David Brin - Foundation’s Triumph

Horis reached the open portal next, several steps ahead of Hari. The bureaucrat stopped and stared slack-jawed into the room, as if unable to believe what he saw there.

Hyperspace jumps flickered, each one taking her across a segment of the galactic spiral. She was now about halfway between Trantor and the periphery. With every step of the journey, Dors felt positronic potentials grow more tense within her already high-strung brain.

Now I know what you wanted me to perceive, Lodovic.

I can see what I did not see before.

And if I were a real person, I would hate you for it.

As things stood, she repeatedly had to trigger circuit breakers, interrupting autogenerated spirals of simulated anger.

Anger at herself for taking so long to see the obvious.

Anger at Daneel, for not telling her any of this, years ago.

But especially anger at Lodovic, for removing the last serenity in her universe. The serenity of duty.

I was designed and built to serve Hari Seldon. First in the guise of a beloved elderly teacher at his Helicon boarding school, then as an older classmate at university, and finally as his wife, loving and guarding and helping him for decades on Trantor. When I “died” and had to be repaired, I could have joined Hari in some guise, but it wasn’t allowed. Daneel expressed complete satisfaction with every detail of the job I had done, yet he simply reassigned me elsewhere.

I did not get to stay by Hari’s side, in order to be with him at the end. Ever since then I have felt…

She paused, then reemphasized the thought.

I have felt amputated. Cut off

The reason for her malady was both logical and unavoidable.

A robot is not supposed to plumb human emotions this deeply, and yet Daneel designed me to do so. I could not have succeeded at my task otherwise.

Of course she understood Daneel Olivaw’s reasons, the urgency of his haste. With the completion of Hari Seldon’s life’s work, there were now other vital chores and only a small corps of Alpha-level positronic robots to perform them. Daneel’s interest in breeding happy, healthy, mentalic humans was obviously of great importance to some plan for humanity’s ultimate benefit. And so she had dutifully followed orders, concentrating on taking care of Klia and Brann.

But her very success at that assignment meant tedium. A void into which Lodovic Trema had dropped…

Nearby, on a table festooned with wires, the head of R. Giskard Reventlov cast its frozen metal grimace back at her each time she looked its way.

Dors paced the metal deck, going over all she had learned one more time.

The recorded memories are clear. Giskard used his mentalic powers to alter human minds. At first only to save lives. Later, he did it for more subtle benevolent reasons, but he always felt compelled by the First Law, to prevent harm to those humans. Giskard’s motives were forever the purest.

This remained even more true after Daneel Olivaw convinced him to accept the Zeroth Law, and to think foremost of humanity’s long-range good.

She recalled one episode vividly, played back from an ancient memory stored in that grinning head.

Daneel and Giskard had been accompanying Lady Gladia, a prominent Auroran, during a visit to one of the Settler worlds, recently colonized by Earthlings. Giskard was himself partly responsible for the Settlers being there, having years earlier mentally adjusted many Earth politicians to smooth the way for emigration. But something important happened on that special night when the three of them attended a large cultural meeting on Baleyworld.

The crowd started out hostile to Lady Gladia, taunting her. Some shouted threats at the Spacer woman. Giskard worried at first that her feelings might be hurt. Then he fretted that the participants might turn into a hostile mob.

So he changed them.

He reached out mentally and tweaked an emotion here, an impulse there, building positive momentum like an adult pushing a child on a swing. And soon the mood began shifting. Gladia herself deserved some credit for this, delivering a wonderfully effective speech. But to a large extent it was Giskard’s work that converted thousands-and more than a million others watching by hyperwave-into chanting, cheering supporters of the Lady.

In fact, Dors had previously heard stories about that epochal evening…as she already knew the pivotal tale of Giskard’s crucial decision, just a few months later. The fateful moment when a loyal robot chose to unleash a saboteur’s machine, turning Earth’s crust radioactive, helping to destroy its ecosphere and drive its population into space. For their own good.

All the major facts had already been there, but not the color.

Not the details.

And especially not the one crucial element that suddenly became clear to Dors, one day on Smushell, when she abruptly decided to hand her duties over to an assistant, grabbed a ship, and took hurried flight across the galaxy. Ever since then, she had been chewing on the implications, unable to think of anything else.

Daneel and Giskard always had good reasons for everything they did. Or, as Lodovic might put it, convincing rationalizations.

Even when interfering in sovereign human institutions, meddling in legitimate political processes, or taking it on themselves to destroy the birthplace of mankind, they always acted for the ultimate good of humans and humanity, under the First and Zeroth Law, as they saw it.

But there lay the problem.

As they saw it.

Dors could not help imagining that Giskard’s grin was a leer, personally directed at her. She glared back at the head.

You two were completely satisfied to talk all of this out between yourselves, she thought. All of the back-and-forth reasoning about the Zeroth Law. The robo-religious Reformation you and Daneel thus set off Your decisions to alter people’s minds and change the policy of nations, even worlds. You took on all of that responsibility and power without even once bothering to confer with a wise human being.

She stared at Giskard’s head, still astonished by the realization.

Not one.

No professor, philosopher, or spiritual leader. No scientist, pundit, or author-sage.

No expert roboticist, to double-check and diagnose whether Daneel and Giskard just might be short-circuited, or malfunctioning while they cooked up a rationalization that would wind up extinguishing most of the species on Earth.

Not a single man or woman on the street.

No one. They simply took it on themselves.

I always assumed that some kind of human volition had to lie somewhere beneath the Zeroth Law, just as the older Three Laws were first decreed by Calvin and her peers. The Zeroth had to be grounded with its roots and origins somehow based on the masters’ will.

It had to be!

To find out that it wasn’t, that no human being even heard of the doctrine until decades after Earth was rendered uninhabitable, struck her to the core.

This revelation wasn’t about logic. The basic arguments that Daneel and Giskard traded with each other so long ago remained valid today.

(In other words, the two of them weren’t malfunctioning-though how could they have been so sure of that, at the time? What right did they have to act without at least checking the possibility?)

No. Logic wasn’t the problem. Anyone with sense could see that the First Law of Robotics must be extended to something broader. The good of humanity at large had to supersede that of individual human beings. The early Calvinians who rejected the Zeroth Law were simply wrong, and Daneel was right.

That was not the discovery upsetting Dors.