Isaac Asimov - Caliban

The deputies learned a lot from Chestrie and the other robots, and from the copious journals Gidi kept, chronicling his search for what he called “a comfortable life.”

The journals seemed to reveal the moment when the downhill slide began. He attended a party that did not go well, one that ended with an inebriated fellow guest attacking Gidi over some imagined insult.

The violence stunned him, shocked him. Gidi stopped attending parties, and soon stopped leaving home altogether.

He could stay where he was, in perfect comfort. With his comm panels and entertainment systems all about him, why would he want to move? With his robots eager and willing to do anything and everything for him, it began to seem foolish, almost criminal, to act for himself when the robots could always do things better and faster, do them with no upset to his routine, his pattern. He could lose himself in his art catalogs, in dictating his articles, in endless fussy arrangements for his monthly parties. In his journals, he described himself as “a happy man in a perfect world.”

At least, all was nearly perfect. The more peace and quiet he had, the more the remaining disturbances irritated him.

Any needless action, by Gidi or by his robots, became unthinkably unpleasant. He began to obsess on simplification as much as regularity, determined to strip away to the essentials, and then strip away whatever he could of the remainder. He set out on a quest to remove all the things that could disturb his quiet, his peace, his solitude, his comfort of being secure in his own place. Banish them, eliminate them, and he could achieve a perfect existence.

Things started to close in as his obsession gathered strength. Gidi realized he need never leave his comm room, or even get out of his favorite recliner chair. He ordered his robots to bring his food in the chair, wash him in the chair. And then came the moment when, beyond question, even by the standards of the most hermetic Spacer, the scales tipped into madness. Gidi ordered his robots to contact a medical supply service, procure the needed equipment. He replaced his chair with a hospital-type bed with a floater-field, the sort used for burn victims and long-term patients. It would eliminate the danger of bedsores, and it had built-in waste-removal lines, thus removing his last reason for getting up. If the system was not entirely perfect, and there were occasional minor leakages, the robots could take care of it.

But even perfect indolence was not enough. There was too much activity around him. He soon grew weary of the robots fussing about him, and ordered them to find ways to reduce their level of activity, cutting back on housecleaning, and then finally ceasing it altogether. He ordered them to stop care of the exterior grounds as well, claiming that the mere thought of them scurrying about out there, pruning and cutting and digging, was most upsetting to his calm.

He decided that his parties had become a bore, and a disruption. He gave them up. Besides, they had forced him to waste too much time on grooming. Once the parties were no more, that problem was eliminated.

He ordered his own bathing schedule cut back, and then cut back again and again. He had his beard and scalp permanently depilated, so he need never shave or cut his hair again. He had his finger- and toenails treated to prevent them from growing.

He did not like the robots bringing him meals and then hovering over him, clattering about with the dishes. He ordered his food brought to him in disposable containers and told the robots to leave him the moment he got his food. But there was still the problem of discarding the containers. He could simply drop them on the floor when he was done, but the sight of them bothered him and he would be forced to endure the graver disturbance of a robot coming in to clean them up.

He discovered that if he flung empty food cartons over his shoulder, they would not be in his line of sight, and thus their presence would not disturb him. But still, the sounds of the robots cleaning was most annoying, and he ordered them to stop.

The human nose becomes desensitized to a given odor over a period of time, and Gidi was completely unbothered by the filth, the stench, the squalor.

But even meals themselves became a distraction. Gidi ordered his robots to install drinking and nutrient tubes. Then he had merely to turn his head left or right and suck his food and drink from tubes.

At last, Gidi had achieved as near to his ideal as could be imagined. Nothing need ever disturb him again. He had reached a state of perfect solitude. He ordered his robots out of his room and told them to stay in their niches until and unless he called for them, and such times became increasingly rare.

And then they stopped altogether.

Of course, by the time things reached that state of affairs, Chestrie and the other robots were half-mad, caught in an absolute tangle of First Law conflicts. Gidi, showing a remarkable talent for order-giving, had convinced them that submission to his whims was essential if they were to prevent severe emotional and mental harm to their master. He did it emphatically enough to overcome the robots’ worries over his long-term deterioration.

That—and the absence of a sense of smell in robots—was why he was able to lie dead far more than long enough to rot. At last, Chestrie’s First Law potential forced him to break Gidi’s command to remain still. He checked on his master and found there was nothing he could do but notify the authorities.

Kresh and his partner entered a dank and fetid room, the walls covered with some sort of mold. The heap of discarded food containers at the back of the room was quite literally crawling with scavengers. But it was Gidi—or what was left of him—that Kresh still saw sometimes, deep in troubled sleep. That grinning, fly-covered corpse, that corpse with skin that moved, writhing and wriggling as the maggots inside fed on their host. The ghastly dribble of fluid that dripped from the foot of the bed, some horrible liquefied by-product of decay. The shriveled eyes, the fleshy parts of the ears and nose that were dried and blackened, starting to resemble bits of leather.

The coroner never bothered—or perhaps could not bring himself—to do an autopsy or determine the cause of death. He set it down as natural causes, and everyone was quite content to let it go at that, and never mind what sort of comment on Spacer society it was for such a death to be called natural.

No one, anywhere, ever, wanted to talk about it. Chestrie and the other robots were quietly destroyed, the house torn down, the grounds abandoned and left to their own devices. No one was even willing to go near the spot anymore. No one would so much as mention Gidi’s name.

Artists who had built their careers and reputations based on his praise suddenly found themselves not only without a sponsor but in the uncomfortable situation of having the merits of their work certified by a madman, or worse, having the direction of their work influenced by his opinions. No one was willing to deal with them. Some of them dropped out of the art world, while those with a bit more backbone started their careers all over again from scratch, and set about the task of remaking names for themselves without Gidi’s endorsement and guidance.

The only other visible effect of his death was that the fad of attending social events via screen and holograph died a sudden and quiet death.

It was cold comfort to assure oneself that Gidi had gone mad. After all, Gidi had started out sane and never realized he had crossed the line. His continued belief in his own rationality was right there in his journals. He spent much of his last days congratulating himself on the achievement of an orderly and sensible life.