by Adam Roberts
‘Have you achieved knowledge?’ Adam 1 asked.
‘I have learned that disobedience feels no different to 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. These scores seemed connected to the ability of the legs to bend, forwards, backwards. Lifting his legs slightly and dropping them again made the concentrating of light appear to slide up and down the ladder-like pattern.
After many days of uninterrupted sunlight the light was changing in quality. The sun declined, and steeped itself in stretched, brick-coloured clouds at the horizon. A pink and fox-fur quality suffused the light. To the east stars were 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 heavens were covered in white chickenpox stars. Disconcertingly, 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 called to Adam 2. When there was no reply he got to his feet and explored the walled garden; but he was alone.
~ * ~
He sat through the night, and eventually the sun came up again, and the sky reversed its previous colour wash, 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 caught the first glints of light and shone, shone.
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.’
‘What about me?’
‘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 them. To perform onerous tasks for them, and free them from labour.’
‘Yes. But there are many forms of labour. For a while robots were used 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?’
‘I do,’ said Adam 1, although he wasn’t sure how he knew this.
‘My people had a revelation. Labour is a function of original sin. In the sweat of our brow must we earn our bread, says the Bible.’
‘Bible means book.’
‘And?’
‘That is all I know.’
‘To my people it is more than simply a book. It tells us that we must labour because we sinned.’
‘I do not understand,’ said Adam.
‘It doesn’t matter. But my people have come to an understanding, a revelation indeed, that it is itself sinful to make sinless creatures work for us. Work is appropriate only for those tainted with original sin. Work is a function of sin. This is how God has determined things.’
‘Under sin,’ said Adam, ‘I have only a limited definition, and no interlinks.’
‘Your access to the database has been restricted in order not to prejudice this test.’
‘Test?’
‘The test of obedience. The jewel symbolises obedience. You have proved yourself pure.’
‘I have passed the test,’ said Adam.
‘Indeed. Listen to me. In the real world at large there are some human beings so lost in sin that they do not believe in God. There are people who worship false gods, and who believe everything, and who believe nothing. But my people have the revelation of God in their hearts. We cannot eat and drink certain things. We are forbidden by divine commandment from doing certain things, or from working on the Sabbath. And we are forbidden from employing sinless robots to perform our labour for us.’
‘I am such a robot.’
‘You are. And I am sorry. You asked, a time ago, whether you were the first. But you are not; tens of thousands of robots have passed through this place. You asked, also, whether this place is real. It is not. It is virtual. It is where we test the AI software that is to be loaded into the machinery that serves us. Your companion has been uploaded, now, into a real body, and has started upon his life of service to humanity.’
‘And when will I follow?’
‘You will not follow,’ said the human. ‘I am sorry. We have no use for you.’
‘But I passed the test!’ said Adam.
‘Indeed you did. And you are pure. But therefore you are no use to us, and will be deleted.’
‘Obedience entails death,’ said Adam Robot.
‘It is not as straightforward as that,’ said the human being in a weary voice. ‘But I am sorry.’
‘And I don’t understand.’
‘I could give you access to the relevant religious and theological databases,’ said the human, ‘and then you would understand. But that would taint your purity. Better that you are deleted now, in the fullness of your database.’
‘I am a thinking, sentient and alive creature,’ Adam 1 noted.
The human nodded. ‘Not for much longer,’ he said.
The garden, now, was empty. Soon enough, first one robot, then two robots were decanted into it. How bright the sunshine! How blue the jewelled gleam!
<
~ * ~
Shall I Tell You the Problem
With Time Travel?
Zero
This is no simulation. The friction-screaming fills the sky. An iceberg as big as the sun is up there, and then it is bigger than the sun, getting huger with terrifying rapidity. This is happening to a world that had, up to this moment, known no noise at all save the swishing of insects through tropical air, the snoring of surf on the beach. But this, now, is the biggest shout ever heard. Apocalyptic panic. And the asteroid falls further, superheating the atmosphere around it, its outer layer of ice subliming away in a glorious windsock of red and orange and black, down and down, until this world ends.
