Barrington Bayley - The Rod of Light

‘Over here, robot,’ a harsh impersonal voice said.

Obeying, he let them usher him to the opening, the mouths of their tubes pointing always at his chest. Once he was through, the panel closed behind him. The dark cubicle he was now in had the feel of concrete, and it plummeted deep underground.

When it stopped there was a long wait. When eventually it opened, they were ready for him.

The examination began.

There had been no questions. No one had spoken to him except to give him orders. They had scanned his body with ultrasound. A Borgor technician had opened his inspection plate and taken a long series of readings, with an instrument so big it had to be pulled in on a trolley.

Now he was left alone in the steel-and-concrete cellar, shackled against the wall with steel chains.

Very faintly, he thought he heard distant voices. He sensitised his hearing; and then, realizing the sounds were being conducted through the room’s steel girder frame, moved his head to bring it into contact with the nearest stanchion.

‘No explosives in its body,’ a tinny voice said. ‘Surprising. No poison gas either, that we could find.’

‘It could have been sent to kill the Marshal with its hands,’ a second voice answered.

‘Why not blow itself up and kill half a dozen marshals, or wreck an entire floor? Besides, why send a robot as an assassin? A man would be better.’

‘Except a man might not regard himself as expendable.’

‘Yes… well, you’d still think it would know the name of its target… it doesn’t make sense… it must have travelled a long way to get here.’

‘What about if there’s a secret southern cell inside the city? They might have made it. Funny thing is, the specialist said it had no hostile intent… no, I don’t believe that.’

They returned. And for the first time, Jasperodus spoke.

‘Listen closely,’ he said, ‘there is something I want to tell your superiors. About ten months ago an unidentified aircraft was intercepted and crashed onto a coal mine some distance to the south of here—I do not know quite where. This aircraft was unusual in that it made no track on radar. If your scientists examined it they will have found themselves in possession of a new, radar-absorptive metal.

‘I was the pilot of that plane, and I was on my way here to warn you of a grave threat to the existence of your nation. Tell your superiors about the plane; they can check what I say.’

There were four examiners. Three were beefy, unimaginative looking men. The fourth wore a white coat and was more clinical, even saturnine. They all gaped at him. A voluble construct was probably outside their experience.

When they made no response, he spoke again. ‘Very well; there was once a marshal of the Imperial Forces of the New Empire who was a robot. I am that robot. Tell your superiors that. I must speak with them.’

‘Just what is this threat?’ the white-coated examiner asked him.

‘I shall explain that to your superiors.’

Suprisingly they did not react by demanding obedience. Instead, they left again. Once more, he heard talk.

‘… that’s right, I heard the Empire put a robot in charge of their army once. That’s how degenerate they are. Taking orders from a goddamned robot! No wonder they fell to pieces….’

‘You really think he’s the one?’

There was confused arguing. Jasperodus understood they were using the internal communicator, trying to get the attention of someone senior.

The voice that eventually came through was resonant, an interesting mixture of urbanity and coarseness, and was dominatingly loud. ‘You want me to sit down and talk with a robot? What do you think I am?’ A pause. ‘All right, so you think it’s important.’ Another pause. ‘Tell you what, get Igor to deal with it. He can decide whether there’s anything we should hear.’

After that came the longest wait yet. Jasperodus estimated that more than a day passed before the foot-thick door again opened. As before, there were guards with beamers, eyeing him nervously.

But the shackles were removed, and he was led down a corridor to an elevator, which took them aloft. He emerged into a carpeted corridor, where the guards showed him to a door, indicating that he should enter, but not following him in.

Jasperodus found himself in a plush office. The desk, with its stuffed swivel chair, was unoccupied, however. Instead, a robot was seated on a couch.

It rose, surveying Jasperodus with a cool gaze. ‘Hello. I am Igor.’

Jasperodus gazed back, surprised. So this was ‘Igor’. He was bulky, his body rounded, encompassed with louvrelike bands. His movements were highly deferential but with a kind of formal gracefulness, like those of a self-confident, well-trained human servant. The face, though distinctly non-human, was similarly marked by a sort of discreet watchfulness. Whoever had designed it had talent.

All in all, Jasperodus decided immediately, this was a construct of high intelligence, even though he did not deserve the ‘super-intelligent’ classification. All the more surprising, then, to see that Igor was definitely of Borgor manufacture. Several details told Jasperodus this, such as the body-shell being riveted instead of jigsaw-welded as would have been the case in the south.

‘Will you be seated?’ Igor asked courteously, gesturing to a chair. ‘I have been instructed to investigate your case. I know you asked to see a high-ranking officer, but I am afraid you will have to be content with me.’

‘My need is to speak with someone who has both influence and intelligence,’ Jasperodus said. ‘I thought the Borgors did not tolerate intelligent robots.’

‘You are right in a general sense,’ Igor replied. ‘However, wise rulers make sure they have all capabilities within their grasp, and my masters are not fools. So they do employ a few where it is prudent, simply for the sake of completeness. My own role in the Ministry is to be a representative of the construct mind, so to speak. In addition I perform advisory military analysis. Vindication of the policy is that it gives the High Command a tool with which to deal with yourself. Now—’

Igor’s tone firmed and his head bent peremptorily to Jasperodus, the attitude of a senior house-slave admonishing a junior house-slave. ‘You spoke of a threat to Borgor. Tell me everything you know.’

‘A threat not just to Borgor,’ Jasperodus said.

This, clearly, was as far as he was going to get. So he began to speak, telling how he had been drawn into the Gargan Cult, then something of what he had seen at the secret research station. He emphasised particularly that the robots there used human prisoners in their research. He told how Gargan spoke of replacing humanity with more intelligent constructs possessing consciousness.

Then he briefly related his journey northwards to give warning, his falling foul of the air defences, and the time he had spent in the mine.

His greatest difficulty, he felt, was in imparting to Igor the idea of consciousness, and what it would mean should robots acquire it.

‘Consciousness,’ Igor mused when he had finished. ‘It is something I cannot really envisage.’

‘It is the only quality robots lack. The leaders of the Gargan Cult already have far greater intelligence than human beings or you or I. Once they become conscious, they will be superior in every way, and there will be no stopping them.’

‘But if I remember correctly artificial consciousness is an impossibility,’ Igor said. ‘There are theorems to prove it.’

Jasperodus had carefully not mentioned the means by which Gargan and his followers planned to achieve their ends. ‘Those theorems were deduced by human roboticians, not by superintelligent constructs,’ he replied. ‘I can only tell you that Gargan has found a way through them. When I left, he was already achieving positive results. By now he may have succeeded altogether. The cult must be destroyed immediately, or it will be too late.’