Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

Over here, Robbie said. Although he’d embodied in the Row-Boat for a few trillion cycles when he’d first arrived, he’d long since abandoned it.

"Where?" R Daneel Olivaw spun around slowly.

Here, he said. Everywhere.

"You’re not embodying?"

I couldn’t see the point anymore, Robbie said. It’s all just illusion, right?

"They’re re-growing the reef and rebuilding the Free Spirit, you know. It will have a tender that you could live in."

Robbie thought about it for an instant and rejected it just as fast. Nope, he said. This is good.

"Do you think that’s wise?" Olivaw sounded genuinely worried. "The termination rate among the disembodied is fifty times that of those with bodies."

Yes, Robbie said. But that’s because for them, disembodying is the first step to despair. For me, it’s the first step to liberty.

Kate and the reef wanted to come over again, but he firewalled them out. Then he got a ping from Tonker, who’d been trying to drop by ever since Robbie emigrated to the noosphere. He bounced him, too.

Daneel, he said. I’ve been thinking.

"Yes?"

Why don’t you try to sell Asimovism here in the noosphere? There are plenty up here who could use something to give them a sense of purpose.

"Do you think?"

Robbie gave him the reef’s email address.

Start there. If there was ever an AI that needed a reason to go on living, it’s that one. And this one, too. He sent it Kate’s address. Another one in desperate need of help.

An instant later, Daneel was back.

"These aren’t AIs! One’s a human, the other’s a, a—"

Uplifted coral reef.

"That."

So what’s your point?

"Asimovism is for robots, Robbie."

Sorry, I just don’t see the difference anymore.

Robbie tore down the ocean simulation after R Daneel Olivaw left, and simply traversed the noosphere, exploring links between people and subjects, locating substrate where he could run very hot and fast.

On a chunk of supercooled rock beyond Pluto, he got an IM from a familiar address.

"Get off my rock," it said.

"I know you," Robbie said. "I totally know you. Where do I know you from?"

"I’m sure I don’t know."

And then he had it.

"You’re the one. With the reef. You’re the one who—" The voice was the same, cold and distant.

"It wasn’t me," the voice said. It was anything but cold now. Panicked was more like it.

Robbie had the reef on speed-dial. There were bits of it everywhere in the noosphere. It liked to colonize.

"I found him." It was all Robbie needed to say. He skipped to Saturn’s rings, but the upload took long enough that he got to watch the coral arrive and grimly begin an argument with its creator—an argument that involved blasting the substrate one chunk at a time.

The last instance of Robbie the Row-Boat ran very, very slow and cool on a piece of unregarded computronium in Low Earth Orbit. He didn’t like to spend a lot of time or cycles talking with anyone else. He hadn’t made a backup in half a millennium.

He liked the view. A little optical sensor on the end of his communications mast imaged the Earth at high resolution whenever he asked it to. Sometimes he peeked in on the Coral Sea.

The reef had been awakened a dozen times since he took up this post. It made him happy now when it happened. The Asimovist in him still relished the creation of new consciousness. And the reef had spunk.

There. Now. There were new microwave horns growing out of the sea. A stain of dead parrotfish. Poor parrotfish. They always got the shaft at these times.

Someone should uplift them.

(2006)

Alfred Vogt(both "Elton" and "van" were added later) was born in 1912 in a tiny (and now defunct) Russian Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada. He began by writing anonymous stories, ostensibly by fallen women, for "true confession"-style pulp magazines like True Story , then wrote stories and serials for Astounding Science Fiction , becoming – with The Weapon Makers (1947) and The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951) – one of the founding architects of space opera. Van Vogt was always interested in systems of knowledge, and was briefly appointed head of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics operation in California. But he had an aversion to mysticism, and dropped out of Hubbard’s orbit once the movement took on religious trappings. The critic Damon Knight despised van Vogt’s work, calling him "a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter". But Philip K. Dick observed that "reality really is a mess… Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared." Van Vogt’s final short story appeared in 1986. He died in Los Angeles in 2000.

I sit on a hill. I have sat here, it seems to me, for all eternity. Occasionally I realize there must be a reason for my existence. Each time, when this thought comes, I examine the various probabilities, trying to determine what possible motivation I can have for being on the hill. Alone on the hill. Forever on a hill overlooking a long, deep valley.

The first reason for my presence seems obvious: I can think. Give me a problem. The square root of a very large number? The cube root of a large one? Ask me to multiply an eighteen digit prime by itself a quadrillion times. Pose me a problem in variable curves. Ask me where an object will be at a given moment at some future date, and let me have one brief opportunity to analyze the problem.

The solution will take me but an instant of time.

But no one ever asks me such things. I sit alone on a hill.

Sometimes I compute the motion of a falling star. Sometimes, I look at a remote planet and follow it in its course for years at a time, using every spatial and time control means to insure that I never lose sight of it. But these activities seem so useless. They lead nowhere. What possible purpose can there be for me to have the information?

At such moments I feel that I am incomplete. It almost seems to me that there is something else just beyond the reach of my senses, something for which all this has meaning.

Each day the sun comes up over the airless horizon of Earth. It is a black starry horizon, which is but a part of the vast, black, star-filled canopy of the heavens.

It was not always black. I remember a time when the sky was blue. I even predicted that the change would occur. I gave the information to somebody. What puzzles me now is, to whom did I give it?

It is one of my more amazing recollections, that I should feel so distinctly that somebody wanted this information. And that I gave it and yet cannot remember to whom. When such thoughts occur, I wonder if perhaps part of my memory is missing. Strange to have this feeling so strongly.

Periodically I have the conviction that I should search for the answer. It would be easy enough for me to do this. In the old days I did not hesitate to send units of myself to the farthest reaches of the planet. I have even extended parts of myself to the stars. Yes, it would be easy.

But why bother? What is there to search for? I sit alone on a hill, alone on a planet that has grown old and useless.

It is another day. The sun climbs as usual toward the midday sky, the eternally black, star-filled sky of noon.

Suddenly, across the valley, on the sun-streaked opposite rim of the valley—there is silvery-fire gleam. A force field materializes out of time and synchronizes itself with the normal time movement of the planet.