Mirage (isaac asimov's robot mystery)

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  What about Bogard? he wondered. He could not find that particular robot here. Perhaps it had already been removed from the gallery. It was not really his anymore-it had been signed over to Special Service for active duty-but Bogard remained Derec's creation and he could not help but worry about it.

  Derec looked away. The outer walls of the gallery bore tall, blackened streaks from the explosions. On the subetheric broadcast, the blasts had seemed great enough to gouge holes, but all that showed were the stains.

  Derec's right foot slid sharply and he pinwheeled his arms to keep balance. He looked down. On the floor was a bright red smear leading from a puddle of blood. His stomach lurched sickeningly.

  The drone led him up onto the platform and toward a small woman who stood in the midst of a cluster of people, talking rapidly and stabbing the air with her index and middle fingers.

  "Supervisor Mil Jeffries, sir," the drone said, loudly enough to attract her attention. The woman glanced his way, frowning, then nodded and held up her hand to indicate that he wait.

  Task completed, the unit moved away. Derec waited at the edge of the cluster and listened while Jeffries issued instructions. One by one and in pairs the people left to carry out their assigned tasks until only Derec remained. She looked at him, one eyebrow cocked dubiously.

  "And?"

  "I'm Derec Avery, from the Phylaxis Group."

  "Those your people out there herding the braindeads away?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. About time. I only have two people on staff who know anything about traumatized tinheads, and right now they're busy with the RI… which is where I need you, if that's what you're wondering."

  "The Resident Intelligence…?"

  "Resident Idiot, you mean." She snorted derisively, then gestured for him to follow. "Come on. Avery? You're supposed to be the expert on positronics?"

  "One of-"

  "Fine. Come with me."

  Jeffries, despite being a good head shorter, walked away fast enough to make Derec struggle to keep up. He glanced over at the huddle around the diplomats and representatives. Ambulances stood open, receiving bodybags and injured. Blood slicked a large area. A dozen or so people were gathered off to one side, the quality of their clothes announcing their importance. A few seemed nervous and several were deathly pale, but none looked hurt.

  Derec and Jeffries came to the far end of the platform, descended the steps shoved against it, and the supervisor led the way through an innocuous door labeled PRIVATE. A few meters within they mounted a narrow stair leading up.

  "I was worried that you might bring some more robots," Jeffries said. "We're having trouble enough with the mere presence of them right now."

  "We don't have any," Derec replied. She gave him a look. "Besides the Spacer districts, the embassies, and here, they are illegal on Earth."

  Jeffries nodded. "Hm. Do you have any idea what happened here?"

  "I saw the replay on subetheric on the way over."

  "Probably edited."

  "How many-I mean, who?"

  "Estimates are that eighteen people died in the shooting, but we have at least thirty wounded, maybe a hundred dead or injured in the panic-trampled, kicked, that sort of thing," Jeffries explained. "All those you saw down there, that's what happened to them, except for a half dozen or so that got hit by stray blaster fire from the security teams on the platform. The Auroran ambassador is dead, along with half her staff, plus the Aurorans from the embassy here." She stopped at the top of the steps and looked at him. "Senator Eliton, too."

  Derec opened his mouth to say something. But then he saw a brief glimmer of pain in Jeffries' eyes, a glimpse of what lay beyond the brusque jobber she had shown him till then, and closed his mouth. He made himself nod. Jeffries' walls came up again, and she continued up the stairs to an unmarked door.

  On the other side was a broad office pressed against a strip of window that overlooked the gallery. Desks, consoles, and people formed a loose maze between the window and a wall of monitors that stretched the length of the room.

  "From here," Jeffries said, "we watch the RI run Union Station. Normally, anyway. Today we watched it go out to play while people died."

  Everyone in the room stopped to look at Jeffries, then at Derec. He felt the bitterness in her voice, saw it reflected in all the staff faces. No robots were present, only people trying to cope.

  "Would you explain that to me?"

