Four million connections, Laura thought. Four million associations learned from their prior life. "The robot that you completely decharged… it was a she before, right?" Griffith nodded again.
"And what is it now?"
He hesitated, moistening his mouth before he spoke. "A she," he replied. "But look, we rig it so the odds of a robot coming up a given gender are roughly fifty-fifty. Plus, like I said, giving them a gender is just a little game we play. It has no scientific significance."
"And the two robots you didn't decharge — Hightop and Auguste — how many connections did they retain from before their reprogramming?"
Griffith frowned. "Maybe… sixty-four trillion, a hundred and twenty-eight trillion, something in that order."
"And you call that reprogramming?"
"Laura, that's only a small fraction of their nets' connections."
"But they remember!" Laura said, incredulous that such an obvious fact had been overlooked. "Maybe it's like a dream to them, or they don't know why they react the way they do to a given situation, or they think they've been somewhere they've never been before. Have you ever taken Hightop back to where he was trapped in those rocks for hours and hours?" Griffith shook his head slowly, staring at Auguste in his cage. "I bet you anything that Hightop would have a powerful reaction to seeing that place, even if he doesn't know why. They remember, Dr. Griffith, and that means they remember what you did to them. Hightop was reprogrammed after an accident, but Auguste was reprogrammed in that chair execution-style, and he fought it. Was he at all violent before the reprogramming, or was he just a slow learner?"
The visibly upset man drew a deep breath. "Auguste wasn't violent before."
Laura lowered her voice. "But now he's your prime suspect, isn't he?"
Griffith quickly looked up at her. He knew about the murder in the jungle. "I'd like to go visit Auguste, please," Laura said.
After a moment's hesitation, Griffith nodded and motioned for her to follow. The French soldier trailed them with his finger on the trigger of the machine pistol.
"He's in here," Griffith said as he stooped to peer into the dark hole of the retinal identifier. They had walked a long way down the corridors of Griffith's underground ghost town. The Model Eight facilities were enormous, and their vast size made the absence of people even more conspicuous. The high ceilings and doorways made it clear the place was designed for beings much larger than humans.
She felt like a visitor there — an alien.
The lock on the door in front of Griffith clicked open. The soldier raised his ugly black weapon and went in first. Griffith followed. Laura entered last.
The giant robot sat idle on the floor in the far corner of the room.
Its pose was strikingly human, and Laura couldn't tell whether she was more amazed at just how like a human the robot appeared, or at its size. The soldier kept his gun raised and leveled on the robot.
"You don't have to do that," Griffith said, waving his hand at the tense man, motioning for him to lower his gun. The soldier paid no attention. He never took his eyes or his gun off the robot.
Griffith frowned comically at Laura in mockery of the man's paranoia. He then walked over to the robot — his and the seated robot's heads on roughly the same level. "Auguste! How are you?"
It was only then that the Model Eight looked up. Laura knew that it must have sensed them enter, but it hadn't bothered to turn their way.
She stared at the robot and walked up behind Griffith.
"Auguste," she whispered to the man, looking at the robot's pose — at his head on his fist and his elbow on his knee. "Auguste Rodin, the sculptor?"
"He always sat like that — with his hand on his chin. I don't know who first noticed the similarities to the sculpture — to The Thinker." Griffith leaned over to get closer to the robot. "How are you?" he said, smiling. "Are you ready to get up?" He motioned up, up, with his hand, and like a circus elephant the robot labored to his feet.
The soldier backed away, keeping his gun raised. It was clear who he thought the enemy was.
The robot stood impassively before Griffith — towering over him. "Come on and get a closer look," Griffith said, motioning her toward the ten-foot-tall machine. She took a step, looking the massive robot up and down — as frightened of their notorious clumsiness as of their uncertain potential for violence. Auguste, however, seemed to have no problem with his balance. "Come on," Griffith said, waving her even closer. Griffith stood half turned away from the robot, and in her mind's eye she imagined the caged robot seizing its unsuspecting captor from behind. But the robot just stood there… still.
"That's all right. I can see him fine from here."
"Don't you want to touch him?" Griffith asked, reaching out without looking and resting his hand on the robot's stomach. The robot glanced down for an instant, but then his head rose to stare blankly across the room at the bare wall. "They've got pressure-sensitive membranes covering most of their bodies." He pushed with his fingertips against the machine's flat gray abdomen. "It gives them a sense of touch, but if they had body temperature it would feel almost like they've got skin. Come over here and check it out."
She shook her head. "That's okay. We can go now."
Griffith ignored her, kneeling down. He pulled back the black stockings covering the robot's large feet and extracted a ballpoint pen from his pocket. "He had a bit of mud right here." He was totally exposed in that position. All the robot would have to do would be to reach down and… Griffith held his glasses tilted at an angle. "All gone now," he said as he looked at a crevice in the metal panels along the robot's shin. "But like I told Mr. Gray, I don't think it was from any recent trips out. Must've been…" — he grunted as he rose to his feet, joints popping—"missed on our last detailing after a session out in the yard."
Griffith turned back to the Model Eight. "Bye-bye, Auguste," he said, waving. As soon as he turned to leave, the robot sank to the floor in the corner. The white concrete was cold and bare. The robots lived like animals in some cruel, primitive zoo of yesteryear. Modern zoos went to great lengths to re-create the natural habitats of their animals. But robots… they had no natural habitat. At least not yet.
But they clearly want out of this cave, Laura thought. To roam around outdoors — free. Laura watched the robot return to his contemplative pose, his chin resting heavily on his fist.
When Griffith joined her, she said, "Is he still resting or whatever — vegging?"
"Oh, no," Griffith said. "They've synchronized their pattern with our day and night. They're active during the manned shifts, and then they spend most of the third…" He twisted to look back over his shoulder and fell silent. He hadn't realized the robot had sunk to his place in the corner. "That's odd," Griffith said and he returned to Auguste. He pulled a small screwdriver from his breast pocket and pried open a panel on the robot's thigh. Griffith squinted and again tilted his glasses to read a glowing blue screen just above a large, three-pronged socket. "Hmmph!" he said, closing the panel with a click and standing upright. "Charge is good." He looked at the lethargic robot with a puzzled expression on his face. "I don't know what it could be."
"Maybe he doesn't like captivity," Laura suggested.
"What do you mean, 'captivity'?"
"I mean being locked up in here. In this room."
"He's not locked up," Griffith said. "He's free to go wherever he wants in these facilities."
"But there was a lock on the door. You had to use the retinal identifier."