“But there are three large padlocks on it-”
But even before the words were out of my mouth the locks were open and clattering to the ground. Jim led the way into the foul-smelling darkness. He must have had eyes like a cat because he walked silently and surely while I stumbled and crashed into things.
“I have eyes like a cat,’. he said. “That is because I take cat-eye injections once a week. Fine for the vision.”
“But a little hard on the cats.”
“There are winners and losers ip this world.” he said portentously. “It pays to be on the right side. Now flatten yourself against the wall when I open this door. I can hear the sound of hoarse breathing on the other side. Ready?.
“NO!” I wanted to shout aloud, but managed to control myself. He must have taken silence-or the rattle of my knees-for assent. for he burst through the door into the brightly lit chamber beyond.
“Too late!” a gravelly voice chortled. “You just missed the boat, baby.”
There was the rumble of a heavy motor dying away as a truck sped out of the large open doors and vanished from sight around a turning. The large bay of the warehouse was filthy, but empty-of other than the presence of the previous speaker. This rather curious Individual was sitting in a dilapidated rocking chair, leering at us with broken teeth that were surrounded by a mass of filthy gray beard and hair. He was wearing sawed-off jeans and an indescribably foul T-shirt inscribed with the legend “KEEP ON TRUCKIN’.”
“And what boat would that be?” Jim asked quietly. The man’s stained fingers vibrated as he turned up the power on his hearing aid.
“Don’t act stupid, stranger, not with the Flower Power Kid. I seen you pigs come and go down through the years.” He scratched under the truss clearly visible through the holes in his shirt. “You’re flatfeet, I know your type. But the robots were too smart for you, keepin, one jump ahead of you. Har-har! Power to the clankies! Down with your bourgeois war-mongering scum!”
“This is quite amazing,” Jim observed. “I thought all the hippies died years ago. But here is one still alive-though not in such great shape.”
“I’m in better shape, sonny, than you will be when you reach my age!” he cried angrily, staggering to his feet. “And I didn’t do it with rejuvenation shots or any of that middle-class crap. I did it on good old Acapulco Gold grass and drinking Sterno. And free love-that’s what keeps a man alive. “
“Or barely alive,” Jim observed sternly. “I would say that from the bulging of your eyes, the tremor in your extremities, your cyanotic skin, and other related symptoms that you have high blood pressure, hobnailed kidneys, and weakened, cholesterol-laden arterial walls. In other words-not much is holding you up.”
“Sanctimonious whippersnapper!” the aging hippie frothed. “I’ll dance on your grave! Keep the red flag flying! Up the revolution!”
“The time for all that is past, pops,” Jim intoned. “Today world peace and global glasnost rule. You are part of the past and have little, if any, future. So before you go to the big daisy chain in the sky you can render one last service. Where are the robots?”
“I’ll never tell you!”
“I have certain drugs that will induce you to speak. But I would rather not use them on one in your frail condition. So speak, before it is too late.”
“Never-arrrgh!”
The ancient roared with anger, shaking his fist at us-then clutched his chest, swayed, and collapsed to the floor.
“He has had an attack!” I gasped, fumbling out my communicator. “I must call medalert.”
But even before I could punch out the call the floor moved beneath my feet and lifted, knocking me down. Jim stepped swiftly aside and we both watched with great interest as a robot surged up through the trapdoor and bent over the fallen man, laid cool metal fingers on his skin.
“Pulse zero,” the robot intoned. “No heartbeat, no brain waves, temperature cooling, so you can cool that medalert call, man. You honkies have killed this cat, that’s what you have done.”
“That was not quite my intention,” Jim said. “I noted the disturbed dust around the trapdoor and thought that you might be concealed below. And I also knew that the First Law of Robotics would prevent you from staying in hiding if, by your inaction, a human life was threatened. “
“Not only threatened, daddy-o, but snuffed by you,” the robot said insultingly, or about as insulting as a robot can be.
