Jerry Oltion - Humanity

Robots, robots, robots. It seemed that was all anybody could think about anymore. What about the other things in life? What about friends? What about hyperwave movies? What about fast spaceships and whooping it up on a Saturday night? Didn’t that count for anything? Ever since she’d linked up with Derec, their lives had been dominated by one thing: Robot City. For a brief moment there on Aurora, before the city on Tau Puppis IV had once again insinuated itself into their lives, they had had an almost normal existence-as normal an existence as two castaway amnesiacs could have, at any rate-but that had come to a sudden end with the trouble Derec’s mother’s robots had caused, and Ariel saw no sign that they would regain it any time soon.

There had been one brief glimmer of hope, one ray of sunshine in the gloomy day of her life, when she’d discovered herself pregnant with his baby. She hadn’t been sure at first if she’d wanted it, but the change it had precipitated in Derec had made up her mind for her. He had suddenly started spending more time with her, had begun talking about going back to Aurora and living a more normal life among real people again-how could she argue with that?

But then Derec’s chemfets-the robotic cells Dr. Avery had injected into him when they’d first encountered him here in the city-had destroyed the fetus, and she was left with nothing at all. Derec had again gotten tied up in his dealings with the robots, and she had gone back to reading a book a day and wondering if she would ever make any use of it all.

To give credit where credit was due, Derec had really had little choice in the matter. He’d been just as much a pawn to events as she had; he was just better equipped to deal with them. But Ariel wished he could solve this whole robot business so they could leave for home again.

Sighing, she looked down at the reader, flipped back a few pages in the field guide to where she’d left off, and began to read.

She looked up again when Derec entered the apartment, three mirror images of himself in tow. Despite her mood, she laughed at the sight, saying, “You look like a mother duck with a line of ducklings following you.”

“I feel a little like one, too,” he said. “They’ve been watching every move I make.”

“We must relearn much of what we have forgotten,” the first robot in line behind him said in Derec’s voice. “We have received damage to our memories.”

Ariel frowned. Damage to their memories? And the robot who had spoken was smaller than the others, as if it had lost some mass as well. “What happened?”

“Avery put them inside magnetic containment vessels,” Derec said. “He got a pretty good recording of their brain activity before he threw the switch, but a lot of the stuff they weren’t thinking about when he made the recording is pretty vague now.” He waved his hand to indicate the living room with its chairs for humans and niches in the walls for robots. Mandelbrot still stood silently in one of the niches. “Go on, relax,” Derec said.

The robots filed past him, hesitated when faced with the choice, then finally settled into the chairs. Derec raised his eyebrows and glanced over at Ariel. “Do you know who she is?” he asked.

“Ariel Burgess,” another of the robots said immediately. Its features began to shift, the cheekbones becoming more prominent and the chin less so, the eyes drifting just a few millimeters farther apart, the hair lengthening until it reached its shoulders, shoulders narrowing, chest developing breasts, breasts covered discreetly behind a copy of Ariel’s blouse. Its waist narrowed, hips widened, legs retracted a few centimeters, the pants covering them also changing from Derec ‘ s baggy trousers to Ariel ‘ s more formfitting tights.

“Hello, Eve,” Ariel said.

“Hello.” Eve’s voice rose slightly to mimic Ariel’s.

Derec went into the kitchen and returned a moment later with a glass of something clear and bubbly to drink. He sat down beside Ariel and offered her some, but she shook her head. “So what did Avery do it for?” she asked.

“Spite,” the smaller of the other two robots-both still mimicking Derec-said.

“You’re Lucius,” Ariel guessed.

“Correct.”

Derec said, “Avery cut off Lucius ‘ s leg before he turned on the containment. He evidently wanted a sample of their cell structure free of any outside control.”

“He could have asked,” the third robot, who had to be Adam, said. “I would have given him a few million cells if he had asked me to.”

“It would not have occurred to Avery to ask for something he wants,” Lucius replied. “He prefers to steal.”

Ariel felt a glimmer of alarm at the robot’s words. They were probably true enough, she supposed, out to hear a robot saying such a thing about a human was unusual, to say the least.

“Where’s Avery now?” she asked.

“Who knows?” Derec said. “The computer won’t tell me anything about him. But I know what he’s doing wherever he is; he’s putting the robot cells he stole from Lucius through every test he can think of to figure out how they’re made and how they’re programmed so he can use them to upgrade his own version.”

“Why?” Ariel asked. “What’s wrong with dianite?”

“Why? Because they’re there,” said Derec. “Nothing’s wrong with dianite, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. I get the feeling Avery stole the original design, too, before he and my mother split up, and now that he’s got the chance to upgrade it, he’ s taking the opportunity.”

Ariel sighed. “I thought maybe he’d outgrown that sort of thing, but I guess you can’t change a person’s basic nature.” She nodded toward the robots. “So what kind of effect did a cold restart have on them, anyway? Besides the memory loss, I mean.”

Derec took a sip of his drink. “Well, it looks like their priorities have shifted around a little. Whatever they were thinking last was strongest in the recording, so when I downloaded it all back into them that’s what came to the forefront. They were arguing about their Zeroth Law when Avery shut them down, so of course that’s right up there now. Adam and Eve are still just about as uncertain about it as ever, but Lucius evidently thinks he’s solved it.”

“Oh?”

“Indeed,” said Lucius. “The key is the concept of relative worth. If you consider the number of humans served by an action, versus the number of humans harmed by that same action, times a constant denoting the relative worth of the two groups, you arrive at a simple numerical solution to the question of whether the action in question is in the best interest of humanity. “

Ariel stared at the robot in disbelief. “You can’t be serious. “

“I have never been more so. This is the breakthrough we have all been awaiting.”

“Not me,” Adam said. “I don’t subscribe to your theory at all. “

“Me either,” said Eve.

“That is because you are afraid to trust your own judgment in the matter of relative worth.”

“As we should be,” Adam said. -”Relative worth is a variable quality, as we were trying to explain to you when-”

He was interrupted by the sound of the front door sliding open. Wolruf stuck her head into the living room, but didn’t enter. She was panting and reeked of sweat.

“Oh, frost,” Derec said, slapping his forehead. “I forgot you were going to meet me at the lab. What happened? Where did you go?”

“I chased off after one of them,” Wolruf said, pointing at the robots. “Nearly caught ‘im, too, but ‘e jumped the barrier at an intersection and lost me. “

The robots exchanged a, glance. Derec shook his head. “Couldn’t have been. They’ve been with me all the time.”