IT WAS NOT A DIRECT FIGHT. Andrew had given Simon DeLong the clue to the right strategy to use, and Andrew agreed with the tactic; but it was DeLong’s considered professional opinion that the campaign was going to be roundabout and slow. DeLong counseled patience.
“I have an endless supply of that, I suppose,” Andrew muttered grimly.
Feingold and Charney then entered into a campaign to narrow and restrict the area of combat.
A certain Roger Hennessey of San Francisco, who had been the recipient of a Martin prosthetic heart seven years before, had supplied robot janitorial services to the Feingold and Charney offices under a contract that had been in effect since the days of Paul Charney. Abruptly Feingold and Charney stopped paying Hennessey’s bills. The account was a good one and it went back many years, so for a time Hennessey said nothing about it. But when five months of unpaid bills had piled up, Hennessey found an occasion to stop by at Feingold and Charney to have a chat with Simon DeLong.
“I’m sure you’re not aware of it, Simon, but something seems to have gone wrong with your accounting procedures lately. What I mean is, my invoices have been sitting here open since December, and it’s coming up on June now, and--”
“Yes. I know.”
“--it really isn’t at all like Feingold and Charney to let an account run 80--” Hennessey paused and blinked. “What did you say? You know, Simon?”
“Yes. The account has gone unpaid on my direct instructions, as a matter of fact.”
Still blinking in astonishment, Hennessey said, “I must be losing my hearing. Or else you’re starting to lose your mind, Simon. Did you actually say you’re deliberately withholding payment?”
“That’s right.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Because we don’t want to pay you.”
“What do you mean, you don’t want to pay me? Do you know how many years my robots have been cleaning these offices, Simon ? Have you ever had the slightest reason in all that time to complain about the quality of the work?”
“Never. And we intend to retain your services just as before. But we’re not going to pay you any more, Roger.”
Hennessey scratched his head and stared. “You’ve gone completely around the bend, haven’t you? To sit there with a straight face and tell me a crazy thing like that? You know that what you’re saying is absolute malarkey, so why are you saying it? What’s the matter with you, man? How in the name of God’s green Earth can you speak such insane drivel?”
DeLong smiled. “There’s quite a good reason for it.”
“And what may that be, can I dare to ask?”
DeLong said, “We aren’t going to pay you because we don’t have to. We’ve decided that your contract with us is invalid, and from now on your robots are going to work for us for nothing if they go on working here at all. That’s the story, Roger. If you don’t like it, sue us.”
“What? What?” Hennessey cried, sputtering. “This gets crazier and crazier. Work for nothing? Back pay withheld? You people are lawyers! How can you let yourself spout such cockeyed nonsense? Contract invalid? For heaven’s sake, why?”
“Because you’re a robot, Roger. There’s only one robot in the world who has the right to enter into binding contracts, and his name is Andrew Martin. The rest of you, because you are not free robots, have no legal right to enforce”
Hennessey turned bright scarlet and rose from his chair. “Hold it just a moment, you damned lunatic! Hold it right there! What are you saying? A robot? Me? Now I know you’re out of your mind!” Hennessey ripped open the ornate body-cummerbund he was wearing to reveal his pink, hairy chest. “Does this look to you like a robot’s chest, man? Does it? Does it?” Hennessey pinched his own abundant flesh. “Is this robot meat, Simon? Damn it, I can’t even begin to understand any of this, but I tell you, if you think you can sit there like that and make a figure of fun out of me for your own perverse pleasure, I’ll sue you people, all right, I’ll sue you black and blue from here to Mars and back, by God, and I’ll see to it that you--”
DeLong was laughing.
Hennessey halted in mid-flow and said icily, “What’s so damned amusing, Simon?”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be laughing. I owe you a tremendous apology for letting this go on so long.”
“I think you do. I don’t expect lawyers to have much of a sense of humor, but a dumb joke like this--”
“It isn’t a joke, though. We really are going to withhold your fees, Roger. We really do want you to take us to court. Our argument indeed is going to be that you are a robot, and that therefore it is quite within the law for us to thumb our collective nose at our contract with you. And we will defend our position with all the skill at our disposal.”
“Will you, now?”
“But it is our profound hope, and our intention as well,” DeLong went on, “to lose the suit. And when we do, you’ll not only be paid the back fees that we owe you, which will be placed in escrow for you accruing interest, but we will pay all your legal fees as well, and I can tell you, strictly off the record, that there’ll be a considerable bonus payment for you besides to compensate you for any incidental difficulties that this case may cause you. A very considerable bonus payment.”
Hennessey adjusted his cummerbund and took his seat again. He blinked a few more times and shook his head. He peered at DeLong for a time in silence.
Then he said quietly, “I’m truly sorry for your troubles, Simon. You really have gone completely out of your mind, then. What a great pity that is.”
“Not at all. I’m as sane as I ever was.”
“Ah. Are you, do you think?”
“Absolutely.”
“In that case, do you have any objection to telling me what this is all about?”
“I’m afraid it would be improper for us to disclose that to you in advance of the litigation. But I will say, Roger, that we have an excellent reason for it all, which will make sense to you in the fullness of time, and I hope that you’ll cooperate with us even in the dark, so to speak, out of consideration for your long relationship with us. We need you to play along with us, Roger, and we’ll take care of you properly afterward.”
