Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  "You mean you don't know what simulations the computer is running them through?" Laura asked.

  "Not a [unclear]," he said, shaking his head with no apparent concern. "Like I said, it runs through trillions in any given course. And it varies them constantly both to improve and to add some diversity to the skill sets. Some of the courses are distinctly better than others, but all the Model Eights' hardware is absolutely identical, I've got to hand it to Mr. Gray. He did such a fine job on the design that we literally haven't made one single change to the prototype, and we've got forty-eight off the line so far. Now that's an astonishing technical feat."

  "You mean to say that Mr. Gray designed the hardware; I thought you were the head of robotics."

  "I am, but 'robotics' in this organization means programming. Like I said, the differences in software-driven performance are remarkable. Hightop, for instance, is head and shoulders above the rest in every category. He sends his regards, by the way." Laura nodded, uncertain how to respond. "But some of the others have been so hopelessly irredeemable that we had to reprogram them."

  "You mean, just pull the plug and start from scratch?"

  "Good heavens, no! Each one of those Model Eights represents probably a billion dollars of hardware, but maybe ten times that much in 'soft' costs. If you consider the cost of construction and operation of this facility and, more significantly, the computer time to run it, then those things would be worth around twelve billion dollars each. With those kinds of costs, we don't make the decision to reprogram lightly, and we certainly don't decharge them and 'start from scratch.' The reprogramming course is only two weeks and involves just patching what the computer thinks the defective functions are. They're almost always higher-order things like 'goals' and 'plans.' That way, we salvage literally billions of dollars' worth of computer time."

  "Why is this chair empty?" Laura asked. "If it costs so much, I'd think you'd keep this place humming."

  "Mr. Gray halted all new programming," he replied. "We had two students in the course, but they're both kept in bays now — charged but inactive."

  "When did he suspend the programming?"

  "Last night right after the town meeting," Griffith said, now shaking his head and frowning. "It's bullshit," he mumbled. "That little boy didn't know what he was talking about." He stepped up close to Laura and looked around to make sure they were out of earshot. "The boy who said he saw a robot out of his window, you know?" Laura nodded. "He didn't see a Model Eight." Griffith shook his head again. "No way."

  "Do you know that for sure?" Laura asked.

  Griffith nodded. "All the Model Eights were accounted for last night. But even more telling was the little boy's description of what he saw. Now I know he's only eight, but his science teacher stood up and raved that the boy was some sort of whiz. And he's got a rich gene pool. His mother works in Krantz's virtual-reality section, and his father is in space operations. But he got it all wrong. The Model Eights don't run in a crouch. They don't run at all!"

  Griffith looked over his shoulder after raising his voice, but then turned back to Laura. "You've seen them. It's a goddamn scientific miracle that they can walk, much less run! And they never, not once, have gotten into a crouch. They're either completely erect, or they're flat on their big tin asses! Now that's simple, Newtonian physics, and I offered to prove it to Gray with as many tests as he'd like. I came straight down here this morning before we opened up and went to Hightop. If any of 'em can crouch, Hightop can. And he fell straight on his butt ten times in a row!"

  "You don't man the facilities down here twenty-four hours?" Laura asked.

  Griffith shook his head. "No need to. It's fully automated. All we're doing here this morning is monitoring. 'Big brother,' like I said before. Gray ordered human monitoring of all Model Eight activity beginning today, which is yet another overreaction to that little boy's story, if you ask me."

  "And you're absolutely sure the boy didn't see a Model Eight?"

  "He couldn't have. The human operators leave here every night at ten o'clock. We open up at six A.M. That's one eight-hour shift during which there are no humans down here. But since the robots don't sleep, the place is operational twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Now I have eight hours of video recordings of every last one of those robots for this and every night since we opened shop down here. The first thing we do when we get in every morning is look at that video!"

  "And you've got a videotape from last night."

