Stanislaw Lem: Terminus

“W-h-o…”

Somehow he wound up back in the passageway. The fans purred ever so softly. He swam topside into a cool, dry breeze coming from the upper decks. Pools of light slid across his face whenever he passed one of the wall lamps.

The cabin was partially open, the desk lamp still on. Flat, wedge-shaped planes of light stretched to the base of the walls, cleaving the darkness.

Who was calling? Was it Simon? Wayne? No, it couldn’t be! They’ve both been dead for nineteen years!

Okay, who else could it have been? Terminus. But he was just a robot, good for patching leaky reactors. Pick his brain? Sure, and listen to a lot of mumbo jumbo about roentgens, neutron leakage, and cement patches! He knew nothing about anything, much less how his labor was being transformed nightly into a ghostly cadence!

One thing was clear: his recorder was far from dead. Whoever those people were—those voices, those signals—you could talk to them, converse with them. You just had to have the guts, that was all…

He pushed off from the ceiling and drifted leisurely over to the other wall. Goddamnit! He wanted to walk, to feel the ground under his feet again, to feel his own weight, to bang his fist down on the table! Oh, it was a cozy feeling, all right, this constant weightlessness that kept turning everything, including his own body, into flimsy shadows—as cozy as a bad dream! Everything he touched slipped away, drifted off-precarious, disembodied, fraudulent, a sham, a dream…

A dream?

Hold it. If I dream about someone, ask that person a question, I won’t know what that person has said until he has said it. Yet that someone is a product of my brain, a brief and momentary extension of it. It happens almost every day, or rather every night—in dreams, when the self splits up, divides, and begets pseudopersonalities. These dream personalities can be invented, or taken from real life. Don’t we sometimes dream of the dead? Carry on conversations with them?

They were dead.

Did that mean Terminus was…?

Immersed in such thoughts, he circled around the cabin, ricocheting off the hard surfaces of the walls until he stood hovering in the hatchway. Holding on to the rim, he contemplated the long, dark passageway, the light trailing off into the darkness…

Should he go back?

Go back—and ask?

It must involve some physical mechanism, he thought—one more complicated than the standard recorder. What the hell, a robot is not a sound-recording device. So it must be equipped with something else, some unique kind of recorder, one endowed with a certain autonomy, a certain mutability… one capable of being probed, of throwing light on the fates of those men—Simon, Nolan, Potter—and Momssen’s silence, that terrifying, inexplicable silence of the commander…

What other explanation was there?

None.

He knew there wasn’t, but he still couldn’t bring himself to budge, to move from the hatchway, as if waiting, hoping for some other explanation…

What was Terminus, anyway? An electronically wired box. Hell, anything alive, any living creature would have perished long ago in the wreckage. So now what? Rap out a few questions before his glass eyes? And even if he did that, what would he get out of him? Would they—those dead men—give him a neat and coherent narrative of what happened? Or wouldn’t he just hear a lot of screaming and yelling, cries for oxygen, for help… And what was he to tell him? That they didn’t exist? That they were only “pseudopersonalities,” isolated figments of his electronic brain—an illusion, a case of the hiccups? That the terror of those men was a fake terror, that their death struggle, repeated every single night, had as much meaning as a worn-out record? He recalled the response provoked by his question—that sudden burst of signals, and that cry, so full of shocked bewilderment and hope, and that frantic, urgent, unremitting pleading: “Come in! Who is signaling? Come in!!!”

He could still hear it ringing in his ears, could feel it pulsating in his fingertips: the terrible despair and fury of those banging supplications.

Didn’t exist? But then whose voices were those? Who were those people calling out for help? Oh, the experts would have an explanation, all right. They’d blame it on some electrical discharge, on the resonating effect of the vibrating metal. He sat down at his desk, pulled out a drawer, angrily slapped his hand down to keep the papers from fluttering away, fished out the printed form he was looking for, and carefully spread it out before him, pressing it flat so his breath wouldn’t disturb it. One by one he began filling in the blanks.

MODEL: AST-Pm - 15/0044.

TYPE: Universal maintenance.

NAME: Terminus.

NATURE OF DAMAGE: Functional disintegration.

RECOMMENDATIONS:…

He hesitated, holding the pen up close to the paper, then pulling it away. He began thinking about the innocence of machines, about how man had endowed them with intelligence and, in doing so, had made them an accomplice of his mad adventures. About how the myth of the golem—the machine that rebelled against its creator—was a lie, a fiction invented by the guilty for the sake of self-exoneration.

RECOMMENDATIONS: To be scrapped.

And with a perfectly rigid face, he signed it: