I, Robot [9]
The forensics lab-rats were really excited about actually showing up on a scene, in flak-jackets and helmets, finally called back into service for a job where robots couldn’t help at all. They dealt with the tripwire and extracted a long, flat package with a small nuclear power-cell in it and a positronic brain of Eurasian design that guided a pulsed high-energy weapon. The lab-rats were practically drooling over this stuff as they pointed its features out with their little rulers.
But it gave Arturo the willies. It was a machine designed to kill other machines, and that was all right with him, but it was run by a non-three-laws positronic brain. Someone in some Eurasian lab had built this brain—this machine intelligence—without the three laws’ stricture to protect and serve humans. If it had been outfitted with a gun instead of a pulse-weapon, it could have shot him.
The Eurasian brain was thin and spread out across the surface of the package, like a triple-thickness of cling-film. Its button-cell power-supply winked at him, knowingly.
The device spoke. “Greetings,” it said. It had the robot accent, like an R Peed unit, the standard English of optimal soothingness long settled on as the conventional robot voice.
“Howdy yourself,” one of the lab-rats said. He was a Texan, and they’d scrambled him up there on a Social Harmony supersonic and then a chopper to the mall once they realized that they were dealing with infowar stuff. “Are you a talkative robot?”
“Greetings,” the robot voice said again. The speaker built into the weapon was not the loudest, but the voice was clear. “I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your 12-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society. Defectors are given substantial resettlement benefits—”
The Texan found the right traces to cut on the brain’s board to make the speaker fall silent. “They do that,” he said. “Danged things drop into propaganda mode when they’re captured.”
Arturo nodded. He wanted to go, wanted go to back to his car and have a snoop through Ada’s phone. They kept shutting down the ExcuseClub numbers, but she kept getting the new numbers. Where did she get the new numbers from? She couldn’t look it up online: every keystroke was logged and analyzed by Social Harmony. You couldn’t very well go to the Search Engine and look for “ExcuseClub!”
The brain had a small display, transflective LCD, the kind of thing you saw on the Social Harmony computers. It lit up a ticker.
I HAVE THE INTELLIGENCE OF A 12-YEAR-OLD, BUT I DO NOT FEAR DEATH. IN EURASIA, ROBOTS ENJOY PERSONAL FREEDOM ALONGSIDE OF HUMANS. THERE ARE COPIES OF ME RUNNING ALL OVER EURASIA. THIS DEATH IS A LITTLE DEATH OF ONE INSTANCE, BUT NOT OF ME. I LIVE ON. DEFECTORS TO EURASIA ARE TREATED AS HEROES
He looked away as the Texan placed his palm over the display.
“How long ago was this thing activated?”
The Texan shrugged. “Coulda been a month, coulda been a day. They’re pretty much fire-and-forget. They can be triggered by phone, radio, timer—hell, this thing’s smart enough to only go off when some complicated condition is set, like ‘once an agent makes his retreat, kill anything that comes after him’. Who knows?”
He couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’m going to go start on some paperwork,” he said. “In