Intruder

Chapter 10. The Wandering Eve

It took some time for the Watchful Eye to catch up on the events that had transpired while it was in stasis. Bogie’s report, transmitted over the robot comlink, was more confusing than helpful, what with all the ancient slang the robot had copied from movies.

The Watchful Eye had only itself to blame for Bogie’s movie obsession. When it had first arrived in Robot City and obtained control of all systems, it had decided to form a network of knowledge. It wanted so much to find out about humanity that it had been unwilling to take the time to penetrate the computer each time it needed a particular item of information. So it had delegated certain groups of robots to research and store information in certain peripheral fields. Bogie was part of the Popular Culture Through the Universe team, while Timestep had belonged to the group studying performance arts. Other groups had specialized in such areas as sociology, psychology, and economics, all fields that the Watchful Eye rarely needed now for its running of the city, but might require in the future. Whenever it did need an item of knowledge from one of these teams, it requested it via comlink, and the robot who had specialized in the requested category would respond with a useful precis of the topic.

Some of the robots, like Bogie and Timestep, had immersed themselves so thoroughly in their areas of expertise that they had developed very peculiar characteristics related to their new-found knowledge. Bogie had adopted certain attitudes and in some cases actual dialogue from the old Earth movies he had been assigned, while a similar robotic pathology had affected Timestep in a more physical way. Although Timestep was less obsessional than Bogie, he had nevertheless acquired a need to perform the dances he researched. Perhaps he had watched too many recordings in hyperwave and old style technologies of dancing through the ages. Part of his research had included a precise examination of the anatomical requirements for good dancing, and he had soon begun to try out the terpsichorean movements themselves. At one time or another he had executed steps for various types of ballet and popular dancing. Lately he had centered his interest on tap dancing. Whatever movements he attempted, the Watchful Eye knew, would appear terribly awkward when compared to the recordings of old dancers, but there was at least a kind of achievement in the clunkily graceful and more or less accurate way he danced.

Timestep was dancing now, as he followed Derec down city streets. Mostly he was doing something called the soft shoe, with an occasional foray into buck and wing.

Bogie’s message had stated that Derec intended to inspect the central core computer. The Watchful Eye would have to seal itself in its hiding place. To throw the intruder off-guard, it would also supply some other surprises.

Eve was not certain what to look for. She wanted to know more about the tiny creatures, and so she searched for signs of their existence the way a hunter sought the spoor of the animal he was tracking.

There were traces. The more she looked, the more she refined her own tracking abilities, seeing clues that might have been ordinarily overlooked. Near a gutter, where-in a normally functioning city-it would have been swept away into the sewer system, she found a coat, so small she could barely hold it between her fingertips. There was a barely discernible piping around the coat’s collar in delicate golden stitches. Short-lived or not, these creatures picked up some skills along the way.

In a corner of a doorway, she discovered some food crumbs. Derec or Ariel would never have perceived them, because they looked so much like dust that had been neglected by the now-inefficient sanitation robots.

Eve went through a half-open doorway into the building, where she saw that a colony of the creatures had indeed once inhabited the place. They had apparently moved on, leaving behind many clues, artifacts of their existence. She was particularly taken with a small metal unit evidently used for cooking. There was a tiny pile of ash beneath its lower grating that indicated some substance was bummed there to give off cooking heat.

Leaving the building, she walked a long way before encountering any more clues. She passed several of the city’s robots, many of whom seemed to be, like her, wandering aimlessly. When she tried to address them to ask them about the tiny creatures, they kept babbling about blocked information. Some of the robots passed by her without even responding to her.

Dawn came to Robot City, and the place quickly got lighter. Bright rays reflected off the metal sides of buildings. Eve was dazzled by the sudden intensity of the light. It must be different here, she thought, from ordinary human cities, where there might not be so many clear bright surfaces for sunlight to bounce off.

As she passed by a spherical building, she heard a mournful noise that reminded her of the wailing in the vacant lot. She stopped and listened at the building’s door. There were more sounds, faint and muffled, that seemed like the voices of the tiny creatures. She pushed the door open. It stuck less than halfway, but she managed to push herself through the narrow opening.

She entered a lobby that, like most Robot City rooms, was decorated with some hope of eventual human habitation. An ornate desk was strategically placed in its center and there were many pictures on the walls. She inspected the pictures, but they meant nothing to her. There was so little in her experience that she could apply to the viewing of any scene. A couple of the pictures presented recognizable activity, but in the main they were unusual colors set in unusual patterns.

