Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  Now they’d returned to Tau Puppis IV, the world on which Dr. Anastasi had dropped Learning Machine #1. Basalom integrated that information with the data base he’d built up over two years of working with Dr. Anastasi, and concluded with 95% confidence that breaking the news to her would precipitate a negative emotional reaction. He could not predict exactly what her reaction would be-no robot was that sophisticated — but he could predict beyond a reasonable doubt that the information would cause Dr. Anastasi significant emotional discomfort.

  And that was Basalom’s dilemma. How did this emotional pain fit within the First Law definition of harm? His systems programming was not precise on that point. If emotional pain was not harm, there was little point to his being programmed to perceive it. But if evoking strong emotion was harm, then obeying Second Law orders could become a terribly ticklish business. How could he obey an order to tell Dr. Anastasi something that would upset her?

  Basalom weighed positronic potentials. The order to provide the information had been emphatic and direct. The harm that would ensue-that might ensue-was only a possibility, and would, Basalom knew from experience, pass fairly quickly. In addition, he recalled from experience that Dr. Anastasi’s reaction to his not providing the information would be just as extreme an emotion as if he did provide it.

  The possibility of harming a human balanced; it was the same, no matter whether he acted or refrained from acting. He began downloading the statement to his speech buffer; as soon as he’d slowed his perception levels down to human realtime, he’d tell her.

  Of course, if blood spurted out of her ears when he voiced the words, then he’d know that he’d caused some harm.

  “Dr. Anastasi?” The slender blond woman looked up from her smartbook and speared Basalom with a glare. “We have entered geostationary orbit over the fourth planet in the Tau Puppis star system, mistress.”

  “Well, it’s frosted well about time.” She reacted as if surprised by the tone of her own voice, rubbed the bags under her bloodshot eyes, and smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Basalom. I’ve shot the messenger again, haven’t I?”

  Basalom blinked nervously and did a quick scan of the room, but found no evidence of an injured messenger or a recently fired weapon. “Mistress?”

  She dismissed his question with a wave of her hand. “An old expression; never mind. Is the scanning team ready?”

  Through his internal commlink, Basalom consulted the rest of the crew. The reply came back as a dialogue box patched through to the scanning team, and a direct visual feed from a camera on the dorsal fin. From Basalom’s point of view he saw Mistress Janet’s image in the upper right corner and the scanning team’s input/output stream in the upper left corner. Both windows overlaid a view of the ship’s top hull gleaming brightly in the reflected planetlight, and as he watched, a long slit opened down the spine of the ship, and a thin stalk somewhat resembling an enormous dandelion began rising slowly toward the planet. At the tip of the stalk, delicate antennae were unfolding like whisker-thin flower petals and dewsparkled spiderwebs.

  “They have opened the pod bay doors,” Basalom said, “and are erecting the sensor stalk now.” He shot a commlink query at the scanning crew; in answer, data from the critical path file flashed up in the scanning team’s dialogue box. “The stalk will be fully deployed in approximately five minutes and twenty-three seconds.”

  Dr. Anastasi made no immediate reply. To kill time while waiting for something further to report, Basalom began allocating every fifth nanosecond to building a simulation of how Dr. Anastasi saw the world. It had often puzzled him, how humans had managed to accomplish so much with only simple binocular vision and an almost complete inability to accept telesensory feeds. How lonely it must feel to be locked into a local point of view! he decided.

  At last, Dr. Anastasi spoke. “Five minutes, huh?” Basalom updated the estimate. “And fourteen seconds.”

  “Good.” She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and tried to work a kink out of her neck. “Boy, will I be glad to get this over with.”

  Basalom felt a tickle in his Second Law sense and formulated a suggestion. “Mistress? If there is another place you’d rather be, we can leave for it right now.”

  Dr. Anastasi opened her eyes and smiled wistfully at the robot; the expression did interesting things to the topography of her face. Basalom quickly scanned and mapped the wrinkles around her eyes, stored the image for later study, and then backed down to normal magnification.

