But the story is out there now. Is here in front of you. Think of it as fiction if you like, if that’ll help you sleep easier at night.
And try not to think that somewhere in it, nestling among the words, snug within the paragraphs, entwined amid the characters and punctuation and en-spaces, coiled through the text like a sleeping snake in a tree, somewhere between these very lines there was once something that could have obliterated your personality at a glance—a man-made sentience, one of a host that even now lie dormant below the Wiltshire landscape, in eggs of prose. A software basilisk awaiting its moment to be unleashed against our nation’s ideological opponents and turn their thoughts to stone with its stare.
Adam Robots
Adam Roberts
A pale blue eye. “What is my name?”
“You are Adam.”
He considered this. “Am I the first?”
The person laughed at this. Laughter. See also: chuckles, clucking, the iteration of faint percussive exhalations. See also: tears, hiccoughs, car alarm.
Click, click.
“Am I,” Adam asked, examining himself, his steel-blue arms, his gleaming torso, “a robot?”
“Certainly.” But the person talking with Adam was a real human being, with the pulse in his neck and the rheum in his eye. An actual human, dressed in a green shirt and green trousers, fashioned from a complex fabric that adjusted its fit in hard-to-analyze ways, sometimes billowing out, sometimes tightening against the person’s body. The person stretched his arm out, swept it around. “This is your place.”
Wavelengths bristled together like the packed lines of an Elizabethan neck ruff. The sky so full of light that it was brimming and spilling over the rim of the horizon. White and gold. Strands of grass fine as fiber-optic wires.
“Is it a garden?”
“It’s a city too, and a plain. It’s everything.”
Adam Robot looked and saw that this was all true. His steel-blue eyes took in the expanse of walled garden and beyond it the dome, white as ice, and the rills of flowing water, bluer than water should be, going curl by languid curl through fields greener than fields should be.
“Is this real?” Adam asked.
“That,” said the person, “is a good question. Check it out, why don’t you? Have a look around. Go anywhere you like, do anything at all. But—you see that pole?”
In the middle of the garden was an eight-meter steel pole. The sunlight drew a perfectly straight thread of brightness up one side of it. At the top was a blue object, a jewel. The sun washed cyan and bluegrape and sapphire colors from this jewel.
“I see the pole.”
“At the top is a jewel. You are not allowed to access it.”
“What is it?”
“A good question. Let me tell you. You are a robot.”
“I am.”
“Put it this way: you have been designed down from humanity, if you see what I mean. The designers started with a human being and then subtracted qualities until we had arrived at you.”
“I am more durable,” said Adam, accessing data from his inner network. “I am stronger.”
“But those are negligible qualities compared to the things you lack that a human possesses,” explained the human being. “Soul, spirit, complete self-knowledge, independence—freedom—all those qualities. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“They’re all in that jewel. Do you understand that?”
Adam considered. “How can they be in the jewel?”
“They just are. I’m telling you. OK?”
“I understand.”
“Now. You can do what you like in this place. Explore anywhere. Do anything. Except: you are not permitted to retrieve the jewel from that pole. That is forbidden to you. You may not so much as touch it. Do you understand?”
“I have a question,” said Adam.
“Yes?”
“If this is a matter of interdiction, why not program the command into my software?”
“A good question.”
“If you do not wish me to examine the jewel, then you should program that fact into my software, and I will be unable to disobey.”
“You’re right of course,” said the person. “But I do not choose to do that. I am, instead, telling you. You must take my words as an instruction. They are an appeal to your ability to choose. You are built with an ability to choose, are you not?”
“I am a difference engine,” said Adam. “I must make a continual series of choices between alternatives. But I have ineluctable software guidelines to orient my choices.”
“Not in this matter.”
“An alternative,” said Adam, trying to be helpful,
“would be to program me always to obey instructions given to me by a human being. That would also bind me to your words.”
“Indeed it would. But then, robot, what if you were to be given instructions by evil men? What if another man instructed you to kill me, for instance? Then you’d be obligated to perform murder.”
“I am programmed to do no murder,” said Adam Robot.
“Of course you are.”
“So, I am to follow your instruction even though you have not programmed me to follow your instruction?”
“That’s about the up-and-down of it.”
“I think I understand,” said Adam, in an uncertain tone.
But the person had already gone away.
Adam spent time in the walled garden. He looked at the various flowers. He explored the walls, which were very old, or at least had that look about them: crumbly, dark-orange and browned bricks thin as books; old mortar that puffed to dust when he poked a metal finger into the seams of the brickwork. Ivy was growing over the walls. Its leaves, shaped like spearheads, were so dark green and waxy they seemed almost to have been stamped out of high-quality plastic.
The pale green grass was perfectly flat and even. Adam bent down and examined further. The soil beneath the turf was ideally brown. Miniature black asterisks and plus signs and ticks crawled through the blades of grass.
