Asimov’s Future History Volume 11

by Isaac Asimov

  He had other concerns. Caliban went back to his starting position in the room and looked down.

  There she was, lying on the floor. Was there any clue on her person, any guide, to who she was? He magnified the image of her body and examined it, centimeter by centimeter. There! A flat badge pinned to the breast of her lab coat. The shapes of the letters were somewhat obscured by her position and the lighting. He stared at it, struggling to puzzle it out. He was fairly certain it read F. Leving, but it could have been F. Leving or some other variant. Did the tag denote her name, then? He could not be sure, but it seemed reasonable.

  Still, he had learned that the written word, even when it was incidental, could open the doors to a great deal of knowledge. Spotting the words “Sheriff’ and “Deputy” had cued his datastore to explain the entire criminal justice system. He looked around the image of the room as recorded by his memory, searching for other writing. He spotted a poster on the wall, a picture of a group of people smiling for the camera, with a legend overprinted along the bottom. Leving Robotics Laboratories: Working for Inferno’s Future.

  Leving again. That must be the name. He examined the poster more closely. Yes, he was virtually certain. There she was, in the front row. Even allowing for the fact that the woman in the lab was unconscious, crumpled at his feet, while the woman in the picture was alert and smiling, the two had to be one. Leving Robotics Laboratories. Labs were places where experiments were run. Was he himself an experiment?

  He continued his search of the room image. He spotted the writing on a stack of boxes and zoomed in to examine it. There was a neat label on each one. Handle with Care. Gravitonic Brain. Reading the, words sent a strange thrill of recognition through him. Gravitonic Brain. There was something, deep in the core of himself, that felt an identity with that word. It related to him. I must have one, he thought.

  It came as no surprise whatsoever that his on-board datastore contained not the slightest shred of information concerning gravitonic anything, let alone gravitonic brains.

  All this was vague, unclear, uncertain. Knowing the woman ‘s name was Leving, and that she seemed to run a robot lab, did not get him much further ahead than he had been before. And a guess at what sort of brain he had was of little use, either.

  Determined to find something clear, substantial, definite, in the image of the room, Caliban pressed on with his search. Wait a second. On the gravitonic brain boxes. Another label, with what his datastore informed him was a delivery address. Over the address were the words Limbo Project surmounting a lightning bolt.

  If he suspected that he himself had a gravitonic brain, and gravitonic brains were being shipped to the Limbo Project... He ran a search over his visual memory, searching for more instances of the words or the lightning symbol. There, on a notebook on the counter. And on a file folder, and two or three other places about the lab.

  It was obvious that not only he, Caliban, but Leving Labs had something to do with the Limbo Project.

  Whatever the Limbo Project was.

  Caliban explored the image of the laboratory in minute detail, but he could not find anything more that could offer him any clues about his circumstances. He faded out the imagery and sat there, alone in the perfect darkness of the tunnel office.

  He was safe down here, and probably would be for quite a while. It might be days or weeks, perhaps longer, before they searched this deep into the tunnel system. It might be that he could elude capture altogether simply by hunkering down, sitting behind the desk, out of sight of the door, and staying there in the dark. It was a big, heavy, metal desk. It might even provide some protection against the sorts of detection devices the police used, according to the datastore.

  Perhaps this might be even more than a temporary haven. Perhaps, if the police could not find him, they might give up after a while. It seemed not at all unlikely that he could remain safely alive indefinitely, simply by staying exactly where he was, motionless in the dark, until the dust settled over him and the grit worked its way into his joints.

  But while that sort of existence might match the datastore’s definition of staying alive, it did not match the one Caliban felt inside himself.

  If he was going to live, truly live, he would have to take action. He would have to know more, a great deal more, about his circumstances.

  Limbo. That seemed to be where it all tied together. The Limbo Project. If he could learn more about it, then perhaps he would know more about himself.

  For form’s sake, he consulted his datastore, but found no information about Limbo there. But he had the street address from that gravitonic brain shipping box.

  He would go there and see what he could learn. But this time, he would stay away from the humans. He would ask the robots his questions. It was, perhaps, a rather vague and sketchy plan, but at least it was something.

  It might work, it might do no good at all. But it had to be better than dealing with humans.

  He stood up and got moving.

  Chapter 13

  HRT-234, BETTER KNOWN as Horatio, was an extremely busy robot at the moment. But then, there was nothing unusual about that. Such had been the case for some time now. There was, after all, Limbo to deal with.

  Horatio noted the time and checked his internal datastore, but the information there only increased his sense of mounting frustration. He linked into a hyperwave link to check the submaster schedule for the next three hours. No doubt about it. They had fallen behind again out on the auxiliary shipping floor. There was a bottleneck somewhere. Smoothing out bottlenecks was one of his duties. Being sure to stay linked into the comm net via hyperwave, he left his normal duty station in Depot Central and hurried out to aux shipping to see what was up.