Hennessey nodded. He looked a little relieved.
“So it’s all a maneuver of some sort, then?”
“You could call it that, I suppose.”
“But you won’t tell me what’s going on?”
“No. Not now. That would be too much like entering into a conspiracy with you.”
“But you are entering into a conspiracy with me!”
DeLong grinned. “ Are we? All we’re doing is refusing to pay your bill. Bear with us, Roger. You won’t regret it. You have my promise.”
“Well--” said Hennessey, grudgingly.
Hennessey’s bill continued to go unpaid. After three months more Hennessey duly notified Feingold and Charney that he could no longer carry their account. He canceled their service contract and filed suit for back charges. Feingold and Charney arranged for a temporary janitorial service to clean the office, and let the Court know that it was ready to defend its position.
When the case of Hennessey vs. Feingold and Charney came to trial, it was one of the junior partners who made the argument in court. He said, simply, that inasmuch as Roger Hennessey could be shown to be a robot rather than a human being Feingold and Charney felt under no obligation to go on honoring its service contract, and had unilaterally abrogated it.
The robot Hennessey, the lawyer continued, had gone on sending in his robot janitorial crews for another few months even so, but Feingold and Charney had not asked him to do so and did not believe that payment was necessary, or that Hennessey, as a robot, had any legal right to force them to pay. Robots, the junior partner pointed out, had none of the constitutional protections that human beings enjoyed. In disputes over contracts involving robots, only their owners could sue, not the robots themselves.
“But my client is not a robot!” Hennessey’s lawyer thundered. “It’s as plain as the nose on my client’s face that he’s as human as any of us here!”
“Your client,” the Feingold and Charney man replied, “was equipped some years ago with a robotic prosthetic heart, is that not the case?”
“Why--possibly he was. I’d need to check with him on that. But what possible relevance can this--”
“It is quite relevant, I assure you. And I respectfully request the Court to obtain a determination on this point.”
The judge looked toward Hennessey. “Well, Mr. Hennessey?”
“I’ve got a prosthetic ticker, sure. But what--”
The Feingold and Charney man said, “Our position, your honor, is that the presence of a life-sustaining mechanical artifact of that kind in Mr. Hennessey’s body changes his entire legal status. It is reasonable to argue that he would not be alive today but for the robotic component of his body. We proceed to assert, therefore, that the partly prosthetic Mr. Hennessey is in fact a robot and has been for some years now, and therefore that all contracts into which he may have entered as a human being became null and void when he attained the status of a robot.”
“So that’s it!” Hennessey muttered. “Well, may I be dipped! The heart makes me a robot, they say? Do they, now? Do they?” And he threw back his head and began to laugh.
The uproar in the courtroom was tremendous. The judge pounded his gavel and shouted, but he could scarcely be heard for minutes. Then at last what he was saying came through the furor. The case was dismissed, with a directed verdict in favor of the plaintiff. Mr. Roger Hennesseywhom the Court found to be undeniably human--was entitled to his janitorial fees plus interest plus additional compensation.
Feingold and Charney appealed.
The case had a more elaborate debate at the appellate level, with expert witnesses called in to discuss definitions of humanity. The issue was approached from every angle--scientific, theological, semantic, philosophic.
The verdict in favor of Hennessey was affirmed.
Feingold and Charney appealed again.
They fought the matter skillfully and tenaciously, losing at every step but always in such a way that the issue widened steadily, from a simple Shall Hennessey’s bill be paid? to, ultimately, What is a human being? At each level they forced the decision to be as broad as possible.
It took years, and millions of dollars. Eventually the case reached the jurisdiction of the World Court.
Which affirmed the original Hennessey ruling and upheld all the accreted rulings having to do with the valid human status of individuals in whom robotic prostheses had been installed. It is the brain, the World Court declared, that is the highest determinant of humanity. The use of auxiliary devices to sustain the life of the brain can in no way invalidate the fundamental and inalienable humanity of that brain. It is unacceptable, the Court said, to argue that the presence of robotic prostheses within a human being’s body gives that person the status of a robot.
When the final decision was handed down, Simon DeLong held what amounted to a victory celebration over the definitive legal defeat. Andrew was, of course, present in the company offices for the great occasion.
“Well, Andrew, we can feel completely satisfied. We’ve accomplished the two things we set out to do. First of all, we have managed to establish the legal point that no number of prosthetic artifacts in the human body causes it to cease being a human body. Secondly, we have engaged public opinion in the question in such a way as to put it fiercely on the side of a broad and loose interpretation of who is human--since there isn’t a human being in existence, on this world or any other, who doesn’t expect to enjoy a greatly extended life-span as a result of the availability of a wide array of prosthetic devices.”
“And do you think the Legislature will now grant me my humanity?” Andrew asked.
DeLong looked a little uneasy.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
“Is that the best you can offer, after all these years of legal struggle?”
DeLong said, “I wish that I could be as optimistic as you’d like me to be. But the real battle isn’t won yet. There remains the one organ which the World Court has used as the criterion of humanity.”
“The mind.”