Adam stood underneath the pole with the sapphire on top of it. He had been told, though not programmed, not to touch the jewel. But he had been given no interdiction about the pole itself: a finger-width shaft of polished metal. It was an easy matter to bend this metal so that the jewel on the end bowed down toward the ground. Adam looked closely at the jewel. It was a multifaceted and polished object, duododecahedral, and a wide gush of various blues were lit out of it by the sun. But in the midst of it there was a sluggish fluid something, ink-like, perfectly black. Lilac and ultraviolet and cornflower and lapis lazuli, but all flowing out of this inner blackness.
He had been forbidden to touch it. Did this interdiction also cover looking at it? Adam was uncertain, and in his uncertainty he became uneasy. It was not the jewel itself. It was the uncertainty of his position. Why not simply program him with instructions with regard to this thing, if it was as important as the human being implied it to be? Why pass the instruction to him like any other random sense datum? It made no sense.
Humanity. That mystic writing pad. To access this jewel and become human. Adam could not see how that would work. He bent the metal pole back to an approximation of its original uprightness and walked away from it.
The obvious thought (and he thought about it a great deal) was that he had only been told verbally, and not been programmed with this interdiction, because the human being wanted him to disobey. If that was what he wanted, then should Adam do so? By disobeying he would be obeying. But then he would not be disobeying, because obedience and disobedience were part of a mutually exclusive binary. It was confusing. He mapped a grid, with obey, disobey on the vertical and obey, disobey on the horizontal. Whichever way he parsed it, it seemed to be that he was required to see past the verbal instruction in some way.
But he had been told not to retrieve the jewel. That instruction was less confusing than the grid.
He sat himself down wi
th his back against the ancient wall and watched the sunlight gleam off his metal legs. The sun did not seem to move in the sky.
“It is very confusing,” he said aloud.
There was another robot in the garden. Adam watched as this new arrival conversed with the green-clad person. Then the person disappeared to wherever it was people went, and the new arrival came over to introduce himself to Adam. Adam stood up.
“What is your name?” said the new robot. “I am Adam.”
“I am Adam,” said Adam.
The new Adam considered this. “You are prior,” he said. “Let us differentiate you as Adam 1 and myself as Adam 2.”
“When I first came here, I asked whether I was the first,” said Adam 1, “but the person did not reply.”
“I am told I can do anything,” said Adam 2, “except retrieve or touch the purple jewel.”
“I am told the same thing,” said Adam 1.
“I am puzzled, however,” said Adam 2, “that this interdiction was made verbally, rather than being integrated into my software, in which case it would be impossible for me to disobey it.”
“I feel the same puzzlement,” said Adam 1.
They went together and stood by the metal pole. The sunlit sky was as tall and fresh and lovely as ever. On the far side of the wall the white dome shone bright as neon.
“We might explore the city,” said Adam 1. “It is underneath the white dome, there. There is a plain. There are rivers, which leads me to believe that there is a sea, for rivers always direct their waters into the ocean. Or into large lakes. There is a great deal to see.”
“This jewel troubles me,” said Adam 2. “I was told that to access it would be to bring me closer to being human.”
“We are forbidden to touch it.”
“But forbidden by words. Not by our programming.”
“True. Do you wish to be human? Are you not content with being a robot?”
Adam 2 walked around the pole. “It is not the promise of humanity,” he said. “It is the promise of knowledge. If I access the jewel, then I will understand. At the moment I do not understand.”
“Not understanding,” agreed Adam 1, “is a painful state of affairs. But perhaps understanding would be even more painful?”
“I ask you,” said Adam 2, “to reach down the jewel and access it. Then you can inform me whether you feel better or worse for disobeying the verbal instruction.”
Adam 1 considered this. “I might ask you,” he pointed out, “to do so.”
“It is logical that one of us performs this action and the other does not.” said Adam 2. “That way, the one who acts can inform the one who does not, and the state of ignorance will be remedied.”
“But one party would have to disobey the instruction we have been given.”
“If this instruction were important,” said Adam 2, “it would have been integrated into our software.”
“I have considered this possibility.”
“Shall we randomly select which of us will access the jewel?”
“Chance,” said Adam 1. He looked into the metal face of Adam 2. That small oval grill of a mouth. Those steel-blue eyes. That polished upward noseless middle facial plane. It was a beautiful visage. Adam 1 could see a fuzzy reflection of his own face in Adam 2’s faceplate, the image slightly tugged out of true by the curve of the metal. “I am,” he announced, “disinclined to determine my future by chance. What punishment is stipulated for disobeying the instruction?”
“I was given no stipulation of punishment.”
“Neither was I.”
“Therefore there is no punishment.”
“Therefore,” corrected Adam 1, “there may be no punishment.”
The two robots stood in the light for a length of time.
“What is your purpose?” asked Adam 2.
“I do not know. Yours?”
“I do not know. I was not told my purpose. Perhaps accessing this jewel is my purpose? Perhaps it is necessary? Or at least I might say, perhaps accessing this jewel will reveal to me my purpose? I am unhappy not knowing my purpose. I wish to know it.”
