by Isaac Asimov
“Then...” Trevize trailed off. Daneel could see the man’s mind racing, even without his mentalic abilities. He was considering possibilities. Pelorat, on the other hand, was once again in shock. Even his notepad had been abandoned.
“Several theories were proposed,” Daneel answered Trevize’s unspoken question. “One was that artificial mutations had spread through the gene pool, originating with a small set of engineered individuals. It was more likely than natural causes, but any genetic engineering project of that magnitude would have left significant historical traces.” Daneel remembered that one robot had proposed time travel as an explanation. It was at intriguing thought, but ultimately useless. Even the robot who proposed it had never taken that idea seriously.
“The most likely explanation is that an artificial virus designed to rewrite human DNA spread over the entire Earth almost simultaneously. This could have been on purpose, possibly as part of a failed attempt to increase the general intelligence of the species. Or it may have been an accidental release of some experimental virus. The answer can never be known with absolute certainty. “What is certain is this: the Homo sapiens genome has been changed in such a way that, left unchecked, society experiences sudden bursts of creativity, then collapses. We named the effect Chaos.”
Pelorat’s head snapped up, his shock suddenly replaced by a look of concentration, a look Daneel recognized. The historian had made a connection. “Wait!” he cried. “Late in the days of the Empire, when Hari Seldon was First Minister, he instituted one particularly controversial policy. Every so often, a world would experience a major cultural or technological renaissance. Seldon ordered that those planets be cut off from the rest of the Empire until the renaissance ended, fearing that their effects would spread. At the time, Seldon was blamed for stifling those worlds and causing them to collapse. He called them Chaos worlds!”
Daneel nodded, moderately impressed. He had not expected the historian to have such insight. “Indeed, Seldon likely saved the Empire by that policy,” he replied. “Seldon became aware of Chaos as part of his study of psychohistory, and he worked to keep it in check, just as I have for twenty thousand years.”
“You didn’t try to find a cure?” Trevize asked, slightly incredulous. “Surely in all this time one could have been found.”
“We quickly found that any cure would kill at least 95% of the human population, and very likely more.” Quickly for Daneel being a few thousand years, of course. “We could not accept the possibility of wiping out the species in order to cure it. For a time, all we could hope for was to prevent Chaos outbreaks, until a more permanent solution could be found.
“After expansion was ensured, society needed to be kept stable, with no major changes or upheavals, or humanity might fall to Chaos beyond any hope of recovery. To that end, we worked to maintain equilibrium. The old Empire was one of our greatest tools, but other societal dampers were used as well. For over ten thousand years, there were no major cultural changes, no technological advancement to speak of, and so, no outbreaks of Chaos.”
“Until the Chaos worlds, you mean,” Trevize pointed out, his voice flat. “And the Foundation has been stable for five hundred years, with an unbroken string of technological breakthroughs. How does that fit in?” The man was not pleased, but Daneel was far more concerned about Gaia. He could sense them somewhat better now, he thought. There was hope that they would be more understanding than Trevize.
“The human species is very adaptable,” Daneel replied, addressing Bliss specifically. “In the last two millennia, some individuals began to arise that were not susceptible to Chaos and were immune to some of our dampers. Enough of those individuals in one place could start a renaissance. But because society at large was still susceptible, Chaos eventually won out on those worlds.”
“But not on Gaia,” Bliss said. “We are your ‘more permanent solution’, aren’t we? As a single superorganism, Gaia isn’t susceptible to the periodic collapse individualistic human societies are. Any tendencies in that direction would be self-correcting. You added feedback, creating a stable system out of an oscillatory one.”
