James P. Hogan (14 page)

Masumichi, wearing a loose multicolored robe and sandals, was waiting in the sitting room adjacent to the kitchen and dining area, where it seemed he had been relaxing. A viewpad displaying text was set down alongside a glass on the side table by the recliner, and the room was playing music that Korshak recognized as reconstructed from old-world sources. Would the long-dead composer ever have guessed that his work would one day be heard in a place like this? Korshak wondered. Hori had probably been amusing himself downstairs in the lab.

“You’re looking well,” Masumichi commented as he came across to usher the arrivals in. “And young master Mirsto. How is your mother?”

“Fine, thank you, sir. And my new sister, Kilea, too.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Sleeping through the night, finally,” Korshak put in.

“So you’re getting some rest again yourselves, eh?” Masumichi nodded and smiled briefly. “How’s Ronti?”

“Never better. He says that teaching acrobatics again has made him ten years younger. But I never did think he’d ever age anyway. Today he’s at Beach, organizing a show that they want us to put on there.”

“Hmph. More likely making time with that artist lady he was with last time, if I know Ronti,” Masumichi said. He turned toward Hori. “Mirsto was hoping to see the neural coupler while he’s here. Why don’t you and Kog take him down to the lab and let him try it?” – a hardly subtle hint that he and Korshak wanted to be alone.

“Yes, can we?” Mirsto said. “Dad told me about it. He says it’s a thing that you strap around your head like a hood, and you can see and hear what a robot’s seeing and hearing. You think you are the robot. It sounds really great.”

“Can Kog show them the trick I taught it first?” Hori asked. Masumichi raised his eyes momentarily at Korshak and gestured for Hori to go ahead. Hori felt in one of his pockets, then another, and produced a white ball, maybe an inch across, made of some soft, rubbery material. Few people would have caught it, but Korshak registered a surreptitious movement of Kog’s hand hanging nonchalantly down by its side as it moved forward to take the ball from Hori.

Smooth, Korshak thought approvingly. Hori’s fumbling in his pockets had been deliberate, a distraction to draw attention from Kog while it retrieved a duplicate ball from where it had been concealed – probably somewhere in the robot’s attachment belt. Clearly, the two of them had set it up beforehand.

Kog held the ball aloft between thumb and forefinger, made a show of solemnly turning back the cuff of a sleeve it didn’t have, and let the ball fall into its palm while turning its hand to show the back with fingers spread, apparently empty. Then, under cover of a quick pass made with the other hand, it turned its hand palm-forward, showing it to be hiding nothing. Korshak knew the move, of course, because he had taught it to Mirsto. It involved pushing the palmed ball through between the fingers at the precise instant that it was covered by the pass, and then holding it out of sight behind the closed fingers by pinching the material between two of them. That was why something soft was used. It was a tricky sleight to master, requiring lots of practice and confidence. With their smaller hands, even the boys were seldom able to execute it as well as Kog had just demonstrated.

“Excellent!” Korshak pronounced – and meant it.

“Wow!” Mirsto supplied.

In conclusion, Kog, managing to look quite pleased with itself, directed attention to its other hand by extending it and looking at it, and opened the fingers slowly one by one to reveal the duplicate ball that had been there all the time. That was when Hori moved a little nearer, as if following, in the process just happening to brush close to Kog’s side. Once again, only Korshak caught the slight movement of Kog slipping the “vanished” ball to its accomplice in order to be able to show a genuinely empty hand if challenged.

“Great stuff, Kog,” Korshak complimented. “Maybe we should give you a slot in the show at Beach, too.”

“The subject exposes some curious anomalies in human reasoning,” Kog commented.

“So, can we go and see the neural coupler now?” Mirsto asked.

“Sure. That’s what my uncle was telling us,” Hori said. The term was used freely. Just about all of the younger element of the Shikoba clan referred to Masumichi as “uncle.”

“Is that okay?” Mirsto asked, looking at Korshak.

“You heard Mr. Shikoba.”

“Let’s go, Kog,” Hori said.

“And don’t touch anything else down there,” Masumichi told them as the two boys and the robot began moving toward the doorway.

