Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

‘DEATH! ALL IS DEATH!’

He was still howling when they switched off his brain.

12

The return of awareness was slow and fragmentary. It began with a solitary thought that flickered for a bare instant against an overwhelming darkness and then vanished.

Intervals of time cannot be measured in oblivion; but on occasion the thought recurred, then was joined by others. Piece by piece a vestigial, primitive creature was built up and became persistent. The period between the birth of this creature and the moment when it began to call itself Jasperodus seemed immense. It ended when Jasperodus recovered sufficient of his memories to recognise himself as a single entity. He was then puzzled to find that he could not locate himself in space; he seemed to be in many places at once.

Still he could not think clearly, neither did he know for certain who he was, where he came from or how he had got into his present condition. There followed a lengthy phase he thought of as ‘groping’. He seemed able to reach out and search the darkness in some vague or undefined manner, finding pieces of himself and adding them to him. As he did so he gained not only memories and extra mental clarity, but also inexplicable scenes that he seemed able to watch, each from a fixed vantage point.

This phase ended when his history and personality were again in his possession. Along with his anger at how he had been treated, Jasperodus was forced to appreciate certain facts.

He had no body.

He had no single spatial location.

There existed within himself, just below the level of his volition in a sort of subconscious stream, a continuous activity of monitoring, computing, comparing, collating and responding to countless small stimuli.

As far as he was able to ascertain he was located within and throughout the walls of Charrane’s palace in the form of a network.

A full understanding of his situation came after a little deductive thinking. Presumably the roboticians had not delivered his parts to the masher after all. Perhaps reluctant to waste such fine workmanship, they had preserved the sub-assemblies and later used them in a low-integration cybernetic system of the standard type that apparently had been installed in the palace and the surrounding ministries.

Just what confluence of interrelations had caused to be reconnected sufficient of his one-time components to restore self-directed integration would remain a mystery. The dim urge that had caused this skeleton brain to seek out the rest of its sub-assemblies was also hard to explain in conventional robotic terms. However, he now found himself fully alert and sound of mind, but embedded in an extensive network of electronic administration.

He wondered what the roboticians had done with his body. That, possibly, had gone to the masher.

His new mode of existence gave him an unexampled opportunity for surveillance. Apart from his having access to stored information of all kinds, there was a good number of hidden sound and image perceptors scattered about, mostly for the use, as it happened, of Charrane himself, who had become suspicious of what went on around him. It was ironic that they put Jasperodus in a much more intimate position to watch him.

With some curiosity Jasperodus took stock of the situation at court. A number of years had passed since his deactivation. Mars was under firm control, but the Borgor Alliance was once more flexing its muscles. He received little direct news from the outside world, but what he did learn caused him to think that the internal state of the Empire was ominous. Charrane, with some reluctance, had been persuaded by Oleander to agree to the onset of large-scale factory production in an attempt to counterbalance the Borgor threat. There were occasional stories of disturbances in the city, at least one being within earshot of the palace. A proposal was afoot to provide free rations and entertainment so as to keep discontented elements among the masses quiet.