concave stump. The material removed floated in three spherical balls of silvery metal above each of the stumps, each at th
e center of a bulky magnetic containment field generator.

  Derec tried to estimate the volume of the spheres. They seemed a little too large to be just the remains of the exam tables. Something had to have been on the tables when the generators were turned on, something that had been crushed under the intense magnetic field into a formless blob along with the city material making up the table. With a shiver of horror, Derec realized what those somethings must have been. Adam, Eve, and Lucius.

  He walked once around the containment vessels, feeling them tug at the robotic cells within his own body. He was feeling just the leakage from the magnet coils, but he imagined what would happen if he stuck his hand inside the field itself. The robot cells would probably be ripped out through his flesh. Perhaps the iron in his blood would feel the pull as well; he didn’t know. He wasn’t particularly eager to find out.

  The power switches were easy to spot. Derec reached gingerly toward one, ready to snatch his hand away if the tug became too strong, but it remained bearable. He flipped the switch off. The phantom tugging on his body diminished, and the sphere of undifferentiated robot cells nearest him settled to rest in the cradle formed by the stump of the exam table.

  “Don’t reabsorb that,” Derec said aloud. He switched off the other two power switches, repeating his command, then added, “But you can get rid of the magnets.” The containment vessels didn’t melt into the floor as he had expected them to, but moved away and through the far wall instead. Evidently they hadn’t been made of dianite, but had been manufactured especially for Avery’s use, and were now either being dismantled again or being returned to a storage warehouse somewhere. Whichever it was, Derec breathed a little easier with them gone.

  He examined the three spherical blobs of city material, now slumping out of round like a large water droplet on a dry surface. No clues indicated which blobs were which robots, but one blob had a lump protruding from the side, just at the point where it rested against its cradle. Derec reached out and gingerly pushed at the blob, half expecting it to be clammy to the touch, but it felt more like a metallic sponge, or the cushion of a chair. It gave a little under his shove, and he was able to roll it around enough to bring the lump out into the open.

  It was a brain.

  More precisely, it was a positronic brain, the kilogram-and-a-half of platinum-iridium that provided the lattice within which a robot’s thought processes took place. Neither platinum nor iridium were particularly responsive to magnetism, which was why the brain had drifted to the bottom of the sphere. Derec had seen dozens of positronic brains before, but the sight of this one sent shivers up his spine. He’d seen lots of them, all right, but never one that belonged to a friend.

  The intense magnetic field had destroyed it, of course. Magnetism wouldn’t damage it directly, but induced electrical currents would, and with a field this strong there had to have been plenty of induced currents zapping around. Derec conquered his revulsion long enough to dig his fingers into the blob around the brain and pull it free, then turned around in search of a monitor that might help him read the brain’s final state.

  He found one right at his left elbow, still switched on, but its sensor was missing. From the length of cable remaining, Derec realized that the sensor had been inside the field with the robot, no doubt reading its thoughts before — and just possibly during — its death.

  He felt a rush of excitement. If the monitor had been recording, and if it had recorded a long enough sequence of thoughts, then it might be possible to revive the robot. Just how functional the robot would be was another story, though. Robotic memories were essentially holographic in nature — any fragment of the recording contained information about the entire thing — but just as with a hologram, the larger the fragment the more well defined the reproduction would be. It would take a substantial amount of recording to re-create the robot’s entire positronic psyche with any degree of accuracy.

  Derec examined the monitor for memcubes, found four of the tiny storage devices nestled into a plug-in rack. Carefully removing them, he carried them to an undamaged monitor on the workbench and inserted them into the empty slot there. Using the monitor’s computer interface, he quickly scanned through the cubes to see what had been recorded. He felt a smile growing as he read; two of the cubes were full and the third halfway so, all with the digital representations of positronic thought patterns. That was a lot of thinking, far more than Avery should have been able to get in a few hours, Derec thought, but then he remembered that the robots had been in one of their communication fugues, arguing at hundreds of times normal speed. Perfect! A recorded argument would really help define each robot’s individual character.

  Provided...

  He got up to check the memcubes on the other monitors. There were four cubes in each one, and two and a half from each rack were full. Derec felt his tension slowly let go. All three sides of the argument had been recorded. There should be more than enough material there to reconstruct the robots’ personalities.

