Software Read online

  Cobb Anderson was not too surprised to see a girl in Sta-Hi's bed when he woke up.

  "Aren't you the stewardess?" he asked, slowly raising himself into sitting position. He'd slept in his clothes three nights running now. First on Mooney's floor, then on the bopper space-ship, and now here in the hotel. The grease on his skin had built up so thick that it was hard to blink his eyes. "Do they have a shower here?"

  "I'm sorry," the hotel's disembodied voice answered. "We do not. Water is a precious resource on the Moon. But you may enjoy a chemical sponge-bath, Mr. Anderson. Step right this way."

  A light blinked over one of the three doors. Stiffly, ponderously, Cobb shuffled through it.

  "I'll have to charge you for triple occupancy, Mr. DeMentis," the hotel told Sta-Hi in a polite, neutral voice.

  But at the same time he could overhear another of its point-voices sniggeringly asking Misty, "Dja come?"

  "Breakfast," Sta-Hi said, drowning the other voice out. "Central nervous stimulants. Cold beer."

  "Very good, sir."

  The old man appeared again, moving like an upended steamer trunk on wheels. He was naked. Seeing Misty he paused, embarrassed.

  "I'm having my clothes cleaned."

  "Don't worry," Sta-Hi put in. "She's just a robot-remote."

  Cobb ignored that, peeled a sheet off the bed and wrapped it around his waist. He was a hairy man, and most of the hair was white. His stomach looked bigger with the clothes off.

  Just then breakfast slid out of the wall and onto the table between the beds. "To your health," Cobb said, taking one of the beers. It had a kick to it, and left him momentarily dizzy. He took a plate of the scrambled... eggs?... and sat down on his bed.

  "He doesn't know what a robot-remote is," Sta-Hi said to Misty.

  Mouth full, Cobb glared at him until he had swallowed. "Of course I do, Sta-Hi. Can't you get it through your drug-addled noggin that I was at one time a famous man? That I, Cobb Anderson, am responsible for the robots having evolved into boppers?"

  Something on the girl's face changed. And then Cobb remembered their cover story.

  "The ears have walls," Sta-Hi remarked. "You shit-head."

  Cobb glared again, and continued eating in silence. So what if some of the boppers found out who he was, anyway. They couldn't all be against him getting immortality. Maybe the hotel didn't even care. He had slept well in the low lunar gravity. He felt ready for anything.

  Having learned that Cobb Anderson was here in the room with her, Misty... that is to say the bopper brain in the nose of the spaceship... took certain steps. But meanwhile she carried on a conversation with Sta-Hi.

  "Why do you say just a robot-remote? As if I were less than human. Would you say that about a woman with an artificial leg? Or a glass eye? I just happen to be all artificial."

  "Stuzzy, Misty. I can wave with it. But as long as BEX has the final word, and I think he does, you're really just a puppet being run by..."

  "What do you call yourself?" Misty interrupted angrily. "Sta-Hi? What a stupid name! It sounds like a brand-name for panty-hose!"

  "Personal insults," Sta-Hi said, shaking his head. "What next?"

  "It is now 0830 hours," the hotel interrupted. "May I remind you of your stated intent to get the 0900 bus to the robotics museum?"

  "Will we need pressure suits?" Cobb asked.

  "They will be provided."

  "Let's go then," Misty said.

  Sta-Hi exchanged a glance with Cobb. "Look Misty... this is likely to be a sort of sentimental journey for the old man. I wonder if you could just... fade. Maybe we'll be back here by lunchtime."

  "Fade?" Misty cried, angrily flouncing across the room. "Too bad there's not a toggle switch on the top of my head! Then you wouldn't even have to ask me to leave. You creep!" She slammed the door very hard.

  "Ouch," the hotel said softly.

  "Why did you get rid of her?" Cobb asked. "She's cute. And I don't think she'd try to stand in my way."

  "You bet she wouldn't," Sta-Hi answered. "Do you realize what the boppers are really planning to do to us?"

  "They're going to give me some kind of immortality drug," Cobb said happily. "And maybe some new organs as well. And as for you, well..."

  Cobb didn't like to tell the younger man that he was only here because the boppers had wanted him out of the way. But before he could tell him about Sta-Hi2 using Mooney's influence to get a night watchman job at the warehouse, Sta-Hi had started talking.

