Bruce Bethke - Maverick

“Basalom, in your conversations with the local robots, have you noticed anything that might lead you to believe that the city supervisors have developed a sense of humor?”

Basalom was silent a moment as he sorted through all his recorded sense impressions, searching for correlating patterns.

Okay, it ’ s coming up, the limousine broke in. Left at the next corner. Basalom ignored the data stream and tried to concentrate on carrying out Dr. Anastasi’s instructions.

“Madam, while I would prefer to build my judgment on a larger experience base-”

Hey, what ’ s the matter with you? You ’ re not slowing down.

“Based on the observations that I have made to date-”

It ’ s this corner. That big circular building is the gasket factory.

“I must conclude that the city supervisors have not developed a sense of humor-”

Left! Oh, fer cryin ’ out loud, you missed the turn.

“But I hasten to add that many of the city robots have developed significant aberrations and eccentricities. ”

For a moment there was blessed silence on the data bus. Then the limousine’s thought stream kicked back in. Oh, so I ’ m eccentric, am I? Well let ’ s just see how you like handling this rig alone. There was a brief surge of DC voltage accompanied by a drop in positronic potentials across the entire width of the data bus. Basalom tried a few exploratory probe pulses and was surprised to come to an inescapable conclusion: Personal Vehicle One had physically switched itself out of the data bus.

Basalom fired off one more round of sampling pulses and then allowed himself a moment of pleasure. What a pity 1 didn ’ t think of this three days ago!

He checked his realtime clock. Close to a quarter-second had elapsed since he’d delivered his findings to Dr. Anastasi, and she was preparing to make a response.

“Darn. I was hoping you’d say yes. ” She picked up the sheaf of fax pages and waved them at Basalom. “If you’d said that the supervisors were capable of intentional humor, I’d say that this was a pretty good practical joke. ”

Dr. Anastasi bit her lower lip. “But if they’re completely serious about this… ”

Basalom swiveled his head around to face Dr. Anastasi and scaled his optics up to a higher magnification, but he was unable to make out the content of the fax sheets. “Serious about what, madam?”

She looked at the papers again and then waved them at Basalom. “This is their proposed plan for modifying the city to suit the needs of the local inhabitants. It’s not just silly. It’s not just stupid. In fact, I think it even transcends ridiculous and scales the heights to pure idiocy. ”

Basalom scanned the papers again,-but his optical character recognition routine still couldn’t read the words through the paper.

“Madam?”

Janet unfolded the papers and looked at them. “We have got to talk the supervisors out of this. It’s insulting. ” She peeled off a sheet and threw it aside. “Condescending. ” She peeled off another and threw it with greater vigor. “Degrading. ” She lifted the entire sheaf and threw it down on the seat beside her. “And possibly immoral. ”

She looked up sharply. “Basalom, I need you to help me reach them. I can build robots. I can order them around. But I’ve never had to try to reason with an Avery model before. You’re going to have to help me understand a city supervisor’s conception of logic. ”

Confused potentials darted through Basalom’s brain. “Understand, madam? What’s to understand? Logic is logic. ”

Dr. Anastasi caught a strand of her long blond hair between her fingers and began unconsciously twisting it. “Wrong, Basalom. Logic isn’t a universal constant, it’s a heuristic decision-making process rooted in the values, prejudices, and acquired conflict -resolution patterns of the decider.

“For example, if I’d given you just a slightly stronger positive bias in your motivation circuit, you would in some situations come to exactly the opposite conclusion that you would come to now. Yet you’d still be just as certain that you’d come to the only logical conclusion. ” Dr. Anastasi smiled, in a hopeless sort of way, and looked at Basalom.

“You, old friend, have got to help me figure out the underpinnings of the city supervisors’ logic. And we’ve got to do it in the next four minutes. ”

Four minutes? Basalom riffled through his job stack, shutting down background processes and diversionary loops. There was no time for further conversational niceties; he pulled all the buffers out of his verbalizing process and jacked his speech clock rate up by ten percent. Then he increased the amplitude on data bus circuits 24 and 57, jumpered around his pride subroutine, and established a direct link to the limousine’s brain.

Personal Vehicle One?

The response was slow and sullen. Whaddaya want?

You must take control of this vehicle.

What makes you think I want it?

The First Law. My full attention is required elsewhere, and I must relinquish control. To ensure the safety of your passenger, you must take over. You have no choice.

Basalom broke off the link and physically disconnected himself from the control panel. There was a microscopic twitch-probably completely imperceptible to Dr. Anastasi-in the steering as Personal Vehicle One took over, but within a millisecond the vehicle was fully under control again.

Satisfied, Basalom rotated his head to face Dr. Anastasi and switched into linear predictive mode. There is no time to wait for her questions. I will have to infer questions from her previous statements and her physical responses. He switched to thermographic vision, locked his optics on Dr. Anastasi’s face, and scaled the magnification up by a factor of 10.

“Logic may not be a universal constant,” he began brusquely, “but the Three Laws are. To have maximum success with the city supervisors, mistress, you must couch your arguments in terms of the Laws of Robotics.

“Here are the anomalies that I have noticed in City Supervisor Beta’s interpretation of the First Law… ”

. Derec was dreaming about his childhood again. Or rather, he was dreaming about a childhood; he couldn’t be sure whether it was a genuine memory of his own life or a pseudomemory that his subconscious had cobbled up out of bits of stories and old videos. This time he was a young boy, perhaps four or five standard years old, and he was playing on a wide, robot-neat lawn under the bright summer sun of…

Aurora? He didn’t know. The lawn was a familiar place; a soft expanse of short, dark green grass interspersed with tiny yellow bell-shaped flowers. Damsel flies droned through air flavored with tangy summer dust and the faint hint of sweet clover, and off at the edge of his vision, dark shapes-robots? adults?-moved in meaningless patterns and spoke in muffled voices.

But there was something wrong with the image. The sun was a little too small and blue for his taste, and he could look straight at it. The house-there was a house there, he could almost feel its presence-but somehow it was an elusive thing that he could never quite manage to look at directly.

And then there was the puppy.

He’d never owned a puppy; even asleep, he was sure of that. Pet robots, yes, and he even had a quick flash of some kind of aquatic arthropod that his mother had kept in a tank and talked to as she fed.