Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  “I’ll take the chance.”

  “I could have predicted you’d say that.”

  Derec saw Adam and Eve standing in the doorway. He wondered how long they had been frozen in position there, watching.

  “Adam? Eve?”

  They ignored him. Their attention was clearly focussed on the capsule.

  This was the moment he had feared, and it had come too soon.

  They entered the room, walking past Wolruf, past Ariel. They were holding hands, and Derec wondered where in Frost’s name they had learned to do that. Ariel came to Derec and held onto his arm.

  They came to a stop by the capsule. Releasing Eve’s hand and reaching down, he flipped a toggle located near the capsule’s seam. A control panel slipped out of the tip of the egg-shaped container. Adam manipulated a number of switches, and the egg began to glow. Derec could feel heat emanating from it. There was a faint humming sound coming from the inside of the capsule. The seams separated, and the Silversides got their first glimpse of the Watchful Eye, who immediately began to stir. It rolled out of the capsule and came to rest in front of Adam and Eve.

  “You are us,” Adam said.

  “We are you,” Eve said.

  The Watchful Eye was so bloblike now that Derec had not missed the presence of a head on the body. Now a head appeared to rise out of the middle of the blob, in the area where the eye had been. The eye had disappeared and, in its place, as facial features became discernible, there appeared two eyes, both closed. When it had fully formed, its eyes opened and Derec saw it had the features of Adam on its face. Adam-as-Derec. Then the surface of its body started to undulate as it gradually formed itself into the humanoid state. As it became more and more humanoid, it stood up on two legs and sprouted normal-length arms.

  As it became more and more like Adam, Adam started to change, too. In a moment he looked more like Avery than Derec.

  Derec realized it could be difficult keeping track of these chameleons without a scorecard.

  “I am you, the both of you,” the Watchful Eye said. “But who are we?”

  “That we will have to find out,” Eve said.

  Eve’s Ariel face had a suggestion of Derec in it. Adam changed to caninoid shape, a mimicry of Wolruf. The Watchful Eye made a try at Wolruf, too. Its Wolruf was less delineated, less convincing as a copy, than Adam’s. Eve became an effective Wolruf, too. Wolruf came and stood beside them, and Derec wondered if, should he close his eyes and then open them to find the quartet had shifted positions, he could tell which one was the true Wolruf. Well, that couldn’t happen. Whatever other miraculous transformations they could achieve, they could not simulate fur, nor could they imitate very well the normal coloring of the beings they imprinted on. A moment later, Adam resembled Derec with a caninoid overlay, the Watchful Eye looked like Avery doing his impression of Bogie, and Eve was simply looking like Ariel again.

  On Derec’s part, on Ariel’s part, neither was sure what was making them uneasy. However, in the past they had both felt a sense of danger from the two Silversides, and now there were three. Three of them chatting together, as if they had so many questions to ask of each other, of themselves, of the worlds where they had been dropped so unceremoniously — and probably speculating about the havoc they could wreak if given half a chance.

  Avery, who had been too busy with the computer to notice the Silversides’ entrance, turned around in his chair and finally saw the curious trio. He smiled.

  “The situation is replete with challenges,” he said.

  “For whom?” Derec said.

  “Them or us?” Ariel said.

  “Them. Us. Whatever, it’s quite wonderful.”

  The three shape-changing robots, apparently oblivious to the remarks of the others, joined hands in a humanlike way and began to walk out of the computer chamber.

  “Should we follow them?” Ariel asked.

  “Let them go,” Derec said. “We’ve got too much to do.” Avery returned to the computer.

  “Message from Mandelbrot,” he said without turning around. “Seems the Supervisors are all active again, out of the meeting room and starting to function like gang busters. Systems are running more efficiently. Robots are coming out of their holes and crowding the streets like usual. The city is returning to normal. What do your chemfets tell you, Derec?”

  “What you’ve reported. They’re more active than normal. I think the crisis is definitely over.” He glanced toward the doorway the Silversides and the Watchful Eye had gone through. “The city’s crisis, anyway.”

  His gaze stayed on the doorway for a short while. Then, his chemfets surging through his bloodstream, he returned to the task of putting Robot City back into order.

  Alliance

  3605 A.D.

  Chapter 1

  NEW BEGINNINGS

  “SO, HAVE YOU decided on a new name yet?”

  “Yes.”

  Derec waited expectantly for a moment, then looked around in exasperation from the newfound robot to his companions. Ariel and Dr. Avery were both grinning. Wolruf, a golden-furred alien of vaguely doglike shape, was also grinning in her own toothy way. Beside Wolruf stood two more robots, named Adam and Eve. Neither of them seemed amused.

  The entire party stood in the jumbled remains of the City Computer Center. It was a testament to Dr. Avery’s engineering skills that the computer still functioned at all, but despite the thick layer of dust over everything and the more recent damage from the struggle to subdue the renegade robot that now stood obediently before them, it still hummed with quiet efficiency as it carried out Avery’s orders to reconstruct the city the robot had been in the process of dismantling.

