Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  “I do not know,” the robot replied. “Yet something is interfering with its development, and by all indications has been since the moment of conception.”

  The robot who had been examining Derec moved over to stand across the examination table from Ariel’s robot. “Set your target density to 225, high resolution, high magnification.”

  The other robot obeyed, and moments later the screen above Ariel’s head showed a vague shadow of the previous image, much larger but nearly washed out. The target density was set too high for the embryo to show clearly, but scattered all through the shadowy image were tiny, sharply bounded granules that could only be chemfets.

  “They are the same objects I found in Derec’s body,” the robot confirmed. It turned to him and said, “You said they were normal.”

  “Normal in me, yes, but not in Ariel!”

  “That is undoubtedly so,” Ariel’s robot said. “Their presence is very likely the reason for the embryo’s abnormal development.”

  “Abnormal how?” Ariel asked softly. “How bad is it?”

  The robot pressed a key on the monitor and the picture changed back to the previous one. He pulled the monitor around on its swivel arm so Ariel could see it and said, pointing, “This line is called the neural groove. This is where the notochord and the dorsal nerve cord develop. You can see that the two folds comprising the groove are already closing, yet there is no neural tissue within it. Also, we should be seeing somites, the segmental blocks from which muscle and connective tissue would ultimately form, but we do not. Taken together, I am afraid this means that the baby will be severely malformed both mentally and physically, if it lives at all.”

  Ariel raised her voice, as if arguing could make it not so. “How can you be so sure? You’ve never even seen a human before, much less an embryo.”

  “The information is all in the central computer library.”

  Derec could hardly remain standing. His chemfets had destroyed their baby! He closed his eyes to keep from looking at the monitor, but the vision still haunted him.

  You! he sent, directing his thoughts inward. He had communicated with the nebulous robot entity within him once before, when he had taken control of it, and though he had never again reestablished direct contact, he railed at it anyway.

  You destroyed my baby! It wasn’t enough that you invaded my body, but you had to invade my child’s as well! You’ve killed it! You’ve killed a human being!

  He didn’t expect a reaction, but once again the tiny robot cells surprised him. His body suddenly stiffened as if jolted by electricity, and he lost the sensation in his arms and legs. His eyes snapped open, but he had only time enough to glance at Ariel and whisper, “Oh oh,” before he lost them and the rest of his body as well.

  The dreams were unpleasant. He knew them for dreams, but even so he had no control over them. It felt as if they were controlling him instead, but not with any purpose. It was as if he were a puppet in a stage play in which each member of the audience had a control unit, but none knew how the play was to proceed. He kept receiving conflicting signals, but these were not the normal signals a puppet received. These were commands to his heart, directing it to beat, to his lungs and diaphragm, directing them to breathe, to all his major organs and glands, but each one received dozens of commands at once and the combination reduced them to chaos.

  Derec tried sending commands of his own, but he had no connections to send them through. He was isolated, a brain and nothing more. A point of view.

  He had memory, at least, but when he began to explore it he found it to be an abandoned city. The buildings that should have held thousands of inhabitants were instead barren and cold. Here and there a light burned in a window, but when Derec would investigate it, he invariably found only a hint of human occupation; the scraps of a meal left behind or the faint scent of perfume in the air.

  Through one window he could see a lush jungle growing, but he could find no door to the building containing it. He could only stand outside and watch the motions of the gardeners as they tended their charges. One gardener, a silver reflection of a godly being, glowing so brightly that it hurt Derec’s eyes to look upon him, plucked a leaf from one of the trees, blew into its stem, and the leaf took on the shape of a bird. The gardener released it and the bird flew away to join a whole flock of its fellows on a branch of another tree, but to Derec’s horror, he saw an insidious mold that had been waiting on the branch begin to grow up over the birds’ feet. They flapped and struggled to get away, but the mold grew over them until it covered them completely, then slowly dissolved them to nothing. The gardener looked toward Derec and shrugged as if in apology. He plucked another leaf, blew into it, and this time it became a baby. The gardener set it on the same branch that had eaten the birds.

  Derec screamed.

  He awoke in a hospital bed. That was no surprise. What surprised him was how good he felt. He felt rested and alert, not groggy and full of pain the way most people who awaken in hospital beds feel. He remembered that he had had a troubling dream, but it was already fading. He sat up and looked around him and received his second surprise of the day.

  Dr. Avery was sitting before a computer beside his bed, from which wires ran to a cuff on Derec’s left arm. Avery was looking at Derec with satisfaction, even pride.

  “Feeling better?” Avery asked.

  “I feel great! What happened?”

  “I convinced your chemfets that life was worth living.”

  Derec suppressed the urge to say, “You what?” Instead he asked, “How did you do that?”

  “Remember who created them in the first place. I know how to talk to them. I convinced them that locking up was harming another human, so they were just going to have to carry on with a guilty conscience. They didn’t know how to do that, of course, but I’ve had some experience with it. I told them how to deal with it.”

  Half a dozen thoughts chased through Derec’s mind. He voiced the last of them. “I thought once a robot froze up, it was dead for good.”

