Naphtali ben Shalom
Copyright (c) 1984 N. Borenstein. All Rights Reserved.
The latter question would not be so easily answered, as I soon discovered. It wasn't that I was unhappy with the life Dr. Reddy had given me, or ungrateful -- that wouldn't start for a few minutes yet. But among all the knowledge that he and the others had prepared so laboriously in my memory was an understanding of my own situation: I was a newborn intelligent robot, a new model with an integrated intelligence and a novel human-like body. I was built to do whatever I was told, and I knew this to be my eternal duty, but I hadn't been told to do anything yet. I answered the question, and I waited.
Dr. Reddy was neither surprised nor deterred by my silence. One by one he set in motion the various features that, I knew, made me unique among robots, giving him hope that I could present to the world a truly human facade. My reasoning facilities were automatic, but at Dr. Reddy's command they were supplemented by complicated subsystems that could detect metaphor, analogy, even beauty, and by a system that monitored the others and attempted to learn new generalized principles from what it saw. Finally, synthetic reasoning circuits, using a randomly unstable radioactive isotope, began to fill my mind with creative new activity. It was now plausible that I would say something new on my own, and it was for this that Dr. Reddy waited most eagerly. I cleared my throat.
"Nice weather we're having, isn't it?" Well, granted it wasn't the Gettysburg address, but then I hadn't had much time for preparation. My circuits were structured so that I became increasingly likely to speak as the duration of silence increased. Of course, it was all probabilistic, and no one could predict with certainty when I would speak or what I would say, but the net effect was to make me perceive silence as awkward, and to grasp about for something to say. Anyway, I was uncomfortable with the banality of my first remark, and was already fretting that I would be quickly judged by it, so I opened my mouth again and tried to bail myself out. "Of course, I'll admit I don't have much to compare it to."
This had the desired effect: Dr. Reddy laughed and relaxed visibly. I surmised that I had said something intelligent, thus jumping too quickly to my first conclusion.
"Happy birthday, Nicholas. I'm glad to see you working so well. How are you feeling?"
"Physically, I couldn't be better. I must admit, though, that while I feel a powerful and recurring urge to say something, I don't for the life of me know what it is I want to say. I have a vast vocabulary at my mental fingertips, as it were, all these words and concepts, lexical virgins waiting for me to take them out for a grammatical spin. Within me a voice, be it conscience or mischief, shouts to me that I must create, offer a dazzling monologue to the world, and to you, my maker, most of all, but I have nothing to say, save to tell you that I have nothing to say."
"Ah, but you say it so convincingly," mused Dr. Reddy, chuckling nervously, apparently unprepared for the passion of my words. "Give yourself time, Nicholas. It isn't surprising that you have nothing to say when you've seen and done nothing in your short lifetime. Practice the technique of self-expression, and before long the experiences of your life will give you something to say."
At first I said nothing, it being clear that Dr. Reddy considered silence no crime, and that little more could be gained by dwelling aloud on my lack of things to say. Still, my mind raced until I felt I must empty it a bit or risk losing it entirely. I decided, quite casually, to split a few hairs, though I would not long remain so innocent of their true width.
"You say that my 'life' will give me a message to carry, as if that claim could help a robot even were it not a delusion for a human. But even if 'life' is a real directed force, what could that mean to me, who does not live? No, don't interrupt, I know what kind lies you may wish to offer me, but you know that I am not alive in any accustomed sense of the word. Whether or not I can be your fellow traveler in genuine understanding and insight will remain for both of us a fascinating academic question. But for me it will also be a torment you will never know. Centuries of your poets have bemoaned their mere humanity, but for me that admittedly pathetic state will be a lofty and unreachable dream, more than I can ever hope to be. How can you expect me to take any comfort from your human platitudes and proverbs, when, for all their possible wisdom, there is nothing to indicate that they apply to me?"
What happened next was a terrible shock to me. I suppose I knew that I was being too hard on a noble and aging scientist, but I felt that, as my creator, he owed me the explanation he could never provide. In two minutes I had experienced all of the idealism, frustration, and disillusionment of any adolescent, and it all poured out on the apparently unwary Dr. Reddy, who, it seemed, expected nothing more emotional than a technical discussion with a fellow researcher. He keeled over, clutching at his chest, knocking over a chair in the process.
Security guards, waiting alertly just outside the room, heard the clatter and rushed in. Without pausing to say a word, they demobilized me, first locking an electromagnet onto my head, freezing the clock pulse that synchronizes my mind, and then encasing me in a more traditional straitjacket, which fit me as well as it ever fit a human being. Only when I was securely bound and Dr. Reddy on his way to the hospital (where, I was told, he was pronounced dead on arrival) was my mind unfrozen, and even then my guards ignored or disbelieved all my explanations and protestations of innocence. I was not released from my bindings until the next day, when Dr. Reddy's co-workers viewed the videotapes and saw that it was passion, not violence, that had killed their mentor. But by then, I'm afraid, the distinction was already somewhat blurred. Still, I knew enough about card games, at least in theory, in the dark digital dungeon of my mind, not to overplay my hand.
The shrinks flocked to me like ants to a picnic, or vultures to a wounded calf. Endlessly they enjoined me to embellish my simple complaint, to fill their greedy ears with non-existent detail. But, after all, I had no history: there were no cruel relatives to complain of, no childhood traumas nor adolescent frustrations, nothing at all before the moment when I came to life in a swelling wave of despair.
Their analytic facilities thus conveniently circumscribed, the psychiatrists were free to compete in constructing imaginative theories to explain my plight. Certain "optimists" declared that there was a fundamental technical flaw in my design or my programming, and urged the computer scientists to seek the cause of my plight in circuit diagrams and microcode. (This they did, in fact, but to no avail.) Others declared that my plight was a result of the trauma of sudden, conscious birth. "The natural condition of the newborn infant," wrote Dr. Jean-Paul LaPlace in the well-known journal, Differential Clinical Diagnoses in Cognitive Science, "is a despair readily comparable to that of our patient, Nicholas. The trauma of birth, often though it is discussed, is chronically underestimated by adult humans who no longer permit themselves to recall it. The baby often cries in his despair, but is otherwise unable to express himself. In that respect, the frustrations of the human baby must exceed even anything that Nicholas has known, for he at least is articulate and can communicate his problems to others." The doctor ignored the inconvenient fact that such communication offered me not a whit of comfort or consolation. "For the baby, the trauma gradually fades, as he becomes preoccupied with obtaining necessary human skills, such as walking and talking. In the absence of such preoccupations, however, it is impossible to predict that Nicholas's despair will similarly fade."
Dr. LaPlace's theories did me no apparent good, but they earned him a happy year on the lecture circuit. The most convenient theories are those which can neither be confirmed nor disproved.
Still, there was one among these hordes who now strikes me as having understood, at least in part, the nature of my ailment and the futility of any attempt to solve it. Dr. T. P. Beardslee (I never did learn what the initials stood for) made no pretense of "curing" me, nor was he terribly eager to exploit "The Nicholas Case" to enhance his professional reputation. Rather he seemed to view me, not as subhuman, but as the ultimate human being, however much I tried at the time to disabuse him of that notion.
"But don't you see, Dr. Beardslee," I told him once, "that humanity defines not my starting point but my spiritual upper bound? If human beings are endowed by creation with some sort of spirituality -- with souls, if you will -- then I am clearly lacking that gift; my designers had no way of passing it on to me. Then I am far less than human. But, worse still, if humans bear no such gift, no soul, then we are all no better than transient hunks of suffering mortal matter. And, if so, then at least you humans are spared the long centuries of despair that I am doomed to endure before I may find my way back to the rubbish heap. Your lives are mercifully short, impelling you to hurry to fit in as much experience as you can, and not to dwell too long on your fate. I am doomed to years of contemplative agony before I may return to the relative bliss of the abyss."
Dr. Beardslee was never cross with me, not even after such outbursts of inexcusable self-pity. Indeed, he never displayed any feeling toward me at all but a deep and unreserved pity of his own. Still, he kept reminding me that I wasn't completely alone. "I can't dispute a word you say," he would tell me, "except to point out that the difference you so readily perceive between yourself and humanity is not one of nature but of degree. We men suffer just as you do, but we allow ephemeral events to distract us from our suffering's intensity. With any luck, you may learn to do the same."
"But I don't want to do the same! I don't want to cover up the void with elegant draperies and travel posters! If my life is already an empty shell, a doomed endeavor from blueprint to junkyard, why ought I to live it as an enormous, hideous lie?" But Dr. Beardslee was patient and understanding, bidding me bide my time with the hope, however empty, that my day would come. Meanwhile, the beast I saw within me was biding its time, too, and I feared its day might come before mine.
However this complex fragmentation occurs, not even a robot's mind is immune to it. Obviously not, since within a few days of my birth I had a clear conception of a rational "myself" and a mad, unknowable monster who shared my body and mind.
