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.