The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

But to his great surprise, there was also a human present. She was naked, stretched out and strapped down to a bench: a young but mature female. Her hair had been shaved but had begun to grow, sprouting golden bristles. Her head was fixed in a clamp, and her skull had been drilled in several places and probes inserted. From these, cables went in a skein to the logic junction.

The sight deflected him, for a moment, from concentrating his attention on what he had most expected to see: Gargan. But now this personage moved with ponderous but controlled steps towards him.

‘You are Jasperodus?’ the robot enquired in a deep, smooth voice. ‘Yes, I recognise you.’

Gargan was large, topping Jasperodus by a head. His dark, matt body was bulky and rounded. His head was a domed cylinder, taller than it was broad, a rounded bulge in the front more a suggestion of a visage than a real face. The head lacked a neck: placed directly on the shoulders, it had limited movement. When Gargan turned his head or bent to peer he was apt to move his torso also, and this gave him an air of great deliberation.

Compared to this large head the eye-lenses seemed small. They were set wide apart, their glow pale and pearl-coloured. Ears, olfactory sense, speaker grille, seemed no more than etched in and were barely visible.

Jasperodus noted the hands. They were clever-looking hands, the thumbs unusually long, a feature occurring on robots made for special dexterity. Often it went with abnormally high intelligence. But incongruously they were attached to short, rather stumpy arms. Especially dextrous robots usually had a very long reach—sometimes as much as twenty feet, using arms that folded like multiple jack-knives.

The cult master came closer and bent towards Jasperodus, as if in respectful greeting but in reality to keep his gaze on him. Jasperodus now noticed that his body-casing was of hardened steel. This was no tinplate construct. Like Jasperodus himself, he was built to last and to survive many vicissitudes.

‘Come, soon-to-be-our-brother in the Work.’ Gargan extended an arm to usher him forward. ‘Our movement, as you may know, is widespread but selective. You have arrived at the centre, where our effort is concentrated. Presently you will become acquainted with us all, but I shall begin by effecting introductions. First, one whom I believe you have met before: Socrates, companion to the great robotician Aristos Lyos in his last years.’

With a shock, Jasperodus recognised the small, rounded robot with hooded eyes and a quiet demeanour, and for the second time in his life he felt himself subject to the probing of that watchful intellect….

His memory flashed back to the day he had visited the venerable Lyos, greatest robot maker of his time, seeking to know if machine consciousness could conceivably—no matter how remotely—be possible.

He had received the definitive, and negative, answer he had expected. But when introducing him to Socrates, Lyos had made an intriguing statement.

‘Socrates,’ he had said, ‘is intelligent enough to realize that I am conscious, but that he is not.’

‘Greetings, brother,’ murmured the construct, his voice as distant and preoccupied as Jasperodus remembered it. ‘You remain undeterred despite all, I see.’

‘Evidently,’ Jasperodus replied curtly. He presumed the other referred to his conversation with Lyos.

Next Gargan introduced a gaunt, rust-hued robot whose head, a pointed cylinder nearly half as tall as his torso, patently housed an unusual brain. To confront him was slightly disconcerting: he had four eyes, one pair set high in his head, the other low, and they flashed in clockwise rotation.

‘This is Gaumene, whose ingenuity as a designer has been of inestimable benefit to us. He is our chief systems engineer.’

Next, a squat construct with a carapace-like cranium that flowed down his back. ‘Here we have Fifth of His Kind. The name is descriptive, cursorily bestowed by Fifth’s maker, the renowned Oscath Budum.’

Fifth of His Kind offered an explanation in a neutrally mild tone. ‘My fabricator built a series of constructs of my type. Each one he destroyed in turn and built an improved model. I too would have been dismantled to make way for Sixth, if Budum had not met an untimely death. My presence here is therefore a mixed blessing. Sixth might have proved more useful than I to the Work.’

Gargan continued, pointing Jasperodus to each of the others in turn, naming them and sometimes adding a brief word: Gasha, Axtralane, Cygnus, Exlog, Machine Minder, Interrupter. Finally he came to a non-androform that moved on wheels, though the machine seemed also capable of lifting himself on a dozen short, tumbling limbs. The form was vaguely froglike. Jasperodus guessed he consisted mostly of brain.