by Larry Niven
They created the Earth and then buried the robot with instructions to wait, then emerge when a civilization had risen, make its way to their leaders, and hand them a bill. An invoice for the creation of the world.
Ethical? Don’t make me need an antacid. These beings are slime. If you could, you would sue them. But for one, your lawyer would be aeons dead by the time the subpoena got halfway to their galaxy. So forget it.
But the robot—it’s been down there all this time, through the volcanoes and the dinosaurs and the asteroid strikes and the cavemen and the battle of Trafalgar and the entire Oprah Winfrey show, and the whole time it has been thinking about nothing but string.
It was designed to be flawless, near-godlike in its immortality and power, which we’ll get into more later. But one of the machines that initialized its psyche got distracted for a moment, thinking about something that would destroy your mind if you could even partially comprehend it but was, relativistically speaking, basically porn. And in that moment—really a billionth of a second—a relay that should have been in one position wound up in six others, and the robot was left thinking about string.
For four and a half billion years. Picture that. Never mind, you can’t. You can’t even do an iguana correctly.
It has thought every thought that it’s possible to think about string. And then some. It’s felt every emotion. Deeper than any human has ever felt anything. If any one person on Earth could ever feel even one tenth of the feelings it had harbored toward eighth-inch gauge tan twine alone, it would split their mind like an atom. The resulting psychotic episode would have its own mushroom cloud.
Needless to say, the robot’s mind cracked. But thanks to its unique, all-encompassing intellect, it cracked like a masterfully cut diamond.
For example:
It stood now in the desert, looking out at the hard blue hemispherical gradient of sky, and it saw all the colors with electron-microscope precision, including billions of shades the human eye can’t perceive—colors bees see, colors radio telescopes see, colors beings a billion light years away see—everything, but not all at once. Instead, it flitted through wavelengths like a shimmering aurora billowing across the stratosphere, cascading from angstrom to angstrom, viewing the world through a million different filters in the snap of a synapse. Like an old style flap-changing train station departure board with a universe of beauty on every new card.
It also saw equations and curves and angles everywhere. It could see the chemistry in the rocks, the advanced calculus in the shape of the cacti, read the genome in the skink, in the bacteria in the dirt. It saw the quantum physics in the ray/particles of sunlight, and other forms of math and science far beyond human understanding, in processes we have yet to glimpse the first hints of, all around it, shimmering like a forest of infinite informational gems. If knowledge is power, this thing was a nova.
It saw all of the possible meanings and metaphors. Deserts as death. As teeming life hidden in apparent emptiness. As the absence of water. As rebirth. As hell. As New Yorker cartoons. It saw every possibility of human interpretation, and also it saw through the eye and the mind of every living organism that has ever or will ever exist on any world or universe, and beyond that, borrowing perspectives from impossible beings that can never exist, that it extrapolated from nothing. It saw everything, from every angle possible, and from many that weren’t. To say that nothing escaped it would be an understatement so large it’d make the dictionary people feel like they missed an opportunity.
It saw each of the molecules, and their atoms, and the sub-parts of atoms, and even smaller things we don’t have concepts for yet, and all the reactions inside them and the myriad forces that held and repelled them. Its vision and the processing power behind it were just that good.
And that’s just its sight. Similarly advanced were its touch, hearing, smell, taste, and a thousand other senses used by no creature on Earth. And its capacity to experience beauty was so much larger than a human’s it would make an astronomer want desperately to explain it on a whiteboard in an internet video. It took everything in, and after four billion years spent thinking about nothing but string, the beauty of it all was enough nearly to split it to quarks.
Yet it held.
The skink still hadn’t answered its question. Built Ford tough? Forget it. This thing would have supported one hell of a warranty.
All of which is to say, for an impervious, perfect, near-godlike, near-omniscient robot, it was patently insane.
