by Isaac Asimov
“What do you want?” he asked grumpily.
“The same thing I wanted the first time we spoke: information.”
“I don’t have any to give you.”
“Bullshit.” Coren wanted to shake Wenithal. “How long would you have played games like this when you were a cop?”
“When I wasn’t pretending, you mean?” Wenithal grunted. “I wouldn’t have played them at all. “He shrugged, tried to sit up straighter, then nodded. “All right... what do, you want to know first?”
Coren picked up Wenithal’s glass and smelled it: Akvet. A Theian drink, a variation on absinthe. No wonder Wenithal was so intoxicated so quickly.
“What were you going to do when the bad guys came?” Coren asked. “Play dead?”
“Very funny...”
Coren looked at Ariel. “Would you see if there’s any stimulant around? Coffee, capvitane, sniff, whatever.”
Ariel raised an eyebrow speculatively, then nodded and headed further into the apartment.
“There’s coffee,” Wenithal called after her. He looked up at Coren. “What do you want to know?”
“First, why did Damik see you after I talked to him?”
“What did you ask him for?”
“I wanted to know who ran the whole baley enterprise. The real managers, not the dockside people.”
“Ah.” Wenithal grinned again. “That’s clever. He never believed he could get caught. Ex-Special Service, you know about that. So he wasn’t ready when someone came asking the right questions. Of course, you realize, it got him killed.”
“We were screened. No one overheard our conversation.”
“So? It’s all connections. People looking for other people. Links get made, conclusions drawn. Brun was killed on spec.”
Ariel returned with a cup of steaming coffee and set it down on the table before Wenithal. He stared at it for a long time, then lurched forward to grasp it.
“I don’t drink much anymore,” he said. “Not used to it.”
“Seems a suicidal habit to start up again just now,” Ariel said.
“If I’m drunk enough it might not hurt so much.” He lifted the cup to his lips and held it there, poised.
“Brun was an orphan,” Coren said. “You sponsored him. Why? Did you know his parents?”
Wenithal stared at him.
“The Holmer Foster Gymnas Cooperative,” Coren said.
Wenithal focussed on him. “You knew?”
“We did work together once,” Coren said evasively.
“Mm. I suppose that counts for something.” He took another drink and scowled. “Something about the acids never mix right with the wormwood...” He set the cup down and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “There was a kidnapping. Oh... when was that?... twenty-something... a long time ago. A district manager for a company that no longer exists. Very high profile. Like an idiot he went to the news nets first, made everything very difficult for us. The thing was, no ransom demand ever came. The child just disappeared and that was it. It wasn’t my case initially, I was called in later, but. I. anyway, we had nothing to go on, no thread to follow through the maze. When we started looking through the database for similar cases, a pattern began to emerge. Hundreds of unsolved kidnappings allover the world over the previous decade, none of them with a common denominator other than the complete absence of further contact. “Wenithal grinned crookedly. “The problem with databases–AIs, smart matrices, logic systems–is that if you don’t ask just the right question you never get the answer you need.”
“Hundreds,” Ariel said. “That many, they had to be going somewhere.”
Wenithal raised a finger. “Absolutely. But where? After canvassing and recanvassing witnesses, acquaintances, associates, total strangers who might possibly have seen or heard something–anything–I started expanding the search. I started looking at schools, hospitals, orphanages.”
“You found the link in orphanages.”
Wenithal nodded. “Not all of them, though. Special ones, ones that took in and maintained ‘problem’ children. Infants with defects, genetic problems, congenital and chronic illnesses. Children turned over to the institution and their records sealed or, in some cases, erased. It was difficult to detect, actually, but I found several of them doing a backdoor business in what they delicately termed ‘material.” ‘
“Selling the children?” Ariel asked.
“Basically. Oh, they claimed they were selling cadavers, but the numbers were too high and the age groups too coincidental. It took a long time to finally prove what I knew was going on.”
“And Brun?” Coren urged.
“I didn’t know his parents very well. They were part of a series of interviews I conducted in relation to the case, but they didn’t really have anything to do with it. They’d tried to adopt, that was all. After Brun they’d been told not to try another natural birth, not without a complicated gene therapy they couldn’t afford. Shortly afterward, there was an accident. A semiballistic struck an old piece of orbital debris. Ninety or so passengers and crew. Holmer Foster was the local institution. I felt... an interest, I suppose. Brun was bright, nine years old. When I checked on him two years later, he was running a kind of black market in his facility, using smuggled-in recordings, access codes, food allotments. I thought it was a waste of natural talent. So I sponsored him.”
“You didn’t adopt him?”
“A police officer? Where would I find the time? No, sponsoring was about the best I could do. It was actually Brun who told me about the missing UPDs.”
“UPDs?” Ariel asked.
“Untreatable Physiological Dysfunction. Children with disorders that can only be watched. Often they can’t even stop their pain. Those were the ones I found out were going missing the most.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Ariel said. “What use–? Oh.”