  The Limbo Project was enormously complicated. Horatio’s duties were complex, and his responsibilities tremendous, but he knew that he was concerned with only the slightest, smallest piece of the picture. At least, he had surmised as much for himself. Doing so was not hard: The evidence was there to be seen on all sides, in the density of message traffic, in the complexity of the routing problems, in the patterns of communications security..

  But, truth be told, there was no need to examine such esoteric areas as signal analysis to know there was something big going on. The conclusion was there to be drawn by a mere glance at the whirling, overorganized chaos that surrounded him on the aux shipping floor.

  The shipping floor, the whole depot, was a place of noise and confusion, of heavy unpainted stresscrete floors and towering support girders, roller/carriers and liftwagons, of hurrying robots darting everywhere and hectoring men and women shouting and arguing, talking into mobile phones, checking the time, pointing at lists of things that had to be done.

  Even the air was filled with rush and hurry. Even here, four deep levels below ground level, there was no room for the cargo vehicles to land while waiting for a load. The heavy-duty cargo flyers were forced to hover instead, and they hung in midair everywhere, waiting for their chance to land. Carrier robots of all descriptions humped freight into the cargo bays of the flyers that found a place to come down. As Horatio watched, another flyer sealed up and launched through the great accessways, up toward ground level and the sky beyond, its place taken by another ship almost before the first had cleared the loading zone. Instantly the newly arrived ship was surrounded by a swarm of loader robots. The cargo doors swung open and they started rushing the cargo inside. Similar scenes were being repeated on all sides. Horatio had heard one of the human supervisors say it reminded her of the panicky rushing about in an overturned ant heap, and Horatio was reluctantly forced to concede he could see the comparison.

  Limbo Depot had often been a busy place, and something close to a madhouse in the days just gone by. But today was the worst of all. Without being told, Horatio could tell there was some sort of deadline approaching. Everything was being rushed through at the last minute.

  It was almost as if someone feared that today would be the last day anything c
ould be done. One or two of the human supervisors – Settler as well as Spacer – had hinted as much.

  But it was not, Horatio somewhat primly reminded himself, his place to worry about such things. If the humans did not wish to advise him of their worries, then those worries were no concern of his. Still, he could not help but worry: The humans could easily do harm to themselves or their vast project – whatever it was – by keeping it too secret. How could he head off trouble if he did not know what was going on?

  It was, he knew, a problem he shared with many harried and overworked supervisor robots. Conversations with the other supervisors confirmed what he had always suspected. It wasn’t just Horatio or the Limbo Project: The humans never told any of their management robots everything they needed to know. It barely mattered, at this point. Horatio had been so busy recently that he was unaware of anything that had taken place outside of Limbo Depot in the past month. The seas could rise up and wipe out the island of Purgatory and the city of Limbo with it, and the first he would know of it would be when his cargo carriers did not return.

  Right now all he needed to know was why the loading operation was falling behind. Horatio turned a practiced eye on the aux shipping floor, searching for the bottleneck that was slowing things down. He knew that the seeming chaos was an illusion, that this operation was moving with a high degree of efficiency. But somewhere out there was a problem that was slowing matters down again. A malfunctioning piece of equipment, a gang of robots confused by a poorly phrased order, something.

  Then Horatio spotted the two humans, a Settler man and a Spacer man, arguing at the far end of the loading dock, surrounded by a cluster of inactive robots. If Horatio had been human himself, he might have let out a sigh just then, for even as he went over to make the attempt to smooth things over, he knew there was nothing to be done. The robots could take no action until the humans agreed what they should do, and, judging by the heated nature of the discussion between Spacer and Settler, that moment seemed likely to be rather far off.

  With little hope of a quick resolution, and all the tact he had at his disposal, he walked to the end of the dock and waded into the argument.

  Fifteen minutes later, a difficulty over which of two loads of cargo should be loaded first was resolved. It could have been settled in fifteen nanoseconds. If either the Spacer or the Settler had been interested in speed rather than winning the spat, both cargoes could have been loaded and on their way by now. But at least it was over now, and the two humans had wandered off to disrupt operations somewhere else. Honestly! He knew humans were superior to robots, and it went without saying that he held each and every one of them in the highest respect, and always followed their orders to the letter, but there were times when they could just seem so silly.

  But be that as may be, he had a job to do, other orders to follow. Orders that seemed far more straightforward than they really were.

  In simplest terms, all he was called upon to do was see to it that the N. L. robots were shipped to the island of Purgatory. Whatever N. L. meant.

  But that, it quickly developed, was to be no simple task. For reasons that were kept from him altogether, the N. L. robots were not to be shipped in a fully assembled condition. Their brains were being sent separately from the bodies.

  In addition, the brains were to be sent in three different shipments by three different routes. He returned to his duty station. The N. L. robots, boxed up and ready to go, were in the center of the shipping floor, a formidable wall of packing cases stacked up nearly to the ceiling. Guard robots stood on duty, one every three meters around the perimeter of the boxes. Two more guard robots stood on top of the stacked cases as well.

