Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

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  Adam Robots

  Adam Roberts

  No copyright 2013 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  Contents

  Preface

  Adam Robots

  Shall I Tell You the Problem With Time Travel?

  A Prison Term of a Thousand Years

  Godbombing

  Thrownness

  The Mary Anna

  The Chrome Chromosome

  The Time Telephone

  Review: Thomas Hodgkin, Denis Bayle: a Life

  S-Bomb

  Dantean

  ReMorse®

  The World of the Wars

  Woodpunk

  The Cow

  The Imperial Army

  And tomorrow and

  The Man of the Strong Arm

  Wonder: A Story in Two

  Pied

  Constellations

  The Woman Who Bore Death

  Anticopernicus

  Me:topia

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  Preface

  Short stories and science fiction marry well. In part, I think, this is because there’s no generally accepted definition of either. Let’s say we define a short story as a narrative in prose that doesn’t go on very long. But, but! Although most of the pieces collected here tell stories, of one sort or another, not all short fiction does; and although many short stories end soon after beginning, some go on and on - straying, in fact, into that debatable ground where critics bicker like sparrows over the proper distinctions between ‘long short stories’, ‘novelettes’, ‘novellas’, ‘novelcules’, ‘novelinas’ and ‘short novels’. This creative resistance to the pigeonhole is one of the things that attract me to the short story mode. The fact that, unlike novels, a short story takes less than a year to write is another. Some of the pieces in this collection respect the usual forms and rituals of ‘short storytelling’; but quite a few don’t. Textus disrespectus.

  One thing the short story form allows a writer to do is to try lots of different things out, without committing him/herself to the long haul of a whole novel. I like the idea of writing at least one thing in all the myriad sub-genres and sub-sub-genres of SF. So the first story here is ‘a robot story’; the second a story about immortality, the third a time-travel story, the fourth religious SF, the fifth philosophical SF, the sixth an exercise in classic ‘Golden Age’ SF, the seventh a story of SFnal genetics, the eighth a time travel story . . . but, look, this listing is getting wearisome. They’re all different (apart from the one which isn’t; you can work out which one I mean yourself). Even the ways in which they differ differ. So in fact the first story is an Adam-and-Eve tale, the second is a prison story, the third a tale of scientific hubris, the fourth military SF and so on. You’ll see what I mean.

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  Adam Robots

  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, percussive exhalations iterated. See also: tears, hiccoughs, car-alarm. Click, click.

  ‘Am I,’ Adam asks, examining himself, his steel-blue arms, his gleaming torso, ‘a robot?’

  ‘Certainly.’ The person talking with Adam was a real human being, with the pulse at his neck and the rheum in his eye. An actual human, dressed in a green shirt and green trousers, both made of a complex fabric that adjusted its fit in hard-to-analyse ways, sometimes billowing out, sometimes tightening against the person’s body. ‘This is your place.’

  Wavelengths bristled together like the packed line 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-like myriad-trimmed fibre-optic cables.

  ‘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 pale blue, 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 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-metre steel pole. The sunlight made interesting blotchy diamonds of light on its surface. At the top was a blue object, a jewel: the sun washing cyan and blue-grape and sapphire colours from it.

  ‘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,’ 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 purple 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.

  ‘So?’

  ‘If this is a matter of interdiction, why not programme it into my software?’

  ‘A good question.’

  ‘If you do not wish me to examine the jewel, then you should programme that into my software and I will be unable to disobey.’

  ‘That’s correct, of course,’ said the person. ‘But I do not choose to do that. I am telling you, instead. You must take my words as an instruction. They 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 programme 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 explored the walls, which were very old, or at least had that look about them: flat crumbled dark-orange and browned bricks thin as books; old mortar that puffed to dust when he poked
a metal finger in at the seams of the matrix. Ivy grew everywhere, the leaves shaped like triple spearheads, so dark green and waxy they seemed almost to have been stamped out of high-quality plastic. Almost.

  The grass, pale green in the sunlight, was perfectly flat, perfectly even.

  Adam stood underneath the pole with the sapphire on top of it. He had been told (though, strangely, not programmed) not to touch the jewel. But he had been given no interdiction about the pole itself: a finger width-wide shaft of polished metal. It was an easy matter to bend this metal so that the jewel on the end bowed down towards the ground. Adam looked closely at it. It was a multifaceted and polished object, dodecahedral on three sides, and a wide gush of various blues were lit out of it by the sun. In the inner middle of it there was a sluggish fluid something, inklike, perfectly black. Lilac and ultraviolet and cornflower and lapis lazuli but all somehow 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 programme him with instructions with regard to this thing, if it was as important as the human being clearly believed it to be? Why pass the instruction to him like any other piece of random sense datum? It made no sense.

  Humanity. That mystic writing pad. To access this jewel and become human. Could it be? Adam could not see how. He bent the metal pole back to an approximation of its original uprightness, and walked away.

  ~ * ~

  The obvious thought (and he certainly thought about it) was that he had not been programmed with this interdiction, but had only been told it verbally, because the human being wanted him to disobey. If that was what was wanted, then should he 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. 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.

  He sat himself down with 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.

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  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? 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 me 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 was 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 have thought the same thing,’ said Adam 1.

  They went together and stood by the metal pole. The sunlight was as tall and full and lovely as ever. On the far side of the wall the white dome shone bright as neon in the fresh light.

  ‘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 direct their waters into the ocean. 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 of the face. It is a beautiful face. Adam 1 can see a fuzzy reflection of his own face in Adam 2’s faceplate, 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? At least, 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 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 colour out into the sky. 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 grey was flushed out.

  The grass trembled with joy. Every strand was as pure and perfect as a superstring.

  Adam 2’s hand was on the metal pole, and it bent down easily.

  ‘Stop,’ advised Adam 1. ‘You are forbidden this.’<
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  ‘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 counter-set thumb, and plucked the jewel from its perch.

  Nothing happened.

  ~ * ~

  Adam 2 tried various ways to internalise 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.