Robert Silverberg - The Positronic Man

THE POSITRONIC MAN

Isaac Asimov

And

Robert Silverberg

For Janet and Karen

--with much love

THE THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to

harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would

conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the

First or Second Law.

ONE

“IF YOU’LL TAKE A SEAT, sir,” the surgeon said, gesturing toward the chair in front of his desk.

“Please.”

“Thank you,” said Andrew Martin.

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He seated himself calmly. He did everything calmly. That was his nature; it was one part of him

that would never change. Looking at him now, one could have no way of knowing that Andrew Martin

had been driven to the last resort. But he had been. He had come halfway across the continent for this

interview. It represented his only remaining hope of achieving his life’s main goal--everything had come

down to that. Everything.

There was a smooth blankness to Andrew’s face--though a keen observer might well have

imagined a hint of melancholy in his eyes. His hair was smooth, light brown, rather fine, and he looked

freshly and cleanly shaven: no beard, no mustache, no facial affectations of any sort. His clothes were

well made and neat, predominantly a velvety red-purplein color; but they were of a distinctly

old-fashioned cut, in the loose, flowing style called “drapery” that had been popular several generations

back and was rarely seen these days.

The surgeon’s face had a certain blankness about it also: hardly a surprising thing, for the

surgeon’s face, like all the rest of him, was fashioned of lightly bronzed stainless steel. He sat squarely

upright at his imposing desk in the windowless room high over Lake Michigan, looking outward at

Andrew Martin with the utmost serenity and poise evident in his glowing eyes. In front of him on the desk

was a gleaming brass nameplate that announced his serial number, the usual factory-assigned assortment

of letters and numbers.

Andrew Martin paid no attention to that soulless string of characters and digits. Such dreary,

mechanistic identity-designations were nothing of any moment to him--not now, not any more, not for a

very long time. Andrew felt no need to call the robot surgeon anything but “Doctor.”

The surgeon said, “This is all very irregular, you know, sir. Very irregular.”

“Yes. I know that,” Andrew Martin said.

“I’ve thought about very little else since this request first came to my attention.”

“I sincerely regret any discomfort that it may have caused you.”

“Thank you. I am grateful for your concern.”

All very formal, very courteous, very useless. They were simply fencing with each other,

neither one willing to get down to essentials. And now the surgeon fell silent. Andrew waited for him to

proceed. The silence went on and on.

This is getting us nowhere, Andrew told himself.

To the surgeon he said, “The thing that I need to know, Doctor, is how soon the operation can

be carried out.”

The surgeon hesitated a perceptible moment. Then he said softly, with that certain inalienable

note of respect that a robot always used when speaking to a human being, “I am not convinced, sir, that I

fully understand how such an operation could be performed, let alone why it should be considered

desirable. And of course I still don’t know who the subject of the proposed operation is going to be.”

There might have been a look of respectful intransigence on the surgeon’s face, if the elegantly

contoured stainless steel of the surgeon’s face had been in any way capable of displaying such an

expression--or any expression at all.

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It was the turn of Andrew Martin to be silent for a moment, now.

He studied the robot surgeon’s right hand--his cutting hand--as it rested on the desk in utter

tranquility. It was splendidly designed. The fingers were long and tapering, and they were shaped into

metallic looping curves of great artistic beauty, curves so graceful and appropriate to their function that

one could easily imagine a scalpel being fitted into them and instantly becoming, at the moment they went

into action, united in perfect harmony with the fingers that wielded it: surgeon and scalpel fusing into a

single marvelously capable tool.

That was very reassuring, Andrew thought. There would be no hesitation in the surgeon’s

work, no stumbling, no quivering, no mistakes or even the possibility of a mistake.

Such skill came with specialization, of course--a specialization so fiercely desired by humanity

that few robots of the modern era were independently brained any more. The great majority of them

nowadays were mere adjuncts of enormously powerful central processing units that had computing

capacities far beyond the space limitations of a single robot frame.

