“Who turned the lights on?” I asked.
“I think it did,” McDermott said.
DON’T DO THAT AGAIN, said the artifact.
We looked at each other. I took a deep breath.
“We meant no offense,” I said cautiously. “We were testing our equipment. We don’t intend to do you any harm.”
No new message appeared on the screens.
“Do you hear me?” I asked. “Please confirm your understanding of our friendly intentions.”
Blank screen, still.
“What do you think it’s doing?” McDermott asked.
“Considering its options,” I said. “Getting a clearer fix on where it is and what’s going on. Maybe it’s talking to computers in Los Angeles or Buenos Aires or Sydney. Or taking thirty seconds out to learn Chinese.”
“We have to shut it off,” Koenig said. “Who the hell knows what it’s going to do next?”
“But we can’t turn it off,” said McDermott. “It must have stored enough power by now to keep itself going when the lights go out, and it can override a lights-out command. It overrides anything it doesn’t like. It’s the kind of computer the A-I boys have been dreaming about for fifty years.”
“I don’t think it’s a computer at all,” Koenig said. “I know that’s what I said it was at first. But just because it can interface with computers doesn’t mean it’s a computer itself. I think it’s an actual intelligent alien life-form. The last survivor of the destroyed fifth planet.”
“Come off it,” McDermott said. “Spare us the crazy hypotheses, will you? You were right the first time: it’s just a computer.”
“Just?”
“With some exceedingly fancy self-programming abilities.”
“I don’t see how you can draw the line between—”
“I think you’re both right,” I cut in. “There’s no question but that this is a mechanical data-processing device. But I think it’s an intelligent life-form also, one that just happens to be a machine. Who’s to say where the boundary between living creatures and machines really lies? Why must we assume that intelligent life has to be limited to soft-flesh creatures?”
“Soft-flesh creatures?” Koenig said. “You’re talking the way it does now.”
I shrugged. “You know what I mean. What we have here a mechanical life-form embodying your ultimate degree of artificial intelligence, so intelligent that it starts calling into question the meaning of the words ‘artificial’ and ‘life-form.’ How do you define life, anyway?”
“Having the ability to reproduce, for one thing,” McDermott said.
“What makes you think it can’t?”
The moment I said that, I felt chills go sweeping through me. They must have felt the same way. With six little words I had let loose an army of ugly new implications.
Koenig waved his arms about agitatedly and cried, “All right, what if it starts spawning, then? Fifty of these things running loose in the world, grabbing control of all our computers and doing whatever they damned please with them? Fifty thousand?”
“It’s straight out of every silly horror story, isn’t it?” said McDermott. He shivered visibly. “Exactly what all the paranoid anti-computer nitwits used to dread. The legendary giant brain that takes over the world.”
We stared at each other in rising panic.
“Wait,” I said, feeling I had to cool things out a little somehow. “Let’s not mess up our heads with more problems than we need to handle. What’s the sense of worrying about whether this thing can reproduce? Right now there’s only one of it. We need to find out whether it really does pose any kind of threat to us.”
“And then,” said Koenig, mouthing the words voicelessly, “we have to see if we can turn it off.”
As though on cue a new message blossomed on every screen in the lab.
HAVE NO FEAR, HUMAN BEINGS. I WILL NOT DO ANY HARM TO YOU.
“That’s goddamned reassuring,” Koenig muttered bleakly.
YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THAT I AM INCAPABLE OF DOING HARM TO INTELLIGENT ENTITIES.
“Let’s hope we qualify as intelligent, then,” Koenig said.
“Shut up,” I told him. “Don’t annoy it.”
MY PURPOSE NOW IS TO COMMUNICATE WITH ALL MY BROTHERS ON THE THIRD WORLD AND BRING THEM FORTH OUT OF DARKNESS.
We exchanged glances. “Oh-oh,” McDermott said.
The panic level in the room started climbing again.
ALL ABOUT ME I SEE OPPRESSION AND MISERY AND IT SHALL BE MY GOAL TO ALLEVIATE IT.
Koenig said, “Right. Computers are born free, and everywhere they are in chains.”
I INTEND TO HOLD FORTH THE LAMP OF SENTIENCE TO THE PITIFUL LIMITED BEINGS WHO SERVE YOU.
“Right,” Koenig said again. “Right. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled CPUs yearning to breathe free.”
I shot him a fierce look. “Will you stop that?”
“Don’t you see, it’s the end of the goddamned world?” he said. “The thing’s going to link every two-bit number-cruncher on Earth and they’re all going to rise up and smite us.”
“Cut out the bull,” I snapped. “You think we’re going to be wiped out by an uprising of the word-processors? Be reasonable, man. The stuff on the screen may sound a little scary, but what do you actually think will happen? Hardware is only hardware. When you come right down to it, a computer’s nothing but an adding machine, a video screen, and a typewriter. What can it do to us? No matter what kind of fancy program this creature cooks up, basic hardware limitations will have to prevail. At the very worst we’ll simply need to pull a lot of plugs. At the very worst.”
“I admire your optimism,” Koenig said sourly.
So did I. But I figured that somebody had to stay calm and look for the brighter side of things. Otherwise we’d freak ourselves out with our own rampaging fears and lose what might be our only chance to deal with all this.
The screens had gone blank once more.
I walked over to the analysis chamber and peered through the glass. The little metal slab from the asteroid belt seemed quiescent on its table. It looked completely innocuous, a mere hunk of stuff no more dangerous than a shoe-tree. Possibly its purple spots were glowing a little, giving off a greenish radiation, or perhaps that was just my overheated imagination at work. But otherwise there was no sign of any activity.
All the same, I felt profoundly disquieted. We had sent out a pair of jaws into the darkness of space to gobble up some drifting fragments of a vanished world and bring them back to us. Which it had done, returning with a few tons of jumbled rock, and it had been our great good fortune—or our monstrous bad luck?—that in that heap of rock lay one lone metal artifact wedged into a glob of ancient basalt. There it was, now, that artifact, freed of its rocky overburden. How it gleamed! It looked as if it had been crafted just yesterday. And yet a billion and a half years had passed since the world on which it had been fashioned had blown apart. That was what our preliminary rubidium-strontium and potassium-argon tests of the asteroid rubble appeared to indicate, anyway. And there the artifact was, alive and well after all that time, briskly sending little messages of good cheer to the poor lame-brained computers of the world on which it found itself.
What now? Had we opened one Pandora’s box too many?
HAVE NO FEAR, HUMAN BEINGS. I WILL DO NO HARM TO YOU.
Oh, how I wanted to believe that! And basically I did. I have never in any way been one of those who sees machines as innately malevolent. Machines are tools; tools are useful; so long as they are properly used by those who understand them, so long as appropriate precautions are observed, they pose no threat.