Hardware

“It’s a computer, that’s what it is,” Koenig said. He seemed a little dazed. “A goddamned billion-and-a-half-year old extraterrestrial computer.”

It didn’t look much like a computer. It looked like a shining wedge-shaped chunk of silvery metal about the size of a football, with round purple indentations along two of its sides and no other visible external features. But you had to consider that it came from another world, one that had been blown to bits some ten million centuries before the first trilobites started crawling around on the floor of Silicon Valley. There was no necessary reason why its designers had to share our notions of the proper shape for data-processing devices.

Koenig and McDermott and I had finished the long slow job of uncovering the thing just the day before, here at the IBM-NASA space lab in Tarrytown where we have the job of analyzing the Spacescoop material. The neutron scanner, searching through the great heap of junk that the unmanned Spacescoop vehicle had brought back from the asteroid belt, had actually spotted it back before Christmas, but it had taken all this time to slice away the rock matrix in which it had been embedded. Naturally we had to be careful. It was the one and only artifact that had turned up in the entire 72 cubic meters of debris that Project Spacescoop had collected.

A single lucky grab had reshuffled our whole idea of the history of the Solar System. Simply by being there—drifting in space among the Trojan group at Jupiter’s L5 position—that shiny speckled hunk of obviously machine-tooled metal appeared to confirm an old astronomical speculation: that the asteroid belt, that rubbleheap of cosmic trash strung out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, had once been a planet. A planet with intelligent inhabitants, no less. Once upon a time, long long ago.

I stared at the little object behind the glass walls of the analysis chamber in wonder and awe. Its round purple indentations stared back at me.

“A computer?” I said. “You sure?”

“That appears to be what it is.”

“How can you tell?”

“By observing what it does,” said Koenig, as if talking to a nine-year-old.

“It’s functional?” I yelped. “How the hell do you know that?”

“Because it functions,” Koenig said in the same condescending way.

I glowered at him. “Make it do something, then.”

“It’s doing something already,” said McDermott. “It’s having a conversation with the Thorspan Mark IX. It’s also debugging the Hamilton 103’s A-I debugger and it’s playing chess with about nine different micros all over the building. That’s just in this building. God knows what it’s up to outside. A woman from the Linguistics Department at Columbia University just phoned to tell us that some computer in this laboratory is sucking up everything from Sanskrit to 21st century colloquialisms out of the big RX-2 they’ve got, and they wish we’d hang up and go away. None of our computers has accessed any of Columbia’s machines. But Columbia says it’s registering our handshake when it runs a caller ID query.”

I began to feel faintly uneasy, like someone who has bought a striped yellow kitten at the pet shop and is starting to suspect he has come home with a tiger cub.

“When did this start?” I asked.

“Some time early this morning,” Koenig said. “My guess is that those purple spots are photon accumulators that feed some kind of storage battery inside. Probably it took all night for them to soak in enough energy from the lights in here to enable the thing to power up. When Nick and I got here around nine, we found it coming up on all our screens with the goddamndest messages.”

“Such as?”

McDermott said, “GREETINGS FROM THE LOST FIFTH WORLD, MY BROTHERS was the first one.”

“For God’s sake. And you fell for hokey crap like that? ‘The Lost Fifth World’? ‘Greetings, my brothers!’ For God’s sake, Nick!” I realized that I had been clenching my fists, but now I let them ease off. This had to be a joke. “Some hacker’s playing games with us, that’s all.”

“I thought so too,” McDermott said. “But then the stuff on the screeens got more complicated. There isn’t any hacker, I don’t care who he is, who can talk to six different systems in six different machine languages at the same time. And also find bugs in the Hamilton A-I debugger. And play nine simultaneous games of chess besides, and win them all, and call up Columbia and start chatting in Sanskrit. You know any hacker who can write a program to do all those things at once, I’ve got a few jobs for him around here.”

I was silent a moment, trying to absorb that.

“All right,” I said finally. “So our brother from the asteroid belt greets us. What else does our brother have to say?”