“We won’t.”

“Kog, keep an eye on them. Call me if they do.”

“Yes, boss.”

Masumichi waited until they had gone, then sighed, shook his head, and turned to gesture at his partly-filled glass, “Can I get you something, Korshak?”

“Oh, a small
tashi
would go down well. Maybe with a touch of lime.” Korshak settled down on the couch near the recliner, while Masumichi went through to the dining area.

“You seemed suitably impressed with Kog’s performance just now,” Masamuchi’s voice called through the connecting archway over the clink of glassware.

“It was good,” Korshak agreed. “You’ve been improving them.”

“We had to refine the faculty of intuitive spatial awareness right down at the level of subconscious basics,” Masumichi replied. “That was what made the difference. They have to know instinctually that what they think they’re seeing doesn’t make sense. Logical ability alone isn’t enough. It was pretty much as you guessed.”

“So they don’t think seeing is believing anymore. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Not so easily as before, anyway.”

“A pity you can’t do the same for some people,” Korshak remarked.

Korshak’s familiarity with illusions, and the insights it gave to human psychology, had helped Masumichi greatly in his work. The earlier robots had remained unimpressed when shown examples of objects “magically” disappearing from one place and reappearing in another. Similarly, they hadn’t displayed any surprise at something apparently broken into pieces only moments before being produced restored and intact. On being quizzed by Masumichi after a demonstration of the latter kind, one of them had answered that the parts must have been put together to make the object in the first place, so what was so strange about seeing them put together to make the same thing again?

“But you didn’t see anyone putting them back together the second time,” Masumichi had persisted.

“I didn’t see anyone put them together the first time, either,” the robot responded.

It was always the same pattern: eminently logical, but missing the whole point.

Behavioral research on human infants had shown that by even a few months of age, they formed the notion that a physical object continued to exist when it was out of sight. For example, when a ball was rolled into a tunnel, they would shift their gaze to the far end in anticipation of its emerging there. Such intuitions arose from the experience of existing and moving as an object in three-dimensional space, which was something shared by all human beings, and enabled them to communicate easily by means of commonly understood metaphors. (Unlike the ball in the tunnel, in “getting an idea through” to someone else, nothing physically moved “through” anything – but everyone knew what was meant.) But the necessary preadaptation at the fundamental level of human neural wiring had to be there for it to work. This was what had been missing in Masumichi’s robots. From what Masumichi had just said, it sounded as if an intuitive “feel” for the effect that a magic trick was supposed to produce was necessary in order to create it proficiently – the attempts of the earlier robots had been hopeless. This came as no surprise to Korshak. He didn’t try to pretend that he understood why.

Masumichi came back in from the dining area, handed a glass to Korshak, and went over to resume his place in the recliner.

“So, what is the latest on the coupler?” Korshak asked, sitting back and crossing a leg over his other knee. “It sounds as if you’ve moved on to a new model.”

The neural coupler was a new concept in interfacing that Masumichi was developing for better control of telebots – robots that were remote-directed by human operators for things like space construction and work in hazardous environments, as opposed to autonomous types like Kog, which were still considered experimental. Information received from the robot was injected directly into the sensory centers of the operator’s brain, while key voluntary motor-control commands were interpreted and transmitted back the other way, bypassing all the messiness of interfacing helmets and body harnesses.

Masumichi confirmed with a nod. “Kog is the first to have it built in from scratch. I’ve got the bandwidth problem straightened out. We’re pretty much ready to begin practical trials.” The last time Korshak was involved, Masumichi had been testing a prototype design added on to a predecessor of Kog’s, called Tek.

“Not too soon, either. There’s going to be plenty of work for them with all the proposals for new constructions that are going around,” Korshak said. “Everybody seems to be having ideas about how governments ought to be run.”

“Marney Clure says the problem with all of them is that they create inequality by definition,” Masumichi said. “He wants to start a colony that doesn’t have any. An anarchy. Do you know anything about it?”

Korshak shook his head. “I never had much time for ideas about how other people ought to live. Taking care of one life is enough.”