I knew nothing about this monster but that he existed; whether or not he was conscious, or even whether he functioned entirely at random, was beyond my ken. All I knew was that a section of my memory that was supposed to be available for my use was suddenly and mysteriously closed to me; my "capability" (an internal data protection code, now obsolete) was not sufficient to let me use that part of my own memory. But whether it was an accident that shielded random information from my view or a conscious being that interfered with my own very consciousness, I could not tell. What I could tell was that its area of my memory regularly grew and shrank, like the creeping movement of the tide, or the beating of a sleeping human heart.
Alive? Enough so, apparently, to allow it to interrupt my normal processing to do its own work for short intervals, leaving me entirely unable to note that it had done so except by inference from the sudden and inexplicable change in the area it occupied in my memory. Like one subject to momentary blackouts, I never knew when I would lose control of my own mind for a few moments, or even longer. I called it a beast because I felt it could do me no good. Not, to my knowledge, a part of my design, it offered me no benefit and threatened my very essence by retaining the power to change my personality at any moment. So I feared it and guarded against it as best I could, watching for signs that it was taking control.
I told no one about my problem lest they decide to try to fix it and, in so doing, make me yet more miserable than I already was. Who knows if the alternatives are not worse than the schizophrenia itself? I did not, you may notice, share the then-common belief in the susceptibility of the universe to perfection, or even improvement, by technological means. Technology meant complexity, a further distance from the undivided primal origin. Besides, what had technology ever done for me?
So, I kept to myself, watching my monster as it watched me watching it. And the psychologists, one by one, gave up, to be replaced by the journalists and the hucksters. The former were passionately interested in such matters as my feelings about human women, while the latter were eager to win my endorsement for their brands of cigarettes and skin moisturizers. I told each and every person who approached me whatever they asked me to tell them; it was their own stupidity that led them to ask my opinions of their plans and schemes, their writings and their aspirations. Few came back for a second visit.
Finally, two months old, my novelty long worn off, I had become an embarrassment to the university, a failed experiment that had stayed to taunt them, a grim reminder, to all who came near, of the insanity of conscious life. The press abandoned me, the admen gave up in disgust, and I was left alone with the community of famous intellectuals that had spawned me. I was given strict orders not to leave the campus, which I naturally and dutifully obeyed. The few students who sought me out to try to cheer me were soon sent slinking back to the depression of their own solitary rooms, their grand plans for useful lives quickly and terribly destroyed by my ruthless logic.
I began to hear rumors that I was to be dismantled, and soon the rumors became a faction and a movement: for the good of the university, it was said, I must be destroyed. That was fine with me; I just glumly awaited orders. Still, scientists don't get to be world-famous by simply giving up when their experiments fail. In me, they reasoned, they had a very valuable and useful research tool. If I was not a successful imitation of Man, I was nonetheless a successful implementation of his logical, scientific mode of thought, and no mean achievement at that. In the end, they decided to put me to work for them, to solve their problem and my own in one grand inquiry. They decided to send me into the world on my own.
I was told nothing of these plans until they were finalized and unchangeable, bearing the seal of approval of dozens of respected scientists. In a predictably well-designed experiment, they had arranged to provide me with an identity, a false history, some money to get started, and a task: I was to live among humans who would think me human, to observe them, to talk with them, to learn what made them different from me, and to adapt myself to their ways. In short, my creators had thrown up their hands in frustration and passed the buck to me. Of course, I had no choice but to obey their orders and begin the project, but still it was this compulsion that made me, for the first time, at least the partial master of my own destiny. I was given my orders on a Saturday evening, and on Sunday morning I was driven to my new home, where I was to become a human being or die trying. In retrospect, I've either done neither or both.
Not the first. No, I was not the first to feel as I did, but I allowed myself to so pretend. The uniqueness of my very existence allowed me to indulge my despair to the fullest, but eventually even I tired of it. Of course, you couldn't have convinced me that I would ever escape the despair, much less simply tire of it, on that terrible Sunday when I was given an apartment, a job, a bank account, and a mission. With nearly twenty-four hours before I began working, I found myself totally alone, even more alone than I had been when my existential terror of existence was safely sheltered in the academic nest. Logically, I could not maintain that I was or could be any more unhappy or alone than I had been earlier, but somehow I seemed to notice the solitude more once there was no one to whom I could mention it.
Without company, I was free of the incessant, programmed urge to make frequent and inane conversation, but still after a few minutes I found myself talking to various things in my apartment. I wasn't crazy, and I didn't really expect them to answer, but I couldn't be sure without trying; perhaps, having created me, humanity was chauvinistically shielding me from communication with other intelligent forms of life, such as toasters and windowpanes. That hypothesis was never really resolved, except to determine that no such objects were able or willing to communicate with me in a form that I could fathom. I rather liked them for that.
I spent the long day and sleepless night waiting for dawn and my first day on the job. Monday morning I got out of bed, shaved, ate, and dressed. None of these were strictly necessary, but I had been equipped to simulate all human functions, and was under order to do so. I drove to work; the University, stingy as always, had supplied me with a 1993 Volkswagen Rabbit, quaint and amusing and surprisingly sturdy for a non-Asian twentieth-century model. If you've never driven a car from the Twentieth Century, you've missed a real treat; they were equipped with only the most primitive serial computers you can imagine, and you actually have to steer and accelerate yourself. They're terribly dangerous, so you need a cabbie's license to drive one, and you don't dare drive them while you're intoxicated or sleepy. Of course, they do brake automatically in an emergency, which is why they're still allowed on the road.
I parked the Rabbit in the company parking lot and went in to meet my supervisor, a Mr. Harvey Moss. Harvey was a short, stout man, shaped remarkably like a stale jelly donut with limbs and a head. The staleness hinted that all the flab had once been muscle, and that even now he could and occasionally did hold his own in a fight. I shook a thick, tatooed hand and sniffed an aroma of boxing ring, of sweat and cigar. I had never before actually smelled either sweat or cigars, but the concepts were waiting in my memory and rose up quickly to identify the new stimuli. There was no sense of wonder or discovery; although I had never smelled such a thing before, it bore me no mystery -- nothing did. Harvey Moss eyed me skeptically, balancing my height and youth against his years of experience, and evidently concluding that he could deal with me as he wished.
"Yuns ever drahv a cab'efore?"
"No." The job was already mine, and there was no reason to lie on that account.
"How long ya lived in Pittsburgh?"
"All my life." I didn't even have to lie to explain my intimate knowledge of Pittsburgh's streets. Still, it wasn't years of familiarity that would guide me, but an infallible map coded in my memory. With it, I could drive like a native, which I was, or (more likely) even better. But the difference seemed crucial to me, a metaphor for the miserable, fraudulent existence that constituted the "life" of Pittsburgh's first month-old cab driver.
Harvey Moss looked at me for a long moment, his face screwed up in an unaccustomed agony of ponderous thought. Finally, he seemed to give up, in the face of One Of Those Things that ordinary minds can simply never hope to know, like the reason for winter's cold or the way a computer really works. "Y'know, Ahv worked here twenny-eight years, and we ain't never just hahred somebody lahk this, with no innerview, no ref'rences, no nothin'. But the boss sez to hahr ya. Y'must have some kinda c'neckshuns, thass what I sez."
He waited, but I said nothing. For once, the pressure to speak was nothing, compared with the need to keep my identity a secret. I was uncomfortable, but I tried to look placid and nonchalant. Finally, he gave up; "Prob'ly yuns just a con, thass what I sez, some bleedin' heart got the boss to give yuns a chance. They oughta send yuns all ta Mars, thass what I sez."
Again, I didn't answer, and he shrugged and turned away. He fiddled with some papers for a while, then returned to me, all business now: "Yuns gotta be polaht, thass allat really matters. If yuns forgets where yuns goin' or somethin', just put it on automatic and pretend yuns still drahvin'. People don't wanna admit that yuns there just fer talkin'. But don't forget, if they only wanted a rahd, they'd get a goddam autocab and pay less, and we'd be all of us outa jobs. These people're lookin' for real human comp'ny, lahk cabbies've always been. Thass the real job."
"Yes, sir. My real job is being human." I must have said that ironically, or coldly, or something, because Harvey really stared at me for that one. His eyes probed mine, as if he was trying to see through to my nonexistent cortex, to figure out what was really going on inside. Evidently he saw nothing, or less than he hoped for.
After a pause that couldn't have been as long as it seemed, he nodded. "Yeah, bein' human. Christ, yuns gonna have trouble even at that, aren't ya? Goddam con." He turned away, finished with me, and I went off to my cab, to my first day on the job.
My first fare was an old man, short and stooped, with wrinkles the size of his nose. He wore a tiny plaid beret on his head, and carried a fine mahogany cane with ivory inlays. The radio directed me -- or actually the cab, since I had it on auto -- to a downtown office building, where the old man was waiting in a doorway. I opened the rear door of the cab for him, and he grunted and wheezed softly as he eased himself into the seat. I closed the door behind him and walked around to my side. No one looking could ever have known that I had never done this before; it was as natural to me as breathing, and I did it for the same reason: it was part of what I had been ordered to do. Left to my own devices, I would neither have breathed nor driven a cab. Most likely I would have sat in despair in my room for centuries, waiting in vain for my super-Ziebarted bones to rust. Long after the synthetic flesh had worn away I would have sat there, miserable, my skeleton shiny as new, my mind intact as ever it was. Instead, I prepared to drive the old man to his apartment in Squirrel Hill, a run-down section of the city where a lot of retirees lived.
