Asimov's Future History Volume 5

by Isaac Asimov

  Odyssey

  3604 A.D.

  Chapter 1

  AWAKENING

  THE YOUTH STRAPPED in the shock couch at the center of the small chamber appeared to be peacefully sleeping. The muscles of his narrow face were relaxed, and his eyes were closed. His head had rolled forward until his chin rested on the burnished metal neck ring of his orange safesuit. With his smooth cheeks and brush-cut sandy blond hair, he looked even younger than he was — young enough to raise the doorman’s eyebrow at the least law-abiding spaceport bar.

  He came to consciousness slowly, as though he had been cheated of sleep and was reluctant to give it up. But as the fog cleared, he had a sudden, terrifying sensation of leaning out over the edge of a cliff.

  His eyes flashed open, and he found himself looking down. The couch into which the five-point harness held him was tipped forward. Without the harness, he would have awakened in a jumbled heap on the tiny patch of sloping floor plate, wedged against the one-ply hatch that faced him.

  He raised his head, and his darting eyes quickly took in the rest of his surroundings. There was little to see. He was alone in the tiny chamber. If he unstrapped himself, there would be room for him to stand up, perhaps to turn around, but nothing more ambitious. A safesuit helmet was cached in a recess on the curving right bulkhead. On the left bulkhead was a dispensary, with its water tube and delivery chute.

  None of what he saw made sense, so he simply continued to catalog it. Above his head, hanging from the ceiling, was some sort of command board with a bank of eight square green lamps labeled “P1,” “P2,” “F,” and the like. The board was in easy reach, except that there appeared to be no switches or controls for him to manipulate. In one corner of the panel the word MASSEY was etched in stylized black letters.

  Apart from the slight rasp of his own breathing, the little room was nearly silent. From the machinery which filled the space behind his shoulders and under his feet came the whir of an impeller and a faint electric hum. But there was no sound from outside, from beyond the walls.

  Thin as it was, the catalog was complete, and it was time to try to make something of it. He realized that, although he did not recognize his surroundings, he was not surprised by them. But then, since he could not remember where he had fallen asleep, he had carried no expectations about where he should be when he awoke.

  The simple truth was he did not know where he was. Or why he was there. He did not know how long he had been there, or how he had gotten there.

  But at the moment none of those things seemed to matter, for he realized — with rapidly growing dismay and disquiet — that he also did not know who he was.

  He searched his mind for any hint of his identity — of a place he had known, of a face that was important to him, of a memory that he treasured. There was nothing. It was as though he was trying to read a blank piece of paper. He could not remember a single event which had taken place before he had opened his eyes and found himself here. It was as though his life had begun at that moment.

  Except he knew that it had not. He was nota crying newborn child, but a man — or near enough to one to claim the title until challenged. He had existed. He had had an identity and a place in the world. He had had friends — parents — a home. He had to have had all of that and more.

  But it was gone.

  It was a different feeling than merely forgetting. At least when you forget something, you have a sense that you once knew it —

  “Are you all right?” a pleasant voice inquired, breaking the silence and making him suddenly tense all his muscles.

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “Where are you? Where am I?”

  “I am Darla, your Companion. Please try to remain calm. We’re in no immediate danger.” The voice, coming from the command panel before him, was more clearly female now. “You are inside a Massey Corporation Model G-85 Lifepod. Massey has been the leader in spacesafety systems for more than...”

  While Darla continued on with her advertisement, he twisted his head about as he reexamined the compartment. I should have known that, he thought. Of course. A survival pod. Even the name Massey was familiar. “Why are there no controls?”

  “All G-series pods have been designed to independently evaluate the most productive strategy and respond appropriately.”

  Of course, he thought. You don’t know who’s going to climb into a pod, or what kind of condition they’ll be in. “You’re not a person. What are you, then? A computer program?”

  “I am a positronic personality,” Darla said cheerfully. “The Companion concept is the Massey Corporation’s unique contribution to humane safety systems.”

  Yes. Someone to talk to. Someone to help him pass hours of waiting without thinking about what it would mean if he weren’t found. The full picture dawned on him. All survival pods were highly automated. This one was more. It was a robot — presumably programmed as a therapist and charged with keeping him sane and stable.

  A robot —

  A human had a childhood. A robot did not. A human learned. A robot was programmed. A robot deprived of the core identity which was supposed to be integrated before activation might “awake” and find he had knowledge without experience, and wonder who and what he was —

  Suddenly he bit down on his lower lip.

  How does a robot experience sensor overload? As pain?

  When he tasted blood, he relaxed his jaw. He would take the outcome of his little experiment at face value. He was human. In some ways, that was the more disturbing answer.

  “Why have you done harm to yourself?” Darla intruded.

  He sighed. “Just to be sure I could. Do you know who I am?”

  “Your badge identifies you as Derec.”

  He looked down past the neck ring and saw for the first time that there was a datastrip in the badge holder on the right breast of the safesuit. The red printing, superimposed on the fractured black-and-white coding pattern, indeed read DEREC.