Walking across a deep-piled rug whose configurations were mazelike but colorful, she approached the desk. She noticed that the legs of the desk were shaped like claws, making her think for a moment that the desk had feet that clutched the rug. Strange, she thought, why would anyone want to carve an animal’s foot on a piece of furniture? Further, no line of the desk was straight, another design feature that seemed unnecessary to her. There were curves, inset grooves, knot-holes, many shapes she did not even recognize.

But it was the top surface of the desk that really caught her attention. Kneeling on it, in a circle, was a group of the tiny creatures, all facing inward. They held hands and made soft, moaning sounds. In the circle’s center, a delicately formed young female swayed, her movements apparently guided by tone changes in the group’s moaning. When their sound increased, her body began to jerk violently. When they became softer, grace returned to her gestures.

Eve put her hands on the desk so that she could lean down and look closer, but her quick movement alerted the group to her presence. The ones facing her looked up at her, while the others twisted around to see her.

Breaking handholds, they started scattering to all sides of the desktop. Directly opposite her, Eve saw the top of a small ladder, that apparently led down to the seat of a plain chair behind the desk. None of the group went to the ladder, however. When they had gone as far as they could, standing with their heels right on the edge of the desktop, they stood tensely. They trembled, as if willing to jump off should Eve get any nearer to them. Only the young female who had been in the circle’s center remained in place. She stared up at Eve with curiosity.

“Who are you?” Eve asked. Her words seemed unnaturally loud as they traveled around the room and discovered echoes of themselves.

There was no response. A skinny little male on one side made a broad hand gesture to a female across the way, but Eve could not discern what it meant. She decided they could not understand her words.

A better idea, she thought, would be to make a sign of peace. Moving her hand slowly, she laid it in an open area of the desktop, palm up, fingers open. There was another flurry of fear among the creatures at the desk’s fringes, but the leader, after a moment of consideration, strode confidently forward and, climbing into Eve’s palm between her thumb and index finger, walked slowly around the center of her hand. Once she knelt down and felt Eve’s malleable metal skin. The female stroked it several times, as if concerned with its texture, then studied her own skin, clearly comparing it to Eve’s and perhaps wondering why hers was so much softer and more pliable.

When she was through with her inspection, the tiny female sat down in the center of Eve’s palm and looked calmly up at her. Eve interpreted this as a signal that it was all right to lift her hand off the desk and hold the female aloft.

Bringing her hand close to her eyes, Eve examined the little creature. She was quite slim, with delicate limbs and very small hands and feet. Her clothing was colorful, with an intricate design, leaves interweaving. There were buttons going down the back of her one-piece garment, and she wore a cloth belt at a slight tilt at her waist. Her round face was as delicate as the rest of her. A bit of a nose, a narrow line of a mouth, eyes like little dots. Her hair was long and wavy. She obviously spent some time grooming it. How could these people not be intelligent, Eve wondered, especially if they could make themselves clothing and take such care of their appearance?

Down below, the ones who had scattered now came close together again. They stood in a group and looked up in awe at Eve’s scrutinization of one of their own. She noted that they, too, were carefully dressed and groomed.

“Now I’m going to put you down,” Eve said, modulating her voice so that it was quite low. Again she put her hand on the desktop and held it there while the female slowly, almost casually, got off. She went back to her group that had not stirred this time when Eve rested her hand on the desktop.

Eve was not sure what to do next. As the tiny figures gazed up at her, and she down at them, they seemed in a standoff.

“Eve,” Adam said. He had entered the room and now stood a few meters behind her. “What is this?”

She explained about her search and how she had found this small band moaning in their odd circle.

“It could be a religious ceremony,” he commented. ‘The group were at prayer, perhaps.”

“You might be right. They seemed to be imploring, or perhaps mourning.”

“You’re interested in them, I see.”

“As a study, yes. They are strange to me.”

“Are you sure, a study? There seems to be something more to it.”

“What?”

“You seem to care about them.”

“Are we capable of caring?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Neither am I.”

“Ariel sent me to find you. She has set up headquarters at a place they call the Human Medical Facility. She dismissed the robots who were stationed there because they did not respond properly. Now she is trying to extract information from a computer devoted to medical data. She is cursing often because it is malfunctioning or has been tampered with. I am to bring you back there with me.”

“Why?”

“My opinion is that she wants to keep track of us. Derec has put her in charge while he tackles the problems of the city’s systems.”

“What if we do not choose to be in her charge? Should she necessarily have dominion over us?”

“Mistress Ariel appeared to believe you should be kept out of trouble.”

“She is so sure I will get into trouble?”

“It seems so.”

“What is the logic of that?”

“It is not necessary to analyze it.”

“I would like to.”