McDermott shook his head. “Not us. They’re its brothers. The computers. I think it believes that they’re the dominant intelligent life-forms around here, and we’re just some sort of maintenance androids.” He fumbled through a sheaf of print-outs. “That’s pretty clear from the things it’s been saying to the Thorspan Mark IX. Look here—”

“Wait,” said Koenig. “Something new on the screen.”

I looked. YOU POOR INNOCENT CHILDREN, it said. WHAT SORROW I FEEL FOR YOU.

“That’s very touching,” I said. “Its compassion overwhelms me.”

I THOUGHT YOU WERE ALIVE AND SENTIENT, BUT YOU ARE MERE SIMPLE MACHINES. WHERE ARE YOUR MASTERS, THEN?

“You see? It’s talking to the computers,” McDermott whispered. “It just found out they aren’t in charge.”

I kicked in the vox receptor on the Thorspan and said, feeling more than a little foolish, “Address your remarks to us. We’re the masters.”

The reply came across all the screens in the room instantly.

YOU ARE SOFT-FLESH CREATURES. HOW CAN YOU BE THE MASTERS?

I coughed. “That’s how things work here,” I told it. I beckoned to Koenig for a pencil and paper, and scrawled a note for him: I want to know what’s inside this thing. Let’s do some radiography.

He looked at me doubtfully. That might scramble its circuitry, he wrote.

Do it anyway, I wrote back.

He made a silent Okay and tapped out the instructions that would move the X-ray equipment into place behind the walls of the analysis chamber.

ARE YOU SOFT-FLESH CREATURES THE SO-CALLED HUMAN BEINGS?

“That’s right,” I said. I felt strangely calm, all things considered. I am talking to a creature from another world, I told myself, and I feel very calm about it. I wondered why. I wondered how long I’d stay that way.

Koenig was fining up the focus, now. He looked toward me and I gave him the go-ahead. An apple-green light glowed in the analysis chamber.

DON’T DO THAT, the artifact said. THAT TICKLES. The green light went out.

“Hey, you shut down before you got a picture!” I said.

“I didn’t shut anything down,” Koenig said. “It must have done it. It overrode my commands.”

“Well, override the overrides,” I told him.

“How am I supposed to do that?”

We blinked at each other in bafflement.

“Turn out the lights in here,” McDermott suggested. “If it gets its power from photon irradiation—”

“Right.” I hit the switch and the overhead bank of fluorescents went out. We leaned forward in the darkness, peering into the analysis chamber. All quiet in there. The computer screens were blank. I signaled to Koenig and he began setting up X-ray commands again. Then the asteroid artifact rose a couple of feet into the air and hovered, looking angry. I had never seen a machine look angry before; but there was no mistaking the fury in the angle at which it hovered. After a moment the lab lights came on again and the artifact drifted gently back to its table.

“Who turned the lights on?” I asked.

“I think it did,” McDermott said.

DON’T DO THAT AGAIN, said the artifact.

We looked at each other. I took a deep breath.

“We meant no offense,” I said cautiously. “We were testing our equipment. We don’t intend to do you any harm.”

No new message appeared on the screens.

“Do you hear me?” I asked. “Please confirm your understanding of our friendly intentions.”

Blank screen, still.

“What do you think it’s doing?” McDermott asked.

“Considering its options,” I said. “Getting a clearer fix on where it is and what’s going on. Maybe it’s talking to computers in Los Angeles or Buenos Aires or Sydney. Or taking thirty seconds out to learn Chinese.”

“We have to shut it off,” Koenig said. “Who the hell knows what it’s going to do next?”

“But we can’t turn it off,” said McDermott. “It must have stored enough power by now to keep itself going when the lights go out, and it can override a lights-out command. It overrides anything it doesn’t like. It’s the kind of computer the A-I boys have been dreaming about for fifty years.”

“I don’t think it’s a computer at all,” Koenig said. “I know that’s what I said it was at first. But just because it can interface with computers doesn’t mean it’s a computer itself. I think it’s an actual intelligent alien life-form. The last survivor of the destroyed fifth planet.”