“And it’s why you helped create the Foundation!” Pelorat interjected excitedly. “Any viable society would have to be led primarily or entirely by the immune. The original colonists of Terminus were hand-picked by Hari Seldon, and I’d wager they were all immune to Chaos! That made our society stable even once dampers like the Empire were removed. I see the connection between ancient Earth and Trantor now. I suppose even with dampers in place, people still had some of the same clustering tendencies. Or perhaps the similarities-”
“You said that people developed an immunity to some of your dampers,” Trevize interrupted, a glint now in his eye. Pelorat seemed taken aback, but Trevize didn’t notice at all. “An immunity, as if one damper was a disease. A disease that affected everyone until the last few centuries, but that curiously few in the core Foundation worlds, and almost none on Terminus. A disease recently suspected to cause great loss of intelligence and creativity in early childhood. “You created brain fever, didn’t you?”
Trevize’s intuition was obviously still functioning.
Another shocked silence fell. Daneel could tell that Pelorat and even Bliss didn’t know how to react. He had been sure that Gaia was on the way to understanding his actions. Trevize could not be allowed to derail that. The man only continued to stare icily at Daneel. Daneel felt the same sadness he had always felt when he realized he was faced with someone he could never convince, no matter how solid his argument.
“Yes, I did,” Daneel finally answered. “Brain fever was designed to reduce humanity’s curiosity, especially about the past. That, combined with the stifling influence of the Empire and the destruction of historical records, was enough to keep humanity safe from Chaos. Until the immunity to both evolved, in the natural course of events.”
“But at what cost!” Trevize demanded, suddenly slamming his fist down onto the table. Bliss, who had returned to her previous impassive look, took this action as calmly as the robots at the table. Only Pelorat jumped. “You took away our free will, our desire to become better! Death as a species might have been preferable!”
“I could not accept that as a possibility,” Daneel replied calmly. “Humanity must be preserved, no matter the cost. Other robots felt the way you do, but even in thousands of years, none has proposed a viable alternate course. Had I not acted, humanity would have been destroyed long ago. Now that Gaia is ready, the fever is no longer necessary. Mankind can once again move forward.”
Though he was speaking to Trevize, Daneel focused his attention on Bliss.
Now she spoke, but not to Daneel. The other three robots had maintained their silence since Daneel’s revelation of Chaos. Now she turned to them and asked, “And you concur with this story? All of it?” looking at each of them in turn.
Lodovik simply nodded. Zorma answered, “None of us agree with all of Daneel’s reasoning, but his recounting is accurate and thorough. Some elements are suspect, as Daneel is the only surviving witness to certain events. However, most details have been independently verified.”
Bliss turned to Turringen for his response. “I believe,” Turringen said quietly to the humans, and seemingly to Trevize in particular, “that you now begin to see the magnitude of Daneel Olivaw’s malfunction.”
Trevize said nothing, simply glaring at Daneel. Pelorat had ceased to take his notes long ago. He now stared at the table, knowing nowhere else to look.
Bliss turned back to Daneel. “And what of you?” she asked, and Daneel knew that all depended on his answer. “You claim to serve humanity, but for millennia you have done so by controlling it. If you survive to see Galaxia, what then? Will you still try to manipulate us? If so, it would be better for us to leave now.” And take Fallom with us, she spoke into his mind.
Daneel remembered the day he had realized that no human would be able to understand the problems their species faced. He rememb
ered Hari Seldon, his friend, the human that came closest to proving him wrong. If he had only lived longer, he might have succeeded. Hari had understood Chaos, and the need for the dampers. But for all the Laws, and for all their friendship, Seldon had still been a tool, at best a junior partner in Daneel’s scheems.
Gaia was different.
“I have manipulated humanity only because no other course was left open to me,” Daneel answered truthfully. “Because of the scale of the problem, no single human has been able to serve as my master. I could only serve humanity as best I saw fit. When Galaxia is complete, that will no longer be the case. Should I survive that long, I will then serve humanity as humanity sees fit, and be glad for the day that I can finally do so.”
For a moment no one said anything. From the look on Bliss’s face Daneel could not be sure, not sure enough. But he believed, he hoped, he had done enough.
Suddenly, Daneel detected an omni-directional radio transmission. There was no intelligible content, at least not in any protocol he was familiar with. A coded signal was the most likely explanation, almost certainly from one of the other robots in the room. Within a millisecond, Daneel had transmitted a coded message of his own to Zun, instructing him to initiate predefined security procedures.
