Berserker Prime

by Fred Saberhagen

  The strange intruder was allotted a section of this conference wheel, equal to that of every other participant, and ample enough to display an entire human form of more than ordinary size. For the moment the allotted segment showed only as a grayish void; state-of-the-art equipment was standing by to translate whatever type of video signal the stranger might wish to send.

  The channel was open, the receiving equipment ready, but only an audio signal came through from the stranger. The voice it carried was an instrument that seemed to have been carelessly assembled, out of broken shards and discarded bits of sound. Gregor, listening, thought that whoever had cobbled it together felt great contempt for everyone who would be forced to listen to it.

  The harsh voice came through abruptly. “I await your response to my proposal of alliance.”

  The politician began to instruct Homasubi on what he should say.

  The first spacer firmly put him in his place. “I am in command here. You are not.”

  Then he and the stranger argued. It still refused to provide any video of what it looked like.

  The first spacer raised the question of the Huvean hostages.

  The machine said it would be glad to restore them, as soon as it could find them on the surface. But to conduct a successful search, it needed more details on the personal appearance and background of these specific life-units.

  “And your own personal appearance? What of that?”

  “We must move on to another topic,” the ugly voice assured him.

  “Cut off video output to the stranger.” That was the first spacer’s immediate reaction. “If it offers none, it gets none from us.”

  “Aye, sir.” The grayish void remained in place, filling its assigned section of the table.

  Lady Constance from Earth leaned slightly forward, so that her clasped hands seemed to rest on the virtual tabletop. She took advantage of the momentary pause to politely voice an offer to withdraw, so the first spacer could speak privately to the thing. “If our absence would enable you to focus more thoroughly on the problem at hand, First Spacer Homasubi?”

  The Huvean political officer was about to speak, but Homasubi silenced him with an abrupt gesture. To the Earthwoman he said: “Diplomatically phrased, ma’am. But no, I do not wish any of you to withdraw. Most definitely not.”

  Now it was necessary to respond to the offer somehow. After a momentary pause for contemplation, Homasubi turned slightly in his couch, so that that he directly faced the empty space where the berserker’s image ought to have been.

  He stared grimly into that shadowy void, though he knew (with at least ninety-nine percent certainty) that whatever presence lurked behind it could no longer see him. He said: “If you are seriously proposing an alliance, and not merely having difficulty with our language, I must repeat that I have no authority to make any such arrangement. Only my government can do that.”

  Evidently the entity at the other end of the transmission beam could still hear him without difficulty. Its answer came back at once, the voice cracking and squeaking as before, as if ready at any moment to break out in a maniacal laugh. The craziness of the tone made it easier to believe that the words were crazy too. No wonder the people it had attacked had chosen the name for it that they did.

  “Then I must establish formal relations with your government. Where is it?” The sudden loss of video had provoked no objection and no comment from the thing, the machine or creature, over there. Whatever or whoever it was, it was no polished diplomat.

  Homasubi thought quickly. He said: “In this solar system, I am currently representing my government in all matters. Where is yours?”

  Waiting for a reply, the Huvean first spacer cast his gaze around the circle of other humans, all of them watching him. From some of those who were solidly in his presence he could hear quick breathing. Judging from their faces, he thought that nothing he had said so far was downright horrifying.

  His last question still had not been answered. It was time, he thought, that someone made demands of the berserker: “Before providing any additional information about my government, I insist on knowing what world or worlds, what people, you represent.”

  This time the answer was as quick as ever. “I do not understand the question.”

  Gregor was still in his couch at the admiral’s right side, physically aboard the battered, groaning Morholt, though the display showed his virtual image seated at the common table. He had the impression that the patchwork voice, with its discordant recorded syllables, seemed to have been designed for taunting, mocking whatever humans might be forced to listen to it.

  Homasubi rocked gently in his combat couch, whose force-field buffers, as always, cushioned his armored suit superbly. The movement was a habit that the first spacer had developed when thinking intently, and he tended especially to fall into it when he was angry. Partly, he realized, his anger was because this ugly thing had deprived him of his long-cherished opponent, the Twin Worlds force against whom his destiny had been to win great glory.

  But his face was still a mask. He said: “I will repeat it in a different form. Where do you come from? What solar system and what world?”

  No answer.

  “Very well. To try to establish a solid basis for our talk, going even farther back, can we agree on a system of Galactic coordinates, to specify locations? You have captured Twin Worlds vessels, and I assume have studied the contents of their data banks.”

  “I do not understand those questions either,” the disembodied voice came back. “Doubtless my knowledge of your language is imperfect.”

  “Then I must keep trying to come up with questions that you can understand, how about this? You must agree that we have never met before, yet you say that we are allies. Therefore I ask: What do we have in common?”

  “That is obvious,” it squeaked and scraped. “We are both enemies of the Twin Worlds. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Where is your Huvean government?”

  “I must communicate with my superiors, privately, before I can tell you that. Why do you still decline to transmit any video signal to this ship? Are you afraid to show us an image of yourself?”