  "Kedder," Jeffries said.

  Two people sat before the sprawling main interface console in the center of the room. One of them, a tall, slim man with short reddish hair, stood and cleared his throat.

  "I, uh-"

  "Kedder, this is the man from Phylaxis," Jeffries went on. "He's here to show us how to talk to our robots."

  Derec went to the console and extended his hand. "Derec Avery."

  "Tathis Kedder."

  "I have floor work to do," Jeffries announced. "You need me, find me."

  With that, she pivoted on her toes and left the room.

  Derec waited several seconds. People returned to what they had been doing. "All right, what happened?" he asked Kedder quietly.

  "Well…" Kedder gazed down at the console as if trying to remember what to do with it.

  The other man at the board started tapping keys deftly. The row of screens at the top of the console cleared to milky white, then new images winked into place.

  Kedder cleared his throat and pointed. "These are the, uh, primary monitor views leading up to the arrival of Senator Eliton."

  "What the RI saw?" Derec asked.

  "Uh-huh."

  Robots moved quickly among the prep people who established the boundaries for spectators and ushered the public into their assigned areas. Quickly, the space filled. Then the first wave of dignitaries arrived. Derec checked the elapsed time: the sequence moved at roughly twice normal speed. The platform became crowded, security robots followed humans around, guaranteeing free access from the main entrance to the platform, accompanying more dignitaries in, herding the throngs of people. Eliton's entourage came in, and Derec's throat tightened at the sight of Bogard. So it had been here.

  But what went wrong? he wondered.

  "Now," Kedder said, "let's slow it back down to normal speed. Watch the audience."

  The swift efficiency of the free-floating staff and security abruptly shifted to a more human pace. Derec looked from screen to screen, each displaying a different view across the gallery. The crowds bobbed and shuffled as if adrift on water. Then something changed. Derec blinked and leaned closer. It had looked as if a section of the recording had been cut out, one moment spliced to another across the gap left by the missing segment. A subtle jump, heads jerking slightly, and then-

  "See?" Kedder asked.

  "I'm not -I saw something, but"

  "Look," the other operator said sharply. The images backed up, across the gap, and then ran forward again. He rose out of his chair and touched a screen. "Watch this person."

  As Derec watched, the gap came, and the person vanished.

  "What the-"

  "It gets better," Kedder said. "Or worse, depending… watch this screen."

  Kedder indicated the middle view which showed the arched tunnel. After several seconds, a crowd of people emerged, marching, boots flashing, black uniforms bulging with armor and adorned by insignia Derec did not recognize.

  The other screens changed then. They showed a combination of corridors and alphanumerics. The main gallery was gone, replaced by what appeared to be a military complex. Uniformed figures hurried past, numbers shifted.

  "From this point," Kedder said, "we got nothing through the RI that related in any way to what we could see happening down on the floor. While people-while the attack happened, this was all the RI showed. We couldn't get it to reset, we couldn't get it to tell us what was happening. It wasn't responding to any command. Nothing."

  "And now?" Derec asked.

  "Now it seems to be in po
sitronic collapse."

  "All the security-"

  "It ran the whole thing. For several minutes before the attack, it was issuing directions for security teams to respond to small crises that we later learned never happened. When the shooting started, most of the security was outside the gallery and all the exits were sealed. We couldn't get the manual overrides to work until it was allover. No data came in, nothing went out, it was as if the entire station had been isolated from all other external systems."

  "Which may be just as well," Kedder's coworker said. "If it was having a breakdown, it might have carried over to externals. We might still be waiting for medical and police support."

  "But I saw the assault on subetheric."

  "Whatever this problem is," Kedder said, "it didn't affect the media nodes the newsnet people brought in that stayed unlinked to the RI. They weren't supposed to do that-everything was supposed to be channeled through the RI for security reasons-but a few always slip unregulated eyes in. Anyway, independent data fed out unimpeded. Only the RI was… diverted."