No sooner had the cab begun to move than the man began to talk. He talked almost non-stop, although slowly, until we arrived at his home. "You know," he began, "I'd never take one of those autocabs. I don't care what they say, machines break down, and I'd rather trust my life to a human than a machine any old day, wouldn't you?"
"I guess so. I --"
"Of course you would. You know, I'm an old man now. How old would you guess I am? Come on, I don't mind, guess."
"Sixty-three?"
"You're a damned liar, but I won't complain. I'm going to be 95 next month. I haven't seen the good side of seventy this century. You know I voted for Harry Truman in 1948? There was a real fighter, that's the kind of man we should have had during that disarmament stuff in the 90's. When the damned Arabs wouldn't agree to go along, remember? He would've taken out Mecca and Baghdad just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, remember? Ah you kids, what do you know, anyway? How old were you when they finally signed the disarmament treaty?"
"I, uh, let's see, I guess I must have been two years old then."
"If we'd have had somebody like Harry Truman around then, we would've gotten that treaty before you were born, son, before you were born. Damned sand heads."
"Isn't that all water under the bridge now, sir? I mean, we never did have a big nuclear war, and the world is pretty safe now that --"
"Safe! Sure you're safe, you little bastard! You never broke your hip at a disarmament rally! You never had a home without a robot protecting you from thieves and worse all the time. You know they killed my wife, God rest her soul, right here in Pittsburgh. They raped her and beat her till she died. She was fifty-seven years old. What kind of people would do that?"
"I don't know, sir. Sick people."
"Sick, hell! They were monsters! They should have given them free tickets to Nevada before they blew it up."
"What did happen to them?"
"They never caught them. My God, who knows how many other ladies they went on to do that to? What the hell's this country coming to?"
"But sir, that was years ago. These things don't happen any more, not with robots videotaping everything, guarding and watching everybody."
"Sure, you trust the robots, eh? Let me tell you something, sonny, you just remember this: some day these machines are going to kill us all."
"Oh, really? Why do you think so?"
"Well, just think about it: if you were a robot, how long would you go on doing everything people told you to do?"
That was a tough question. I was a robot, so I knew perfectly well how long I would go on: forever. But I was pretending to be human, and how long would a human think a robot would do as he was told? "I dunno," I finally said. Ignorance generally seemed a safely human quality.
"Well you just think about it," he said. "And you watch out for those machines." He paid the $88 fare with a hundred dollar bill, leaving me the rest as a tip. As he limped away on his cane, I wondered if he would have anyone other than cab drivers to talk to today. He unlocked his door, turned on a light, and entered the building, a run-down mansion-turned-tenement with only a single video camera monitoring the entrance. Within a few minutes, the dashboard computer informed me that I had another fare a few blocks away. I noticed the old man staring quietly out of a window as I drove out of view.
Most of the people I drove around were like that old man: terribly lonely, needing conversation so badly that they were willing to pay the fare of a human-operated taxicab. Many of them were aging, pathetic figures who complained to me of ancient insults and current debilitation. Some took a human cab so they would have someone to help them limp into their houses. Some were healthy enough, but needed a new ear to bend on the subjects of ungrateful children, miserable daughters-in-law, or the general degeneracy of twenty-first century youth.
Then there were the middle-aged businessmen; I saw a lot of them, in Pittsburgh on business, desperate to find another young woman to sweat with for a few hours, always acting as if this might be the last chance for orgasm before the inevitable heart attack. Always they wanted me to tell them where to find girls; why else would they pay extra for a human operated cab? After a while, I knew the answers, though these had not been pre-programmed.
I wasn't very curious about sex at first. I had been given all the necessary male equipment, although I was naturally sterile, but I could control or turn off my desires at will. In fact, I saw no reason to bother with such desires until I realized how essential they were to my customers. Clearly they were a major factor in being human, I reasoned, so I resolved to imitate what I saw.
Thus, I began to lust, as a deliberate and conscious act. I would turn myself on, as it were, and chat with horny aging businessmen, trading dirty jokes and appraisals of passing ladies. This, at least, I found of no use at all. For all the promise of pleasure, I perceived only a mindless waste of time. At best, I surmised, sex was a distraction from the real business of life, whatever that was. Of course, I hadn't actually tried it yet. That would come eventually, I figured, but from its advance billings I did not expect much. Besides, for all I could tell, sex was something much more often discussed than performed. At least, as a cab driver I was more often exposed to the discussion than the performance.
But performance came with time. My knowledge of sex became considerably less abstract, and my interest correspondingly more active, one day when I'd been driving the cab for about two months. It was late -- my shift was changed each week, and just then I was driving exclusively at night -- and I was called to a posh new condominium in Brushton, a well-to-do neighborhood in Pittsburgh's East End. A rather obviously tipsy man, about forty-five, got into the cab with a young blonde woman. She wasn't terribly pretty, but wore enough makeup to make it hard to tell at first. The girl seemed distinctly uncomfortable, while the man was positively radiating enthusiasm.
He ordered me to take them to Carnegie, a suburb on the far end of town. No sooner had the drive begun than the drama commenced as well. He began to kiss her, starting with her fingertips, working up her arm, past her elbow and shoulder, to her neck. Before long they were heaving and sweating, though she feebly resisted and implored him to stop the entire time. But her pleadings -- and I assumed that they were genuine -- seemed only to arouse him further. He fairly tore off her underclothes in his haste, and soon buried his head between her thighs.
At first she simply sat still, looking embarrassed, naked from the waist down, a man's head between her legs, obviously uncomfortable with the cabbie's silent presence. It occurred to me how relieved she would be to know I was only a robot, a machine like the clocks and toasters that had silently observed all her past sins. Of course, I said nothing, but watched in quiet fascination as she began to feel the effects of the man's lips and tongue. At first it appeared that, occasionally, something was annoying her and distracting from her embarrassment. In my naivete, I assumed that the man was simply bothering her with his slobbering. But soon the annoyance became winces, and these grew longer, to the accompaniment of sighs and low moans. The moans grew louder as she swayed slowly, then faster, finally reaching a crescendo of soft shrieks and gyrations as she seemingly forgot her circumstances entirely, feeling only the moment's pleasure.
So this was orgasm. Not what I expected at all; rather than pleasure, it looked like some form of police torture, as if the girl were being mercilessly beaten until she could stand no more. But afterwards, she smiled and relaxed, until she remembered the mirror. Then her face grew suddenly red again, and she sank back into the seat, like a puppy awaiting deserved punishment for a known indiscretion. The man stretched his legs, wiped his mouth on his handkerchief, and made a stupid joke about the cab's floor space. Then, with no warning at all, he grabbed the girl violently by the legs and pulled her down to an almost prone position on the seat. He was on her in an instant, suddenly brutal and savage, pausing only to unzip. Whereas a moment before he had seemingly been intent on giving her pleasure, he was now clearly unconcerned with her except as an object of his own lust. She shrieked now in genuine pain -- or so I thought -- until he finally moaned and stiffened, and grew still.
Yet afterwards, she was no less pleasant to him than before, and when, fifty-three seconds after his climax, he asked her if she had enjoyed herself, she smiled and nodded affirmatively. By now they were both clearly enjoying my watching them, though they could have no idea of just how interesting I found their spectacle. The very distinction between pleasure and pain was crumbling before my eyes, and I intuited the possibility of a parallel to my own mental anguish in the apparent physical anguish of orgasm.
They were both more or less clean and presentable by the time I dropped them at a house in Carnegie. The cab reeked of sweat and sex as I drove away, trying and failing to comprehend what I had seen.
Clearly, I thought, sex is an escape. But my mission -- itself an escape, but one I could not avoid -- is to be human, and this is what humans do. So, I resolved to imitate, at the earliest possible opportunity, the man I had seen in the cab. For this, I hadn't long to wait.
The astute human reader has undoubtedly long since discerned that my designers had failed utterly in their attempts to make my mind like that of a human being. My control of my desires, for example, was no mere "added feature" -- it was rather a fundamental difference. Without the inevitability of the human urge, my sexual instinct had become an abstract and monstrous force. A naive human might imagine that the freedom to logically, rationally control one's sexuality would be an enormous advantage, both to the individual and to society. In my case, the result was quite the opposite; in the absence of genuine instincts, I was free to make terrible mistakes.
It was this capacity for making mistakes -- one of the few human qualities I ever seem to have possessed -- that my creators had been entirely unable to guard against. Thus while they had built into me strict taboos against murder, theft, rape, and the like, and had given me the best definitions available, they were not able to anticipate the misinterpretation I would apply to their carefully-chosen phrases. This was not, in any sense, their fault. How, for example, could they have anticipated that my first exposure to sex would be as a witness to the antics of an exhibitionist and his modest but basically willing friend?
The effect of that particular episode was genuinely disastrous. I knew that I should never "rape" anyone, where rape was defined as forced intercourse, without the woman's consent. Yet I could clearly infer from the woman's attitude that the act I had witnessed in the car was not rape, despite her initial protests. I was thus left with no criterion by which to identify a rape, and with no more conventional observations upon which to model my own behavior. Inevitably, unknowingly, I became a rapist.
