Isaac Asimov's Robots and Aliens 1 - Changeling

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Changeling - Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens, Book One

Books in the Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Robots and Aliens™ series

BOOK 1: CHANGELING by Stephen Leigh

BOOK 2: RENEGADE by Cordell Scotten

BOOK 3: INTRUDER by Robert Thurston

BOOK 4: ALLIANCE by Jerry Oltion

BOOK 5: MAVERICK by Bruce Bethke

BOOK 6: HUMANITY by Jerry Oltion

ISAAC ASIMOV’S

ROBOT CITY

ROBOTS

AND ALIENS

Changeling by Stephen Leigh

To Megen and Devon

Who are already exploring their own sense of wonder and who have given new

meaning to mine.

ROBOTS AND ALIENS

ISAAC ASIMOV

You may have noticed (assuming that you have read my robot stories and novels)

that I have not had occasion to discuss the interaction of robots and aliens.

In fact, at no point anywhere in my writing has any robot met any alien. In

very few of my writings have human beings met aliens, in fact.

You may wonder why that is so, and you might suspect that the answer would

be, “I don’t know. That’s just the way I write stories, I guess.” But if that

is what you suspect, you are wrong. I will be glad to explain just why things

are as they are.

The time is 1940...

In those days, it was common to describe “Galactic Federations” in which there

were many, many planets, each with its own form of intelligent life. E. E.

(“Doc”) Smith had started the fashion, and John W. Campbell had carried it on.

There was, however, a catch. Smith and Campbell, though wonderful people,

were of northwest European extraction and they took it for granted that

northwest Europeans and their descendants were the evolutionary crown and

peak. Neither one was a racist in any evil sense, you understand. Both were as

kind and as good as gold to everyone, but they knew they belonged to the

racial aristocracy.

Well, then, when they wrote of Galactic Federations, Earthmen were the

northwest Europeans of the Galaxy. There were lots of different intelligences

in Smith’s Galaxy but the leader was Kimball Kinnison, an Earthman (of

northwest European extraction, I’m sure). There were lots of different

intelligences in Campbell’s Galaxy, but the leaders were Arcot, Wade, and

Morey, who were Earthmen (of northwest European extraction, I’m sure).

Well, in 1940, I wrote a story called “Homo Sol”, which appeared in the

September 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. I, too, had a Galactic

Federation composed of innumerable different intelligences, but I had no brief

for northwest Europeans. I was of East European extraction myself and my kind

was being trampled into oblivion by a bunch of northwest Europeans. I was

therefore not intent on making Earthmen superior. The hero of the story was

from Rigel and Earthmen were definitely a bunch of second-raters.

Well, Campbell wouldn’t allow it. Earthmen had to be superior to all others,

no matter what. He forced me to make some changes and then made some himself,

and I was frustrated. On the one hand, I wanted to write my stories without

interference; on the other hand, I wanted to sell to Campbell. What to do?

I wrote a sequel to “Homo Sol”, a story called “The Imaginary”, in which only

the aliens appeared. No Earthmen. Campbell rejected it; it appeared in the

November 1942 issue of Superscience Stories.

Then inspiration struck. If I wrote human/alien stories, Campbell would not

let me be. If I wrote alien-only stories, Campbell would reject them. So why

not write human-only stories. I did. When I got around to making another

serious attempt at dealing with a Galactic society, I made it an all-human

Galaxy and Campbell had no objections at all. Mine was the first such Galaxy

in science fiction history, as far as I know, and it proved phenomenally

successful, for I wrote my Foundation (and related) novels on that basis.

The first such story was “Foundation” itself, which appeared in the May 1942

Astounding Science Fiction. Meanwhile, it had also occurred to me that I could

write robot stories for Campbell. I didn’t mind having Earthmen superior to

robots—at least just at first. The first robot story that Campbell took was

“Reason”, which appeared in the April 1941 Astounding Science Fiction. Those

stories, too, proved very popular, and presuming upon their popularity, I

gradually made my robots better and wiser and more decent than human beings

and Campbell continued to take them.

This continued even after Campbell’s death, and now I can’t think of a recent

robot story in which my robot isn’t far better than the human beings he must

deal with. I think of “Bicentennial Man”, “Robot Dreams”, “Too Bad” and, most

of all, I think of R. Daneel and R. Giskard in my robot novels.

