Read First Person Peculiar Online
Authors: Mike Resnick
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Anthologies, #Science Fiction, #Short Stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories
First Person Peculiar (20 page)
I’d left long before that, of course. We’re too busy to linger once the job is done. It was a few years and a dozen assignments later that I chanced to run into Duncan Smythe in a bar out in the Binder system. For a moment he didn’t recognize me. Then, from the way he began glaring with open hostility, I knew he had remembered who I was.
I walked over and offered him a greeting. “Hello, Mr. Smythe. I trust you’re doing well.”
“No thanks to you,” he replied bitterly.
“Oh?”
“After you jury-rigged that little fiasco out on MacArthur 4 with your ridiculous solution, they wanted to transfer me to some desolate, underpopulated world on the Inner Frontier. I got a reprieve at the last minute.”
“I know you did,” I said.
He looked puzzled.
“
We
vouched for you.”
“You?” he repeated. “You mean the Miracle Brigade?”
“That’s right.”
“But … but I
loathe
you and your so-called methods. Why should you go out of your way to keep me at my post?”
“We enjoy our work, Mr. Smythe,” I said. “And if they fire or demote enough well-meaning people like you, we could someday find ourselves out of a job.”
I turned and left before he could take a swing at me or throw his drink in my face.
Then I walked across the street to our regional office to deal with the problem of Bluewater III, an aquatic world where the nine distinct species of sentient fish were displaying some seemingly-inexplicable resentment over the Republic’s good-hearted attempt to attract money and tourism by introducing sport fishing.
***
I wrote this story for a Roy Torgeson anthology back in 1979. I thought it was a nice, powerful little story, but I had no idea how many reprint anthologists and foreign editors would agree with me. This is its thirteenth appearance, not bad for a sub-1,500-worder by an unknown.
Beachcomber
Arlo didn’t look much like a man. (Not all robots do, you know.) The problem was that he didn’t act all that much like a robot.
The fact of the matter is that one day, right in the middle of work, he decided to pack it in. Just got up, walked out the door, and kept on going.
Some
body must have seen him; it’s pretty hard to hide nine hundred pounds of moving parts. But evidently nobody knew it was Arlo. After all, he hadn’t left his desk since the day they’d activated him twelve years ago.
So the Company got in touch with me, which is a euphemistic way of saying that they woke me in the middle of the night, gave me three minutes to get dressed, and rushed me to the office. I can’t really say that I blame them: when you need a scapegoat, the Chief of Security is a pretty handy guy to have around.
Anyway, it was panic time. It seems that no robot ever ran away before. And Arlo wasn’t just any robot: he was a twelve million dollar item, with just about every feature a machine could have short of white-walled tires. And I wasn’t even so certain about the tires; he sure dropped out of sight fast enough.
So, after groveling a little and making all kinds of optimistic promises to the Board, I started doing a little checking up on Arlo. I went to his designer, and his department head, and even spoke to some of his co-workers, both human and robot.
And it turned out that what Arlo did was sell tickets. That didn’t sound like twelve million dollars’ worth of robot to me, but I was soon shown the error of my ways. Arlo was a travel agent supreme. He booked tours of the Solar System, got his people into and out of luxury hotels on Ganymede and Titan and the Moon, scheduled their weight and their time to the nearest gram and the nearest second.
It
still
didn’t sound that impressive. Computers were doing stuff like that long before robots ever crawled out of the pages of pulp magazines and into our lives.
“True,” said his department head. “But Arlo was a robot with a difference. He booked more tours and arranged more complicated logistical scheduling than any other ten robots put together.”
“More complex thinking gear?” I asked.
“Well, that too,” was the answer. “But we did a little something else with Arlo that had never been done before.”
“And what was that?”
“We programmed him for enthusiasm.”
“That’s something special?” I asked.
“Absolutely. When Arlo spoke about the beauties of Callisto, or the fantastic light refraction images on Venus, he did so with a conviction that was so intense as to be almost tangible. Even his voice reflected his enthusiasm. He was one of those rare robots who was capable of modular inflection, rather than the dull, mechanistic monotone so many of them possess. He literally loved those desolate worlds, and his record will show that his attitude was infectious.”
I thought about that for a minute. “So you’re telling me that you’ve created a robot whose entire motivation had been to send people out to sample all these worlds, and he’s been crated up in an office twenty-four hours a day since the second you plugged him in?”
“That’s correct.”
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe he wanted to see some of these sights himself?”
“It’s entirely possible that he did, but leaving his post would be contrary to his orders.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, sometimes a little enthusiasm can go a long way.”
He denied it vigorously, and I spent just enough time in his office to mollify him. Then I left and got down to work. I checked every outgoing space flight, and had some of the Company’s field reps hit the more luxurious vacation spas. He wasn’t there.
So I tried a little closer to home: Monte Carlo, New Vegas, Alpine City. No luck. I even tried a couple of local theaters that specialized in Tri-Fi travelogs.