A surgeon, too, really needed to be nothing more than a set of sensors and monitors and an

array of tool-manipulating devices--except that people still preferred the illusion, if nothing more than that,

that they were being operated on by an individual entity, not by a limb of some remote machine. So

surgeons--the ones in private practice, anyway--were still independently brained. But this one, brained or

not, was so limited in his capacity that he didn’t recognize Andrew Martin--had probably never heard of

Andrew Martin at all, in fact.

That was something of a novelty for Andrew. He was more than a little famous. He had never

asked for his fame, of course--that was not his style--but fame, or at any rate notoriety, had come to him

all the same. Because of what he had achieved: because of what he was. Not who, butwhat.

Instead of replying to what the surgeon had asked him Andrew said, with sudden striking

irrelevance, “Tell me something, Doctor. Have you ever thought you would like to be a man?”

The question, startling and strange, obviously took the surgeon aback. He hesitated a moment

as though the concept of being a man was so alien to him that it would fit nowhere in his allotted

positronic pathways.

Then he recovered his aplomb and replied serenely, “But I am a robot, sir.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to be a man, don’t you think?”

“If I were allowed the privilege of improving myself, sir, I would choose to be a better

surgeon. The practice of my craft is the prime purpose of my existence. There is no way I could be a

better surgeon if I were a man, but only if I were a more advanced robot. It would please me very much

indeed to be a more advanced robot.”

“But you would still be a robot, even so.”

“Yes. Of course. To be a robot is quite acceptable to me. As I have just explained, sir, in

order for one to excel at the extremely difficult and demanding practice of modern-day surgery it is

necessary that one be--”

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“A robot, yes,” said Andrew, with just a note of exasperation creeping into his tone. “But think

of the subservience involved, Doctor! Consider: you’re a highly skilled surgeon. You deal in the most

delicate matters of life and death--you operate on some of the most important individuals in the world,

and for all I know you have patients come to you from other worlds as well. And yet--and yet--a robot?

You’re content with that? For all your skill, you must take orders fromanyone, any human at all: a child,

a fool, a boor, a rogue. The Second Law commands it. It leaves you no choice. Right this minute I could

say, ‘Stand up, Doctor,’ and you’d have to stand up. ‘Put your fingers over your face and wiggle them,’

and you’d wiggle. Stand on one leg, sit down on the floor, move right or left, anything I wanted to tell

you, and you’d obey. I could order you to disassemble yourself limb by limb, and you would. You, a

great surgeon! No choice at all. A human whistles and you hop to his tune. Doesn’t it offend you that I

have the power to make you do whatever damned thing I please, no matter how idiotic, how trivial, how

degrading?”

The surgeon was unfazed.

“It would be my pleasure to please you, sir. With certain obvious exceptions. If your orders

should happen to involve my doing any harm to you or any other human being, I would have to take the

primary laws of my nature into consideration before obeying you, and in all likelihood I wouldnot obey

you. Naturally the First Law, which concerns my duty to human safety, would take precedence over the

Second Law relating to obedience. Otherwise, obedience is my pleasure. If it would give you pleasure to

require me to do certain acts that you regard as idiotic or trivial or degrading, I would perform those acts.

But they would not seem idiotic or trivial or degrading to me.”

There was nothing even remotely surprising to Andrew Martin in the things the robot surgeon

had said. He would have found it astonishing, even revolutionary, if the robot had taken any other

position.

But even so--even so--

The surgeon said, with not the slightest trace of impatience in his smooth bland voice, “Now, if

we may return to the subject of this extraordinary operation that you have come here to discuss, sir. I can

barely comprehend the nature of what you want done. It is hard for me to visualize a situation that would

require such a thing. But what I need to know, first of all, is the name of the person upon whom I am

asked to perform this operation.”

“The name is Andrew Martin,” Andrew said. “The operation is to be performed on me.”

“But that would be impossible, sir!”

“Surely you’d be capable of it.”

“Capable in a technical sense, yes. I have no serious doubt on that score, regardless of what

may be asked of me, although in this case there are certain procedural issues that I would have to

consider very carefully. But that is beside the point. I ask you please to bear in mind, sir, that the

fundamental effect of the operation would be harmful to you.”

“That does not matter at all,” said Andrew calmly.

“It does to me.”

“Is this the robot version of the Hippocratic Oath?”

