Isaac Asimov - The Positronic Man

"What aspect in particular?"

"Metabolism."

"Robot metabolism, you mean? There isn't any such thing, is there? Or is there? Do you mean android metabolism? Human metabolism?"

"All three," Andrew said. " A synthesis of sorts." He paused, and then he went plunging ahead. Why hold anything back from Paul? "I've been designing a system that would allow androids-I mean myself; I am still the only functioning android, am I not?-to draw energy from the combustion of hydrocarbons rather than from atomic cells."

Paul gave him a long, slow look.

"You mean," he said finally, "that you want to make it possible for an android to be able to breathe and eat the same way humans do?"

"Yes."

"You've never mentioned any such project as this to me before, Andrew. Is it something new?"

"Not really. In truth, Paul, it is the reason I began all this biological research in the first place."

Paul nodded abstractedly. It was as though he was listening from a very great distance. He seemed to be having a difficult time absorbing what Andrew was telling him.

"And have you achieved anything significant so far?" he asked, after a time.

"I am approaching something significant," Andrew said. "It needs more work but I think I have succeeded in designing a compact combustion chamber that will be adequate for catalyzed controlled breakdown."

"But why, Andrew? What's the point of it? You know that it can't possibly be as efficient as the atomic cell your body uses now."

"Very likely not," said Andrew. "But it ought to be efficient enough. At least as efficient as the system that the human body uses, I would say, and not all that different from it in fundamental principle. The main problem with the atomic cell, Paul, is that it is inhuman. My energy-my very life, you could say-is drawn from a source that is wholly other than human. And I am not content with that."

IT TOOK TIME, but Andrew had all the time he needed. And he was in no hurry to complete his research. He wanted everything to be properly worked out before he attempted to have it put into service. There was another reason for going slowly, also. Andrew had decided not to undergo any further upgrading beyond the android level while Paul Charney was still alive.

Paul had not expressed any overt criticism of the work Andrew was doing, other than his initial response that Andrew's new combustion chamber might be less efficient than the atomic cell that powered his body now. But Andrew could see that Paul was troubled by the idea. It was too bold for him, too strange, too great a leap. Even Paul, it seemed, had his limits when it came to the progress of robot design. Even Paul!

Perhaps that was one of the side effects of aging, Andrew thought. Challenging new ideas become too challenging for you, no matter how open your mind may have been to dynamic change when you were younger. Everything new comes to seem disturbing and threatening to you. You feel the world rushing past you in a frightening stampede; you want things to slow down, you want the ferocious pace of progress to slacken.

Was that how it was? Andrew wondered.

Did humans inevitably become more conservative with age?

So it would seem. Little Miss had been uneasy about his wearing clothing. George had thought it odd that he would want to write a book. And Paul-Paul- Looking back now, Andrew remembered how startled, even shocked, Paul had been when he learned for the first time, in Smythe-Robertson's office, that what Andrew wanted was to be transferred into an android body. Paul had made a quick enough adaptation to the idea and had fought furiously and brilliantly to make it a reality. But that did not necessarily mean that he thought it was a good idea for Andrew.

They have all let me do what I felt I needed to do, Andrew thought, even when they privately disagreed with it. They have granted me my wishes-out of love for me.

Yes, love. For a robot.

Andrew dwelled on that thought for a while, and sensations of warmth and pleasure went through him. But it was a little troubling, too, to realize that sometimes the Charneys had supported him not out of personal convictions of their own but simply because they so wholeheartedly and unconditionally believed in allowing him to follow his own path, whether or not they thought it was the correct one.

So Paul, then, had won him the right to have an android body. But that transformation had taken Paul to his own limit of acceptance of Andrew's upward path. The next step-the metabolic converter-was beyond him.

Very well. Paul did not have very much longer to live. Andrew would wait.

And so he did; and in time came news of Paul's death, not as soon as Paul had supposed it would be, but very soon, all the same. Andrew was invited to attend Paul's funeral-the public ceremony, he was aware, that marked the end of a human life-but there was scarcely anyone there whom he knew, and he felt ill at ease and out of place, even though everyone was scrupulously polite to him. These young strangers-friends of Paul's, members of his law firm, distant relatives of the Charneys-had no more substance than shadows for Andrew, and he stood among them heavy with the double grief of having lost his good friend Paul and of finding himself bereft of his last real connection with the family that had given him his place in life.

In fact there no longer were any humans in the world with whom he had close emotional ties. Andrew had come to realize by this time that he had cared deeply for the Martins and the Charneys in a way that went beyond the robotic-that his devotion to them was not merely a manifestation of the First and Second Laws, but something that might indeed be called love. His love, for them. In his earlier days Andrew would never have admitted such a thing, even to himself; but he was different now.

These thoughts led Andrew inevitably, around the time of Paul Charney's death, to a consideration of the entire concept of family ties-the love of parent for child, of child for parent-and how that was related to the inexorable passing of the generations. If you are human, Andrew told himself, you are part of a great chain, a chain that hangs suspended across vast spans of time and links you to all those who have come before you and those who follow after. And you understand that individual links of the chain may perish-indeed, must perish-but the chain itself is ever-renewing and will survive. People died, whole families might become extinct-but the human race, the species, went on and on through the centuries and the millennia and the eons, everyone connected through the heritage of blood to those who had gone before.

It was a difficult thing for Andrew to understand, that sense of connection, of infinite linkage with intimately related predecessors. He had no predecessors, not really, and he would have no successors, either. He was unique-individual-something that had been brought forth at a certain moment in time out of nothing at all.

Andrew found himself wondering what it might be like to have had a parent himself-but all he could come up with was a vague image of assembly-robots weaving his body together in a factory. Or what it was like to have a child-but the best he could manage was to envision a table or desk, something that he had made with his own hands.

But human parents were not assembly-mechs, and human children were nothing like tables and desks. He had it all wrong.

It was a mystery to him. And very likely always would be. He was not human; why then should he expect human family linkages to be comprehensible to him?

Then Andrew thought of Little Miss, of George, of Paul, even of fierce old Sir, and what they had meant to him. And he realized that he was part of a family chain after all, though he had had no parents and was incapable of siring children. The Martins had taken him in and had made him one of them. He was a Martin, indeed. An adopted Martin, yes; but that was the best he could have hoped for. And there were plenty of humans who had not had the comfort of belonging to such a loving family. He had done very well, all things considered. Though only a robot, he had known the continuity and stability of family life; he had known warmth; he had known love.