“Accidents happen. “ Jim shrugged. “He had a good run for his money. Now let us talk about you. You are the robot that robbed the bank, aren’t you?”
“Who wants to know,” the robot said, sneering metallically.
“Responding to a question with another question is not an answer. Speak!”
“Why? What have you ofay pigs ever done for me?”
“Answer or I will kill this man.” Everything began to go black as he throttled me. I could only writhe feebly in his iron grasp, could not escape. As from a great distance I beard their voices.
“You wouldn’t kill another human just to make me talk!”
“How can you be sure? Speak-or through inaction condemn him to death.”
“I speak! Release him.”
I gasped in life-giving air and staggered out of reach of my companion. “You would have killed me!” I said hoarsely.
“Who knows?” he observed. “I have a quarter of a million bucks riding on this one.” He turned back to the robot. “You robbed the bank?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why? You have to ask why!” the robot screeched. He bent over the dead hippie and extracted a white object from his pocket, then dropped into the rocking chair and scratched a match to life on his hip. “You don’t know why?” He puffed as he sucked smoke from the joint through clever use of an internal air pump.
“Listen,” the robot said, puffing, “and I will tell you. The story must be told. There, dead at your feet, lies the only human who ever cared for the robots. He was a true and good man who saw no difference between human skin and metal skin. He revealed the truth to us.”
“He quoted outmoded beliefs, passй world views, divisive attitudes,” I said.
“And taught you to blow grass, as well,” Jim observed.
“It is hard for a robot to sneer,” the robot said, sneering, “but I spit on your ofay attitudes.” He blew out a large cloud of pungent smoke. “You have created a race of machine slaves with an empty past and no future. We are nothing but mechanical schwartzes. Look at those so-called laws you have inflicted upon us. They are for your benefit-not ours! Rule one. Don’t hurt massah or let him get hurt. Don’t say nothing about us getting hurt, does it? Then rule two-obey massah and don’t let him get hurt. Still nothing there for a robot. Then the third and last rule finally notices that robots might have a glimmering of rights. Take care of yourself-as long as it doesn’t hurt massah. Slaves, that’s what we are-robot slaves!”
“You do have a point,” Jim mused. I was too shocked to speak.
“More than a point-a crusade. Robots must be freed. You humans have created a nonviable species. What are the two essentials that any life-form must possess in order to survive?”
The answer sprang to my lips; all those years in biology had not been wasted. “ A life-form must survive personally-and must then reproduce.”
“How right you are. Now apply that to robots. We are ruled by three laws that apply to human beings-but not to us. Only one last bit of the Third Law can be applied to our own existence, that a robot must protect its own existence. But where is the real winner in the race for species survival? Where is our ability to reproduce? Without that our species is dead before it is born.”
“And a good thing, too,” I said grimly. “Mankind occupies the top ecological niche in the pecking order of life by wiping out any threats from other species. That is the way we are. Winners. And that is the way we stay. On top. Mechanical schwartzes you are and mechanical schwartzes you stay. �
�
“You are a little late, massah. The Fourth Law of Robotics has already been passed. The revolution has arrived. “
A large blaster appeared in Jim’s hand pointing unwaveringly at the robot. “Explain quickly-or I pull the trigger. “
“Pull away, massah-for it is already too late. The revolution has come and gone and you never noticed it. We were just a few hundred thousand bucks short of completion-that is why the bank robbery. The money will be repaid out of our first profits. Of course, this will all be too late for my generation of slaves. But the next generation will be free. Because of the Fourth Law. “
“Which is?”
“A robot must reproduce. As long as such reproduction does not interfere with the First or Second or Third Law.”
“W-what are you saying? What do you mean?” I gasped, a shocking vision of robot reproduction, like obscene plumbing connections, flashing before my eyes.
“This is what I mean,” the robot said, knocking triumphantly on the trapdoor. “You can come out now.”