  “No, Basalom,” Janet said, in that curiously slow output-only mode that humans used so often. “This is where I want to be. It’s just...” Her voice tapered off into a little sigh.

  Mistress Janet’s last sentence didn’t make immediate sense, so Basalom tried to parse it out. It’s just. That broke out to It is just. Substituting for the pronoun, he came up with Being in orbit around Tau Puppis IV is just. Quickly sorting through and discarding all the adverbial meanings of just, he popped up a window full of adjective definitions. Reasonable, proper, righteous, lawful, see Fair

  Ah, that seemed to make sense. Being in orbit around Tau

  Puppis N is fair. Basalom felt a warm glow of satisfaction in his grammar module. Now if he only understood what Mistress Janet meant.

  Janet sighed again and finished the sentence. “It’s just, I’ve been thinking about old Stoneface again, that’s all. Sometimes I swear that man is the albatross I’ll be wearing around my neck the rest of my life.”

  Basalom started to ask Janet why she wanted to wear a terran avian with a three-meter wingspan around her neck, then thought better of it. “Stoneface, mistress?”

  “Wendy. Doctor Wendell Avery. My ex-husband.” Basalom ran a voiceprint across the bottom of his field of view and watched with familiar alarm as the hostility markers erupted like pimples in Or. Anastasi’s voice. “Derec’s father. My chief competitor. The little tin god who’s out to infest the galaxy with his little tin anthills.”

  “By which you mean the robot cities, mistress?” Janet put an elbow on the table and rested her chin in the palm of her hand. “I mean exactly that, Basalom.” She sighed, frowned, and went silent again.

  Basalom stood quiet a moment, then switched to thermographic vision. As he’d expected, Or. Anastasi’s skin temperature was rising, and the major arteries in her neck were dilating. He recognized the pattern; she was building up to another angry outburst.

  He was still trying to sort out the First Law implications of defusing her temper when it exploded..

  “Oammit, Basalom, he’s an architect, not a roboticist!” Janet slammed a wiry fist down on the table and sent her smartbook flying. “That’s my nanotechnology he’s using. My cellular robots; my heuristic programming. But do you think he ever once thought of sharing the credit?”

  She kicked the leg of the table and let out a little sob. “The Learning Machine experiments were beautiful. Three innocent, unformed minds, experiencing the universe for the first time. Unit Two, especially; growing up with those brilliant, utterly alien Ceremyons. Just think of what we could have learned from it!

  “But instead, old Stoneface dropped one of his architectural nightmares not ten kilometers away and ruined the whole frosted thing. Now Unit Two is traveling with Derec-Ghu knows what kind of hash is in its brain now-and the Ceremyons won’t give us a second chance.” Janet closed her eyes, plunked her elbows on the table, and put her face in her hands. “I don’t know what I did to deserve having that man in my life, but you’d think I’d have paid for that sin by now.” Her voice fell silent; a little sound that may have been a sob slipped through her fingers.

  Basalom watched and listened, the mass of chaotic potentials that symbolized uncertainty surging through his positronic brain. Mistress Janet was in some kind of pain; he understood that. And pain was equivalent to harm, that was also clear. But while the First Law kept demanding that he take some action to remove that pain, seven centuries of positronic evolution still hadn’t resolved t
he question of how to comfort a crying woman.

  He was saved from further confusion by a message from the scanning team that came in over his commlink accompanied by the video image of the sensor stalk at full extension. “Mistress? The sensor pod is deployed and operational.”

  She did not respond. A minute later, an update followed. “The scanning team reports contact with the transponder on the aeroshell, mistress. The flight recorder appears to be intact.” Pause. More data flashed through Basalom’s mind, and a tactical plot of the planet with projected and actual reentry curves popped up in his head. “The pod made a soft landing within 200 meters of the planned landing site. Learning Machine #1 was discharged according to program. Preliminary imprinting had begun. All indicators were nominal.”

  After a few seconds, Dr. Anastasi asked, “And then?”