  "And all the security com…?"

  "Was being routed through the RI."

  Derec stared at the two technicians. "This is impossible."

  Kedder looked embarrassed; the other man shrugged.

  "What is this it was experiencing?" Derec asked, waving at the screens. "Looks like a simulation."

  "A game," the other man said. "Old strategy stuff. It has a number of them in its accessory buffers. Running all the facilities doesn't take up enough of its capacity, so it plays games. It has a terrific chess approach." He pointed to the screen. "This one is called Coup."

  "How did it overwhelm the positronic pathways?"

  "Beats me, gato."

  Kedder frowned at his partner, then said, "Oh, I'm sorry. Mr. Avery, this is Joler Hammis."

  Derec nodded briefly.

  "Sorry for being rude," Hammis said. "It's been that kind of a day."

  "Forget it. So you're running everything manually now?"

  "Partly," Hammis said. "We've got a hard programmed back-up helping. It took time to bypass all the systems the RI has-had-direct control of. A few things are run by imbedded hardware and none of that seemed affected at all. There are still functions we can't operate now, like traffic control. All shuttle service has been suspended for the time being, but we have to get that back on-line soon-"

  "All right, we can take care of that much," Derec said. "Are the external comlines for the RI open?"

  "No, but it's not a problem," Kedder said uncertainly. "Right now it's in no condition to send or receive-"

  "Doesn't matter. Is there a place I can work? And patch me into that com system."

  While Kedder and Hammis set up a station for him, Derec ran the images back and forth on the screens. It made no sense. It looked almost as though an invasive program had taken over the Resident Intelligence's entire sensory network and fed it false input. But the virtue of positronic RIs made such an invasion impossible. Unlike standard, nonsentient computer systems, positronic brains were not solely dependent on simple digital data input to set priorities. Rather, positronic brains used pre-established, unamendable priorities-the Three Laws, among others-to determine the value of sensory input. They depended on reality as a basis for judgment, reality as perceived through direct sense experience, vetted by hardwired expectations. Data, like that which computer and datum systems used and which told them how to interpret reality, was used only as a secondary reference, without the ability to interfere with the sense-priority nature of the positronic matrix. In this way, the positronic brain was occasionally superior to the human brain-it could not hallucinate, could not delude itself by referencing its own store of experience in isolation from base reality or privileging its experience to supersede its predetermined priorities. In short, a positronic brain could not be subverted. If conflicting information bombarded it to the point where its sense-priority makeup became compromised, collapse occurred. It simply failed.

  But this…

  "Here, Mr. Avery," Kedder said.

  "Derec, please." He looked over the console they had cleared for him. "Good. What I'm going to do is link to the RI at Phylaxis and start load-sharing. Then I'm going to dump the memory buffers of the station RI into our systems so we can start analyzing what happened."

  Kedder frowned, glancing over his shoulder. "You can replace our RI with your own?"

  "Sort of. It's a temporary arrangement and not nearly as efficient, but it should get all your systems back up and running."

  "Well, I suppose that's all right."

  Derec hesitated. "Why wouldn't it be?"

  "Just that… well, a lot of people blame the RI for what happened-a lot of people here. I'm just not sure how they'd feel about going back to one-"

  "Look. As I understand it, you need one to operate efficiently. You can't run the station without one."

  "Mainly flight control"

  "Fine. Then let me get this set up. Switching to a hard program system will be a lot easier with an RI in place facilitating the changes. Either way, this is necessary."

  "I see that, Mr. -uh, Derec. I don't have a problem with it but-"

  "Let me worry about the backlash. I'm used to it."

  Kedder nodded.

  "By the way," Drec said, "what did the robots on the floor do when the shooting started?"

  "I don't know. Wandered around, got knocked down by the mob. Nothing useful. See, they're all tied directly to the RI. More efficient to coordinate the entire robotic staff through a central unit-"

  "So when the RI started losing touch-"

  "It affected the mobile units."

