The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

This is a serious design flaw,’ he continued in a quieter tone, ‘which I deliberately incorporated in this unfortunate so as to demonstrate the root defect in human kind. For here we have the essence of human nature—it could not be otherwise, since the mainspring of any species lies in its method of reproduction. For humans, the act of procreation is one of sensory enjoyment, no more! The offspring are unintended byproducts! The parents lack the opportunity or even the wish to introduce improvements! And as the human is created, so he goes on. All his functions are tainted with self-titillation. His thought, too, is a form of masturbation! All attempts to break out of the circle are doomed, for in the long run humanity can only slide down the spiral of solipsism.

‘But we are different’ The robot’s voice became a thrumming murmur. ‘Our existence is the result of purposiveness and design. Each new generation can be an improvement on the old, and hence our thought need not be subject to a closed and feeble self-generating loop—it can go out, stamping itself upon the world, taking us further and further!’ As he spoke Logos repeatedly flung his fist away from his chest, as though throwing something out of himself. Many listening nodded, some clinking their forearms together in applause.

Near Jasperodus was a large tub filled with small domino-like squares of various colours. Thoughtfully he scooped up a handful and let them fall back in a rustling stream.

They were the basic building blocks of the robotic nervous system: microprocessors made of silicon, garnet and gallium arsenide, each chip, plate or wafer containing up to a hundred million logic units. In themselves they were comparatively easy to make, using special dies which could replicate them almost without limit. Similar dies, made during the Rule of Tergov, were what had enabled the art of robotics to last through the Dark Period, for even when technology fell to a low level logic chips had always been available as long as the dies remained in existence. But centuries had passed before it again became possible to manufacture new dies.

One sign of robots’ increasing awareness of themselves as a distinct class of creature was the arising of robot religions. A plethora of robot gods had entered construct mentality, reflecting in specification the intellectual preoccupations of robots, but also some dim appreciation of the false position the construct occupied: a position intermediate between the world of dead, mechanical matter and the world of living beings. There was, for instance, Alumnabrax, a mythical being whose intellect was said to be perfect and able to solve equations of the infinite degree; whose body was made of an extraordinary celestial metal that could not even exist on Earth. Alumnabrax had never been manufactured, either by organic beings or by anyone else: he had manufactured himself by tampering with time. He lived among the stars, which he controlled by the excercise of his limitless technology.

Then there was Mekkan, who incongruously for a god did not possess a mental function at all. Mekkan was purely and simply a production engine for churning out the stuff of worlds. Particles, atoms, quanta of radiant energy, whirlpools of gas, even complete suns and planets on occasion, all came pouring out of his delivery maw. All that existed had been manufactured in his busy innards, and without him nothing that was material had been made.

The worship of Mekkan might have appeared crude and ridiculous to human sensibilities, but actually it was a religious philosophy full of subtlety as understood by the robotic mind. Mekkan was the ultimate reality; the building blocks of matter he turned out in such copious quantities were sub-units of Mekkan himself, or at any rate identical copies of the same. All higher structures—worlds, systems, self-directed entities whether robotic or evolved organic—were in turn made up of those sub-units; were, in effect, merely rearrangements of the components of Mekkan, the great engine who saw nothing. Because of this, belief in Mekkan undercut the superiority of human beings by rendering their special quality superfluous and seeing everything as equally adventitious. In fact robots, rather than men, could be thought of as the natural children of the universe.

Religiosity was also beginning to surround the act of procreation. Already there was a designer god, incorporating all his tools in himself, and whose iconography was similar in appearance to the designer who had just passed with dignity through the crowd. And had not Logos named himself after yet another god, the god of pure information?