by Isaac Asimov
But for Andrew the struggle never seemed to reach its end. The debate had gone on and on-the angry, baffled Legislators had tried to take all possible sides of the issue-the voting public, unable to come to any clear philosophical position, had fallen back on emotion, on primordial fear, on the deepest-rooted of uncertainties and prejudices
Congresswoman Chee had withdrawn her bill, had modified it substantially to take into account the stubborn opposition that it had run into. But she had not yet offered it again to the Legislature.
"What do you think?" Andrew asked. "Will you introduce the revised bill in the new session or not?"
"What do you want me to do?"
"You know what I want you to do."
Li-hsing nodded, a little wearily. "I told you once, Andrew, that your cause was not really my cause, and that I might have to abandon it if I felt my career was at stake. Well, my career is at stake. And I still haven't abandoned you."
"And do you still feel that my cause isn't your cause?"
"No. It has become my cause. I have no doubt that you are human, Andrew-perhaps made so by your own hand, but human all the same. And I understand that to deny the humanity of a single member of our kind is to raise the renewed possibility of denying humanity to whole multitudes, as was done all too often in our ugly past. We must never permit that to happen again. But even so-even so, Andrew-"
She faltered for a moment.
"Go on," Andrew said. "Now comes the point where you tell me that you have to abandon me despite everything, isn't that right, Li-hsing?"
"I didn't say that. But we have to be realistic. I think we've gone as far as we can go."
"So you won't introduce the revised bill."
"I didn't say that, either. I intend to give it one more try after recess. But to be honest, Andrew, we can't win. Look at the numbers." She touched a button and a screen came to life on the wall of her office. "The group on the left side of the chart, the section in green-those are the members who are unalterably opposed to any kind of loosening of the definitions. That's just about 40% of the Legislature: immovable, permanently committed to opposing you. The segment marked in red: there are your supporters. 28%. The rest are the undecided ones."
"In two different colors? Why is that?"
"Yellow is the group that's undecided but leaning in your direction. That's a 12.5% slice. Blue is undecided against you. That's 19.5%."
"I see."
"In order to get a majority, we need to keep every single one of the undecideds in the yellow slice of the chart, and win over more than half of those who are still on the fence but currently thinking of voting against you. Plus, of course, retaining the solid support of your basic 28% group. Even if we can manage to win over a few of your diehard opponents, I don't think we can put together the vote, Andrew."
Andrew said, "Then why bother even bringing the bill up for debate?"
"Because I owe you that much. As you can see, it isn't going to work, and I'm afraid this is going to be my last try. Not because I'm walking away from the fight-not at all-but because I'm not going to be in a position any longer where I can stay in it. Everything that I've been doing on your behalf is going to be wrapped around my neck at the next election and it's going to pull me down to defeat. I have no doubt of that. I'm going to lose my seat."
"I know," said Andrew, "and it distresses me. For your sake, not for mine. You saw it coming long ago, didn't you, Li-hsing? And yet you stayed with me. Why? Why, after telling me at the start that you'd drop me if you found that I was endangering your career? Why didn't you?"
"One can change one's mind, you know. Somehow, Andrew, abandoning you involved paying a higher price than I was willing to pay for the sake of winning just one more term. As it is, I've been in the Legislature for over a quarter of a century. That's long enough, I think."
"But if your mind could change, why not the minds of the others?"
"We've changed all that are amenable to reason. The rest-and it's a majority of them, I'm sorry to say-simply can't be moved. It's a matter of deep-rooted emotional antipathy."
"Theirs, or the people who voted for them?"
"Some of each. Even those members of the Legislature who are more or less rational themselves tend now and then to assume that their constituents aren't. But I'm afraid that plenty of them have powerful antipathies of their own, when it comes to anything robotic."
"And is relying on emotional antipathy a valid way for a Legislator to decide how to vote?"
"Oh, Andrew-"
"Yes. How terribly naive of me to say a thing like that."
"Naive isn't the right word. But you know that they'd never admit they were voting their emotions. They'd offer this or that carefully reasoned-out explanation for their decision-something about the economy, or an analogy from Roman history, or some antiquated religious argument-anything but the truth. But what does it matter? It's how they'll vote that counts, not why they do it."
"It all comes down to the question of the structure of the brain, then-isn't that so?"
"That's the problem, yes."
Andrew said cautiously, "I don't see why that should be such a sticking point for them. What a brain is made of isn't the essential thing: it's how the brain functions. Its thought patterns, its reaction time, its ability to reason and to generalize from experience. Why does the whole issue have to be drawn down to the level of organic cells versus positrons? Is there no way of pushing through a functional definition?"
"Functional?"
"My brain does everything that an officially legal human brain can do -does it better, in many ways, faster, more directly, more logically. Perhaps that's what bothers them. Well, it's too late for me to start hiding my intelligence, if that's the problem. But must we go on insisting that a human brain has to be made of some officially approved cellular substance in order to be legally human? Can't we simply stipulate that a human brain is something-anything, organic or not-that is capable of attaining a certain complex level of thought?"