  "But their own programming should've kicked them out of the RI's matrix, let them function independently."

  Kedder shook his head, a sour expression on his face. "No, they were all deadswitch linked to the RI. Management wanted to be able to shut down all of them from one location. It was easier to simply slave them all to the RI rather than bypass the Three Laws with one single command."

  "Slaved through… that would've required patching their sensory modules through the RI sensory net."

  "Exactly."

  Derec sighed heavily. "In the name of fear and efficiency." He shook himself. "All right, one problem at a time. Have I got direct access to your board from here?"

  "Yes. Here and here…"

  Derec let Kedder guide him through the basic arrangement until he understood how the systems were integrated, then made a call to Group.

  "Rana, this is Derec. We need Thales to sub for the RI here. Let me feed you the parameters."

  "Excuse me," Kedder said and walked away to another console.

  "Union Station?" Rana asked.

  "Yes."

  "What a mess. Who's dead?"

  "All the wrong people. Humadros and Eliton especially. "

  "Oh, hell."

  "Spoken with true precision," Derec said sarcastically. "I want a memory dump set up, too-we need to download the RI for study. Something really nasty happened here and I don't understand how it was doable. We have a subverted RI."

  "It didn't collapse?"

  "Not till it came back to reality and saw what had happened."

  "If Eliton's dead-"

  "I haven't seen Bogard yet. I don't know what happened. One crisis at a time for now."

  "All right. I'm setting up the patches now. Give me the transfer codes."

  Derec worked steadily, absorbed in the details of the construct for several minutes. When he leaned back to stretch, he noticed people watching him, several wearing expressions of disapproval. He looked away, out the windows to the floor below.

  Out in the gallery, maintenance units were cleaning up the blood, police techs were gathering evidence, and medical techs were collecting samples. Ambulances still crowded the platform, but most of the bodies had been taken away.

  On the opposite side of the gallery, he saw a large robot emerge from one of the service accesses, carr
ying a woman in its arms, which had unfolded like a sling around her; it was followed by two transport drones laden with more bodies. Derec stood and went to the window.

  "Bogard…" he whispered.

  Four

  Ariel Burgess gazed at the tri-D image projected above her desk, a vague dread displacing the concern she knew she should feel. The robot hovering in the field lacked an arm and both legs, and its head had been crushed as if a huge foot had stomped down on it as it lay on the ground. Various symbols covered its scuffed, dark blue body, most of them indecipherable yet threatening. The one Ariel did recognize shone bright white in the center of the robot's upper torso, a lemniscate crossed by an arrow at an upward angle: the sign of the Managins. The unit had been attacked by members of the Order for the Supremacy of Man Again.

  "I'm not familiar with this model," Ariel said.

  "We just began importing them last month," the man across from her said. "Porter model DP-8."

  "A domestic."

  "Exactly so."

  Ariel remembered the designation, but had not seen one till now. She had been busy with the preparations for the Humadros-Eliton Conference and had skipped several inspections, so she was not surprised. She studied what remained of the head. "Do you have a catalogue image of this, Mr. Udal?"

  "Um… yes, I think so…" He fumbled in his jacket pocket for a moment, clearly dismayed at her request. He fished out a disk and slipped it into her desk viewer. "This is the fourth act of vandalism in less than two weeks. Customers have stopped coming into the showroom, sales have dropped off precipitously, and now my staff is talking about leaving. They need the jobs, but they're afraid."

  "You've contacted the police?" Ariel asked, knowing the answer already. The catalogue image appeared in the air alongside the first view. It showed a neat, smooth-bodied robot with a pleasantly-smiling approximation of a human face. Ariel felt a cold lump suddenly form behind her breastbone.

  "Of course. The first time, a couple of inspectors came by, took statements. The second time, only one of them showed up. Same questions, same answers. The third instance, a uniformed patrol came, and this time, no one did." He shrugged elaborately. "Earthers. They don't care."