by Jerry Oltion
“Betelgeuse, anyone?” he asked loudly.
“Yecch”‘ Ariel said from the living room.
Wolruf padded into the kitchen. “I’ll ‘ave one,” she said, holding out her hand. Derec gave her the one he had already dialed for, then ordered another for himself and a glass of Ariel’s favorite, Auroran Ambrosia, for her.
From the library Avery said, “Mandelbrot, get me a mug of coffee.”
The robot entered the kitchen behind Wolruf, waited patiently for Derec to finish with the automat, then pushed buttons in the sequence for coffee. Derec shook his head in exasperation. Avery had a whole city full of robots at his command, but he still loved to order Mandelbrot around. No doubt it was because Mandelbrot was Derec’s robot, and Ariel’s before him. Derec had considered telling Mandelbrot to ignore Avery’s picayune orders, but so far he hadn’t felt like provoking the conflict that Avery so obviously wanted.
Ariel was already sitting in one of the single-person chairs in the living room, her back to the glassed-in comer looking out over the city.Adam and Eve and Lucius were seated on a couch at an angle beside her, looking like a triple reflection of her. Wolruf followed Derec into the room and took another chair opposite the robots, leaving Derec with the choice of a chair beside Wolruf or one across from Ariel. Or
Convert Ariel ’ s chair into a loveseat,he sent to the apartment controller, and the malleable Robot City material began flowing into the new shape. The chair’s right arm receded from Ariel while more material rose up from the floor to fill in the space.
“What the-oh. You could warn a girl.”
“But you’re so pretty when you’re surprised. Your eyes go wide, and you breathe in deep…”
“Beast.”
“Thank you.” Derec handed her the glass of Ambrosia and sat beside her.
He took a long pull at his Betelgeuse. It felt grand to relax. It seemed he’d been going full tilt since he’d first heard of these strange new robots. But now, with Lucius tracked down and ordered to stop his human-creating project, the problems he had caused were over. Completely. One nice thing about robots; once they accepted an order to do something-0r not to do it-they were locked into whatever behavior pattern that entailed.
Which, come to think of it, didn’t necessarily mean no more trouble. No amount of orders could cover every eventuality, not even a blanket order like, “Don’t cause any more trouble.” Not even the Three Laws, built into the very nature of their brains, could keep them from occasionally damaging themselves, or disobeying orders, or even harming a human, however inadvertently. It kept such harm to a minimum, surely, but it didn’t prevent it entirely. Nor would anything Derec could do keep these robots from letting their curious nature draw them into unusual situations. They were like cats; only dead ones stayed out of mischief.
“So,” Derec said, stretching out and putting an arm around Ariel. “What are we going to do with you three?”
Ariel snuggled into Derec’s side. The robots looked to one another, then back to Derec. At last Eve spoke. “You need do nothing. We are perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves.”
“And causing all sorts of problems in the process. No, sorry, but I think I want to keep an eye on you from now on.”
“As you wish.”
Lucius said, “I am happy with that arrangement. I will be glad for the opportunity to observe you as well. You are the first humans I have encountered, and since I have been ordered not to create any more, it seems likely that my time will be most profitably spent in your presence.”
Still operating under the decision to use speech rather than comlink when with humans, Adam turned to Lucius and said, “Eve and I have observed them for some time now. We are attempting to use our experience to determine what makes humans act the way they do. We intend to formulate a set of descriptive rules, similar to our own Laws of Robotics, which will describe their actions.”
“That was one purpose of my project as well.”
“When you get it figured out, let us know, okay?” Derec said facetiously.
“We will.”
Lucius fixed his eyes on Adam. “What have you learned about them?”
“We have learned that-”
“Hold it,” Ariel interrupted. “New datum for all of you. Humans don’t like being discussed by robots as if they weren’t in the room. If you’re going to compare notes, do it somewhere else.”
“Very well.” The three robots got up as one and walked silently out of the living room. Derec heard footsteps recede down the hallway, pause, then a door that hadn’t been there before closed softly. The robots had evidently ordered the building to make them a conference room at the other end of the apartment from the humans.
“Those robots are spooky,” Ariel whispered.
“ ‘Ur rright about that,” Wolruf said.
“If they really are my mother’s creations, then I’m not sure I want to meet her,” Derec added. “They’re so singleminded. Driven. And once they do figure out their ‘Laws of Humanics,’ I’m not sure if I want to be around for the implementation, either.”
“What do you mean? No robot can disobey the Three Laws, not even them. We’re safe.”
“Famous last words. What if they decide we’re not fit to be our own masters? What if they decide-like Adam did with the Kin on the planet where he awoke-that they would make wiser rulers than we could? The First Law would require them to take over, wouldn’t it?”
“You sound like an Earther. ‘Robots are going to take over the galaxy!’”
Derec grinned sheepishly, but he held his ground. “I know, it’s the same old tired argument, but if it was ever going to happen, now’s the time. Avery’s robot cities were spreading like cancer before we stopped them, and for all I know they could take off and start spreading again. Now these robots show up, and one of them has already made itself leader of an intelligent race. It wouldn’t take much for them to combine their programming and come up with robots who could reproduce themselves faster than humanity can, and who think humans need supervision.”