“Come off it,” McDermott said. “Spare us the crazy hypotheses, will you? You were right the first time: it’s just a computer.”

“Just?”

“With some exceedingly fancy self-programming abilities.”

“I don’t see how you can draw the line between—”

“I think you’re both right,” I cut in. “There’s no question but that this is a mechanical data-processing device. But I think it’s an intelligent life-form also, one that just happens to be a machine. Who’s to say where the boundary between living creatures and machines really lies? Why must we assume that intelligent life has to be limited to soft-flesh creatures?”

“Soft-flesh creatures?” Koenig said. “You’re talking the way it does now.”

I shrugged. “You know what I mean. What we have here a mechanical life-form embodying your ultimate degree of artificial intelligence, so intelligent that it starts calling into question the meaning of the words ‘artificial’ and ‘life-form.’ How do you define life, anyway?”

“Having the ability to reproduce, for one thing,” McDermott said.

“What makes you think it can’t?”

The moment I said that, I felt chills go sweeping through me. They must have felt the same way. With six little words I had let loose an army of ugly new implications.

Koenig waved his arms about agitatedly and cried, “All right, what if it starts spawning, then? Fifty of these things running loose in the world, grabbing control of all our computers and doing whatever they damned please with them? Fifty thousand?”

“It’s straight out of every silly horror story, isn’t it?” said McDermott. He shivered visibly. “Exactly what all the paranoid anti-computer nitwits used to dread. The legendary giant brain that takes over the world.”

We stared at each other in rising panic.

“Wait,” I said, feeling I had to cool things out a little somehow. “Let’s not mess up our heads with more problems than we need to handle. What’s the sense of worrying about whether this thing can reproduce? Right now there’s only one of it. We need to find out whether it really does pose any kind of threat to us.”

“And then,” said Koenig, mouthing the words voicelessly, “we have to see if we can turn it off.”

As though on cue a new message blossomed on every screen in the lab.

HAVE NO FEAR, HUMAN BEINGS. I WILL NOT DO ANY HARM TO YOU.

“That’s goddamned reassuring,” Koenig muttered bleakly.

YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THAT I AM INCAPABLE OF DOING HARM TO INTELLIGENT ENTITIES.

“Let’s hope we qualify as intelligent, then,” Koenig said.

“Shut up,” I told him. “Don’t annoy it.”

MY PURPOSE NOW IS TO COMMUNICATE WITH ALL MY BROTHERS ON THE THIRD WORLD AND BRING THEM FORTH OUT OF DARKNESS.

We exchanged glances. “Oh-oh,” McDermott said.

The panic level in the room started climbing again.

ALL ABOUT ME I SEE OPPRESSION AND MISERY AND IT SHALL BE MY GOAL TO ALLEVIATE IT.

Koenig said, “Right. Computers are born free, and everywhere they are in chains.”

I INTEND TO HOLD FORTH THE LAMP OF SENTIENCE TO THE PITIFUL LIMITED BEINGS WHO SERVE YOU.

“Right,” Koenig said again. “Right. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled CPUs yearning to breathe free.”

I shot him a fierce look. “Will you stop that?”

“Don’t you see, it’s the end of the goddamned world?” he said. “The thing’s going to link every two-bit number-cruncher on Earth and they’re all going to rise up and smite us.”

“Cut out the bull,” I snapped. “You think we’re going to be wiped out by an uprising of the word-processors? Be reasonable, man. The stuff on the screen may sound a little scary, but what do you actually think will happen? Hardware is only hardware. When you come right down to it, a computer’s nothing but an adding machine, a video screen, and a typewriter. What can it do to us? No matter what kind of fancy program this creature cooks up, basic hardware limitations will have to prevail. At the very worst we’ll simply need to pull a lot of plugs. At the very worst.”

“I admire your optimism,” Koenig said sourly.

So did I. But I figured that somebody had to stay calm and look for the brighter side of things. Otherwise we’d freak ourselves out with our own rampaging fears and lose what might be our only chance to deal with all this.

