Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

Having lived only one of his two assigned centuries, he wondered if he could last through another hundred years of such tedium.

Curanov's private counselor, a robot named Bikermien, assured him that this boredom was only temporary and easily alleviated. If one was clever, Bikermien said, one could find limitless excitement as well as innumerable, valuable situations for data collection about both one's environment and one's mechanical aptitude and heritage. Bikermien, in the last half of his second century, had developed such an enormous and complex data vault that he was assigned stationary duty as a counselor, attached to a mother computer, utterly immobile. By now, extremely adept at finding excitement even through secondhand experience, Bikermien did not mourn the loss of his mobility; he was, after all, a spiritual superior to most robots, inwardly directed. Therefore, when Bikermien advised, Curanov listened, however skeptical he might be.

Curanov's problem, according to Bikermien, was that he had started out in life, from the moment he'd left the factory, to pit himself against the greatest of forces — the wildest sea, the coldest cold, the highest temperatures, the greatest pressures — and now, having conquered these things, he could see no interesting challenges beyond them. Yet, the counselor said that Curanov had overlooked some of the most fascinating explorations. The quality of any challenge was directly related to one's ability to meet it; the less adequate one felt, the better the experience, the richer the contest, and the more handsome the data reward.

Does this suggest anything to you? Bikermien inquired, without speaking, the telebeam open between them.

Nothing.

So Bikermien explained it:

Hand-to-hand combat with a full-grown male ape might seem like an uninteresting, easy challenge at first glance; a robot was the mental and physical superior of any ape. However, one could always modify oneself in order to even the odds of what might appear to be a sure thing. If a robot couldn't fly, couldn't see as well at night as in the daylight, couldn't communicate except vocally, couldn't run faster than an antelope, couldn't hear a whisper at a thousand yards — in short, if all of his standard abilities were dulled, except for his thinking capacity, might not a robot find that a hand-to-hand battle with an ape was a supremely exciting event?

I see your point, Curanov admitted. To understand the grandeur of simple things, one must humble himself.

Exactly.

And so it was that, on the following day, Curanov boarded the express train north to Montana, where he was scheduled to do some hunting in the company of four other robots, all of whom had been stripped to their essentials.

Ordinarily they would have flown under their own power. Now none had that ability.

Ordinarily they would have used telebeams for communication. Now they were forced to talk to one another in that curious, clicking language that had been designed especially for machines but that robots had been able to do without for more than six hundred years.

Ordinarily, the thought of going north to hunt deer and wolves would have profoundly bored them. Now, however, each of them felt a curious tingle of anticipation, as if this were a more important ordeal than any he had faced before.

A brisk, efficient robot named Janus met the group at the small station house just outside of Walker's Watch, toward the northernmost border of Montana. To Curanov, it was clear that Janus had spent several months in this uneventful duty assignment, and that he might be near the end of his obligatory two years' service to the Central Agency. He was actually too brisk and efficient. He spoke rapidly, and he behaved altogether as if he must keep moving and doing in order not to have time to contemplate the uneventful and unexciting days that he had spent in Walker's Watch. He was one of those robots too eager for excitement; one day, he would tackle a challenge that he had not been prepared for, and he would end himself.

Curanov looked at Tuttle, another robot who, on the train north, had begun an interesting if silly argument about the development of the robot personality. He contended that until quite recently, in terms of centuries, robots hadn't possessed individual personalities. Each, Tuttle claimed, had been like the other, cold and sterile, with no private dreams. A patently ridiculous theory. Tuttle had been unable to explain how this could have been, but he'd refused to back down from his position.

Now, watching Janus chatter at them in a nervous staccato, Curanov was incapable of envisioning an era when the Central Agency would have dispatched mindless robots from the factories. The whole purpose of life was to explore, to carefully store data collected from an individual viewpoint, even if it was repetitive data. How could mindless robots ever function in the necessary manner?

As Steffan, another of their group, had said, such theories were on a par with belief in Second Awareness. (Some believed, without evidence, that the Central Agency occasionally made a mistake and, when a robot's allotted life span was up, only partially erased his accumulated memory before refitting him and sending him out of the factory again. These robots — or so the superstitious claimed — had an advantage and were among those who matured fast enough to be elevated to duty as counselors and, sometimes, even to service in the Central Agency itself.)

Tuttle had been angered to hear his views on robot personality equated with wild tales of Second Awareness. To egg him on, Steffan also suggested that Tuttle believed in that ultimate of hobgoblins, the "human being." Disgusted, Tuttle settled into a grumpy silence while the others enjoyed the jest.

"And now," Janus said, calling Curanov back from his reverie, "I'll issue your supplies and see you on your way."

Curanov, Tuttle, Steffan, Leeke, and Skowski crowded forward, eager to begin the adventure.

Each of the five was given: binoculars of rather antique design, a pair of snowshoes that clipped and bolted to their feet, a survival pack of tools and greases with which to repair themselves in the event of some unforeseen emergency, an electric hand torch, maps, and a drug rifle complete with an extra clip of one thousand darts.

"This is all, then?" Leeke asked. He had seen as much danger as Curanov, perhaps even more, but now he sounded frightened.

"What else would you need?" Janus asked impatiently.

Leeke said, "Well, as you know, certain modifications have been made to us. For one thing, our eyes aren't what they were, and—"

"You've a torch for darkness," Janus said.

"And then, our ears—" Leeke began.

"Listen cautiously, walk quietly," Janus suggested.

"We've had a power reduction to our legs," Leeke said. "If we should have to run—"

"Be stealthy. Creep up on your game before it knows you're there, and you'll not need to chase it."

"But," Leeke persisted, "weakened as we are, if we should have to run from something—"

"You're only after deer and wolves," Janus reminded him. "The deer won't give chase — and a wolf hasn't any taste for steel flesh."

Skowski, who had thus far been exceptionally quiet, not even joining the good-natured roasting the others had given Tuttle on the train, now stepped forward. "I've read that this part of Montana has an unusual number of… unexplained reports."

"Reports of what?" Janus asked.

Skowski swept the others with his yellow visual receptors, then looked back at Janus. "Well… reports of footprints similar to our own but not those of any robot, and reports of robotlike forms seen in the woods."

"Oh," Janus said, waving a glittering hand as if to brush away Skowski's suggestion like a fluff of dust, "we get a dozen reports each month about `human beings' sighted in wilder regions northwest of here."