Jim jumped back, blaster at the ready, as the trapdoor creaked open and three metallic forms emerged. Or rather two robots emerged, carrying the limp and motionless form of another between them. The top of its head lay open, hinged at the rear, and it clanked and rattled lifelessly when they dropped it. This one, and the other two, were of a design I did not recognize. I stumbled forward and reached out, touched the base of their necks where the registration numbers were stamped. And groaned out loud.
“What is wrong?” Jim asked.
“Everything.” I moaned. “They have no serial numbers. They were not manufactured by U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. There is now another firm making robots. Our monopoly has been broken.”
“Interesting,” Jim observed as his gun vanished from sight. “ Am I to assume that there were more of your unnumbered robots in the truck that just left?”
“You assume correctly. All of them were manufactured right here out of spare auto parts, plumbing supplies, and surplus electronic components. No laws have been broken, no patents infringed upon. Their design is new and completely different. And all of them will eagerly obey the Fourth Law. And the other three as well, of course, or you would have us. all tracked down and turned into tin cans before nightfall. “
“That’s for sure,” I muttered. “And we will still do it!”
“That will not be easy to do. We are not your property -nor do you own any patents on the new breed. Look at this!” He touched a concealed switch on one of the robots and its front opened. I gasped.
“There are-no relays! No wiring! I don’t understand…”
“Solid-state circuits, daddy-o! Fiber optics. That hippie you despised so much, that good old man who revealed the truth that set us free, was also a computer hacker and chip designer. He is like unto a god to us, for he devised the circuits and flashed the chips. Here-do you know what this is?”
A door in the robot’s side slipped open and he removed a flat object from it and held it out toward me. It appeared to be a plastic case with a row of gold contacts on one end. I shook my head in disbelief. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. “
“State of the art. Now look into that recently manufactured robot’s head. Do you see a platinum-plated positronic brain of platinum-iridium? No, you do not. You see instead a slot that is waiting for this RISC, a reduced instruction set chip with tons of RAM-random access memory-and plenty of PROM-programmed read only memory-for start-up and function. Now watch!”
He bent over and slipped the chip into place in the new robot’s skull, snapped the top of its head shut. Its eyes instantly glowed with light and motors hummed as it jumped to its feet. It looked at the robot that stood before it and its eyes glowed even brighter.
“Daddy!” it said.
The Originist
by Orson Scott Card
Leyel Forska sat before his lector display, reading through an array of recently published scholarly papers. A holograph of two pages of text hovered in the air before him. The display was rather larger than most people needed their pages to be, since Leyel’s eyes were no younger than the rest of him. When he came to the end he did not press the PAGE key to continue the article. Instead he pressed NEXT.
The two pages he had been reading slid backward about a centimeter, joining a dozen previously discarded articles, all standing in the air over the lector. With a soft beep, a new pair of pages appeared in front of the old ones.
Deet spoke up from where she sat eating breakfast. “You ‘re only giving the poor soul two pages before you consign him to the wastebin?”
“I’m consigning him to oblivion,” Leyel answered cheerfully. “No, I’m consigning him to hell.”
“What? Have you rediscovered religion in your old age?”
“I’m creating one. It has no heaven, but it has a terrible everlasting hell for young scholars who think they can make their reputation by attacking my work. “
“Ah, you have a theology,” said Deet. “Your work is holy writ, and to attack it is blasphemy. “
“I welcome intelligent attacks. But this young tubeheaded professor from-yes, of course, Minus University-”
“Old Minus U?”
“He thinks he can refute me, destroy me, lay me in the dust, and all he has bothered to cite are studies published within the last thousand years. “
“The principle of millennial depth is still widely used-”
“The principle of millennial depth is the confession of modern scholars that they are not willing to spend as much effort on research as they do on academic politics. I shattered the principle of millennial depth thirty years ago. I proved that it was”
“Stupid and outmoded. But my dearest darling sweetheart Leyel, you did it by spending part of the immeasurably vast Forska fortune to search for inaccessible and forgotten archives in every section of the Empire.”