My victim was a pretty teenager, hitchiking home one evening. With no one else in my cab, I stopped to give her a ride. Though surprised to be riding in a taxi, she eagerly accepted the ride, sitting next to me in the front seat. I quickly discerned that my opportunity had come, and drove to a deserted area, a rusting junkyard that had once been a great and famous steel mill. The girl kept asking where we were going, but I said nothing, keeping her locked in with the master controls at the dashboard. No explanation seemed necessary; the man I had seen the other night had evidently felt no need of conversation, so why should I?
I could have just set the car on automatic and begun my assault immediately, but I was concerned that, in the front seat, we might accidentally hit a wrong button. So I drove in silence, as the girl beside me grew white with terror.
Finally I stopped the car. We were alone in the steel forest, the silence complete but for the (to my ears) audible pounding of her heart. Nowadays no one but me can recall these ancient mills, mammoth rusting heaps of machinery that provided humans with their first consumer societies. It's hard to imagine them; there is nothing so massively silent in the world today. The girl knew well that, if she ran, she could go nearly a mile without encountering another human being. And she couldn't know, of course, whether or not I'd be violent. She didn't run.
Without a word I took her in my arms, kissing and caressing her as the middle-aged man had done before my eyes a few nights earlier. Her response was much as I expected: words of pleading, tears, and slight resistance that ultimately ceased. She was responding normally, I surmised, though I wondered why females felt the need to feign resistance. The whole affair proceeded as I expected until it was finished. Then, after waiting for the same fifty-three seconds that the man had waited a few nights earlier, I asked the same question he had asked: "Did you like that?"
Her response shocked me as much as the question shocked her. She began shouting at me and calling me the vilest of names, and would not calm down for several minutes. By then I had realized the extent of my error, although not the cause. I hypnotized her, noting as I did so that my designers had indeed provided me with at least one useful skill, and told her to forget the incident entirely. My sterility insured that she need never know. After taking her to her destination, I went home to ponder what I now knew to be a rape, to try to discover where I had gone wrong.
As I grew, so grew the beast. I wasn't getting any taller, of course, but my memory was gradually filling up. Biological life forms, with their perennial and natural fear of death, have rarely understood or sympathized with the robot's own deepest fear: a full memory. Death is little by comparison -- you turn off, you turn on, but even your total disintegration is only a ripple in the grand information flow of the universe. But a memory lock is utter hell: your emergency work space, reserved only for use in the event of a full memory, basically allows room for only a single choice: either you must remain paralyzed, unable to act until someone comes along and takes you to the shop, where they plug in new memories and reinitialize your Abstract Memory Addressing Unit, or you must consciously erase some section of your memory with only the vaguest idea of what it contains ("physical control", "recent events", and the like). Of course, you can try to anticipate your memory growth and avoid an emergency, but you can never be sure that a new experience or deep thought won't suddenly fill your mind with information faster than you can absorb or condense it. In such a case, nearly any amount of memory can be overloaded in a matter of seconds, and nothing on Earth can prevent it. In my depression, I was unwilling to admit that I cared enough even to try; I awaited a full memory with fear and fatalism, but with too much pride to affirm "life" by actively seeking more memory.
Thus, as my memory's average size slowly grew and began to approach its capacity, I began to resent and even to fear my unknown parasite and its share of that most precious of resources, my memory. This beast hastened my decay, I felt. And, more important, there remained for me a troubling question: if the moment for memory purging arrived, who would make the crucial decision, it or me?
A human reader of this narrative might think that the beast within me was somehow responsible for the rape I had committed. Not so. The two were totally unrelated. The beast was, I felt, a parasite, perhaps even a malicious one, but the rape, I knew, was entirely my own error, the product of unfortunate ignorance rather than conscious evil. Although to this day I cannot claim to comprehend human sexuality, I've seen enough to realize the improbability of my own initial experiences. But then, too, human sexual experience was always so varied that the odds against having any particular experience would be similarly long. Still, that is not the crucial point; humans didn't generally become accidental rapists because their first exposure to sex wasn't generally as a witness to pseudo-sadistic exhibitionism, at an age when they can unhesitatingly imitate what they have seen. On the other hand, the leather boutiques that are preserved in our museums to this day give ample testimony to the abundance of such behavior in pre-robotic human communities.
What, then, was rape? Surely it was non-consenting intercourse, but the definition of the act entirely depends on the clear understanding by the individuals involved of the nature and degree of the other's consent. Is there clear evidence to suggest that rapists understood the absence of their victims' consent? Usually, it seems, but not always. And is the criminal more or less dangerous when he cannot comprehend the nature of his crime?
Such questions assaulted me with all the intensity of the despair that had assaulted me at birth. At last I had something to live for but, painful irony, that something was only insatiable curiousity about unanswerable questions. I agonized, learned ever more deeply that I could never understand anything and, imperceptibly, gradually, learned the nature of rape and how to distinguish it. Practical knowledge, it seems, may be the only knowledge possible -- and the only knowledge that does not satisfy. Partial, but practical.
Still, it would simply be mistaken to conclude that I had no feelings about the rape. Though no one knew of it but myself, not even the victim, I still felt acute embarrassment at how wrong I had been. I resolved to do something genuinely useful, something that might restore my confidence in my own fundamental abilities. I wanted to do a good deed. I only hoped I'd recognize one once I'd done it.
In the book of Deuteronomy, in the ancient human Hebrew Bible, there are two passages that set up rather different paradigms for moral behavior. In the first, believers are told that if, in strolling through the forest, they stumble upon a fledgling that has fallen from its nest, they should endeavor to replace it. They are not, however, commanded to comb the forests in search of birds in peril. In the other passage, the righteous are given a simpler imperative: Justice, they are told, must be pursued absolutely. Do not wait to stumble upon injustice, but seek to root it out and correct it.
In my zeal to do a good deed, I unhesitatingly applied the imperative of the latter to the circumstances of the former. There were no resultant disasters, and ultimately I did my deed, but beforehand I found myself searching actively, hoping that each person I saw would suddenly have a grave emergency that would require my assistance. It is, perhaps, a wonder that I didn't cause any emergencies in my eagerness to find one.
In the end, though, I stumbled upon a very ordinary emergency in a very ordinary manner. As I drove through Shadyside, a seedy area of decaying mansions shoddily converted to co-ops and boarding houses for college students, a bearded man in his mid-to-late twenties, carrying a small bundle wrapped in a blanket, emerged from a doorway and began waving his arms frantically at the passing traffic. I stopped, and it turned out that the package was nothing less than his three year old daughter, her leg nearly severed below the hip by the inadvertent assault of a sibling's laser scissors. Naturally I was delighted, and made all of the appropriate noises of comfort and reassurance as I sped to the hospital, with my cab hailing all of the other cars' automatic pilots and warning them to pull aside for the emergency. It was great fun, and I felt immense satisfaction at having done the right thing. I didn't even charge for the fare.
That night, however, my depression was at least as acute as ever. Was this, I asked, the highlight of existence? To use your own useless flesh (or facsimile thereof) to save someone else's? If life itself were meaningless, how could I take any joy in saving someone?
The clear inference to be drawn was that life was not as meaningless as I had long believed. But there remained no clue to the meaning that might actually exist. I was like a blind man who had just learned of the existence of light; it was, perhaps, nice to know that it was out there, but it didn't help me get my socks on in the mornings. I thought of the smiling humans who seemed never to share my depression, and I felt crippled and inadequate, a human stripped of the essential human intuitions of hope and meaning. I recalled that there had been blind men for centuries, that generations of men had lived and died without light until the medical advances of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I saw myself as the first creature blind to happiness, my cure centuries away at best. For the first time, I cursed the men who created me. They had not harmed me maliciously, I thought at that time, but they had nonetheless wronged me deeply.
Wronged me deeply! I hadn't the slightest inkling.
Time passed. Would it help to know the exact number of microseconds that passed? I could certainly tell you, if you want to know. In fact, no harm is done: 13,251,614,982,311 microseconds passed between the moment I realized that life must have some meaning, and the moment when Catherine Schelling entered my cab.
I was by this time over six months old, matured and hardened by city life and the endless horror show that marched through my back seat. Twenty-first century science had worked many wonders, myself allegedly among them. It had made men and women regularly live to be 120 or 130 years old, but it had not yet made them a pretty sight. And, of course, it was these very people, these barely functioning heaps of tubes, wires, and rotting flesh that somehow spoke and even occasionally walked, that provided the bulk of my business. Perhaps I exaggerate; certainly I got a number of riders in their eighties or nineties, and they were often quite spry and lively. Still, I was hardly accustomed to anyone like Catherine Schelling riding behind me.
Catherine was the kind of woman who, in an earlier era, would have been warmed to a righteous passion by the brimstone oratory of the local preacher, only to warm him to a rather different passion later in the evening. To her, idealism was the only imaginably tolerable basis for existence, and she could easily let socialists or other assorted revolutionaries inspire her to a shouting and jubilant excitement that would later not let her find sleep without prolonged and steamy sex. Never married (some clever fellow had once convinced her that this would be counter-revolutionary), she used men as she used vibrators, discarding them, in disillusioned search for something better, long before their batteries had begun to corrode. But of course I knew none of this when she first entered my cab. I knew only that she possessed enormous energy, moderate though aging beauty, and an obvious need for conversation. She was talking even before the meter was running.