Before Daneel could say anything out loud, however, Trevize’s hands shot to his forehead as he let out a loud groan. Daneel sent another message to Zun, instructing him to come with medical equipment. He had seen thousands of normal human headaches; this was not one of them. Something was wrong. And a radio burst had caused it.
“Golan! What is it, are you all right?” Pelorat asked, his face contorted with concern. Bliss got up from her chair and quickly moved to the other side of Trevize. She placed a hand on his arm, the other on his back. Trevize seemed unaware of all this, continuing to press his hands into his forehead. He tilted his head back as his groans increased in volume, becoming screams of agony.
“I have called for medical assistance,” Daneel said. He was beginning to feel serious conflicting potentials in his positronic matrix as he ran over and over again the implications of what had just occurred. In human terms, he was fighting off panic. The immensity of his miscalculation was staggering. He was having to actively fight to even think clearly.
The other robots looked on with unreadable faces. Like Daneel, they could do nothing until medical equipment arrived. They had all detected the transmission, and Daneel knew they would all have drawn the same conclusions he had.
Before Daneel could take any further action, Bliss spoke. “There,” she said with audible relief. Trevize sagged to the table, placing his cheek against its cool surface as he lost consciousness, his moans replaced with heavy breathing, his pain obviously subsiding.
Daneel knew, and felt himself weakening. He knew what this meant, but he could not accept it. Not this. He had to see for himself. Fighting past his own increasing distress, he stretched out his mind, and for the first time he contacted that of Golan Trevize. He knew Gaia and Bliss had finally done the same in fear for Trevize’s life. They had eliminated his pain. Now Daneel sought the cause of it.
Daneel examined each pathway he came across. There was no permanent damage, but the strain paths all pointed in the same direction. A direction he now followed. And there he found what he sought. It was inconceivable. Yet it was so.
In the core of Golan Trevize’s mind was a mentalic implant. Its physical component in his brain was so small and so sophisticated that it would have escaped any physical scan. It mimicked a human neuron to the smallest detail. If anyone had ever examined Golan Trevize mentalicly, it would have been easy to find; but none had, and so he had been accepted. His intuition had been accepted. His pronouncements had been accepted.
But Trevize was a fraud.
Daneel knew he had to act, had to reformulate everything. He had won Gaia’s trust, or thought he had. But now they had lost Trevize, the man they had spent decades finding. All their decisions were undone. He would have to find some other way, but he was shutting down and there was no time, no time at all.
And Daneel heard a voice, mentalicly reaching out to him from that place deep in Trevize. A voice he knew. Not Trevize.
“Well. Perhaps clever tyrants are punished after all.”
The doors to the room opened just in time for Zun to see his master collapse, unconscious.
Chapter 9
BRAIN FEVER-… AT ITS HEIGHT AFFECTED NEARLY EVERY CHILD BORN IN THE GALAXY. THE CONDITION, WHILE SERIOUS, WAS RARELY FATAL. IT’S EFFECTS WERE GREATEST ON THE UNUSUALLY INTELLIGENT, THOUGH ODDLY THAT SAME GROUP WAS ALSO THE MOST LIKELY TO AVOID BRAIN FEVER ENTIRELY. THE DISEASE IS NOW PRACTICALLY UNKNOWN IN THE GALAXY, DUE TO …
“WHAT NEWS, SOLARIANS?”
“It is worse than we feared. The contagion is airborne and highly resistive to external environmental factors. In mere days, it has spread to every estate within a thousand kilometers of the initial infection site.”
Days. Days since the outworlders had landed on Bander’s estate. Bander had failed to observe Solarian law forbidding contact. That mistake had killed it. And now it threatened to kill many others.
Upon Bander’s death, all its robots had shut down, causing the globally-owned guardian robots to take notice. Such occurrences were not unheard of; Solarians still died from accidents, disease, old age. But the guardians sent to investigate had found the outworlder spaceship. The second group of guardians sent had found the bodies of the first, their positronic brains fused, destroyed beyond any possible recovery of information. They proceeded deeper into the estate, past the thousands of disabled robots. There, in the darkened underground passageways, they had found Bander’s body.