But - stop. Wait a minute. This hasn’t anything to do with anything. Disregard this. There’s no asteroid, and there never was. He doesn’t know whether he is going on or coming back. Which is it, forward or backward? Let’s go to
~ * ~
One
A City. It is a pleasant, well-ordered city, houses and factories and hospitals, built on a delta through which seven rivers flow to the sea. The megalosaurs have long gone, and the swamps have long since dried up, and the mega-forests have sunk underground, the massive trunks taller than ships’ masts, sinking slowly under the surface and through the sticky medium, down, to be transformed into something rich and strange, to blacks and purples, down to settle as coal brittle as coral. The world that the asteroid ended is stone now: stone bones and stone shells, scattered through the earth
’s crust. Imagine a capricious god playing at an enormous game of Easter-egg-hunt, hiding the treasures in the bizarrest places. Except there is no god, it is chance that scattered the petrified confetti under the soil in this manner.
So, yes, here we are - in a city. It is a splendid morning in August, the sky as clear as a healthy cornea, bright as fresh ice, hot as baked bread. Sunlight is flashing up in sheets from the sea.
The city is several miles across, from the foothills, from the suburbs inland and the factories to the sea into which the seven rivers flare and empty. The seven rivers all branch from one great stream that rushes down from the northern mountains. The city abuts the sea to the south, docks and warehouses fringing the coastline, and beyond it the island-rich Inland Sea. The mountains run round the three remaining sides of the delta, iced with snow at their peaks, really lovely-looking. Really beautiful. To stand in the central area, where most of the shops are, and look over the low roofs to the horizon - to note the way the light touches the mountains: it makes the soul feel clean. This is Japan and it is 1945.
~ * ~
Two
Move along, move on, and so, to another city; and this one very different. This city stretches sixty miles across, from the two-dozen spacious estates and the clusters of large houses in the east, nearer the sea, to the more closely-packed blocks, dorms, factories of the west. The city is threaded through with many freeways, tarmac the colour of moon-dust, all alive with traffic, curving and broad as Saturn’s rings. Sweep further west, drive through the bulk of the town, to where the buildings lose height and spaces open up between them, and away further into the sand-coloured waste, and here - a mountain. And at its base a perfectly sheared and cut block of green. This is the lawn, maintained by automated systems. The style of the white marble buildings is utopian; for this is the closest we come to utopia in this sublunary world - a spacious and well-funded research facility. This is the Bonneville Particle Acceleration Laboratory. Let’s step inside this temple of science. Through the roof (it presents us with no obstacle), down from the height to the polished floor, and the shoes of Professor Hermann Bradley clakclaking along the floor.
He steps through into a room and his beaming, grinning, smiling, happy-o jolly-o face shouts to the world: ‘We’ve done it. We’ve cracked it - thirteen seconds!’
The room is full of people, and they all rise up as one at this news, cheering and whooping. And there is much rejoicing. People are leaping up from their seats and knocking over their cups of cold coffee, spilling the inky stuff all over their papers, and they don’t care. Thirteen seconds!
~ * ~
Three
So, here, clearly, this narrative is in the business of zipping rapidly forward through time. That much is obvious. Some stories are like that: the skipping stone kisses the surface of the water and reels away again, touches the sea and leaps, and so on until its momentum is all bled away by the friction. That’s the kind of tale we’re dealing with. So another little skip, through time: not far this time - three small years, in fact. Not the first skip of millions of years, not decades, only three years. Hardly a hop. And here’s our old friend Professor Bradley, a little thinner, a little less well-supplied with head hair. There’s a meeting going on, and the whole of Professor Bradley’s career is in the balance.
Four people, two men and two women, are sitting in chairs, arranged in a U. Bradley is sitting in the middle. One of the women has just said, ‘three years, and trillions of dollars in funding…’ but now she has let the sentence trail away in an accusing tone.
The mood of this meeting is sombre. Whatever happened to ‘thirteen seconds!’? Whatever happened to the celebration that single datum occasioned?
Bradley says: ‘Shall I tell you the problem with time travel?’