  He said the name aloud, experimentally: “Derec.” It seemed neither familiar nor foreign to his tongue. His ear heard it as a first name, even though it was more likely a surname.

  But if I’m Derec, why does the safesuit fit so poorly? The waist ring and chest envelope would have accommodated someone with a much stockier build. And when he tried to straighten his cramped legs, he found that the suit’s legs were a centimeter or two short of allowing him to do so comfortably.

  I certainly was shorter once — maybe I was heavier, too. It could be my old suit — one I wouldn’t have used except in an emergency. Or it could be my ID, but someone else’s suit.

  “Can you scan the datastrip on the badge?” he asked hopefully. “There should be a photograph — a citizenship record — kinship list. Then I’d know for sure.”

  “I’m sorry. There’s no data reader in the pod, and my optical sensors can’t resolve a pattern that fine.”

  Frowning, he said, “Then I guess I’ll be Derec, for now.”

  He paused and collected his thoughts. To know his name — if it was his name — did nothing to relieve his feelings of emptiness. It was as though he had lost his internal compass, and with it, the ability to act on his own behalf. The most he could do now was react.

  “All of the pod’s environmental systems are working well,” Darla offered brightly. “Rescue vessels should be on their way here now.”

  Her words reminded him that there was a problem more important in the short run than puzzling out who he was. Survival had to come first. In time, perhaps the things he did know would tell him what he had forgotten.

  He was in a survival pod. His mind took that one fact and began to build on it. When he shifted position in his harness, he noted how the slightest movement set the pod to rocking, despite the fact that its mass could hardly be less than five hundred kilograms. He extended an arm and let the muscles go limp. It took a full second to fall to his side.

  A hundredth of a gee at best. I’m in a survival pod on the surface of
a low-gravity world. I was in a starcraft, on my way somewhere, when something happened. Perhaps that’s why I can’t remember, or perhaps the shock of landing —

  There was no window or port anywhere in the pod, not even a hatch peephole. But if he couldn’t see, perhaps Darla could.

  “Where are we, Darla?” he asked. “What kind of place did you land us on?”

  “Would you like me to show you our surroundings? I have a limpet pack available.”

  Derec knew the term, though he wondered where he had learned it. A limpet pack was a disc-shaped sensor array capable of sliding across the outer surface of a smooth-hulled space craft — a cheaper but more trouble-prone substitute for a full array of sensor mounts. “Let’s see.”

  The interior lights dimmed, and the central third of the hatch became the background for a flatscreen projection directed down from the command board overhead. Derec looked out on an ice and rock landscape that screamed its wrongness to him. The horizon was too close, too severely curved. It had to be a distortion created by the camera, or a false horizon created by a foreground crater.

  “Scan right,” he said.

  But everywhere it was the same: a jumble of orange-tinged ice studded with gray rock, merging at the horizon into the velvet curtain of space. He could see no distinct stars in the sky, but that was likely to be due to the limited resolving power of the limpet, and not because of any atmosphere. The planetoid’s gravity was too slight to hold even the densest gases, and the jagged scarps showed no signs of atmospheric weathering.

  In truth, it looked like a leftover place, the waste of star-and planet-making, a forgotten world which had not changed since the day it was made. It was a cold world, and a sterile one, and, in all probability, a deserted one.

  Formerly deserted, he corrected himself. “Moon or asteroid?” he asked Darla.

  “No matter where we are, we are safe,” Darla said ingenuously. “We must trust in the authorities to locate and retrieve us.”

  Derec could foresee quickly growing weary of that sort of evasion. “How can I trust in that when I don’t know where we are and what the chances are that we’ll be found? I know that this pod doesn’t have a full-recycle environmental system. No pod ever does. Do you deny it?” He waited a moment for an answer, then plunged on. “How much of a margin did the Massey Corporation decide was enough? Ten days? Two weeks?”

  “Derec, maintaining the proper attitude is crucial to —”

  “Save the therapist bit, will you?” Darren sighed. “Look, I know you’re trying to protect me. Some people cope better that way — what they don’t know and all that. But I’m different. I need information, not reassurance. I need to know what you know. Understand? Or should I start digging into your guts and looking for it myself?”

  Derec was puzzled when Darla did not answer. It dawned on him slowly that he must have presented her with a dilemma which her positronic brain was having difficulty resolving — but there should have been no dilemma. Darla was obliged by the Second Law of Robotics to answer his questions.

  The Second Law said, “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”

  A question was an order — and silence was disobedience. Which could only be if Darla was following her higher obligation under the First Law.

  The First Law said, “A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

  Darla had to know how small the chance of rescue was, even within a star system, even along standard trajectories. And Darla knew as well as any robot could what sort of harm that fact could do to the emotional balance of a human being. The typical survivor, already terrorized by whatever events brought him into the lifepod, would respond with despair, a loss of the will to live.