But the decision I made in the heat of World War II and in my resentment of

Campbell’s assumption have stayed with me. My Galaxy is still all-human, and

my robots still meet only humans.

This doesn’t mean that (always assuming I live long enough) it’s not possible

I may violate this habit of mine in the future. The ending of my novel

Foundation and Earth makes it conceivable that in the sequel I may introduce

aliens and that R. Daneel will have to deal with them. That’s not a promise

because actually I haven’t the faintest idea of what’s going to happen in the

sequel, but it is at least conceivable that aliens may intrude on my close-

knit human societies.

(Naturally, I repel, with contempt, any suggestion that I don’t introduce

aliens into my stories because I “can’t handle them.” In fact, my chief reason

for writing my novel The Gods Themselves was to prove to anyone who felt he

needed the proof, that I could, too, handle aliens. No one can doubt that I

proved it, but I must admit that even in The Gods Themselves, the aliens and

the human beings didn’t actually meet face-to-face.)

But let’s move on. Suppose that one of my robots did encounter an alien

intelligence. What would happen?

Problems of this sort have occurred to me now and then but I never felt moved

to make one the basis of a story.

Consider— How would a robot define a human being in the light of the three

laws. The First Law, it seems to me, offers no difficulty: “A robot may not

injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to

harm.”

Fine, there need be no caviling about the kind of a human being. It wouldn’t

matter whether they were male or female, short or tall, old or young, wise or

foolish. Anything that can define a human being biologically will suffice.

The Second Law is a different matter altogether: “A robot must obey orders

given it by a human being except where that would conflict with the First

Law.”

That has always made me uneasy. Suppose a robot on board ship is given an

order by someone who knows nothing about ships, and that order would put the

ship and everyone on board into danger. Is the robot obliged to obey? Of

course not. Obedience would conflict with the First Law since human beings

would be put into danger.

That assumes, however, that the robot knows everything about ships and can

tell that the order is a dangerous one. Suppose, however, that the robot is

not an expert on ships, but is experienced only in, let us say, automobile

manufacture. He happens to be on board ship and is given an order by some

landlubber and he doesn’t know whether the order is safe or not.

It seems to me that he ought to respond, “Sir, since you have no knowledge as

to the proper handling of ships, it would not be safe for me to obey any

order you may give me involving such handling.”

Because of that, I have often wondered if the Second Law ought to read, “A

robot must obey orders given it by qualified human beings...”

But then I would have to imagine that robots are equipped with definitions of

what would make humans “qualified” under different situations and with

different orders. In fact, what if a landlubber robot on board ship is given

orders by someone concerning whose qualifications the robot is totally

ignorant.

Must he answer, “Sir, I do not know whether you are a qualified human being

with respect to this order. If you can satisfy me that you are qualified to

give me an order of this sort, I will obey it.”

Then, too, what if the robot is faced by a child of ten—indisputably human as

far as the First Law is concerned. Must the robot obey without question the

orders of such a child, or the orders of a moron, or the orders of a man lost

in the quagmire of emotion and beside himself?

The problem of when to obey and when not to obey is so complicated and

devilishly uncertain that I have rarely subjected my robots to these equivocal

situations.

And that brings me to the matter of aliens.

The physiological difference between aliens and ourselves matters to us—but

then tiny physiological or even cultural differences between one human being

and another also matter. To Smith and Campbell, ancestry obviously mattered;

to others skin color matters, or gender or eye shape or religion or language

or, for goodness sake, even hairstyle.

It seems to me that to decent human beings, none of these superficialities

ought to matter. The Declaration of Independence states that “All men are

created equal.” Campbell, of course, argued with me many times that all men

are manifestly not equal, and I steadily argued that they were all equal

before the taw. If a law was passed that stealing was illegal, then no man

could steal. One couldn’t say, “Well, if you went to Harvard and were a

seventh-generation American you can steal up to one hundred thousand dollars;

if you’re an immigrant from the British Isles, you can steal up to one hundred

dollars; but if you’re of Polish birth, you can’t steal at all.” Even

Campbell would admit that much (except that his technique was to change the

subject).

And, of course, when we say that “All men are created equal” we are using

“men” in the generic sense including both sexes and all ages, subjected to the

qualification that a person must be mentally equipped to understand the

difference between right and wrong.

In any case, it seems to me that if we broaden our perspective to consider

non-human intelligent beings, then we must dismiss, as irrelevant,

physiological and biochemical differences and ask only what the status of

intelligence might be.