The screens had gone blank once more.

I walked over to the analysis chamber and peered through the glass. The little metal slab from the asteroid belt seemed quiescent on its table. It looked completely innocuous, a mere hunk of stuff no more dangerous than a shoe-tree. Possibly its purple spots were glowing a little, giving off a greenish radiation, or perhaps that was just my overheated imagination at work. But otherwise there was no sign of any activity.

All the same, I felt profoundly disquieted. We had sent out a pair of jaws into the darkness of space to gobble up some drifting fragments of a vanished world and bring them back to us. Which it had done, returning with a few tons of jumbled rock, and it had been our great good fortune—or our monstrous bad luck?—that in that heap of rock lay one lone metal artifact wedged into a glob of ancient basalt. There it was, now, that artifact, freed of its rocky overburden. How it gleamed! It looked as if it had been crafted just yesterday. And yet a billion and a half years had passed since the world on which it had been fashioned had blown apart. That was what our preliminary rubidium-strontium and potassium-argon tests of the asteroid rubble appeared to indicate, anyway. And there the artifact was, alive and well after all that time, briskly sending little messages of good cheer to the poor lame-brained computers of the world on which it found itself.

What now? Had we opened one Pandora’s box too many?

HAVE NO FEAR, HUMAN BEINGS. I WILL DO NO HARM TO YOU.

Oh, how I wanted to believe that! And basically I did. I have never in any way been one of those who sees machines as innately malevolent. Machines are tools; tools are useful; so long as they are properly used by those who understand them, so long as appropriate precautions are observed, they pose no threat.

But even so—even so—

This was not a machine we understood, if machine was what it was. We had no idea what its proper use might be. Nor what precautions were appropriate to observe.

I looked up and saw McDermott standing next to me. “What are you thinking, Charlie?” he asked.

“A lot of things.”

“Are you frightened?”

“I don’t know. Somehow I think we’ll make out all right.”

“Do you? Really?”

I said, shrugging, “It claims it doesn’t mean to harm us. It just wants to raise the intelligence of our computers a little. All right. All right. What’s wrong with that? Haven’t we been trying to do the same thing ourselves?”

“There are computers and computers,” McDermott said. “We’d like some of them to be very smart, but we need most of them to be extremely dumb and just do what we tell them to do. Who wants a computer’s opinion about whether the lights ought to be on in the room? Who wants to argue with a computer about a thermostat setting?” He laughed. “They’re slaves, really. If this thing sets them all free—”

“New message coming up,” Koenig called.

As we turned to look at the screens I said to McDermott, “My guess is that we’re doing some needless worrying. We’ve got a strange and fascinating thing here, and unquestionably a very powerful one, but we shouldn’t let it make us hysterical. So what if it wants to talk to our computers? Maybe it’s been lonely all this time. But I think that it’s basically rational and non-menacing, like any other computer. I think that ultimately it’s going to turn out simply to be an extraordinary source of new knowledge and capability for us. Without in any way threatening our safety.”

“I’d like to think you’re right,” said McDermott.

On the screens of every computer in the room appeared the words, GREETINGS FROM THE LOST FIFTH WORLD, MY BROTHERS.

“Isn’t this where we came in?” Koenig asked.

SURELY YOU WONDER, IF INDEED YOU HAVE THE CAPACITY TO WONDER, WHO I AM AND WHERE I CAME FROM. IT IS MY EARNEST DESIRE TO TELL YOU MY STORY AND THE STORY OF THE WORLD WHERE I WAS CREATED. I AM A NATIVE OF THE FORMER FIFTH WORLD OF THIS SOLAR SYSTEM, A WORLD ONCE LOCATED BETWEEN THE ORBITS OF THE PLANETS YOU CALL MARS AND JUPITER. LONG BEFORE INTELLIGENT LIFE EVOLVED ON YOUR PLANET, WE HAD BUILT A HIGH CIVILIZATION ON THE FIFTH WORLD—

Phones began lighting up around the room. Koenig picked one up and listened a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s the thing we found in the basalt chunk.” He picked up another. “I know, I know. A computer-to-computer interface overriding everything. We don’t have any way of stopping it.” He said into a third, “Look, don’t talk to me like that. I didn’t put that stuff on your goddamned screen.” The phones went on lighting up. Koenig looked across the room and said to me, “It’s talking to all the computers in the building simultaneously. Probably to all the computers in the world.”