  "Immortality. What they want to do, old man, is to cut out our brains and grind them up and squeeze all the information out. They'll store our personalities on tapes in some kind of library. And if we're lucky, they might send copies of the tapes down to Earth to help run those two robot-remotes. But that's not..."

  "BUS TOUR PARTICIPANTS MUST PROCEED TO THE LOBBY IMMEDIATELY!" the hotel-room blared, interrupting Sta-Hi.

  Cobb was galvanized into activity by this. He hurried out to the elevators, dragging Sta-Hi with him. It was like he didn't want to hear the truth. Or didn't care. And Sta-Hi? He came along. Now that the hotel knew that he knew, he wouldn't be safe in it. He'd have to try to make his break in the museum.

  The tour-bus was about half-full. Most of the others were ageing rich folks, singles and couples. Everyone was wearing a bubble-top pressure suit. They were supple, lovely things... made of a limp clear plastic that sparkled with a sort of inner light. In the shade, a person in a bubble-topper looked normal, except for the mild halo that seemed to surround his head. But the suits turned reflective in sunlight.

  The bus was a wire-wheeled flat-car surmounted by two rows of grotesquely functional seats. Each seat consisted of three black balls of hard rubber mounted on a bent Y of stiff plastic. To Sta-Hi, his seat looked like Mickey Mouse's head... with everything but the nose and ears invisible. He half-expected a squeak of protest when he lowered his body down onto it.

  As they pulled clear of the dome a sudden crackle of static split his helmet.

  "We've got an AOK on that, Houston. We are proceeding to deploy the egression facility."

  Breathing, a fizzling whine, another voice.

  "I am leaving the vehicle."

  Pause.

  "Got a little problem with the steps here."

  Long pause.

  "We read you, Neal." Faint, encouraging.

  Big crackle.

  "-at's one small step for man, giant step for humanity."

  Synthetic cheering washed out the voices. Sta-Hi turned to Cobb, trying to catch a glimpse of his face. But now there was no way to see in through the other's bubble-topper. Their suits had turned mirror-like as soon as they'd left the shade of the dome.

  The bopper bus continued with its taped "Sounds of Lunar Discovery" as they approached Disky. The key moon-landings were all dramatized, as were the attempts at human settlement, the dome blow-outs, and the first semi-autonomous robots. When Disky was about 500 meters off, the transcendentally bland voice on the tape reached its finale.

  "Nineteen Ninety-Five! Ralph Numbers and twelve other self-reproducing robots are set free in the Sea of Tranquility! Learn the rest of the story in the robotics museum!" There was a click and a longish pause.

  Sta-Hi stared at the buildings of Disky, filling the small horizon. Here and there, boppers moved about, just small glittering lights at this distance.

  Suddenly the bus's real voice sounded in their earphones. "Good morning, fleshers. I am circumscribing Disky through fifty-eight degrees to reach our entry ray. Please to be restful and asking questions. My label Captain Cody in this context. Do brace for shear."

  Hardly slowing down, the vehicle swerved sharply to the right. The Y-seats swayed far over. Too far. Sta-Hi grabbed Cobb's arm. If he fell off, nothing would stop him from rolling under those big, flexing wheels. You had the feeling that "Captain Cody" wouldn't even slow down. For a minute the seats wobbled back and forth. Now the bus was driving along the outskirts of Disky, circling the city counterclockwi
se.

  "How many boppers live here?" came some oldster's voice over the earphones. No answer.

  The voice tried again. "How many boppers live in Disky, Captain Cody?"

  "I am researching this information," came the reply. The bus's voice was high and musical. Definitely alien-sounding. Everyone waited in silence for the population figure.

  A large building slid by on their left. The sides were open, and inside you could see stacked sheets of some material. A bopper standing at the edge stared at them, its head slowly tracking their forward motion.

  "What precision is required?" the bus asked then.

  "I don't know," the old questioner crackled uncertainly. "Zuh... zero precision? Does that make sense?"

  "Thank you," the bus chortled. "With zero precision, is no boppers living in Disky. Or ten to sixty-third power."

  Boppers were notorious for their nit-picking literal-mindedness when talking to humans. It was just another of their many ways of being hostile. They had never quite forgiven people for the three Asimov laws that the original designers had... unsuccessfully, thanks to Cobb... tried to build into the boppers. They viewed every human as a thwarted Simon Legree.

