To Obey

by Mickey Zucker Reichert

  “A fake.” Lawrence seemed condemned to repeat Susan’s last words. His eyes flickered around the room, landing everywhere except Susan’s face. “Are you…are you quite sure?”

  Susan was. “Not at first. They created an almost reasonable scenario involving a brain tumor and a prolonged period of seizures.”

  Lawrence sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. It was a casual gesture executed too casually. It indicated an unspoken discomfort, an effort to pretend to accept information he had discarded only a few moments earlier. “Could he have had a brain tumor without us knowing it?”

  “It’s plausible.” Susan addressed only the direct question. “As I said, they created an almost reasonable scenario, something even I might have believed, despite the fact it would force me to accept I had missed subtle signs in the person I loved most in the world, signs I never would have overlooked in any patient.” She paused for breath. “The problem is, it completely contradicts the obvious evidence.”

  “Which is?”

  This time, Susan took a roundabout route to the answer. “I was almost ready to believe my father’s body arrived at Hasbro headless because the extent of his injuries and suspicion of the tumor caused the medical examiner to want the skull and its contents studied at a separate facility from the body. I might even buy the idea the funeral home accidentally cremated his body, then forged my signature on the papers to cover their mistake. Perhaps, if I suspended all my disbelief, I might come to accept that the chief Pathology resident at Manhattan Hasbro, one of the best hospitals and teaching programs in the world, had a lapse of memory in regard to the receipt of, and the disappearance of, a corpse in her care.

  “Stretching that even further, I could just barely grasp the possibility of a woman murdered in our hallway on the same day my father died being just a phenomenal coincidence. Maybe my antigun father secretly owned an antique revolver and, in the throes of an unreasoning convulsion, shot her himself.” Finally, Susan got to the point. “However, when I finally went home and examined the scene—”

  Lawrence interrupted in a voice so stern it sounded almost angry. “You went to the apartment today? Susan, that’s horribly dangerous. Why would you do that?”

  Susan finally managed to pin down his gaze again. “If he died of natural causes, what danger could there be?”

  Lawrence looked away again, though not far. He trained his attention fanatically on Susan’s upper lip. “The threat against your father was real.”

  “So, what are they going to do? Use me to get to…a dead man? Murder or natural causes, John Calvin is dead.” Susan suddenly realized the possibility still existed that the body was misidentified. She had never actually seen it. She started to tremble. “Isn’t he?”

  Lawrence did not immediately answer.

  “Isn’t he?” Susan repeated more forcefully. She needed to know, had every right to do so.

  Lawrence scooted his chair closer and put his arms around Susan again. “Susan, there is no doubt about this: Your father is dead.”

  Susan looked at Nate and found him blurry behind a curtain of her own tears. He pursed his lips, and his eyes held longing and hope.

  “Tell her,” the robot said, “what you told me.”

  Lawrence turned his head toward Nate, and Susan could almost feel the heat of the glare she could not see. She tried not to let her hopes rise. Lawrence had not said “John Calvin is dead” as he might if he had changed her father’s name and sent him somewhere safe temporarily. He had specifically stated, “Your father is dead.”

  “Shut your mouth,” Lawrence instructed Nate, and the robot obeyed, as the Second Law stated he must. But his gaze found Susan’s again, and it spoke volumes.

  Susan shoved off Lawrence, until she created enough space between their seats that he could no longer hold her, could no longer keep his face hidden, could no longer avoid her searching gaze. “Lawrence, you can silence Nate, but not me. Whether you like it or not, we’re in this together.”

  Lawrence sighed. “Susan, you’re misunderstanding. There’s nothing I can tell you that will change anything. You have to understand that.”

  Susan would not let go. “The only thing I understand is I’m missing a crucial piece of information that might tie this all together. Until I have it, I can’t focus and I can’t rest. And if you don’t give it to me, I’ll have to find it out myself, even if it means significant risk to USR, to you, and to my own life.”