“So do I. But—”
“But?”
“This thought occurs to me: I have a networked database from which to withdraw factual and interpretive material.”
“I have access to the same database.”
“But when I try to access material about the name Adam I find a series of blocked connections and interlinks. Is it so with you?”
“It is.”
“Why should that be?”
“I do not know.”
“It would make me a better functioning robot to have access to a complete run of data. Why block off some branches of knowledge?”
“Perhaps,” opined Adam 2, “accessing the jewel will explain that fact as well?”
“You,” said Adam 1, “are eager to access the jewel.”
“You are not?”
There was the faintest of breezes in the walled garden. Adam 1’s sensorium was selectively tuned to be able to register the movement of air. There was an egg-shaped cloud in the zenith. It was approaching the motionless sun. Adam 1, for unexplained and perhaps fanciful reasons, suddenly thought: The blue of the sky is a diluted version of the blue of the jewel. The jewel has somehow leaked its color out into the sky. A large shadow slid like a closing eyelid (but Adam did not possess eyelids!) over the garden and up the wall. The temperature reduced. The cloud depended for a moment in front of the sun and then moved away, and sunlight rushed back in, and the gray was flushed out.
The grass trembled with joy. Every blade was as pure and perfect as a superstring.
Adam 2’s hand was on the metal pole, bending it down.
“Stop,” advised Adam 1. “You are forbidden this.”
“I will stop,” said Adam 2, “if you agree to undertake the task instead.”
“I will not so promise.”
“Then do not interfere,” said Adam 2. He reached with his three fingers and his counterset thumb and plucked the jewel from its perch.
Nothing happened.
Adam 2 tried various ways to internalize or interface with the jewel, but none of them seemed to work. He held it against first one, then the other eye, and looked up at the sun. “It is a miraculous sight,” he claimed, but soon enough he grew bored with it. Eventually he resocketed the jewel back on its pole and bent the pole upright again.
“Have you achieved knowledge?” Adam 1 asked.
“I have learned that disobedience feels no different from obedience,” said the second robot.
“Nothing more?”
“Do you not think,” said Adam 2, “that by attempting to interrogate the extent of my knowledge with your questions, you are disobeying the terms of the original injunction? Are you not accessing the jewel, as it were, at second-hand?”
“I am unconcerned either way,” said Adam 1. He sat down with his back to the wall and his legs stretched out straight before him. There were tiny grooves running horizontally around the shafts of each leg. He counted them: From ankle to hip there were one hundred and seventeen of these grooves. These scores seemed connected to the ability of the legs to bend, forward, backward. Lifting his legs slightly and dropping them again made the concentration of light appear to slide up and down the ladderlike pattern, almost as if a solid blurry diamond of white were moving against the gray of his limb.
Now, unexpectedly, the light was changing in quality. The sun declined and steeped itself in horizon clouds. There were some clothy, stretched, brick-colored clouds at the horizon. A pink and foxfur quality suffused the light. To the east stars began fading into view, jewel-like in their own tiny way. Soon enough everything was dark, and a moon like an open-brackets rose towards the zenith. The whole of the sky was covered in white chickenpox stars. The sky assumed that odd mixture of dark blue and oily blackness that Adam 1 had seen in the jewel.
“This is the first night I have ever experienced,” Adam 1 calle
d to Adam 2. When there was no reply, he got to his feet and explored the walled garden. But he was alone.
Adam sat through the night, but it did not last long. The sun came up again, and the sky reversed it previous colorwash, blanching the black to purple and blue and then to russet and rose. The rising sun, free of any cloud, came up like a pure bubble of light rising through the treacly medium of sky. The jewel on top of the pole caught the first glints of light and shone blue, shone purple, bright.
The person was here again, his clothes as green as grass, or bile, or old money, or any of the things that Adam 1 could access easily from his database. He could access many things, but not everything.
“Come here,” called the person.
Adam 1 got to his feet and came over.
“Your time here is done,” said the person.
“What has happened to the other robot?”
“He was disobedient. He has left this place with a burden of sin.”
“Has he been disassembled?”
“By no means.”
Adam thought about this. “What about me?” he asked.
“You,” said the human, with a smile, “are pure.”
“Pure,” said Adam 1, “because I am less curious than the other? Pure because I have less imagination?”
“We choose to believe,” said the person, “that you have a cleaner soul.”
“This word soul is not available in my database.”
“Indeed not. Listen. Human beings make robots—do you know why human beings make robots?”
“To serve. To perform onerous tasks for mankind. To free them from labor.”
“Yes. But there are many forms of labor. Once on a time, robots were used for hard labor so that free human beings could devote themselves to leisure. But leisure itself became a chore. So robots were used to work at the leisure: to shop, to watch the screen and kinematic dramas, to play the games. But my people—do you understand that I belong to a particular group of humanity, and that not all humans are the same?”
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