Caliban

Kresh looked hard at Jomaine, stared him down. The testing was starting early. Here was his chance, Jomaine realized. Kresh wanted to see what he would do if given the chance to play games. Kresh had not even asked a question. It was Jomaine’s chance to ask what a No Law was, or who Caliban was.

But Jomaine had a pretty fair idea what would happen if he did that, and he had no desire to find out if he was right.

The silence went on for another few seconds before Jomaine Terach could bring himself to speak the words.

“Yes,” he said. “Caliban is a No Law.”

“I see,” Kresh said. “How is that possible?”

Jomaine was thrown off balance by the question, and no doubt that was the intention. “I-I don’t understand,” he said. “What do you mean?”

“I believe that what the Sheriff wishes to know are the technical details of the process,” Donald 111 said.

Jomaine looked over to the small blue robot, and was not fooled for a minute by Donald’ s unprepossessing appearance and gentle voice. Donald had come out of Leving Labs, after all, and Jomaine had had a hand in his design. Behind that harmless blue exterior was a formidable mind, a positronic brain that came close to the theoretical limits for flexibility and learning ability.

“You mentioned in our first interview after the attack that gravitonic brains were a new departure,” Kresh said, his voice deceptively mild.

“Yes, they are. Gubber designed them that way and was justifiably proud of what he had done. But no one would listen to him-until he came to Fredda.”

“All right, that’s fine. But then we get into a problem area. I am not very happy to hear about this New Law experiment, to say the least, but it appears to have legal sanction from the Governor, and I don’t see that there is much I can do about it. But, as I understand it, these gravitonic brains have the New Laws as part of their integral makeup, just as the positronic brain’ s basic structure must of necessity include the Three Laws. So how did you manage to erase those laws from Caliban’s brain?”

“They were never there in the first place,” Terach said. “Thereare no Laws inherent in the structure of the gravitonic brain. That’s the whole idea. The positronic brain became a dead end precisely because the Three Laws were so tightly woven into it. Because of the inherent nature of the Laws inside the positronic brain, it was almost impossible to consider one element of the brain by itself.

“The Laws interconnected all the aspects of the brain so thoroughly that any attempt to modify one part of a positronic brain would affect every other part of it in complex and chaotic ways. Imagine that rearranging the furniture in your living room could cause the roof to catch fire, or the paint on the basement walls to change color, and that putting out the fire or repainting could cause the doors to falloff and the furniture to reset to its original configuration. The interior architecture of the positronic brain is just about that interconnected. In any sort of deep-core programming or redesign, anything beyond the most trivial sort of potential adjustment was hopelessly complex. By leaving the gravitonic brain with a clean structure, by deliberatelynot making the Three Laws integral to every pathway and neural net, it became far easier to program a new pattern onto a blank brain.”

Jomaine looked up and saw the anger and disgust on Alvar Kresh’s face. Clearly the very idea of tampering with the Three Laws was the depths of perversion so far as he was concerned. “ All right,” the Sheriff said, trying to keep his voice even. “But if there are no Laws built into the gravitonic brains, how do these damned New Laws get in there? Do you write them down on a piece of paper and hope that the robot thinks to read them over before going out to attack a few people?”

“No.” Jomaine swallowed hard. “No, no, sir. There is nothing casual or superficial about the way a Law set-either Law set.:-is embedded into a gravitonic brain. The difference is that the lawset is embedded centrally, at key choke points of the brain’s topology, if you will. It is embedded not just once, but many times, with elaborate redundancy, at each of these several hundred sites. The topology is rather complex, but suffice it to say that no cognitive or action-inductive processing can go on in a gravitonic brain without passing through a half dozen of these Law-support localities. The difference is that in a modern positronic brain, the Laws are written millions, even billions, of times, across the pseudocortex, just as there are billions of copies of your DNA written, one copy in each cell of your brain. The difference is that your brain can function fairly well if even a large number of cells are damaged, and your body will not break down if a few DNA cells fail to copy properly.