Isaac Asimov - Utopia

Q. But many humans now alive are likely to die young, and die most unpleasantly, if we do no repair the climate. By preventing the comet impact, there is a high probability you are condemning those very real people to premature death. Where is the comet? I order you to tell me its coordinates, mass, and trajectory.

A. I cannot tell you. I must tell you. I cannot tell you—

And so on, unto death.

It would have gone on that way, if it had lasted even that long. Either the massive conflict between First and Second Law compulsions would have burned out his brain, or else Kaelor would have invoked the second clause of First Law. He could not, through inaction, allow harm to humans.

Merely by staying alive, with the unerasable information of where the comet was in his head, he represented a danger to humans. As long as he stayed alive, there was, in theory, a way to get past the confidentiality features of Kaelor’s brain assembly. There was no way Fredda could do it here, now, but in her own lab, with all her equipment, and with perhaps a week’s time, she could probably defeat the safeties and tap into everything he knew.

And Kaelor knew that, or at least he had to assume it was the case. In order to prevent harm to humans, Kaelor would have to will his own brain to disorganize, disassociate, lose its positronic pathing.

He would have to will himself to die.

That line of questioning would kill him, either through Law-Conflict burnout or compelled suicide. He was still perilously close to both deaths as it was. Maybe it was time to take some of the pressure off. She could reduce at least some of the stress produced by Second Law. “I release you from the prohibition against volunteering information and opinions. You may say whatever you wish.”

“I spent all of last night using my hyperwave link to tie into the data network and rebuild as many of Dr. Lentrall’s work files as possible, using my memories of various operations and interfaces with the computers to restore as much as I could while remaining in accordance with the Three Laws. I would estimate that I was able to restore approximately sixty percent of the results-level data, and perhaps twenty percent of the raw data.”

“Thank you,” said Lentrall. “That was most generous of you.”

“It was my duty, Dr. Lentrall. First Law prevented me from abstaining from an action that could prevent harm to a human.”

“Whether or not you had to do it, you did it,” said Lentrall. “Thank you.”

There was a moment’s silence, and Kaelor looked from Lentrall to Fredda and back again. “There is no need for these games,” he said. “I know what you want, and you know thhhat I I I knowww.”

Lentrall and Fredda exchanged a look, and it was plain Lentrall knew as well as she did that it was First Law conflict making it hard for Kaelor to speak.

Kaelor faced a moral conundrum few humans could have dealt with well. How to decide between probable harm and death to an unknown number of persons; and the misery and the lives ruined by the ruined planetary climate. And it is my husband who must decide, Fredda told herself, the realization a sharp stab of pain. If we succeed here, I am presenting him with that nightmare choice. She thrust that line of thought to one side. She had to concentrate on Kaelor, and the precious knowledge hidden inside him. Fredda could see hope sliding away as the conflicts piled up inside the tortured robot’s mind. “We know,” she said at last, admitting defeat. “And we understand. We know that you cannot tell us, and we will not ask.” It was pointless to go further. It was inconceivable that Kaelor would be willing or able to tell them, or that he would survive long enough to do so, even if he tried.

Lentrall looked at Fredda in surprise, and then relief. “Yes,” he said. “We will not ask. We see now that it would be futile to do so. I thought Dr. Leving might have some trick, some technique, some way of learning the truth without destroying you, but I see that I was wrong. We will not ask this of you, and we will not seek to gain the knowledge from you in other ways. This is our promise.”

“I join in this promise,” Fredda said.

“Hu-hu-humansss lie,” Kaelor said.

“We are not lying,” Fredda said, her voice as urgent as she could make it. “There would be nothing we could gain by asking you, and thus no motive for lying.”

“Yourrrr promisse does—does—does not apply to other humans.”

“We will keep the fact of what you know secret,” Lentrall said, a note of hysteria in his voice. “Kaelor, please! Don’t!”

“I tried tooo kee—keep the fact of wwwhat I knewww secret,” said Kaelor, “but yoooou realized that I had seeen what I saw, and that I woullld remember.” He paused a moment, as if to gather the strength to speak again. “Othhers could do the same,” he said in a voice that was suddenly little more than a whisper. “I cannot take thhat channnce.”

“Please!” Davlo cried out. “No!”

“Remaininng alivvve represents inaction,” Kaelor said, his voice suddenly growing stronger as he reached his decision. “I must act to prevent harm to humans.”

His eyes glowed brighter, his gaze turned from Davlo to Fredda, as if looking at each of them one last time, and then he looked straight ahead, at the wall, at nothing at all, at infinity. There was a low-pitched hum, the smell of burning insulation, and suddenly the light was gone from his eyes. His head sagged forward, and a thin wisp of smoke curled up from the base of his neck.

The room was silent. Fredda and Davlo looked at each other, and at the dead thing hanging on the frame in the center of the room.

“By all the forgotten gods,” Fredda whispered. “What have we done?”

“You did nothing, Doctor,” said Davlo, his voice nothing but a whisper as he fought to hold back a sob. “Nothing but help me do what I would have done. But as for me,” he said, his voice close to cracking, “I’ll tell you what I’ve done.”

He moved a step or two forward, and looked up at Kaelor’s body.

“I’ve just killed the closest thing to a friend I’ve ever had.”

JADELO GILDERN LIKED to tell himself that his job was to guess—and to guess correctly. The job of an intelligence chief was not to know everything. That was impossible. But a good intelligence chief was capable of seeing the whole puzzle when many of the pieces were lost, or hidden, or even disguised. A good intel chief could see the underlying pattern, take what he knew of the facts, what he knew of the personalities involved and figure out how they would interact. He could calculate what a person’s words and actions—or absence of words and actions—actually meant.

And as he sat in his office in the Ironhead Building, and thought over the situation, he was close to reaching an interesting conclusion. He was almost tempted to go the whole distance now. He knew it had to be the Settlers behind the Government Tower chaos, and it took no excess of brainpower to guess that they had been after Lentrall. And Gildern knew exactly what other steps he himself would have taken to suppress the information Lentrall had. Presumably the Settler leaders, Tonya Welton and Cinta Melloy, had as much sense as he did.

That much was all speculative, of course. However, one thing he did know to something like a certainty. He had already divined where Kresh had vanished to. Gildern had been able to use the Ironhead taps into the air traffic control system, and spot three long-range aircar flights, two starting at the governor’s private residence, and one terminating there. One, the first, had been untraceable in the storm. The return flight of the same vehicle had come in from precisely one hundred and eighty degrees away from the direction of Purgatory. That was exactly the sort of thing a robot would do if told to take evasive action. And then, a third flight, with a flight plan filed, showing a destination of First Circle, a small and far-off suburb of Hades. First Circle’s air traffic control had no record of the aircar arriving. Either it had crashed, or it had gone somewhere else. Gildern could guess where.