  "Yes! From every night. But it's not taped. It's recorded digitally on an off-board computer."

  "But the computer controls all the off-board computers, doesn't it?"

  "Yes, but—" He clearly registered, the point she was making. "Look. You want to know why I'm sure that little boy's story is wrong? Why I'm absolutely positive? He described the thing he saw as not as tall as the dumpsters in back of the grocery store. I must've asked him twenty different ways, and every time that boy was completely, positively sure that whatever he saw didn't come close to being as tall as the trash container he saw it next to. That dumpster is only six feet, eight inches tall. You've seen how big the Eights are! At a hundred feet away is there any chance you could fail to tell that a Model Eight isn't more than six eight? They're ten feet tall, for Christ's sake!"

  "Was it well lit in the parking lot?"

  "No. But what does it matter? It was just some hoodlum breaking curfew, that's all. We've had problems with vandalism, you know."

  "Vandalism of trash bins?"

  "There's been some gang of little punks running around this island for months. They've knocked over streetlamps, dragged a weather station down by the launch pads out into the jungle, chipped off pieces of the base of the statue up at the top of the Village's main boulevard, things like that. Some kind of initiation ceremony or ritual, that's Hoblenz's guess."

  Laura shook her head in disbelief. "Are you people all blind? You're just so convinced that your precious robots are under control that you come up with some ridiculous explanation for what's going on like 'gang initiation ritual?'"

  He was taken aback by her outburst. "You sound just like all the rest of them," he said.

  "Like all the rest of whom?"

  "The people at the town meeting! Mass hysteria! By the time they all stormed out of the gymnasium I swear I could've convinced 'em that a UFO had just landed on the roof."

  "Are you saying that everyone stormed out of that meeting last night over rumors of robots running loose, and not over the asteroid?"

  "Stormed out of that meeting and right off the island, if what I'm hearing is true. Some of my own people, too — people who should know better! The damn asteroid is probably what held on to the few hundred who stayed — that and Gray's talk. You should've heard him. What it's going to be like after a ten-thousand-fold increase in human productivity. Humanity relieved from drudgery and dangerous jobs. There were people with tears in their eyes. I would've thought more would want to stay and be a part of it."

  "A part of what?"

  "Of phase two," Griffith said as if she was missing the most elementary of his points. "Of the expansion."

  "Of the colonization?" Laura asked, feeding him Janet's word.

  He frowned. "It's not exactly colonization. It's more of a natural… progression. An expansion, like I said. Building on everything that has come before."

  "A tower to the sky," Laura said under her breath, but Griffith paid no attention to the comment.

  "It's like we take everything known right now and… grow it. Information grows exponentially, you know." He shook his head. "You really should have heard the speech. It's too bad nobody recorded it."

  "Well, maybe somebody did."

  Griffith shook his head. "It was the first time I ever saw metal detectors on this island. Hoblenz's men ran 'em like airport security. Wouldn't let any recording devices — camcorders, recorders, anything — inside the gym." Griffith shook his head and said, "Anyway, I'm s
orry. As I said, this has to be a short tour of necessity." He headed back toward the work area, and Laura followed.

  They passed by the last [unclear] darkened one.

  "What's this room?" she asked, pausing at the thick glass.

  "Oh?" Griffith replied, stopping but not turning fully to face her. "That's another tactile room."

  It was pitch-dark inside. "Can I see?"

  He clearly didn't want to show her. "I wish I had enough time to explain all we go through in a course — how much we have to teach these robots before we can dare set them loose in the world."

  He looked down, shuffling his feet.

  "Why don't you just show me the room?"

  "But you won't understand," he said in a plaintive tone. "You can't. You haven't had to make all the discoveries we've made or design the programs necessary to deal with—"

  "I know you're busy, Phil," Laura interrupted, "and I don't have all day either, so if you'll just turn on the lights down there I'll be out of your hair."

  He frowned, but after a moment's hesitation walked over to a panel just below the window. With a flick of his wrist he threw a switch.

  The room below was flooded with light. The empty chamber was about the size of the tactile room on the far side of the [garbled] area.

  "Like all young… creatures," Griffith continued in a voice drained of inflection, "the robots are fascinated by moving things. There were two doors leading into the room — one large enough for the robots, the other too small even for humans. The room was empty save a huge drain in the middle of the floor and thick metal sprinkler heads protruding from the ceiling. The white concrete had clearly been scrubbed, but no amount of detergent seemed capable of removing the faint but indelible brown stains.

  "It's absolutely essential that we let them get the curiosity out of their system."

  "Whose are those bloodstains," Laura said.

  "There's no other way. They're just fascinated, absolutely fascinated, by animals. Goats and sheep, mostly, but dogs, cats, other wildlife."

  "My God," Laura said. "They rip them limb from limb."

  "Not on purpose, Laura," Griffith said with true emotion. "They don't mean to hurt their toys. They're really quite gentle, as much as they can be. And" — he shook his head—"it's not a pleasant part of the course for any of us, or for them. Some of the robots get quite distraught after… after they've broken one of the animals. But that's what we want, don't you see? The experience is so traumatic that the connections their nets develop are strong and long-lasting. I swear after this course you could put them in a room full of babies and they wouldn't move till they dropped to the ground with dead batteries."

  Griffith watched Laura intently, as if waiting for her to absolve him of his guilt. She could say nothing, however. It was all merging into a single disgusting picture. The soldier, the animals led to slaughter what else in the name of progress? In the name of Gray.

  Griffith threw the switch to extinguish the lights in the room.

  They keep that room dark, Laura thought, seeing in the darkened glass the frozen look of revulsion on her face. They don't like to be reminded of what goes on down there.

  Laura walked back to the window overlooking the first, brightly lit room. The Model Eight now played with a chrome faucet, and water shot up from the sink. The robot banged the metal sprayer against a man's suit that it had draped over the back of a chair. When the robot lost interest, the fixture fell to the floor.

  He looked up with a start at the observation window — directly at where Laura now stood. When Griffith stepped up beside her, the robot flung its arm out violently, knocking the chair and the jacket across the room.

  "He can see us," Laura said.

  "Nonsense," Griffith replied. "It's one-way glass."

  "He looked right at us, and then he lashed out."

  "He looked up at what to him is a mirror. He can't see us."

  "Don't they have thermal imagery? Maybe he detected our heat through the glass."

  Griffith looked down at the robot, squinting, but then shook his head. "That's not it. They hate mirrors. Every last one of the Model Eights. Before they learn to control their behavior, they tend to lash out whenever they're the least bit irritated."

  "And he became irritated just by looking at the mirrored glass?" She chuckled. "So you fill their world with mirrored observation windows even though it pisses them off?"

  "I'm sorry, I wasn't being clear enough. It's not just mirrors that aggravate them. It's their image in those mirrors. They hate seeing themselves."

  Laura tilted her head. "Why?" Griffith shrugged, but said nothing.

  "You know they've been getting out of here," Laura said.

  "Now that has been blown way out of proportion," he replied, bristling. "They're just isolated incidents."

  Laura looked up at Griffith, and he turned away. "They're each different, remember. There are going to be some bad seeds."

  "I'd like to see one of the 'bad seeds,'" Laura said. When Griffith started to object, she interrupted with "Then I'll get out of your hair. I'd just like to observe a Model Eight who's not a showpiece like Hightop for a few moments."

  Griffith headed off to the work area with a frown on his face. Laura turned back to watch the young Model Eight below. It was sitting quietly and holding a colorful green-and-blue globe in both arms, staring at the details on the orb. She felt unsettled — on a wild ride she wanted to slow down but knew would only go faster. There was too much, too many new ideas. It was impossible to keep up.