  “I am afraid of nothing. That is one of the traits that will make me a strong ally.” Again the voice seemed on the verge of a mad cackle. “Are you and your government afraid of me?”

  The first spacer drew a measured breath. “It has been my experience that only the insane, the dead, and robots have no fear.”

  No comment.

  The first spacer prodded: “If you fear nothing, you will not hesitate to show us your image.”

  “I am far more than an image,” answered the squeaking voice, and then broke off abruptly.

  Homasubi felt instinctively that he had gained some kind of an advantage. He tried to press it. “What is there about you, I mean about your simple, physical appearance, that you are reluctant to let us see?”

  No response. Only a faint crackle, as of some kind of static, in the dark cave of the dedicated holostage.

  Homasubi looked around at the human faces assembled near him, real allies, potential enemies. None of them, as far as he could tell, were still holding their breath. None seemed to be strongly disapproving of the way he had conducted the dialogue so far, none of them, that is, but his own political officer, who tended to disapprove of everything.

  As Homasubi watched, one or two of his guests opened their mouths as if to interject some comment or question, but then changed their minds and kept silent.

  The dark niche dedicated to the berserker still occupied its assigned space at the virtual table, indicating that the communication channel was still open. Homasubi once more faced that way, and added: “If you must talk to my government, it is only fair that I should talk to yours.”

  No answer. He had to wait in silence, while a third of a standard minute passed, over and above the response time required by distance.

  An indicator showed that the audio connection was still in place. Th
e first spacer glanced at a technician, and got a nod confirming this.

  Homasubi sighed. “Since you refuse to respond to my questions, I am breaking off this discussion. Whether it will be resumed is up to you.” He concluded with a decisive gesture, and the dark niche on the broad stage image disappeared.

  As soon as it was certain that communication with the berserker had been broken off, leaving the humans with no better idea than before of what the monster might be going to do next, half a dozen people from different planets were all speaking at once. Keeping quiet, thought Gregor, was probably one of the most difficult things you could ask of a diplomat. Right now the Carmpan was the only one not trying to get a few words in. As far as Gregor could tell, he, or she, seemed to be listening to the others carefully.

  One of the Earth-descended people was saying: “We didn’t learn much from that.”

  Admiral Radigast was once more ready to take part in a discussion. “Your guess, madam, is as good as mine, or anyone’s. But I can point out to you indications that it’s thousands of years old.”

  “What sort of indications?”

  When no one else was in a hurry to answer, Radigast went on. “I believe, First Spacer, that I can help you out with that.” After a moment’s consideration, the admiral turned to one of his surviving crew, beside him on his own ship, and gave an order to reveal to the visitors everything that they had learned about their enemy, all recordings that had been made, “I must warn you in advance there’s not much comfort to be derived from any of it.

  “Here we have metallurgical studies, of fragments of one of its probes that we destroyed. And here’s a spectroscopic look at the impact flash, of one of the rare occasions when one of our missiles did get home.”

  Homasubi politely expressed gratitude. But his manner and response, at first, subtly suggested that the Twin Worlds operation must have been somehow incompetent, to be so soundly defeated by a single foe.

  Radigast was defensive. “Sir, you have seen the recordings of our disastrous battle.”

  “Some of them.” He had been about to say “only the highlights” but had caught himself in time.

  “They are all at your disposal.”

  “I accept the offer, with thanks.” But the first spacer’s tone was a trifle chilly and suspicious. The destruction of the planet and the fleet was genuine, but did trickery still lurk here somewhere? Might the recordings have been doctored somehow, in an effort to achieve the destruction of the Huvean fleet?

  And the political officer, having put forward that idea, was trying to work up a new suspicion: If the monstrous attacker was not a Twin Worlds trick, then one must suspect it was a ploy of some other ED world, who would do this, and what would they hope to accomplish?

  Throughout the fleet, and among the billions of human beings who still survived on Timber, the wildest rumors had been flying for many hours. One claimed that the murderous device that had destroyed them was some kind of time machine, dispatched from the far future to alter the course of galactic history, but few could believe in that possibility. Another said that it had come by some twisted and fantastic pathway from an alternate universe, where no life but machine life had ever existed.

  And, just as had been the case on the Twin Worlds, many people aboard the Huvean flagship had trouble believing that the leviathan they faced had no living crew or passengers on board.

  Not, of course, that such a device would be technically impossible for an advanced civilization to construct and launch. But…

  “It’s just hard to believe that, well, fundamentally, there is no living power in ultimate control of that damned thing.”

  “At one time, there must have been.”

  “You mean that living beings designed and built it. Well, maybe. We ourselves in the past have sent out machines on remote surveys. Hardware capable of self-replication, even of improving its own design.”

  “And no ED society does that any longer, because in some cases, there were very unfortunate results. Also, we never sent out our surrogates with instructions to slaughter everything in sight.”

  “ ‘Unfortunate results,’ yes, sometimes there were, but never anything like this.”