In short, a robot must apply the Laws of Robotics to any intelligent

biological being, whether human or not.

Naturally, this is bound to create difficulties. It is one thing to design

robots to deal with a specific non-human intelligence, and specialize in it,

so to speak. It is quite another to have a robot encounter an intelligent

species whom it has never met before.

After all, different species of living things may be intelligent to different

extents, or in different directions, or subject to different modifications. We

can easily imagine two intelligences with two utterly different systems of

morals or two utterly different systems of senses.

Must a robot who is faced with a strange intelligence evaluate it only in

terms of the intelligence for which he is programmed? (To put it in simpler

terms, what if a robot, carefully trained to understand and speak French,

encounters someone who can only understand and speak Farsi?)

Or suppose a robot must deal with individuals of two widely different species,

each manifestly intelligent. Even if he understands both sets of languages,

must he be forced to decide which of the two is the more intelligent before he

can decide what to do in the face of conflicting orders—or which set of moral

imperatives is the worthier?

Someday, this may be something I will have to take up in a story but, if so,

it will give me a lot of trouble. Meanwhile, the whole point of the Robot

City volumes is that young writers have the opportunity to take up the

problems I have so far ducked. I’m delighted when they do. It gives them

excellent practice and may teach me a few things, too.

PROLOGUE

A SYNOPSIS OF ROBOT CITY, BOOKS 1-6

He woke up...somewhere.

He didn’t know where he was or how he had managed to get there. He didn’t

remember anything of his past.

Not even his name.

He was in some small capsule without windows. He could not even see where he

was going.

His awakening had stirred a computer into life, and through its positronic

personality he found that he was in a Massey lifepod. A badge on his clothing

identified him as Derec—the name seemed to fit as well as anything. The

positronic intelligence built into the lifepod could help him with very

little; it had no information to aid him at all, not even the name of the ship

from which it had been ejected.

The lifepod had landed on an asteroid that Derec quickly found was inhabited

by a colony of robots. He seemed to be the only human there. The robots were

as little help to him as the lifepod. Strangely silent about their task, they

ignored him for the most part. They were obviously looking for something

buried in the rock of the asteroid—it seemed to be the only explanation. While

he tried to decipher just what it was they were looking for and why, a raider

ship appeared.

While the robot colony prepared to self-destruct, Derec made a desperate

attempt to escape from the asteroid and contact the raider.

As he was doing so, the raider’s bombardment uncovered a shiny silver object,

perhaps five centimeters by fifteen centimeters. He would later learn that it

was called a “Key to Perihelion.” A pursuing robot revealed that this was the

object for which the robots were so obsessively searching.

Derec grabbed the Key and jumped. With the power of his augmented worksuit and

the almost nonexistent gravity of the asteroid, he reached escape velocity,

angling for the raider. But suddenly his faceplate was filled with a glaring

blue light, and he was knocked unconscious.

He awoke on the raider ship and was confronted by a strange creature: wolf-

like but with fingers instead of paws and a flattened, fur-covered face. The

alien’s name, as best he could pronounce it, was Wolruf. The creature escorted

Derec to Aranimas, the captain of the raider ship, which seemed to be a jumble

of half a dozen or more ships welded together in a patchwork maze.

Aranimas was also an alien, a humanoid of the Erani race, and very dangerous.

Using a form of electrical prod, he tortured Derec to gain information as to

what the robots were doing on the asteroid. Derec, of course, could tell him

nothing. Aranimas then ordered Derec to put together a working robot from the

salvaged parts from the asteroid and other raids.

Through Wolruf, Derec learned that Aranimas intended to replace the

subservient Narwe race (who functioned as Aranimas’s crew) with even more

docile robots. Derec found that he did indeed seem to know a great deal about

robotics; the knowledge came naturally to him. He managed to salvage one

positronic brain and enough working parts to create a patchwork robot he

called Alpha. The most curious thing about the robot was one of its arms: made

of tiny cellular surfaces that seemed infinitely malleable, it could

literally shape itself into any form needed. Derec remembered that many of the

structures on the asteroid bore that same unique design, and he was filled

with a desire to meet the inventor of this new substance.

Aranimas’s constant mistreatment of Derec, Wolruf, and the Narwe made Derec

determined to escape. With the use of Alpha, he and Wolruf successfully

mutinied against Aranimas. They also met another prisoner on the ship, a human

female named Katherine Ariel Burgess. Derec recovered the Key to Perihelion,

and they escaped Aranimas’s ship, landing on a refueling station.