  There was one thing, however, that Laura knew with certainty. Soon, very soon, Gray's revolution would sweep across the green-and-blue orb the young robot held in his hands, and it would change everything… forever. It meant a spurt of growth — a period of unparalleled advancement for mankind. She already had enough truly novel, revolutionary ideas to write a dozen, two-dozen breakthrough papers. She could take her science to new heights, and then walk triumphantly down the halls of her department. In her mind she could hear the pleas for her time and her thoughts that would come from the very same people who had judged her unworthy of tenure.

  Somehow, the thought seemed petty. Publishing papers? For whose benefit? Whose critique? As long as Joseph Gray lived, no one would equal his brilliance. He was a once-in-a-million-year phenomenon, and this was her chance to be a part of his world — the society of the mind.

  "We call him 'Auguste,'" Griffith said, using the French pronunciation—"Owgoost."

  The robot sat on the floor of his cell, and Laura and Griffith watched him on a computer screen from the underground monitoring station. "His formal name is 1.2.09R."

  "Why the R at the end of his version number?"

  Griffith gave her a significant look. "Reprogrammed," he said, almost whispering. "But look, I explained to Mr. Gray that these Eights are notoriously dirty creatures. They're into everything. And the same type of mud — volcanic mud — that you find down in the swamp is what you get right out in the yard."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Mr. Gray asked this morning that I inspect the robots for any traces of mud. We found some on Auguste."

  Laura turned to the computer monitor. "Why was Auguste reprogrammed?"

  Griffith shook his head. "We couldn't coax him out of his shell. Behavior patterns never even began to approach normal. He was also way behind in motor skills. Two months into basic and he could barely walk across the room. I really thought… There were some tense times until we got those restraints on him, let me tell you. And he busted one of the chair's arms right before we got started. It's after the experience with Auguste that we went to titanium brackets."

  Laura understood, now. The robots resisted reprogramming.

  They fought when they were sent to the chair. But why? "How do they know they're going to be reprogrammed? How do they know it's not just another simulation?"

  Griffith shrugged. "They just do. They sense something's wrong, I suppose. We have to
get the juveniles — the Model Eights who're just out of the advanced course — to put them in the chair. Maybe they tell them, I don't know."

  "Why do you call him 'Auguste'—and the French pronunciation? That seems a bit odd when the others are named Hightop and Bouncy and things like that."

  "Auguste is an odd robot." He looked up at her. "But that doesn't mean out of control! The reprogramming took on him. We didn't have to decharge him — to 'start from scratch,' as you put it — like we did with one of the others."

  "So Auguste was a slow learner, and Hightop got his foot caught in the rocks and lost power," Laura said. Griffith confirmed her summary with a nod. "And you reprogrammed them, but didn't have to start all over." Again he nodded. "What about the robot you did have to start from scratch?"

  "Her behavior was… erratic. Totally erratic. One day, we let her out of the chair after some simulations and she came out swinging. Never did get her calmed down. We ultimately decharged her completely. She's one of the two infants currently."

  "By decharging do you wipe out all traces of previous programming?"

  Griffith nodded. "Almost all the connections in the robots' mini-nets are virtual — software instructions about how to route packets of data. They've got very few fiber-optic connections — only something like two to the twenty-second power of combination possibilities."

  "And that hardwiring remains after decharging?" Griffith nodded.

  Laura tried the math in her head, but gave up. "How much is two to the twenty-second power?"

  "A little over four million," Griffith said.

  Laura was stunned. "So four million connections remained in place when you decharged that robot?"

  Another nod from Griffith. "So, you see, it's practically a clean slate. Hardwiring usually represents only the most unvarying of connections. Things like basic motor skills."

  "Wait a minute! What about traumas? Didn't you say the trauma of the slaughter rooms gets seared into their memory? Isn't it possible traumatic experiences are also part of their unvarying, hardwired memories?" Griffith looked stricken and didn't respond.