"Here he comes," the technician seated behind them said.
Laura spun to look at the open corridors, which were being guarded by the French soldier.
"Down there," Griffith said, tapping Laura's shoulder and pointing down at the room below.
The Model Eight walked slowly through a tall door, which closed automatically behind it. The robot was enormous — much larger than Laura had expected. It headed straight for a large, open bin and extracted a shredded yellow piece of rubber by its handle.
"Ah," Griffith said. "I see it's 1.3.07." The robot slung the frayed strands through the air. The whir and slap of the pieces could be heard through a small speaker over the window. "I can always tell," Griffith explained. "This one likes that rubber ball, or what used to be a ball. He always goes to it first."
The Model Eight let the yellow shreds drop to the floor, and it headed next for the overflowing toy chest. "He can't really remember why he liked that rubber ball so much. His play time with it is falling off rapidly now that it has been destroyed. It's no longer as interesting as it used to be, and his mini-net's connections that led to a reward when he played with it are weakening."
"Do you realize, Dr. Griffith, that you refer to the Model Eight as a 'he'?"
"Not all Model Eights," he said. "Some are quite definitely 'she.' That's one of the more amusing distractions among my team, figuring out whether each new Eight is a boy or a girl." He looked over at her with a mischievous grin. "It's obviously not as easy as checking the hardware, you understand."
"What do you mean a boy or a girl?"
"I hope you don't find us to be terribly sexist, Dr. Aldridge, because it's really just intended for our amusement. We need a diversion because we spend so much time observing the Eights' behavior, especially now that Mr. Gray instituted a big-brother program."
The Model Eight below broke a long plastic truck into two pieces.
The look on Griffith's face was like the amusement of a parent watching the boisterous, if slightly destructive, play of an active toddler.
The robot held the broken truck high over its head, pausing, Laura thought, to consider its next move. It then smashed it to pieces against the opposite wall and moved on.
"We base our informal gender designations on traditional, stereotypical human behavioral patterns. Some, like Bouncy down there, are very much into exploration of large-scale mechanical forces. Throwing things, moving as big an object as their strength and agility allows, et cetera. We call them boys. The girls tend to come into the tactile rooms and actually sit down. They'll find something like a quilt with a complicated print on it and patiently study it for hours."
Griffith looked over at her to confirm, Laura supposed, that she wasn't offended. Apparently satisfied, he continued. "The physical result to both boys' and girls' toys is usually the same. They're utterly destroyed during the learning process. But the behavioral patterns are quite distinctive, and they're generally consistent right from the first Power-up. Not that there's any scientific significance to the distinction, of course, but it does make for a lively office pool. Sometimes it takes several months of argument. Most of the time, however, we can develop a consensus after two or three trips out of the chair."
"What's the 'chair?'"
Griffith led Laura to the center window. The initial impression she got was of something sinister. The room was bathed in low, red light, and in the center was an enormous metal armchair. A rounded hood was mounted on the top, and from the inside protruded a variety of needle-like projections pointed downward. The entire scene reminded Laura uncomfortably of a torture chamber.
"The chair is a combination simulator and recharging station. For the first month or so after they leave the line, the Model Eights spend most of their days plugged into the computer by means of that interface you see at the top. When they arrive here from the assembly building, they're just inert lumps of metal on a gurney. After the first twenty-four hours in the chair, they can move their limbs about and sit up. It takes a long time before balance can be programmed, and even longer to get them to take that first step."
"And the computer runs them through simulations while they're plugged in down there?"
Griffith nodded. "It'll fire through trillions of simulations before they're done."
Laura looked down at the room and its sinister chair. There were brackets on the chair's arms and legs, and several large metal straps protruded at chest and waist level. "Why the restraints?"
"Oh, the simulations are quite real to the robots. Are you familiar with the virtual-reality workstations Mr. Gray has on the island?" Laura nodded. "Well, imagine how real the computer's representation of the world would seem to a robot when it was fed directly via cable to its neural net. It's bound to be as real to the robots as… well, reality is to us. Anyway," he chuckled, "it's quite comical sometimes. Have you ever seen a dog sleep? How they'll sometimes kick their legs chasing rabbits in their dreams? The same thing happens to the Model Eights. Some go nuts. They broke quite a few restraints until we went to titanium. The bolts holding the chair to the floor are sunk twenty feet into the base rock under the simulation room. I'd love to know just what's running through their nets when they react the way they do."
"You mean you don't know what simulations the computer is running them through?" Laura asked.
"Not a [unclear]," he said, shaking his head with no apparent concern. "Like I said, it runs through trillions in any given course. And it varies them constantly both to improve and to add some diversity to the skill sets. Some of the courses are distinctly better than others, but all the Model Eights' hardware is absolutely identical, I've got to hand it to Mr. Gray. He did such a fine job on the design that we literally haven't made one single change to the prototype, and we've got forty-eight off the line so far. Now that's an astonishing technical feat."
"You mean to say that Mr. Gray designed the hardware; I thought you were the head of robotics."
"I am, but 'robotics' in this organization means programming. Like I said, the differences in software-driven performance are remarkable. Hightop, for instance, is head and shoulders above the rest in every category. He sends his regards, by the way." Laura nodded, uncertain how to respond. "But some of the others have been so hopelessly irredeemable that we had to reprogram them."
"You mean, just pull the plug and start from scratch?"
"Good heavens, no! Each one of those Model Eights represents probably a billion dollars of hardware, but maybe ten times that much in 'soft' costs. If you consider the cost of construction and operation of this facility and, more significantly, the computer time to run it, then those things would be worth around twelve billion dollars each. With those kinds of costs, we don't make the decision to reprogram lightly, and we certainly don't decharge them and 'start from scratch.' The reprogramming course is only two weeks and involves just patching what the computer thinks the defective functions are. They're almost always higher-order things like 'goals' and 'plans.' That way, we salvage literally billions of dollars' worth of computer time."
"Why is this chair empty?" Laura asked. "If it costs so much, I'd think you'd keep this place humming."
"Mr. Gray halted all new programming," he replied. "We had two students in the course, but they're both kept in bays now — charged but inactive."
"When did he suspend the programming?"
"Last night right after the town meeting," Griffith said, now shaking his head and frowning. "It's bullshit," he mumbled. "That little boy didn't know what he was talking about." He stepped up close to Laura and looked around to make sure they were out of earshot. "The boy who said he saw a robot out of his window, you know?" Laura nodded. "He didn't see a Model Eight." Griffith shook his head again. "No way."