“You have come to this place,” Euler said loudly, “to help us in our search for correctness, for perfection, for completeness. We are the keys-human and robot-to the synergy of spirit. Synnoetics is our goal. I will introduce the rest of us and we will begin.”
“Synnoetics?” Katherine whispered.
“Man and machine,” Derec replied, “the whole greater than the sum of the parts.”
“It is religious!” she rasped. “And how did you know that?”
Derec shrugged. “This all feels so… comfortable to me.”
“You know Rydberg,” Euler said, “and Avernus and Arion.” The robots nodded as their names were called. “The rest of us… Waldeyer… ”
“Good day,” said a squat, roundish robot with wheels.
“Dante… ”
“I welcome you,” Dante said, his telescopic eyes sticking out several inches from his dome.
“And Wohler.”
A magnificent golden machine bowed formally without removing his pincers from his neighbors’. “We are honored,” Wohler said.
“We will answer what questions we can from you,” Euler said, “and hope that you will do the same.”
“If, as you say,” Derec told them, “we are all looking for truth and perfection, then our meeting will be fruitful. I would like to begin by asking you why there are certain areas of life here that you will not discuss with us.”
Rydberg spoke. “We are in a standby security mode that renders certain information classified by our programming.”
“Did our arrival prompt the institution of the security mode?” Katherine asked.
“No,” Euler said. “It was in effect when you arrived. If, in fact, you arrived when you said you did. We must ask you again how you came to be here.”
Derec decided to try a little truth. It couldn’t hurt as long as no mention was made of the Key. Perhaps a dose of the truth might get them to open up about the Key’s existence. “We materialized out of thin air atop this very building.”
“And where were you before that?” Wohler, the gold one, asked.
Derec walked slowly around the circle, studying his questioners. “A Spacer way station named Rockliffe near Nexon, right on the edge of the Settlement Worlds quarantine zone.”
Arion, the mannequin, asked, “What means, then, did you use to get from one place to the other?”
“No means,” Derec said. “We were simply transported here.”
There was silence for a moment. “This does not coordinate with any information extant in memory,” Avernus said, his large dome following Derec’s progress around the circle.”
You’ve found no ship that could have brought us,” Derec said, “and I’m sure you’ve searched.”
“That is correct,” Euler said, “and our radar picked up no activity that could have been construed to be a vessel in our atmosphere.”
“I can’t explain it beyond that,” Derec said. “Now, you answer a question for me. Where did you come from?”
“Who are you addressing?” Euler asked.
“All of you,” Derec said.
Avernus answered. “All of them except for me were constructed here, on Robot City,” he said. “I was… awakened here, but believe I was constructed elsewhere.”
“Where?”
“I do not know,” the large robot replied. “My first i/o memories are of this place. Nothing in my pre-programming suggested anything of an origin.”
“Are you trying to say,” Katherine broke in, “that all of you know nothing but the company of other robots? That your entire existence is here?”
“Correct,” Rydberg said. “Our master programming is well aware of human beings and their societies, but no formal relationship exists between our species.”
“Then how did you come to build this place?” Derec asked. “How then, did it become important to you to make a world for humans?”
“We are incomplete without human beings,” Waldeyer said, his squat dome swiveling to Derec and then Katherine. “The very laws that govern our existence revolve around human interaction. We exist to serve independent thought, the higher realms of creativity that we are incapable of alone. We discovered this very quickly, without being told. Alone, we simply exist to no end, no purpose. Even artificial intelligence must have a reason to utilize itself. This world is the first utilization of that intelligence. We’ve been building it for humans, in order to make the perfect atmosphere in which human creativity can flourish to the greater completeness of us all. Without this world we are nothing. With it, we are vital contributing factors to the ongoing evolution of the universe.”
“Why would that matter to you?” Katherine asked.
“I have a theory about that,” Dante said, his elongated eyes glowing bright yellow. “We are the product, the child if you will, of higher realms of creative thought. It seems impossible that the drives of that creative thought wouldn’t permeate every aspect of our programming. We want for nothing. We desire nothing. Yet, the incompleteness of our inactivity makes us… feel, for lack of a better word, useless and extraneous. Given the total freedom of our own world, we were driven to function in service.”
Derec suddenly felt a terrible sadness well up in him for these unhappy creatures of man’s intelligence. “You’ve done all this, even though you never knew if any people would come here?”
“That is correct,” Euler said. “Then David came, and we thought that all would be right. Then came his death, then the calamities, then you… suspects to murder. We never meant for anything to be this way.”
“When you say calamities,” Derec said, “are you speaking of the problems with the storms?”
“Yes,” Rydberg said. “The rains threaten our civilization itself, and it’s all our own fault. We are breaking apart from the inside out, with nothing to be done about it.”
“I don’t understand,” Derec said.
“We don’t expect you to, nor can we tell you why it must be this way,” Euler said.
Derec thought about the hot air pumping through the reservoir. “Is the city’s rapid growth rate normal?” he asked.
“No,” Euler said. “It coincides with David’s death.”
“Is it because of David’s death?”
“We do not know the answer to that,” Euler said.
“Wait a moment,” Katherine said, walking away from the circle to sit on the floor, her back up against the north wall. “I want to talk to you about our connection with all this… and why Rydberg called this a preliminary trial.”
“You were the one who first mentioned the concept of trial,” the robot replied, leaning out of the circle to stare at her. “I only used that term to make you feel comfortable.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll play. You say this is a civilization of robots that have never had human interaction, yet obviously someone gave you your initial programming and ability to perform the work on this city.”
“Someone… yes,” Euler said.
“Someone who’s in charge,” she said.
“No,” Euler said. “We are now in group communication with our master programming unit, but it simply provides us with information from which logical decisions are made. Our overall philosophy is service; our means are logical. Other than that, our society has no direction.”
“Then why put us on trial at all?” she asked.
“Respect for human life is our First Law,” Rydberg said. “When we envisioned our perfect human/robot world, we saw a world in which all shared respect for the First Law. We envisioned a system of humanics that would guide human behavior, just as the Laws of Robotics guide our behavior, just as the Laws of Robotics guide our behavior. Of course, we have been working entirely from theory, but we have made a preliminary list of three laws that would provide the basis for an understanding of humans.”