by Yoss
There’s only one reason why my buddies and I exist: somebody has to enforce the law. Or keep up the appearance of lawfulness, at least, in this no-man’s land. We’re the only ones authorized to bear arms here—and to use them. We’re the customs officers of this borderland between Earth and the Galaxy, the Charons of this River Styx between underdevelopment and high tech.
Waxing poetic, am I? What a pity the reality turns out to be so prosaic. That’s a fact. Isaac Asimov proved prophetic with his R. Daneel Olivaw, after all: like him, we pozzies aren’t human police officers, just positronic robots. Sometimes reality makes literature look small, even science fiction.
True, ever since the aliens showed up nobody on Earth writes SF anymore. Too bad. I really liked the good doctor’s stories. After Chandler, I mean. Maybe now that the future has caught up with humans and it turns out they don’t like it, they find it hard to think up new possible tomorrows.
Of course, we’re neither dead nor alive, neither earthlings nor galaxians, humans nor aliens, but rather both things—and something more. Or something less.
Earth probably would have preferred a police force consisting of human beings, or of living beings at least, but the Galactic Trade Confederation isn’t made up of a single race of aliens. They don’t trust humans, but they have just as little faith in each other. Following what by now is an ancient tradition, the police forces of the various Stations (and I’d love to know how many there are; of course, like all interesting facts, that’s classified and above a simple pozzie’s pay grade) are made up of beings like us.
Neither fish nor fowl. Perfectly fair and neutral. In theory, at least.
Sometimes I wonder what my equivalents on other Stations look like. Quadrupeds? Gas clouds? Do they swim or float in superdense atmospheres? Most likely I’ll never find out. But I’m sure they must be very different, at least in appearance. The Confederation sticks to a prudent policy of making their police in each system look like the predominant sentient race there—at least approximately.
That’s why we’re bipedal, have five-fingered hands with opposable thumbs, our pupils turn in our eye sockets, our jaws move when we speak (using thoracic air compressors, because we don’t need to breathe and have no lungs). We even wear clothes even though we have no need for them, strictly speaking. We’ve got nothing to hide—no genitals, inside or out.
And there are other differences. Though we have tongues in our mouths and noses on our faces, we don’t have a sense of taste or smell. And why should we? Well, considering that we work as bloodhounds, a sense of smell might have come in handy. But some paranoid Grodo must have figured that over time we could maybe decipher their pheromonic speech, so smell was out. We don’t need to eat or sleep (our teeth and lips are for purely cosmetic purposes), don’t sweat or defecate, we have no body hair (except on our heads, some of us; not me), our pseudoskin is red, blue, silver, gold, or any other humanly impossible color (apparently somebody wanted us to look like mannequins), most of our “brains” are in our torsos, not our heads (that’s why Weekman, Makrow 34’s human henchman, shot Zorro at stomach-level: destroying that region is the most effective way of neutralizing a pozzie; I’m still wondering how he knew), and other such details. It’s just a matter of looking human—a very different proposition from being human.
We’re also stronger and faster than humans—but without overdoing it. Yes, our reflexes and strength are superior to the average human’s. But our reaction time is slower than a Grodo’s and our muscles are weaker than a Colossaur’s, for example. (The aliens hate taking risks; they’d never accept a police force of robots that were too powerful for them to beat one-on-one.) That’s as far as our superpowers go. We can’t fly and don’t shoot death rays (at least not without antigrav belts or energy weapons). Much less do we have Psi abilities.
The material part of us, our bodies, are 100 percent human tech: we are manufactured on Earth, Mars, or the asteroids. We have state-of-the-art cybernetic bodies, just like all the industrial robots used in terrestrial factories, except ours are completely android—that is, much more anthropomorphic than any industrial use would require.
Nor are our germanium-foam positronic brains fundamentally different from the computers that guide any terrestrial interplanetary ship.
What makes us special are our—can I say “personalities”? I don’t know if the aliens left them up to randomness generators or planned them one by one. The fact is, no two are alike. But as individualized as we are, we still have our limits. Oh, yes, it remains an enigma to human cybernetics how positrons move through our germanium-foam labyrinths; the sole yet definitive alien contribution to the package. The divine spark that animated our dead metallic clay. The thing that turned us into individual entities, with characters, skills, and tastes all our own.
Take our keynames, for instance. They’re not just a way of distinguishing us at a glance; they are expressions of our individuality that sometimes extend even to our appearance. As a fan of crime novels and especially those of Raymond Chandler, I always wear a trench coat and a broad-brimmed hat like Humphrey Bogart’s. Like Philip Marlowe must have worn. Zorro wore a Cordovan sombrero, a mask, and a black cape to go with his sword and whip. Achilles had his plumed helmet, breastplate, greaves, lance, and shield. Arnold Stallone wears a leather jacket with rivets and dark glasses, after the Terminator. Mao Castro never takes off his khaki Red Guard uniform from Cultural Revolution times. And so on, all of us. It isn’t as boring and monotonous as uniforms would be (not that some aliens wouldn’t prefer that), but it serves almost the same function: anywhere in the station, if you run into a humanoid who looks like he’s stayed up late at a costume party, there’s no question, he’s one of us.
