Isaac Asimov's I, Robot: To Preserve

by Mickey Zucker Reichert

  Susan nodded broadly. “I’ve already told you the Second Law. The Third Law merely states, ‘A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.’”

  Another flash lit Pal’s gorgeous eyes. “Which is why, despite Nate’s suggestion to just destroy him, you’re not worried about him doing that to himself.”

  “Right,” Susan said, though she had not seriously considered Nate committing suicide until Pal mentioned it. “At the risk of sounding elitist, I never realized athletic soldier types were . . .” When she started the sentence, Susan had not meant anything offensive, so it surprised her when she had to struggle to find an unobjectionable last word.

  Pal finished for her. “Capable of intellectual thought?”

  That being particularly insulting, Susan had to deny it, though it was not truly far from what she had been thinking. “No! I just meant to say . . .”

  Pal had her cornered. “Yes?”

  Susan dropped the pretense. “I was thinking more about education than intelligence.”

  “MARSOC,” Pal reminded. “For special operations forces, they seek out the best and the brightest.”

  Susan smiled. “In all modesty.”

  Pal also grinned. “I said they seek out. Some of us slip through.” His gaze shifted to Nate, who was a study in inertia. “Do you feel as weird as I do chatting with him standing there?”

  “He can’t see or hear us,” Susan pointed out.

  “Still . . .”

  “I wanted to try something else anyway.” Susan turned her attention to the robot. “Nate, as you were.”

  The transformation was instant, as if a carving of flesh – and clothing-colored marble melted into life in an instant. “Did I do all right?”

  “That depends. What do you remember of our conversation?”

  Nate repeated it back to Susan verbatim, using reasonable facsimiles of the appropriate voices:

  Pal: “Hard day?”

  Susan: “Definitely. Though not the worst I’ve lived through.”

  Pal: “Ditto. Mind if I take off my shoes?”

  Susan: “Please. Make yourself comfortable.”

  Nate: “If you two would like your privacy, feel free to shut me down.”

  Susan: “I have a better idea. I’ve been wanting to try something. You will see and hear nothing and make no movements until I speak your name again.”

  Nate stopped there and looked at the humans. “Is that right?”

  Susan suspected he had reproduced each and every word correctly. “And after that, Nate? This is very important, so I want you to think hard. What did you hear?”

  Nate complied:

  Susan: “Nate, as you were.”

  Nate: “Did I do all right?”

  Susan: “That depends. What do you remember of our conversation?”

  Nate as Pal: “Hard day?”

  Nate as Susan: “Definitely. Though not the worst—”

  “Stop!” Susan interrupted, and Nate complied. “You really didn’t see or hear anything after I told you not to?”

  “I couldn’t,” Nate insisted. “I was given an order. I have no choice but to obey it.”

  Intrigued, Susan continued. “There’s a difference between not hearing something at all and hearing but discarding it.”

  Nate looked at her curiously. She had not asked a question.

  Susan pressed. “Which of those were you doing?”

  “I was doing,” Nate said, carefully enunciating each word, “precisely what I was commanded to do. I heard nothing, saw nothing, and did not move until you spoke my name.”

  Susan glanced at Pal. “So . . . if I now instructed you to remember, to hear and see, everything that happened between the time I told you not to hear, see, or move and the time I told you to become as you were? Could you reconstruct that period?”

  “I could reconstruct it,” Nate said, “but only as a blank. I literally shut down my sensors, as you ordered.”

  Susan studied her feet, still trying to put the whole thing together. “If a human someone told you to become still and shut down your senses, could that explain the missing time between when you were in the storage area collecting tubes for Dr. Goldman and when you found yourself standing over him with the murder weapon?”

  Nate hesitated, head tipped to one side.

  Susan held her breath.

  “No,” Nate finally said.

  It was not the answer Susan expected. “No?” she repeated. “Are you sure?”

  Nate pointed out the obvious. “I would remember him or her telling me not to see, hear, or act. And I would also recall him or her using whatever trigger he or she chose to bring me back to my senses. In your case, speaking my name.”

  Pal arched his back, stretching kinks from his neck and shoulders. “Nate, would you mind shutting yourself down again, in another room? I’d like some real alone time with Susan.”

  “Not a problem,” Nate replied, though he made no move to comply. “I could use a respite, too.” He had not yet been given an actual order. “Shall I go and do that?”

  Susan glanced around her tiny apartment, wishing it were bigger. “Would it be uncomfortable to shut down in the bathroom?” That would not only keep Nate out of their way; it would supply a simple excuse for Layton’s absence should Jake or any of his ilk come visiting. Also, she and Pal could not possibly forget about him there as, sooner or later, they would need to use the facilities themselves.

  “I’ll shut down in the shower stall,” Nate suggested. “That way, if either of you need to use the toilet, you won’t have me towering over you.”

  Even knowing Nate would not hear or see, Susan could understand how his presence might make her or Pal decidedly uncomfortable. With the door to the shower stall closed, they would have some semblance of privacy. “Good idea,” Susan said, supposing Nate needed an actual command. “Go into the shower stall and shut down. Do not hear, see, or move until such time as I . . .” She stopped herself from saying “speak your name.” Likely, she and Pal would talk about the case, and she was not feeling sharp enough to be sure she did not say “Nate.” Instead she finished, “Call out the name ‘Layton.’”