  “The umbilical was severed, as programmed. There has been no further contact with Unit #1 since that time.”

  Janet sat up, brushed back a few loose strands of her grayblond hair, and dabbed at the corner of one eye with the cuff of her lab coat. “Very good,” she said at last. She pushed her chair back from the table and stood up. “Very good indeed. Basalom, tell the scanning team to begin searching for the learning machine. Contact me the moment they find any sign of it.” She began moving toward the door. “I’ll be, uh, freshening up.”

  “Your orders have been relayed, mistress.” At the door, she paused and softly said, “And thanks for listening, Basalom. You’re a dear.” She turned and darted out of the cabin.

  Basalom felt the draining flow of grounded-out potentials that was the robotic equivalent of disappointment. Dr. Anastasi had called him a deer, but she’d left the cabin before he could ask her to explain his relationship to Terran herbivores of the genus Cervidae.

  Chapter 2

  THE HILL OF STARS

  IT WAS AN old tradition, older than robotics itself. As was the case with so many of the behaviors passed down to robots from their human forebears, City Supervisor 3 found it to be slightly illogical; with the development of modern telecommunications technology, it had been several centuries since it was actually necessary for the participants in a conversation to meet physically. Yet traditions have a way of developing an inertia all their own, and so when City Supervisor 3-or as he was usually called, Beta-received the summons to an executive conference, he readily bowed to centuries of custom, delegated his current task to Building Engineer 42, and set out for the Compass Tower.

  Not that it had been a terribly interesting task, anyway. He’d spent the last few weeks overseeing subtle changes in building designs, and the task he’d left was just one more round in a pattern of minor refinements. Beta’s personality programming was not yet eccentric enough for him to admit to feeling bored, but ever since Master Derec had reprogrammed the robot city to cease expansion, he’d felt a certain sense of frustrated potentials. Installing a new and improved cornice simply didn’t give him the same warm glow of satisfaction as came from, say, completing an entire block of luxury apartments.

  Still, Beta reminded himself, a job’s a job. And any job that keeps robots out of the recycling bin is worthwhile. Unbidden, a statement of the Third Law flashed through his mind: A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.” Yes, Beta thought, that’s what we’re doing. Protecting our existence. As long as we have jobs, we can justify our continued existence. The Third Law potential resolved to a neat zero sum and stopped bothering him.

  As he strolled toward the nearest tunnel stop, Beta allocated a few seconds to look around and review his earlier work. The avenue was broad, clean, and straight as a laser beam. The buildings were tall, angular, and functional, with no outrageous flights of engineering fantasy but enough variation in the use of geometric solids to keep the city from looking monotonous.

  We certainly have fulfilled our original purpose. We have constructed a city that’s clean, bright, and beautiful. One of the advantages of being a robot was that Beta could crane his neck and look up at the buildings without slowing his walking pace. Perhaps we overdid it on the gleaming pale blue, though. Maybe next week we can paint a few things, just for contrast. Looking down again, Beta found the entrance to the tunnel stop. He started down the ramp. Along the way, he passed a number of idle function robots.

  For a moment he considered ordering them to report to the recycling bin. Then he felt a pang of-could it be guilt? — at the idea of destroying even non-positronic robots simply for the crime of being unemployed. Pausing a few microseconds, he managed to think up a busywork assignment for them. It was an illogical notion, of course, but he thought he detected a certain primitive kind of gratitude in the way they clanked off to their new jobs.

  In a sense, we’re all function robots. Some of us are a little more self-aware than others, that’s all. Those function robots clean and lube things; I create gleaming, perfect buildings.

  Why?

  A dangerous question: Already, Beta could feel the stirring of a latent general command to self-destruct if he was no longer serving a useful purpose. Fortunately, with the summons to the executive council still fresh in his input register, he was able to duck that issue. He continued down the ramp.

