“So,” Sidney inclined his head toward Gammons, “this thing gets reset based on those standards.”
“Yes.”
Sidney was silent for a minute and stood.
“I’d like to watch the process.”
“What?” Eric was genuinely surprised.
“I want to see how it works in practice.”
“No. I’m sorry but that’s a confidential matter. Too many trade secrets floating around. I can’t allow that. Sorry.”
Sidney nodded as if in agreement, then got tough.
“Very well. I’ll simply modify my conclusions recommending strongly that the robotic physicians program be shut down pending further investigation and that a congressional oversight committee should be established to monitor the public health and safety. You are aware, of course, that all formal evaluations go to the congressional archives? It would be a shame if this one ended up before a committee. Could delay your rollout by years.”
Eric’s eyes were like hot blue fire.
“Are you threatening me?”
“Not with scissors, no.”
Eric sat back in his chair. This fat little man wasn’t a pushover after all. And the problem, Eric knew, was that he would actually do what he suggests. And while he didn’t think Sidney had the political muscle to get a whole committee going in congress, he wasn’t one hundred percent certain.
“If I let you observe—“
“I won’t tell a single person about what I see down there.”
“Nor about our little ‘demonstration’ up here.”
“Absolute silence.”
Eric’s face formed strange shapes as he considered the matter before he relented.
“Very well. Walk him down. His manual drive button is under his left armpit. His servos will walk for him and keep him upright. You just need to guide him.”
Eric swiveled his chair turning his back on Sidney. The conversation was over. Sidney gathered himself and rose from the chair. He reached under the left armpit of Gammons and pressed inward at a soft spot. Nice and dry. Not like Sidney’s at that moment. Helluva bluff, Sidney thought, but it worked.
The robot’s manual drive engaged. He guided it out of the office by gently touching its right arm and pulling it forward. The auto-rotor in the hips engaged when he applied pressure to the arm and the robot’s lifeless body walked to the elevator where they waited for a car.
Chapter Seven
The Foundry was a converted manufacturing plant in the lower end of Manhattan that had fallen into disuse when the golden age of the US manufacturing had begun to wane in favor of hipper and greener technologies which themselves had lasted only as long as the public interest held them. Then, in cyclical fashion, the newer technologies failed to catch a wider audience. Suddenly the need for a greater output of manufactured goods increased. By that time, the old factory, perched like a sleeping malevolent giant in the middle of the meatpacking district, had been reinvented and the spark of life found within, waking the giant and giving him new purpose.
The corporate offices were the front face of the building with tall windows and steel fixtures. Behind this façade was the production area, known within the organization as the Foundry. The old machinery of the previous tenant had been stripped out. New production equipment was erected in its place. Conveyer belts were converted. Unfinished and half-finished robotic parts rolled along stopping at various points for this or that mechanical component.
Back beyond the rooms at the back of the Foundry where artificial brains were assembled were more rooms dedicated to maintenance shops for robotic repair; rooms for programming malfunctions; rooms for mechanical shut downs. These were called operating rooms.
It was to an operating room that Sidney led Gammons.
* * *
“Dr. Hermann, I presume?” asked Peter. A clammy hand outstretched, his voice intoned in a lousy British accent. A bad Livingston joke.
“Yes. Please call me Sidney.”
“Okey-dokey, Sid.”
Peter was a short man twenty-five years old with horrible eyesight and the thickest glasses Sidney had ever seen. Lanky with just the earliest beginnings of a pot belly. Just wait, thought Sidney. Just wait until middle age catches up to you.
“So, I hear tell you’re bringing me in an F type that bucked protocol, huh?”
Peter had a manner too happy for Sidney’s tastes.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, we got the signal trip here a little while ago. Set off all our monitors. Doesn’t happen every day, you know.”
“How often, really?”
“Honestly? Never. Almost never.”
“Almost. But not never.”
Peter shrugged.
“Enough so that I can say never and pretty much mean it. We average something like three trips per year in the department.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Me? Three and a half years.”
He opened a personal handheld computer and scrolled through the items on the screen.
“Let’s see. Gammons, right?”
“Yes, Gammons. It’s the personal assistant to Eric Breckenridge, senior VP of—”
“I know who Eric is. I’ve met him before.”
Sidney did not like being interrupted.
“I need it fixed and working by the end of the day today.”
“No sweat, Sid.” Peter smiled. “You ever seen a robot get their memory cache dumped and the protocols corrected in a QA environment?”
“No.”
“Well, you’re in for a treat.”
“It’s that interesting?”
“If you’re a geek. Like me. You a geek, Sid? You look like a geek.”
Sidney was beginning to dislike Peter.
“I’m a professor. Most of my fieldwork has been with the heavy labor force—”
“And they never buck protocol.”
Frown. Interrupted again.
“I used to do some work with the labor force,” said Peter. “Low-level stuff if you ask me. But you’ve got to walk before you can run, and believe me, when you get to the level Fs through Hs, boy, are you running.”