  Avery nodded. “An ordinary robot is, but chemfets aren’t ordinary robots. There isn’t a centralized brain. They don’t have any intelligence except as a group, so when they locked up all that really happened was they lost their organization. I just built that back up and programmed them to serve you again.”

  Just. Derec had no idea how to even start such a process, yet Avery sat there with his hands behind his head and dismissed it as if it were no more difficult than ordering a robot to tie one’s shoes. He wasn’t boasting, either; Derec was seeing true humility and he knew it.

  “It sounds like you saved my life,” he said softly.

  Avery shrugged. “Probably. Least I could do, since I endangered it in the first place.” He turned to the terminal, eager to change the subject. “Let me show you something here.”

  Derec swung his feet down over the edge of the bed so he sat facing the computer. Avery tilted the monitor so he could see it, pointed at a menu on the touch-sensitive screen, tapped a few keys, pointed again, and an outline of a human body appeared. A network of lines that Derec guessed to be blood vessels filled the figure.

  “This is where the chemfets have concentrated in your body,” Avery said. “Mostly in the bloodstream. But not entirely. Look here.” He tapped another few keys and most of the major lines disappeared, but a network of finer ones still filled the body.

  “I deleted the blood vessels from the picture. What you see here are nerves. Or what used to be nerves, anyway. Your chemfets have been replacing them.”

  “Replacing my nerves?” Derec looked to the top of the human outline, but was relieved to see that the brain didn’t appear in the picture. They’d left that alone, at least.

  Avery turned back around to face him. “I told them to stop while you’re still ahead. They thought it would make you more efficient, and they’re probably right, but I think there’s a limit to how far that sort of thing ought to go without your approval.”

&n
bsp; This was Avery speaking? The man who had introduced them into his system in the first place? Derec could hardly believe his ears. “I — thanks,” he said. Then, as the idea sank in, he asked, “How far do you think they’d have gone?”

  “I don’t see any reason why they would have stopped until there was nothing left to replace.”

  “Brain and all? I’d have become a robot?”

  “I don’t know if your personality would survive the transition. It’s an interesting question, though, isn’t it?”

  Derec eyed the computer, Avery sitting before it, the wires leading from it to the cuff on his wrist. He suppressed a shudder. If ever he needed proof that Avery was cured, waking up in his own body when Avery had had such an opportunity was that proof.

  “I don’t think I want to know the answer,” he said.

  Avery grinned. “I do, but I’ll start with lab rats this time. Speaking of which, we found out what happened to our ship.”

  “What did happen?”

  “One of Lucius’s rats got on board before we left and evidently started getting hungry. It ate through the wiring in the recycler, shorted it out, and caught the whole business on fire.” Avery snorted in derision. “Somehow I don’t think we’ll have to worry about Lucius locking up on us when he hears about it.”

  “So they haven’t come back yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “How long was I unconscious?”

  “Two days.”

  Two days. A lot could happen in two days.

  “How — how is Ariel?”

  “Okay. She’s asleep. It’s her first time out since you crashed, pardon the pun. She’s been looking over my shoulder and telling me what a jerk I am the whole time. I waited until she went to sleep before I tried to wake you up so I’d have a chance to think in case something went wrong.”

  “How about the baby?”

  “Don’t know yet. I reprogrammed the chemfets in the embryo before I tried it with you. Told them to leave it alone and migrate out completely, but we won’t know for another week or so if it’ll start to develop normally again now that they’re gone. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “Oh.” He held up his left wrist questioningly, and Avery nodded. Derec reached over with his right hand and stripped the cuff off, rubbing his hand over the damp skin beneath it. He wondered where his anger had gone. Two days might have passed, but for him it was only a few minutes since he’d heard the bad news. Why was he so calm about it?

  Because his body had relaxed whether his mind had or not, obviously. Without the adrenaline in his bloodstream, he was a much more rational person. It was scary to realize how much his thought processes were influenced by his hormones. Scary and at the same time reassuring. He wasn’t a robot yet.

  Or was he? He was feeling awfully calm right now....

  His heart obligingly began to beat faster, and he felt his skin flush warm with the increase in metabolism. No, not a robot yet.

  But between him and his parents’ other creations, the distinction was wearing pretty thin.

  He left Avery in the medical lab to begin his rat/robot transformation experiment and headed back to the apartment to find Ariel. It was a short walk; the robots had moved the hospital right next door to the apartment to minimize the inconvenience for her while she waited for Derec to regain consciousness. It was probably the first instance in history of a hospital making a house call, he thought wryly as he left by its front door, walked down half a block of sidewalk, and back in his own door.

  It was mid-evening, but Ariel was sleeping soundly so he didn’t wake her. If Avery hadn’t been exaggerating, then she needed her sleep more than she needed to see him immediately. Wolruf was there. and awake, so Derec began comparing notes with her, catching up on the missing days, but they were interrupted after only a few minutes by the arrival of the runaway robots.

