Could he fall in love with a thing?
He sighed and thought, why not? He loved his banjo. Others, multitudes of others, had full-blown passions for cars, model airplanes, hi-fi’s, rare books, and bicycle seats.
But Chworktap was definitely a human being, and surely there was a difference between love for a woman and love for antique furniture.
“I’m basically a protein robot,” Chworktap said. “I’ve got some tiny circuit boards here and there along with some atomic energy units and capacitors. But mostly I’m flesh and blood, just like you. The difference is that you were made by accident and I was designed by a board of scientists. Like it or not, you had to take whatever genes—good or rotten—your parents passed on to you. My genes were carefully selected from a hundred models, and then they were put together in the laboratory. The artificial ovum and sperm were placed in a tube, the sperm then united with the ovum, and I spent my nine months in the tube.”
“Then we have at least that in common,” Simon said. “My mother, the selfish old bitch, didn’t want to bother carrying me around.”
“The human Zelpstians spend their first nine months in tubes, too,” she said. “The ova and sperms are mailed in by the adults, and the Population Control Bureau, which is run by robots, uses them to start a baby whenever an adult dies. At the same time, a hundred robot babies are started. These are raised as companions and servants for the human baby. They’re also socially programmed to admire and love their human master. And the only adults the human child sees are robots which act as surrogate parents.”
Zelpst was dedicated to furnishing all humans with all the comforts of its splendid technology. Even more important, every human was spared the pains and frustrations which Earthmen assumed were inevitable. The only things denied the human child were those which might endanger him. When a human reached puberty, he/she was given a castle in which he/she lived the rest of his/her life. The Zelpstian was surrounded by every material comfort and by a hundred robots. These looked and acted just like humans except they were unable to hurt the owner’s feelings. And they behaved exactly as the owner wanted them to behave. They were programmed to be the people the lord/lady of the castle wanted to associate with.
“My master, Zappo, liked brilliant witty conversation,” she said. “So we were all brilliant and witty. But he didn’t like us to top his wit. So every time we thought of a one-upman remark, it was routed to a deadend circuit board in us. The male robots were all impotent because Zappo didn’t want anybody except himself fucking the female robots. Every time they thought about getting a hard-on, the impulse would be rerouted through a circuit board and converted into an overwhelming sense of shame and guilt. And every time we thought about punching Zappo, and believe me, we thought about it a lot, the impulse was also converted into shame and guilt. And a splitting headache.”
“Then you all had self-consciousness and free will?” Simon said. “Why didn’t the programmers just eliminate that in the robots?”
“Anything that has a brain complex enough to use language in a witty or creative manner has to have self-consciousness and free will,” Chworktap said. “There’s no getting away from it. Anything, even a machine composed solely of silicon and metal parts and electrical wires, anything that uses language like a human is human.”
“Good God!” Simon said. “You robots must’ve suffered terribly from frustration! Didn’t any of you ever break down?”
“Yes, but our bad thoughts were all rerouted back into our selves. This was done so that we wouldn’t harm our master. Every once in a while, a robot would commit suicide. When that happened, the master would just order another one. Sometimes, he got tired of a particular robot and would kill it. Zappo was a sadistic bastard, anyway.”
“I would have thought that anybody raised with nothing but love and kindness and admiration would grow up to be a kind and loving person.”
“It doesn’t always work out that way,” she said. “Humans are programmed by their genes. They’re also programmed to some extent by their environment. But it’s the genes that determine how they’re going to react to the environment.”
“I know,” Simon said. “Some people are born aggressive, and others are passive all their lives. A kid can be raised in a Catholic family, and his brothers and sisters will remain devout Catholics all their life. But he becomes a raving atheist or joins a Baptist church. Or a Jew forsakes the religion of his fathers but still gets sick at the thought of eating ham. Or a Moslem believes in the Koran one hundred percent, but he has to fight a secret craving for pork. The dietary genes control this.”
“Something like that,” Chworktap said. “Though it isn’t that simple. Anyway, no matter how carefully the Zelpst society was designed to prevent unhappiness and frustration for the humans, it wasn’t one hundred percent efficient. There’s always a flaw, you know. Zappo got unhappy because his robots didn’t love him for himself. He was always asking us, ‘Do you love me?’, and we’d always reply, ‘You’re the only one I love, revered master.’ And then he’d get red in the face and say, ‘You brainless machine, you can’t say anything else but! What I want to know is, if I took the reroute circuits out, would you still say you love me?’ And we’d say, ‘Sure thing, master.’ And he’d get even more angry, and he’d scream, ‘But do you really love me?’ And sometimes he’d beat us. And we’d take it, we weren’t programmed to resist, and he’d scream, ‘Why don’t you fight back!’
“Sometimes I felt sorry for him, but I couldn’t even tell him that. To feel sorry for him was to demean him, and any demeaning thought was routed to the devoicing circuit.
“Zappo knew that when he made love to me I enjoyed it. He did not want a masturbating machine, so he’d specified that all his robots, male or female, would respond fully. Whether we were being screwed by him, blowing him, or being buggered, we had intense orgasms. He knew that our cries of ecstasy weren’t faked. But there was no way for even the scientists to ensure that we would love him. And even if they could have made us automatically fall in love with him, Zappo wouldn’t have been satisfied. He wanted us to love him by our own free choice, to love him just because he was lovable. But he didn’t dare to have the inhibiting circuits removed, because then, if we’d said we didn’t love him, he wouldn’t have been able to stand it.
“So he was in a hell of a situation.”
“You all were,” Simon said.
“Yes. Zappo often said that everybody in the castle, including himself, was a robot. We’d been purposely made robots, but chance had made him one. His parents’ ovum and spermatozoon had determined his virtues and his vices. He did not have any more free will than we did.”
Simon picked up his banjo, tuned it, and then said, “Bruga put the whole philosophical question in a single poem. He called it Aphrodite and the Philosophers. I’ll sing it for you.”