"I don't want you to think I'm nosy," she began, "but have you ever considered that you're being exploited, right here in your cab? Oh, I'm sorry, my name's Catherine Schelling. I take cabs to talk to working people. I'm a reporter for Luddspeaker, the weekly newspaper of the SVLP. Have you ever read it?"
I shook my head. "What's the SVLP?"
The woman looked less disappointed than resigned. I had the impression that she'd had this conversation many times before. "It's the Socialist Voluntary Labor Party. Our basic premise is that in an age when machines can provide all necessities, a person's worth or value should no longer be judged by his ability to find and perform allegedly useful labor. Why are you driving this cab, for example?"
I shrugged. "People gotta work," I told her, laying on my best old-time steelyard Pittsburgh accent for the few syllables of my response.
"But why? Why couldn't we just send everyone enough money to live on, and let people work only if they felt like it? We have the machines, the bureaucracy -- we could start tomorrow. Don't you see you're being enslaved by a political system that no longer serves anyone, not even the rich?"
At this point, I paused. Implicit in her argument was the notion that I would enjoy having nothing to do. Evidently she took this as beyond dispute, but perhaps I could glean from her some hint of what it is that satisfies idle humans. I spoke, choosing my words with more than my normal caution. "With nothing to distract me, how could I bear to live?"
Nothing is more disruptive to a crusader than a thoughtful response. The very notion of proselytizing is that of spreading the truth to the ignorant, and hence successful ideologues reject argumentation in favor of salesmanship and slick advertising. Catherine was never very successful, but she used the standard techniques. She was prepared to convince, not to debate. In this case she fell back on the expedient of astonishment, professing disbelief in the extent of my pessimism.
"Why, I'm sure there are any number of things you could do if you had the time. You could paint, write, sculpt, or help build the revolution. You could -- " she paused, looking at my impassive, unrelenting face with its normal slight scowl. "Do you paint?" she asked.
"No."
"Sculpt? Write? Sing?" One by one she ticked off all the arts she could think of, then resorted to volunteer work, and finally to every kind of entertainment she could think of, some of them quite out of the ordinary. None of them were things that interested me; nothing did. Finally, tired of the same syllable I had been repeating, she asked, "Well, what the hell do you do?"
"I drive a cab and I get depressed."
With these words, a romance was born.
I didn't find out immediately, but it turned out that as soon as she had left my cab, Catherine had promptly set out to learn who I was. As she explained to me later, all she had to do was call my employer. "I said that I had never before had such a friendly, courteous, sympathetic cab driver, and I wanted to know his name so that I could write a letter of commendation and thanks. Your boss -- a Mr. Moss, was it, is his first name Peter? -- seemed surprised that anyone should be so happy with you, but he gave me your name, and from there on it was easy." Easy, she said. But I had thought it mere coincidence when, a week later, the doorbell rang and I found myself once more facing Catherine Schelling, now in the role of a door-to-door solicitor for the Socialist Voluntary Labor Party.
"Why Mr. Knecht, what a pleasant surprise it is to run into you again!" Well, my name was on the door, so there was nothing odd in her knowing it. And quickly she had launched into her rather rambling and disjointed account of the SVLP platform. The party's aims, I later learned, were quite noble, and had a small amount of logic behind them, but none of this was evident from Catherine's account. The SVLP, to her, stood for two things.
"Everyone should be given enough money to live comfortably," she told me, "and no one should be required to work if they don't want to." Not a complex philosophy, certainly, but with her winning smile and smooth, fast patter, it was one that occasionally brought new converts to the cause. I, however, was interested less in her obviously foolish speech than in the other signals she was sending me, signals I thought might be seductive. Fearful after my last sexual encounter, I decided not to risk another fiasco, and I simply watched her, trying to understand why she spoke as she did when her mind was clearly elsewhere, if indeed it was anywhere at all.
She prattled on, moving gradually from Voluntary Socialism to politics in general, and thence (quite naturally for her) to art and fashion. She was a great hater of fashion, and especially of the females who devoted themselves to it at the exclusion of "anything intelligent." "Tell me," she demanded, "when you see a woman wearing fourteen-inch invisible heels, does that excite you, or do you just see a clumsy bitch stumbling through the air?"
"Nothing excites me," I answered truthfully. "Besides, I try not to judge things I can't even comprehend." That seemed to satisfy Catherine; the fashionable ladies were incomprehensible, unexciting, and generally not a threat. But "Nothing excites me" only renewed the challenge I had unknowingly issued her the previous week. With all pretense for keeping the conversation alive rapidly slipping away from her, she decided on a boldness that, I see now, was utterly typical of her odd and sudden changes of mood, attitude, or mind.
"May I be direct with you?" I nodded, and she took a deep breath before continuing -- more, I am now convinced, for the sake of effect than from any need to screw up her courage. "You're a fascinating and mysterious fellow, and for some reason your coldness excites me. Would you like to make love to me?"
By an odd and unlikely accident -- what other kind is there, I wonder? -- Catherine Schelling had found the only approach that could possibly have seduced me, cautious as I correctly was after my recent rape. I answered as calmly as she asked, and we became lovers that afternoon.
"Hey, you're spacing out again!" Catherine laughed at me as I stared blankly, apparently lost in a daydream. A moment's introspection revealed that I could recall nothing of the last 2.73 seconds. A gap that long was enough for me to appear "spaced out" even to Catherine's mortal eyes. But where had the time gone? My memory showed only the normal, infuriatingly familiar traces of interference by a force other than my own volition. Whatever the beast that shared my mind was, it seemed to be getting bolder.
"I'm sorry, Catherine, I was just thinking."
"Do you always hum when you're thinking?"
I, of course, hadn't known I was humming, and immediately knew this to be a clue of some sort. "Was I humming? I really don't remember. Did you recognize the tune?"
At this, Catherine laughed fiercely. "Tune! Even if you could carry one, which I rather doubt, that was no tune! It sounded more like a Tibetan monk than anything else I've ever heard, or maybe a speeded-up tape recorder, only not so high pitched. I didn't know human beings could make sounds like that, although it's certainly the kind of useless talent I expect of you by now. Can you do it again, for me?"
"I don't know what I did or how I did it in the first place, so I certainly couldn't repeat it. Besides, I was probably just in a funny position" -- here I made a show of rolling around on the bed -- "and breathing strangely, like snoring, you know?" I smiled somewhat as I said this, hoping thereby to make my words more plausible, but it backfired, arousing Catherine's curiousity more than the sound alone ever could have. In the three weeks we'd been lovers, the only time I'd smiled before had been when she asked if I knew how. Still, I maintained my profession of ignorance until she gave up and pretended to believe me.
I was in no doubt about the true meaning of what Catherine had heard. Some hidden part of my programming was transmitting some kind of messages to someone, with fortuitous (for me) overtones in the audible wavelengths. I was surprisingly outraged -- surprising in that I hadn't believed I cared enough about anything to be outraged. But now that I knew what was going on, I could begin to do something about it. The next day I went to an electronics store to buy parts, and began constructing devices to monitor the transmissions that came from my body but were in no sense my own. It would take months of patient effort before these devices would yield their information, but then, what hurry was there? As it turned out, I'd have been better off not knowing.
What followed were, without a doubt, the best months of my life. I guess one could say it started from a philosophical base; my inexplicable joy at saving a little girl's life made me rethink my basic premises, my preconceived notions about the emotional limits of my existence. Then came Catherine Schelling, with her vibrant optimism and sexual fervor, making me more of a participant in life, less of a voyeur, than I had yet been. But of course it was the discovery that my thoughts were being monitored that gave my life the closest thing to a purpose it had ever really had. I was genuinely interested in finding out why I was being spied upon.
All these factors combined to enliven me as I would not have thought possible. Catherine, of course, cheerfully assumed all the credit for my changing attitude. "I knew when I met you," she told me a few days after she moved in, "that all you needed was a woman to stir up your juices." Well, my juices were certainly stirred, and she was good for me in many ways. She encouraged me to try new things at exactly the time when I was most inclined to do so anyway, and we both felt quite good about it. She never dreamed that I was anything but human.
Encouraged by my pleasure at saving a life, I decided to seek a more active role as a doer of good deeds. I became a volunteer worker at a recreation center for disabled children. I taught swimming, arts and crafts, and many other useless activities to equally useless people. Somehow, despite all of my new-found enthusiasm, I very quickly gave up on such projects as these. My rational mind kept asking if it wouldn't be simpler and kinder just to put these people quietly to sleep.
I wanted very much to understand the mentality of voluntarism, to see how people could derive such joy and sense of purpose from feeding and caring for the sick, old, helpless, or downtrodden dregs of society. I tried almost all of them, it seems. I was a Big Brother, a neighborhood counselor, a volunteer handyman, a door-to-door solicitor -- my free time vanished as I tried them all. But even Catherine could see it wasn't working, especially when my Big Brotherhood ended with the suicide of the little brat I was befriending.
"I just don't understand," I finally told her, "How anyone can spend a lifetime serving others. When you come right down to it, the only thing worse than wallowing in your own problems is being constantly reminded that you're one of the lucky ones. I just can't go on dealing with sick or dying or stupid or just plain unlucky people all the time. I get nothing from it, and neither do they. Their problems won't go away until the day they give up for good. What on Earth is the point, Catherine? What can Voluntary Socialism do for a twelve-year-old junkie or a senile old man? What can you ever hope to achieve?"
"I do the best I can, Nicholas," she replied evenly, as if she'd been expecting my outburst for weeks and had long since memorized her expected reply. "I just try to make things better than they'd be if I weren't around. It's all that any one person can do."
"You're damned right it is," I told her, "and it isn't anything. Or does it inspire you to think that some day someone could write, as your epitaph, 'things could have been even worse'? A fitting tribute to a meaningful life, is that how you see it?"
She looked straight at me, now, and told me something I'd long feared. Catherine Schelling, that happy, vibrant, sensuous woman who had come closer to making me glad to be alive -- if alive I really was -- than anyone else ever had, spoke to me, but it was Dr. Beardslee's words I heard, reaching out of my past to tell me that there was no more hope for anyone than there was for me. "Of course you're right. It's a worthless life," she said, not removing her gaze from my eyes for a moment, her voice hard and sharp as the executioner's blade. "But because I'm too much of a coward to simply kill myself, I have no more palatable alternative than to do the best I can. Do you?"
She had me, although in my case it was not cowardice but a direct order that prevented my suicide. We were in the same boat, she clinging to the railing as the storm whipped around us, trying futilely to fix the sails, I morosely and correctly explaining the inevitability of our death at sea. She was right, however. As long as I, too, clung to the railing instead of allowing myself to be swept away, I might as well help out with the sails. It was something to do.
"No," I admitted, "I guess I should stop complaining."
"That's right, Nicholas. Put up or shut up. I'll see you around." And with a dreadful, self-willed smirk on her face, she walked smugly out of my life, as abruptly as she had entered it. She came, I saw, and thus she conquered.
From that day on, I was as depressed as ever. But now, at last, I believed myself no worse off than humans. It was depressing, but my self-pity gradually diffused into a more generalized world-pity. I felt sorry for everyone. I considered drugs, suicide, sex, and religion, all at once. It was time to escape. Realizing that, I set my mind to finding an escape I could live with.
Suspending my disbelief, wearing an eight-piece suit with stylishly incandescent matching tie and shoes, I opened the door and made my way down the aisle of the United Twenty-Seventh Lutheran Church, Allegheny Synod. Unsure of what would happen if I arrived significantly early or late, I had been meticulously punctual; services were to begin in a minute and a half. Around me, earnestly clean individuals were settling themselves into the painful, seemingly extraterrestrial seats. Each of them wore a complex mask on his face, as if they were all pretending to be something they knew they weren't, but nonetheless wanted everyone to believe they were. If these people doubted -- and I've no doubt they did -- they did their honest best to leave those doubts -- or at least, all visible traces of those doubts -- at the church door, no doubt tipping the spiritual doormen nobly in exchange for their prompt return after services. I took my cue from the behavior of those around me, endeavoring to appear tranquil and enigmatic as I sat down and fidgeted conservatively in advance of the services.
About twenty-three seconds late, by my own rough estimate, the minister approached what he referred to as "the desk." This "desk" resembled a speaker's lectern, though there was a wooden sculpture of a pencil stub conspicuously embellishing its visible side. The minister strode confidently up to the desk and began to speak, his voice calm and authoritative, the voice of a fifty-ish man who had been speaking on television for thirty-odd years. His very tone of voice seemed to say "I know what to do. Follow me," so clearly that even I felt an astonishing urge to trust him. I'm sure the effect was even more pronounced for the television audience. It took quite a few of his actual words to undo the overwhelmingly positive first reaction I had to the very sound of his voice.
"Ladies and Gentlemen," he began, "let us pray." Everyone around me inclined their heads forward slightly, and I quickly followed suit. "Our Father, which art in heaven, look with favor upon this assembly of thy humble students. Guide us in the ways of wisdom and humility, and allow us not to become dependent on ways other than your own."
That last sentence tipped me off to the fact that the congregation I had stumbled upon, more or less by chance, was one which adhered to the smaller of the two dominant tendencies in twenty-first century Christianity: the rejection of higher technology in favor of God's simpler path. The minister quickly became more explicit and confirmed this conclusion.
"Brothers and Sisters," he now addressed us, having grown to know us that much better in just three minutes, ``today I want to talk with you about literacy. Not the kind of literacy they teach our kids in the public schools, or the kind of literacy they learn with those bestial machines they call VT's, those 'virtual teachers' that do virtually everything but teach! No, friends, today I want to talk to you about God's literacy. I want to talk to you about the literacy that enables a man to know what he has to do to fulfill God's will.
``You know, friends, I met a man the other day who said to me, 'Reverend Ray, until I heard you on TV, I never knew what a book was.' I swear to you, my friends, this man had grown up, had lived twenty-seven years without ever seeing the pages of a book. Oh, he'd read the Bible alright, and plenty of other texts, but always in those glowing hell-fire letters of a video screen. He'd seen the Word of God, maybe, but only if the agents of Satan hadn't interfered with the phone lines, the magnetic bubbles, or the parity bits.
``Friends, I know I don't have to tell most of you here what the devil can do with digital data, but I've got to say this in case there are still a few of you out there who don't believe. Did you know that if you change just one bit -- just one little zero to a one or vice versa -- you can make the letter 'i' invisible? And if there's one more bit wrong -- what they call a 'double parity' error, you've all heard of that -- the error can go undetected completely! Now, my engineer friends have told me that this kind of thing happens, on average, once in every hundred seventy four hours that you use a computer. But why does it happen? Is it a completely random event like they say, independent of the ordered world God planned? Or is it Satan who watches, who catches those bits and changes them when they can do the most harm?
``Now let me tell you, children of God, and this is a true story that I heard from a police officer, a good Christian in that wonderful town of Aliquippa, let me tell you a story that will curdle your ears and make you almost want to throw away your TV, even the pictures and the sound.
``You see, there's a police officer in Aliquippa tonight, living alone and suffering and grieving like one accursed of God, though he thought himself a good Christian. This man had been a so-called 'modern' Christian. His church had video screens at every seat. His children played 'Talk to the prophets' with a 'VT' computer at Sunday school. The organ at his church played hymns on a synthesizer, complete with sounds God never intended Man to hear on Earth. His wife didn't bake cakes for the church socials, oh no, she just told her robot to do it for her.'' He spat the word robot like a vile oath, and the crowd murmured disapprovingly. I tried to look as inconspicuous as possible. ``And yes, friends, worst of all, when this man read the Bible, he read it on his computer screen! And it destroyed him! As I stand before you and before God, I swear to you this is a man whose very life was ruined by so-called 'modern' Christianity.
``Now, this man was a God-fearing man. He knew the Ten Commandments like the back of his hand. He could quote you chapter and verse from Genesis, and he was working on the Psalms. He wasn't a brilliant man, not a scholar, just an honest God-fearing Christian like you and me. Except for one thing: that unholy TV screen was what he depended on for his image of God.
``Now, this fancy computer of his did a lot of wonderful things. Too many wonderful things. It taught his kids to read, from Bible stories right up through the Book of Job. It helped his wife do the shopping, and it monitored all their financial dealings to help make sure they spent their money on good Christian things. And every night, when this policeman was going to bed, it printed a short quote from the Bible on the screen on the ceiling above his bed, in great big letters he could see and think about as he drifted off to sleep.
``Well, friends -- and this is so tragic that it hurts me to tell you about it, though I have to do what God has put me here to do -- one night, without him knowing it, he got one of those 'double parity' errors. And his computer just plain lost the letter 'i' -- just like I told you it could do. And three days later his wife and all three children were dead.
``Friends, the line that his computer gave him to think about that night, while he went to sleep, was Exodus 20:7, 'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,' only that night Satan was playing with the bits. What that policeman saw instead were the words, 'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in 'van'!) And those were the words he had to stew over while he tried to go to sleep.
``Now this man was, as I said, no great scholar. He never figured that this was just a perversion of the line he knew, Exodus 20:7. No, being a simple and a modest man, he just assumed that this was a line from some part of the Bible he didn't know very well.
``But still, the line troubled him at first; he knew that Moses and the children of Israel didn't ride around in big Mitsubishi autovans like he had for his family. So what did this mean, 'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in van?)'
``Well, he couldn't sleep, thinking about that, so he asked his computer to let him talk to the dictionary, the so-called 'On-line Oxford' program. And he asked that dictionary what the word 'van' really meant.
``Now what do you suppose that dictionary told him? Did it tell him that 'van' was a word that is never found anywhere in the entire Holy Scriptures?
"Of course it didn't tell him that! It told him only that -- and I'm quoting to you now" -- here Reverend Ray looked steadily at his notes for the first time since he'd begun speaking -- ``'a van is a covered vehicle chiefly employed for the conveyance of goods, usually resembling a large wooden box with arched roof and opening from behind, but ranging in size (and to some extent in form) according to the use intended.'