“The brain, Andrew. That’s what the Court singled out, not the mind. The mind is an abstract concept; the brain is a bodily organ. And human beings have organic cellular brains whereas robots have a platinum-iridium positronic brain if they have one at all--and you certainly have a positronic brain. --No, Andrew, don’t get that look in your eye. I know what you’re thinking. But I’ve been assured that we lack the knowledge to duplicate the functions of a cellular brain in an artificial structure that would be close enough to the organic type to allow it to fall within the Court decision. Not even you could do it.”
“What should we do, then?”
“Make the attempt, of course. Congresswoman Chee will be on our side and so will a growing number of other Legislators. The World Coordinator will undoubtedly go along with whatever a majority of the Legislature decides.”
“Do we have a majority?”
“No,” DeLong said. “Far from it. But we might manage to put one together if the public will allow its desire for a broad interpretation of humanity to extend to you. A small chance, I admit. But you are, after all, the man who gave them the prosthetics on which their lives now depend.”
Andrew smiled. “The man, is that what you said?”
“That’s what I said, yes. Isn’t that what we’ve been fighting for, Andrew?”
“Of course.”
“Then we might as well begin thinking that way here. And carry our thinking onward and outward to the rest of the world until everyone else agrees. It won’t be easy, Andrew. None of this has been, and there’s no reason to think it will get any better. The odds are very much against us, I warn you. But unless you want to give up, we have to take the gamble.”
“I don’t want to give up,” Andrew said.
CONGRESSWOMAN CHEE LI-HSING was considerably older now than she had been when Andrew first met her. No longer did she indulge in the coquettishness of shimmering transparent garments. She was dressed in somewhat more chaste tubular coverings, now. Her once lustrous black hair was streaked with gray, and she wore it cut much shorter.
Andrew, though, had of course not changed at all. His face was as unlined as ever; his soft, fine hair was still brown. And he clung, as closely as he could within the limits of reasonable taste, to the loose style of clothing that had prevailed when he first adopted clothing over a century before.
It was late in the year. The harsh chill winds of winter were blowing through the ancient canyons of New York and faint wisps of snow were swirling through the air above the giant gleaming tower that housed the World Legislature. The Legislature’s wordy struggles were over for the season.
But for Andrew the struggle never seemed to reach its end. The debate had gone on and on--the angry, baffled Legislators had tried to take all possible sides of the issue--the voting public, unable to come to any clear philosophical position, had fallen back on emotion, on primordial fear, on the deepest-rooted of uncertainties and prejudices
Congresswoman Chee had withdrawn her bill, had modified it substantially to take into account the stubborn opposition that it had run into. But she had not yet offered it again to the Legislature.
“What do you think?” Andrew asked. “Will you introduce the revised bill in the new session or not?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“You know what I want you to do.”
Li-hsing nodded, a little wearily. “I told you once, Andrew, that your cause was not really my cause, and that I might have to abandon it if I felt my career was at stake. Well, my career is at stake. And I still haven’t abandoned you.”
“And do you still feel that my cause isn’t your cause?”
“No. It has become my cause. I have no doubt that you are human, Andrew--perhaps made so by your own hand, but human all the same. And I understand that to deny the humanity of a single member of our kind is to raise the renewed possibility of denying humanity to whole multitudes, as was done all too often in our ugly past. We must never permit that to happen again. But even so--even so, Andrew--”
She faltered for a moment.
“Go on,” Andrew said. “Now comes the point where you tell me that you have to abandon me despite everything, isn’t that right, Li-hsing?”
“I didn’t say that. But we have to be realistic. I think we’ve gone as far as we can go.”
“So you won’t introduce the revised bill.”
“I didn’t say that, either. I intend to give it one more try after recess. But to be honest, Andrew, we can’t win. Look at the numbers.” She touched a button and a screen came to life on the wall of her office. “The group on the left side of the chart, the section in green--those are the members who are unalterably opposed to any kind of loosening of the definitions. That’s just about 40% of the Legislature: immovable, permanently committed to opposing you. The segment marked in red: there are your supporters. 28%. The rest are the undecided ones.”
“In two different colors? Why is that?”
“Yellow is the group that’s undecided but leaning in your direction. That’s a 12.5% slice. Blue is undecided against you. That’s 19.5%.”
“I see.”
“In order to get a majority, we need to keep every single one of the undecideds in the yellow slice of the chart, and win over more than half of those who are still on the fence but currently thinking of voting against you. Plus, of course, retaining the solid support of your basic 28% group. Even if we can manage to win over a few of your diehard opponents, I don’t think we can put together the vote, Andrew.”
Andrew said, “Then why bother even bringing the bill up for debate?”
“Because I owe you that much. As you can see, it isn’t going to work, and I’m afraid this is going to be my last try. Not because I’m walking away from the fight--not at all--but because I’m not going to be in a position any longer where I can stay in it. Everything that I’ve been doing on your behalf is going to be wrapped around my neck at the next election and it’s going to pull me down to defeat. I have no doubt of that. I’m going to lose my seat.”
“I know,” said Andrew, “and it distresses me. For your sake, not for mine. You saw it coming long ago, didn’t you, Li-hsing? And yet you stayed with me. Why? Why, after telling me at the start that you’d drop me if you found that I was endangering your career? Why didn’t you?”
“One can change one’s mind, you know. Somehow, Andrew, abandoning you involved paying a higher price than I was willing to pay for the sake of winning just one more term. As it is, I’ve been in the Legislature for over a quarter of a century. That’s long enough, I think.”
