David Gerrold - When HARLIE Was One

“Huh? Oh, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Oh, well — my family was Episcopalian, but — I guess you could call me an atheist.”

“You don’t believe in God at all.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know if I do or not. I don’t know if there is a God.”

“Then you’re an agnostic, not an atheist.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“The atheist is sure — the agnostic doesn’t know.”

“Is one better than the other?”

“The agnostic,” she said. “At least he’s got an open mind. The atheist doesn’t. The atheist is making a statement every bit as religious as saying there is a God.”

“You sound like an agnostic yourself.”

Her eyes twinkled. “I’m a Jewish agnostic. What about HARLIE? What is he?”

“HARLIE?” Auberson grinned. “He’s an Aquarius.”

“Huh?” She gave him a look.

“I’m not kidding. Ask him yourself.”

“I believe you,” she said. “How did he — realize this?”

“Oh, well, what happened was we were talking about morality, HARLIE and I — I wish I had the printout here to show you, it’s beautiful. Never argue morality — or anything for that matter — with a computer. You’ll lose every time. HARLIE’s got the words and ideas of every philosopher since the dawn of history to draw upon. He’ll have you arguing against yourself within ten minutes. He enjoys doing it — it’s a word game to him.”

“I can imagine,” she said.

“Can you really? You don’t know how devious he can be. He had me agreeing with Ambrose Bierce that morality is an invention of the weak to protect themselves from the strong.”

“Well, of course, you’re only a psychologist. You’re not supposed to be a debater.”

“Ordinarily, I’d be offended at that, but in this case I’ll concede the point. In fact, I know some so-called debaters I’d like to turn him loose on.”

“It wouldn’t be hard to make a list,” she agreed.

“Well, anyway,” he said, getting back to his story, “I thought I finally had him at one point. He’d just finished a complex analysis of the Christian ethos and why it was wrong and was starting in on Buddhism, I think, when I interrupted him. I asked him which was the right morality. What did he believe in?”

“And…?”

“He answered, ‘I HAVE NO MORALS.’ ”

She smiled thoughtfully. “That’s kind of frightening.”

“If I didn’t know HARLIE’s sense of humor, I would have pulled his plug right then. But I didn’t. I just asked him why he said that.”

“And he said?”

“He said, ‘BECAUSE I AM AN AQUARIUS.’ ”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Honest, ‘I AM AN AQUARIUS.’ ”

“You don’t believe in that stuff, do you?”

“No, but HARLIE does.”

She laughed then. “Really?”

Shrug. “I don’t know. I think it’s another game to him. If you tell him you’re planning a picnic, he’ll not only give you tomorrow’s weather forecast, but he’ll also tell you if the signs are auspicious.”

She was still laughing. “That’s beautiful. Just beautiful.”

“According to HARLIE, Aquarians have no morals, only ethics. That’s why he said it. It wasn’t till later that I realized he’d neatly sidestepped the original question altogether. He still hadn’t told me what he really believed in.” He smiled as he refilled their glasses. “Someday I’ll have to ask him. Here’s to you.”

“To us,” she corrected. She put the wineglass down again. “What got him started on all that anyway?”

“Astrology? It was one of his own studies. He kept coming up against references to it and asked for further information on the subject.”

“And you just gave it to him?”

“Oh, no — not right off the bat. We never give him anything without first considering its effects. We qualified this one the same way we qualified all the religious data we gave him. It was just one more specialized system of logic, not necessarily bearing any degree of correspondence to the real world. It’s what we call a variable relevance set. Of course, I’m willing to bet that he’d have realized it himself, sooner or later — but at that point in our research we couldn’t afford to take chances. Two days later, he started printing out a complex analysis of astrology, finishing up with his own horoscope, which he had taken the time to cast. His activation date was considered his date of birth.”

Her face clouded. “Wait a minute — he can’t be an Aquarius. HARLIE was activated in the middle of March. I know because it was just after Pierson quit as President. That’s why I was promoted — to help Dome.”

Auberson smiled knowingly. “True, but that’s one of the things HARLIE did when he cast his horoscope. He recast the Zodiac too.”

“Huh?”

“The signs of the Zodiac,” he explained, “were determined in the second century before Christ — maybe earlier. Since then, due to the precession of the equinoxes, the signs have changed. An Aries is really a Pisces, a Pisces is really an Aquarius, and so on. The rest of us are thirty days off. HARLIE corrected the Zodiac from its historical inception and then cast his horoscope from it.”

Annie was delighted with the idea. “Oh, David — that’s priceless. Really priceless. I can just imagine him doing that.”

“Wait, you haven’t heard it all. He turned out to be right. He doesn’t have any morals. Ethics, yes. Morals, no. HARLIE was the first to realize it — though he didn’t grasp what it meant. You see morality is an artifice — an invention. It really is to protect the weak from the strong.

“In our original designs we had decided to try to keep him free of any artificial cultural biases. Well, morality is one of them. Any morality. Because we built him with a sense of skepticism, HARLIE resists it. He won’t accept anybody’s brand of morality on faith any more than he could accept their brand of religion on faith — although they’re the same thing really. Everything has to be tested. Otherwise, he’ll automatically file it under systems of logic not necessarily corresponding to reality. Even if we didn’t tell him to, he would. He won’t accept anything blindly. He questions it — he asks for proof.”

“Mm — sounds like ‘insufficient data.’ ”

“It’s a little more sophisticated than that. Remember, HARLIE’s got those judgment circuits. He weighs things against each other — and against themselves too. A morality set has to be able to stand up on its own or he’ll disregard it.”

“And…?” she prompted.

“Well, he hasn’t accepted one yet.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Frankly, I don’t know. It’s disappointing that nothing human beings have come up with yet can satisfy him — but just the same, what if HARLIE were to decide that Fundamentalist Zoroastrianism is the answer? He’d be awfully hard to refute — probably impossible. Could you imagine an official, computer-tested and approved religion?”

“I’d rather not,” she smiled.

“Me neither,” he agreed. On the other hand, HARLIE is correct when he says he has ethics.”

“Morals, no. Ethics, yes? What’s the difference?”

“Ethics, according to HARLIE, are inherent in the nature of a system. You can’t sidestep them. HARLIE knows that it costs money to maintain him. Someone is putting out that money and wants to see a return on it. HARLIE explains it like this: Money is a storage form for energy, or sometimes value. You invest it in enterprises which will return an equal or greater amount of energy, or value. Therefore, HARLIE has to respond — he has to give the investors a return on their investment. He’s using their energy.”