A handsome, fine-boned man of mixed race piped up next. “Are you saying the nanorobots caused these people to act this way?”
“Impossible,” Alfred snapped. “I programmed those nanos myself. There’s absolutely nothing in them that could induce someone to act in any fashion.” He added emphatically, “Nothing!”
Remington released Susan. “Unless, Dr. Lanning, someone tampered with them.”
The room fell into an even deeper silence than before, if possible. Susan suddenly understood why Remington had wanted to keep her from talking. He suspected someone at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, perhaps someone in the room, was a saboteur.
Apparently, Lawrence Robertson made the same connection. He addressed Remington directly. “With the exception of you, young stranger, I trust every person in this room not only with my business, but with my life itself. Not one has worked with me fewer than fifteen years, and all of them have invested a life work into this company. As to you, Remy, I’m assuming you don’t have the knowledge to program nanorobots, and I know you haven’t had the opportunity.”
“No, sir.” Remington rolled his eyes at the bare thought. “But I do have reason to believe this tampering is occurring, and not necessarily at your facility.” He approached Lawrence Robertson with a hand in his pocket, pulled out the vial and seal, and placed them on the desk. “I compared the seals to the ones on the vials in your laboratory. They’re not the same.”
Alfred Lanning scooped it up before anyone else could take a closer look. “Where did you get this?”
“From one of the vials Susan injected into a patient.”
Susan appreciated he did not mention he had taken over for her on two occasions. It might make her appear incompetent.
The scientist tossed the objects back onto the desk. “He’s right. That seal is definitely more orange in color and not quite as thick as the ones we use.” He shrugged a single shoulder. “Someone is tampering with our work.” His eyes widened at the implications of his own words. “Someone sabotaged our nanorobots!”
A pallor seemed to overtake the room. Every face, the air in the room itself, seemed to grow white with strain. Susan watched them all carefully. She could read a lot from faces, from fidgeting, from words and movement. Everyone seemed genuinely shocked and dismayed. If a traitor stood among them, he was well trained at guarding his thoughts and emotions.
Lawrence Robertson took over immediately. “Javonte and George, start looking into whoever touches those vials once they leave the refrigerators: lower-level employees, delivery men, shipping companies. No one outside this room is above suspicion.”
The handsome black man and the gangly roboticist rushed to obey. “Alfred, get Goldman and Peters up on the secure speaker. Susan —” Apparently suddenly realizing he was commanding someone not in his employ, he softened his tone. “Based on what you’ve seen so far, and your knowledge of the study patients, what can we expect?”
Susan had focused so intently on her theory about the Three Laws, she had not taken her ideas on the matter much further. Now, she thought aloud. “Since the nanorobots don’t have the capacity to mull the Three Laws the way a full positronic brain does, we have to assume the patient’s ethical considerations play a role here, filling in what the nanorobots can’t.” The idea was so stunning, Susan had to stop herself. The protestor, the one who had tried to talk her out of helping with the project, had a point. If she was right, they had created an odd and primitive form of cyborg, robot function interacting seamlessly with human thought and emotion. Except we can hardly consider it seamless under the current circumstances.
No one spoke, not even Alfred Lanning, who looked as if he had just rushed headlong into a train.
Susan had to continue, resorting to an exterior stony coldness to explain something shocking the instant it came to her mind, yet make it appear as if she had given it her full attention for an appropriate period of time to make it a viable theory. “The way I figure it, someone programmed the nanorobots to overtake the brains of their human hosts, each programmed to blow up a different target. But whoever did the programming either didn’t know about, or didn’t understand the overwhelming significance of, the Three Laws of Robotics.”
To Susan’s surprise, the silence persisted. Every man in the room kept staring directly at her, their expressions anticipatory, to a man. She wondered what more they expected. She felt as if she had thrown out more than enough ideas to contemplate for hours.
Remington gave her hand another squeeze, this one less insistent, more encouraging. “Susan, in your psychiatric opinion, will the Three Laws of Robotics hold? Can we be certain the other patients will also follow them when performing their . . . um . . . their, um . . . ?”
Susan did not wait for Remington to find the right word to describe the programmed missions of the saboteurs. Susan opened her mouth to answer, but the words did not come. She had no precedent on which to base her answer. She needed to think. “At this point, shouldn’t we call the police with our suspicions? We need to prevent anything else terrible from happening.”
Finally, murmurs swept the room, punctuated by Lawrence Robertson’s loud sigh. He rose from his chair, walked around his desk, and came to Susan’s side. He glanced at John Calvin before turning his attention fully to the daughter. “Susan, I’m not sure if I can explain this properly, but it’s important I try.” Again, he looked at John, as if trying to elicit help. “We can’t go to the police.”
Susan made no objections, wanting to hear him out first, but Lawrence raised a hand as if she had.
“Other than that, we will do everything in our power to prevent ‘anything else terrible from happening.’ ”
Susan suppressed a horrific urge to laugh in his face. Other than call the police? What else is there?
Not entirely ignorant of her thoughts, Lawrence answered the unspoken question. “I know that sounds absurd, but it’s true. If word gets out to the general public that the people causing these explosions had nanorobots injected into their brains, it would mean the end of U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men.”
The words seemed irresponsible; yet Susan understood more from his eyes than from his explanation. The company was the life work of Lawrence Robertson, of Alfred Lanning, of John Calvin, of most of the men in this very room.
Lawrence leaned in closer. “Susan, you’ve met N8-C, right?”
Susan could not help smiling at the memory. “Nate, yes. Many times. He’s absolutely amazing, brilliant.”
“Yes.” Lawrence glanced around the room, where so many men seemed to be holding their breath simultaneously. “And, if the population at large gets wind of this, Nate will be erased, along with all the other prototypes and working robots. Their positronic brains will be wiped out, the technology outlawed, robotics set back for at least another generation.” His eyes grew moist; the thought was clear agony.
Susan bit her lips. She no longer thought of Nate as a robot, but as a living individual. The idea of allowing anyone to destroy him seemed as intolerable as killing her own father. “We don’t know that will happen.”
She was distracted by shaking heads all around the room, but managed to continue. “We could explain the truth. Give people some credit; they’d understand.”
The combined force of those shaking heads stole Susan’s concentration completely, especially when she realized her father’s and Remington’s were now among them. She considered all the things she knew, what Nate had told her about how few of the hospital staff felt comfortable using him, how many of the patients refused his assistance once they knew, how protestors demanded his immediate removal. “But we’re talking about sabotage and spies. About homicide bombings, for Christ’s sake. People have died, will die. Next time, it could be hundreds, thousands.”