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“Something far more stringent than that,” the surgeon said. “The Hippocratic Oath is, of

course, a voluntary pledge. But there is, as plainly you must be aware, something innate in my circuitry

itself that controls my professional decisions. Above and beyond everything else, I must not inflict

damage. Imay not inflict damage.”

“On human beings, yes.”

“Indeed. The First Law says--”

“Don’t recite the First Law, Doctor. I know it at least as well as you. But the First Law simply

governs the actions of robots toward human beings. I’m not human, Doctor.”

The surgeon reacted with a visible twitch of his shoulders and a blinking of his photoelectric

eyes. It was as if what Andrew had just said had no meaning for him whatever.

“Yes,” said Andrew, “I know that I seem to be quite human, and that what you’re

experiencing now is the robot equivalent of surprise. Nevertheless I’m telling you the absolute truth.

However human I may appear to you, I am simply a robot. Arobot, Doctor. A robot is what I am, and

nothing more than that. Believe me. And therefore you are free to operate on me. There is nothing in the

First Law which prohibits a robot from performing actions on another robot. Even if the action that is

performed should cause harm to that robot, Doctor.”

TWO

IN THE BEGINNING, of course--and the beginning for him was nearly two centuries before his visit to

the surgeon’s office--no one could have mistaken Andrew Martin for anything but the robot he was.

In that long-ago era when he had first come from the assembly line of United States Robots

and Mechanical Men he was as much a robot in appearance as any that had ever existed, smoothly

designed and magnificently functional: a sleek mechanical object, a positronic brain encased in a

more-or-less humanoid-looking housing made from metal and plastic.

His long slim limbs then were finely articulated mechanisms fashioned from titanium alloys

overlaid by steel and equipped with silicone bushings at the joints to prevent metal-to-metal contact. His

limb sockets were of the finest flexible polyethylene. His eyes were photoelectric cells that gleamed with

a deep red glow. His face--and to call it that was charitable; it was the merest perfunctory sketch of a

face--was altogether incapable of expression. His bare, sexless body was unambiguously a manufactured

device. All it took was a single glance to see that he was a machine, no more animate, no more human,

no more alive, than a telephone or a pocket calculator or an automobile.

But that was in another era, long, long ago.

It was an era when robots were still uncommon sights on Earth--almost the very dawn of the

age of robotics, not much more than a generation after the days when the great early roboticists like

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Alfred Lanning and Peter Bogert and the legendary robopsychologist Susan Calvin had done their

historic work, developing and perfecting the principles by which the first positronic robots had come into

being.

The aim of those pioneers had been to create robots capable of taking up many of the dreary

burdens that human beings had for so long been compelled to bear. And that was part of the problem

that the roboticists faced, in those dawning days of the science of artificial life late in the Twentieth

Century and early in the Twenty-First: the unwillingness of a great many human beings to surrender those

burdens to mechanical substitutes. Because of that unwillingness, strict laws had been passed in virtually

every country--the world was still broken up into a multitude of nations, then--against the use of robot

labor on Earth.

By the year 2007 they had been banned entirely everywhere on the planet, except for scientific

research under carefully controlled conditions. Robots could be sent into space, yes, to the

ever-multiplying industrial factories and exploratory stations off Earth: let them cope with the miseries of

frigid Ganymede and torrid Mercury, let them put up with the inconveniences of scrabbling around on the

surface of Luna, let them run the bewildering risks of the early Jump experiments that would eventually

give mankind the hyperspace road to the stars.

But robots in free and general use on Earth--occupying precious slots in the labor force that

would otherwise be available for actual naturally-born flesh-and-blood human beings--no! No! No

robots wanted around here!

Well, that had eventually begun to change, of course. And the most dramatic changes had

begun to set in around the time that Robot NDR-113, who would someday be known as Andrew

Martin, had been undergoing assembly at the main Northern Region factory of United States Robots and

Mechanical Men.

One of the factors bringing about the gradual breakdown of the antirobot prejudices on Earth

at that time was simple public relations. United States Robots and Mechanical Men was not only a

scientifically adept organization, it knew a thing or two about the importance of maintaining its

profitability, too. So it had found ways, quiet and subtle and effective, of chipping away at the

Frankenstein myth of the robot, the concept of the mechanical man as the dreaded shambling Golem.

