Caliban

“Gubber did not know about the Caliban project. No one did, besides Fredda and myself. All Gubber knew was that we wanted him to display a series of situation simulations-essentially holographic versions of the same situations we wanted Caliban to confront-to the sessile free-matrix testbed unit, alongside a normally programmed Three Law sessile testbed. We would have preferred using a New Law robot, of course, because those were the Laws we wanted Caliban to come up with on his own. Unfortunately we hadn’t received any sort of approval for lab tests of New Law robots at that point, so that was no go.

“But the main test was to see if an un-Lawed brain could absorb and lock down a Law set. Gubber did not know which was which, or even that the two were supposed to be different. Afterwards he performed a standard battery of tests on the two units and found that the results were essentially identical. The sessile No Law robot had absorbed and integrated the Three Laws, just as predicted.”

“What happened to the testbed units?” Donald asked.

“The No Law, free-matrix unit was destroyed when the test was over. I suppose the Three Law unit was converted into a full robot and put to use somehow.”

“What goes into converting a sessile unit?”

“Oh, that is quite simple. A sessile is basically a fully assembled robot, except that the legs are left off the torso while it is hooked to the test stand and the monitor instruments installed. Basically just plug the legs in and off it goes.

“At any rate, Fredda intended Caliban as a final grand demonstration that a rational robot would select her Laws as a guide for life.”

“Wait a moment,” Kresh said, rather sharply. “You’re telling me this is what wassupposed to happen. Whatis happening? What is Caliban doing out there?”

Jomaine shrugged. “Who knows? In theory, he should be doing exactly what I’ve just described-using his experience to codify his own laws for living.”

Kresh reached out his hands and placed them flat on the table, tapping his right index finger on its surface. He did not speak for half a minute, but when he did, all the masks were off. The calm, the courtesy, were gone, and only the anger remained in his steel-cold voice.

“In other words, this robot that assaulted and nearly killed its creator in its first moment of awakening, this robot that threw a man across a warehouse and committed arson and refused to follow orders and fled from repeated police searches-this robot is out there trying to find good rules forliving? Flaming devils, what, exactly, are the laws he has formulated so far? ‘ A robot shall savagely attack people, and will not, through inaction, prevent a person from being attacked?’ “

Jomaine Terach closed his eyes and folded his hands in his lap.Let it be over. Let me wake up and know this is all a nightmare. “I do not know, Sheriff. I do not know what happened. I do not know what went wrong.”

“Do you know who attacked Fredda Leving?”

“No, sir. No, I do not. But I cannot believe it was Caliban.”

“And why is that? Every scrap of evidence points to him.”

“Because I wrote his basal programming. He was not-is not-just a blank slate. He has no built-in Laws. Neither do you and I. But his innate personality is far more grounded in reason, in purpose, than any human ‘ s could be. You or I would be far more likely than he to lash out blindly in a random attack. And if I had made a mistake big enough to cause Caliban to attack Fredda like that, that mistake would have cascaded into every other part of his behavioral operant system. He would have seized up for good before he reached the door to the lab.”

“Then who was it?”

“You have the access recorder records. Look there. It is some one of us on that list. That’s all I can tell you for certain.”

“Access recorder?”

Jomaine looked up in surprise. They hadn’t known about the recorder! Of course. Why should they even think about such things? With the endless wealth of Spacer society, and the omnipresent robots to serve as watchkeepers, theft was almost unknown, and security systems even rarer. If he had not assumed they knew and let it slip, they never would have known. If he had kept his mouth shut about it, they would have had no way of knowing he had been at the lab that night, just about the time of the attack…

But it was too late to hold back. Now they would know what to ask about. There was nothing for it but to charge on. They would get the access records, and that would be that. “It’s a Settler security device,” he said. “Tonya Welton insisted that Fredda install it because Leving Labs had access to Limbo Project material. It records the date and time and identity of the person every time someone passes in or out of the lab. It works on a face-recognition system. Humans only. It was programmed to ignore robots. Too many of them.”