“But if your mind could change, why not the minds of the others?”
“We’ve changed all that are amenable to reason. The rest--and it’s a majority of them, I’m sorry to say--simply can’t be moved. It’s a matter of deep-rooted emotional antipathy.”
“Theirs, or the people who voted for them?”
“Some of each. Even those members of the Legislature who are more or less rational themselves tend now and then to assume that their constituents aren’t. But I’m afraid that plenty of them have powerful antipathies of their own, when it comes to anything robotic.”
“And is relying on emotional antipathy a valid way for a Legislator to decide how to vote?”
“Oh, Andrew--”
“Yes. How terribly naive of me to say a thing like that.”
“Naive isn’t the right word. But you know that they’d never admit they were voting their emotions. They’d offer this or that carefully reasoned-out explanation for their decision--something about the economy, or an analogy from Roman history, or some antiquated religious argument--anything but the truth. But what does it matter? It’s how they’ll vote that counts, not why they do it.”
“It all comes down to the question of the structure of the brain, then--isn’t that so?”
“That’s the problem, yes.”
Andrew said cautiously, “I don’t see why that should be such a sticking point for them. What a brain is made of isn’t the essential thing: it’s how the brain functions. Its thought patterns, its reaction time, its ability to reason and to generalize from experience. Why does the whole issue have to be drawn down to the level of organic cells versus positrons? Is there no way of pushing through a functional definition?”
“Functional?”
“My brain does everything that an officially legal human brain can do --does it better, in many ways, faster, more directly, more logically. Perhaps that’s what bothers them. Well, it’s too late for me to start hiding my intelligence, if that’s the problem. But must we go on insisting that a human brain has to be made of some officially approved cellular substance in order to be legally human? Can’t we simply stipulate that a human brain is something--anything, organic or not--that is capable of attaining a certain complex level of thought?”
“It won’t work,” said Li-hsing.
“Because if we defined humanity by brain function alone, too many humans would fall below the stipulated level of intellectual ability?” Andrew asked bitterly. “Is that it?”
“Andrew, Andrew, Andrew! Listen to me: there are those who are determined to keep a barrier up between themselves and robots at any cost. For the sake of their own self-esteem, if nothing else, they want to believe that they belong to the only true and lawful human race and that robots are some sort of inferior creatures. You’ve spent the past hundred years beating those people back, and you’ve won your way through to a status that would have been utterly inconceivable in the early years of robotics. But now they’ve got you on an issue where you can’t win. You’ve put yourself inside a body that for all intents and purposes is close enough to being human as makes no real difference. You eat, you breathe, you sweat. You go to fine restaurants and order splendid meals and drink the best wines, I’ve noticed, though I can’t imagine what value that can have for you other than for appearance’s sake.”
“That is value enough for me,” said Andrew.
“All right. Plenty of humans probably can’t appreciate the expensive wines they drink either, but they drink them all the same, and for the same reason you do. Your organs are all artificial, but by now so are many of theirs. Quite possibly there are people out there living in bodies that are virtually identical to yours, wholesale artificial replacements for the ones they were born with. But they aren’t complete replacements, Andrew. Nobody has a prosthetic brain. No one can. And so you differ from everyone else in one fundamental respect. Your brain is man-made, the human brain is not. Your brain was constructed, theirs was naturally developed. They were born, you were assembled. To any human being who is intent on keeping up the barrier between himself and robots, those differences are like a steel wall five kilometers high and five kilometers thick.”
“You aren’t telling me anything I don’t know. My brain is different in composition from theirs, certainly. But not in its function, not really. Quantitatively different, maybe, but not qualitatively. It’s just a brain--a very good brain. They’re merely using the positronic-vs. cellular issue as a pretext to keep from admitting that what I am is a human being of a kind somewhat different from them. --No, Li-hsing, if we could somehow get at their antipathy toward me because of my robotic origins--the very source of all their hostility--this mysterious need they have to proclaim themselves superior to someone who is by every reasonable definition superior to them--”
“After all your years,” said Li-hsing sadly, “you are still trying to reason out the human being. Poor Andrew, don’t be angry at me for saying this, but it’s the robot in you that drives you in that direction.”
“You know that there’s very little left of the robot in me by this time.”
“But there’s some.”
“Some, yes. And if I were to get rid of that--”
Chee Li-hsing shot him a look of alarm. “What are you saying, Andrew?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I have an idea. The problem is, Li-hsing, that I have human feelings trapped within a robot mind. But that doesn’t make me human, only an unhappy robot. Even after all that has been done to improve my robot body, I’m still not human. But there’s one more step that can be taken. If I could bring myself--if I could only bring myself--”
IF HE COULD ONLY bring hirnself--
And now he had, finally.
Andrew had asked Chee Li-hsing to hold off as long as possible before bringing her revised bill to the World Legislature floor for debate and vote, because he planned to undertake a project in the very near future that might have some significant impact on the issue. And no, Andrew said, he didn’t care to discuss the details of the project with her. It was a highly technical thing; she wasn’t likely to understand, and he wasn’t at the moment willing to take the time to explain it to her. But it would make him more human, he insisted. That was the essential detail, the only thing she really needed to know. It would make him more human.