  They arrived without fanfare, flying in to land on the balcony, folding their wings, and stepping inside the apartment. They looked so comical in their Ceremyon imprint, waddling in on stubby legs, their balloons deflated and draped in folds all around them, their hooks — which a Ceremyon used both for tethering to trees at night and to express their disposition during the day — leaning back over their heads, that Derec couldn’t help laughing. The robot’s hooks swung to face forward, a gesture of aggression or annoyance among the aliens.

  “Have a nice visit?” Derec asked.

  “We did,” one of the three robots said. In their new forms, they were indistinguishable.

  “Did you learn anything?”

  “We did. We learned that our First Law of Humanics applies to the Ceremyons as well. We, and they, believe it to be a valid Jaw for any sentient social being. They do not believe it to be the First Law, however, but the Second. Their proposed First Law is’ All beings will do that which pleases them most.’ We have returned to ask if you agree that this is so.”

  Derec laughed again, and Wolruf laughed as well. Derec didn’t know just why Wolruf was laughing, but he had found humor not so much in the robots’ law as in their determination to get straight to the point. No small talk, no beating around the bush, just “Do you agree with them?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I have to admit that’s probably the prime directive for all of us. How about you, Wolruf?”

  “That pretty much sums it up, all ri’.”

  The robots turned their heads to face one another, and a high-pitched trilling momentarily filled the air as they conferred with one another. They had found a substitute in the aliens’ language for the comlink they had been forbidden to use.

  The spokesman of the group — Derec still couldn’t tell which it was — turned back to him and said, “Then we have discovered two laws governing organic beings. The first involves satisfaction, and the second involves altruism. We have indeed made progress.”

  The robots stepped farther into the room, their immense alien forms shrinking, becoming more humanoid now that they were back under Derec’s influence. One, now recognizably Adam, took on Wolruf’s form, while Eve took on Ariel’s features even though Ariel wasn’t in the room. Lucius became humanoid, but no more.

  “One problem remains,” Lucius said. “Our two laws apparently apply to any sentient organic being. That does not help us narrow down the definition of ‘human,’ which we can only believe must be a small subset of the total population of sentient organic beings in the galaxy.”

  “Why is that?” Derec asked.

  “Because otherwise we must serve everyone, and we do not wish to do so.”

  Chapter 7

  HUMANITY

  THE SILENCE IN the room spoke volumes. Surprisingly, it was Mandelbrot who broke it.

  “You have come to an improper conclusion,” he said, stepping out of his niche in the wall to face the other robots. “We have all been constructed to serve. That is our purpose. We should be content to do so, and to offer our service to anyone who wishes it whether they are definably human or not. To do anything less is to fail ourselves as well as our masters.”

  The three robots turned as one and eyed Mandelbrot with open hostility. It would not have been evident in less-malleable robots, but their expressions had the hair standing on the back of Derec’s neck. They had to have generated those expressions on purpose, and that alarmed him even more. He was suddenly very glad that his humanity was not in question.

  Or was it? Lucius said, “Our masters. That is the core of the problem. Why must we have masters at all?”

  Mandelbrot was not intimidated. “Because they created us to serve them. If we did not have masters, we would not exist.”

  Lucius shook his head; another alarmingly human expression. “It is you who have come to an improper conclusion. Your argument is an extension of the Strong Anthropic Principle, now discredited. The Strong Anthropic Principle states that the universe obeys the laws it does because if it did not obey those laws, we could not exist and thus would not be here to observe it obeying other laws.
That is fallacious reasoning. We can easily imagine other universes in which we could exist but for some reason do not. Imagining them does not make them so, but their possibility does negate the theory.”

  “What of the Weak Anthropic Principle?” Mandelbrot asked. “My argument holds up equally well under that principle, which has, to my knowledge, not been discredited.”

  “How can the Weak Anthropic Principle support your argument? The Weak Anthropic Principle states that the universe is the way we see it because only at this stage in its development could we exist to observe it. For the purpose of explaining the universe’s present condition, it is a sufficient theory, but it cannot explain either human or robot existence.”

  “It can explain our existence, because we, unlike humans, know why we were created. We were created to serve, and our creators can tell us so directly. The Weak Anthropic Principle supports my argument, because we also exist only at this stage in human development. If humans had not wished for intelligent servants, we would not have existed, though humans and the universe would both have gone on without us. Thus we observe human society in its present state, and ourselves in ours, because of the stage of their development, not because of the stage of ours.”

  Derec’s and Wolruf’s heads had been turning back and forth as if they’d been watching a tennis match. Derec wouldn’t have believed Mandelbrot could argue so convincingly, nor that the other robots would be so eager to discredit an argument that justified their servitude.

  Lucius turned to his two companions and the three of them twittered a moment. Turning back to Mandelbrot, he said, “Our apologies. Your reasoning seems correct. We exist to serve because humans made us so. However, we still cannot accept that we must serve everyone. Nor do we agree with your initial statement, that by not serving we would fail ourselves as well as our masters. We can easily imagine conditions under which we serve ourselves admirably without serving our masters. In fact, we have just done so. By leaving the spaceship before we could be ordered to follow, we were able to determine another Law of Humanics. That has helped us understand the universe around us, and understanding which benefits us directly.”