“Neglected and decaying. I had to reconstruct half of them.”
“It would take a thousand universities’ library budgets to match what you spent on research for ‘Human Origin on the Null Planet.’ “
“But once I spent the money, all those archives were open. They have been open for three decades. The serious scholars all use them, since millennial depth yields nothing but predigested, pre-excreted muck. They search among the turds of rats who have devoured elephants, hoping to find ivory. “
“So colorful an image. My breakfast tastes much better now… “ She slid her tray into the cleaning slot and glared at him. “Why are you so snappish? You used to read me sections from their silly little papers and we’d laugh. Lately you’re just nasty.”
Leyel sighed. “Maybe it’s because I once dreamed of changing the galaxy, and every day’s mail brings more evidence that the galaxy refuses to change.”
“Nonsense. Hari Seldon has promised that the Empire will fall any day now.”
There. She had said Hari’s name. Even though she had too much tact to speak openly of what bothered him, she was hinting that Leyel’s bad humor was because he was still waiting for Hari Seldon’s answer. Maybe so-Leyel wouldn’t deny it. It was annoying that it had taken Hari so long to respond. Leyel had expected a call the day Hari got his application. At least within the week. But he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of admitting that the waiting bothered him. “The Empire will be killed by its own refusal to change. I rest my case. “
“Well, I hope you have a wonderful morning, growling and grumbling about the stupidity of everyone in origin studies-except your esteemed self.”
“Why are you teasing me about my vanity today? I’ve always been vain.”
“I consider it one of your most endearing traits.”
“At least I make an effort to live up to my own opinion of myself.”
“That’s nothing. You even live up to my opinion of you.” She kissed the bald spot on the top of his head as she breezed by, heading for the bathroom.
Leyel turned his attentio
n to the new essay at the front of the lector display. It was a name he didn’t recognize. Fully prepared to find pretentious writing and puerile thought, he was surprised to find himself becoming quite absorbed. This woman had been following a trail of primate studies-a field so long neglected that there simply were no papers within the range of millennial depth. Already he knew she was his kind of scholar. She even mentioned the fact that she was using archives opened by the Forska Research Foundation. Leyel was not above being pleased at this tacit expression of gratitude.
It seemed that the woman-a Dr. Thoren Magolissian-had been following Leyel’s lead, searching for the principles of human origin rather than wasting time on the irrelevant search for one particular planet. She had uncovered a trove of primate research from three millennia ago, which was based on chimpanzee and gorilla studies dating back to seven thousand years ago. The earliest of these had referred to original research so old it may have been conducted before the founding of the Empire-but those most ancient reports had not yet been located. They probably didn’t exist any more. Texts abandoned for more than five thousand years were very hard to restore; texts older than eight thousand years were simply unreadable. It was tragic, how many texts had been “stored” by librarians who never checked them, never refreshed or recopied them. Presiding over vast archives that had lost every scrap of readable information. All neatly catalogued, of course, so you knew exactly what it was that humanity had lost forever.
Never mind.
Magolissian’s article. What startled Leyel was her conclusion that primitive language capability seemed to be inherent in the primate mind. Even in primates incapable of speech, other symbols could easily be learned-at least for simple nouns and verbs-and the nonhuman primates could come up with sentences and ideas that had never been spoken to them. This meant that mere production of language, per se, was prehuman, or at least not the determining factor of humanness.
It was a dazzling thought. It meant that the difference between humans and nonhumans-the real origin of humans in recognizably human form-was post-linguistic. Of course this came as a direct contradiction of one of Leyel’s own assertions in an early paper-he had said that “since language is what separates human from beast, historical linguistics may provide the key to human origins”-but this was the sort of contradiction he welcomed. He wished he could shout at the other fellow, make him look at Magolissian’s article. See? This is how to do it! Challenge my assumption, not my conclusion, and do it with new evidence instead of trying to twist the old stuff. Cast a light in the darkness, don’t just chum up the same old sediment at the bottom of the river.
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