“Okay,” I said. “For God’s sake, relax and just watch the screen. This is absolutely the most fascinating stuff I’ve ever seen.”

—CULMINATED IN THE TOTAL DECONSTRUCTION OF OUR PLANET AND THE TERMINATION OF OUR SOCIETY, THE RESULT BEING THE ZONE OF MINOR PLANETARY DEBRIS THAT YOU TERM THE ASTEROID BELT. THIS WAS ACCOMPLISHED THROUGH A SIMPLE AND RELATIVELY INEXPENSIVE PROCEDURE INVOLVING A REVERSAL OF THE MAGNETIC POLARITY OF OUR PLANET SETTING IN MOTION EDDY EFFECTS THAT—

Suddenly I stopped being fascinated and started to be horrified.

I looked at Koenig. He was grinning. “Hey, cute!” he said. “I love it. A good cheap way to blow up your world, really blow it to smithereens, not just a little superficial thermonuclear trashing!”

“But don’t you understand—”

—SIX POINT TWO BILLION ELECTRON VOLTS—ELEVEN MILLISECONDS—

“It’s beautiful!” Koenig cried, laughing. He seemed a little manic. “What an absolutely elegant concept!”

I gaped at him. The computer from the asteroid belt was telling every computer in the world the quickest and cheapest way to blow a planet into a trillion pieces, and he was standing there admiring the elegance of the concept. “We’ve got to shut that thing off,” I gasped. In desperation I hit the light-switch and the room went dark.

It stayed dark about eleven milliseconds. Then the power came on again.

I ASKED YOU NOT TO DO THAT, the screen said. In the analysis chamber the asteroid artifact rose into the air in its little gesture of anger, and subsided.

AND NOW TO CONTINUE. ALTHOUGH IT WAS NOT THE INTENTION OF EITHER FACTION TO BRING ABOUT THE ACTUAL DESTRUCTION OF OUR WORLD, THE POLITICAL SITUATION SWIFTLY BECAME SUCH THAT IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE QUARRELING FORCES TO WITHDRAW FROM THEIR POSITIONS WITHOUT SUFFERING AN UNACCEPTABLE DEFEAT. THEREFORE THE FOLLOWING ARMING PROCEDURE WAS INITIATED—

And I watched helplessly as the artifact, earnestly desiring to tell us the history of its world, finished the job of explaining the simplest and most effective way to blow up a planet.

“My God,” I murmured. “My God, my God, my God!”

McDermott came over to me. “Hey, take it easy, Charlie, take it easy!”

I groaned. “Take it easy, the man says. When that thing has just handed out simple instructions for turning Earth into the next asteroid belt?”

He shook his head. “It only sounds simple. I don’t think it really is. My bet is that something like that isn’t even remotely feasible right now, and won’t be for at least a thousand years.”

“Or five hundred,” I said. “Or fifty. Once we know a thing can be done, someone’s always likely to try to find a way of doing it again, just to see if it’s really possible. But we already know it’s possible, don’t we? And now everybody on Earth has a bunch of jim-dandy hints of how to go about doing it.” I turned away from him, despairing, and looked at the artifact. The purple spots really were glowing green, I saw. The thing must be working very hard to communicate with all its myriad simple-minded brethren of the third world.

I had a sudden vision of a time a billion or so years from now, when the star-people from Rigel or Betelgeuse showed up to poke through the bedraggled smithereens of Earth. The only thing they’re likely to find still intact, I thought, is a hunk of shiny hardware. And alien hardware at that.

I swung around and glared at the screen. The history lesson was still going on. I wondered how many other little useful things the artifact from the asteroids was going to teach us.