"It won't work," said Li-hsing.
"Because if we defined humanity by brain function alone, too many humans would fall below the stipulated level of intellectual ability?" Andrew asked bitterly. "Is that it?"
"Andrew, Andrew, Andrew! Listen to me: there are those who are determined to keep a barrier up between themselves and robots at any cost. For the sake of their own self-esteem, if nothing else, they want to believe that they belong to the only true and lawful human race and that robots are some sort of inferior creatures. You've spent the past hundred years beating those people back, and you've won your way through to a status that would have been utterly inconceivable in the early years of robotics. But now they've got you on an issue where you can't win. You've put yourself inside a body that for all intents and purposes is close enough to being human as makes no real difference. You eat, you breathe, you sweat. You go to fine restaurants and order splendid meals and drink the best wines, I've noticed, though I can't imagine what value that can have for you other than for appearance's sake."
"That is value enough for me," said Andrew.
"All right. Plenty of humans probably can't appreciate the expensive wines they drink either, but they drink them all the same, and for the same reason you do. Your organs are all artificial, but by now so are many of theirs. Quite possibly there are people out there living in bodies that are virtually identical to yours, wholesale artificial replacements for the ones they were born with. But they aren't complete replacements, Andrew. Nobody has a prosthetic brain. No one can. And so you differ from everyone else in one fundamental respect. Your brain is man-made, the human brain is not. Your brain was constructed, theirs was naturally developed. They were born, you were assembled. To any human being who is intent on keeping up the barrier between himself and robots, those differences are like a steel wall five kilometers high and five kilometers thick."
"You aren't telling me anything I don't know. My brain is different in composition from theirs, c
ertainly. But not in its function, not really. Quantitatively different, maybe, but not qualitatively. It's just a brain-a very good brain. They're merely using the positronic-vs. cellular issue as a pretext to keep from admitting that what I am is a human being of a kind somewhat different from them. -No, Li-hsing, if we could somehow get at their antipathy toward me because of my robotic origins-the very source of all their hostility-this mysterious need they have to proclaim themselves superior to someone who is by every reasonable definition superior to them-"
"After all your years," said Li-hsing sadly, "you are still trying to reason out the human being. Poor Andrew, don't be angry at me for saying this, but it's the robot in you that drives you in that direction."
"You know that there's very little left of the robot in me by this time."
"But there's some."
"Some, yes. And if I were to get rid of that-"
Chee Li-hsing shot him a look of alarm. "What are you saying, Andrew?"
"I don't know," he said. "But I have an idea. The problem is, Li-hsing, that I have human feelings trapped within a robot mind. But that doesn't make me human, only an unhappy robot. Even after all that has been done to improve my robot body, I'm still not human. But there's one more step that can be taken. If I could bring myself-if I could only bring myself-"
Twenty-Two
IF HE COULD ONLY bring hirnself- And now he had, finally.
Andrew had asked Chee Li-hsing to hold off as long as possible before bringing her revised bill to the World Legislature floor for debate and vote, because he planned to undertake a project in the very near future that might have some significant impact on the issue. And no, Andrew said, he didn't care to discuss the details of the project with her. It was a highly technical thing; she wasn't likely to understand, and he wasn't at the moment willing to take the time to explain it to her. But it would make him more human, he insisted. That was the essential detail, the only thing she really needed to know. It would make him more human.
She said she would do the best she could to give him enough time for this mysterious project of his, though she sounded puzzled and concerned.
Andrew thanked her, and set out at once to have a little talk with the highly acclaimed robot surgeon whom he had chosen to do the work. It was a difficult conversation. Andrew found himself putting off the moment of decision for a long while with a sad line of questioning that reflected the turmoil within himself, while the surgeon grew more and more confused by the unusual and probably impossible nature of what Andrew seemed to be asking him to do.
The First Law of Robotics was the obstacle: the immutable law that prevented a robot from harming a human being in any way. And so at last Andrew could delay things no longer, and brought himself to admit the one necessary fact that made it possible for the robot surgeon to perform the operation, the one thing that the surgeon had not suspected: Andrew's own proper status as something other than a human being.
The surgeon said, "I don't believe I understood you correctly, sir. You claim that you are a robot yourself?"
"That is precisely what I am."
The surgeon's facial expression, calm and impassive as ever, could not and did not change. But the set stare of his glowing photoelectric eyes somehow managed to reveal great internal distress and Andrew could tell that the surgeon's positronic brain was being swept by troublesome conflicting potentials.
He said, after a little while, "I would not presume to contradict you, sir. But I must tell you that I see nothing at all robotic about your external appearance."
"You are correct. My external appearance has been altered extensively to make me appear human. But that does not mean I am human. Indeed, I have put myself to a great deal of extraordinary legal expense over the past few years for the sake of clarifying my status and it appears, after all of that, that I remain a robot, despite everything."