  It made sense to him now. Of course Darla would try to protect him from the consequences of his own curiosity — unless he could make her see that he was different.

  “Darla, I’m not the kind of person you were told to expect,” he said gently. “I need something to do, something to think about. I can’t just sit here and wait. I can deal with bad news, if that’s what you’re hiding. What I can’t take is feeling helpless.”

  It seemed as though she were prepared for his kind too, after all, but had only needed convincing that he was one. “I understand, Derec. Of course I’ll be happy to tell you what I know.”

  “Good. What ship are we from?” he asked. “There’s no shipper’s crest or ship logo anywhere in the cabin.”

  “This is a Massey Corporation G-85 Lifepod —”

  “You told me that already. What ship are we from?”

  Darla was silent for a moment. “Massey Lifepods are the primary safety system on six of the eight largest general commercial space carriers —”

  “You don’t know?”

  “My customization option has not been initialized. Would you care for a game of chess?”

  “No.” Derec mused for a moment. “So all you know how to do is shill for the manufacturer. Which means that we probably came from a privately owned ship — all the commercial carriers customize their gear.”

  “I have no information in that area.”

  Derec clucked. “In fact, I think you do. Somewhere among your systems there has to be a data recorder, activated the moment the pod was ejected. It should tell you not only what ship we came from and where it was headed, but what’s happened since. It’s time to find out how smart you really are, Darla,” he said. “We need to find that recorder and get into it.”

  “I have no information about such a recorder.”

  “Trust me, it’s there. If it wasn’t, there’d be no way to do postmortems after a ship disaster. Are you in control of the pod’s power bus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look for an uninterruptible line. That’ll be it.”

  “Just a moment. Yes, there are two.”

  “What are they called?”

  “My system map labels them 1402 and 1632. I have no further information.”

  Derec reached for the water tube again. “That’s all right. One will be the recorder, and the other is probably the locator beacon. We’re making progress. Now find the data paths that correspond with those power taps. They should tell us which one is which.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “They have to be there. The recorder will be taking data from your navigation module, from the environmental system, probably even an abstract of this conversation. There ought to be a whole forest of data paths.”

  “I’m sorry, Derec. I am unable to do what you ask.”

  “Why?”

  “When I run a diagnostic trace in that portion of the system, I am unable to find any unlabeled paths.”

  “Can you show me your service schematic? Maybe I can find something.”

  The icescape vanished and was replaced by a finely detailed projection of the lifepod’s logic circuits. Scanning it, Derec quickly found the answer. A smart data gate — a Maxwell junction — was guarding the data line to the recorder. The two systems were effectively isolated. Similar junctions stood between Darla and the inertial navigator, the locator beacon, and the environmental system.

  This is all very odd, Derec thought. It wasn’t surprising that there was a lower-level autonomous system regulating routine functions. What was strange was how Darla was locked out of getting any information from it.

  Coddling frightened survivors required tact and discretion. But robots were strongly disposed toward an almost painful honesty. Perhaps it had proven too difficult to program a Companion to put on a happy face while keeping grim secrets. Lying did unpredictable things to the potentials inside a positronic brain.

  And there were Third Law considerations as well. The Third Law went, “A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”

  How would a robot balance its responsibility to p
reserve itself with the increasing probability of its demise? It was as though the designers had concluded that there were things Darla was better off not knowing, and thrown up barriers to prevent her from finding out. They had kept her ignorant of herself, and even of her ignorance.

  There was a disturbing parallel in that to Derec’s own situation. Is that what happened to me? he wondered. He had hoped almost from the first that his loss of memory was the consequence of whatever disaster had put him in the lifepod, perhaps along with the shock of a hard landing on this world.

  Now he had to ask whether such selective amnesia could be an accident. He had read the schematic easily, but he could not remember where or why he had acquired that skill. Obviously he had some technical training, a fact which — if he survived — might prove a useful clue to his identity. But why would he remember the lessons, but not the teacher? Could his brain have been that badly scrambled?

  Yet reading the schematic was a complex task which clearly required that his mind and memory be unimpaired. As well as he could judge, his reasoning was measured and clear. If he were in shock or suffering from a concussion, wouldn’t all his faculties be affected?

  Perhaps this wasn’t something that had happened to him. Perhaps, as with Darla, it was something that had been done to him.

  Derec grimaced. It was unsettling enough looking at the blank wall of his past, but more unsettling to think that hiding behind that wall might be the reason why it had been built.

  By this time Darla had grown impatient. “Have you found anything?” Darla asked with a note of anxiety.

  Blinking, Derec looked up at the status board. “The recorder’s tied in through a Maxwell junction. The junction won’t pass through to the recorder anything it doesn’t recognize, which is why you can’t find it with a trace. And why we’re not going to be able to read it through you. But there has to be a data port somewhere, probably on the outer hull —”

  At that moment, the whole pod lurched and seemed to become buoyant. Derec had the sensation that it was no longer in contact with the frozen surface of the asteroid. “What’s going on?” he demanded.