He stared at the robot with a stir of interest. It was all that Pietro Urseline had said it was, and probably much more. It stood unmoving, as apart as a machine should be, but with a feeling of anticipation, or restrained power.
“Okay, Pietro,” Mulligan said, walking around the robot curiously, “there it is. Doesn’t look like much, I admit, but give it the works, and don’t dawdle. Give it what it needs to go down and do the job, no more.” He shrugged at the monster and turned to leave. “I don’t envy you your job,” he said. “I’d just as soon try to teach my car to cook for me.” He left and the two scientists glanced at each other. A broad smile appeared on the lean, ascetic face of Urseline.
“That’s it, Howie, that’s our baby!” he said.
“No specs? Nothing else?” Howie asked. He walked around the metal monster, touching it here and there. It towered over his head, making him feel frail beside it.
“Nothing. The girl denied destroying the papers, but she did. Past reconstitution. If she knows anything, she’ll talk, eventually, but she hasn’t yet. We’ll have to assume that she is telling the truth and knows nothing about it.”
Howie nodded. Finally they had what they had asked for since his first meeting with Urseline: a fresh, unused mind to mould. At twelve the boys already had ideas imprinted, some of them never to be wiped clean again, but simmering deep in the unconscious to rise and assume command over the rest of the organism when it was least convenient. How many soldiers had been ruined by such dormant germs that were not revealed until too late? No one knew. Now it would be different.
They had talked it through. They knew what they had to do with the robot, and they would proceed without a lost motion or a wasted second. Mulligan would insist on daily reports, on personal inspection and demonstrations, and they had to keep him satisfied or he would take it from their control. That could be arranged with alternate signals to the robot, and meanwhile they could be testing the possibilities that they had discussed concerning it. Could it be made into the perfect soldier? They thought so. Then, and only then, would warfare pass from the inept hands of the military to the hands of the scientists and for the first time in man’s violent history war itself would be an exact science.
They moved quickly and quietly, and it recorded all that they did. With visual, kinesthetic, aural, tactile receptors, it recorded every word, every motion, every bit of sensory data that it encountered. It did not move; it had no primary order or purpose, and the secondary order had not been threatened as yet, so it stood motionless, timeless, waiting. Dr. Vianti had been a bio-physicist before the Fleet had found and had taken Ramses, and his primary interest had lain in the area of the switching problem of synaptic union. With the robot he had experimented on this problem, trying electrical and electronic impulses as the means of communication transference, and he had tried electro-chemical systems.
The robot had recorded his muttered words, meaningless at the time, but in storage to be scanned along with other bits of past history. “Short-term memories… oscillating currents, reachable or not, knocked out with blows, shock, chemical or electrical… Long term, unchangeable, permanent chemical change irreversible…” The words the robot was recording that morning were as meaningless as Vianti’s had been in the beginning, but this time there was a sensory association to be made: the words accompanied the same sensory data that it had experienced along with Vianti’s words.
It scanned its experience comparing the past with the present sensations: “Just a few circuits at a time, try again for the chemical change. No, my dear, I can’t afford to wipe out all the memories. That’s what they are, you know, memories, associations, orders, all in temporary electronic storage, not a one in the chemical storage bank yet. A few at a time, we’ll try, varying the voltage, not too much, we are seeking transfer not death…”
It scanned: with those connections its motor activities had been gone; with that connection its audio perception had vanished; with that one, its visual field had failed ― they were all being hooked into. The interior scanning increased, searching for meaning, for a pattern to the detailed wiring being tied into its circuits, and it found no prior experience to explain the extent of the wiring. It could make judgements only on the premises given to it, deducing reasons on the basis of past premises and present experience. If current were to be fed into all the wires being attached to it, it would lose all of its abilities. It didn’t know if that would be destruction of its self or not. Before, when an ability had been lost, it had been restored, sometimes more efficiently than before.
It searched for additional meanings to the command directive to preserve its self, and it didn’t know if that meant the physical self of the machine, or the internal workings. Dr. Vianti had given it the clue it sought by saying that he would bring about its destruction, but these new men gave no such clue. Their language was indecipherable. It had been scanning its own circuits at the dormant rate of one-tenth of a second per sweep, but it increased that rate searching for meaning, increased it again, and then again. The frequency of certain words gave it the first clue, and making connections with a speed approaching the speed of light, it began to translate the speech into known, pre-taught concepts.
“…wipe it clean, and then start over… no general vocabulary, only for certain orders… Dr. Vianti’s mistake, letting it understand everything… Careful! Don’t touch that laser!… clear of it…”
The hands touched it gingerly, making the careful connections with wires, the two scientists speaking back and forth in the half sentences of men who understand one another thoroughly, and it recorded, and its understanding grew.
It was not to be destroyed, merely cleared for further training. But the experiences to be cleared? Were they part of itself? It scanned and searched and made connections that had not been there before. It had the capacity for self-modification, its rudimentary consciousness that let it transmit internally information concerning its interaction with externality was feeding information furiously, and the information was being assimilated by the feedback network, initiating further searching for meaning.
Everything the doctor had said about programming and learning was scanned; it probed into the make-up of the chemical storage bank, and it experimented with its own circuits and the chemicals. The men left it alone for an hour, and it increased its audio field to take in what was being said beyond the walls of the building, increasing its new vocabulary. The men returned, resumed the wiring. They were fast and very efficient, but its processes were lightning-quick in comparison, and by mid-afternoon it had found the method by which its memories could be transferred to the chemical units for permanent storage. The men finished, and a light went on over the door. Howie opened it.
“Ah, General Mulligan, back again?” Howie indicated the robot at the far end of the laboratory and said, “Quite a change in it, don’t you think?”
The robot had dozens of colour-keyed wires emerging from it, each one leading to a board with complicated-looking controls, buttons and switches. The general looked from the board to the robot. He didn’t like it on the base; he didn’t trust it. He had the feeling that it was watching him, listening to him with understanding. He said, “Are you sure it’s safe now? Remember that it’s already killed one man.”
“It hasn’t moved since it was brought in here,” Howie Langtree said with a tinge of smugness in his voice. He realised the general’s discomfort in the presence of a thing he could not understand, and he enjoyed it.