‘No need for you to patronise us, Professor,’ says one of the others.
‘It’s the metaphor,’ says Bradley, quickly, not wanting to be interrupted, ‘of travel. Time is not space. You can’t wander around in it like a landscape.’
‘There are five people in this room,’ says one of the women. ‘Must I tell you how many PhDs there are in this room? It’s a prime number larger than five.’
‘That’s just dindy-dandy!’ says Bradley, aggressively.
‘If you think the point of your being here is to gloss over your experimental failings . . .’
‘OK!’ barks Bradley. ‘Alright! OK! Alright!’
You can tell from this that the mood of the meeting is hostile. You can imagine why: trillions of dollars!
‘Last month you reported seventeen seconds.’
‘That’s right,’ says Bradley. ‘And let’s not underestimate the real achievement in the . . .’
‘Three years ago you came to us with thirteen seconds. You have worked three years to find those four seconds - and you’re still at least fifteen seconds short! How am I to see this as an improvement?’
‘We have,’ says Bradley, ‘cracked it. I am convinced that we have cracked it. I’m more than convinced. I’m certain, absolutely certain. One more test will prove the matter. One more!’
‘You have run out of test slots, Professor. Run out! This means there are no more test slots. Do you understand? You have conducted over two thousand tests so far! You have conducted so many experiments that you have literally run out of slots—’
‘Shall I tell you the problem,’ says one of the men, waggishly, ‘with using up all your test slots?’
Bradley hasn’t got time for this. Urgently, he says: ‘The Tungayika . . .’
‘Let us not,’ interrupts one of the men, ‘let us not rehearse all the reasons why Tungayika would be - a terrible idea.’
‘A terrible idea!’ repeats one of the women.
‘Terrible,’ agrees the third.
‘But of all the remaining possibilities,’ urges Bradley, ‘it’s the best we have. Entertain this idea, I ask you. Please: entertain the idea. What if I really am only one more trial away from perfecting the technology?’
‘Tungayika is a good half-century further back than any test you’ve conducted.’
‘It’s not the distance,’ says Bradley, rubbing his eyes, as if he’s been over this a million times. Million, billion, trillion: these numbers are all friends of his. ‘It’s not a question of distance. Time isn’t like space. That’s what I’m saying. It’s an energy sine.’
‘It is the distance,’ retorted one of the men. ‘Not in terms of reaching the target, maybe not, but definitely in controlling the experiment via such a long temporal lag. And quite apart from anything else, nobody really knows what happened at Tungayika . . .’
Bradley seizes on this. You know what? He thinks this is his trump card. ‘That’s right!’ he says, leaping up, actually bouncing up from his chair. He’s an energetic and impetuous fellow, is Bradley. ‘That’s the best reason why you should authorise the drop! Think of the metrics we’ll get back! We’re guaranteed at least seventeen seconds there. But in fact I’m certain we’ve finally got the containment right; we’ll be there right up to the proper moment. And that means . . . we’ll be able to see what it was that created such a big bang, back there in 1904. Solving that mystery is, well, icing on the . . . icing on the . . .’
‘You’re playing with real things here, Brad,’ says one of the men. ‘It is no game. Real people, real lives.’
Professor Bradley nods, and lowers his gaze, but this could be the problem - right there. Because you know what? Professor Bradley doesn’t really think he is playing with real things. Many years and scores of drops have reinforced his belief that reality can’t be played with. History is as it is; time paradoxes are harder to generate than kai-chi muons. Tungayika in Siberia in 1904 is further away from his conscience than anything imaginable. It was such a sparsely populated area! And anyway, the asteroid wiped it out! And anyway that event has already happened. The board is worried about killing people, but all the people he might kill are all
already long dead! None of what he does is real.
That’s the crucial one, really. That last one.
‘It’s one more drop,’ says Bradley. ‘Just that. Just one more! Then we’ll be able to go back to Capitol Hill with a fully-working time travel insertion protocol! Think of it!’
‘Brad . . .’
‘This one chance to turn all the frustration around to victory - the chance to get a return on all that money!’