Barrington Bayley - Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus - The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

‘Jasperodus, this is your new master. Serve him as you have served me.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Jasperodus said meekly.

After Cree Inwing had gone the landlord looked Jasperodus over and chuckled. ‘I heard about your little fracas this morning. A robot that cannot be commandeered – that’s a valuable commodity in this city! I’ll get a few days’ work out of you first, then, with a new ownership deed, you should fetch… let’s see… twenty-five thousand with no questions asked!’

He directed Jasperodus to his duties and went off laughing.

Late that night Jasperodus slipped away and once more turned his steps to the slums where, by means of study, he proposed to turn himself into a fully urbanised being.

The small room was a box ten feet by eight. The unpainted plaster of the walls was broken in places, revealing bare brick; the single window looked down three storeys to a dusty courtyard where grew a few stunted shrubs. There was, however, a chair on which Jasperodus sat – a habit he had picked up along the way, although it was physiologically unnecessary for him.

Otherwise the room was filled with books. Piles of books, tumbling in terraces and seracs, books on nearly every science that was available to the New Empire, but especially on mathematics, physics, engineering and robotics.

With the help of this untidy library of mainly second-hand volumes Jasperodus had filled in many gaps in his knowledge, and could count himself an expert in several spheres, notably that of mathematics. He had no cause now to fear he had an educational inferiority to the sophisticates of Tansiann.

His primary aim had been, as he frequently reminded himself, to excel at everything and thus to prove his equality with mankind. But time and time again he had been drawn to one particular subject: robotics. This he had studied with manic intensity, until he was conversant with all the main principles of robot design.

In his hands at the present moment was a slim volume that came to the heart of his inquiries:

Much study and investigation has gone into the possibility of producing an artificial consciousness which would make construct minds virtually indistinguishable from the natural variety. The formulae on which such a consciousness would have to be based have even been elucidated.

These formulae refer themselves to the central feature of consciousness, namely its characteristic property of self-reference, or the ‘problem of the perceiving “I”’ as it has been called. The nature of conscious perception is such that the perceived object becomes perfectly blended, or ‘identified’ with the perceiving subject or ‘I’. In other words ‘I’ becomes the object and at the same time remains itself. The problem of an artificial consciousness then hinges on duplicating this phenomenon.

Unfortunately no arrangement of material or energy can achieve this. All matter is essentially particulate: perfect blending does not occur. The same holds for any conceivable type of logic circuitry, no matter how advanced its state of integration may be. Early attempts at machine consciousness relied on the principle, where ‘I’ is the directrix (i.e. subject) and ‘X’ the object, of raising each to the power of the other in an alternating series, thus:

And so on with variations, such as bending the process into an ever-accelerating cycle known as the ‘perception vortex’. No positive result was ever obtained from this method, beyond defining some techniques for ordinary machine (i.e. un-conscious) perception that were already available. The reason for this failure is that the arrangement is asymptotic – however far it is carried a unity cannot be achieved between the ‘perceiving directrix’ and the object. It may be stated categorically that consciousness cannot be artificially created in the physical universe as it is constituted, because that would require the operation of a physical entity having no differentiation between its parts, and no such entity can exist in the material realm. Consciousness must therefore have a spiritual, not a material source, and cannot be duplicated.

There followed the consciousness formulae in full. Jasperodus, having studied them time and again, together with all the associated theorems and equations first enunciated to him by Padua, now understood them and was forced to admit their cogency. Secretly he had hoped to discover some flaw, some chink in robotic theory, that would leave open the possibility – however remote – that he was conscious, or at least that he might strive to attain consciousness. But the equations were watertight. It seemed certain both that he lacked true sentience and that he never could acquire it, thus invalidating the passionate boast he had made to Inwing.

With a gesture of despair he flung the book aside.

Jasperodus had been living as a free construct in Robot Town, the slum borough of Subuh, for about six months. In that time he had become a recognised figure there, though he was but one among Subuh’s droves of colourful characters, and for his part he had learned much about the more wayward aspects of robot psychology. He saw it as a tribute to the robotic art that constructs, made to be slaves, could go so much against their own natures as to follow the example of men and live as free individuals. Admittedly the phenomenon was not too common, being more the result of a combination of accidents than of planning; nevertheless the total number of wild robots to be found was large. Most intriguing to Jasperodus were the knacks and tricks by which they evaded recapture. Some robots simply went to elaborate lengths to avoid all human contact. Others used a form of double-think, engaging themselves in a deeply divisive effort to misunderstand any direct order through close examination of its grammar or semantics. And there were some in whom this ploy had developed into an advanced neurosis rendering them incapable of hearing anything a human being said.

Safest from capture were those robots with a secret command language known only to their masters. Such machines were rare, but they would accept no commands except in that language and therefore had an unusual degree of personal freedom. A few of more urbane capability, intellectually superior to a normal human, even managed to survive in select districts like the Elan. Most wild robots, however, lived here in Subuh, where they had blended to some extent with the more poverty-stricken elements of the populace, who were apt to look upon them with a sort of grudging fellow-feeling. The robots occupied, in fact, the very lowest rung of the social ladder. Classed as non-persons, lacking the protection of the law, they were subject to every kind of exploitation.

A great problem every robot faced was how to obtain sufficient money to buy replacement isotope batteries, which ran down every few years. A trap many fell into was to sell sections of their brain, hoping to make good the loss later. A slower method was to become a wage-earner, with all the disadvantages of the dispossessed. Various kinds of work were available, the feature common to them all being that the wages paid to a wild robot were a fraction of those earned by a human or even by a robot hired out by an owner. Some wages offered were so trifling as never to amount to anything. Slightly better money could be made from dangerous work, where there was less competition from humans or from robot-owners – in fact there were high-risk tasks that were almost entirely the province of wild robots. Jasperodus had for a spell hired himself out as a construction worker, clambering up the spidery lacework of a new radio tower a thousand feet above the ground, and had earned enough to rent his room and to buy the books he needed.