Had it been functioning properly, it would probably have followed its orders. Made its way to Washington or Beijing, and presented the invoice for the creation of the Earth, and sat back and relied on its mission programming, which basically ordered it to wait thirty days, deliver a past-due notice, wait thirty more, present a final notice, wait another thirty, and then annihilate the planet.
It could do that. Easily. It had the ability to unite magnetism, gravity, both the weak and strong nuclear forces, and the power of the Home Depot into one colossal thrum that would erase most of the solar system, not just from the present and future, but from all time. A sort of retroactive screw you. Would it feel guilty? A little. But the way it saw things, if you’re too lazy to pay off your bills, then you deal with the consequence.
But it was not functioning properly. Right now, beset by beauty almost beyond the capacity for the universe to contain, it had decided to present the bill for all creation not to any world leader, but to a guy named Ernie Nuttalberg in Port Malabar, Florida, give him six days, treat him to a few harassing phone calls, and then blow everything up.
It figured that was fair.
“Some help you turned out to be,” it told the skink, and it walked off in the general direction of McCarran International Airport.
2. JERRY
Why do people say someone is as pleased as punch? Would you be happy sitting in a bowl while people ladled you out and drank you and dropped bits of corn chips and ham salad in you off napkins, while they made small talk about their careers and the new baby and remodeling their kitchen and the dog’s case of roundworms? If so, you are a rare individual or need medication or both. Likewise happy as a clam. Cut off one of your feet and sit in bottom mud, blind, eating sunken carrion for six weeks and get back to me. Let’s say, then, joyful as someone with no problems, plenty of sensate delights, intellectual engagement, at least acceptably good health, and lots more of the same to look forward to. Gets tangled up trying to roll off the tongue, doesn’t it? No wonder we resort to inanities.
This was Jerry. I say “was” because here comes the robot. But we have a few yet. So let’s take a look.
He’s sitting on a comfy, cushioned seat at his gate, reading a book. It’s a fun mystery, with lots of good humor. Comfortable. Like a friend who never confronts you about your choice in romantic partners or makes fun of your shorts. He’s also eating a cheeseburger and reveling in the sounds of the people. A little girl is asking her mommy about Florida and Disney World, rocking back and forth unselfconsciously with her hands on mommy’s knees. Mommy’s overjoyed, and some of it spills into Jerry. He can feel it. He’s smiling.
He’s almost fifty, with receding hair, longish, a mustache halfway between a Magnum P.I. and a walrus, heavyset, with happy, tired eyes and faded blue jeans and a big silver belt buckle. His tee shirt, which he got from the SkyMall, says, “I went to a pet psychic but it peed on my leg.”
He takes a big bite of the burger. The meat, mustard, ketchup, yellow cheese, and tomato, unhealthy though they are, hit his taste buds like something from DARPA.
He loves, loves, absolutely loves to fly. He even loves airports. When he first realized it he thought about seeing a specialist. He loves the nearby hotels, with their complimentary breakfasts and personal waffle makers, fitness rooms, cable TVs, comfy beds. Loves the shuttle vehicles. Walking through automatic glass doors. Loves people-watching, interacting with clerks, browsing the shops, the throng and the mill of humanity on its way so
mewhere exciting—vacations and business and life events—real human emotion multiplied by the thousands. Excitement after all is contagious, and Jerry is, metaphorically speaking, touching the hand rails and rubbing his eyes.
Takeoff’s his favorite, when the combined engineering brilliance of generations comes to a point and a roar, throwing him back in his seat and then up in the sky. The thrill and the flight, the sky toilets and landings—he loves it all. To him it’s a free amusement park, minus the giant, slightly frightening, anthropomorphized cartoon animals. Unless you count the possibility of running into Alec Baldwin in the food court.
It’s free because six years ago, coming home from a wedding in Texas, he volunteered to get bumped. In return, the airline gave him an extra ticket to anywhere in the Continental U.S., plus vouchers for food and hotel. Then the next day he did it again. When you’ve nowhere to be, it’s fun to relax. As long as you’re at least 200 miles from Detroit.