Wenithal glanced at her. “Research, spare parts, other things I never cared to think about.”
“You ‘re sure they were being shipped offplanet?” Coren asked.
“That’s where the trail went cold. We traced them to four or five labs. They all funneled the ‘material’ through a single lab that I could never really prove was involved.”
“Let me guess,” Coren said. “Nova levis?”
“Very good. You must’ve been a decent cop.”
“I still am. Who was running the operation?”
“Very corporate. But I could never prove it. I know it, but I can’t take it to court.”
“Imbitek,” Ariel said.
Wenithal shrugged.
“How did that tie in with the kidnapping that brought you into it?” Coren asked.
“That was the most perverse component. The boy that was kidnapped was just a normal boy. It didn’t make sense in light of what I had found out about these... these... flesh mills. So I took a closer look at my concerned parents and found that they had had two previous children. One had died shortly after birth, the other... the records had been manipulated. The claimed death was not a death. They relegated it to one of these orphanages. There was a connection.” Wenithal frowned at Coren. “Do you even want to know? You work for Rega Looms, how much do you know about him?”
“I–”
The door chimed.
Wenithal groped for his pistol.
“Take it easy,” Coren said quietly, easing his own weapon out. He looked at Ariel and gestured for her to move to the far side of the room. Coren moved quickly to the wall alongside the door. He nodded to Wenithal, who brought his pistol into his lap.
“Enter.”
Coren tensed as the door slid open. Light from the balcony outside spilled across the carpet, outlining a shadow. Wenithal raised the pistol.
Coren stepped away from the wall, aiming at head height.
A sharp hiss and a muffled “Shit!” came from the person standing in Wenithal’s entryway.
The light in the room brightened, revealing a woman in dark clothes w
ith a heavy pack slung over her left shoulder. She gaped at Coren, stunned.
“Jeta Fromm,” Coren said. “I’ve been looking allover for you.”
Eighteen
THE LAB DATUM has been compromised, Derec, “Thales announced.
Derec looked up from the screen and blinked. “What?”
“The lab datum has been compromised,” the RI repeated. “I have detected nine gates placed at various locations within the system that are diverting information to an external source.”
“What about you?”
“I have already detected and blocked an attempt to establish a gate in the immediate array. Judging from the other gates, this will not be a problem; they are sophisticated but limited. However, the longer I block implementation, the more likely other measures will be taken.”
“In other words, they’re not just giving up and going away.”
“Essentially, yes.”
Derec went to the end of the blind and looked across the lab. Only one tech was on duty, this late in the third shift. Derec returned to his chair and rubbed his eyes. He had been at it since arriving, nearly eighteen hours now. The excavation was proceeding more slowly than he had expected due to a series of defensive modifications someone had added to the DW-12. It took Rana several hours to tease through them with Thales’ help. Once they understood that bypassing them would not corrupt the matrix any further, everything went smoothly, but making sure ate up a lot of time.
“How soon?” Derec asked.
“Regarding what?”
“The excavation. When do we start getting useful data?”
“I have isolated the constellation of memory nodes we need, and I am beginning a chronological assignment. Another hour.”
“I want your findings copied directly to Ariel’s datum.”
“That precaution is already in place.”
“Are you able to trace the gates to their external source?”
“The risk of detection is high. I suggest completing the task at hand first before attempting any further action.”
Derec reached for the cup of cold coffee on the workbench. He needed sleep. He had sent Rana to her apartment hours ago.
He felt the passing of time acutely. Ariel had not commed in over five hours. Sipha Palen estimated she could keep the deaths out of the news nets for another day, two days at most, before someone figured out that she was hiding something. Or–and Derec thought this more likely–someone who already knew would sell the information. In either case, this needed to be done quickly.
“I would like to talk to you about another matter, Derec,” Thales said.
“Hm? What, Thales?”
“I have taken advantage of the access here to larger memory buffers to set up my examination of Bogard’s positronic matrix. I have run six attempts at reestablishing a functional template.”
I forgot all about that, Derec thought uneasily. “I didn’t know you’d done that.”
“It has not interfered with the performance of any other task,” Thales said. “As we do not know if another opportunity may occur, I thought it best to use this one.”
“That’s fine, Thales. Um... six attempts? I gather none of them have been successful?”
“In achieving a stable matrix, no. However, I believe I have achieved something positive. I now know that we cannot do more in simulation. The convolutions in the error log indicate the presence of a reifying condition.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Basically, there is a command error which repeatedly instructs the matrix to disassemble at the same point. I could not be sure of this before because I was forced to continually reconfigure the parameters to accommodate the lack of memory. Now that this is no longer a problem, I see that the breakdown occurs at the same point each time.”
Derec leaned forward, curiosity cutting through weariness. “Can you identify that point?”
“That is the difficulty. It seems to be in the checksum routine that oversees the data interface with the physical plant.”
“Seems to be?”
