Jerry Oltion - Humanity

“Well, Basalom, that didn’t take him long.”

Janet leaned back in her chair and smiled. Her son was a pretty good detective. She idly considered calling him directly and congratulating him, but after a moment’s thought she decided to let him finish what he’d started. At this rate it wouldn’t take him long anyway.

Sometimes Basalom seemed to be telepathic. He stepped out of his niche in the wall beside her desk and said, “I am confused. Why are you waiting for him to find you, when it is apparent that you wish to speak with him directly?”

Janet shrugged. “That’s just the way I want it to be.”

“Is it perhaps a manifestation of guilt?” the robot asked. “You have ignored him for so long, you cannot bring yourself to change that behavior now?”

“No,” Janet said immediately, but right behind it she felt the hot blush of shame. A bit too quick with the denial, wasn’t she? “All right, maybe so. Maybe I do feel guilty about it. But to just call him up now and expect everything to be all right would be absurd. If I let him find me, then it’s his project. He can decide how he wants it to be.”

“But you are intentionally leading him to you. Isn’t that functionally equivalent to calling him?”

“He can ignore the clues if he wants.”

Basalom remained silent for a moment before asking, “Did you plan it this way all along, or did this explanation come after the fact?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“I am trying to ascertain whether you originally intended to assuage your guilt in this manner, or whether it was a subconscious decision which you have only now stated in definite terms. “

“Why?”

“Because I am curious.” Janet laughed. “ And I’ve got only myself to blame for that. All right. Since you asked, I guess I decided subconsciously to do it this way. It just seemed the best way to go about it. I didn’t think about guilt or any of that; I just did it. Satisfied?”

“For now. Subjective matters are difficult to resolve, but I will try to assimilate the information into my world-view.” Basalom stepped back into his niche.

The indignity of it all. Psychoanalyzed by her valet. If she hadn’t made him herself, she would have sent him back to his manufacturer. But he was actually pretty perceptive when it came right down to it. She probably was trying to avoid the guilt of abandoning Derec. If she went to him she would have to apologize, or at least explain, but if he came to her she could maintain her reserve.

She suddenly wondered how long this subconscious arranging of events had been going on. Had she left her robots in Derec’s path on purpose, hoping they would eventually lead him to her?

No. Impossible. If anything, he had found them and kept them near him to lure her to him.

Another possibility occurred to her. By the look of things, Derec had been following Wendell around; what if Wendell were the one keeping the robots by his side in order to lure Janet back to him?

The thought was staggering. Wendell? He hated her as thoroughly as she hated him, didn’t he? He couldn’t possibly want to see her again. Still, incredible as it seemed, everything fit. She couldn’t think of a much better way to draw her in than to kidnap her learning machines, which was just what he seemed to have done.

Another thought came on the heels of the first. Did he know he was arranging a meeting? His subconscious mind could be directing his actions as thoroughly as Janet’s had been directing hers. He could think he had an entirely different reason for keeping the robots by his side, when the real reason was to bring her back to him.

And she was playing right into his hands. Part of the reason she had come here was to find him. Among other things, she’d intended to deliver a lecture on the moral implications of dropping robot cities on unsuspecting societies, but now she wondered if even that hadn’t been just another stratagem to bring her back. It would be just like Wendell to use an entire civilized world as a pawn in a larger game.

Or was she just being paranoid?

Round and round it went. Not for the first time, she wished she were a robot instead of a human. Human life was so messy, so full of emotions and ulterior motives and impossible dreams. She had thought she’d solved the Avery problem once and for all, but here it was again, come back to haunt her.

What should she do? What could she do? She wanted her robots back; that was top priority. But she wanted to make sure Wendell didn’t screw up any more civilizations in an attempt to bring her back for some sort of gooey reconciliation, too. And the only way to do that, it seemed, was to confront him about it. Like Derec following her trail, she was going to have to play Wendy’s game if she wanted to reach him.

At least to a point. Once she tracked him down, all bets were off.

Where to start, though? The computer would obey her wishes, but that was useless against the commands he would certainly have given it to protect his privacy.

Still, even if he were doing all this unconsciously, he had to have left a trail she could follow, and it didn’t take a genius to see where that trail began.

She scooted her chair back, stood, and said, “Come on, Basalom. We’ve got our own puzzle to solve.”

Avery frowned as he watched the miniature robot attempt to walk across the workbench. It was only a foot high and bore an oversized head to accommodate a normal-sized positronic brain and powerpack, but neither of those factors contributed to its clumsy gait. The problem was one of programming. The robot simply didn’t know how to walk.

He’d tried to tell it how by downloading the instruction set for one of his normal city robots into the test robot’s brain, but that wasn’t sufficient. Even with the information in memory, the idiot thing still stumbled around like a drunkard. The programming for walking was evidently stored somatically, in the body cells themselves, and could only be learned by trial and error.

Avery snorted in disgust. What a ridiculous design! Trust Janet to create a perfectly good piece of hardware and screw it up with a bad idea like this one. The problem wasn’t restricted to walking, either. A robot made with her new cells couldn’t talk until it learned the concept of language, couldn’t recognize an order until that was explained to it, and didn’t recognize Avery as human even then. It was ridiculous. What good was a robot that had to learn everything the hard way?

Avery could see the advantage to giving a robot somatic memory. It would have the equivalent of reflexes once it learned the appropriate responses to various stimuli. And if the brain didn’t have to control every physical action, then that freed it for higher functions. Properly trained, such a robot could be more intuitive, better able to serve. But as it was, that training was prohibitively time consuming.

Janet had to have had a method for getting around the brain-body interface problem. No doubt it was in the brain’s low-level programming, but that programming was still in the inductive monitors’ memcubes in his other lab.

Drat. It looked like he was going to need them after all. He briefly considered sending a robot after them, but he rejected that as a bad idea. Robots were too easily subverted. If Derec were there in the old lab, he could probably trick the robot into leading him here to the new lab as well, and Avery wasn’t ready for that.

He couldn’t order the city to carry the memcubes to him internally, either, not if he wanted to maintain his isolation from it.

That left going for them himself. It seemed crazy, at first, to go into an area where people were looking for him, but upon sober reflection Avery realized that he wasn’t really trying to protect his own isolation so much as his laboratory’s. If he retrieved the memcubes himself, there would actually be less risk of exposure. Central was still under orders not to betray his presence, so reentering the city shouldn’t be a problem, and if he should encounter Derec or Janet or anyone else, he supposed he could simply endure their questions and accusations, biding his time and slipping away again when the opportunity arose. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it wouldn’t be disastrous, either.