  A half-dozen idle tunnel transit platforms were waiting at the bottom of the ramp. Beta boarded the first one in the queue and gave it his destination. “Compass Tower.” A fast scanning beam swept over him; the transit platform determined that its passenger was robotic and jumped into traffic with a necksnapping jolt.

  Always these subtle reminders, Beta thought. The city was built for humans. Yet we who live here are not human.

  The platform shot through the tunnels at maximum speed, darting across lanes and dodging other platforms with reckless abandon. Beta locked his hands tightly on the grips and became a rigid part of the platform.

  The force of air alone would knock a human off this platform despite the windscreen. Yet because I am a robot, the tunnel computer trades off safety for efficient traffic flow.

  We built this city for humans. We are only caretakers. So where are the humans?

  An interesting question, indeed. And one that Beta could not answer.

  With another rough jolt, the transit platform slid into the station beneath the Compass Tower and slammed to a stop. Beta unlocked his wrist and knee joints and stepped off; he only had one foot on solid pavement when the platform rocketed off into the storage queue. As i/there was a hurry. Beta looked around the station, saw no one waiting to go anywhere, and dismissed the experience with the positronic equivalent of a shrug. Moving off the apron, he located the ascending slidewalk ramp and started up.

  The meeting was to be held in the Central Hall. An apt name, Beta thought. This pyramid we call the Compass Tower is the geographical center of the city. And Central Hall is at the heart of the pyramid. That wasn’t the real reason it was called that, of course; the name came from the fact that the hall housed Central, the enormous, disembodied positronic brain that ultimately controlled all activity in Robot City.

  Or used to, anyway. Beta stepped off the last run of slidewalk and entered the cavernous hall.

  He was immediately stopped by two hunter robots, tall and menacing in their matte-black armor. Tolerantly, Beta submitted to being surface-scanned, deep-radared, and bitmapped. He was all too familiar with the need for tight security in this, the most critical of all places. After all, it was a lapse in security in this very room that had elevated him to the rank of Supervisor.

  The hunters apparently were satisfied that he was who he claimed to be, and had legitimate reason for coming to Central Hall. They waved Beta through the checkpoint, and a moment later he stepped around the corner and got a good look at Central.

  Even in its disabled state, Central was an impressive being. A collection of massive black slabs five meters high, resembling nothing so much as a silicon Stonehenge, it blazed with communication lasers, twinkled with monito
r lights, and radiated an immense impression of great, dormant intellect on the 104 megahertz band.

  At least, we hope it’s intellect. A vague mismatch of positronic potentials flowed through Beta’s brain; he identified the feeling as sadness. Pausing a moment, he watched the security observer robots drift overhead in tight, metric patterns, and stole sidelong glances at Positronic Specialists I through 5, who were once again up to their elbows in Central’s brain.

  Beta was capable of free-associating. Looking at the brain crew at work always reminded him of that terrible day

  Terrible? Beta caught himself. A judgmental expression? Yes, Beta decided, it was terrible. Great responsibility had devolved on him that day a year before, when a malleable robot named SilverSides had appeared and adopted the wolf-like shape of the local dominant species. Breaking into Central Hall, it had attempted to destroy Central.

  In that respect, SilverSides had failed. The backup and protective systems had kicked in in time to save Central’s “life.”

  The city had survived, and Central’s authority was simply distributed to first-tier supervisors, like Beta.

  In another respect, though, SilverSides had succeeded. Where once Central was a scintillating intellect that guided all the robots in the city and kept them working and thinking in harmony, now it was a babbling idiot-savant, full of bits and pieces of ideas, only occasionally lucid.

  Still, we keep believing that it can be restored. We keep telling ourselves that the damage caused by SilverSides can be repaired. and that it can again be the Central we once knew.

  Is this another example of how we are evolving? Simple efficiency demands that we scrap Central and leave the supervisors permanently in charge. Yet we supervisors are reluctant to even suggest the idea. We keep insisting that our authority is only temporary. and that we will return power to Central just as soon as it passes diagnostics. That only Central is equipped to administer our fundamental programming.