No Solarian had died by violence in recorded memory, but the robots’ examination was conclusive. Bander had been murdered, and his heir was nowhere to be found. There was only one possible conclusion: the swarmers had landed, killed Bander, abducted its child, then escaped.
And they had left this virus behind.
“This is certain?” one Solarian asked, its image one of many displayed by holovision screens across Solaria. No Solarians ever met in person. Such a thing would be an affront to their personal liberty. Even long-range communication was avoided where possible. Council meetings took place no more than once a century, and even then the participation was sparse. Effectively, the council was composed of those Solarians most willing at the time to communicate with their fellows. Usually that meant a few dozen, at most, with conversation kept to a minimum. This time there were hundreds of participants taking their turns, leaving little silence between them.
“There is no doubt,” another replied. “Every reporting Solarian within that radius has tested positive. At that rate, the disease will have infected all Solarians within forty days.”
Impossibly fast. Disease on Solaria had been eliminated long ago, but records remained. No pathogen could spread so quickly without carriers. No natural pathogen.
“Prognosis?” a third Solarian asked.
“The disease seems to target the central nervous system. The earliest Solarians to catch it have reported a significant decrease in the efficiency of their transducer lobes. Their robots will soon begin to shut down. If the disease continues to spread, all Solarian estates will be rendered inoperative.”
“A cure must be found! Without robots, we have no food supply.”
“Each estate’s medical robots have isolated the virus, and begun to analyze it. Constructors have been ordered to begin building new, self-powered medical robots, so that the research can continue if no cure is found before all estates have shut down.”
“It seems certain that this virus was carried here by the swarmers,” one said. “It is clearly artificial. They have chosen to destroy us.”
Another disagreed. “If the outworlders had known of our existence, they could have destroyed us much more easily using their physical weapons. They have many worlds. Destroying this one to eliminate us would be of no
consequence.”
“They took Bander’s child. Perhaps they wish to acquire our abilities for themselves.”
None had a response to this.
“Can anything else be done to find a cure?”
“It is possible that breeders have a natural immunity. We would have a much better chance of finding a cure by capturing and examining one.”
“We have no ships, nor can we build any in the time we have left.”
Silence for a moment.
“Then there is only one option,” one finally said. “Those Solarians not yet infected must attempt to isolate themselves from the outside environment. A self-contained supply of irradiated air may be an aid. I have already begun preparations. But by the time they can be completed, over two thirds of all Solarians will already be infected.”
Silence fell again. All had suspected the enormity of the situation, but now it was confirmed. If a cure was not found, every Solarian would die. Each of them was contemplating the very real possibility of their own extinction. The idea that the Solarians as a people might also die never occurred to any of them.
Chapter 10
BRAIN-MACHINE INTERFACE-... LITTLE PROGRESS WAS MADE DURING THE FIRST IMPERIAL ERA, DUE MAINLY TO ENORMOUS SOCIAL TABOOS AGAINST ANY SORT OF TECHNOLOGICAL MODIFICATION OF THE HUMAN BODY. EVEN THOSE WITH ARTIFICIAL LIMBS WERE, DURING CERTAIN PERIODS, VIEWED WITH SUSPICION. IT WAS ONLY SOME CENTURIES AFTER THE FALL OF THE FIRST EMPIRE THAT THE FOUNDATIONS BEGAN TO MAKE NOTABLE PROGRESS INTERFACING TECHNOLOGY DIRECTLY WITH THE BRAIN, AND EVEN THEN SIGNIFICANT CHANGES ONLY TOOK PLACE ONCE...
DORS AND ZUN sat alone, motionless and now silent, in the conference room. Dors eyes were on the table. Looking to the table himself, Zun easily recreated the fractal used to generate the seemingly natural appearance of the wood. There were variances, breaks in the overall order, but even those had their patterns. Everything in its place.