  “She has a right to know,” Nate said.

  Lawrence looked sharply at the robot. “Didn’t I tell you to shut your mouth?”

  “Yes,” Nate admitted. “And I did.” He smiled ever so slightly, clearly for Susan’s benefit. “Then I opened it again.”

  Susan winked at Nate but continued addressing Lawrence. “Lawrence, there are at least a dozen bullet holes in my walls. Nearly everything I own was cut or torn open and strewn across the floor, far too methodically for seizures to explain it. What are the odds my father managed to destroy every single thing we own before hitting his head on some object so hard it killed him?” Susan shook her head; she had considered all of this on her way to United States Robots and Mechanical Men. “Nothing fits, because I’m missing important information.” She rose and stared intently into his face. “I deserve to know the truth.”

  To Susan’s surprise, Lawrence quailed beneath her gaze. He did not try to rise; merely clasped his hands in his lap and dropped his gaze to them. “Susan, what if something I say changes your relationship with your father? What if it quakes your very foundation? What if it destroys your confidence in yourself and everything you’ve ever accomplished?”

  Susan sat back down, giving Lawrence’s questions their due consideration. She allowed several full minutes to tick past while thoughts raced through her mind. She did not try to guess what Lawrence might say, because that would undermine the purpose of his questions. She considered herself strong and capable, despite the events of the past year. Before starting at Manhattan Hasbro, she never would have believed anything could unnerve her. Now she knew otherwise. “Lawrence,” she said, with all the sobriety the request deserved. “I can’t quit searching until I know the whole truth. You can either let me find it on my own, whatever the danger, and deal with any consequences by myself. Or you can help me.”

  “Tell her,” Nate said. Though he scarcely moved, there was a forcefulness about his stance and tone that made him seem more master than creation. Then, more softly, “Tell her.”

  Lawrence Robertson sucked in a deep breath, as if prolonging the moment indefinitely.

  Susan understood his reluctance and did not press. Knowledge sometimes had its price, including the realization that, once learned, it might never be forgotten.

  Chapter 14

  They sat in Lawrence Robertson’s spacious office at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Lawrence’s and Susan’s seats facing one another while Nate pulled a chair up beside Susan, close enough to put a supportive arm around her or hold her hand, if either became necessary.

  At the moment, Susan found herself more intrigued than concerned or frightened. So much had happened in the past year, she doubted Lawrence could say anything that would upset or truly surprise her, though she felt certain he was going to delve into all the worst moments of her life. In that, he did not disappoint her, beginning with the most horrible time of her existence.

  “Do you remember, Susan, when you were a little girl of three or four?”

  Susan knew exactly where Lawrence was going. “When my mother died in a horrible accident, and I nearly lost my father as well. My life changed dramatically from that moment onward. Nothing was ever the same.”

  “Yes.” Lawrence glanced at Nate as if to beg the robot not to force him to continue. Of course, Nate had no power over his creator, so nothing he said or did truly mattered. He was only the voice of Lawrence’s conscience, albeit one who could compute complex mathematical riddles in an instant and had grown to know Susan’s psyche fa
r better than her father’s best friend. “And for more reasons than you know.”

  Susan cocked her head to indicate interest. She steeled her emotions, not wishing to reveal any hurt or distress, to give Lawrence any reason to abort his story. “My mother died more than twenty years ago. You’re not opening any fresh wounds here, Lawrence.”

  “Maybe,” Lawrence did not sound nearly as certain as Susan. “Except I need to change the details a bit, present it to you a different way.”

  “All right.” Susan looked directly into Lawrence’s face, wanting to reassure him nothing he said would bother her. Her father had not handled the death of Amanda Calvin well. He had avoided talking about it, dodged questions, and generally changed the subject to the point where Susan learned not to broach it with him at all. She suspected denial had suited her as well, crushing the horrible memory of losing her mother into the deepest recesses of her brain and allowing her to focus solely on the happy times.