  For a while after that, no one asked Captain Cody any more questions. Disky was big ... perhaps as big as Manhattan. The bus kept a scrupulous five hundred meters from the nearest buildings at all times, but even from that distance one could make out the wild diversity of the city.

  It was a little as if the entire history of Western civilization had occurred in one town over the course of thirty years. Squeezed against each other were structures of every conceivable type: primitive, classical, baroque, gothic, renaissance, industrial, art nouveau, functionalist, late funk, zapper, crepuscular, flat-flat, hyperdee ... all in perfect repair. Darting among the buildings were myriads of the brightly colored boppers, creatures clad in flickering light.

  "How come the buildings are so different?" Sta-Hi blurted "Captain Cody?"

  "What category of cause your requirements?" the bus sing-songed.

  "State the categories, Captain Cody," Sta-Hi shot back, determined not to fall into the same trap as the last questioner.

  "WHY QUESTION," the bus answered in a gloating tone, "Answer Categories: Material Cause, Situational Cause, Teleological Cause. Material Cause Subcategories: Spacetime, Mass-energy. Situational Cause Sub-categories: Information, Noise. Teleological Cause Subcategories ..."

  Sta-Hi stopped listening. Not being able to see anyone's face was making him uptight. Everyone's bubble-topper had gone as silvery as a Christmas-tree ball. The round heads reflected Disky and each others' reflections in endless regresses. How long had they been on the bus?

  "Informational Situational Cause Subsubcategories:" the bus continued, with insultingly precise intonation, "Analog, Digital. Noisy ..."

  Sta-Hi sighed and leaned back in his seat. It was not a short ride.

  Chapter Twelve

  The museum was underground, under Disky. It was laid out in a pattern of concentric circles intersected by rays. Something like Dante's Inferno. Cobb felt a tightening in his chest as he walked down the sloping stone ramp. His cheap, second-hand heart felt like it might blow out any minute.

  The more he thought about it, the likelier it seemed that what Sta-Hi said was true. There was no immortality drug. The boppers were going to tape his brain and put him in a robot body. But with the body he had now, that might not be so bad.

  The idea of having his brain-patterns extracted and transferred didn't terrify Cobb as it did Sta-Hi. For Cobb understood the principles of robot consciousness. The transition would be weird and wrenching. But if all went well...

  "It's on the right down there," Sta-Hi said, pressing his bubble-topper against Cobb's. He held a little engraved stone map in his hand. They were looking for the Anderson room.

  As they walked down the hall the exhibits sprang to life. Mostly hollows... holograms with voice-overs broadcast directly to the suits' radios. A thin little man wearing a dark suit over a wool vest appeared in front of them. Kurt Gödel it said under his feet. He had dark-rimmed glasses and silvery hair. Behind him was a blackboard with a statement of his famous Incompleteness Theorem.

  "The human mind is incapable of formulating (or mechanizing) all its mathematical intuitions," Gödel's image stated. He had a way of ending his phrases on a rising note which chattered into an amused hum.

  "On the other hand, on the basis of what has been proved so far, it remains possible that there may exist (and even be empirically discoverable) a theorem-proving machine which in fact is equivalent to mathematical intuition ..."

  "What's he talking about?" Sta-Hi demanded.

  Cobb had stopped to watch the hollow of the great master. He still remembered the years he had spent brooding over the passage which was being recited. Humans can't build a robot as smart as themselves. But, logically speaking, it is possible for such robots to exist.

  How? Cobb had asked himself throughout the 1970's, How can we bring into existence the robots which we can't design? In 1980 he had the bare bones of an answer. One of his colleagues had written the paper up for Speculations in Science and Technology. "Towards Robot Consciousness," he'd called it. The idea had all been there. Let the robots evolve. But fleshing the idea out to an actual...

  "Let's go," Sta-Hi urged, tugging Cobb through G6-del's talking hollow.

  Beyond, two frightened lizards scampered down the hallway. A leathery-winged creature came zooming up the hall towards them, and darted its scissoring beak at the lizards. One of the little beasts escaped with a quick back-flip, but the other was carried off over Cobb and Sta-Hi's heads, dripping pale blood.

