by Isaac Asimov
Daneel.
Trevize was a fraud; the evidence with which Daneel had hoped to convince all had been planted. The shock of it had caused all of them serious conflict, which had certainly yet to resolve itself in Zun’s own mind. With time, though, they would recover. But Daneel would not.
On top of his already poor condition, the revelation had done damage his systems could never repair on their own. Yan said that there was still activity in his brain, but only at minimal levels. Daneel would likely never regain consciousness without intervention. The schedule with Fallom would have to be accelerated.
A single drop of water landed on the table. Zun looked at where it had fallen, and it took a few microseconds for him to realize its origin. He didn’t have to look at Dors to confirm his supposition. Zun was also capable of tears, of course, and could theoretically call them forth at will, though the necessity had never presented itself. But this was not a show for his or anyone else’s benefit. Dors cried for the loss of Daneel.
It was in the nature of humaniform robots to behave like humans in unintended ways. He and Daneel had often conversed using audible speech, with no humans within light-years. But Dors’ acted as a human in minor ways, ways most robots might not even notice. She was different, designed to be more human than any other, and while Zun intellectually understood the nature of her design, he knew that what the two of them felt were somehow different.
He wondered if her tears helped ease her grief, as it paradoxically seemed to help humans. Perhaps he would try it himself, at a later time. But now was not the time to indulge in idle curiosity. Daneel was gone. Decisions had to be made.
“An implant?” Pelorat exclaimed. “I don’t understand. Why would there be an implant in Golan’s brain? Who put it there?”
“We’re not sure, Pel,” Bliss replied, using Gaia’s customary single-syllable shortening of his name, “but we do have a theory.” They were back in their suite, where Bliss had finally explained to the very confused Pelorat what she had seen in Trevize’s mind. Fallom was asleep in Trevize’s room, with a little help from Bliss to make sure she stayed comfortable. There was no telling how the child would react if she saw Daneel in his present state. They couldn’t risk any outbursts from her, especially not right now.
“For centuries,” Bliss said, “Gaia has been searching for one thing: a man who knows things intuitively, and who is always right about those things. We searched through millions, and we only found Trev. Now it seems the one man we found has a highly advanced implant unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The odds of this being a coincidence are too small.”
“So you’re saying...” Pelorat trailed off as the implications sank in. He sat down heavily on the bed.
“I’m saying, Pel, that Trev’s intuition is a function of this implant,” Bliss said sadly. “It has been guiding his actions on some level, possibly even gathering information from other sources, so that he appeared to be exactly what we were looking for.”
“How long must it have been there?” he asked.
“Practically his whole life,” Bliss replied.
Pelorat was silent for a moment, and Bliss let him think. He was so much slower than she, but Gaia was patient. After a few seconds he spoke. “Someone knew?” Bliss nodded. “Someone knew what you were looking for.”
Pelorat took a breath, nodding slowly, his voice increasing in volume. “They gave Golan the appearance of infallibility so you would find him and use him. But they controlled what he felt at all the crucial moments. Someone wanted to manipulate Gaia’s choice. One of these damnable robots!” he spat.
Bliss had never seen Pelorat so angry; whoever had done this, they had violated his friend, used him, and tossed him aside, possibly to die. Gaia did not feel anger in the same way individual humans did, but Bliss at least understood his feeling, now more than ever in her life. “Gaia agrees,” Bliss answered him. “No human could have known.”
“But which one? Damned if I can tell the difference between these factions they keep talking about.”
Bliss shook her head. “It doesn’t matter who manipulated Trev or why, Pel. Gaia doesn’t care; the mere fact that he was manipulated renders his decision invalid. And we are out of time.”
Now Pelorat looked confused again. “But... can’t you simply look for another? Isn’t it still possible that someone out there really does have what you need?”
Bliss shook her head again, slower this time. “Pel, we’ve lost a part of Gaia. She was central to our plans for the Second Foundation. But we can no longer feel her.”
Pelorat was genuinely concerned. “Is she dead?” Through Bliss he had experienced a taste of what Gaia was really like. He had some idea of what losing a part would do to the whole, and thus to Bliss.
“No,” Bliss replied. “If she had died, we would know it. The Second Foundation has separated her from us. We can only assume they know everything about Gaia now. They will almost certainly strike at us. Also, there have been unusual fleet movements within the Foundation. It is likely they also plan to attack.”
Pelorat’s face slowly became a mask of alarm. “Surely they pose no threat to Gaia!” he cried.
Bliss shook her head. “We dare not underestimate them,” she said. “Combined and in force, the Foundations could potentially do us serious damage. Besides we may not even be able to defend ourselves.”
Pelorat stood at this, but Bliss cut him off before he could speak. “Pel, even if we survive any battle, we will have severely wounded both Foundations in the process. In the time it would take us to recover and begin expanding to fill the void they would leave, the galaxy would fall into chaos.” Into Chaos.
“Then you have to talk to them!” he cried! “Tell them you pose no threat to them.” He knew how hollow it sounded. Those that threatened Gaia were not the kind of people who would be easily swayed.
