The Fifth Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer

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СКАЧАТЬ the disk in his trouser pocket without bothering to first put it in its case. “Th-th-this is none of your buh-buh-business, and I-I-I’d ap-ap-appreciate it if y-y-you’d k-k-k-kindly stay out of it. Samson needs to b-b-be reprogrammed. Th-th-th-that’s all.”

      No argument either way. Phil’s relationship with Kathy wasn’t any of my business, and there was no doubt that Samson conditioning module needed drastic remodification. Like it or not, our team had designed a third-generation robot which took all the wrong cues from human behavior. Kathy and Phil could fight out their problems on their own, but it wasn’t right to send a robot to market whose training inadvertently reflected their love-hate relationship.

      “Sure, Phil,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

      Still not looking directly at me, Phil nodded as he headed for the door. “Th-th-that’s the end of t-t-t-today’s exercise,” he said quietly. “I-I-I’ll work on S-s-s-samson tonight, have it r-r-ready for t-t-tomorrow’s test with D-d-d-d-d…”

      “Sure you want to do that?” Tomorrow morning we had another test scheduled with D-team. Same routine as before: Samson comes out of the woods, offers an apple to Delilah, bows to her, offers his hand and asks if she wants him to join her on the bench. Both teams had agreed this as a test of whether the two robots could work in unison without operator intervention. “Maybe we should ask for a delay.”

      Phil appeared to think about it for a moment, then he shook his head. “No,” he said at last. “We’ll do the test tomorrow. Between now and then, don’t touch Samson. Just let me take care of this, okay?”

      “Sure,” I said, and he nodded and let himself out of the booth. It wasn’t until long after he had closed the door behind him that I realized he had stopped stuttering.

      By this time, though, I had taken a seat at the console and begun doing a little work of my own.

      The two R&D programs were supposed to be isolated from one another, but the seal wasn’t airtight. Kathy and Phil weren’t the only couple who were keeping company when no one was watching; there was a cutie on Delilah Team with whom I was cooping from time to time, sometimes sleeping over at her apartment and vice-versa. What she didn’t know, though, was that I had learned her password. It was a sort-of-accidental discovery; one time we were lounging in bed together, she took a few minutes to check her company email on TV, so I was able to see her password when she entered it. I had never abused that knowledge, but there’s always a first time for everything, so it was with no small amount of guilt that I used my occasional girlfriend’s password to gain access to D-Team’s files.

      It took a couple of hours of rummaging, but after a while I managed to locate a batch of reports regarding Delilah’s trial runs. I wasn’t surprised to discover that D-team had their own problems with their robot. Like Samson, Delilah sometimes behaved aggressively when the circumstances called for her to be friendly. The fault obviously lay in the conditioning module, yet no one—at least, not those who had written the reports; I couldn’t find any from Kathy Veder—had been able to figure out what was providing negative stimuli to the robot.

      But I knew. Delilah was being also being trained in a suite much like Samson’s. It didn’t take a rocket scientist, let alone a cyberneticist, to realize that this suite was sometimes being used by Drs. Veder and Burton for certain extracurricular activities…with Delilah in the same room, watching the entire time, absorbing everything. Learning all the wrong lessons about the human condition.

      It could be argued either way whether Samson and Delilah truly had any emotions of their own. Were they merely imitating Phil and Kathy, or had they developed inner lives, as incredible as that may seem? Regardless of the explanation, though, their environment was causing them to sometimes behave in what appeared to be an irrational manner.

      Yet love—even agape, its highest expression—isn’t rational. It cannot be reduced to bar-graphs and lines of source code; once you get past pheromones, body language and casual eye-contact, there is no reason for it to happen, save for the biological imperatives to procreate, maintain tribal associations, or remain close to one’s family. But love does nonetheless persist, and sometimes under the strangest of circumstances.

      Were Samson and Delilah in love? Probably not; they were robots, machines with none of the beforementioned hangups. You could spend countless man-hours of R&D trying to resolve that question. Yet the only people who had the answer were their own creators…and they had a hard enough time researching and developing their own feelings toward each other.

      When I arrived the trailer the following morning, the rest of Samson Team was already getting ready for the test. Phil, however, was nowhere to be found, and neither was Samson. I paged him but he didn’t return the call, and while Bob was setting up his camera and Keith was opening his first bag of Fritos for the day, Kathy Veder appeared in the atrium, walking Delilah ahead of her.

      Delilah was dressed in the same ankle-length, high-collared gown she had worn the day before. Once again, I wondered what purpose it served to put clothes on a robot. It didn’t seem to impede her movements—indeed, the dress had been cut so that it allowed her double-jointed arms and legs to move more freely—yet it was unnecessary to assign a gender-role to a machine. On the other hand, perhaps Darth was attempting to humanize her creation; if that was the case, it might be a good marketing strategy, yet rather futile since Delilah’s spherical, nearly featureless head belied the femininity of her outfit.

      Kathy stopped next to the bench, turning her back to us as she waited for Delilah catch up. Donna hadn’t switched on the shotgun mike, so we couldn’t hear the instructions Kathy gave the ’bot. She pointed to the bench, and Delilah walked over to it, her feet whisking beneath the hem of her dress, until she turned and daintily sat down, once again folding her silver hands in her lap. Kathy bent over Delilah and closely examined a panel in the side of her slender cylindrical neck. I glanced at the clock. We were already running fifteen minutes late…

      The door behind me opened, and at first I thought it was Phil. “What took you so…?” I started to say until I glimpsed Keith hastily stashing his chips beneath the console. I turned around and saw Jim Lang entering the trailer.

      “Mind if I join you?” he asked. As always, Jim was dressed in sandals, faded Levis and a Hawaiian shirt. In all the time I had worked for LEC, I had never seen him wear a coat and tie, not even for stockholder meetings.

      “No, Jim, not at all.” I recovered fast enough to not show just how startled I was by his unexpected arrival. “We’re…ah, still setting up here. If you want to take a seat…?”

      “Thanks, Jerry. Excuse me, Donna…it is Donna, isn’t it?” Ignoring her forced smile, Jim eased past her, then settled down in Phil’s empty chair. “Sorry to interrupt, but I was just curious to see how things were making out down here.”

      Right. Slim Jim never showed up anywhere just out of curiosity. When he made an appearance outside the executive suite, it meant that he had become aware that a project was having problems. “We’re doing great, Jim,” Keith said, just a little too quickly. “Just…uh, working out a few bugs here and there.”

      I looked away so that Jim wouldn’t see me wince. Brilliant, Einstein. Yet Slim Jim only nodded. He gazed through the window at Kathy Veder and Delilah. “I don’t see Phil,” he said. “Where’s…ah, yes, here he comes now.”

      I followed his gaze, spotted Phil walking through the trees on the other side of the atrium. He saw Kathy, stopped a few yards away from the bench as she looked up at him. Their eyes locked for a few seconds, and for a moment or two I thought he was going to say something to her, or she something to him. But nothing happened; СКАЧАТЬ