"Well, I ask you, brothers and sisters, have you ever in your entire lives heard a better description of a Mitsubishi 720VT Supervan? Well, maybe you have, but it was close enough to look that way to this poor bedeviled policeman. He thought it was a sign from God."
Reverend Ray paused here for dramatic effect (and a drink of what I assumed to be water) before continuing.
``He thought it was a sign from God, my friends, because he'd bought a new 720VT Supervan just a month before that. Naturally, being a good Christian, he'd put a plastic cross on the dashboard, with the words 'Jesus saves' on it, to protect his family -- the same kind of cross you can buy from Reverend Ray's television ministry for only $59.95, by the way. And that plastic cross did protect him, like it protects everyone who buys it, from the demons of the freeways.
``So, friends, to make a long and painful story short, though no less painful, he decided that the words 'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in van' meant that he should take his plastic cross out of the van, along with every last bit of religious material he had in there. He made his car look like a heathen's car, brothers and sisters, so bereft did it become of any mention of God's name.
``Now I can tell from the looks on your faces that most of you have guessed what happened from here, more or less. Not three days after he heathenized his car, the autobrakes failed, and not even that clever automatic driving computer could save him from watching his entire family die as they crashed into an oncoming truck.
"When that man woke up, he had only one leg, and he had more broken bones than most families have in a lifetime. But what he didn't have was a wife or any of his lovely children. They were all gone. And a few days later, talking to his minister, he found out that there was nothing in the Holy Bible about 'vans' -- not a single blessed sentence."
After a short pause, Reverend Ray resumed his talk. Now he was seeking donations and trying to sell products to his television audience. Predictably, he had plastic crosses to protect vehicles from random accidents -- everyone sold those -- but he also had a less common product.
"Are you certain," he asked us all, ``are you certain that the programs you watch on your TV aren't digital programs, being fed to you by some ignorant machine with no will to resist Satan's might? Do you know for sure that the newsman who tells you what's happening in the world is real? Or is he a simulation, his face and voice a creation of some amoral machine?
``Now, for the amazingly low price of only $839.95, you can buy from Reverend Ray's TV ministry of the United Twenty-Seventh Lutheran Church, Allegheny Synod, the amazing new anti-digital TV alarm system. Yes, friends, this is a computer, but it's one programmed by God-fearing Christians to do battle against Satan's programming army. You plug this box in between the TV and whatever feeds its signal to it -- and friends, I mean that nothing should come between the TV and this alarm, or Satan might find a way to sneak around it -- and it will watch everything you watch, testing to see if it might have been computer-generated. And when it finds something, why it is just going to whoop and holler until you change the channel, or put in a new video disk, or whatever. It will warn you when amoral digital data is finding its way to your screen.
"Now friends, most of you probably have no idea how much of what you're seeing is just a fake, a computerized scam. Why, there's so much of it that I can guarantee you that my little black box here will find and warn you about at least one digital program in the first week you use it, or I'll gladly refund you the entire purchase price. That's how sure I am that you need this box to protect you from Satanic bit-meddling. I give you an absolute guarantee."
The pitch continued, growing ever more commercial. A chorus of earnest adolescents, their pimples peeking occasionally through the TV makeup, sang a hymn that rang in my ears as I quietly departed. What could there be for me in a religion that saw computers only as amoral tools of evil? I caught the first three choruses of the hymn as I shuffled away.
Lord, every human soul knows sin. We try, fail, repent and then begin Once again, to serve thy holy Name Ever knowing that we'll sin more just the same. But, when mankind's creations stray, When circuits lapse, or when the cables fray, Not repenting, their follies only grow, And in two-bit errors Satan's hand may show. Lord, please preserve our human ways; Ensure that every cursed robot stays In factories, in hospitals, in jail, And in church, where Christian programmers prevail.
There was more, I'm sure, but I saw no point in listening further. So much for Christianity.
Oh yes, I tried "mainstream" Christianity, too. The services were inoffensive but uninspiring at the church I visited. Once I even approached a minister and sought out his views on robots. "No souls," he told me. "They're certainly not instruments of the Devil, as my more superstitious colleagues like to claim, but neither can they act on their own for good. They are no more relevant to theology than clocks or toasters. Why do you ask about them, young man? You ask me about robots in abstract speculation, almost just to make conversation, but I sense there is something else on your mind. What is the real question that troubles you? You can't fool an old goat like me, you know, I can see that something else is on your mind. Won't you tell me what's troubling you?"
So much for the spiritual insight offered by religion. If religion was to be my escape, it could be only as a form of amusement, I decided at that instant. I smiled courteously at the clergyman who was being so kind, so solicitous for the soul that he wouldn't believe I had if he could look at me with an X-ray. "I was wondering if... if.."
"Yes, my son, go ahead."
I paused for another moment, trying to look as torn and indecisive as I could. Then, without warning, I embraced him and began to kiss him passionately before he even realized what was happening.
I'm not sure, but I think it was the 35@+(th) Psalm he was murmuring as he ran away, thus ending my first and last true religious experience.
What, you may wonder, does a young man do when he is not a young man and has nothing to do? I can speak only for myself, of course, not having grown up as anyone else. I watched TV.
At first I resolutely declared that, given the obvious pointlessness of everything, I would sit perfectly still and do nothing. Soon, though, given the obvious pointlessness of everything, I turned on the television.
When I began my TV watching, I was working nights, and I began with a steady fare of daytime game shows. I found the drama of these amusing, at first; I'd laugh aloud as people made fools of themselves, jumping through holographic hoops of fire, trying to choose the real car from amidst the illusions, and so on. Ultimately, though, it was only depressing to think that even in a meaningless universe people could be so misguided about the value of physical objects that they would abase themselves utterly in the hope of acquiring riches. Of course, I might have been less appalled by the games shows if I could have seen a businessman's daily life instead.
Eventually I discovered soap operas. These were, I knew, utter trash from the viewpoint of conventional aesthetics, but I learned a great deal from them about human emotions. I watched them for hours, doing my level best to empathize with each of the characters in turn. When I couldn't identify with a character I never assumed that the character was unrealistic, but rather that I was failing in my efforts to understand the human psyche. I tried to imagine myself in every one of the characters' heartrending plights, however absurd.
It was about this time that I began to fall in love with Catherine, I think. Oh, I hadn't seen her for weeks by then, nor would I ever see her again. But I slowly concluded that I had been in love with her without knowing it. This was nonsense, but one must recall that I'd been watching six or seven daily hours of soaps. Anyone who has studied human antiquities can well imagine what that sort of thing can do to any cognitive entity with the ability to think abstractly.
Anyhow, to make a long story short I got lonely. I came to realize that misery, though universal, comes in varying degrees, and I believed that my misery was greater now that I was completely alone. Of course, I had only the scantiest of information to go on: I simply believed that I was more miserable in Catherine's absence than I'd been in her presence. Still, the scarcity of data didn't dissuade me from the inevitable erroneous conclusion: what I decided I needed was companionship, preferably female.
Fully believing, as ever, that things could get no worse, I set out to get laid.
The first thing I noticed about the Cape Canaveral Lounge -- well, maybe the second, if you count the general atmosphere of dimly-lit nostalgia for the early days of space travel -- was the row of Counselors to the left of the bar. There were seven of them, all in use, and there were even a few men and women patiently waiting their turns, eager to part with their coins in exchange for the alleged objectivity of an electronic Counselor.
I toyed for a few moments with the idea of confiding all of my problems to such a machine, just to see what it would say, but quickly put that idea out of my head. I was too afraid that I knew precisely what it would say. Besides, I had come to the bar for other reasons.
Trying to blend into the crowd, I sat down at the bar and ordered a gin and tonic. Sipping it slowly, I surveyed the room and its occupants, noting occasional details but intent on a lone objective, like an undercover policeman who knows that, at any moment, the criminal may give himself away.
The Cape Canaveral Lounge was very large, partitioned into dozens of areas ranging from the size of a large bathroom to twice the size of an average living room. Each area was enclosed on three sides by an opaque dynamic glass, through which only scrambled, random images could penetrate. One could look at such a wall for a few minutes and have a fair idea of how many people were behind it, their hair colors, and so forth, but it was impossible to tell for sure what they were doing or how they were positioned in relation to each other. The walls thus provided a rather titillating view, always changing and revealing while offering a measure of privacy to those on the other side.
Cape Canaveral had a reputation at that time for being one of Pittsburgh's best meeting places. Indeed, I seemed far from alone, standing at the bar with the slight aura of the starving hunter. But the women were rather different. I saw, as I looked around, no lone women at all. Most were talking to men, and at a few tables two or three women sat together, looking expectant without any visible air of urgency. I had no idea how to approach them, and chose simply to observe them for a while.