There Derec learned that Kate claimed to know something of his past but

stubbornly refused to talk to him about it. He learned too, that she was

suffering from some type of debilitating disease herself, and she also refused

to talk about that.

The robots on the refueling station had taken the Key to Perihelion, and now

it seemed that the bureaucrats who ran the Spacer society were also after the

Key. Derec, with Ariel and Wolruf’s help, recovered it. Through a mistake,

Kate activated the Key while Derec was holding it. In an instant, the two were

transported to Perihelion, a cold, formless place of gray fog. Pressing the

switch on the Key again, they found themselves on top of a huge pyramidal

tower in the middle of a city.

The Compass Tower of Robot City.

They were to find that Robot City was an intriguing place. The material of

which it was composed was shaped like tiny Keys of Perihelion, and the city

itself was undergoing constant change. Buildings would appear and move

overnight. There was a constant blaze of activity by the millions of robots in

the city, who claimed to be preparing this place for human inhabitants, though

at the moment, the only humans here were Derec and Kate.

The city was in trouble. Nightly deluges raced through the streets,

uncontrollable. Huge lightning storms daily menaced them. And there was a

murdered human, a human named David who had looked exactly like Derec. Derec

slowly realized that the city—as one robotic entity—was responding to what it

considered to be a Third Law threat to its existence. The threat was David’s

blood; more specifically, the microbes in it. The rainstorms were a byproduct

of the city’s enormous and uncontrolled growth in response to that perceived

threat. To save the city, he reprogrammed the central computer core to

deactivate the city’s defenses.

At the same time, Kate made an effort to recover the Key to Perihelion, which

she had hidden in the Compass Tower. It was gone. She and Derec were trapped

here.

They found that the city robots had taken the original Key and were making

duplicates of it. In the course of trying to steal one of the Keys, Derec and

Kate began to develop a trust for each other.

Kate admitted to Derec that her real name was Ariel Welsh. She was the

daughter of a wealthy Auroran patron of the sciences. Her mother had furnished

one Dr. Avery the funds to design and build his pet project. Avery was an

eccentric, argumentative genius who wanted to create on-going, self-sufficient

cities to seed the stars for humankind. Avery, though, had disappeared. Robot

City, Ariel guessed, was his original experiment, now running without Avery’s

control. As for Ariel, she had been banished from Aurora because of her

incurable disease, contracted from a Spacer. Given a ship and funds by her

mother, she’d gone looking for a cure.

It was imperative for her to leave Robot City if she was going to live.

In the meantime, Robot City had acquired another human visitor: Jeff Leong,

whose ship had exploded just outside the atmosphere. He was badly injured; to

save him, the robots of Robot City turned him into a cyborg: a human brain

encased in a robotic body. Insufficient knowledge of the bio-chemical

structure of the brain led to Jeff’s slow insanity, though otherwise the

surgery was a complete success.

Alpha and Wolruf had also made their way to the city via a modified Massey

lifepod, big enough for only one human.

With Alpha and Wolruf’s help, Derec and Ariel were able to capture the

increasingly violent and unstable cyborg. Using Derec’s body as a model, the

medical technicians of Robot City were able to transplant Jeff’s brain back

into his own newly healed body. However, he remained ill and largely out of

his senses.

Alpha, during the capture of Jeff, had received instructions from the cellular

material in his flexible arm ordering the robot to change its name to

Mandelbrot. Derec suspected that the arm, from an Avery-style robot, might

well have also sent a signal to Avery to return to Robot City.

A choice had to be made: let Ariel take the lifepod and escape, or send Jeff

back. Ariel insisted that Jeff must be the one to go.

Robot City continued its fascinating evolution. Not long after Jeff’s

departure, the behavior of the robots began to show definitely odd tendencies.

Circuit Breaker appeared: a building like two four-sided pyramids stuck

together at their bases and balanced on one point. The building, the first

work of creative art built by a robot, reflected ever-changing colors as it

rotated. Three robots, calling themselves the Three Cracked Cheeks, formed a

Dixieland jazz band. All this came about as an effort by the city to formulate

what it called the Laws of Humanics—corollaries to the Three Laws of Robotics.

The Laws of Humanics were supposed to govern—or at least explain—the actions

of human beings as the Three Laws of Robotics governed those of positronic

intelligence.

