Rob Chilson - Refuge

Perhaps Ariel was right; perhaps it was a form of death.

Yet-”If the memory traces are close enough to the original-?”

“Ideally, it would be like copying a program into a blank positronic brain,” said Dr. Li. “The second robot would, for all practical purposes, become the old one.”

“We always explain what’s been done to them,” Derec said absently.

“Yes. But if the original was destroyed-” Derec frowned. “-the new one would, for all intents and purposes, be the same one in a new body.”

True, it was not unlike shifting a positronic brain to a new robotic body. Derec had an uneasy flash. On Robot City there had been an accidental death, of a boy called David, which Derec and Ariel had investigated for the robots. This David had looked just like him

He usually shrugged that fact off, but now he was jolted. Maybe the other was the duplicate-or was it himself?

“In a human, of course, it is not quite so simple,” said Dr. Powell, not noticing his jolted expression. “We could activate a significant fraction of the locked memories without reactivating the old personality. It’s a matter of knowing which memories are important to the patient.”

“How close can we come?” Derec asked.

“It depends on how much we know. The robots are, of course, recording and analyzing everything she says, and there’s a tendency to relive the most important memories first and most often, till they’re gone. So we’re developing a good sketch, too crude to be called a diagram.”

Derec nodded. “That’s where you need my help.”

“Quite so. You know her better than we, or the robots, can hope to.”

“Not well enough, I’m afraid,” said Derec steadily, wishing for some of that tranquilizer they were keeping Ariel on. “I’ve only known her for a few weeks.”

And already married, their expressions said. Spacer morals. Derec didn’t enlighten them. “I can go into a lot of detail about our time together, but before that…she was a very private person.”

Again, their expressions spoke for them: Spacers lived alone, on the surface, surrounded only by robots, and had few human contacts… …Not true, but try to explain. Besides, he’d had his own quota of chauvinistic nonsense about Earthers to lose.

“Whatever you can do, you must do,” Dr. Li said heavily.

“Uh…well…I can’t,” Derec said lamely.

If he mentioned his amnesia, they’d be allover him. The question of their identities would arise in a way he couldn’t duck. The Terries would certainly be called in, and the Spacer embassy at the port would be queried. The whole house of cards would come down-next thing you knew, they’d have learned about Dr. Avery-and Robot City.

That secret must be kept at all costs.

“Why not?” Dr. Powell barked.

“It’s…a matter of privacy, sir.”

“Oh.” Greatly mollified. Spacers! “Well, there’s a lot more than you could do sitting here…why don’t you take all the material we have with you, go home, and do your dictating there?”

Derec had been so used to having First Law-driven robots intruding on his life that he was startled by this easy acquiescence. A robot wouldn’t let anything be put into Ariel’s head without checking it over first

“And the memory traces? Will they be kept private?”

The doctors looked at each other. “Well, they have to be coded,” Dr. Li began.

Dr. Powell said, “They use a technique modified from one used to implant synapses in positronic brains. Of course that can’t be used on human brains, but it’s based on the same idea, as it were. I don’t know the full details, myself -”

“But it’s a matter of coding,” said Dr. Li. “We’re having a specialist come in from the Mayo. If he could teach you-perhaps you could code the more private portions…?”

It took several conversations and a conference before it was decided to let Derec attempt coding memory traces for Ariel. His education stood him in good stead; he had the necessary background to do the work. Spacer! said the expressions again, this time with approval. Spacer education in robotics and computers in general was notoriously the best.

The work called for the use of a good computer, and with some trepidation he revealed the existence of R. David during the conference.

“Of course,” Dr. Powell said. “A Spacer would naturally have a robot in his apartment.”

They seemed to take it quite for granted, and to be a little amused by it.

“Scots sleeping with bagpipes,” someone muttered at the back of the room, a reference that sounded so funny that Derec meant to look it up, but forgot. He didn’t think of it again till weeks later…far too late to ask.

So, once he was instructed in the technique-not simple, but not too hard to learn-of coding memories as synapses, Derec sat up, day and night, dictating his memories of his life with Ariel.

“Any time she remembers something, playing the memory trace, there is a certain strong chance that she will unlock the actual memory of the event, or of part of it,” the expert told Derec. “Each such unlocked memory will be retained, and will strengthen the memory trace leading to it, and to the fields about it. All this was worked out at the Lahey within the past ten years.”

She was a sharp-nosed, unpretty woman, tiny and quite dark of skin. The breeds of mankind, or races as they were called on Earth, remained far more distinct than on the Spacer worlds. Darla, her name was, and she knew her stuff. She seemed to be hundreds of years old; he supposed vaguely that she might be sixty or seventy.

“Eventually, the personality that is recovered will be indistinguishable from the patient’s original personality, both to the patient and to the patient’s loved ones. But that depends on the accuracy of the memories, the accuracy of the coding, and the completeness of the memories.”

The coding accuracy he could create by care and sheer hard work. The completeness of the memories he had little control over. At least, he thought comfortingly, the last weeks of her life must be very important, and those he could cover well.

But the accuracy of the memories? How did he know what was important to her and what was not? Her moods had always been a mystery to him.

He could but do his best, and try not to worry too much.

Derec took to visiting the hospital every other day, and sometimes every third day. Whether he went or not, he always stopped at the public combooth mornings and evenings, on the way to and from the kitchen, to call and ask about her. The news usually was that she was doing well but was in no condition to talk.

Derec knew it. His work went rapidly enough, but there was a lot of it. He slogged through it grimly. If not for the necessity of going out to call the hospital, he might not have gone near the kitchen until R. David was forced to take action to prevent collapse.

He had one slight consolation. His own memories must also be locked away, unharmed by the plague. If only he could find someone who knew him as well as Ariel did before she lost her memories, someone he could persuade to come to Earth and dictate his memories…not likely, knowing Spacers. But there was that thread of hope that he might recover his memories…might recover himself.

Nights were bad. He dreamed nightmares of Ariel not responding to the treatment and being as blank as he had been upon awakening. It was terribly important that she not lose her memories of him…and in the dream it was always his fault. His coding failed, or she was swept away in the flash floods through the drains of Robot City, or…

Robot City! It, too, haunted his dreams, and these dreams were even darker and more frightening than the nightmares about Ariel. Those he could understand; they sprang from a quite natural anxiety.