“Not much, except that they can’t do it. The first time a human told them they were hurting its normal development, they’d either have to back off or go into freeze-up with the conflict.”
“That’ s the theory, anyway,” said Derec.
“Gloom an’ doom!” Wolruf said with a rumbling laugh. “‘Uthink ‘u ‘ave trouble; what about me? I don’ even have that defense.”
“You don’t sound very worried about it.”
“ ‘Ulive where I come from, ‘u’dknow why. Robots-even alien ones-would make better rulers than what we’ve got.”
She had a point, Derec thought. When he had first encountered Wolruf, she had been a slave on an alien ship, using her servitude to payoff a familial debt. He doubted that a robot government would allow that kind of arrangement to continue.
But would they allow creativity? Adventure? Growth? Or would there be only stagnation under the robots’ protective rule? Derec spent the rest of the day wondering. They were all just abstract questions at this point, but if his parents, reckless experiments got any farther out of hand, the entire galaxy might have the chance to find out the answers.
Chapter 2. The Robotics Laboratory
Derec awoke to find himself in a splash of sunlight coming in through the window. So east is that way today, he thought automatically. In a city whose buildings moved about and flowed from shape to shape, orienting himself in the morning was a habit he had quickly gotten into. Directions-and landmarks-were too temporary to rely on from day to day.
He became aware that he was alone in the bed. Ariel’s absence from his side wasn’t surprising, since she tended to be more of a morning person than he was, but the sounds coming from the Personal were. Someone-presumably her, since Avery and Wolruf had their own Personals-was being quite sick.
He got out of bed and padded to the closed door. “Ariel?” he called out hesitantly.
“Don’t come in
here!” she shouted. There came a sound of rushing water, not quite loud enough to drown completely the sound of her being sick once again.
Derec stood by the door, feeling helpless and, now that he was uncovered, cold. He took his robe from its hook by the door, put it on, saw hers still there, and took it down as well.
The Personal was silent now. “Are you okay?” he called.
“I am now. Give me a minute.”
Still worried, but unwilling to risk Ariel’s wrath by opening the door, Derec crossed to the window to look out at the spires and rooftops of Robot City. It looked completely healed now from Lucius’s destruction, healed and full of robots going about their normal duties. Derec could see hundreds of them in the streets, on elevated walkways, in transport booths, in maglev trucks, all moving purposefully once again. From this height-twenty-five stories today, Derec guessed-it was hard to tell that all the activity wasn’t the ebb and flow of humanity in a fully populated human city.
Behind him he heard more water running, some soft bumping around, the cabinet opening and closing: all normal Personal noises. Then the door opened and Ariel stepped into the bedroom.
She was unselfconsciously nude. Derec turned away from the window, smiled as he always did to see how beautiful she was by light of day, and held out her robe. She let him help her into it.
“You sure you’re all right?” he asked.
“Fine, now,” she said. “I just woke up feeling sick. Must have been something I ate.”
“Maybe.” Derec knew she was probably right, but a remnant of the old worry had crept back to haunt him. She had been sick once, deathly sick, and before she had found treatment for it on Earth, Derec had learned what it was to worry about someone’s health. That was before they had become lovers; now his concern for her was even more intense.
There might have been another possibility, now that they were sharing a bed again, but her disease had ruled that out.
“I feel fine,” she said with exasperation. “Really. And I don’t want you telling the robots about this, or they won’t rest until they’ve had me in for a full-blown exam and proven to themselves that I’m healthy.”
She had never liked the attention her illness had forced upon her before, either. Derec nodded. “Okay,” he said, giving her a strong hug before going over to the closet and picking out a fresh pair of pants and a simple pullover shirt to wear.He wouldn’t tell the robots, but he would keep a close watch on her himself today just to make sure she really was okay.
That intention died within minutes of stepping out from the bedroom into the rest of the apartment.
Avery was waiting for him in the kitchen. “What did you do to them?” he asked in his usual belligerent tone.
“Do to whom?” Derec replied calmly, going to the automat and dialing for breakfast.
“The robots,” Avery replied.
“The-oh, those robots. Ariel sent them off to their room last night to talk business out of earshot. Theirs is the new door at the end of the hallway. Can’t miss it.”
“I’m aware of that,” Avery snarled. “What I’m talking about is that the robots are locked up. Inert. Dead.”
“What?” Derec turned from the automat with his breakfast still only half ordered.
“Is your hearing going along with your intelligence? The robots are-”
“Locked up. Inert. Dead. I got that. My statement-” here Derec mimicked the tone of a robot so clearly that Avery rolled his eyes to the ceiling, “-was merely a conversational device intended to indicate extreme surprise. And,” he added in his own voice again, “to indicate that I had nothing to do with it. Which I didn’t.”
“So you say. You must have said something to make them lock up. Some contradictory order.”