The most serious and unusual event in all the strangeness was that a robot was

murdered by another robot. Lucius, the creator of Circuit Breaker, was found

with all its positronic circuitry deliberately destroyed, so that the brain

could never be reconstructed. It seemed a deliberate attempt to stifle the

advances made by the Avery robots.

In the midst of this, Avery himself returned to the city, and Derec, Ariel,

Wolruf, and Mandelbrot quickly discovered that the doctor was a dangerous

megalomaniac. All that mattered to Avery was his work; he could not have cared

less about Ariel’s illness or the plight of the others. All that mattered to

him was Robot City. He had stationed Hunter-Seeker robots around the area to

take all of them prisoner until he could analyze all that had happened here—in

whatever way was most convenient to him.

They were taken prisoner, and Derec, unknowingly, was given a dose of

chemfets: miniature replicas of the city material that took residence in his

bloodstream.

Escaping at last, Derec, Ariel, Wolruf, and Mandelbrot left Robot City on Dr.

Avery’s ship. There, in a hidden compartment, they found a Key to Perihelion.

It was obvious that Avery anticipated their escape, for the ship was

sabotaged. Without the ability to home in on the navigational beacons, they

could not program the jumps through hyperspace. Ariel had also taken a

definite turn for the worse. Derec decided that he and Ariel must use the Key

to Perihelion to try to get help for her. Wolruf and Mandelbrot would remain

with the ship and try to complete repairs or attract help from another ship.

Derec activated the Key, and he and Ariel found themselves in an apartment on

Earth. They found Earth society paranoid and isolated, with extremely

xenophobic attitudes toward Spacers. However, Ariel was getting progressively

weaker, and Derec in desperation took her to a local hospital. If Earth was

backward in some ways, it seemed that its medical facilities were better than

Aurora’s. They recognized her disease—amnemonic plague—and cured her.

Unfortunately, the chemfets in Derec’s body were asserting their presence, and

he was rapidly getting weaker himself. With the help of R. David, an Earth

robot, they stole a ship from an Earth spaceport and headed out to rescue

Wolruf and Mandelbrot.

Another spaceship followed them: Aranimas, who had tracked the bursts of Key

static to Earth. In a tense battle, Derec and Ariel, with Mandelbrot and

Wolruf, managed to destroy Aranimas’s ship at great cost to their own vessels.

They had only one option left to them with Derec growing weaker: use the Key

to jump back to Robot City.

They emerged from the Compass Tower into Avery’s vacant office, intending to

force the doctor into helping Derec. To find him, Wolruf and Mandelbrot went

into the city, while Derec and Ariel began searching the tunnels underneath

the tower.

Mandelbrot and Wolruf found that the robots were all following the orders of

what they called the Migration Program. They were leaving the first Robot City

and seeking new worlds on which to build. And when they returned to Compass

Tower, they found that Hunter-Seeker robots were searching for Derec and

Ariel, who had fled.

Above the planet, a small spacecraft arrived, carrying Jeff Leong. Back to

normal, he was returning to rescue the others. Meeting with Derec and company,

he was determined to help them find Dr. Avery.

It was actually Dr. Avery who found them, the Hunter-Seeker robots capturing

the company one by one. The Doctor revealed that Derec was actually David

Avery, Dr. Avery’s son, and that the chemfets in his body would one day allow

him to control every Avery robot in existence. Derec would become Robot City.

But Avery had believed Derec would be a willing partner in his plans. He was

very wrong in that. Derec used his new control of the city to free his

companions; Dr. Avery triggered a Key to Perihelion before he could be

captured. He fled into the void.

Derec and the others gave no thought to pursuit. At last, they were safe and

free to leave.

It seemed reward enough....

ISAAC ASIMOV’S

ROBOT CITY

ROBOTS

AND ALIENS

Changeling

CHAPTER 1

BIRTH

“I feel uneasy about this, Dr. Anastasi.”

Janet Anastasi glanced up with a half-smile. She brushed blond hair back from

bright, hazel eyes cupped in smile lines. “And just how does a robot feel

‘uneasy,’ Basalom?” she asked with a laugh.

Basalom’s eyes blinked, a shutter membrane flickering momentarily over the

optical circuits. Janet had deliberately built in that random quirk. She built

idiosyncrasies into all her robots-eccentricities of speech, of mannerisms.

The foibles seemed to make Basalom and the rest less mechanically predictable.