  More guards watched over another, smaller, stack of packing cases, the ones that held the robots’ brains. Horatio felt a sudden impulse to take another look at the brains, or at least the boxes they came in. He walked over to them. After a moment’s hesitation, the guards let him past. Horatio knelt down and took a good hard look at the cases. He found himself mystified at all the fuss. The containers seemed to be ordinary padded shipping boxes. The only thing even remotely out of the ordinary seemed to be that new labels reading

  HANDLE WITH CARE

  POSITRONIC BRAINS

  had been hurriedly slapped over the old ones, as if someone were trying to cover up what the old labels had said. On one of the boxes, the new label failed to cover the old one completely, and the first letters of two lines of type were visible.

  HAN

  GRA

  The first was obviously HANDLE WITH CARE, but Horatio could not imagine what GRA could be. Horatio had a strong streak of curiosity, and he was at least somewhat tempted to peel back the new label and get a peek at the old one. But that he knew he could never do. Management robots were of necessity given a large degree of autonomy, a lot of room to make their own decisions. However, that did not give manager robots the ability to exceed the wishes of their owners – and it was clearly the wish of Leving Robotics Laboratories that the original label remain hidden and unread, and he, Horatio, was charged with the security of the shipment.

  Reluctantly, dutifully, he took a marker from his workbag and obliterated the exposed part of the old label.

  He stood up and went back to his work rostrum. Horatio’s instructions told him to send the bodies in three shipments as well, sending them at different times, via different routes, using different shipping procedures, from the three brain shipments. Human overseers would meet the three brain and three body shipments at their arrival points on the island of Purgatory and escort them to their final destination.

  A third set of components, not brains or bodies, was to go out via its own secure route. “Range restricters,” it said on the invoice, but Horatio had not the slightest idea what that meant. Just another piece of busywork the humans insisted upon.

  “Excuse me,” a rich, mellifluous voice said at his back.

  Horatio turned around, expecting to see a human at his back. To his surprise, he instead saw a tall red robot there, a robot with a remarkably sophisticated voice system. Indeed, that voice went to waste in the cacophony of this place. It was difficult to speak on the working levels of the depot, and most robots did not bother trying. “Use your hyperwave, my friend,” Horatio said. “It is hard to hear you.”

  “Use my what?”

  “Your hyperwave signaling system. It is too noisy for speech here.”

  “A moment, please.” The robot paused, as if he were consulting some internal reference or another. “Ah. Hyperwave,” he said at last. “Now I see. I was unfamiliar with the term. I am afraid I have no such signaling system. I must speak out loud.”

  Horatio was astonished. Even the crudest, lowest-end carrier robots were equipped with hyperwave. And even if this robot did not have hyperwave, how could he not know what it was at first, and yet then be able to look it up? High-level robots sometimes had internal look-up sources, but they were meant for referral to esoteric knowledge needed for a specific job. Certainly such look-up datastores were not meant to serve as a dictionary of common terms. It would be a waste of effort, when such things could have and should have been downloaded to the robot’s brain during manufacture.

  What sort of strange robot was this? “Very well,” Horatio said. “We shall talk out loud. What is it that you require?”

  “You are supervisor Horatio?”

  “Yes. What are you called?”

  “Caliban. I am glad to find you, friend Horatio. I need your advice. I tried to seek some sort of help from the other robots, the blue ones working over there, but none of them seemed able to offer me guidance. They advised me to come and talk with you.”

  Horatio was more puzzled than ever. The Shakespearean name “Caliban” told him something. Fredda Leving herself had built this robot, as she had built Horatio. But the name “Horatio” should have meant something to this Caliban, and yet it seemed that it did not. Stranger still, this advanced, sophisticated-looking robot had gone to
the lowest of laborers seeking advice. The DAA-BOR series robots, such as the blue workers Caliban had gestured at, were capable of only the most limited sort of thought. Another fact that any robot or human should have known.

  There was something very strange going on here. And perhaps strangest of all, friend Caliban seemed quite unaware of the oddness of his own behavior.

  All this flickered through his mind in an instant. “Well, I hope that I can be of more help. What is the difficulty?”

  The strange robot hesitated for a moment, and made an oddly tentative gesture with one hand. “I am not sure,” he said at last. “That in itself is part of the difficulty. I seem to be in the most serious sort of trouble, and I don’t know what to do about it. I am not even sure who I am.”

  How much stranger could this get? “You just told me. You are Caliban.”

  “Yes, but who is that?” Caliban made a broad, sweeping gesture. “You are Horatio. You are a supervisor. You tell other robots what to do and they do it. You help operate this place. That is, in large part, who you are. I have nothing like that.”

  “But, friend Caliban. We are all defined by what we do. What is it that you do? That is what you are.”

  Caliban looked out across the wide expanse of the depot, pausing before he spoke. “I flee from those who pursue me. Is that all I am, Horatio? Is that my existence?”

  Horatio was speechless. What could this be? What could it all mean? Beyond question, this situation was peculiar enough, and potentially serious, that he would have to give it some time. Things were running smoothly for the moment. Perhaps they would remain that way for a while. “Perhaps,” Horatio said gently, “we should go to another place to talk.”