"I would never have thought it, sir."
"No. You never would."
Andrew had not selected this surgeon for his dazzling personality, his quick wit, his readiness to cope with difficult social situations. None of that was important. What mattered was his skill as a surgeon, and by all accounts he had plenty of that. And also that he was a robot. A robot surgeon was the only possible choice for what Andrew had in mind, for no human surgeon could be trusted in this connection, neither in ability nor in intention. The robot could do the job.
The robot would do the job, too. Andrew intended to see to that.
"As I have told you, sir-"
"Stop calling me sir!"
The robot halted, plainly perplexed. Then he began again. " As I have told you, Mr. Martin, to perform an operation such as you request on a human being would be a blatant violation of the First Law and I could in no way carry it out. But if you are, as you claim, a robot, then there is still a problem. Performing the operation would constitute inflicting damage on property, you see, and I would be unable to do it except at the direct instructions of your owner."
"I am my owner," Andrew said. "I'm a free robot and I have the papers to prove it."
"A-free-robot?"
"Listen to me," Andrew said. He was seething with inner anguish now and his own positronic mind was being swept by troublesome potentials indeed. "Enough of this chatter. I won't pretend to be human, and you'd discover soon enough when you operated that I'm not, anyway, so we can leave First Law considerations entirely out of this. But Second Law will apply. I am a free robot and you will do as I say. You will not oppose my wishes. Is that clear?" And he declared, with all the firmness that he had learned how to use even with human beings over these past decades, "I order you to carry out this operation on me."
The robot surgeon's red eyes turned brighter than ever with inner confusion and conflict and for a long moment he was unable to reply.
Andrew knew what the surgeon must be going through. Before him was a man who insisted that he was not a man, or else a robot who claimed to have as much authority over him as a human being, and either way the surgeon's pathways must be abuzz with incomprehension.
If this were indeed a man, then First Law would override Second and the surgeon could not accept the commission. But if this were a robot, did Second Law govern the situation or not? What was there in Second Law that gave one robot the right to order another one around-even a free robot? This was a robot, though, who denied being a man but looked entirely like one. That was an almost incomprehensible situation. The ambiguity of it was probably overwhelming the surgeon's positronic pathways. All his visual responses were crying out that his visitor was human; his mind was trying to process the datum that his visitor was not. The visual evidence would tend to activate the First and Second Laws, the other evidence would not.
Faced with chaotic contradictions of that sort, it was conceivable that the surgeon's mind would short out altogether. Or perhaps, Andrew hoped, the safest way out of the crisis for the surgeon would be to take a Second Law position: that this visitor, while by his own admission not human enough to invoke First Law prohibitions, had sufficiently human characteristics to be able to demand obedience from the surgeon.
Which was the path that the surgeon ultimately took, after a lengthy period of hesitation.
"Very well," the surgeon said, and there was an unmistakable undertone of relief in his voice. "I will do what you have asked me to do."
"Fine."
"The fee will not be small."
"I'd be worried if it was," said Andrew.
Twenty-Three
THE OPERATING ROOM was nothing nearly as grand as the one in which U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men had performed its various upgrades on Andrew in recent years, but Andrew could tell that the facility was superbly equipped and completely equal to the task. He looked with admiration and approval at the laser bank, the board of measuring dials and control panel, the spidery maze of auxiliary needles and tubes and pipes, and the main surgical stage itself, dais and bed and lights and instruments, white linens and dazzling chrome-s
teel fixtures, everything in readiness for the unusual patient.
And the surgeon himself was magnificently calm. Quite clearly he had been able in the interim to resolve whatever conflicts he had felt over the irregularities of Andrew's request and the ambiguities of Andrew's appearance, and now he was focused entirely on the professional task at hand. Andrew was more than ever convinced that he had made the only possible choice by selecting a robot surgeon to perform this operation.
Still, he felt a flicker of uncertainty-just a flicker-as the actual moment for the start of the operation arrived. What if something went wrong? What if he came out of the operation incapacitated in some way? What if the operation failed and he terminated right on the operating table?
No. None of that mattered. There was no way for the operation to fail, none. And even if it did-no. That simply did not matter.
The surgeon was watching him carefully.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
"Absolutely," Andrew told the surgeon. "Let's get down to it."
"Very well," said the surgeon phlegmatically, and with a quick, sweeping gesture took his laser-scalpel into his splendidly designed right hand.
Andrew had chosen to remain completely conscious throughout the entire process. He had no wish to shut down awareness even for an instant. Pain was not an issue for him, and he needed to be certain that his instructions were being followed precisely. But of course they were. The surgeon's nature, being robotic, was not one that would permit any capricious deviation from the agreed-upon course of action.
What Andrew was not prepared for was the unexpectedly intense weakness and fatigue that came after the job had been done.
He had never known such sensations as those that came over him in the early hours of his recovery period. Even when they had transferred his brain from the robot body to the android one, Andrew had experienced nothing like this.