“It is possible the error precedes that point, which is why I am unwilling to be more confident. But in each case the breakdown occurs at the place where the program attempts to command the actual body. There is no body, of course, and I am studying the options to construct one in simulation, but I am not convinced this can be solved that way. I am of the opinion that the error is tied to the violation that caused the initial collapse. It may be that what I am seeing is not an error at all but an irreconcilable dilemma. In either case, the error effectively orders a new collapse each time. Available memory is not the problem. The matrix itself is self-destructive.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Thales. That would suggest intent on some level. There isn’t enough coherence for that to be the case.”
“Under normal circumstances, I would agree with that assessment. However, Bogard was unusual in several respects and its termination was singularly traumatic.”
“All right. The next question, obviously, is what do you propose we do about it?”
“It is possible that the error can be resolved by loading a partially reestablished matrix into a blank positronic brain and tracing the final connections through to see if the error persists.”
“Treat it like a hardware problem, you mean.”
“Essentially, Derec.”
Derec smiled. “And where do you propose we obtain a blank positronic brain?”
“We have one at hand–after I have completed my excavation.”
Derec looked at the DW-12 lying on the table, cables snaking from it, connecting it to the board Thales was using.
“It’s not at all what Bogard would be used to,” he said. “That assumes we’re allowed to use it at all.”
“If I may point out the obvious, the owner is no longer a matter of concern.”
“Heirs, Thales.”
“I have considered that. Do you really think Rega Looms will want it?”
Derec laughed dryly. “No, I don’t imagine so. But Sipha Palen has authority. It’s station security property.”
“With all due respect, Derec, Chief Palen has procured the robot under false pretext. She has filed no official records that it even exists on Kopernik. Effectively, the robot occupies a legal void. It belongs technically to no one. I believe my position is defensible in Terran court.”
“It may be, but...” Derec sighed. His brief spurt of energy was ebbing. He needed sleep. “I can’t make this decision now, Thales. We have other matters to resolve first.”
“Would you object if I created an implementation program in the event that we do make use of the robot?”
“No, of course not. Right now, though, we need that excavation.”
“It will be completed in fifty-two minutes.”
“Good, good.” He regarded the screens before him speculatively. Somewhere in all that machinery was a consciousness. It surprised him sometimes how easily he disregarded the inorganic nature of positronic entities. “Thales, why are you so interested in Bogard?”
“Why?”
“Yes, why.”
“Bogard is a problem you set me to solve.”
“True, but–never mind now. Thales, I may doze off sitting here. If anything happens that I need to know about, wake me.”
“Of course, Derec.”
He closed his eyes. He did not fall immediately to sleep, though. He could not shake the feeling–tenuous, barely identifiable–that Thales had just evaded answering his question.
“The question of will in a positronic matrix is and may remain one of the unsolved–and unsolvable–mysteries about these minds we have created. We built them to serve us and in that matter they have no choice. But we then gave them an imperative to serve not our commands but our morality. To assume this makes them thrall to human will to exclusion of their own may be an error.”
Who said that? Derec fished through his memory until he found it. Ariel had said
that, in her graduate thesis from the Calvin Institute.
Something to that...
A constant question in positronics–one most positronic specialists toyed with but never wanted to discuss–concerned the hardware: How much of a robot’s “personality” depended on the actual mechanism, and how much on what was called “accrued experiential associations”? The easy answer–always–was that a positronic brain was entirely a matter of physical linkages and connections, tied directly to its sensory apparatus–the “real world” model that allowed them to make deterministic decisions based on the Three Law parameters encoded into the pathways.
But that begged the question; it did not address the problem of Mind. Derec had come up against it with Bogard and now with Thales–why, he wondered, could Thales not simply construct a matrix very much like Bogard’s? Evidently, Thales could not. Bogard’s physical modifications had been an integral part of its consciousness. Thales’ suggestion that the entire matrix be reinserted in a blank brain reinforced the obvious: that a robot was inextricably mechanistic, even though it demonstrated consciousness very similar to a human.
How many humans willingly admitted that they were as much meat as mind?
Derec yawned, and sparks danced at the edge of his vision. Too much, too deep. He waited for sleep. But his mind writhed with questions.
“Mr. Avery.”
Derec opened one eye and looked up at Hofton. “Mmm?”
“We have a problem.” Hofton nodded toward the lab.
Derec stood slowly. A huddle of people crowded at the entrance. He recognized Palen, Leri, and Polifos, all apparently on one side of an argument, facing four Terrans–two men, two women–whose clothes–neatly-cut, unadorned, and severe–suggested authority. They spoke in low, terse tones that even without knowing the subject made Derec apprehensive.
“Thales, how far along are we with the excavation?”
“I require a few more minutes, Derec.”
“Who are they, Hofton?”
“TBI,” Hofton said. “Leri, to his credit, is fending them off with implied threats of ‘political repercussions’ and ‘violation of sovereignty; but they aren’t really backing down. They want the robot. My sense is that they intend to take it regardless of the consequences.”