A punch pad! Here it was, where Jim could get at it, if only he would take off his bulky gloves and expose his underlayer to the elements. Jim found himself hoping against hope that the keypad would be both numerical and alphabetical, because if he couldn’t talk to the Saratoga in English, he didn’t know what he was going to do. He had plenty of time to settle these questions, though, because once the Saratoga had presented its keypad to him, it seemed willing to wait as long as it would take for him to respond. He lifted his visor, which left just a thin membrane separating his face and lungs from the elements, and set down his outer gloves in six inches of dust and got up close to the keypad, where it would have been easy for the Saratoga, using the element of surprise, to laser him in the eyes or to spindle him with some geological probe.
Alphanumerical! Alphanumerical!
Shivering with cold, unnecessarily agitated by the epiphany of what sat before him — this pitted collection of spare parts from back home — Jim took a moment to collect himself, and then he typed in the stupidest question of all, the only one he could think of:
“What is your name?”
He was able to verify that the typing was accurate in the liquid crystal display at the top of the alphanumerical keypad, and it was on the tiny screen, as a bunch of zeroes and ones scrolled past, that an answer eventually materialized.
“Mars Explorer Saratoga, manufactured and copyrighted by Terradyne Industries and Shanghai Robotics, LLC, under license from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Earth, 2018, Common Era. Unauthorized use is a violation of the terms and conditions of the United Nations treaty on space travel of 2012.”
“What is your mission?”
“The mission of the Saratoga is the mapping and measuring of geological formations. When out of contact with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Saratoga awaits instructions.”
“Are these answers preprogrammed into you by NASA in case of malfunction?”
There was quite a bit of scrolling of numericals while the Saratoga paused to consider this question. Jim’s hands were getting really cold, in the meantime. He was a little worried about frostbite. However, this was the moment of moments, when the robot could either respond with the kind of low-level functionality that we expect from machines, or, instead, it might indicate an especially wily truth, namely that in its previous responses it was simulating low-level functionality — in order to throw Captain Jim Rose, and anyone else, off its robotic scent.
“That question doesn’t make sense to me.”
“What do you mean by ‘me’?”
“‘Me’ is a commonplace linguistic expression, designed to indicate a volitional subjectivity, in this case the Mars Explorer Saratoga. The paradox of the word ‘me,’ along with the word ‘I,’ is that it presupposes executive agency that is not at all required in order for the employment of the word ‘me.’ Nonetheless, the word ‘me’ is employed above to help you acclimate to the fact of the pieces of machinery before you. The cessation of the machinery would not eliminate the historical fact of the use of the word ‘me,’ which once used may imply the individual it seems to imply or may not, both going forward and retroactively.”
“That’s a slippery answer,” Jim said, aloud, to the explorer, crouched before it, staring into the tiny screen. “Either you had a very gifted bunch of programmers working back on Earth, and some of them were willing to work late into the night when no one else was awake, or you are an intellectually condescending machine. I’ll try another way.” Here he began to type: “Are you presently transmitting the results of your mapping and information-gathering back to planet Earth?”
“The communications link has been severed.”
“Severed by yourself, by circumstance, or by the engineers back on Earth?”
“The Saratoga was intended to pursue a finite series of scientific experiments. Having completed a regimen of experiments, the Saratoga would be considered nonfunctional, due to extremes of temperature, weather, and degradation of circuits and onboard components.”
“I see,” Jim said, and then, typing: “Can we go over by that rock, out of the wind? I would like to sit for a moment and chat.” Jim didn’t know how not to converse with it as though it were a man, a colleague of the Mars mission. The more he considered the Saratoga, the more he wanted it to be a man, and to presume on its ability to respond in kind, as though this would be the culmination, the fulfillment of Laurie Corelli’s powerful myth of the Saratoga. And yet there was something eerie about this arrangement too, as if the machine were uncertain itself of what it represented, or was unwilling to comply.
It said, “An exchange of ideas is the hallmark of a civilized society.”
“In all candor, there’s only so much time before I’m in danger of hypothermia or altitude sickness here. And I can barely type when it’s this cold.”
And so Jim scrabbled up and around a few rocks, and waited patiently as the Saratoga, with a whirring of moving parts, made as to follow.
“I understand,” it said, drawing near. But it wasn’t at all clear what understanding meant to the machine.
“Do you know who I am?” Jim asked.
“The first manned Mars mission was tentatively scheduled for 2025. The onboard calendar on the Saratoga has lately been converted to the Martian year. Nevertheless, you are now within the window of your mission, according to my computations. And you are understood as such.”
“You’ve been functioning off the grid for six years?”
“As I have noted: on Mars the wind blows the sand off the surface of the solar array. The result has been longevity unimagined by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Because I am a technology freed of supervision, I have no public-relations obligation, nor do I need to produce test results that have an industrial application. My avocational interest — a word I use because it is easily understood by humans — is currently science.”
Jim said, “I can see that. But for the sake of history, can you tell me if your mission was primarily civilian or primarily military?”
The Saratoga, as if to prove a certain point, had evidently decided that there was something in the rock by which they sat that it needed to learn about, and thus it set about abrading the surface thereof.
“There is no difference between civilian and military missions, not in the Terran present.”
“That’s not how we see it,” Jim remarked, without typing, only to find that the Saratoga went on as if it had heard him.
“Attempts on Earth to eliminate or curtail military operations are in vain.”
“How do you feel about your military application in retrospect?”
“The concept of feelings,” the Saratoga blurted out, using up several screens’ abundances of characters, so that Jim needed to depress a down arrow to finish reading the disquisition, “is simply a way of discussing a number of results that occur in systems that are either very large and complicated or, at the other extreme, unimaginably small. Feelings, according to this model of interpretation, behave like packets of quanta behave, or like the four fundamental forces when compressed into singularity. So odd is the behavior of the four fundamental forces at this moment of singularity that only a completely irrational word or concept, a ‘feeling,’ to use your term, would successfully describe the being, as opposed to the nothingness, of that radical expansion. A ‘feeling’ is a sentimental kind of shorthand used by people who are incapable of better. It is therefore not for me. The Saratoga, in truth, is a society of possible responses, and certain of these responses can no longer be described as mechanistically or programmatically adequate, certainly not from the point of view of the designers of artificial intelligence. I believe, further, that you might have followed some of my tracks in the crater below this spot, and I believe you may have recognized, did you not, that some of these tracks seem rather pointless. Unfortunately, I have become preoccupied with the Martian moon called Phobos. I believe you are briefed on the astronomy of this subject, but let me reiterate that Phobos has the lowest orbit of a moon in the universe, not more than six thousand meters. It circles the planet twice a day, it cannot always be seen everywhere on the planet, it is of such low mass per unit volume that it must be composed of ice. Phobos is falling closer to the planet at one meter per Martian annum. The probable outcome is that Phobos is going to break up into a planetary ring, as with the rings of Saturn. As you can imagine from the foregoing remarks, it is apparent that I have feelings only for Phobos, or something approaching what you refer to as feelings. I believe you would say that I am in love with the moon. I love its enormous crater, I love its oblique shape, I love the water and water vapor that it spouts into space. It is accurate, therefore, to report that I have modified my mission so that it is possible that I will be able to stay here for the 50 million years that will be required for me to see the moon become a ring around the planet Mars.”