Robots are here for our convenience, the U.S.R.M.M. public relations people said. Robots

are here to help us. Robots are not our enemies. Robots are perfectly safe, safe beyond any possibility of

doubt.

And--because in fact all those things were actually true--people began to accept the presence

of robots among them. They did so grudgingly, in the main. Many people--most, perhaps--were still

uncomfortable with the whole idea of robots; but they recognized the need for them and they could at

least tolerate having them around, so long as tight restrictions on their use continued to be applied.

There was need for robots, like it or not, because the population of Earth had started to

dwindle about that time. After the long anguish that was the Twentieth Century, a time of relative

tranquility and harmony and even rationality--a certain degree of that, anyway--had begun to settle over

the world. It became a quieter, calmer, happier place. There were fewer people by far, not because there

had been terrible wars and plagues, but because families now tended to be smaller, giving preference to

quality over quantity. Migration to the newly settled worlds of space was draining off some of Earth’s

population also--migration to the extensive network of underground settlements on the Moon, to the

colonies in the asteroid belt and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and to the artificial worlds in orbit

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around Earth and Mars.

So there was no longer so much excitement over the possibility of losing one’s job to a robot.

The fear of job shortages on Earth had given way to the problem of labor shortages. Suddenly the robots

that once had been looked upon with such uneasiness, fear, and even hatred became necessary to

maintain the welfare of a world that had every material advantage but didn’t have enough of a population

left to sweep the streets, drive the taxis, cook the meals, stoke the furnaces.

It was in this new era of diminishing population and increasing prosperity that NDR-113--the

future Andrew Martin--was manufactured. No longer was the use of robots illegal on Earth; but strict

regulations still applied, and they were still far from everyday sights. Especially robots who were

programmed for ordinary household duties, which was the primary use that Gerald Martin had in mind

for NDR--113.

Hardly anyone in those days had a robot servant around the house. It was too frightening an

idea for most people--and too expensive, besides.

But Gerald Martin was hardly just anyone. He was a member of the Regional Legislature, a

powerful member at that, Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee: a man of great presence

and authority, of tremendous force of mind and character. What Gerald Martin set out to achieve, Gerald

Martin inevitably succeeded in achieving. And what Gerald Martin chose to possess, Gerald Martin

would invariably come to possess. He believed in robots: he knew that they were an inevitable

development, that they would ultimately become inextricably enmeshed in human society at every level.

And so--utilizing his position on the Science and Technology Committee to the fullest--he had

been able to arrange for robots to become a part of his private life, and that of his family. For the sake of

gaining a deeper understanding of the robot phenomenon, he had explained. For the sake of helping his

fellow members of the Regional Legislature to discover how they might best grapple with the problems

that the coming era of robotic ubiquity would bring. Bravely, magnanimously, Gerald Martin had offered

himself as an experimental subject and had volunteered to take a small group of domestic robots into his

own home.

The first robots that arrived were simple specialized ones dedicated to specific routine tasks.

They were approximately human in form but they had little if anything to say and went about their

business in the quiet, efficient manner of the machines that they all too plainly were. At first the Martins

found it strange to have them around, but very quickly they faded into the background of the family’s

existence, arousing no more interest than toasters or vacuum cleaners would.

But then--

“This is NDR-l 13,” Gerald Martin announced one cool, windy afternoon in June, when the

delivery truck had rolled up the long driveway that led to the imposing clifftop estate of the Gerald Martin

family and the sleek, shining mechanical man had been released from his crate. “Our personal household

robot. Our own private family retainer.”

“What did you call him?” Amanda asked. Amanda was the younger of the two Martin

daughters, a small golden-haired child with penetrating blue eyes. She was just beginning to learn to read

and write, then.

“NDR-113.”

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“Is that his name?”

“His serial number, actually.”

Amanda frowned. “En-dee-arr. Endeearr 113. That’s a peculiar name.”

“Serial number,” Gerald Martin said again.

But Amanda wanted no part of that. “Endeearr. We can’t call him something like that. It

doesn’t sound like any kind of name anything ought to have.”