We pozzies are very democratic. No vertical military structures for us. We don’t have ranks. When one of us shows himself to be particularly skillful, judicial, and trustworthy, he’s given the honor of choosing a secondname. I suppose it’s a trivial thing and doesn’t make any difference, but I’ve always wanted one.
Why should I want anything more?
But our positronic brains are as far as our kinship goes with our virtual predecessors, the Good Doctor’s literary creations. No Three Laws of Robotics for us. Especially nothing about protecting humans at any cost. We have free will. We get bored, we have fun, some of us even fall in love (it’s never happened to me; I think it’s an aberrant sado-maso absurdity—as I’ve mentioned, we have no sex organs—and anyway, not many pozzies go for a female key-identity: the macho police tradition is hard to escape, I guess). There even was a Chacumbele who killed himself, and a George III who went mad.
It all comes with the job. We’re pretty stable, psychologically speaking. Anyway, as we like to say: maybe our lives and our intelligence are artificial, but our existence, our feelings, and our problems are completely real.
With computers for brains, our memories never fail us. We can mentally calculate 329 to the nth in an instant, whatever good that does us. What makes us special isn’t the number of calculations per second we can perform; it’s that, as true living beings, we can function in analogical mode, not logically alone. Make deductions based on insufficient data, self-induce flexible rules of conduct in ourselves, and so on.
Not belonging to any side, we should supposedly be fair and impartial judges and executioners. But even though we couldn’t be what we are without the aliens’ cybernetic technology, we all feel much closer to human beings than to our “cerebral parents.” Maybe it’s because we have free access to all of human history, psychology, and art, whereas we can only access similar data from the three alien races when they deem it useful.
Which is almost never.
Who are we, where did we come from, where are we going? That’s no problem for us. It’s good to know the answer to what humans call the universal questions. We are police officers, we must maintain order, we’re happy when we succeed; if the brain circuitry in our torsos gets destroyed we disappear, leaving o
nly a memory of us—that’s the whole meaning of our lives. The only deep question I sometimes ponder is: What am I? Do I owe this unique, inimitable Raymond, so different from Ivan Stalin or Miyamoto, which I so enjoy being, entirely to the aliens’ detailed programming? Or does free will—or something else—really exist?
I don’t know if I’ll ever find the answer. I don’t know if there is an answer.
In any case, even in the middle of our most abstruse philosophical musings we never forget that the aliens are the ones who are in control. Tough luck to any police officer who does forget. There’s only one punishment and one fear for us: a personality wipe. Our bosses have only resorted to this ultima ratio regum once. The other stuff they do, like changing our postings or temporarily suspending us, are just administrative measures.
Meanwhile, so long as our brain casings are intact, we’re immortal. Though sometimes we have to have a new limb or system installed.
If there’s anything we run short of on the Burroughs, it’s replacement parts.
I wonder what Zorro and Achilles must have thought when they felt the impact of the microwave beam. When they realized they were about to disappear.
If they had time to think anything at all, that is.
Four
Anyway. Getting back to the story.
Or the chaos. The Burroughs was buzzing like a hornet’s nest after a brat throws a rock at it.
Of course it was. An alien, dead. An alien from one of the powerful, respected races. A Grodo, no less. (His pheromonal name, translated into Standard Anglo-Hispano, would be something like Vigilante Fixer of Alien Carroña Who Is Never Taken por Sorpresa, though the events of the day proved that moniker to be… inadequate.) The entire insectoid community was in an uproar, demanding that the responsible parties pay in blood or lymph or brake fluid, they didn’t care which, so long as they paid it all, immediately.
Turns out none of the perps stuck around to let the Colossaurs tear them to shreds, or the Cetians mutilate them, or the Grodos turn them into living incubators for their cute carnivorous larvae—quaint custom, that. Makrow 34, Giorgio Weekman, and the Colossaur (we never did get an ID on him; the brass from Colossa aren’t keen on divulging data about their people) had taken off for parts unknown, leaving the challenge of tracking, locating, and neutralizing them to the pozzies, and in particular to yours truly.
The Galactic Trade Confederation called an urgent Special Summit. I didn’t get to go, of course—none of us pozzies did—but I have a pretty good idea of how it went down: the Grodos waved those six ugly appendages of theirs around and threatened everybody in sight with their ovipositor stings, blaming it all on the Colossaurs. The giant reptiles of Colossa grated their teeth and shook their tails menacingly, insisting the perpetrator was just a renegade and there was no call for blaming their whole species. The Cetians expressed dismay over the outrages committed by the flawed and wayward Cetian while considering how best to screw over the two other races. All this under a very thin veil of politeness.
Realpolitik, in a word.
Somebody had to pay the piper, so it ended in the usual shakedown, just as you’d expect. Either all the criminals got caught, or all the aliens left the Solar System. That would mean the end of human intergalactic trade, sending Homo sapiens back to the technological Middle Ages. They gave this good news to us pozzies to pass along to the humans, seeing as how we were the middlemen, so to speak.
It was a huge mess, and it dawned on us that we might be facing a much more complicated business than a simple gunfight. We all felt sorry that Zorro and Achilles were no longer among us, of course: we may be artificial, but our esprit de corps is real.
