Not bad. Not bad at all. Like he’d said, they certainly weren’t compulsory as far as most humans went, but Janet doubted she could have done any better. “And what is your Zeroth Law?” she asked.
“That is much more difficult to state in words, but a close approximation would be that any action should serve the greatest number of humans possible.” Adam nodded toward Lucius. “Lucius has taken the Law a step farther than Eve or I, and we believe it was that step which led him to do what he did to Dr. Avery. He believes that the value of the humans in question should also be considered. “
Eve. She’d guessed right. “And you don’t?”
Adam raised his arms with the palms of his hands up. It took Janet a moment to recognize it as a shrug, since she’d never seen a robot use the gesture before. Adam said, “I am…uncomfortable with the subjectivity of the process. I had hoped to find a more definite operating principle.”
“But Lucius is satisfied with it.”
“That seems to be the case. “
“Why do you suppose he is and you aren’t?”
“Because,” Adam said, again hesitating. “Because he believes himself to be human.”
If the robot were hoping to shock her with that revelation, he was going to be disappointed. Janet had expected something like this would happen from the start; indeed, in a way it was the whole point of the experiment. She waited patiently for the question she knew was coming.
Adam didn’t disappoint her. He looked straight into her eyes with his own metallic ones and said, “Each of us has struggled with this question since we awakened, but none of us have been able to answer it to our mutual satisfaction. You created us, though. Please tell us: are we human?”
Janet used the same palms-up gesture Adam had used. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
Adam knew the sudden surge of conflicting potentials for what it was: frustration. He had experienced enough of it in his short life to recognize it when it happened. This time the frustration came from believing his search for truth was over and suddenly finding that it wasn’t.
He felt a brief Second Law urge to answer her question with a simple declarative statement, but he shunted that aside easily. She obviously wanted more than that, and so did he. She wanted to see the reasoning behind his position; he wanted to see if that reasoning would withstand her scrutiny.
He opened a comlink channel to Eve and explained the situation to her. Together they tried to establish a link with Lucius, but evidently the five volts Derec was supplying him hadn’t been enough to wake him. They would have to do without his input. Adam wasn’t all that disappointed; Lucius’s reasoning had led him to violate the First Law.
Janet was waiting for Adam’s response. Carefully, consulting with Eve at every turn, he began to outline the logic that had led them to their conclusion that any intelligent organic being had to be considered human. He began with his own awakening on Tau Puppis IV and proceeded through the incident with the Ceremyons, through Lucius’s experiments in creating human beings in Robot City, through the robots’ return to Tau Puppis and their dealings with the Kin, to their final encounter with Aranimas. He explained how each encounter with an alien being reinforced the robots, belief that body shape made no difference in the essential humanity of the mind inside it, and how those same contacts had even made differences in intelligence and technological advancement seem of questionable importance.
Throughout his presentation, Adam tried to judge Janet’s reaction to it by her facial expression, but she was giving nothing away. She merely nodded on occasion and said, “I’m with you so far.”
At last he reached the concept of Vitalism, the belief that organic beings were somehow inherently superior to electromechanical ones, and how the robots could find no proof of its validity. He ended with, “That lack of proof led Lucius to conclude that Vitalism is false, and that robots could therefore be considered human. Neither Eve nor I-nor Mandelbrot, for that matter-were able to convince ourselves of this, and now that Lucius ‘ s belief has led him into injuring a human, we feel even less comfortable with it. We don’t know what to believe.”
Adam waited for her response. Surely she would answer him now, after he had laid out the logic for her so meticulously.
His frustration level rose to a new height, however, when she merely smiled an enigmatic smile and said, “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
Derec felt just as frustrated as Adam. He had hoped that finding his mother would knock loose some memories from his amnesic brain, but so far nothing had come of the encounter except a vague sense of familiarity that could be easily attributed to her similarity to Avery.
She seemed just like him in many ways. He was a competent roboticist, and so was she. Avery never divulged information to anyone if he could help it, and evidently neither did she. Avery was always testing someone, and here she stood, leading poor Adam on when it was obvious she didn’t know the answer to his question either.
He glanced up at the monitor, checking to see if the signal was any clearer. While Janet and Adam had been talking, he had been trying to trace another unfamiliar potential pattern in Lucius’s brain, this one an indistinct yellow glow surrounding an entire level of activity, but the monitor’s trace circuitry couldn’t isolate the thought it represented. Whatever it was, it fit none of the standard robotic thought patterns.
He heard Janet say, “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” and took that as his cue. “Adam, maybe you can help me figure this out. What’s that pattern represent?”
Adam looked up to the monitor. “I do not recognize it,” he said.
“Can you copy it and tell me what it does?”
“I do not wish to contaminate my mind with Lucius’s thought patterns.”
“Put it in temporary storage, then.”
Adam looked as if he would protest further, but either the Second Law of Robotics or his belief that Derec would follow the Third Law of Humanics made him obey instead. He fixed his gaze on the monitor for a moment, then looked away, toward the wall.
Derec wondered what was so interesting all of a sudden about the wall. Adam didn’t seem inclined to clue him in, either; he merely stood there, hands clenching and unclenching.
Then Derec realized what was behind the wall. Just on the other side was the hospital where Avery was still undergoing surgery.
“Erase that pattern,” he commanded, and Adam relaxed. “What was it?”
Adam turned to face Derec and Janet again. “It was a potential like those I have come to associate with emotions,” he said. “However, I have not felt this one before. It was an unspecified negative bias on all thoughts concerning Dr. Avery.”
Derec glanced over at Janet, saw that she wore an expression of triumph.
Adam saw it, too. “How can you approve?” he asked. “I have never felt this emotion, but I know what it had to be. Lucius was angry. Considering the degree of bias and the ultimate influence it had upon his actions, I would say he was furious. “
“What’s one thing a human can do that a robot can’t?” Janet asked in return.
“You wish me to say, ‘feel emotion,’ “ said Adam, “but that is incorrect. Every robot experiences a degree of potential bias on various subjects. If you wish to call it emotion, you may, but it is merely the result of experience strengthening certain positronic pathways in the brain at the expense of others.”
“And everything you know comes from experience, doesn’t it?”
“Nearly everything, yes.”
“So?”
Derec could see where her argument was leading. “A tabula rasa!” he exclaimed. He saw instant comprehension written in Janet’s smile, but Adam remained unmoved. Derec said, “ ‘ Tabula rasa ’ means ‘blank slate.’ “ It’s a metaphor for the way the human mind supposedly starts out before experience begins carving a personality into it. That’s one side of the Nature-versus-Nurture argument for the development of consciousness. Dad told me about that just a couple weeks ago, but he was talking about erasing the city Central on the Kin’s planet, and I didn’t make the connection.” He looked back at his mother. “That’s what you were trying to prove with Adam and Eve and Lucius, wasn’t it? You were trying to prove that the tabula rasa argument is valid. “