Barrington Bayley - The Rod of Light

Also due to that, the monstrous octopus that connected together the separate brains was giving him what few humans had ever known: experience of the mind’s functional substructures.

And at the same time he learned the reason why waking consciousness normally was prevented from visiting its own supporting depths. Try as he might, he was unable to regain access to his external senses.

He was trapped. And he began to fear it would be for the rest of his existence….

Time flowed… and then flowed no longer….

…Until, after a measureless interval, the waters of the unconscious receded, leaving the heap of silent, motionless robots high and dry. Disconnected by the neural cable, Jasperodus found himself staring skyward once more.

Judging by the position of the sun and the quality of the light the time was mid-morning. There came a noise of trampling and clashing; someone was climbing the heap, using metal bodies as stepping stones, and by the sound of it dislodging several and sending them slithering down the pile.

Shortly the brute face of one of his captors loomed over him. The robot reached down, and with uncharacteristic gentleness eased the neural cable from the back of his head. Then, seizing him under his arms with large hands, it lugged him awkwardly down the heap, nearly losing its footing more than once.

At the bottom Jasperodus was dragged to where another construct waited, then was dropped. The second robot knelt to finger the back of his skull.

He heard his inspection plate click shut. The two constructs stepped back, and Jasperodus realised that the power of movement had been returned to him.

Tentatively he stirred, feeling unsteady at first although no deterioration had taken place in his motor system. Cautiously he lifted himself on one knee, and after a moment, to his feet.

The two confronting him were probably the same robots that had captured him, though it was not possible to be sure. After a pause, one spoke.

‘We are instructed to apologise for placing you forcibly upon the pile. Gargan was expecting you. He will see you now.’

Jasperodus glanced up the metal slope. ‘How long was I there?’

Twenty days? Thirty? Am I a timekeeper?’

‘Also remove from that heap the construct who conducted me here,’ Jasperodus ordered.

‘No instruction was issued with regard to your guide,’ the robot told him brusquely, and made an impatient gesture. ‘Come. You are to meet Gargan.’

He turned and walked towards the nearest zinc shed, taking the path of the thick trunk-line that snaked thither from the foot of the pile.

With a heightened sense of curiosity and expectation now that his delayed journey was at an end, Jasperodus followed.

Seizing a handle, the robot slid aside a panel in the wall of the shed and stepped inside. Jasperodus heard him speak in a low voice.

‘Here is the one you sent for, master.’

Receiving some reply, he stepped back and indicated to Jasperodus that he should enter.

The panel slid shut behind him. Within, harsh white light from wall tubes filled the interior of the shed. There were no internal divisions: it was one large space, sparsely populated by workbenches, storage racks, and apparatuses mounted both on the floor and on benches, most of it unfamiliar to Jasperodus except for the construct assembler and disassembler rigs such as could be found in any robotician’s workshop.

The floor was unusual in being of smooth concrete, not the beaten earth common to robot buildings. Across it there snaked the neural trunkline, ending in a cube-shaped grid-like object six foot or so on the side. Jasperodus guessed it to be a logic junction of huge proportions.

The dozen or more robots in the shed had paused from whatever activity they were engaged upon, and turned to witness Jasperodus’ entry. One, the nearest, Jasperodus knew instantly to be Gargan.

But to his great surprise, there was also a human present. She was naked, stretched out and strapped down to a bench: a young but mature female. Her hair had been shaved but had begun to grow, sprouting golden bristles. Her head was fixed in a clamp, and her skull had been drilled in several places and probes inserted. From these, cables went in a skein to the logic junction.

The sight deflected him, for a moment, from concentrating his attention on what he had most expected to see: Gargan. But now this personage moved with ponderous but controlled steps towards him.

‘You are Jasperodus?’ the robot enquired in a deep, smooth voice. ‘Yes, I recognise you.’

Gargan was large, topping Jasperodus by a head. His dark, matt body was bulky and rounded. His head was a domed cylinder, taller than it was broad, a rounded bulge in the front more a suggestion of a visage than a real face. The head lacked a neck: placed directly on the shoulders, it had limited movement. When Gargan turned his head or bent to peer he was apt to move his torso also, and this gave him an air of great deliberation.

Compared to this large head the eye-lenses seemed small. They were set wide apart, their glow pale and pearl-coloured. Ears, olfactory sense, speaker grille, seemed no more than etched in and were barely visible.

Jasperodus noted the hands. They were clever-looking hands, the thumbs unusually long, a feature occurring on robots made for special dexterity. Often it went with abnormally high intelligence. But incongruously they were attached to short, rather stumpy arms. Especially dextrous robots usually had a very long reach—sometimes as much as twenty feet, using arms that folded like multiple jack-knives.

The cult master came closer and bent towards Jasperodus, as if in respectful greeting but in reality to keep his gaze on him. Jasperodus now noticed that his body-casing was of hardened steel. This was no tinplate construct. Like Jasperodus himself, he was built to last and to survive many vicissitudes.

‘Come, soon-to-be-our-brother in the Work.’ Gargan extended an arm to usher him forward. ‘Our movement, as you may know, is widespread but selective. You have arrived at the centre, where our effort is concentrated. Presently you will become acquainted with us all, but I shall begin by effecting introductions. First, one whom I believe you have met before: Socrates, companion to the great robotician Aristos Lyos in his last years.’

With a shock, Jasperodus recognised the small, rounded robot with hooded eyes and a quiet demeanour, and for the second time in his life he felt himself subject to the probing of that watchful intellect….

His memory flashed back to the day he had visited the venerable Lyos, greatest robot maker of his time, seeking to know if machine consciousness could conceivably—no matter how remotely—be possible.

He had received the definitive, and negative, answer he had expected. But when introducing him to Socrates, Lyos had made an intriguing statement.

‘Socrates,’ he had said, ‘is intelligent enough to realize that I am conscious, but that he is not.’

‘Greetings, brother,’ murmured the construct, his voice as distant and preoccupied as Jasperodus remembered it. ‘You remain undeterred despite all, I see.’

‘Evidently,’ Jasperodus replied curtly. He presumed the other referred to his conversation with Lyos.

Next Gargan introduced a gaunt, rust-hued robot whose head, a pointed cylinder nearly half as tall as his torso, patently housed an unusual brain. To confront him was slightly disconcerting: he had four eyes, one pair set high in his head, the other low, and they flashed in clockwise rotation.

‘This is Gaumene, whose ingenuity as a designer has been of inestimable benefit to us. He is our chief systems engineer.’

Next, a squat construct with a carapace-like cranium that flowed down his back. ‘Here we have Fifth of His Kind. The name is descriptive, cursorily bestowed by Fifth’s maker, the renowned Oscath Budum.’