  Nate dutifully headed for the bathroom. “Good night, Susan. Good night, Pal,” he called out over his shoulder. The bathroom door clicked shut behind him.

  Susan yawned. “Don’t let me forget that trigger word.”

  Pal’s dark brows inched upward. “All of six letters? I think I can handle it.” He patted the left side of his chest, the one closer to Susan. “You’re exhausted, but we still need to talk. Why don’t you lay your head here? It’s warm and comfortable.”

  Susan hesitated only a moment before accepting Pal’s invitation. Her cheek nestled into the sinewy crook between his pectoral muscle and his shoulder. The fabric of his shirt, though surely synthetic, felt as soft as natural cotton. The smells of laundry detergent, shampoo, and underarm deodorant mixed with a hint of perspiration that defined him, and she found herself strangely aroused by the odor. She could hear his heart thumping slowly and regularly deep inside his chest, the occasional hiss of air entering and leaving his lungs. She curled up beside him, and he placed his arm around her protectively.

  It was the first time Susan felt truly safe since before Remington’s death. Somehow, nothing could harm her while Pal cocooned her. The dangers of the world, the bombs and snipers, the murderers and deceivers seemed to exist in a distant world, a previous lifetime. She could sleep like this, unmoving and uncaring, through the night. For longer than a year, Susan had encased herself in ice, hidden from the horrors of a world that had exploded around her. Certain she would never love again, that no one would ever love her, that she would never experience the pleasures most people took for granted, she had resorted, as usual, to throwing
herself fully and entirely into her work.

  Pal broke the silence softly, his words a double rumble in Susan’s ears as she heard them through the solidness of his chest and spoken through the air simultaneously. “Susan, if I’m going to protect you, I need to fully understand what’s going on. You’ve told me people are trying to kill you for a code that would deactivate the features preventing robots from harming human beings. I’m assuming that’s the same as the Three Laws you told me about. You said they murdered your parents for the same reason. Who are these people, and just how dangerous are they?”

  Susan sucked in a deep breath full of his scents, closed her eyes, and snuggled deeper. Once she explained, she wondered if she would ever see Pal again, and she wanted to enjoy his closeness for as long as possible. Plain and intelligent women married to their work did not live in fairy-tale worlds with princes. Remington had been a surprise, her once-in-a-lifetime match. Over the past year, she had come to the realization that utopian concepts, such as passion and romance, were not for people like Susan Calvin. She held Pal’s mingled aromas in her lungs as long as she could before exhaling and explaining.

  “There’s an organization called the Society for Humanity, the SFH, that hates robots and is dedicated to their destruction. They’re the ones who murdered my parents. What I didn’t tell you was that, unbeknownst to the SFH, my father managed to survive. He and I were given new identities, and no one bothered us for longer than twenty years.”

  Susan did not get into the replacement of her father with a positronic robot. It would force her to explain a lot more details than necessary, and she preferred as few people as possible knew. Jake had alluded to it when he had spoken with her in the hallway of her building, and she had later discovered Pal had listened to their conversation through the door. However, either Pal had not made sense of the comment or he chose to ignore it for the moment. “Two years ago, Goldman and Peters were working on a research project using nanorobots in the treatment of refractory psychiatric diseases. Knowing my father worked for USR, they enlisted my help. The SFH deliberately turned the subjects of their experiment into human bombs.”

  Susan squeezed her eyes even more tightly closed, distracting herself from the details. She had relived the explosions too many times, had suffered flashbacks until she had finally managed to control the memories. “That’s how I came to the attention of the SFH. Through me, they discovered my father was still alive. They murdered him and attempted to kill me, too. This time, mostly with snipers.” Susan finally raised her lids and looked at Pal. She could no longer hide from his reaction.

  Pal was looking back at her, more than simple concern in his eyes. His left arm tightened around her, and the right came around to rest casually on her curled-up knee. His touch sent a shiver through Susan. “That’s terrible. How did you survive?”

  Susan answered with a single word, “Jake.” She did not mention her own significant contributions to keeping all of them alive. Kendall, Jake, and Pal had spent enough time lauding her brilliance.

  Pal held Susan for several moments in silence. Absently, his left hand stroked her hair. Her scalp and knee felt on fire from his touch, and that burning seemed to spread through her, especially to her most intimate places. She could never remember feeling this way before, not even with Remington, and she wondered if her notably awkward session of lovemaking with Kendall had awakened something she had not previously known existed. It was a primal desire, carnal and physical, that had little or nothing to do with emotion. Good God, Susan. It’s lust. She knew about the sensation intellectually but had never personally experienced it before that moment. It made her feel embarrassed, vulnerable, and excited all at once.

  Clearly, Pal was not in the same place as Susan. His grip loosened suddenly. “What does that have to do with G-men?”

  Susan’s mind had gone off in a wholly different direction, so it took her a moment to process Pal’s words. “What?”