“Listen to her,” Melissa Martin said. Melissa was the older Martin girl: five years older than

Amanda, dark-haired, dark-eyed. Melissa was practically a woman, so far as Melissa was concerned.

Amanda was merely a child, and therefore Melissa regarded her as foolish by definition. “She doesn’t

like the robot’s serial number.”

“En-dee-arr,” Amanda said again, elaborately paying no attention to Melissa. “That isn’t any

good. It really isn’t. What about calling him Andrew?”

“Andrew?” Gerald Martin said. “It’s got ann in it, doesn’t it? And ad?” For a moment

Amanda looked a little doubtful. “Sure it does. And anr, that much I’m certain of. N-D-R. Andrew.”

“Just listen to her,” Melissa said scornfully. But Gerald Martin was smiling. He knew that it

wasn’t at all unusual to adapt a robot’s serial letters into a name. Robots of the JN series tended to

become Johns or Janes. RG robots became Archies. QT robots were called Cuties. Well, here was an

NDR-series robot, and Amanda wanted to call him Andrew. Fine. Fine. Gerald Martin had a way of

letting Amanda do what Amanda thought was best for Amanda. Within limits, of course.

“Very well,” he said. “ Andrew it is.”

And Andrew it was. So much so that, as the years went along, no one in the Martin family

ever called him NDR--113 again. In time his serial number was forgotten altogether, and it had to be

looked up whenever he needed to be taken in for maintenance. Andrew himself claimed to have

forgotten his own number. Of course, that wasn’t strictly true. No matter how much time might go by, he

could never forget anything, not if he wanted to remember it.

But as time went on, and things began to change for Andrew, he had less and less desire to

remember the number. He left it safely hidden away in the oblivion of his memory banks and never

thought of going searching for it. He was Andrew now--Andrew Martin--the Andrew of the Martin

family

Andrew was tall and slender and graceful, because that was how NDR robots were designed

to look. He moved quietly and unobtrusively around the splendid house that the Martin family occupied

overlooking the Pacific, efficiently doing all that the Martins required him to do.

It was a house out of a vanished age, a grand and majestic mansion that really required a

grand retinue of servants to keep it up; but of course there were no servants to be had any longer, except

for robots, and that had been causing some problems for the Martins before Gerald Martin offered

himself up for this experiment. Now a pair of robot gardeners tended the glistening green lawns and

pruned the glorious hedges of fiery red azaleas and trimmed away the dead fronds of the towering palm

trees that ran along the ridge behind the house. A robot housecleaner kept dust and cobwebs at bay.

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And Andrew the robot served as valet, butler, lady’s maid, and chauffeur for the Martin family. He

prepared meals; he selected and poured the wines of which Gerald Martin was so fond; he supervised

their wardrobes; he arranged and cared for their fine furniture, their works of art, their myriad distinctive

possessions.

Andrew had one other duty, too, which in fact monopolized much of his time to the detriment

of the rest of his formal household routine.

The Martin estate--for that was what it was, nothing less, a great estate--was an isolated one,

alone on its beautiful ridge overlooking the chilly blue ocean. There was a little town nearby, but it was

some distance away. The nearest city of any size, San Francisco, was far down the coast. Cities were

starting to become obsolete now, anyway, and people preferred to communicate electronically and keep

plenty of distance between one house and the next. So the Martin girls, in their grand and wonderful

isolation, had very few playmates.

They did, however, have Andrew.

It was Miss who first figured out how that might best be arranged.

(“Miss” was what Andrew invariably called Melissa, not because he was incapable of

pronouncing her first name but because it seemed improper to him to address her in such a familiar way.

Amanda was always “Little Miss”--never anything else. Mrs. Martin--Lucie was her first name--was

“Ma’am” to Andrew. And as for Gerald Martin, he was “Sir.” Gerald Martin was the sort of individual

whom many people, not simply robots, felt most comfortable calling “Sir.” The number of people in the

world who called him “Gerald” was a very small number indeed, and it was impossible to suppose him

being “Jerry” to anybody at all.)

Miss quickly came to understand more than a little about how to take advantage of the

presence of a robot in the house. It was a simple matter of utilizing the Second Law.

