Isaac Asimov - Caliban

If any of those cases were possible, if the start of his memory was not a reliable marker for the start of his existence, then there were no limits to the actions he might have taken before his memory began. He could have been awake, aware, active, for five seconds before that moment—or five years. Probably not that long, however. His body showed no signs of wear, no indication that any parts had ever been replaced or repaired. His on-line maintenance log was quite blank—though it, too, could have been erased. Still, it seemed reasonable to assume that his body was quite new.

But that was a side issue. How had that woman come to be on the floor in a pool of blood? It was at least a reasonable guess that she had been attacked in some way. Had she been dead or alive? He reviewed his visual memories of the moment. The woman had been breathing, but she could easily have expired after he left. Had the woman died, or had she survived?

The thought brought him up short. Why had he not even asked himself such questions before?

Then, like twin blazes of fire, two more questions slashed through his mind:

Had he been the one who attacked her? And, regardless of whether or not he had—was he suspected of the attack?

Caliban stopped walking and looked down at his hands.

He was astonished to realize that his fists were clenched. He opened out his fingers and tried to walk as if he knew where he was going.

THE night before, Alvar Kresh had taken a needle-shower in hopes of helping him to sleep. Tonight he took one in hopes of waking up. He was tempted to watch the recording of Leving’s lecture while sitting up in bed, but he knew just how tired he was, and just how easy it would be for him to doze off if he did that. No, far better to get dressed again in fresh clothes and watch on the televisor screen in the upper parlor.

Kresh settled down in front of the televisor, ordered one of the household robots to adjust the temperature a bit too low for comfort, and told another to bring a pot of hot, strong tea. Sitting in a cold room, with a good strong dosage of caffeine, he ought to be able to stay awake.

“All right, Donald,” he said, “start the recording.”

The televisor came to life, the big screen taking up an entire wall of the room. The recording began with a shot of the Central Auditorium downtown. Kresh had seen many plays broadcast from there, and most times the proceeds were rather sedate, if not sedated, and it looked as if the occasion of Leving’s first lecture had been no exception. The auditorium had been designed to hold about a thousand people and their attendant robots, the robots sitting behind their owners on low jumper seats. It looked to be about half-empty.

“…and so, without further ado,” the theater manager was saying, “allow me to introduce one of our leading scientists. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dr. Fredda Leving.” He turned toward her, smiling, leading the applause.

The figure of Fredda Leving stood up and walked toward the lectern, greeted by a rather tentative round of applause. The camera zoomed in closer, and Kresh was startled to be reminded what Leving had looked like before the attack. In the hospital, she had been wan, pale, delicate-looking, her shaved head making her look too thin. The Fredda Leving in this recording looked as if she had a slight touch of stage fright, but she was fit, vigorous-looking, with her dark hair framing her face. All in all, an unfashionably striking young woman.

She reached the lectern and looked out over the audience, her face clearly betraying her nervousness.

She cleared her throat and began. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” She fumbled with her notes for a moment, clearly still somewhat nervous, and then began. “I would like to start my talk this evening with a question,” she said. “One that might seem flippant, one wherein the answer might be utterly obvious to you all. And yet, I would submit, it is one that has gone thousands of years without a proper answer. I do not suggest that I can supply that missing answer myself, now, tonight, but I do think that it is long past time for us to at least pose the question.

“And that question is: What are robots for?”

The view cut away to reaction shots of the people in the auditorium. There was a stirring and a muttering in the audience, a strangled laugh or two. People shifted in their seats and looked at each other with confused expressions.

“As I said, it is a question that few of us would ever stop to ask. At first glance, it is like asking what use the sky is, or what the planet we stand upon is for, or what good it does to breathe air. As with these other things, robots seem to us so much a part of the natural order of things that we cannot truly picture a world that does not contain them. As with these natural things, we—quite incorrectly—tend to assume that the universe simply placed them here for our convenience. But it was not nature who placed robots among us. We did that to ourselves.”

Not for ourselves, Kresh noticed. To ourselves. What the devil had Leving been saying the night of the lecture? He found himself wishing that he had been there.

Fredda Leving’s image kept talking. “On an emotional level, at least, we perceive robots not as tools, not as objects we have made, not even as intelligent beings with which we share the universe—but as something basic, placed here by the hand of nature, something part of us. We cannot imagine a world worth living in without them, just as our friends the Settlers think a world that does include them is no fit place for humans.

“But I digress from my own question. ‘What are robots for?’ As we seek after an answer to that question, we must remember that they are not part of the natural universe. They are an artificial creation, no more and no less than a starship or a coffee cup or a terraforming station. We built these robots—or at least our ancestors built them, and then set robots to work building more robots.

“Robots, then, are tools we have built for our own use. That is at least the start of an answer. But it is by no means the whole answer.

“For robots are the tools that think. In that sense, they are more than our tools—they are our relatives, our descendants.”

Again there was a hubbub in the audience, a stirring, this time of anger and surprise. “Forgive me,” Fredda said. “That is perhaps an unfortunate way to phrase it. But it is, in a very real sense, the truth. Robots are the way they are because we humans made them. They could not exist without us. There are those who believe that we humans could not exist without them. But that statement is so much dangerous nonsense.”

Now there was a full-fledged roar from the back of the hall, where the Ironheads had congregated. “Yes, that does strike a nerve, doesn’t it?” Fredda asked, the veneer of courtesy dropping away from her voice. “ ‘We could not live without them’—it is not a factual statement, but it is an article of faith. We have convinced ourselves that we could not survive without robots, equating the way we live with our lives themselves. We have to look no further than the Settlers to know that humans can live—and live well—without robots.”

A chorus of boos and shouts filled the hallway. Fredda raised her hands for quiet, her face stern and firm. At last the crowd settled down a bit. “I do not say that we should live that way. I build robots for a living. I believe in robots. I believe they have not yet reached their full potential. They have shaped our society, a society I believe has many admirable qualities.

“But, my friends, our society is calcified. Fossilized. Rigid. We have gotten to the point where we are certain, absolutely certain, that ours is the only possible way to live. We tell ourselves that we must live precisely as our ancestors did, that our world is perfect just as it is.