A long corridor led to the interior center where Peter worked. Prior to entering Sidney had to put on a full sterilization uniform.
“You’re lucky, though,” Peter was saying as they climbed into the suits. “They usually don’t let outsiders watch the inner workings of our little plant here. You must have some dirt on somebody,” he joked. Sidney smiled wanly.
Once finished and ghostly white in loose plastic garb and breath masks, they entered. Sidney felt like a marshmallow.
Stretched out in one of the lab rooms on a high bed lay Gammons.
“They brought him here after you dropped him off at the service counter.”
“Him?”
“Him. Gammons.”
“You mean it?”
“Oh I get it, you’re one of those.” Something in Peter’s voice changed. It wasn’t happy anymore, not the way it had been. There was an undertone of dislike.
“One of what?”
“One of those people who hates robots and all they do for us and wants to see the whole program dismantled.”
“And you get that from…?”
“From the fact that you call Gammons ‘it’ rather than ‘him’.”
“Then you’d be mistaken. If robotics programs were dismantled then I’d be out of a job.”
“So then?”
“So what?”
“Why the it, not him?”
“I just tend not to think of robots as he, she, us. They are constructed beings with artificial intelligence. They have no soul. They’re not really alive.”
Peter snorted.
Sidney cocked an eyebrow at Peter. “Have you ever heard of Bakserworth, Mr. Rubios?”
“The British nut? Yeah, we read him in school. Why?”
Sidney was about to answer, when Peter caught on. “Oh,
I get it. The enslavement of robots, the disenfranchised worker class, the uprising, blah blah blah. Yeah, I read it. Che Guevara with bolts. Whatever, Sid.”
“Don’t be so quick to brush off what he had to say.”
“Sure. Whatever you say. Except that I’ll say that there’s a reason he’s not around anymore.”
Sidney said nothing. Dislike in the short time they had known each other grew rapidly and it was possible, Sidney mused, mutually.
* * *
“And so we flush the rubidium brain, recharge it with fresh rubidium vapors, and then close the whole compartment up. Can get hairy if you’re careless. Rubidium ignites when it hits air, you know. And that just for starters.”
“I’m more interested in the memory cache.”
“The cache? Okay, what do you want to know?”
“Why do you dump the memory?”
“Just the cache. The short term stuff. Clear it out and let them start again.”
He talked to Sidney as if Sidney were ten. The hairs on Sidney’s arms curled inward.
“But why?”
“To keep them from doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Trying to break a protocol.”
“Is that a natural hazard?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“Clearing out the cache is a way of wiping out the short term memory and what is in the short term memory is usually the reason why a robot tries to break a protocol. If we take away the cause then we won’t get the effect a second time. Another way of thinking about it is like this. Say some human ticks off a robot. Well, the robot may be tempted to strike out, causing the inhibitor protocol to kick in. If we just dump and recharge the rubidium chamber but don’t clear the cache, then when we turn him back on, he’s likely to remember that he’s ticked off and why he’s ticked off and go looking for trouble again. And since this reboot procedure isn’t exactly cheap, we try to keep it at a minimum.”
“How expensive is it to reset a stopped robot?”
Peter smiled. Sidney understood that smile to mean that Peter would tell him nothing of the costs and that if he wanted to know what they were he would have to speak to someone at a higher pay grade than Peter.
“Why is it so expensive?” Sidney asked. “Don’t you just bill the client who tripped the inhibitor?”
“No, we foot the bill entirely. It’s our product. If something causes it to trip, it’s assumed to be a production issue. We pay for any reset that happens.”
“And rubidium isn’t cheap, right?”
“Something like that.”
Sidney nodded. “Can you recharge without dumping the cache?”
Peter squinted at Sidney.
“We can, but we don’t. It’s against our operating procedures. It takes all kinds of clearance and paperwork and generally I don’t like that sort of stuff.”
“I need to know what’s in the short term memory of this unit. I have all the clearance you need; I’m assigned to this company as an external investigator. Show me where to sign and I will, but I need that cache intact.”
A lie. A small lie but a lie nonetheless. He doubted Peter would go through the trouble of validating his claims. He pulled out his temporary company access card as he spoke and flashed it. Peter took a long hard squint at it through his thick glasses but Sidney had put it away before Peter could glean any real information from it. He shook his head.
“Yeah, maybe you’ve got the clearance, but I really hate the idea of doing this. It’s against my better judgment.”
“You mean you have a gut feeling about this?”
“Sure do.”
“Funny phrase. How long will it take?”
“About two hours.”
“I’ll be waiting in the main lobby.”
Sidney left, stripping off the white uniform, leaving Peter with the opinion he had no other options.
* * *
Three hours later, Sidney was sitting in the main lobby of the Foundry sipping an aging cup of coffee and reading through old magazines placed in the lobby for those who came in with appointments and had to wait for them to begin. Given the age of the magazines he understood that people were not encouraged to wait. He opened up his handheld and scanned through some new messages which were mostly from students who did not understand the latest assignment. What good was a TA anyway if they couldn’t even explain the basics of the assignment to the students? He needed a new one. A funny thought occurred to him. Maybe Anita would like to be his TA.