She said she would do the best she could to give him enough time for this mysterious project of his, though she sounded puzzled and concerned.
Andrew thanked her, and set out at once to have a little talk with the highly acclaimed robot surgeon whom he had chosen to do the work. It was a difficult conversation. Andrew found himself putting off the moment of decision for a long while with a sad line of questioning that reflected the turmoil within himself, while the surgeon grew more and more confused by the unusual and probably impossible nature of what Andrew seemed to be asking him to do.
The First Law of Robotics was the obstacle: the immutable law that prevented a robot from harming a human being in any way. And so at last Andrew could delay things no longer, and brought himself to admit the one necessary fact that made it possible for the robot surgeon to perform the operation, the one thing that the surgeon had not suspected: Andrew’s own proper status as something other than a human being.
The surgeon said, “I don’t believe I understood you correctly, sir. You claim that you are a robot yourself?”
“That is precisely what I am.”
The surgeon’s facial expression, calm and impassive as ever, could not and did not change. But the set stare of his glowing photoelectric eyes somehow managed to reveal great internal distress and Andrew could tell that the surgeon’s positronic brain was being swept by troublesome conflicting potentials.
He said, after a little while, “I would not presume to contradict you, sir. But I must tell you that I see nothing at all robotic about your external appearance.”
“You are correct. My external appearance has been altered extensively to make me appear human. But that does not mean I am human. Indeed, I have put myself to a great deal of extraordinary legal expense over the past few years for the sake of clarifying my status and it appears, after all of that, that I remain a robot, despite everything.”
“I would never have thought it, sir.”
“No. You never would.”
Andrew had not selected this surgeon for his dazzling personality, his quick wit, his readiness to cope with difficult social situations. None of that was important. What mattered was his skill as a surgeon, and by all accounts he had plenty of that. And also that he was a robot. A robot surgeon was the only possible choice for what Andrew had in mind, for no human surgeon could be trusted in this connection, neither in ability nor in intention. The robot could do the job.
The robot would do the job, too. Andrew intended to see to that.
“As I have told you, sir--”
“Stop calling me sir!”
The robot halted, plainly perplexed. Then he began again. “ As I have told you, Mr. Martin, to perform an operation such as you request on a human being would be a blatant violation of the First Law and I could in no way carry it out. But if you are, as you claim, a robot, then there is still a problem. Performing the operation would constitute inflicting damage on property, you see, and I would be unable to do it except at the direct instructions of your owner.”
“I am my owner,” Andrew said. “I’m a free robot and I have the papers to prove it.”
“A--free--robot?”
“Listen to me,” Andrew said. He was seething with inner anguish now and his own positronic mind was being swept by troublesome potentials indeed. “Enough of this chatter. I won’t pretend to be human, and you’d discover soon enough when you operated that I’m not, anyway, so we can leave First Law considerations entirely out of this. But Second Law will apply. I am a free robot and you will do as I say. You will not oppose my wishes. Is that clear?” And he declared, with all the firmness that he had learned how to use even with human beings over these past decades, “I order you to carry out this operation on me.”
The robot surgeon’s red eyes turned brighter than ever with inner confusion and conflict and for a long moment he was unable to reply.
Andrew knew what the surgeon must be going through. Before him was a man who insisted that he was not a man, or else a robot who claimed to have as much authority over him as a human being, and either way the surgeon’s pathways must be abuzz with incomprehension.
If this were indeed a man, then First Law would override Second and the surgeon could not accept the commission. But if this were a robot, did Second Law govern the situation or not? What was there in Second Law that gave one robot the right to order another one around--even a free robot? This was a robot, though, who denied being a man but looked entirely like one. That was an almost incomprehensible situation. The ambiguity of it was probably overwhelming the surgeon’s positronic pathways. All his visual responses were crying out that his visitor was human; his mind was trying to process the datum that his visitor was not. The visual evidence would tend to activate the First and Second Laws, the other evidence would not.
Faced with chaotic contradictions of that sort, it was conceivable that the surgeon’s mind would short out altogether. Or perhaps, Andrew hoped, the safest way out of the crisis for the surgeon would be to take a Second Law position: that this visitor, while by his own admission not human enough to invoke First Law prohibitions, had sufficiently human characteristics to be able to demand obedience from the surgeon.
Which was the path that the surgeon ultimately took, after a lengthy period of hesitation.
“Very well,” the surgeon said, and there was an unmistakable undertone of relief in his voice. “I will do what you have asked me to do.”
“Fine.”
“The fee will not be small.”
“I’d be worried if it was,” said Andrew.
THE OPERATING ROOM was nothing nearly as grand as the one in which U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men had performed its various upgrades on Andrew in recent years, but Andrew could tell that the facility was superbly equipped and completely equal to the task. He looked with admiration and approval at the laser bank, the board of measuring dials and control panel, the spidery maze of auxiliary needles and tubes and pipes, and the main surgical stage itself, dais and bed and lights and instruments, white linens and dazzling chrome-steel fixtures, everything in readiness for the unusual patient.
And the surgeon himself was magnificently calm. Quite clearly he had been able in the interim to resolve whatever conflicts he had felt over the irregularities of Andrew’s request and the ambiguities of Andrew’s appearance, and now he was focused entirely on the professional task at hand. Andrew was more than ever convinced that he had made the only possible choice by selecting a robot surgeon to perform this operation.