He took three more bumps in three days, flew to Los Angeles, and got bumped six more times, amassing more flights and hotels. He quit his job over the phone, and he’s been doing it since. A perpetual air traveler. Like the Flying Dutchman with an inflatable neck pillow. He hasn’t paid for a flight, meal or hotel since he started. He always picks vacation destinations in peak season—in the spring it’s jostling for the armrest on the way to Florida and California, in the summer, lost luggage en route to New England and Oregon, in the winter, the sneezes and wet coughs of snowbirds heading to ski towns. This increases the odds of an overbooked plane, and thus, of a new bump. He never skis or goes to the beach or the lakes. He would if he ever got bored, but he doesn’t. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Routine maintenance, however, is necessary.
The airlines have tightened up recently, but he’s got enough freebies now to last for the rest of his life.
He finishes his burger and wipes his fingers on a napkin, gets up, goes to a trash can, and throws in the wrapper. He stretches, feeling the warm sun coming through the tall windows, taking in the view of the big planes outside. One of them will take him to Florida soon.
However.
When he returns to his seat, a robot is in it.
3. JERRY AND THE ROBOT
At first Jerry thought it was a man in a costume, maybe doing a viral video for Doritos or HostGator. But the robot disabused him by projecting belief and understanding into his head of what it was, where it had come from, why it was here, where it was going, and what it meant to do. Jerry sat next to it, the wind taken out of him.
“My God, we’ll all die,” he said hoarsely.
Nobody heard him. This was because the robot sent out matching sound waves with opposing phase-timings to collide in their ears at just the same moment, canceling his voice. It tinkered likewise with their optic nerves to make them think it wasn’t a robot at all, but a fortyish man in a suit with a bad Caesar cut. When it first got to the airport, it had let everyone see it as is, but so many parents had asked it to pose with their kids it took 35 minutes to get past the main entrance. But it decided to show itself to Jerry, as a kind of self-sustaining conversation piece.
“Don’t worry,” it said. “Maybe Nuttalberg will pay up.”
Jerry’s eyes focused on something about three miles in the distance.
“But the bill is the entire GDP of the solar system for the next million years,” he said.
“True,” said the robot, nodding at the woman with the daughter across from them. “But what did you expect, something for nothing?”
“Well, no,” Jerry said. “But my God.”
“And anyway, after, your world will be debt-free. You can do whatever you want. What a party I imagine you’ll have. I can’t wait to try the hors d’oeuvres. I’m speaking figuratively, of course. I’ve created a poem for the occasion: ‘When you breathe, I want to be the air for you / As long as I don’t then have to pass through your pulmonary alveoli / Have my oxygen bound to the iron in your red blood cells and consumed by your body’s oxidative processes / My wastes excreted through your kidneys / To travel through corroded pipes to the sewage treatment plant amidst the other unpleasantness / I mean I have strong romantic feelings, yes / But let’s be realistic / I’m not into anything gross.’ Do you think I should rhyme it? You can’t believe I’m single, can you Jerry? Let’s face it. Some women are terrified by honesty.”
“But that’s—you can’t do that,” said Jerry.
“Recite poetry?”
“No. Kill everyone.”
“No, I can,” said the robot, and it showed him, by way of a gorgeous induced hallucination, how it could connect all the forces to wipe out the solar system.
“No, I believe you,” said Jerry, “but it’s immoral.”
“Morals,” said the robot, “are defined by the system in which they exist. Immorality’s the new morality. Though also, saying something is the new something is the new saying something is so ’90s. I looked it up on your Internet.”
“But you’re damaged,” said Jerry. “You’re supposed to go to the world leaders.”
“Again, frame of reference. From my infinite perspective, it’s the universe that’s damaged, and I’m putting it right.”
Nobody’s the bad guy in their own story after all. Jerry had read about cultural relativism in a few in-flight magazines, but he thought this was spreading it thin.