  So, then, Avery hadn’t managed to kill them off after all.

  Using his comlink, Derec sent, I need three new positronic brains, and three portable micro fusion power packs.

  In answer, a cabinet to his left slid open, revealing at least a dozen of each already prepared. Of course; Avery had no doubt ordered a complete robotics laboratory, and no lab was complete without a supply of repair parts.

  Derec took a brain from the cabinet, removed its packaging, and carried it over to the lump of robot cells from which he had removed the other brain. He felt a moment of hesitation, wondering just how to go about hooking it up. In a normal robot there would have been a series of direct connections, actual plugs that fit into sockets in the brain case, but with an undifferentiated cellular robot there weren’t any plugs. No one place was any more or less special than any other.

  With a shrug, Derec pressed the brain into the mass of cells, maintaining a gentle, steady pressure until the cells yielded and allowed the brain to sink into the surface. He repeated the process with a power pack, then stood back to see if anything would happen.

  The surface of the sphere closed over both brain and power pack, but when four or five minutes passed without further action, Derec decided that the cells themselves didn’t contain any volitional programming. That must have been imparted in a brain overlay, the first of many instruction sets governing the robot’s actions.

  Derec picked up the severed cable that had led to the inductive sensor and held the end of it against the blob. Even if his mother had used a different cellular structure for her robots, as Avery seemed to believe she had, there had to be some regular city cells from the exam table mixed in with the robot cells, and if that was the case then the monitor could re-form its remote sensor around the brain, and he could use it to feed the memories into it the same way they had been recorded.

  “Establish contact with the brain,” he ordered the monitor, and when the status screen indicated that the link had been formed, he plugged the memcubes back into their slots. He still had no idea which of the three robots he was dealing with, but if everything worked the way he expected it to, he would soon find out.

  “Download the memory cubes,” he ordered.

  For a long moment nothing apparent happened, but just as Derec began to wonder what had gone wrong, the sphere of robot material shuddered, deformed as if being squeezed by an enormous fist, and shed a quarter of its mass in a heavy metallic rain. That would be the dianite from the examination table, Derec thought. The robot was eliminating the foreign matter from its body.

  What was left slowly elongated, creases forming and the separate sections differentiating into crude approximations of arms and legs and a head. For a maddeningly long time it remained in that vaguely humanoid state, then the limbs slowly took on more definite form and the head expelled a more conventional external sensor, still attached to the monitor by its cable.

  The robot’s face was still generic, with only a faint indication
of a nose and lips, and only shallow depressions where the eyes should be. Its hands reached up and removed the sensor, letting it drop to the floor, and where the sensor had been, ears began to grow.

  The eye sockets deepened, horizontal slits formed across them, and the newly formed lids slid apart to reveal blank, expressionless eyes. The eyes panned outward, each one moving independently, then inward to fix upon Derec. Robot and human stared at one another for what seemed a millenium before Derec finally broke the spell.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  The robot seemed to consider that question carefully. It raised its right hand, then its left, clenched both into fists and relaxed them, tilted its head from side to side as if listening to internal sounds, then closed its eyes. After a second its mouth finished developing, and its eyes opened again. Its chest expanded as if it were drawing breath, and it stammered, “A... as... as... well...” It stopped, breathed in again, and started over, saying clearly this time,” As well as can be expected.” It took another breath, ex haled, and not bothering to breathe again, added, “For someone who has just returned from the dead.”

  Chapter 4

  EMOTION IN MOTION

  THE PERSON LEANING over him wore a concerned expression. He had asked about the robot’s welfare. Concern for other people’s welfare was a good thing. Tentative conclusion: This is a good person.

  The thought train came easily, even before recognition. The robot saw nothing amiss in that; of course you determined the relative value of a person as quickly as you could. Relative value was the most important quality a person could have, far more important than a mere name. A person’s relative value determined how much protection a robot must afford him when a conflict arose.

  Names were useful once a relative value had been assigned, however, so that value could be associated with the name and thus refined as time passed. The robot searched for the name belonging to the person before it, but was dismayed to find that name garbled. “De —” something. Delbert? Dennis? Neither seemed to fit.