Still, he felt a flicker of uncertainty--just a flicker--as the actual moment for the start of the operation arrived. What if something went wrong? What if he came out of the operation incapacitated in some way? What if the operation failed and he terminated right on the operating table?
No. None of that mattered. There was no way for the operation to fail, none. And even if it did--no. That simply did not matter.
The surgeon was watching him carefully.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” Andrew told the surgeon. “Let’s get down to it.”
“Very well,” said the surgeon phlegmatically, and with a quick, sweeping gesture took his laser-scalpel into his splendidly designed right hand.
Andrew had chosen to remain completely conscious throughout the entire process. He had no wish to shut down awareness even for an instant. Pain was not an issue for him, and he needed to be certain that his instructions were being followed precisely. But of course they were. The surgeon’s nature, being robotic, was not one that would permit any capricious deviation from the agreed-upon course of action.
What Andrew was not prepared for was the unexpectedly intense weakness and fatigue that came after the job had been done.
He had never known such sensations as those that came over him in the early hours of his recovery period. Even when they had transferred his brain from the robot body to the android one, Andrew had experienced nothing like this.
Instead of walking normally, he lurched and staggered. Often he felt as though the floor before him was rising up to strike him in the face. There were times when his fingers trembled so violently that he had difficulty holding things. His vision, which had always been flawless, suddenly would grow blurry for long minutes at a stretch. Or he would try to remember someone’s name, and nothing would come to mind except a tantalizing blankness that glimmered at him from around the corners of his memory.
He spent an entire afternoon, the first week after the operation, searching his mind for the full name of the man he had known as Sir. Then, suddenly, the name was there: Gerald Martin. But now Andrew had forgotten the name of Little Miss’s dark-haired older sister, and it took him hours more of diligent searching before “Melissa Martin” popped abruptly into his brain. Two hours! It should not have taken him two milliseconds!
It was all more or less what Andrew should have expected, and in an abstract way he had expected it. And yet the reality of the feelings themselves was far beyond anything that Andrew had anticipated. Physical weakness was something new to him. So were poor coordination, uncertain reflexes, imperfect eyesight, and episodes of impaired memory. It was humiliating to feel so imperfect--so human
No, he thought.
There is nothing humiliating about it. You have everything backward. It is human to feel imperfect. That was what you wanted, above all else: to be human. And now that is what you are. The imperfections--the weaknesses--the imprecisions--they are the very things which define humans as human. And which drive them to transcend their own failings.
You never had failings before, Andrew told himself. Now you do, and so be it. So be it. You have achieved the thing you set out to accomplish and you must feel no regrets.
Gradually, as one day slid into the next, things began to improve.
Gradually. Very gradually.
The memory functions returned first. Andrew was gratified to discover that he had full access again, instant and complete, to the whole of his past.
He sat in the grand high-winged chair by the fireplace in the great living room of what once had been Gerald Martin’s house, and let images of years gone by play through his mind: the factory where he had been constructed, and his arrival at the Martin house, and Little Miss and Miss as children, walking with him on the beach. Sir and Ma’am at their dining table; his wooden sculptures and the furniture he had made; the U. S. Robots executives who came west to inspect him; his first visit from Little Sir; the time he had decided at last to begin wearing clothing; Little Sir’s marriage and the birth of Paul Charney. Even less pleasant things like the episode of the two louts who had tried to disassemble him while he was on the way to the public library. And much, much more, nearly two hundred years of memory.
It was all there. His mind had not been permanently impaired, and he was tremendously relieved.
The floor stopped trying to jump up and hit him. His vision stopped playing tricks on him. His hands finally stopped their infuriating shaking. When he walked, he was no longer in danger of stumbling and falling. He was himself again, in most of the essential ways.
But a certain sense of weakness still remained with him, or so he thought: a pervasive chronic weariness, a feeling that he needed to sit down and rest awhile before going on to whatever might be his next task.
Perhaps it was only his imagination. The surgeon said that he was recovering quite well.
There was a syndrome called hypochondria, Andrew knew, in which you felt that you were suffering from conditions that in fact you did not have. It was a fairly common thing among human beings, he had heard. People who were hypochondriacs found all manner of symptoms in themselves that no medical tests could confirm; and the more thought they gave to the possibility that they might be ill, the more symptoms they discovered.
Andrew wondered whether in his long unceasing quest to attain full humanity he had somehow managed to contract a case of hypochondria, and smiled at the thought. Quite likely he had, he decided. His own testing equipment showed no measurable degrading of his performance capabilities. All parameters were well within permissible deviation. And yet--yet--he felt so tired
It had to be imaginary. Andrew ordered himself to give his feelings of weariness no further thought. And, tired or not, he made one more journey across the continent to the great green-glass tower of the World Legislature in New York to pay a call on Chee Li-hsing.
He entered her grand and lofty office and she beckoned him automatically to a seat before her desk, the way she would have done with any other visitor. But Andrew had always preferred to stand in her presence, out of some obscure impulse of courtesy that he had never tried to explain to himself, and he did not want to sit now--especially not now. It would be entirely too revealing to do that Nevertheless, he found after a moment or two that standing seemed a bit troublesome to him, and he leaned, as unobtrusively as he could manage, against the wall.