To her, they lent the robots individual personalities they otherwise lacked.

“The term is simply an approximation, Doctor.”

“Hmm.” She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and wiped

it on the leg of her pants. “Give me a hand with this, will you, my friend?”

The two were in the cargo hold of a small ship. A viewscreen on one wall

showed the mottled blue-and-white curve of the planet they were orbiting. Twin

moons peered over the shoulder of the world, and the land mass directly below

them was green with foliage. It seemed a pastoral land from this distance, no

matter what the reality might actually be. Janet knew that the atmosphere of

the world was within terran norms, that the earth was fertile, and that there

was life, though without any signs of technology: the ship’s instruments had

told her that much. The world, whatever the inhabitants might call it, fit

her needs. Beyond that, she didn’t care.

Her husband of many years ago, Wendell Avery, had said during their breakup

that she didn’t care about anything made of simple flesh—not him, not their

son. “You’re afraid to love something that might love you back,” he’d raged.

“Which makes us exactly the same, doesn’t it?” she’d shouted back at him. “Or

can’t the genius admit that he has faults? Maybe it’s just because you don’t

like the fact that I’m the one who’s considered the robotic expert? That’s it,

isn’t it, Wendell? You can’t love anyone else because your own self-worship

takes up all the space in your heart.”

His remark had made her furious at the time, but time had softened the edges

of her anger. Avery might be a conceited, egocentric ass, but there had been

some truth in what he’d said. She’d looked in that mirror too often and seen

herself backing away from contact with other people to be with her robots.

Surely she’d been content here on this ship for the last few years, with only

Basalom and a few other robots for company.

Avery she missed not at all; her son sometimes she missed terribly. Basalom

and the others had become her surrogate children.

“Gently,” she cautioned Basalom. A spheroid of silvery-gray metal

approximately two meters in diameter sat on the workbench before her, its

gleaming surface composed of tiny dodecahedral segments. She’d just finished

placing the delicate, platinum-iridium sponge of a positronic brain into a

casing within the lumpy sphere. Now Basalom draped the sticky lace of the

neural connections over the brain and sealed the top half of the casing. The

geometric segments molded together seamlessly.

“You can put it in the probe,” Janet told the robot, then added: “What’s this

about being uneasy?”

“You have built me very well, Doctor; that is the only reason I sense

anything at all. I am aware of a millisecond pause in my positronic relays due

to possible First Law conflicts,” Basalom replied as he carefully lifted the

sphere and moved it to the launching tube. “While there is no imminent danger

of lock-up, nor is this sufficient to cause any danger of malfunction or loss

of effectiveness, it’s my understanding that humans feel a similar effect when

presented with an action that presents a moral conflict. Thus, my use of the

human term.”

Janet grinned, deepening the lines netting her eyes. “Longwinded, but logical

enough, I suppose.”

Basalom blinked again. “Brevity is more desired than accuracy when speaking of

human emotions?”

That elicited a quick laugh. “Sometimes, Basalom. Sometimes. It’s a judgment

call, I’m afraid. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you say so long as you just

talk.”

“I am not a good judge when it comes to human emotions, Doctor.”

“Which puts you in company with most of us, I’m afraid.” Janet clamped the

seals on the probe’s surface and patted it affectionately. LEDs glowed emerald

on the launching tube’s panel as she closed the access.

“What does a human being do when he or she is uneasy, Doctor Anastasi?”

Janet shrugged, stepping back. “It depends. If you believe in something, you

go ahead with it. You trust your judgment and ignore the feeling. If you never

have any doubts, you’re either mad or not thinking things through.”

“Then you have reservations about your experiment as well, but you will still

launch the probe.”

“Yes,” she answered. “If people were so paralyzed by doubt that they never did

anything without being certain of the outcome, there’d never be children,

after all.”

As Janet watched, Basalom seemed to ponder that. The robot moved a step closer

to the controls for the launching tube; its hand twitched—another

idiosyncrasy. The robot seemed to be on the verge of wanting to say more. The

glimmer of a thought struck her. “Basalom?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“Would you care to launch this probe?”

Blink. Twitch. For a moment, the robot didn’t move. Janet thought perhaps it

would not, then the hand reached out and touched the contact. “Thank you,

Doctor,” Basalom said, and pressed.

Serried lights flashed; there was a chuff of escaping air, and the probe was

flung into the airless void beyond. Basalom turned to watch it on the

viewscreen; Janet watched him.