You know where I finally found him?
Stuck in the sand at Coney Island. I guess he’d been walking along the beach at night and the tide had come in and he just sank in, all nine hundred pounds of him. Some kids had painted some obscene graffiti on his back, and there he stood, surrounded by empty beer cans and broken glass and a few dead fish. I looked at him for a minute, then shook my head and walked over.
“I knew you’d find me sooner or later,” he said, and even though I knew what to expect, I still did a double take at the sound of that horribly unhappy voice coming from this enormous mass of gears and gadgetry.
“Well, you’ve got to admit that it’s not too hard to spot a robot on a condemned beach,” I said.
“I suppose I have to go back now,” said Arlo.
“That’s right,” I said.
“At least I’ve felt the sand beneath my feet,” said Arlo.
“Arlo, you don’t have any feet,” I said. “And if you did, you couldn’t feel sand beneath them. Besides, it’s just silicon and crushed limestone and …”
“It’s sand and it’s beautiful!” snapped Arlo.
“All right, have it your way: it’s beautiful.” I knelt down next to him and began digging the sand away.
“Look at the sunrise,” he said in a wistful voice. “It’s glorious!”
I looked. A sunrise is a sunrise. Big deal.
“It’s enough to bring tears of joy to your eyes,” said Arlo.
“You don’t have eyes,” I said, working at the sand. “You’ve got prismatic photo cells that transmit an image to your central processing unit. And you can’t cry, either. If I were you, I’d be more worried about rusting.”
“A pastel wonderland,” he said, turning what passed for his head and looking up and down the deserted beach, past the rotted food stands and the broken piers. “Glorious!”
It kind of makes you wonder about robots, I’ll tell you. Anyway, I finally pried him loose and ordered him to follow me.
“Please,” he said in that damned voice of his. “Couldn’t I have one last minute before you lock me up in my office?”
I stared at him, trying to make up my mind.
“One last look. Please?”
I shrugged, gave him about thirty seconds, and then took him in tow.
“You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you?” I said as we rode back to the office.
“Yes,” he said. “They’re going to put in a stronger duty directive, aren’t they?”
I nodded. “At the very least.”
“My memory banks!” he exclaimed, and once again I jumped at the sound of a human voice coming from an animated gearbox. “They won’t take this experience away from me, will they?”
“I don’t know, Arlo,” I said.
“They can’t!” he wailed. “To see such beauty, and then have it expunged—erased!”
“Well, they may want to make sure you don’t go AWOL again,” I said, wondering what kind of crazy junkheap could find anything beautiful on a garbage-laden strip of dirt.
“Can you intercede for me if I promise never to leave again?”
Any robot that can disobey one directive can disobey others, like not roughing up human beings, and Arlo was a pretty powerful piece of machinery, so I put on my most fatherly smile and said: “Sure I will, Arlo. You can count on it.”
So I returned him to the Company, and they upped his sense of duty and took away his enthusiasm and gave him a case of agoraphobia and wiped his memory banks clean, and now he sits in his office and speaks to customers without inflection, and sells a few less tickets than he used to.
And every couple of months or so I wander over to the beach and walk along it and try to see what it was that made Arlo sacrifice his personality and his security and damned near everything else, just to get a glimpse of all this.
And I see a sunset just like any other sunset, and a stretch of dirty sand with glass and tin cans and seaweed and rocks on it, and I breathe in polluted air, and sometimes I get rained on; and I think of that damned robot in that plush office with that cushy job and ever need catered to, and I decide that I’d trade places with him in two seconds flat.
I saw Arlo just the other day—I had some business on his floor—and it was almost kind of sad. He looked just like any other robot, spoke in a grating monotone, acted exactly like an animated computer. He wasn’t much before, but whatever he had been, he gave it all away just to look at the sky once or twice. Dumb trade.
Well, robots never did make much sense to me, anyway.
***
I wrote this one less than a year ago. Tom Easton was editing an anthology called IMPOSSIBLE FUTURES. I agreed to write a story for it, totally forgot about it, and then was reminded when the deadline was about four hours away—and I beat it by an hour and a half.
The Enhancement
You want to know why the courts are more overcrowded than ever? I’ll tell you why. It’s all Arturo Rubichenko’s fault, but he’s too damned busy basking in the public’s adoration to know or care about it.
I remember how the media was so thrilled with him and his breakthrough. They covered it daily for almost two years, and of course Rubichenko won the Nobel Prize and damned near every other prize and award a grateful world could devise. Word is that he actually pulled down almost two billion dollars in prize money.
I never understood exactly how it worked. I still don’t. I probably have that in common with everyone in the world except six or seven scientists. All we knew was that somehow he injected something—I can’t even spell the word, let alone pronounce it—into a Bonobo chimpanzee, and six months later, in a series of carefully regulated lab tests, it had an IQ of 93. We all thought it was truly remarkable.
