Isaac Asimov - Utopia

Kresh laughed. “Not a bad line, that,” he said. “You might catch me stealing it for use in a speech one of these fine days.” The governor looked from the Unit Dee Controller to the Unit Dum Controller, and then back up at Soggdon. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get this thing set up.”

“GOOOD MORRN-ING. GOVVVENORR Kressh.” Two voices came through the headphone to address him in unison—one a light, feminine soprano, the other a gravelly, slightly slurred, and genderless alto. They spoke the same words at the same time, but they did not synchronize with each other exactly.

The voices seemed to be coming from out of nowhere at all. No doubt that was an audio illusion produced by the stereo effect of the headphones, but it was nonetheless disconcerting. Alvar Kresh frowned and looked behind himself, as if he expected there to be two robots there, one standing behind each ear. He knew perfectly well there would be nothing to see, but there was some part of him that had to check all the same.

The whole setup seemed lunatic, irrational—but the iron hand of the Three Laws dictated that there be some such arrangement. Kresh decided to make the best of it. “Good morning,” he said, speaking into the headset’s microphone. “I take it I am addressing both Unit Dee and Unit Dum?”

“Thaat izz comect, Governorrr,” the two voices replied. “Somme vizzzitors finnnd iiit dissconcerrrting to hear usss both. Shalll we filllter ouut onne voice?”

“That might be helpful,” Kresh said. Disconcerting was far too mild a word. The two voices speaking as one was downright eerie.

“Very well,” the feminine voice said in his left ear, by itself, speaking with a sudden brisk, clipped tone, a jarring change from what had come before. Perhaps she found it easier to speak without the need to synchronize with Unit Dum. “Both of us are still on-line to you, but you will hear only one of us at a time. We will shift from one speaker to the other from time to time to remind you of our dual presence.” The voice he heard was almost excessively cheerful, with an oddly youthful tone to it. A playful voice, full of amusement and good humor.

“This higher-pitched voice I hear now,” Kresh said, “it is Unit Dee?”

“That is correct, sir.”

Suddenly the other voice, low-pitched, impersonal and slightly slurred, spoke into his right ear. “This is the voice of Unit Dum.”

“Good. Fine. Whatever. I need to speak with you both.”

“Please go ahead, Governor,” said Unit Dee in his left ear again. Kresh began to wonder if the voice-switching was some sort of game Unit Dee was playing, a way of putting him off his stride. If so, it was not going to work.

“I intend to,” he said. “I want to talk to you about an old project, from the period of the first effort to terraform this world.”

“And what would that be?” asked Unit Dee.

“The proposal to create a Polar Sea as a means of moderating planetary temperatures. I want you to consider an idea based on that old concept.”

“Ready to accept input,” said the gravelly, mechanical voice in his right ear. It was plain that very little effort had gone into giving Unit Dum a simulated personality. That was, perhaps, just as well. Kresh had the sense of talking to a schizophrenic as it was.

“Here is the idea. Assume that, in the present day, the existing Polar Depression were flooded, with inlets to the Southern Ocean provided by cutting a canal through the Utopia region on the eastern side of Terra Grande, and by redirecting the flow of the River Lethe in the west. Assume the work could be done very rapidly, within a few years’ time.”

There was the briefest of pauses. “This would cause a Polar Sea to form,” Unit Dum went on. “However, the concept is implausible. There is no way of performing such an enormous engineering task in any practical length of time.”

“Even if we could do it, I’m sure the collateral damage to existing ecosystems and property would be huge,” said Unit Dee, clearly talking more to Unit Dum than to Kresh.

“Current projections show the issues of damage to ecosystems and property become moot in between two and two point five standard centuries,” Unit Dum replied.

“Why do they become moot?” Kresh asked, fearing the answer.

“Because,” Unit Dee replied, her voice clearly unhappy, “our current projection shows all ecosystems collapsing and all humans—the owners of the property—either dying or being evacuated from the planet by that time.”

Kresh was genuinely surprised. “I was not aware that the numbers were that bad. I thought we at least had a chance at survival.”

“Oh, yes,” said Unit Dee. “There is at least a chance human life will survive here. That is in large degree a matter of choice for your descendants. Human beings can survive on a lifeless, airless, sterile ball of rock if they choose to do so. If the city of Hades were domed over or rebuilt underground, and properly shielded, it could no doubt sustain a reduced population indefinitely after the climate collapses.”

“But things are improving,” Kresh protested. “We’re turning things around!”

“So you are—for the moment, in localized areas. But there is little or no doubt that the current short-term improvements cannot be sustained and extended in the longer term. There is simply not enough labor or equipment to expand the zones of improved climate far enough, and establish them firmly enough, for them to be self-sustaining.”

“And therefore there is no real point in worrying over ecological damage or property loss,” Kresh said. “Fine. Disregard those two points—or, rather, factor in the results of attempting to deal with them, of efforts to repair the damage.”

“The calculation involves a near-infinite number of variables,” said Unit Dum. “Recommend a pre screening process to select range of near best-case scenarios and eliminate obviously failed variants.”

“Approved,” Kresh said.

“Even the prescreening process will take a few minutes,” said Unit Dee. “Please stand by.”

“As if I had much choice,” Kresh said to no one in particular. He sat there, looking from Unit Dee’s smooth and perfect hemispherical enclosure to the boxy, awkward, hard-edged looking enclosure around Unit Dum. Dum’s enclosure, or containment, or whatever, at least had the merit of looking like machinery. Dum looked like it did something, was hooked into things, made things happen. It was hardware and wires. It was solid, firmly attached to reality by power cables and datastreams. Dum was of this world.

In many more senses than one, Dee plainly was not. She was sheltered from the rude outside universe. She was the smooth and perfect one, sealed off in her idealized containment enclosure that needed special treatment. Dee looked more like an abstract sculpture than a working robot. She looked liked something that was supposed to stand off, aloof, on her own, a divine being or magic totem to be consulted rather than a machine meant to do work. And was that so far off? Kresh glanced at Soggdon on the far side of the lab, pretending to be puttering around with something or other while she kept a nervous, unhappy eye on Kresh.

Yes, indeed. Unit Dee had her acolytes, her priests, who ministered to her whims and did their best to rearrange the world to suit her convenience, who walked on eggshells rather than anger or upset the divine being on whom all things depended. Kresh thought suddenly of the oracles of near-forgotten legend. They had been beings of great power—but of great caprice and trickery as well. Their predictions would always come true—but never in the way expected, and always at an unexpected price. Not a pleasant thought.

“I believe we are ready to begin with the main processing of the problem,” Dee said, her voice coming so abruptly into the silence that Kresh jumped ten centimeters in the air. “Would you care to observe our work?” she asked.