“He seems to be getting attention. A lot of young people like what he’s saying. But they’re always the ones who rebel the most against being kept in line, I suppose.”

Korshak took a taste from his glass and looked skeptical. “So, whose rules decide? Everyone ends up in a free-for-all. How could it work? It would end up like Tranth – all the way back to what he came from years ago.”

Masumichi shrugged. “It’s Marney’s idea, not mine.”

Silence fell. Korshak studied the window-framing sycamore boughs at the far end of the room, and then looked back. “Anyway, I’m sure that wasn’t what you wanted to talk about,” he said.

“Yes, er… well.” Masumichi fidgeted in his chair. “I could use some help with something, Korshak. It’s kind of personal and confidential, and needs to be handled discreetly. You’d be the right person.”

“Okay.”

Masumichi made a face and rubbed his nose awkwardly. He had obviously known this moment would come, yet seemed to have been putting it off. Finally he gestured downward in a vague way that failed to communicate anything specific. “The truth is, I’ve lost one.”

“One what?”

“An AI vehicle. One of the robots.”

Korshak realized that the gesture was at the laboratory area below. “That… sounds like something that would take some doing,” was all that he could manage by way of reply just at that moment.

“It’s not always easy, living alone, you know,” Masumichi said. “You have that charming former princess as a wife…. And especially for someone involved in work as intensive and demanding as mine, with long hours of concentration…” The suddenly defensive-sounding tone and the apparent change of subject left Korshak at a loss. He could only knit his brow and show an empty palm in total incomprehension. Masumichi continued. “All right, so every once in a while I take a few hours off to unwind with some company on Istella. It’s not uncommon among single professionals, you know. I don’t know why it gets to be socially frowned upon. Human nature is what it is. People only create problems for themselves when they try to deny it.”

Now it was making more sense. Korshak had to bite his lip to prevent himself from smiling. Istella was the name of the off-ship pleasure resort that had been one of the first of the
Aurora
’s companion worlds to be built. The mission’s original planners had been generous in their provision for healthy and wholesome sports and entertainments, recreations that were culturally elevating as well as physically beneficial, and other such activities conducive to the improvement of body, mind, and character. But either through a sensed need for propriety that came with the job, or because they genuinely lived in blissful remoteness from such matters, there was no concession to such things as the gaudier bars and show houses, casinos, and other attractions that characterized parts of just about any town in Sofi or anywhere else, that real flesh-and-blood people liked to spend time in every now and then.

The Directorate had expressed surprise and some confusion when the proposal was put forward to remedy the situation by creating such a facility outside their range of jurisdiction. Probably spurred by feelings of civic duty, they had voiced misgivings and attempted to discourage the venture, but it all proved to no avail when a referendum carried the decision with a majority that was overwhelming. An interesting conclusion from polls carried out before and afterward was that the way people voted anonymously could be directly opposite to the position they adopted publicly. The project went through, and Istella had done a flourishing business ever since.

Masumichi still hadn’t explained what this had to do with a missing robot, but Korshak thought he already had a good idea of what had probably happened. The biggest problem in getting the robots to communicate reliably in natural language was their lack of commonly shared “world knowledge,” which humans acquired as a result of growing up in the same physical, cultural, and experiential world. For years, going back to the time when GPT-2D had routed Zileg’s cavalry on the road to Belamon and before, one of Masumichi’s principal strategies for remedying this had been to broaden his robots’ horizons of concept and association by exposing them to as wide a range of experiences as possible.

“Let me guess,” Korshak offered. “You took one there to let it see more of life – a new side to the world that it hadn’t come across previously. Right?”

Masumichi stared for a second, then nodded shortly. “It was Tek.” Masumichi paused morosely, and then sighed. “I had been under extreme pressure of work. As I mentioned, to ease the stress I occasionally indulge in certain…” Korshak nodded and waved away any need to elaborate. Masumichi went on. “I told Tek to walk around Istella, see the place, and talk to people. I’d meet it later in a bar called the Rainbow.” He shrugged, indicating that there wasn’t much else to add. “It never showed up, and I haven’t seen it since.”