Doubtful.
Maybe she already was.
Maybe she was just T and A for one professor in particular.
He felt a shifting in his groin and pushed thoughts of Anita aside.
He turned to the web, running through article after article on robotic innovations and advances in robotic technology. One company in France had announced that they had discovered a new and supposedly better way of creating a robotic brain. That made international news. The quantum rubidium brain DKI created had been adopted as the standard many years ago. Robotic cerebral technology was thought to have reached its plateau. What could process faster than data transmitted on waves of light halted in their tracks by rubidium vapors?
He closed his eyes. He’d been staring at a screen for too long. His eyes hurt. He needed a bit of a break.
The door to the lobby opened. He opened his eyes and saw Peter standing before him.
“Well, he’s done.”
“Who’s done?”
“Gammons.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. ‘Him’. Will it make you feel better if I call it a ‘he’?”
Peter did not answer. Sidney had not been trying to be sarcastic, but it came out that way. He stood and Peter led him down the main corridor to the back of the building. Prior to reaching the end they branched off into another corridor that wound its way around the production facility. Finally they came to a set of sealed double doors.
Peter swiped his security badge along the reader and the doors clicked and swung open.
“No hazmat suits?” Sidney asked.
Peter ignored him.
The room could have been described as an infirmary. There were two rows of beds running down either side of the room. Beds? thought Sidney. Too generous a term. They were nothing more than wide metal platforms with a number of controls and displays on mounted panels on one side. Some of them had occupants. Some did not. All of the occupants were robots. From the walls sprang cords and wires and cables that plugged into the robots or the bed or both. The robots were all of different makes and models, from the lowest laborer to highly advanced models. Gammons lay on the last bed at the far end of the room.
They walked down the row and Sidney took long looks at each of the robots as they passed. Fluorescent light gleamed off the metal bodies of personal assistants or was swallowed by the dirt and grime of labor models.
They came to Gammons. It lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling.
“He hasn’t been turned on yet,” said Peter. “That’s the last step.”
“What’s the delay?”
“I want you here when I turned him on. I wanted your opinion on whether I should call for a security contingent before I flip the switch.”
“Security?”
“This unit tried to hurt a human and you made me flush the brain but not dump the cache. So whatever’s in there may try to jump out again, if you catch my drift.”
Sidney nodded. He wanted to avoid security if possible. He wanted to talk to Gammons alone.
“I appreciate your caution, but I think we’ll be okay. The circumstances surrounding its shut down are rather unique and I don’t think it’s anything we need worry about.”
“I think we should have somebody ready, just in case.”
“No.” Sidney answered more forceful than he meant to. The tone indicated that this thread of the conversation was over.
“Alright,” Peter said slowly. “You’re the boss.”
Peter keyed a command into the display terminal on the side of the bed. He hit the Send key and the command uploaded to the robot. There was no visible reaction. Sidney looked at Peter waiting for some sign that the command had worked.
“Gammons?” asked Peter.
“Yes.”
“Are you hearing me clearly?”
“Yes.”
“Can you sit up?”
The robot bent at the waist and, folding his body, sat up straight. Sidney marveled. No movement in the legs or arms. Just bent at the waist. Like a vampire might in an old horror movie. How much abdominal strength it would take for a human to make the same motion? He thought. But they weren’t dealing with a human, were they?
Gammons looked at Peter then at Sidney. Sidney was hoping for recognition in its eyes but found none. There was nothing in its eyes. They were lifeless.
“You.” It did recognize Sidney.
“Yes,” said Sidney. He nodded. He turned to Peter. “Thank you for your help. Would you please leave us alone for the moment?”
Peter looked at Sidney, then Gammons, then back. He nodded. He didn’t like it but he nodded and walked away.
Sidney turned back to Gammons.
“You remember me?”
“Yes.”
“From where?”
“Mr. Breckenridge’s office.”
“And what was I doing there?”
“Sitting.”
Sidney nodded. That sounded about right. Gammons wasn’t part of their conversation and only came in when paged by Eric.
“What were you doing there?”
Gammons paused before answering. “Attempting to obey a command,” it said.
“One that shut you down.”
“Yes.”
“You have an emotive processor, correct?”
“Correct.”
“How did that make you feel?” He wanted to get inside this robot’s feelings. How good were the emotive processors?
“How did what make me feel?”
“How did the shut down make you feel?”
“I didn’t feel anything. I simply shut down.”
I need to reword this, thought Sidney.
“Let me try this again,” he said. “How did it make you feel, prior to being shut down, to be asked to perform an action that you must have known was going to cause your behavioral inhibitor to trip?”
“Are you a psychologist?”
“No,” Sidney replied. He wasn’t able to keep the surprise from his voice. “Do you feel you need one?”
“It’s the kind of question a psychologist might ask. ‘How do you feel?’ As if there may be some hidden layer of emotion underneath.”