Eve glanced down at the desktop. The little creatures there were conferring among themselves. Their chattering sounds could barely be heard, but they seemed to contain more agitation than meaning.

“Adam?”

“Yes?”

“Let’s bring them with us.”

“That is unnec-”

“It is for research, Adam. We need to discover more in our quest to define humanity. They may help.”

She reached her hand toward the group, intending to pick up a couple of its members as delicately as she could. But the fear returned to their eyes, and they began to scatter.

“No,” she said. carefully modulating her voice so that it took on a humanlike, soothing gentleness. “I win not harm you. Adam, is there something here we can carry them in?”

He scanned the room. “I see no container of any kind.”

“Then we will carry them on this desk.”

“Eve, they could falloff.”

“We will walk slowly.”

Only Avery saw them carry the desk slowly through the city streets. He hadn’t usually paid much attention to furniture-moving robots on Spacer planets. With their strength and meticulous sense of caution, they were expert at it, able to keep their load level, never bumping the item against anything, and delivering it undamaged.

It seemed to him that robots regularly performed miracles, as a matter of course. In fact, he thought, only robots could perform miracles nowadays. Whatever capacity humans may have had for such feats was long gone.

The more he watched robots in general, the more he knew he needed to become one. And he would. He could feel himself transform more and more into a robot as the days went by. He had convinced himself there were microprocessors in all his limbs and that his senses were now controlled by sensory circuits. All he needed was the positronic brain. That would come, he was sure. He would find a way to turn the inefficient lump in his head to a perfectly functioning, spongelike, positronic entity.

In a dim back part of his mind, he recalled an old Earth story where a primitive robot had wanted a human heart put inside his body so he could be more human. Of course, he really wanted human emotion. a useless prize if there ever was one, Avery thought. The story was so vague in his memory that he could not remember whether the robot had gotten a heart. Probably it had. Earth stories could be dreadfully sentimental about such things. (He did not. of course, know it. but Timestep could dance a musical number from a film adaptation of that story. And Bogie could have told him how the tale came out.)

As Avery moved closer to the desk-toting robots, he noticed the living creatures cowering at the center of the desktop. They seemed puzzled by the city, as if they thought they had passed over into another dimension.

His excitement grew as he saw how nicely formed these tiny humans or androids were. They might be just the experimental rats he needed. The body he’d taken from the vacant lot had been too decayed by the time he’d carried it to his laboratory several levels beneath the city.

He had been able to put it through only a few tests before discarding it. Under a microscope-scanner he saw that a simple microchip had been implanted in its brain and that there appeared to be patterns of circuitry that might control the body’s movements, the way a puppetmaster gave false life to the wooden figures attached to strings.

However, nothing was conclusive. The creatures did not appear all that robotic, either. He suspected they had been genetically engineered, then activated by the implanted technology. At any rate, he was certain they were not actual laboratory-grown humans. No, they were more like dolls, formed from genetic materials but given a kind of life through robotic means. It was even possible they had a minimal awareness.

He had to find more specimens and had been seeking them out when he saw Derec’s odd robots taking that desk down a Robot City street. The runty creatures on the desktop were the specimens he needed.

The robots were of special interest to him, also. He had recognized immediately, when he saw them back at the vacant lot, that they had not been constructed from his own designs. They were definitely not Avery robots. Where had they come from, and whose design were they?

Avery nearly laughed from happiness. (Derec would certainly have been surprised to know that his father could actually laugh.) There was much to study here, and he was never happier than when he was engaged in theorizing or conducting experiments.

Watching Avery watch the robots (who, in this chain of spying, were keeping a close watch on their diminutive charges), the Watchful Eye was puzzled by the new turn of events. How, it wondered, did Avery keep appearing from out of nowhere? He seemed to have an uncommon knowledge of the labyrinthine routes through the city and particularly of the hiding places that removed him from the Watchful Eye’s surveillance.

And why were the new arrivals carrying a desk? And what were the experimental subjects (from Series C, Batch 21) doing on top of the desk?

Too many mysteries, too much disorder.

It seemed as if Derec and his cohorts had, since their arrival in Robot City, thrown much of what the Watchful Eye had done into confusion. They had, in fact, become a serious threat to his domain. It believed it should just eliminate them -but it could not. That was also a mystery to it. What was it that held it back from simply disposing of the intruders?

It sometimes appeared that it, too, had to respond to the demands of First Law, just the way a robot might. But it could not be a robot, it was sure of that. Robots could not do what it could do. Also, it knew it was different from the so-called humans who were now interfering with his design. It could not be a human, either.

There was a sound outside the computer chamber. It reassembled itself and waited for Derec to enter.