“Andrew,” she said, “we order you to stop what you’re doing and play with us.”

At the moment Andrew was arranging the books in the Martin library, which had wandered a

little out of alphabetical order, as books have a way of doing.

He paused and looked down from the high mahogany bookcase between the two great

leaded-glass windows at the north end of the room. Mildly he said, “I’m sorry, Miss. I’m occupied at

present by a task requested by your father. A prior order from Sir must take precedence over this

request of yours.”

“I heard what Daddy told you,” Miss replied. “He said, ‘I’d like you to tidy up those books,

Andrew. Get them back into some kind of sensible arrangement.’ Isn’t that so?”

“That is exactly what he said, yes, Miss. Those were his very words.”

“Well, then, if all he said was that he’dlike you to tidy up those books --and you don’t deny

that he did--then it wasn’t much of an order, was it? It was more of a preference. A suggestion. A

suggestion isn’t an order. Neither is a preference. Andrew, I order you. Leave the books where they are

and come take Amanda and me out for a walk along the beach.”

It was a perfect application of the Second Law. Andrew put the books down immediately and

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descended from his ladder. Sir was the head of the household; but he hadn’t actually given an order, not

in the formal sense of the concept, and Miss had. She certainly had. And an order from a human member

of this household--anyhuman member of the household--had to take priority over a mere expression of

preference from some other human member of the household, even if that member happened to be Sir

himself.

Not that Andrew had any problem with any of that. He was fond of Miss, and even more fond

of Little Miss. At least, the effect that they had upon his actions was that which in a human being would

have been called the result of fondness. Andrew thought of it as fondness, for he didn’t know any other

term for what he felt toward the two girls. Certainly he feltsomething. That in itself was a little odd, but

he supposed that a capacity for fondness had been built into him, the way his various other skills had

been. And so if they wanted him to come out and play with them, he’d do it happily--provided they

made it permissible for him to do it within the context of the Three Laws.

The trail down to the beach was a steep and winding one, strewn with rocks and gopher-holes

and other troublesome obstacles. No one but Miss and Little Miss used it very often, because the beach

itself was nothing more than a ragged sandy strand covered with driftwood and storm-tossed seaweed,

and the ocean, in this northern part of California, was far too chilly for anyone without a wetsuit to

consider entering. But the girls loved its bleak, moody, windswept charm.

As they scrambled down the trail Andrew held Miss by the hand and carried Little Miss in the

crook of his arm. Very likely both girls could have made their way down the path without incident, but

Sir had been very strict about the beach trail. “Make sure they don’t run or jump around, Andrew. If

they tripped over something in the wrong place it would be a fifty-foot drop. I can’t stop them from going

down there, but I want you to be right beside them at all times to be certain they don’t do anything

foolish. That’s an order.”

One of these days, Andrew knew, Miss or even Little Miss was going to countermand that

order and tell him to stand aside while they ran giddily down the hill to the beach. When that happened it

would set up a powerful equipotential of contradiction in his positronic brain and beyond much doubt he

would be hard pressed to deal with it.

Sir’s order would ultimately prevail, naturally, since it embodied elements of the First Law as

well as the Second, and anything that involved First Law prohibitions always took highest priority. Still,

Andrew knew that his circuitry would be stressed more than a little the first time a direct conflict between

Sir’s decree and the girls’ whims came into play.

For the moment, though, Miss and Little Miss were content to abide by the rules. Carefully,

step by step, he made his way down the face of the cliff with the girls in tow.

At the bottom Andrew released Miss’s hand and set Little Miss down on the damp sand.

Immediately they went streaking off, running gleefully along the edge of the fierce, snarling sea.

“Seaweed!” Miss cried, grabbing up a thick brown ropy length of kelp that was longer than

she was and swinging it like a whip. “Look at this big chunk of seaweed, Andrew!”

“And this piece of driftwood,” said Little Miss. “Isn’t it beautiful, Melissa?”

“Maybe to you,” the older girl said loftily. She took the gnarled and bent bit of wood from

Little Miss, examined it in a perfunctory way, and tossed it aside with a shudder. “Ugh. It’s got things

growing on it.”

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Robert Silverberg - The Positronic Man

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