“If I did, I don’t know what it was.” Derec looked back to the automat, shrugged, and pressed the cancel button. “Come on, let’s go see.”
He padded down the hallway, still in bare feet, to the robot’s new room. They hadn’t been interested in creature comforts; it was just big enough for the three robots to stand in without bumping into one another or the walls. It held no windows, no chairs-nothing but the robots.
When Derec and Ariel first arrived in Robot City, the robots gave them a small, one-bedroom apartment to live in. It had seemed miserly in a city built on such a grand scale, but the robots had truly thought they were fulfilling the humans’ every need. Similarly, the food had been nutritious but bland until they experimented with the automats to get them to produce flavor. Robots simply had no concept of the difference between sufficiency and satisfaction, and now, as Derec looked into the tiny, windowless closet these particular robots had made for themselves, he realized they were still a long way from making that distinction. Either that or their concept of satisfaction was simply so different from the human norm that Derec didn’t recognize it when he saw it.
Avery had certainly been accurate enough in his description of them. All three of them were frozen in place, standing up straight, arms at their sides. None of them betrayed the slightest hint of motion.
Derec tried the obvious. “Adam. Eve. Lucius. Respond.”
Nothing happened.
Avery smiled his “I told you so” smile.
Derec tried the less obvious. Adam, Eve, Lucius, he sent.
At once his mental interface filled with a hiss of static like that from a poorly tuned hyperwave radio. Behind it Derec heard a faint whine that might have been a signal, but it might have been just noise. On the off chance that they were still receiving, he sent, J order you to respond.
Nothing happened.
He cancelled the link and said aloud, “They do seem to be locked up. I got nothing on the comlink, either. I wonder what happened to them.”
“We’ll find out.” Avery-lacking an internal comlink of his own-stalked out of the robots’ cubbyhole, went to the corn console in its niche in the library, and keyed it on. Into the receiver he said, “I want a cargo team, big enough to carry three robots, up here immediately.” He switched it off before the computer could respond.
Derec had followed him into the library. “What are you going to do with them?” he asked.
“Take them to the lab. I’ll find out what happened to them, and what makes them tick as well.”
Something about Avery, s manner made Derec suspect that he wouldn’t be restricting himself to non-invasive examination. “You’re going to take them apart?”
“Why not?” Avery asked. “It’s the perfect opportunity.”
Derec didn’t know why he felt so disturbed by that thought; he had taken robots apart before himself. But then, when he had done so he had known how to put them back together again, too. With these, Avery had no assurance he could rebuild them when he was done. That was the difference: Avery was considering permanent deactivation, not just investigation.
“Is that reason enough to do it?” Derec asked. “Just because you have the opportunity? They’re thinking beings. You should be trying to fix whatever’s wrong with them, not cut them open to satisfy your curiosity.”
Avery rolled his eyes. “Spare me the sentiment, would you? They’re robots. Human creations. Built to serve. If it amuses me to take one apart-0r to order one to take itself apart-then I have every right, legal or moral, to do so. These robots are a puzzle, and I want to know more about them. Besides that, they’ve interfered with my own project. I want to make sure they don’t do that again.”
“You don’t need to destroy them to do that.”
“Maybe I won’t. We’ll see.”
Derec was of a mind to argue further, but the arrival of the cargo robots interrupted him. There were six of them in the team, and under Avery’s direction they moved silently through the apartment, picked up the inert robots unceremoniously by arms and legs, and carried them out to a waiting truck. Avery followed after them, and Derec, struggling into his shoes, came along behind.
“Do you wish the malfunctioning robots taken to the repa
ir facility?” the truck’s robot driver asked as Derec and Avery climbed into the cab with it.
“No,” Avery said. “To my laboratory.”
“To your laboratory,” the driver replied, and with a soft whine of maglev motors, the truck lifted and began to slide down the street.
The truck used the same magnetic levitation principle that the transport booths used, holding itself up off the street and providing thrust with magnetic fields rather than with wheels. It was an old design, but not that common on most worlds even so because of the need for a special track for the magnetic fields to work against. Trains and busses were all maglev, but trucks, which needed the ability to travel anywhere, were usually not.
Here in Robot City, however, all the streets would support maglev vehicles. Everything was made of the same material. There was no place in the city where a maglev truck couldn’t go, and thus no reason for them to have wheels. Derec wondered briefly if there were wheels on anything here, but couldn’t think of a single instance where one was necessary.
Humanity had finally outgrown them, he realized. Or would, when this and the other robot cities on other worlds were opened up for human occupation.
They had hardly gone a block before Derec noticed a flicker of movement in the recessed doorway of one of the buildings lining the street. He looked more closely and saw that it was one of Lucius’s rodent-like creations. He looked for more and wasn’t disappointed; they were out in force, scavenging the nearly sterile city for food and no doubt starving in the process. They would be able to glean a little nourishment from the occasional strips of grass and ornamental shrubs between buildings, but given as many creatures as Derec saw in just one block, that food supply wouldn’t last out the week. Lucius had evidently bred more of them than that one warehouse-full he had shown them yesterday.