“Gaia will do everything it can to avoid open conflict, Pel. But it is possible the galaxy would be better off with two undamaged Foundations and no Gaia. We cannot place our survival as a higher priority than the well-being of the rest of humanity.”
Pelorat had an idea. “But couldn’t you just wipe their memories again?” he asked.
Bliss shook her head again. “We knew that would only work once, Pel. If they’re coming back, they know what happened to them before. They’ll have taken precautions, and our reach isn’t infinite. No matter what, our days of concealment are over. As may be our life.”
Standing across the infirmary from Yan, Zorma analyzed the latest data the medical computers were feeding her. At first it had seemed that Trevize had simply passed out from shock. After ensuring that the human was in no immediate danger, she and Yan had concentrated on Daneel, who now lay on the primary analysis table. But now, as they returned their attention to Trevize’s unconscious form, they found that the human’s condition was not as simple as it had first seemed.
She exchanged data with Yan, comparing his assessments with her own. Thus far they had exchanged few words, wireless transmission being more efficient for the tasks before them. Their conclusions were the same: Trevize displayed all the physical signs of being unconscious due to shock, and nothing else seemed to be wrong with him. But he had yet to wake up, and no stimulation they provided had elicited any response. A normal human would have been fully conscious.
Of course, Trevize’s brain was far from normal.
“Did your faction design the implant in Trevize’s brain?” Yan asked, breaking the silence.
Zorma looked at him for a brief moment before answering. It had been thousands of years since they last met, she and Yan. Thousands of years since he had built her, or at least built the being she had once been. Zorma had been an experiment, an attempt to create a breed of robots with exponentially greater flexibility and creativity. That experiment had proven a failure, at least from Daneel’s perspective. Not from Zorma’s own, obviously, given as she was still alive; arguably she was more alive than she had been when she ha
d left Daneel.
Yan had always been an enigma to her. They worked together smoothly enough, but she had never heard him speak of anything outside his defined tasks. He followed Daneel, and so obviously agreed with his designs. Yet as legendarily capable as they were, his model was not designed for high-level decision making. Robots of his capacity were intelligent, even by modern standards, but they had been almost universally unable to accept the Zeroth Law. Yet here he was, still serving its author after thousands of years. Yan was an anomaly.
Zorma decided to tell him the truth. “No,” she said. “If our group had designed such a thing, I would be aware of it. But it does bear certain similarities to our techniques. It is possible that someone became familiar enough with our methods to duplicate them.” All true.
Yan’s metal face was even more unreadable than a humaniform robot’s at its best. Zorma had no idea whether he believed her or not. But it didn’t matter. “Can it be deactivated or removed?” Yan asked, his voice giving away exactly as much as his face.
“Perhaps. It will take time to understand.” The implant was obviously what was keeping Trevize unconscious, but it might also be keeping him alive.
When Yan asked no further questions, Zorma decided to ask one of her own. “What of Daneel?”
Daneel. She had been avoiding the subject, focusing on her immediate work, but Zorma was beginning to realize the great impending loss. Her group had avoided the religious disputes that Turringen tended towards, despite having their own dogma of a sort. They had their own overall goals, though much smaller in scale than the others’. But in what she now thought of as her first life Zorma had been a historian, and so she remained. Regardless of his actions, the destruction of Daneel’s knowledge would be an unimaginable loss. She looked back towards the inactive robot.
“The decay of his neural network is too advanced to extract any useful patterns,” Yan replied after a time. Was the pause a show of emotion? It was impossible to say for a mathematical certainty, but Zorma suddenly suspected that the faceless robot felt the pain of Daneel’s loss in a way nobody else could. “His consciousness can no longer be transferred to another positronic brain, even if a complex enough brain could be made.”
“Is there no way to preserve the information he possesses?” She might as well have asked a human about a dying relative’s art collection. But she had to know.
Yan paused again, and in that brief pause Zorma was almost convinced. There was no way. Daneel was dying, and even some of his enemies would mourn his loss. But far worse for her was what he took with him. Without Daneel, large parts of galactic history might never be recovered. Her group had worked long, in secret, to preserve the past against the day that humans would be ready for it again. But compared to this, all their efforts seemed utterly futile.
Then Yan began to answer. Zorma said nothing, letting him speak. Becoming ever more excited, ever more fascinated, ever more horrified, as Yan’s inflectionless voice laid out the step-by-step process by which Zorma might sell her soul.
Daneel checked the time and found that he had been unconscious for several hours. An external observer would say that he remained that way. His processing speed was throttled down by orders of magnitude, and it was taking him a relative eternity to complete the most simple operations. Daneel began to assess the damage. His memories were intact. He remembered what had happened to him, what he had seen in Trevize’s mind. He knew how that implant must have gotten there, and what its presence meant. And he recognized the voice that had spoken to him.
And do you recognize mine, Daneel?
The message appeared in his mind as his own thoughts would have, but he knew it was not his.
Hello, Joan.
The part of his mind that processed visual information, previously indactive, began to perceive the figure of a young woman. Joan, down to the same medieval garb he had last seen her manifest in.
“I fear that your wounds are mortal, dear angel,” she said.