Not like it would be any skin off our backs if the humans were deprived of alien trade goods and trash, sentimental considerations aside. But with the aliens gone, there’d be no more reason to keep the Burroughs in orbit. They’d decommission it and sell it for scrap—and us along with it, no doubt.
Some pozzies profess a faith in an electronic great beyond and positronic reincarnation, but I doubt they would want to test the hypothesis.
Not within a humanly measurable time frame, I mean.
Faced with this threat, the Positronic Police Force went to Code Red. We had to nab the perps, no matter what. That didn’t mean we should all leave the station, though. Business had to keep moving, the show must go on. All it meant was, for this one time and only as an exception, somebody had to leave the safety of the Burroughs and hoof it across the Solar System, hunting down the fugitives.
As the first officer to reach the scene of the crime, my pals elected me to do the job. The top Confederation brass all agreed.
I accepted. I wasn’t particularly keen to go, but somebody had to do their dirty work, right? And if the guys with the secondnames had decided that I was the one for the job, well, maybe this would be my chance to get me a secondname of my own, after it was all over.
Not that they gave me any choice.
They granted me full authority inside the Station—for all the good that would do me. Fortunately, the aliens aren’t dumb: seeing as the fugitives must have holed up in some rocky corner of the Solar System, they made a couple calls and got my carte blanche extended over almost all the space under human control. Except Earth, naturally.
Not because the Homo sapiens police didn’t want to suck up to our omnipotent employers, but because there’s a limit to everything. Too many resentful, xenophobic fundamentalist hotheads on the old planet would give their right arms (not much of a sacrifice, considering the current state of medicine and reconstructive grafts, but take it as a metaphor) to shred one of the hated pozzies, the aliens’ guard dogs. Even if I left my usual Humphrey Bogart fedora and trench coat behind, my golden epidermis would give me away. Not even the police could protect me from a determined attacker. Or protect the attacker from my counterattacks. No point stirring things up. I’d get to see Earth some other occasion. There’d be time.
But apart from the sacred cradle of humanity, I could go wherever I wanted. And request (that is, demand) the cooperation of any human authorities, federal or local.
When the Galactic Trade Confederation informed me of the wide authorization I’d been granted, I understood just how worried they were about what Makrow 34 and his friends might do—and that if I didn’t find them in time, I’d probably envy the fate of Zorro and Achilles.
First thing I did was rewatch the holotapes, over and over. I was intrigued by what happened to Achilles. He didn’t have time to understand what he had run up against, and the first few times I watched the recording, I didn’t get it either. It seemed like just a lot of bad luck, all coming at once and at the worst possible time. First he moved too slow and aimed badly. Then more slowness, topped off by a weapon malfunction. We checked, cleaned, and adjusted our weapons every day, so a misfire was unlikely, but it wasn’t out of the question.
I started by inspecting my buddy’s maser. It was in perfect condition: he hadn’t forgotten to oil it, the energy crystals were in top shape, no dust on the prisms. So what, then? Was it the buttered toast phenomenon—always falls butter-side down? Or Murphy’s law: whatever can go wrong will go wrong, especially when it does the most harm?
In principle, I don’t believe the universe has a statistical grudge against anybody. I kept looking. But it wasn’t until I was watching the scene for the third time that I noticed the detail. If I had involuntary muscle reactions like humans do, I would have trembled when I recognized the concentration on Makrow 34’s face as Achilles approached him and opened fire.
Especially with Zorro’s whip and black sombrero levitating as though the artificial gravity had gone out over that square yard of space. They were in the background, behind him, but perfectly visible.
It could only mean one thing: probabilistic fluctuation.
In other words, our Cetian really was a Psi. Not a telepath, though. Nothing that simple. Achilles’ mind, like all our minds, wasn’t susceptible to Psi con
trol. He wasn’t a teleporter, either, or even a telekinetic; neither of those talents would have given him the time to modify the trajectory of a beam moving at relativistic speeds, such as microwaves.
I know what two and two make. With the impossible eliminated, only the improbable remained.
Makrow 34 had to be a Gaussical.
Gaussical. The term had only entered the human vocabulary (and therefore our own) fifteen years earlier. That was when a Grodo with this unforeseen power—Psi specialists on Earth had never predicted it—thought a Cetian trader had double-crossed him. In one of the internal passageways on board the Burroughs, the guy lost the self-control Grodos always show and unleashed a chaos of physical improbabilities. Objects floated in midair. It snowed upwards. Some people even claimed they saw a galloping herd of centaurs. Two-headed centaurs.
As Sandokan Mompracem, the pozzie who’s our current expert on alien languages, explained it to me, “Gaussical” is an unhappy effort on the part of a machine translator to turn a highly complicated Grodo pheromonal term into Standard Anglo-Hispano. A more precise translation would come out more like The Desconsiderado Who Willfully Distorts the Curva de Probabilidades. Earthlings call it a probability curve, a bell curve, or a Gauss distribution. The machine offered a bunch of possible translations, as it does when it comes up against new concepts. The one that stuck was Gaussical.