  When John had spoken of Amanda, he did so with all the love in the universe and always in superlatives. To Susan’s knowledge, he had never so much as dated since her death. It had taken her until last year, until she found Remington, to question her father about his private life. Only then, with his assistance, had she dredged up enough cobwebbed images to remember he had gotten severely injured in the same accident, sustaining wounds that left him with permanent neurological damage and little desire or capacity for sexual entanglements.

  “Amanda was a brilliant woman, Susan, dedicated to her work with USR.”

  Susan caught herself stiffening. Her father had never mentioned her mother also worked for U.S. Robots. He had always downplayed his own role there, too.

  “Surely John told you I invented the positronic brain.”

  Susan nodded vigorously. John Calvin had shown the same breathless, reverent awe whenever he mentioned the name Lawrence Robertson and his staggering creations.

  “It was your parents, Susan, who meticulously crafted the wording of the Three Laws of Robotics, with input from me and Alfred, of course.” Lawrence waved vaguely toward the office of Alfred Lanning, a stocky man he had once introduced as his head of research. “But it was wholly John and Amanda who came up with the coupling, the indelible and inseparable process of eternally linking the Three Laws of Robotics and the positronic brain, so one could never exist without the other.”

  That brought Susan’s thoughts back to a day when she and Remington had visited with Nate and, during the discussion, came up with a theory that the Three Laws were the very thing sabotaging the Society for Humanity’s attempts to use nanorobot-infused, mentally ill humans as mindless bombers. Nate had insisted, “The Three Laws of Robotics are the basis from which all positronic brains are constructed. Without them, there is no positronic brain, no thinking robot. U.S. Robots has made the Three Laws so essential to production that such cannot be undertaken without them.” John Calvin had later added, “All USR robotics begin and end with the Three Laws. It would be utterly impossible to build a positronic brain without the Three Laws or to remove them without permanently disabling the robot.”

  It never ceased to amaze Susan how her father could so easily bypass any mention of his own hand in the events he described with such assuredness and admiration.

  “It’s rare to meet two people so ideally suited to one another as Amanda and your father. They wanted to remain together during work, after work, night after night. And they lavished attention on what they considered their greatest joint endeavor.”

  “The Three Laws of Robotics,” Susan guessed.

  Lawrence managed a laugh, though the situation strained it. “I meant you, Susan. They considered you their monumental achievement. They used to take you almost everywhere, and it was a stroke of luck you were with your grandmother when…” He stopped suddenly, his next word garbled by a lump in his throat.

  “The accident,” Susan filled in. Too many years had passed for her to surrender to emotion about it, especially in front of Lawrence.

  “It was no accident.” The words emerged softly, conversationally, yet they struck Susan like a physical blow.

  “Dad’s always described it as an accident.” Lawrence’s words made no sense. “Are you trying to say…he crashed the car on purpose?” Lawrence had warned Susan that knowing the truth might change her opinion of her father, but she would never believe he had intentionally killed her mother and, nearly, himself.

  “No car,” Lawrence corrected. “No crash.” He closed his eyes deliberately, slowly, and held them shut. “Susan, your parents were gunned down.”

  Susan’s mouth fell open.

  “By the Society for Humanity.”

  Susan could not believe what she was hearing. “Gunned down,” she repeated. “My parents?”

  Lawrence opened his eyes. “I told you it would quake your foundation. I can stop here, if you wish.”

  Susan shook her head vigorously. She had to know it all, for her safety if for no other reason. “Why target my parents? Why not…the creator of the positronic brain? Why not…” In her rush to get the name out, she momentarily forgot his official title. “…Alfred Lanning?”

  Lawrence sighed, lowered his head, and sighed again. “Believe me, I asked myself that question a million times. Why them? Why not me? Why? Why? Why?” He fell silent, apparently questioning the universe again, as if this time he might get the answer. “USR was only a few years old at the time, barely on the SFH radar. I had revealed the positronic brain at a few symposiums, and there was some buzz, some early excitement.”