“You never said what your reservations were exactly, Basalom,” she noted.

“These new robots—with your programming, so much is left for them to decide.

Yes, the Three Laws are imbedded in the positronic matrix, but you have given

them no definition of ‘human.”‘

“You wonder what will happen?”

“If they one day encounter human beings, will they recognize them? Will they

respond as they are supposed to respond?”

Janet shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s the beauty of it, Basalom. I don’t

know.”

“If you say so, Doctor. But I don’t understand that concept.”

“They’re seeds. Formless, waiting seeds coded only with the laws. They don’t

even know they’re robots. I’m curious to see what they grow up to be, my

friend.”

Janet turned and watched the hurtling probe wink in sunlight as it tumbled

away from the ship. It dwindled as it fell into the embrace of the world’s

gravity and was finally lost in atmospheric glare. Janet sighed.

“This one’s planted,” she said. She took a deep breath. “Now let’s get out of

here,” she said.

CHAPTER 2

THE DOPPLEGANGER

The probe lay encased in mud halfway down a hillside. The once-silvery sides

were battered and scorched from the long fall through the atmosphere; drying

streamers of black earth coated the dented sides. Ghostly heat waves

shimmered, and the metallic hull ticked as it cooled and contracted. The

echoes of its landing reverberated for a long time among the hills.

Inside the abused shell, timed relays opened and fed power to the positronic

circuitry of the robot nestled in its protective cradle. The neophyte mind

found itself in total darkness. Had it been a living creature, its birth

instincts would have taken over like a sea turtle burrowing from the wet sand

to find the shimmering sea. The robot had its own instinct-analogue—the Three

Laws of Robotics. Knowledge of these basic rules flooded the robot’s

brightening awareness.

First Law: A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a

human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where

such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection

does not interfere with the First or Second Laws.

This was the manner in which most of known human space defined the Laws. Any

schoolchild of Aurora or Earth or Solaris could have recited them by rote. But

to the fledgling, there was one important, essential difference. To the

fledgling, there were no words involved, only deep, core compulsions. The

fledgling had no sense that it had been built or that it was merely a

constructed machine.

It didn’t think of itself as a robot.

It only knew that it had certain instructions it must obey.

As survival instincts, the Laws were enough to spark a response. Second Law

governed the fledgling’s first reactions, enhanced by Third Law resonance.

There were imperious voices in its mind: inbuilt programming, speaking a

language it knew instinctively. The robot followed the instructions given it,

and more circuits opened.

An opening appeared in the probe’s hull, and the fledgling allowed itself to

rollout. The skin of its body shimmered, the myriad dodecahedral segments

flexing and shifting as it stretched like warm putty. The robot extruded

pseudopods to stabilize the round body. Sensory input was taken in through the

skin: optical, auditory, tactile, scent. At the same time, a larger store of

basic files was released into the receptive mind: a heavily edited

encyclopedia of carefully chosen knowledge. It paused, searching the

programming as it absorbed impressions of its surroundings.

A voice whispered.

Move away from the landing site. Beings may come to investigate; they may be

aggressive and dangerous. Hide.

Which left the problem: how to move? The positronic brain searched the files

and found an answer. The skin molded itself further, the pseudopods becoming

muscular legs. The robot scuttled away quickly, moving uphill to a stand of

coarse, tall grass. Its round body flattened, the legs retracted; it hunkered

down, patient.

As it waited, it inventoried itself dispassionately. The Three Laws overlaid

everything else in its mind, but there was more. Most of its programming, and

indeed this very self-evaluation, seemed to be manifestations of the Third

Law. It must protect its own existence; to survive, it must learn as much as

possible.

Underneath the Laws was the layer of initial programming, most of which the

fledgling had already followed in the first few minutes of life. Beneath that

was a substrate of complex if/then branches. The robot ignored most of those—

they all fed back into the Laws in any case.

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Changeling-IsaacAsimov'sRobotCity:RobotsandAliens,BookOneBooksintheIsaacAsimov’sRobotCity:RobotsandAliens™seriesBOOK1:CHANGELINGbyStephenLeighBOOK2:RENEGADEbyCordellScottenBOOK3:INTRUDERbyRobertThurstonBOOK4:ALLIANCEbyJerryOltionBOOK5:MAVERICKbyBruceBethkeBOOK6:HUMANITYbyJerryOltionISAACASIMOV’SROBO...

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