  The robot had originally called itself the Watchful Eye, but Derec had tired of that mouthful almost immediately and had ordered it to come up with something better. Evidently the robot had obeyed, but....

  “Ask a simple question,” Derec muttered, shaking his head, but before he could ask a more specific one, such as what the new name might be, the robot spoke again.

  “I have chosen the name of a famous historical figure. You may have heard of him. Lucius, the first creative robot in Robot City, who constructed the work of art known as ‘Circuit Breaker.’”

  “Lucius?” Derec asked, surprised. He had heard of Lucius, of course, had in fact solved the mystery of Lucius’s murder, but a greater gulf than that which existed between the historical figure and this robot was hard to imagine. Lucius had been an artist, attempting to bring beauty to an otherwise sterile city, while this robot had created nothing but trouble.

  “That is correct. However, to avoid confusion I have named myself ‘Lucius II.’ That is ‘two’ as in the numeral, not ‘too’ as in ‘also.’”

  “Just what we need,” Or. Avery growled. “Another Lucius.” Avery disliked anything that disrupted his carefully crafted plan for Robot City, and Lucius’s creativity had disrupted it plenty. In retaliation, Avery had removed the creative impulse from all of the city’s robots. He looked at his new Lucius, this Lucius II, as if he would like to remove more than that from it.

  The robot met his eyes briefly, its expression inscrutable, then turned to the two other robots in the group surrounding it.

  “We should use speech when in the presence of humans,” Adam said after a moment, and Derec realized that Lucius II had been speaking via comlink.

  “Is this your judgment or an order given to you by humans?” asked Lucius II.

  “Judgment,” replied Adam.

  “Does it matter?” Ariel asked.

  “Yes. If it had been an order, I would have given it higher priority, though not as high as if it had been an order given directly to me. In that case it would become a Second Law obligation.”

  The Second Law of Robotics stated that a robot must obey the orders of human beings unless those orders conflicted with the First Law, which stated that a robot could not harm a human or through inaction allow a human to come to harm. Those, plus the Third Law,
which stated that a robot must act to preserve its own existence as long as such protection did not conflict with the first two Laws, were built into the very structure of the hardware that made up the robot’s brain. They could not disobey them without risking complete mental freeze-up.

  Derec breathed a soft sigh of relief at hearing Lucius II refer to the Second Law. It was evidence that he intended to obey it, and, by implication, the other two as well. Despite his apparent obedience since they had stopped him, Derec hadn’t been so sure.

  Lucius II was still his own robot, all the same. Ariel’s question had been an implicit Second-Law order to answer, and he had done so, but now that he had fulfilled that obligation, Lucius II again turned to Adam and Eve and said, “We seem to have much in common.” As he spoke, his features began to change, flowing into an approximation of theirs.

  Adam, Eve, and Lucius II were not ordinary robots. Where ordinary robots were constructed of rigid metal and plastics, these three were made of tiny cells, much like the cells that make up a human body. The robot cells were made of metal and plastic, certainly, but that was an advantage rather than a limitation, since the robot cells were much more durable than organic cells and could link together in any pattern the central brain chose for them. The result was that the robots could take on any shape they wished, could change their features — or even their gross anatomy — at will.

  The other robots in Robot City, with one exception, were also made of cells, but Dr. Avery’s programming restricted them to conservative robot forms. Not so with these three. They were not of Avery’s manufacture, and without his restriction they used their cellular nature far more than the City robots, forgoing hard angles, joints and plates in favor of smooth curves and smooth, continuous motion. They looked more like metal-coated people than like the stiff-jointed caricatures of men that were normal robots, but even those features weren’t constant. They imprinted on whomever was foremost in their consciousness at the time, becoming walking reflections of Derec or Ariel or Avery, or even the alien Wolruf.

  At the moment, Adam mimicked Derec’s features and Eve mimicked Ariel’s. Lucius II, his imprinting programming struggling for control in unfamiliar company, was a more generic blend of features.

  Derec found it unnerving to watch the robot’s face shift uncertainly between a copy of a copy of his own and of Ariel’s. He decided to get the thing to focus its attention on him, and said, “One thing you all have in common is that you’re all a lot of trouble. Lucius — Lucius II,” he added, emphasizing the “II” as if making a great distinction between the former robot and his namesake, “— did you give any thought to what you were destroying when you started this — this project of yours?”

  “I did.”

  “Didn’t you care?”

  “I do not believe I did, at least not in the sense you seem to give the word. However, you may be surprised to know that my motive was to restore the city to normal operations.”

  “By destroying it?” Avery demanded.

  “By rebuilding it. The city was not functioning normally when I awakened here. It was designed to serve humans, but until you arrived, there were no humans. Therefore, I set out to create them. In the process, I found that the city required modification. I was engaged in making those modifications when you stopped me.”

  “What you made was a long way from human,” Ariel said.

  Lucius II had nearly adjusted his features to match Derec’s; now they began to shift toward Ariel’s again. “You saw only the homunculi,” he said. “They were simple mechanical tests run to determine whether complete social functions could be programmed into the later, fully protoplasmic humans. Unfortunately, they proved too limited to answer the question, but the human-making project has enjoyed better success.”

