The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

‘It is not the only factor,’ Gaumene corrected him. The pile was shut down and then reactivated. That itself could be the cause of failure.’

‘Both items should be investigated,’ Gargan mused. ‘Perhaps the addition of Jasperodus’ brain brought the pile up to the critical cortical mass. It is easily tested. But as I have other plans for him at present, one of our number could be substituted.’

He turned to Jasperodus. ‘I must return to the project shed. The house servant will show you to your room in one of the other villas. You will wish to deliberate on what I have told you.’

When the others had left the servitor appeared once more, politely taking Jasperodus through the patio, then along a short path to a villa similar to Gargan’s but larger.

He was shown to a small room whose window viewed the main part of the villa complex. The servitor departed, leaving Jasperodus to his thoughts.

One thing was now clear. Hobartus had been working on the consciousness-inducting process before he left Viss’ employ. He must have edited out all knowledge of it from the personality print he put into his robot copy. Indeed he had believed he had destroyed all trace of his work. Yet here it was: one treacherous record, accidentally hidden, forgotten, or thought incinerated with the rest of his papers, perhaps.

Jasperodus knew that in humans such slips often had an unseen cause. Poor father, he thought. Were you subconsciously unwilling for your discovery to be lost forever? Thus we betray ourselves.

Yet what an improbable trick of fate had placed the notebook in Gargan’s hands! Or was it? In the long run, it was probably inevitable.

And he recalled how his father, from his deathbed, had warned of what would happen if his secret method became known. ‘It would lead to robots stealing the souls of men … one can imagine mankind being enslaved by a superconscious machine system, kept alive only so that men’s souls could be harvested.’

Roughly speaking, the future Gargan envisaged! Humans kept as cattle, milked of their brains’ light to illumine the brains of robots….

How well they would be kept was problematical. Conceivably no outright cruelty would be involved. A little light from each, just as Jasperodus had been illumined from the souls of two people without exhausting either. But the principle would remain the same. Humans would have the status of domestic animals.

It was something of a relief to know that Gargan was not as close to fulfilling his ambition as he thought. The consciousness detected in the pile had been Jasperodus’ own … and that reminded him that he was here by accident and fraud. It had puzzled him that Socrates should think him a worthy recruit to the Gargan Work, when Aristos Lyos had pronounced his interest in consciousness to result from nothing more than a fictitious self-image. His maker, Lyos said, had given him the belief that he was conscious, in order to make him more human-seeming.

Then he remembered that Socrates had not actually been present during the conversation with Lyos. He must have gained an incomplete account of the interview.

Due to that mistake, Gargan now accepted Jasperodus as an equal. Yet it was not so. Jasperodus’ mental powers were those of a very talented man, no more. Had he been created without consciousness, like other robots, no conception of it could ever have entered his mind—that was something he had once proved by constructing a replica of himself.

But now a conclave of towering mental abilities surrounded him. He had been offered the companionship of entities far surpassing him in intellect, entities who had deduced what, by definition, lay beyond their comprehension. As for Gargan, he towered even over them: he stood on the limit of reason. While the others had all received help, direct or indirect, in embarking on their mental sagas—Socrates must have gleaned much during his years with Aristos Lyos, for instance—one could only contemplate Gargan’s achievement with stunned wonder. He had been alone. He had arrived unaided at the knowledge of his own deficiency, in what could only rank as the greatest feat of pure thought in the history of the world.

Where did all this leave Jasperodus? He was a robot who had lived among robots, had made himself a part of the world of robots. He felt kinship with them, enough to wonder if there was not some merit in Gargan’s view of the future.

At the same time, he had the consciousness of a man, freely given to him by man.

To which was he to be traitor?

9

By the next time he saw Gargan Jasperodus had made his decision.