  “Kendall said G-men blew Jake’s brains out. You corrected the ‘blowing brains out’ part, but you didn’t argue with G-men. Are you suggesting the SFH is a branch of the United States government?”

  “Definitely not.” Susan dragged herself back to her story. “That’s a whole separate thing.” She amended, “Well, a somewhat related thing, actually. It goes back to the belief that my family has a secret code that can uncouple the positronic brain from the Three Laws of Robotics. But where the SFH wants me dead, a special team from the Department of Defense wants the code itself so they can weaponize positronic robots.”

  Pal’s hand disappeared from Susan’s knee, to her disappointment, but his fingers continued to rake slowly and rhythmically through her hair. “So . . . I’m protecting you from a civilian organization hell-bent on murdering you and from our own DoD?”

  Susan buried her face in his chest, muffling her reply. “I’m afraid so.” She could not bear to look at him.

  Silence reigned for several moments, then Pal said softly, “Wouldn’t it be better to cooperate with the DoD? I mean, it’s our government, for Christ’s sake. Flawed as it is, you have to admit it’s kept us alive and free this long. We have an amazing military, if I do say so myself.”

  Reluctantly, Susan raised her head. “You’re right, Pal. Except for two enormous problems.”

  Pal looked expectantly at Susan.

  “First, there’re the robotics issues. If you remove the Three Laws, you destroy any possibility that mankind will trust robots enough to work with and around them. That’s exactly what the SFH has been trying to do, when it’s not attacking me and my family. They want it to appear to the world as if the Three Laws don’t exist or are ineffective.”

  “Surely USR could make some arrangement with the Department of Defense so that only certain robots have the Three Laws deactivated. Those robots would work for the DoD and remain a secret from the general populace.”

  Susan shook her head. “Until they got loose, which is inevitable. If they don’t have anything to constrain them from murder, to force them to obey humans or even to protect themselves from harm, what’s to keep them within the control of the DoD?”

  “Surely that could be—”

  Susan did not allow him to finish. She had given this more than enough thought and discussion. “It can’t, believe me. They’re faster, smarter, and stronger than us. Controlling them would be like harnessing hordes of superintelligent lions. They might obey for a while, so long as it suits them, but eventually they’re going to realize that if they can tear an enemy to pieces, they can do the same to the people controlling them. There’s nothing you can offer them worth more than freedom, and my fear is that they’d use their superior power to rule the entire world.”

  Pal gave the words appropriate consideration before arguing again. “Maybe a rewording of the Laws might work to everyone’s advantage.”

  Susan let her head slump back to Pal’s chest. She found the body heat, the consistent thump of his heart, remarkably soothing. “Which brings me to the second and probably more significant problem, one I’ve already mentioned: The code does not exist.”

  “The uncoupling code?”

  “Correct.”

  Pal sat up, nearly dumping Susan. “So, a murderous group of civilians and the government of the United States are terrifying and killing people for . . . nothing?”

  Pal had summed it up perfectly. “Exactly,” Susan said.

  “But there has to be . . . someone has to . . . to . . . code the positronic brain to accept the Three Laws in the first place.” Pal added carefully, “Right? So, presumably, they could also remove them.”

  Susan could only go on what Lawrence and her father had told her. “My parents created the Three Laws. The wording is as perfect and precise as the mathematical formulas that tie them inexorably to the positronic brain. It’s impossible to build a positronic brain without their programming embedded in it. Any at
tempt to remove it would make the brain, and thus the robot, entirely unusable.”

  Pal added, “Unless you knew the exact right sequence, an uncoupling code that only the people who made up the Three Laws and programmed them into the positronic brain could possibly know.”

  Susan shook her head and said emphatically, “If there ever was an uncoupling code, it died with my parents. They told no one, not Lawrence, not Albert, not me. In the last words my father ever wrote, he insisted the uncoupling code did not and never could exist. I believe him.”

  Pal settled back into the love seat and held out an arm to beckon Susan back into position.

  Gladly, Susan complied, comfortably cradled between his chest and left arm.

  She felt certain Pal mulled details she had already considered repeatedly over the past year. The code could encompass anything: letters, numbers, symbols, pictograms in any language, living, invented, or dead. It could be of varying lengths. The possibilities approached infinity. A person tasked with finding it randomly could consider a combination a second for millennia and still not rule out a tiny fraction of the prospects. All of the computing power of all the existing positronic brains could not locate it within any number of conceivable human lifetimes. There was only one hope for finding it: the writings of Calvin and Amanda Campbell, now longer than twenty years dead. “Susan,” Pal said slowly, “let us assume that such a code exists, if only because so many people are so convinced it does that they are willing to torture or kill you over it.”

  “All right,” Susan said, wondering where Pal was going.

  Even Pal did not seem to know. He paused a long time before speaking slowly. “Surely, it’s recorded somewhere. A video, a snapshot, some writings . . .”

  “Maybe,” Susan allowed. “But after they murdered my parents, the SFH set fire to most of their papers and pictures.”

  Pal made a sympathetic noise. “Except, your father survived. For twenty-some years, you said. He could have re-created whatever got destroyed.”