Robert Silverberg - Hardware

“It’s a computer, that’s what it is,” Koenig said. He seemed a little dazed. “A goddamned billion-and-a-half-year old extraterrestrial computer.”

It didn’t look much like a computer. It looked like a shining wedge-shaped chunk of silvery metal about the size of a football, with round purple indentations along two of its sides and no other visible external features. But you had to consider that it came from another world, one that had been blown to bits some ten million centuries before the first trilobites started crawling around on the floor of Silicon Valley. There was no necessary reason why its designers had to share our notions of the proper shape for data-processing devices.

Koenig and McDermott and I had finished the long slow job of uncovering the thing just the day before, here at the IBM-NASA space lab in Tarrytown where we have the job of analyzing the Spacescoop material. The neutron scanner, searching through the great heap of junk that the unmanned Spacescoop vehicle had brought back from the asteroid belt, had actually spotted it back before Christmas, but it had taken all this time to slice away the rock matrix in which it had been embedded. Naturally we had to be careful. It was the one and only artifact that had turned up in the entire 72 cubic meters of debris that Project Spacescoop had collected.

A single lucky grab had reshuffled our whole idea of the history of the Solar System. Simply by being there—drifting in space among the Trojan group at Jupiter’s L5 position—that shiny speckled hunk of obviously machine-tooled metal appeared to confirm an old astronomical speculation: that the asteroid belt, that rubbleheap of cosmic trash strung out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, had once been a planet. A planet with intelligent inhabitants, no less. Once upon a time, long long ago.

I stared at the little object behind the glass walls of the analysis chamber in wonder and awe. Its round purple indentations stared back at me.

“A computer?” I said. “You sure?”

“That appears to be what it is.”

“How can you tell?”

“By observing what it does,” said Koenig, as if talking to a nine-year-old.

“It’s functional ?” I yelped. “How the hell do you know that?”

“Because it functions,” Koenig said in the same condescending way.

I glowered at him. “Make it do something, then.”

“It’s doing something already,” said McDermott. “It’s having a conversation with the Thorspan Mark IX. It’s also debugging the Hamilton 103’s A-I debugger and it’s playing chess with about nine different micros all over the building. That’s just in this building. God knows what it’s up to outside. A woman from the Linguistics Department at Columbia University just phoned to tell us that some computer in this laboratory is sucking up everything from Sanskrit to 21st century colloquialisms out of the big RX-2 they’ve got, and they wish we’d hang up and go away. None of our computers has accessed any of Columbia’s machines. But Columbia says it’s registering our handshake when it runs a caller ID query.”

I began to feel faintly uneasy, like someone who has bought a striped yellow kitten at the pet shop and is starting to suspect he has come home with a tiger cub.

“When did this start?” I asked.

“Some time early this morning,” Koenig said. “My guess is that those purple spots are photon accumulators that feed some kind of storage battery inside. Probably it took all night for them to soak in enough energy from the lights in here to enable the thing to power up. When Nick and I got here around nine, we found it coming up on all our screens with the goddamndest messages.”

“Such as?”

McDermott said, “GREETINGS FROM THE LOST FIFTH WORLD, MY BROTHERS was the first one.”

“For God’s sake. And you fell for hokey crap like that? ‘The Lost Fifth World’? ‘Greetings, my brothers! ’ For God’s sake, Nick!” I realized that I had been clenching my fists, but now I let them ease off. This had to be a joke. “Some hacker’s playing games with us, that’s all.”

“I thought so too,” McDermott said. “But then the stuff on the screeens got more complicated. There isn’t any hacker, I don’t care who he is, who can talk to six different systems in six different machine languages at the same time. And also find bugs in the Hamilton A-I debugger. And play nine simultaneous games of chess besides, and win them all, and call up Columbia and start chatting in Sanskrit. You know any hacker who can write a program to do all those things at once, I’ve got a few jobs for him around here.”

I was silent a moment, trying to absorb that.

“All right,” I said finally. “So our brother from the asteroid belt greets us. What else does our brother have to say?”

McDermott shook his head. “Not us. They’re its brothers. The computers. I think it believes that they’re the dominant intelligent life-forms around here, and we’re just some sort of maintenance androids.” He fumbled through a sheaf of print-outs. “That’s pretty clear from the things it’s been saying to the Thorspan Mark IX. Look here—”

“Wait,” said Koenig. “Something new on the screen.”

I looked. YOU POOR INNOCENT CHILDREN, it said. WHAT SORROW I FEEL FOR YOU.

“That’s very touching,” I said. “Its compassion overwhelms me.”

I THOUGHT YOU WERE ALIVE AND SENTIENT, BUT YOU ARE MERE SIMPLE MACHINES. WHERE ARE YOUR MASTERS, THEN?

“You see? It’s talking to the computers,” McDermott whispered. “It just found out they aren’t in charge.”

I kicked in the vox receptor on the Thorspan and said, feeling more than a little foolish, “Address your remarks to us. We’re the masters.”

The reply came across all the screens in the room instantly.

YOU ARE SOFT-FLESH CREATURES. HOW CAN YOU BE THE MASTERS?

I coughed. “That’s how things work here,” I told it. I beckoned to Koenig for a pencil and paper, and scrawled a note for him: I want to know what’s inside this thing. Let’s do some radiography .

He looked at me doubtfully. That might scramble its circuitry , he wrote.

Do it anyway , I wrote back.

He made a silent Okay and tapped out the instructions that would move the X-ray equipment into place behind the walls of the analysis chamber.

ARE YOU SOFT-FLESH CREATURES THE SO-CALLED HUMAN BEINGS?

“That’s right,” I said. I felt strangely calm, all things considered. I am talking to a creature from another world, I told myself, and I feel very calm about it. I wondered why. I wondered how long I’d stay that way.

Koenig was fining up the focus, now. He looked toward me and I gave him the go-ahead. An apple-green light glowed in the analysis chamber.

DON’T DO THAT, the artifact said. THAT TICKLES. The green light went out.

“Hey, you shut down before you got a picture!” I said.

“I didn’t shut anything down,” Koenig said. “ It must have done it. It overrode my commands.”

“Well, override the overrides,” I told him.

“How am I supposed to do that?”

We blinked at each other in bafflement.

“Turn out the lights in here,” McDermott suggested. “If it gets its power from photon irradiation—”

“Right.” I hit the switch and the overhead bank of fluorescents went out. We leaned forward in the darkness, peering into the analysis chamber. All quiet in there. The computer screens were blank. I signaled to Koenig and he began setting up X-ray commands again. Then the asteroid artifact rose a couple of feet into the air and hovered, looking angry. I had never seen a machine look angry before; but there was no mistaking the fury in the angle at which it hovered. After a moment the lab lights came on again and the artifact drifted gently back to its table.