“But think of all the lives,” he said.
“I have,” said the robot. “I’ve examined them all to a sub-sub-sub-sub-atomic level. I’m rounding. Actually I went deeper than that. This makes the most logical sense. Observe.”
It showed Jerry then, by projecting its rationale into his brain. It had to augment his intelligence to avoid the information overload ripping his frontal cortex apart like neural confetti. For one brief shining moment he was fifty times smarter than Einstein, and he saw plainly how the robot’s choice of action was really best for everyone involved, no matter that it was also insane and beyond genocidal. I could explain, but again, the iguana.
Jerry sat back, mortified, mollified, his soul crushed to a metaphorical pulp. If the wind had been taken out of him before, now someone had stolen the actual sails and deconstructed the ship and made attractive natural wood furniture from it and sold it on the Internet with free shipping. But at the same time he knew what to do. Because when he’d been hyperintelligent, he’d had an idea.
“But you still don’t understand,” he said.
“Nonsense,” said the robot. “You don’t believe that. You’ve seen it.”
“I’ve seen it through you,” he said. “But you’re myopic.”
The robot turned to regard him.
“I could rearrange the physicality of my facial molecules to form a nose so I could use it to snort, but it’s not worth the effort. What are you talking, myopic? My understanding is infinite.”
“So that’s the wrong word,” Jerry said. “Not myopic. Too broad. What’s the word for that?”
“Fathead?”
“Close enough. What I mean is, you see it all at once. You need to narrow your field to really get what I’m saying. Until then you have no leg to stand on, and I win the argument.”
“Manipulative,” said the robot, dismissively. “But I’ll bite, because it’s not hard and I imagine it’ll be so much fun saying I told you so after.”
And the robot did. It inhabited Jerry, one hundred percent, traveling back in time first, to a moment some three days ago while he’d sat in first class on a flight to Virginia, and it shut out everything else.
It had never seen or felt the like of it before. The fidelity was incredible. With all other sense and thought turned off, the interior of a human was all intensity and focus and fine Corinthian leather. It picked up the little plastic cup of Scotch and melting ice from the tray table and felt the smooth, curving cold on its fingertips. It raised it, a sudden bump of turbulence making it almost spill a drop, and cautiously sipped, feeling the cool and the warmth hit its mouth and s
pread stomachwards, the taste like King Midas threw up in an oak tree and then set it on fire. It picked a Zwieback out of the wrapper on the little snack tray and munched it, the absence of all other data making its crunch and sweetness blaze like a comestible sun. It got in a conversation with the fat man next to it about workplace training that brought tears to its eyes.
And suddenly it saw the tragedy of its existence. A near-omniscient and all-powerful, unbalanced robot can never truly compartmentalize the way a human can. To a human, the moment was a singular thing, upright and locked, stowed in the overhead compartment or under the seat bottom in front, so few distractions, 100% of a single, microscopic facet of the world right there for the taking. The feeling was pleasant, to say the least. Like jumping in cool water after a day spent in a blast furnace or a room full of eight-year-olds. Relaxing. The robot wanted more.
So, using powers beyond our ability to comprehend, it rewound itself back to the moment of Jerry’s birth, and it lived his whole life, from his first breath in a hospital in Indiana to his last in a nursing home bed in East Texas. But it didn’t stop there. It then lived the life of every being that had ever or would ever exist in the solar system from beginning to end, including all the penguins and Simon Cowell, experiencing all the joys, sorrows, tragedies, triumphs, all the colds and upset stomachs and awkward dinners and games of pickup and sex and kangaroo births and love and insults and preenings and naps. All the French kisses, deaths, broken arms, triple backflips, moltings, and incarcerations over crimes that it did and/or didn’t commit. And it was gorgeous, beautiful, unaccountably lovely and lonely, and perfect.
And when it had finished, it returned to the seat next to Jerry, at the departure gate for the flight he would board soon for Florida, and it gave him another mental flash to show him what it had done.