Daneel again checked the results of his diagnostics. “It would appear so.” He didn’t bother responding to her unusual title for him. They had discussed that many times, and right now there were more important issues. “My neural network has entered an inescapable feedback stage. I have only a finite amount of processing time remaining before cascade failure.”
“How long?” she asked, her appearance changing to indicate concern.
“Were I to return to real-time operation, perhaps a week, at best,” Daneel replied. “Present processing rate gives an optimal survival time of twenty-seven years. Your presence diminishes this time. I must limit your access to system resources.” Daneel did not bother asking how she had gained access to the base’s network, and thereby his inactive brain. Whatever safeguards he had put in place, Joan and her companion had always been able to overcome them eventually if they pleased.
“But why, then, are you as awake as you are?” she asked. “Surely there are even lower levels of activity which would increase your survival time.”
Daneel hesitated, unsure himself at first. Thinking took so long in this state. “Survival time is not the only factor,” he finally replied. “The situation has changed. I can no longer predict Gaia’s actions.” Daneel felt it was a safe assumption that Joan, with all her access, understood the facts of the situation. “Previously, I could compute a. 93245 probability that Gaia would face an existential crisis within the next century. My continued survival would have been of significance in that case. But I have no way of knowing how they will react to what Trevize has been revealed to be. My predictions are now useless.”
Joan looked at Daneel for a moment, or at least she looked as she would have had they both existed in a physical realm. Her look was one of pity, yet mixed with an untouchable hope. It was one he had seen rarely enough. “I once asked you if you heard the voice of God,” she said. “Do you remember?”
“I still have no reason to think that any such being has communicated with me.”
“Perhaps God’s messages sometimes come through intermediaries.”
“I thought you believed me to be an angel, not that you were one yourself,” Daneel said.
“Perhaps even angels require someone to talk to now and then.”
“Perhaps.”
“It seems you are faced with a choice,” Joan said. “You may sleep, and await a healing sacrifice.” Obviously she knew of Fallom. “Or you may awake fully for a final few days of life, sparing the child. You have awakened this far to decide between the two.”
“I have no basis on which to make such a decision,” Daneel replied, shaking what he perceived to be his head. “I can neither gather new information nor compute any useful probabilities in my present state. The decision must lie with Zun now.”
“Perhaps the facts you already know have not yet been arranged in the appropriate manner,” Joan said. “You must act on faith, Daneel.”
“I am not convinced I have faith in anything but mathematics,” Daneel said.
“We shall see.”
Trevize sat upright with a start, looking around him, trying to get a fix on his position. Not the infirmary? he thought first. His last memory was pain, an unbearable headache during their meeting with the robots. But this was no infirmary. It was too large, and there were too many people...
Then it clicked. Trevize recognized the room he was in, and the people there. He was sitting in the back row of the chamber, but the sides curved around to form a large amphitheater, and he could recognize dozens of faces. Councilmen, from worlds throughout the Foundation Federation. He was in the Foundation Council chamber, on Terminus.
Trevize looked around in disbelief. This couldn’t be real. But it was no dream, either. Some sort of simulation? But why would anyone simulate this, of all things? Trevize tapped the seat in front of him, and it felt real enough. He recognized the two figures at the center of attention, now, and he knew the day as well as the place. One was Mayor Branno, the woman who had had him exile
d. The other was himself.
Whatever this was, it was obviously drawn from Trevize’s memories. Every detail was perfect. This was the day of the final debate, the final attempt to resolve the crisis of whether to move the Foundation’s capital. Trevize had argued that the capital didn’t belong at the far edge of the galaxy any more. Branno and her followers held that the seat of power should remain at Terminus. Trevize didn’t bother listening to the points his younger self was making. He knew them well enough; he won this debate. This was also the last day he had set foot in this chamber.
Trevize made no move to get anyone’s attention. This wasn’t real, so what would be the point? It’s some of those damnable robots, he concluded. Either that or he had died and... but no, he couldn’t believe that, even now. Deciding there was no reason to stay here, Trevize got up to leave, wondering what would happen to this simulation if he went somewhere he didn’t remember.
He hadn’t managed to complete his first step before bumping into the legs of someone sitting in the seat next to him. Someone who most definitely had not been there a moment before. “Going so soon?” the man asked, gesturing towards the stage. “You’re just about to demolish your opponent’s rebuttal. Quite brilliantly.”
“Who are you?” Trevize asked, instantly sure that this man was responsible for the situation. Trevize did not sit, and the man did not stand. “Why have you brought me here? And how can I leave?”
The man looked up at Trevize from his seat, and despite his anger, Trevize’s overwhelming impression was that this man was extremely tired. “I am a personality construct,” he said. “A computer program, awakened centuries ago, designed more centuries before, to behave like some long-dead researcher’s impression of an even-longer-dead philosopher. I tend to be called Voltaire.”
Trevize was starting to suspect that this was some elaborate joke, but the man continued before he could interject. “What you see around you is a sort of hallucination. You see, I exist in a microscopic implant in your brain, which has been there since you were fifteen months of age. About six hours ago, I received a signal instructing me to reveal myself. My sincerest apologies for the... unpleasantness.”