Caliban wandered the room, seeming to be astonished by all that he saw. He stared hard at the map upon the table, closely examined a globe of the planet that stood hanging in the air by the table. He stared out both windows, but seemed to take a special interest in the vistas of nature to the north.
But Horatio’s time was precious, and he could not let it drift away watching this odd robot stare out the window. “Friend Caliban—” he said at last. “If you could explain yourself now, perhaps I could be of assistance.”
“Excuse me, yes,” Caliban said. “It is just that I have never seen such things before. The map, the globe, the desert—even this sort of room, this human room—they are all new things to me.”
“Indeed? Pardon my saying so, friend Caliban, but many things seem new to you. Even if you have never seen these precise objects before, surely your initial internal dataset included information on them. Why do you seem so surprised by them all?”
“Because I am surprised. My internal dataset held almost no information at all, beyond language and the knowledge of my own name. I have had to learn about everything, either from a built-in datastore that works as a look-up system, rather than a memory, or by firsthand observation. I have found that I must rely far more on the second technique, as large and important areas of information have been deleted from the datastore.”
Horatio pulled out one of the hardwood chairs at the conference table and sat down, not out of any question of comfort, but so he could seem as quiet and passive as possible. “What sort of data has been deleted? And how can you be sure it was cut out? Perhaps it was never there in the first place.”
Caliban turned and faced Horatio, then crossed the room and sat in the chair opposite him at the conference table. “I know it was deleted,” he said, “because the space it should have occupied is still there. That space is simply empty. There are literally gaps in my map of the city, places that do not exist according to the map. Some gaps exist inside the city limits, but the land outside the city is nonexistent. The first time I went to the border of the city, I wondered what the ‘nothing’ beyond the city limits would look like.” Caliban pointed out the window. “The mountains I see out that window do not exist in my map. According to my map, there is nothing whatsoever outside the city of Hades. No land, no water, no nothing. Did your initial datasets tell you such things?”
“No, of course not. I awakened fully aware of the basics of geography and galactography.”
“What is galactography?” Caliban asked.
“The study of the locations and properties of the stars and planets in the sky.”
“Stars. Planets. I am unfamiliar with these terms. They are not in my datastore.”
Horatio could only stare. Clearly this robot was suffering a major memory malfunction. It could not be that a robot of such high intellect would be allowed out of the factory with such a faulty knowledge base. Horatio decided he must assume that any highly stressful event could send this Caliban over the edge. Horatio found himself fascinated by Caliban. As a management robot, it was his duty to oversee the mental health of the laborers in this section. He had made something of a study of robopsychology, but he had never seen anything like Caliban. Any robot who showed this degree of confusion and disorientation should be almost completely incapable of any meaningful action. Yet this Caliban seemed to be functioning rather well under circumstances that should have produced catatonia. What has Dr. Leving done to make him so strong and yet so confused? he wondered. “The terms ‘stars’ and ‘planets’ are not immediately important,” he said soothingly. “Are there any other major gaps? Any other subjects you feel that you should know more about?”
“Yes,” Caliban said. “Robots.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My internal data sources say nothing at all about beings such as ourselves, beyond providing the identifying term ‘robot.’ ”
Again, and for a long time, Horatio was left with nothing but silence. At first, he even entertained the idea that Caliban was joking. But that seemed hardly possible. Robots had no sense of humor, and there was nothing other than deadly seriousness in Caliban’s voice.
“Surely you must be in error. Perhaps the data is misfiled, wrongly loaded,” he suggested.
Caliban opened his palms, in a rather human gesture of helplessness. “No,” he said. “It is simply not there. I have no information about robots. I was very much hoping you could tell me about them—about us.”
“You know nothing. Not about the science of robotics, or the proper modes of addressing a human, or the theory underlying the Three Laws?”
“None of that, though I can surmise what some of it is. Robotics, I take it, is the study of robotic design and robot behavior. As to how to address a human, I have a great deal of data about them. There are many different social statuses and ranks, and I have already gathered that there is a rather complicated system of address based on all sorts of variables. I can see that robots must have their place in that system. As to the last, I am afraid that I know nothing about the theory underlying the Three Laws you mentioned. I’m afraid I don’t even know what the Three Laws you’re talking about are.”
Horatio actually blacked out for a split second. He did not collapse forward, or twitch violently, or any of that. It was more subtle than that, just a quick moment of total and complete cognitive dissonance. There, before him, talking quite rationally, was a robot who did not know what the Three Laws were! Impossible. Flatly impossible. Then he was back, from wherever he had been. Wait a moment. He had heard of such cases in the past. Yes, yes. There were cases, many of them, of robots who did not know they knew the Three Laws—and yet obeyed them, anyway. It must be something like that. Yes. Yes. The alternative was unthinkable, impossible. “Why don’t you tell me everything,” Horatio suggested. “Start at the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”
“That could take some time,” Caliban said. “Will it cause you any problem to be away from your duties that long?”
“I can assure you, there can be no higher duty for me at this time than dealing with a robot in your situation.”
Which was certainly true. Horatio would no more leave Caliban to wander off on his own than he would walk away from an occupied house on fire.
“I am deeply relieved,” Caliban said. “At last, I have someone sympathetic, experienced, and intelligent who will listen to me and be able to help.”
“I will certainly do my best,” Horatio said.
“Excellent,” Caliban said. “Then let me begin at the beginning. I have only been alive for a brief time. I awoke two days ago in the Leving Robotics Laboratories, and the first thing I saw was a woman I have since identified as Fredda Leving, unconscious on the floor in front of me, a pool of blood under her head.”
Horatio’s head snapped back with astonishment. “Unconscious! Bleeding! This is terrible news. Did she recover? Were you able to assist her, or summon help?”
Caliban hesitated for a moment. “I must admit that I should have done so, but up until you suggested it just now, it never occurred to me to do any such thing. I should have gone to the aid of a fellow being. But I must plead my own inexperience as a defense. The world was quite new to me—indeed it still is. No, I stepped over her and left the room and the building.”