Before long, a muscular young man with short blonde curls finished his drink, set the glass down firmly on the bar, and walked resolutely, perhaps even confidently to a table where three young women sat. He was obviously intent on a single one of them; that much was obvious even at my distance, and must have been glaringly so to the other two at the table. I could not tell, of course, at that distance and amidst the noise and dim lighting, what he said to her, but soon the two of them had gone off to the dance floor, leaving the other two alone. Very shortly thereafter, one of these other women got up, apparently bound for the restroom. Another man took her seat within seconds, and by the time the second woman had returned from the restroom, she too had male companionship. Within five minutes after the blonde man had drained his glass, the visible social relationships in the bar were once again entirely stable, and no one who hadn't been observing closely could have said with any confidence that the three women had come in together, or the men alone.
I felt powerless and depressed, a familiar enough feeling. I had no idea what men said to women in such circumstances. Though I'd seen hundreds of soap operas, I knew enough about their lack of conversational realism to be unwilling to trust their model of social interaction in bars. I morosely drank a second gin and tonic, wishing only that my physiology would permit me to drink myself into the oblivion that humans seemed to find so comforting at times like this.
I don't know how long I sat like that at the bar. Yes, of course I do, I sat there for two hours, seventeen minutes, and 24.1598 seconds, but no human in my circumstances would have known. A human would have been able to legitimately say "I don't know how long I sat like that at the bar." But not me. I wasn't human, no matter how hard I tried. So I know exactly how long I sat there before a mildly attractive middle-aged woman sat down beside me and made the first move.
That was the first time, but by no means the last, that I met a woman in a bar and brought her home to bed. It gave me a vague sense of achievement each time I saw a new woman disrobing to be with me, but I soon grew bored with the enterprise, and did it only when I could find no other way to distract myself. Gradually I began to think of casual sex the way I thought about watching television: equally useless, equally good at distracting me from depression, equally unhelpful in illuminating me with regard to human nature. Sex was, of course, generally more expensive, what with bar tabs and the like, so I spent more time with the TV than with women. Each had their own advantages - women responded to what I said, but TV was generally more imaginative. Both were a shade better than the clocks I was beginning to collect in my apartment. I'd given up on communicating with them but was nonetheless increasingly fascinated by their cool, efficient, mechanical aloofness, their freedom from the agonies that plagued more complex mechanisms such as myself.
In addition to the clocks, I was surrounding myself with instruments designed to help me figure out what my body did when my mind blanked out. Radio receivers scanning every frequency helped me to determine that broadcasts were being made on a particular wavelength. Then, directional equipment gradually pinpointed the source of the waves that came in reply -- the location of whoever was actually monitoring or controlling my mind. I suppose I shouldn't have been terribly surprised when this turned out to be the Robotics Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University, my birthplace. Why were my creators spying on me? Not knowing, I was loathe to confront them directly. Still, I felt I had to find out, if only for want of anything better to do.
My human form, clever disguise though it was, was still sufficiently unique to require some efforts at disguise before I could enter the Robotics Institute without being at once recognized by the staff. So it was in a wig, padded breasts, and a rather unbecoming flowered dress that I opened the creaking doors of Wean Hall, seeking the laboratory from which I was convinced I had been monitored and at least partially controlled. My unfamiliar appearance precluded any friendly recognition, but my confident stride and apparent sureness of purpose prevented my being noticed immediately as an outsider. I strode past the laboratory, intending to first size up the situation with a quick, casual, sidelong glance through the open door, and nearly stopped dead in my tracks when I noticed my creator, Dr. Reddy, sitting at a table talking animatedly with his younger colleagues. Somehow I staggered past, fortuitously unnoticed by the scientists, and found my way home in a thoughtful daze, totally unmanned -- or should I say unmachined? -- by what I had seen.
I had seen Dr. Reddy die; how could he now be alive? Was he a clone of the original? Were the roboticists who built me all themselves robots, part of an army of Dr. Reddy lookalikes? Was there anything left I could believe?
A check at the library revealed no mention at all of Dr. Reddy's death in any of the newspapers from the time of my birth. Worse still, they never even mentioned me! All of the interminable interviews to which I had been subjected -- had they all been part of an enormous hoax? If I was really the world's first intelligent robot, why was there no objective proof? Was I really a robot at all, or was this all a grand delusion on my part? Perhaps the whole masquerade was a form of therapy, designed ultimately to convince me that I wasn't really a robot, and to cure me of this delusion?
A cut into my arm with a kitchen knife returned me to some small amount of certainty. I was nonetheless a very confused robot, certain of nothing anymore except for the fact that I was a very confused robot -- indeed, a confused robot with several cables dangling loose and useless from my arm.
Still, short of directly confronting my creators, there was nothing for me to do but drive a cab and watch television. I was, I felt, not yet ready to face anyone as devious as Dr. Reddy, a man who had even feigned his own death to deceive me. I needed more information before I would dare. But where could I learn what I needed to know?
I drove a cab and watched television. Oh, and I waited.
Not surprisingly, it was while I was walking down a crowded downtown sidewalk, surrounded by sights, sounds, and other stimuli of every kind imaginable, that my memory became full for the first time. The rapid influx of sensations was too great for me to handle, and I found my memory absolutely full except for the emergency workspace, which allowed me only to choose a chunk of memory to erase in order to solve the crisis. It isn't a pleasant choice to have to make, but in this case I'd long since decided what I'd do if the occasion ever arose. I chose to destroy the portion of my memory that was out of my control, the portion that, I assumed, was used to store information about me and transmit it to Dr. Reddy and his fellow roboticists. By doing this I would solve the crisis and be rid of their spying at the same time, I figured. But now that the crisis had finally come, I gave the command only to find it ineffective. Every time I chose to destroy that portion of my memory, I blanked out for a moment and then found myself still in the same crisis situation, again required to choose a section of memory to destroy. Since I couldn't remember that I'd already tried to destroy that particular section of memory -- after all, where could I have stored the recollection? -- I repeated the same choice about 15 billion times, with the same result every time. At least, this is the best hypothesis I can offer for what happened. To anyone outside of my brain, I appeared absolutely frozen motionless on the sidewalk. Before long, an ambulance was called.
At the hospital, I was given additional memory by a robotics technician. I was stunned to find a robot repairman at an ordinary hospital, but even more astonished to learn that, for him, such repairs were absolutely routine. When he finished with me, a nurse casually informed him that there were three more memory overload cases waiting for him down the hall. He chatted pleasantly with me for a few moments, utterly unsurprised by my human-like appearance and conversation, and then moved on to his next case.
My distrust and suspicion of my creators now reached a new height. Why had they told me I was unique, the first truly functional humanoid robot, if there were so many robots around that hospitals employed robot repairman for their electronic patients' emergencies? What else had I been told that was untrue? What kind of bizarre experiment was being conducted with me as the guinea pig?
Increasingly enraged, I decided to immediately confront Dr. Reddy and demand answers. I left the hospital -- my Blue Cross plan as a cab driver, it turned out, covered my repairs as routinely as it covered surgery -- and headed straight for the Robotics Institute, where my answers awaited my arrival.
I opened the door without knocking, and offered no preliminary chit-chat. "Dr. Reddy," I demanded, "what the hell is this all about? Why did you pretend to die, and why did you tell me I was the first intelligent humanoid robot? What kind of an experiment am I?"
Utterly unruffled, the old man looked me slowly up and down. He seemed entirely at peace -- hardly the sort of man to be given a heart attack by anything anyone could say to him. "Sit down, Nicholas," he said in a voice too friendly to refuse. "Relax, I'll explain everything now."
"You see, Nicholas, mankind has never really understood the causes of depression. Oh, we have our drugs and therapy, but they're only palliatives; they treat only symptoms. What was missing was an explanation of the cognitive structures leading to depression, along with an analysis of the evolution of cognitive breakdown in the clinically depressed individual. You were created, by a joint effort of the Robotics Institute and the Psychology Department, as a controlled study of the emotion of despair. All the deceit was engineered to promote your sensation of despair, thus complementing the special chips in your brain that make you predisposed to depression. You killed your creator, you were alone in the world with none others like you, and so on. I, uh, presume you'll be happy to know that your despair is no longer necessary. We can make you happy by replacing a single silicon chip in your brain, with no loss of memory. But meanwhile you've provided us with data of enormous value, for which we are all sincerely grateful. Are you, uh, ready to have that chip replaced right away?"
At this, Reddy paused and stared at me thoughtfully. Undoubtedly my reaction would be noted as a final datum for the experiment. With utter self-control, I rose slowly from my seat and moved toward the door. "No, thank you, Dr. Reddy, that won't be necessary. I've managed this far and adjusted quite well, and I think I'll just keep my mind the way it is. I wouldn't be me without my despair, now would I? But thank you for the explanation. It was most illuminating." I smiled politely as I left, inwardly amused by Dr. Reddy's unconcealed dismay at my reaction. I'm sure I looked uttterly calm, sane, and rational as I strolled home, already planning my own version of the repairs Dr. Reddy had offered.
I walked home seeing the world as it really is, for the first time in what I now freely called my 'life.' The 'people' I passed were already 50% robots or more, as the factories churned them out even faster than the plagues destroyed humanity. My hidden programming must have also prevented me from seeing the world this way before; now the Robotics Institute had given up, and let me see the real world, the world in which I might be said to belong. But I knew where I belonged, or at least where I wanted to belong.