Then he injected the same damned thing into a cat, and the cat’s attendants—PhD’s all—actually taught it how to read and to manipulate a specially-made computer keyboard, and she had an IQ of 104.
That was fine too, and the chimp and the cat actually toured the world, showing off their enhanced IQs, and people were saying that all he had to do now was find out how to make it work on people, and the human race would take a quantum step ahead.
The first seven humans he injected died, and that was the end of our march toward an intellectual Valhalla.
But something else happened, something that no one predicted or expected. The chimpanzee and the cat both had offspring. The chimp’s firstborn had an IQ of 117 at four years of age, and the cat’s six kittens ranged from 101 to 124.
It wasn’t long before they started mass-producing the miracle. We were all in favor of having more brains in service of humanity. After all, we didn’t care who came up with scientific and medical breakthroughs, as long as somebody or
something
did.
We’re still waiting for the breakthroughs—after all, a 105 IQ isn’t more likely to cure cancer or Alzheimer’s just because it’s between a cat’s ears instead of a human’s—but that doesn’t mean the world hasn’t changed.
Especially
my
world. I’m the Judge of the Circuit Court.
Take last Tuesday, for example. My first case was brought by the 600-pound gorilla who sat down next to his attorney and glared sullenly at me.
“Harvey Kerchak versus MGM Pictures,” announced my bailiff.
“And who is representing Mr. Kerchak?” I asked, because while every animal you see these days can think, frequently better than the average man on the street, they still can’t speak.
“Bradley T. Driscoll,” said the well-dressed lawyer, getting to his feet.
“And the nature of his complaint?”
“My client wants all versions of all Tarzan movies immediately withdrawn from circulation,” answered Driscoll. “We would like them destroyed, but will settle for them being locked in a vault and never withdrawn without my client’s permission.”
“I assume you have a reason?” I said.
“The apes in the films are portrayed as cute, mindless chimpanzees, whereas in the novels they were much larger, quite intelligent, and totally verbal, able to articulate as well as you and I.”
“These films were made before what has become known as the Enhancement,” I noted.
“Nonetheless, the public showing of these motion pictures causes my client untold emotional pain.”
If it’s untold,
I felt like asking,
then why the hell are you in court telling me about it?
Still, a conscientious judge always looks for a compromise that will satisfy both parties in a dispute.
“Would it cause untold pain if it were shown only in theatres, so that members of Mr. Kerchak’s species could easily avoid it and not encounter it accidentally on television?”
“You might ask if a film from the same era portraying members of the Negro race as slow-witted ‘darkies’, or a film showing women as nothing more than mindless and willing sex objects would be acceptable to blacks and females who do not set foot in the theatre but must deal with the subsequent behavior of those who
do
attend.”
“All right,” I said. “Let me just be sure about this. Your client has no objection to the source material?”
“He strongly approves of the books,” replied Driscoll. “And the comic strips and comic books as well.”
“There are comic books?” I asked.
“Certainly, Your Honor.”
“And Mr. Kerchak approves of them?” I continued with the vague feeling that parts of my literary education had been sadly lacking
“Yes, Your Honor. The apes in the comic books are, if anything, even more intelligent and articulate than the apes in the books.”
I turned to the opposing attorney. “Has MGM any rebuttal?”
“You have made it yourself, Your Honor,” she replied. “The films were created prior to the Enhancement.”
Both sides presented more arguments, while I tried to concentrate on what they were saying but found myself thinking about the weather, and my garden, and even the girl in the short skirt in the third row.
Finally they finished, and I told them I’d consider their arguments and would deliver a verdict in two days.
Then the bailiff declared a fifteen-minute break and I retired to my chambers. I sat down, lit a totally-illegal cigar, leaned back, and tried to remember why I went to law school and what kind of cases I hoped I’d be deciding when I became a judge. Finally I sighed and shook my head sadly. Who the hell ever thought that saying “Sit, goddamn it!” would become a serious First Amendment case? Or that a trio of Clydesdales could bring a suit claiming that the constitutional negation of the Dred Scott decision applied to them as well? Did I really become a judge to rule on the antiquated legality of “Once a plow horse, always a plow horse”?
After I finished the cigar I nodded to the bailiff, who went out ahead of me to tell everyone to rise when I entered and that court was back in session.
I sat down and looked out at the plaintiff’s table, where a collie sat perched on a cushion atop a stool.
“Fluffy versus Columbia Broadcasting System,” announced the bailiff.
“Has the plaintiff a surname?” I asked.
“No, Your Honor,” said the plaintiff’s lawyer.
“All right,” I said. “What is the nature of his complaint?”
“
Her
complaint, Your Honor,” the lawyer corrected me.
Big deal,
I thought. “All right,” I amended.
“Her
complaint.”
“It seems that the popular television show,
Lassie
, is using a male collie in the title role. This is clearly a case of sex discrimination, and my client seeks redress.”
I rolled my eyes, cursed Arturo Rubichenko for the thousandth time, and began counting the minutes to my retirement.
***