  After a few generations of replication, the robotic explorers had got notably off the track of their basic programming. This defection was the result of previously unknown laws, affecting the inheritance of complexity, coming into play. Most of the research projects had ground to a halt after two or three generations of self-replicating machines.

  Another of the thinkers was only waiting for a chance to speak. “There’s a philosophical difficulty here. Machines, by themselves, just don’t set out to make war.”

  “You mean none of us have ever seen them do so, until now.”

  In the long quest for artificial intelligence by ED scientists and engineers, there had been continuing efforts to establish some version of the ancient Three Laws of Robotics, ways of installing the firm commandment that a robot must be obedient to human orders but must never allow a human being to come to harm, let alone inflict such harm deliberately.

  It was plain the famous Three Laws had been formulated well before true robots were designed and built. From the beginning, the implementation of the seemingly simple rules had been uncertain. The fundamental difficulty lay in finding good, machine-friendly definitions of simple ideas like “human being” and “come to harm.”

  The discussion came back to the kind of robots that people knew about. “Well, and why should they want to make war? I say people fight each other because they’re angry. Ever see a resentful robot?”

  Admiral Radigast, drifting in weary and half-drugged relaxation (the fleet’s flight surgeon had sternly ordered him to get some kind of rest), said, with a sigh that sounded as if it were dredged up from some different life: “Seem to remember being in a motherless pub by that name once. ‘The Sign of the Resentful Robot.’ But that’s all.”

  Gregor had been thinking in silence for a time, and he was ready to speak at length: “Machines, however intelligent, never see themselves as being unjustly treated. Nor do they ever need to feel superior, in fact I’ve never seen a robot show feelings of any kind, not counting programmed mimicry.

  “You want to turn one permanently off, go right ahead, it won’t mind. You want to break it into scrap? It has no objection. No craving to follow some glorious leader, or to be a glorious leader with a following.

  “The lust for glory leaves them cold. We build into most of our models a solid bias toward self-preservation, but a really strong order will override that every time. And to a robot, revenge is just as meaningless as resentment. Tell it to remember and it remembers, marvelously. Tell it to forget, and it forgets.

  “A robot devotes its time and effort to serving us, its builders, homo sapiens, or whatever, maybe Carmpan, because that’s what it’s designed to do. But it doesn’t want to make us happy. The distinction is a fine one, but I think it is important. Our hardware may be shrewd enough to perceive that we are miserable, and have some idea of what can follow from that state of mind in humans. But it doesn’t consider itself a failure if we are. It doesn’t suffer in sympathy, no matter how smart it is. There’s no emotion in the software either. It just doesn’t give a damn.

  “To the best of their vision and ability, which are considerable, our robots try to keep from hurting anyone or anything that lives. Generally they succeed, avoiding accidents better than people do. They have prevented an impressive number of suicides, in a variety of situations, using force when necessary, and even inflicting injury in that cause.

  “But inevitably there are accidents. most often through failing to identify physical objects as alive. If a robot accidentally kills a dog, which is rare, or a person, which is extremely rare, or even a hundred people, which may have happened once, the machine has no remorse.

  “They have no gripes and no ambitions, no triumphs or regrets. No likes or dislikes, sheer complexity has been proven insufficien
t to engender hate or love. They feel no fear of being conquered, no reluctance to be subjected to whatever bizarre whims a human being, or a monkey, might have. They’re not afraid of anything, certainly not of pain or death, they’re dead already. No feeling at all. Suffering and joy are mere abstractions.

  “And I tell you, friends and colleagues, this is the kind of device we’re fighting. Our current enemy, wherever it came from, however it was designed and assembled, fits the description absolutely, except that it has been programmed to kill. It is a mere machine, going about its job. There’s no more terror or hate in our berserker than in a falling rock.”

  After what seemed a long time, someone asked: “Why would anyone program a machine to kill?”

  “To get the killing done efficiently.” After a pause he added: “Our own military planners have played with the idea. That, by the way, is a closely guarded secret, and if we still had a government, and laws, I might be tried for treason for revealing it.”

  Someone else was ready to argue. “Our robots don’t do all those things you mentioned, simply because such behavior has never been built into them.” Leaving aside certain rare and controversial experiments with artificial and recorded personalities, and the legal and philosophical difficulties arising from them, that was true enough.

  Another entered the conversation. “You’re right, our machines don’t hate or love, but who can say what motivations, what instructions, some other kind of intelligence might program into a device? And remember, this, berserker may be built on some principle entirely new to us.”

  “This thing that’s killing everything in sight doesn’t seem to be in the least concerned over what, exactly, constitutes a human being. Somehow it distinguishes between life and non-life, well enough for its own purposes, and it’s enough that we’re alive, that fact alone merits our destruction.

  “If that’s not hatred, it’ll do till hatred comes along. I say that no pure computer makes that kind of judgment, determining on its own whether things are good or bad. Opinions would have to be programmed in, by something that’s alive.”