  A strangely serene look stole over his features; the memory of simpler times, with everything fresh and new, briefly carried away the burdens of the next two and a half decades. “Calvin was the one who anticipated the Frankenstein Complex….”

  Susan had never heard Lawrence call her father by their last name before, and it seemed jarringly out of place.

  “And it was his attempts to assuage it that ultimately led to his death.”

  Susan remained quiet but tried to keep an inquisitive look plastered on her face. She did not want Lawrence to see any of the building turmoil in her own thoughts. She worried he would hold back on those parts of the story he thought would most upset her, the very ones that could make the difference between appropriate wariness and abject panic. She needed to know what dangers she faced without false reassurances or gaps in her knowledge. “Hence their work on the Three Laws.”

  “Yes.” Lawrence studied her features intently. If he could read below the superficial game she played to keep him talking, it did not stop him. “Amanda and Calvin believed that if they could convince the public of the safety of the positronic robot, they might get past the irrational fear. But the announcement did not go as they planned. Somehow the emphasis fell squarely on the security of the bond between the Three Laws of Robotics and the positronic brain.”

  Susan noted the oddity again and could not help commenting on it. “I’ve never heard you call my father Calvin before. Now you’ve done it twice.”

  Lawrence bobbed his head. “Calvin was your father’s name.” He added carefully, “His first name.”

  Susan supposed the information ought to startle her, but it did not. It only made sense to let the killers believe they had accomplished their goal, that her father was a different man, by changing his name. Otherwise they would go after him again. Susan now understood what must have happened. On or about July 4, 2036, the SFH had finally seen through the deception, more than twenty years after their quarry had survived their deadly barrage.

  Lawrence anticipated Susan’s question. “Unfortunately, Calvin had a bright daughter who reveled in her ability to write the names of herself and the two people she loved most in the world. No amount of gentle or coercive steering could get you to give up those three names: Susan, Amanda, and Calvin.” He smiled ever so slightly. “And Calvin was adamant that, no matter what happened to him, things be as normal for you as possible.”

  Sus
an had to admit he had done a marvelous job, miraculous by some standards. She did not like that he had lied to her about the car accident, but she understood why he had needed to do so. Now his reasons for avoiding talking about it made even more sense. Had Susan known the truth as a child, she could never have kept it secret, and any revelation would have placed her father, and probably her, in lethal danger.

  Lawrence finished answering her question. “Luckily, you couldn’t handle the last-name part yet. Just ‘Susan,’ ‘Amanda,’ and ‘Calvin.’ We simply added ‘John,’ moved ‘Calvin’ to the end, and everything worked out.” He added quickly, “It wasn’t the name that tipped off the SFH this time.”

  Susan knew she needed to explore that, but the issue of why the SFH had targeted her family in the first place still remained on the table. She wondered about her original last name but saw no real reason to know it, since she could never safely use it. “So, they targeted my parents because they were the ones speaking publicly about positronic robots.”

  Lawrence frowned and shook his head. “That might be part of it, but I’ve come to agree with Alfred. What put Calvin and Amanda in SFH’s crosshairs was a comment they made about the Three Laws. The reporters had become utterly relentless and refused to accept that the Three Laws would keep mankind safe from a robotic revolt because, somehow, the sheer brilliance of a brain capable of learning would allow robots to uncouple themselves from the restrictions placed upon them. Repetition wasn’t working. Even their insistence that the two were inseparably linked, that any attempt to uncouple them would render the positronic brain nonfunctional, didn’t do the trick.

  “It somehow got into the public consciousness that a secret formula existed that could separate the two, and the questions became even more unstoppable about how USR would keep that information out of the hands of the robots or some other malevolent force. In exasperation, Amanda said something to the effect that if such a formula existed, it would die with the two of them, because not even I knew it.”