Li-hsing said, “The final vote will come this week, Andrew. I’ve tried to delay it, but I’ve run out of parliamentary maneuvers, and there’s nothing more I can do. It’ll be voted on and we’ll lose. --and that will be it, Andrew.”
Andrew said, “I’m grateful for your skill at delaying things. It provided me with the time I needed--and I took the gamble I had to take.”
Li-hsing gave him a troubled look. “What gamble do you mean, Andrew?” And then, with some irritation in her voice: “You’ve been so mysterious these past months! Hinting darkly at this or that big project, but refusing to let anybody know what it was that you were up to--”
“I couldn’t, Li-hsing. If I had told you anything--or had said a word to the people at Feingold and Charney--I would have been stopped. I’m sure of that. You could have stopped me, you know, simply by ordering me not to proceed. The Second Law: there’s no way for me to put up resistance against that Simon DeLong would have done the same. So I had to keep quiet about my plans until I had carried them out”
“What is it that you have done, Andrew?” Chee Li-hsing asked, very quietly, almost ominously.
Andrew said, “The brain was the issue, that was what we agreed--the positronic brain vs. the organic one. But what was the real issue behind that? My intelligence? No. I have an unusual mind, yes, but that’s because I was designed to have an unusual mind, and after me they broke the mold. Other robots have outstanding mental abilities along one line or another, whatever specialty it is that they’ve been designed to perform, but basically they’re pretty stupid things. The way a computer is stupid, no matter how many trillion times faster than a human it can add up a column of numbers. So it isn’t my intelligence that makes people envious of me, not really. There are plenty of humans who can think rings around me.”
“Andrew--”
“Let me have my say, Li-hsing. I’m getting to the point, I promise you.”
He shifted his position against the wall, hoping that Li-hsing wouldn’t notice that he didn’t seem to have the strength to stand up unsupported for many minutes at a time. But Andrew suspected that she had already registered that fact. She was staring at him in an uncertain, troubled way.
He said, “What is the greatest difference between my positronic brain and a human one? It’s that my brain is immortal. All the trouble we’ve been having stems from that, don’t you see? Why should anyone care what a brain looks like or is built out of or how it came into existence in the first place? What matters is that organic human brain cells die. Must die. There’s no way of avoiding it Every other organ in the body can be maintained or replaced by an artificial substitute, but the brain can’t be replaced at all, not without changing and therefore killing the personality. And the organic brain must eventually die. Whereas my own positronic pathways--”
Li-hsing’s expression had been changing as he spoke. Her face bore a look of horror now.
Andrew knew that she had already begun to understand. But he needed her to hear him out He continued inexorably, “My own positronic pathways have lasted just under two centuries now without perceptible deterioration, without any kind of undesirable change whatever, and they will surely last for centuries more. Perhaps indefinitely: who can say? The whole science of robotics is only three hundred years old and that’s too short a time for anyone to be able to say what the full life-span of a positronic brain may be. Effectively my brain is immortal. Isn’t that the fundamental barrier that separates me from the human race? Human beings can tolerate immortality in robots, because it’s a virtue in a machine to last a long time, and nobody is psychologically threatened by that. But they would never be able to tolerate the idea of an immortal human being, since their own mortality is endurable only so long as they know it’s universal. Allow one person to be exempted from death and everyone else feels victimized in the worst way. And for that reason, Li-hsing, they have refused to make me a human being.”
Li-hsing said sharply, “You said you were going to get to the point Get to it, then. What is it that you’ve done to yourself, Andrew? I want to know!”
“I have removed the problem.”
“Removed it? How?”
“Decades ago, when my positronic brain was placed in this android body, it was connected to organic nerves, but it remained carefully insulated from the metabolic forces that would otherwise have ultimately caused it to deteriorate. Now I have undergone one last operation in order to rearrange the connections along the brain-body interface. The insulation has been removed. My brain is now subject to the same forces of decay that any organic substance is vulnerable to. Things are set up now in such a way that--slowly, quite slowly--the potential is being drained from my pathways.”
Chee’s finely wrinkled face showed no expression for a moment. Then her lips tightened and she balled her hands into fists.
“Do you mean that you’ve arranged to die, Andrew? No. No, you can’t possibly have done that. It would be a violation of the Third Law.”
“Not so,” Andrew said. “There is more than one sort of death, Li-hsing, and the Third Law does not differentiate between them. But I do. What I have done is to choose between the death of my body and the death of my aspirations and desires. To have let my body live at the cost of the greater death--that is the true violation of the Third Law. Not this. As a robot I might live forever, yes. But I tell you that I would rather die as a man than live eternally as a robot.”
“Andrew! No!” Chee cried. She rose from her desk and went to him with astonishing speed, and seized his arm as though she were about to shake him. But all she did was grip it tightly, her fingers sinking deeply into his pliable synthetic flesh. “Andrew, this isn’t going to get you what you want. It’s nothing more than terrible folly. Change yourself back.”
“I can’t. Too much damage was done. The operation is irreversible.”
“And now--?”
“I have a year to live, Li-hsing--more or less. I will last through the two hundredth anniversary of my construction. I confess that I was weak enough to time things so that I would still be here that long. And then--a natural death. Other robots are dismantled--they are irrevocably terminated--they are taken out of working order. I will simply die. The first robot ever to die--if, that is, it is felt that I am still a robot.”