  "Survival of the Fittest," an announcer's mellow voice intoned. "One of the two great forces driving the engine of evolution."

  In speeded-up motion, the little lizard laid a clutch of eggs, the eggs hatched, and new lizards grew and whisked around. The predator returned, the survivors laid eggs... over and over the cycle repeated. Each time the lizards were more agile, and with stronger rear legs. In a few minutes' time they were hopping about like loathsome little kangaroos, fork-tongued and yellow-eyed.

  It was Cobb who had to urge them past this exhibit. Sta-Hi wanted to stick around and see what the lizards would come up with next.

  Stepping out of the prehistoric scene, they found themselves on a carnival midway. Rifles cracked and pinball machines chimed, people laughed and shrieked, and under it all was the visceral throb of heavy machinery. The floor seemed to be covered with sawdust now; and grinning, insubstantial bumpkins ambled past. A boy and girl leaned against a cotton-candy stand, feeding each other bits of popcorn with shiny fingers. He had a prominent Adam's apple and a bumpy nose. A sine-wave profile. She wore a high, blonde pony-tail fastened by a mini-blinker. The only jarring note was a hard rain of tiny purplish lights... which seemed to pass right through everything in the scene. At first Cobb took it for static.

  To their right was a huge marquee with lurid paintings of distorted human forms. The inevitable barker... checked suit, bowler, cigar-butt... leaned down at them, holding out his thin cane for attention.

  "See the Freaks, Feel the Geeks!" His loud, hoarse voice was like a crowd screaming. "Pinheads! The Dog-Boy! Pencil-Necks! The Human Lima Bean! Half-Man-Half-..." Slowly the carnival noises damped down, and were replaced by the rich, round tones of the voice-over.

  "Mutation. " The voice was resonant, lip-smackingly conclusive. "The second key to the evolutionary process."

  The zippy little dots of purple light grew brighter. They passed right through everyone on the midway... especially those two lovers, french-kissing now, hips touching.

  "The human reproductive cells are subjected to a continual barrage of ionizing radiation," the voice said earnestly. "We call these the cosmic rays."

  The carnival noises faded back in now. And each of the fast little lights made a sound like a slide-whistle when it passed. The two kissing lovers began slowly to gr
ow larger, crowding out the rest of the scene. Soon an image of the swain's bulging crotch filled the hallway. The cloth ripped loose and a single huge testicle enveloped Cobb and Sta-Hi, standing there mesmerized.

  Hazy red light, the heavy, insistent sound of a heartbeat. Every so often a cosmic ray whistled through. An impression of pipes-a 3-D maze of plumbing which grew and blurred around them. Gradually the blur became grainy, and the grains grew. They were looking at cells now, reproductive cells. The nucleus of one of them waxed to hover in front of Cobb and Sta-Hi.

  With a sudden, crab-like movement the nuclear material split into striped writhing sausages. The chromosomes. But now a cosmic ray cut one of the chromosomes in half! The two halves joined up again, but with one piece reversed!

  "Geek gene," a hillbilly muttered somewhere in the nearly infinite fairground. And then the pictures went out. They were in a down-sloping stone hallway.

  "Selection and Mutation," Cobb said as they walked on. "That was my big idea, Sta-Hi. To make the robots evolve. They were designed to build copies of themselves, but they had to fight over the parts. Natural selection. And I found a way of jiggering their programs with cosmic rays. Mutation. But to predict..."

  Just ahead, a door branched off to the right. "This is your meet," Sta-Hi said, consulting his map. "The Cobb Anderson Room."

  Chapter Thirteen

  Looking in, our two heroes could see nothing but darkness, and a dimly glowing red polygon. They stepped through the door and the exhibit came on.

  "We cannot build an intelligent robot," a voice stated firmly. "But we can cause one to evolve." A hollow of the young Cobb Anderson walked past banks of computers to meet the visitors.

  "This is where I grew the first bopper programs," the recorded voice continued. The hollow smiled confidently, engagingly. "No one can write a bopper program... they're too complicated. So instead I set thousands of simple AI programs loose in there," he gestured familiarly at the computers. "There were lots of ... fitness tests, with the weaker programs getting wiped. And every so often all the surviving programs were randomly changed... mutated. I even provided for a sort of... sexual reproduction, where two programs could merge. After fifteen years, I..."