Robert Thurston - Intruder

Ariel laughed abruptly, pleased at the first hint of merriment in her life for some time.

Adam had changed himself from a mimicry of Derec to a nearly exact rendition of the short, round, wavy-haired and moustachioed Dr. Avery!

Avery didn’t notice Adam’s transformation until Ariel laughed. At first he thought she was laughing at him, and he prepared a withering comment. (Avery could not abide being laughed at. The mockery of too many colleagues had made him sensitive to criticism and developed in him a lightning reflex to respond as cruelly as he could.) Then he saw where Ariel’s attention was directed.

He saw Adam’s robotic and (to him) nightmarish version of himself, and he screamed in anger. It was the kind of scream that rattled any loose item or emotional equilibrium in its vicinity. On the desktop the dancers scattered in fear.

Adam had not expected such a violent reaction from Avery, and it shocked as well as intrigued him. He had imprinted upon Avery several times already, but only twice in Avery’s presence. Each of those times the self-centered doctor had not noticed or even looked at him.

Although Avery knew about the Silversides’ shape-changing abilities, this was the first time he had observed an actual transformation.

“I won’t have this!” Avery yelled. “It is mockery! You have no right to take my shape! How is it possible even? What kind of material are you made of?” He touched Adam on his arm, his chest, his face. Adam’s skin was still like the syntheskin on any robot, except the few humaniforms. “There’s no human texture to your skin, no-”

Ariel stepped forward. “That’s because Adam is a robot.” She searched Avery’s face for reactions and saw deep confusion in his eyes, so she added slyly, “Like you, Ozymandias.”

Avery seemed momentarily confused. “Of course,” he said. “Like me.” He examined Adam more closely. “And robots are fixed, permanent. Not like humans, not like animals. Then Adam can’t be a robot. He’s something else in a robot’s clothing.”

“What am I?” Adam asked.

“I don’t know what you are.”

“If not human, what? If not robot, what?”

“Yes,” Ariel said, moving closer to Avery, “what is Adam?”

“Some new kind of creature, but I don’t know what. He is capable of changing his shape?”

“Yes, he is. He can be human, robot, animal, alien. But he is robot, Ozymandias.”

“He can’t be!”

“Oh, but he can. They both can. Derec’s not sure how they shape-change, but he thinks it’s facilitated by a kind of DNA or DNA-analog in their cells. Apparently they can gain voluntary control over their cells, even adjusting their sizes and shapes. They sort of think of the shape they’ll take, and its details are worked out in their positronic brains. Mandelbrot can drastically change the shape of his arm, but these two work miracles on their entire bodies. Adam says he started as a blob and knew how to alter his shape into a practical ambulatory form in his first few moments of awareness.”

“I refuse to accept that. Why did you laugh?”

“Because you are like me now. You accused me of being sentimental for believing the dancers to be human, and now you refuse to believe Adam is a robot. Nevertheless, it is true. Why does it bother you so, Ozymandias?”

“I won’t discuss it.”

“Of course. Because it would embarrass you. Now that you’re a robot, you’re annoyed when another one comes along who’s greater than you are.”

“That’s not it at all! And it’s not true! Transmogrification is no special achievement. It makes him no more than a circus freak.”

“Maybe you’re right. It isn’t true. Good thing you’re not Avery any more, Ozymandias. If you were, I’d have to say that maybe the great Dr. Avery, creator of the Avery robots, is jealous that someone else has designed and built a better model.”

For a moment Avery did not speak. Instead, he merely stared at Adam, which was like looking in a mirror that slightly distorted the image. Adam’s skin was silvery, and there were more sharp lines in the shape of his body than in Avery’s softly curved figure. Adam’s eyes had a serenity in them that Avery had not, when looking in a mirror, seen in many years. It forced him to consider a human Avery whose life had been more satisfactory, when he had been married and at the top of his profession, adored by many, certainly respected by almost everyone. Why had his eyes changed? he wondered.

Ariel saw the emotional disruption in Avery’s face, and at the same time saw a way to work with the man as Derec had urged. She moved to the other side of the desk, beside Eve, who had been busy calming the dancers with gestures and a soft humming that almost had a tune to it.

“Eve,” Ariel whispered.

“Yes?”

“Can you do one of those shape-changes for me?”

“Yes, into anything I know about.”

“Well, do what Adam did. Imprint on Avery. Can you do that?”

“Of course.”

Ariel watched with fascination as Eve went through the same transformations that Adam had. It was even stranger to view in her, since before Ariel’s eyes, Eve changed from a female to a male. While she had always known that Eve could change shape, and had been told that Adam had been a female when he was a member of the kin, she was still amazed by the process. Eve’s face changed earlier than Adam’s had, and then she rearranged her body from the shoulders down. When finished, she was even more uncomfortably like Avery than Adam was.

“Ozymandias,” Ariel said, breaking his concentration on Adam. As the man turned toward her, his jaw dropped open when he saw still another copy of himself.

“This is unfair!” he cried, furious.

“Why? Most of the time they go around looking like Derec and me, and it doesn’t bother us. Why does it so upset you, Ozymandias?”

“I feel like they’re taking something away from me.”

“What? Your soul?”

Ariel’s question came as such a shock to Avery that it made him laugh. “My soul? Hardly. What would a robot do with a soul? No, I mean my personality, all that constitutes me, my dignity.”

“Dignity? Personality? What do you care about those?”

As Ariel talked, Eve had gone to Adam, and now they stood side by side, twin Averys, with the same subtle differences between them that a set of identical twins showed.

Avery, uncharacteristically speechless, whirled around and strode back to where Wolruf stood. Ariel might have been mistaken, but she thought, from the way the caninoid alien stood at a slight tilt and from the faint gargling sound coming from her throat (usually an indication of amusement for her), that Wolruf found the proceedings funny.

“Come back here!” Ariel shouted.

“I refuse.”

“How can you refuse my order? You are a robot and I am human. You have to obey me. Second Law, Ozymandias.” She spoke this last with a lilt in her voice, mockingly. He stood still for a moment, then spun around and returned to the desk.

Meanwhile Ariel had sidled up to the Silversides. “Adam, Eve, I want you to do something for me.” They both glanced at her, awaiting their orders. “You’ve been around Avery for long enough. Imitate him all the way. Talk like him, sound like him, rant like him, move like him, strut like him, whatever you have stored in your memory banks that you can use to be like him. Can you do that?”

They both responded yes. Adam, particularly, welcomed the challenge. It was a use of his shape-changing ability, after all. In a world where there was little to imprint on, any challenge would do.

“All right,” Ariel said when Avery had returned to the desk. “Separate from each other, and when I give the signal, start.”