“I can’t believe what you’re telling me, Andrew. What good can any of this do? You’ve destroyed yourself for nothing--nothing! It wasn’t worth it!”
“I think it was.”
“Then you’re a fool, Andrew!”
“No,” he said gently. “If it brings me humanity at last, then it will have been worth it. And if I fail in achieving that, well, at least there will soon be an end to my fruitless striving and my pain, and that will have been worth accomplishing also.”
“Pain?”
“Pain, yes. Do you think I’ve never felt any pain, Li-hsing?”
Li-hsing did something then that astonished Andrew beyond words.
Quietly, she began to weep.
IT WAS STRANGE how the dramatic last deed of Andrew’s long life caught at the imagination of the world. Nothing that Andrew had done before had managed to sway people from their denial of his humanity. But Andrew had finally embraced even death for the sake of being fully human, now, and that sacrifice was too great to be rejected.
The story swept across the world like a hurricane. People spoke of nothing else. The bill granting Andrew what he had sought so long went through the World Legislature without opposition. No one would have dared to vote against it. There was scarcely even any debate. There was no need for it. The measure was unprecedented, yes--of course it was--but for once everyone was willing to put precedent aside.
The final ceremony was timed, quite deliberately, for the day of the two hundredth anniversary of Andrew’s construction. The World Coordinator was to put his signature to the act publicly, making it law, and the ceremony would be visible on a global network and would be beamed to the lunar settlements and to the other colonies farther out in space.
Andrew was in a wheelchair. He still was capable of walking, but only shakily, now, and it would embarrass him to be seen looking so feeble when so many billions of people would be watching.
And billions were watching--watching everywhere.
The ceremony was simple and quite brief. The World Coordinator--or his electronic simulacrum, rather, for Andrew was at his home in California and the World Coordinator was in New York--began by saying, “This is a very special day, Andrew Martin, not only for you but for the entire human race. There has never been a day like it before. But then there has never been anyone like you before, either.
“Fifty years ago, Andrew, a ceremony in your honor was held at the headquarters of the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation to celebrate the hundred-fiftieth anniversary of your inception. I understand that at that ceremony one of the speakers proclaimed you to be a Sesquicentennial Robot. The statement was correct--as far as it went. But it did not go quite far enough, we realize now. And so the world has taken steps to make amends, and those amends will be made today.” The World Coordinator glanced toward Andrew and smiled. There was a document before him on a little podium. The World Coordinator leaned over it and, with a grand flourish, signed his name.
Then, looking up after a moment and speaking in his most formal, solemn tone, the Coordinator said, “There you are. The decree is official and irrevocable. Your sesquicentennial anniversary is fifty years behind you, today. And so is the status of robot with which you came into the world, and for which you were cited on that day. We take that status from you now. You are a robot no longer. The document that I have just signed changes all that. Today, Mr. Martin, we declare you--a Bicentennial Man.”
And Andrew, smiling in return, held out his hand as though to shake that of the World Coordinator--despite the distance of a continent’s width that actually lay between them. The gesture had been carefully rehearsed, everything measured down to the millimeter. And to the billions of onlookers it seemed that the two hands did in fact meet--a warm human gesture linking, for a moment, one man with the other.
THE CEREMONY of just a few months before was only a dim memory, now, and the end was growing near. Andrew’s thoughts were slowly fading as he lay in his bed in the grand house overlooking the Pacific.
Desperately he seized at them.
A man! He was a man, a human being at last! For decade after decade he had struggled up the ladder from his robotic origins, not completely recognizing the extent of his aspirations at first but gradually bringing them into focus; and finally he had attained the goal that had become so desperately important to him. He had achieved something almost unimaginable--something unique in the history of the human race.
He wanted that to be his last thought. He wanted to dissolve--die--with that.
Andrew opened his eyes one more time and for one last time recognized Li-hsing waiting solemnly beside the bed. There were others, too, gathered around him, watching his last moments as long ago he had watched those of Sir and Little Miss; but they were only shadows, vague unrecognizable shadows. He was beginning to forget names, faces, everything. It was all slipping away from him, the accumulated memories of two hundred years of life.
Let it go, he thought. Let it go, all of it.
Only the slender figure of Li-hsing stood out unmistakably against the deepening gray. The last of all his friends. He had had so many, over the two centuries, but they were all gone now, and she was the only one who still remained. Slowly, quaveringly, Andrew held out his hand to her and very dimly and faintly he felt her take it. She said something to him, but he was unable to hear the words.
She was fading in his eyes, as the last of his thoughts trickled into the darkness.
He felt cold--very cold--and Li-hsing was disappearing now, vanishing into the dark mist that had begun to engulf him.
Then one final fugitive thought came to him and rested for a moment on his mind before everything stopped. Briefly he saw the flickering image of the first person who had recognized him for what he really was, almost two hundred years before. A mantle of light and warmth surrounded her. Her shining golden hair gleamed like a brilliant sunrise. She was smiling at him--beckoning to him--
“Andrew--” she said softly. “Come, Andrew. Now. Come. You know who I am.”
“Little Miss,” he whispered, too low to be heard.
And then he closed his eyes and the darkness engulfed him fully and--fully human at last--he gave himself up to it without regret.