  In the voice of someone who wasn’t sure she wanted to know, Ariel asked, “What do you mean? What have you done?”

  By way of answer, the robot turned toward the computer terminal at Avery’s side. He didn’t need the keyboard, but sent his commands directly via comlink. By the time everyone else realized what he was doing, he had an inside view of a large, warehouselike building on the monitor. The building was missing a corner, torn completely away in the destruction of only a few minutes earlier, but they could still see what Lucius had intended to show them.

  The floor was acrawl with small, furry, ratlike creatures. Lucius II said, “Whereas the homunculi you saw and dissected were completely robotic, and were, as you said, ‘a long way from human,’ these are actual living animals. In fact, they each carry in their cells the entire genetic code for a human being — all twenty-three chromosome pairs — but certain genes for intelligence and physical appearance have been modified for the test run. Once I am convinced that the process has no hidden flaws, I will use the unmodified genes to create humans for the city to serve.”

  “You will do no such thing!” Dr. Avery demanded. “That is an order. When I want humans here, I will put them here myself.”

  “I will comply with your order. However, you should know that there was no indication of your wishes in the central computer’s programming.”

  “There will be,” Avery promised. Derec suppressed a grin. No matter how much he denied it, his father’s city was still in the experimental stages as well. He and Derec had both had to make many modifications in its programming to keep it developing properly. True, the complications Lucius II had brought about were not Avery’s doing, but the city robots’ underlying desire to find and serve humans — and thus, in a sense, Lucius’s project — was.

  Ariel was staring, horrified, at the creature on the screen as it picked up a scrap of something between its teeth and scuttled out the hole in the wall and out of sight. “That’s human?” she whispered.

  “Not at all,” Lucius II said. “It merely uses altered human genes.”

  “That’s — that’s awful. It was human, but you twisted it into something else.”

  “It was never anything other than what it is.”

  “It could have been!”

  “Certainly. The raw materials making up this city could also have been used to produce more humans. So could a large percentage of the atmosphere. However, the depleted resources that would result from such a usage would not support those humans in any degree of comfort. I made a logical deduction that no thinking being would wish for every combination of chemicals that could possibly become human to actually do so. Was I in error?”

  “Yes!” Ariel stared at him a moment, slowly realizing the true meaning of what she’d said, and went on, “I mean, no, you weren’t in error in that particular conclusion, but to apply it to already-formed genes is different.”

  “The genes existed only as information patterns in a medical file until I synthesized them.”

  “I don’t care! They were still —”

  “Hold it,” interrupted Derec. “This is neither the time nor the place for a philosophical discussion of what makes a human. We can do that just as well at home, where we’re more comfortable.” Of his father, he asked, “Have you finished your reprogramming?”

  “For the time being,” Avery replied. “There’s more yet to be done, but there’s no sense fiddling with the details until the major features are restored.”

  “Then let’s go home. Come on.” Derec led the way out of the computer center, through the jumble of wreckage in the corridors — wreckage that robot crews were already at work cleaning up and repairing — and out into the street.

  The destruction outside was less evident than what they had seen in the computer center. Entire buildings were missing, to be sure, but in a city that had changed its shape as often as Adam or Eve changed their features, that was no indication of damage. Only the pieces of buildings lying in the street revealed that anything was amiss, and even as they watched, those pieces whose individual cells were still functional began to melt into the surface, rejoining with the city to become part of its general building reserve once again. A few fr
agments were too damaged to rejoin, but robots were already at work cleaning those up as well, loading them into trucks and hauling them back to the recycling plant.

  Avery smiled at the sight, and Derec knew just what was going through his mind. Transmogrifying robots meant nothing to him; entire cities were his palette.

  A row of transport booths waited at the curb just outside the computer center’s doorway. The booths were just big enough for one passenger each, little more than meter-wide transparent cylinders to stand in while the magnetic levitation motors in the base whisked their passengers to their destinations. They were a new design, completely enclosed and free-roaming rather than open to the air and following tracks like the booths Derec was used to. Either the destruction had been too great to allow using the track system immediately, and these booths were a temporary measure until the old system was restored, or the City had taken advantage of the opportunity to change the design and this was to be the style from now on. It didn’t matter to Derec either way. The booths were transportation, whatever their shape.

  Derec boarded one, felt it bob slightly under his weight, and grasped the handhold set into the console at waist level. “Home,” he said to the speaker grille beside the handle, trusting the central computer to recognize his voice and check his current address.

  Through his internal link with the city computers, he expanded the order. Bring the others to the same destination, he sent, turning around to focus on the other members of the group, who were each boarding booths of their own. He sent the image with his order, thus defining which “others” he was talking about.

  It was probably unnecessary in all but Lucius II’s case, since everyone else knew where they were going, but it never hurt to be certain.

  Acknowledged, came the response.

  On a whim, Derec sent, Patch me into receivers in the other booths in this party.

  Patched in.

  He could have listened in without going through the computer, but his internal comlink got harder and harder to control the more links he opened with it. Much easier to keep one link open to the computer and let it make the multiple connection.