Thread-Safe
by Gray Rinehart
“First time?” the man asked as he looked at Gregor’s ID. He was taller than Gregor by a good six inches and had salt-and-pepper hair, wire-framed glasses, and a wide, happy smile.
Gregor smiled back. “Is it obvious?”
He nodded. “We don’t get many first timers anymore. So many people register as soon as we open up. We get used to recognizing people.” He held out a hand, which Gregor shook. “I’m Rich Groller.” Rich’s handshake radiated genuine friendly pleasure, same as his smile.
“Gregor Behringer.”
“So you are!” Rich handed back Gregor’s ID and started flipping through a box. He asked, “Do you go to many conventions, Gregor?”
Gregor chuckled. “This will literally be my first.”
“Good for you for starting with the best! Are you new to fandom?”
“Well,” he said, trying to pick his words so as not to offend, “I suppose everyone’s a fan of something, right?”
Rich pulled out a badge and said, “I guess you could say that. So, what are you a fan of, then?”
He handed over the badge, and Gregor smiled at the stylized image of a rampaging B9-style robot on it, underneath which his name was emblazoned.
“Not what, but who,” Gregor said, and inwardly cringed at how pedantic he must sound. He pointed at the robot image. “I’ve followed Lu—that is, Dr. Bradley’s research for some time.” Her married name felt wrong coming out of his mouth.
Rich handed Gregor a lanyard and a little ribbon that said First-Timer. “Put that on your badge, so people know to welcome you.” Then he gestured. “And step over this way. I may have a special treat for you.”
“O-kay.” Gregor moved to the end of the registration table and affixed the ribbon to the badge. He avoided covering up the QR codes for the convention schedule and local information and the sticker that said Banquet.
“Who do we have here?” said a friendly female voice.
Gregor looked up at a small woman who, like Rich, wore a polo shirt with Staff over the heart. Her hair was only a little darker than Rich’s, done up in a bun with what looked like chopsticks poking out of it. Her eyes were bright, and her smile was as infectious as Rich’s.
Rich said, “This is Gregor. Gregor, this is my wife, Tish.”
Gregor bowed a little and tipped his hat. “Pleased to meet you.”
Rich put one hand on Tish’s shoulder. They looked very comfortable together. He said, “You mentioned that Brandy needed help about now? I think Gregor should volunteer.”
Tish’s eyes widened. “Oh, really?”
Gregor almost asked the same thing, but Rich just grinned and tapped the side of his nose. “Trust me.”
Tish came around the table, deftly put her hand in the crook of Gregor’s elbow, and started walking.
Gregor let himself be pulled along, grinning a bit stupidly. “Brandy?”
“She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,” Tish said in a low voice, nodding as if she were initiating Gregor in a conspiracy. “LibertyCon’s Supreme Empress,” she continued. “Her father started it all, and she took over as chairperson when he stepped down. I can’t believe that’s been almost a decade ago.”
Gregor said, “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed?”
Tish looked at him over her glasses. “And don’t you forget it.” Then she laughed and led him to a set of double doors. They showed their badges and Tish pulled him into the Dealers’ Room.
The soft murmur of the hallway conversations gave way to an insistent buzz in the ballroom-turned-marketplace. Towering racks held T-shirts and assorted other clothing, portable shelves were stuffed with books and games and souvenirs, and orderly rows of tables overflowed with merchandise. Tish pulled Gregor past the vendors, most of whom were putting finishing touches on their displays, to a table along the back wall.
Here Lucinda would display her robots. At the moment, the setup was rather meager, though. Except for the four black plastic cases stacked on luggage carts behind the table, it looked like a grad school poster session… and he recognized one of the posters straightaway.
Tish leaned in with him. “‘A Naturalistic Model of Machine Learning,’” she read, then pointed at Gregor’s name under the title. “You helped with this?”
Gregor mixed a grin with a shrug. He liked that Lucinda hadn’t written him entirely out of her research, but he had never liked her terminology. It seemed contradictory, but he hadn’t come up with anything better.
“Did Rich know about this?”
“I don’t see how he could,” Gregor said. “He just asked me what I was a fan of.”
“A lucky guess, then. Still, he’ll crow about it for weeks!” Tish looked behind them. “Here comes someone you’ll recognize, I’d guess.”
Gregor turned. Dr. Lucinda Bradley was walking down the aisle next to a petite, very pretty, dark-haired lady. They were trailed by two men, both also dark-haired, one a good deal taller than the other.
Medium height with dirty blonde hair, Lucinda was, to Gregor’s eye, stunning. She was wearing what might have been a costume of some sort: loose green calf-length pants, white shirt, and a vest… no, a corset… that accentuated her already substantial curves. Gregor felt petty, insignificant, even insubstantial in comparison, in his off-brand jeans and AutoDyn company polo shirt.
Gregor struggled not to stare at Lucinda as the shorter lady introduced her to Tish. Then she said, “And this is…”
“Gregor,” Lucinda said in a flat, almost bored, tone that broke the spell.
Gregor tipped his hat to her—“Doctor,” he said, in deference to the others more than Lucinda—and then to the pretty dark-haired lady. “As she said, I am Gregor.”
“Brandy,” the lady said. She turned as if to introduce him to the gentlemen with them, then looked back and asked, “Dr. Bradley, were you expecting your friend to be here?”
Lucinda barked out a quick laugh. “Not at all.”
Gregor bowed. “Yet here I am, at your service.”
“Oh, stop it, Gregor! Don’t feign interest—”
Gregor stepped back and raised his hands. He resisted the urge to tell her his interest had never been feigned. “I really only came to observe”—and to see if you’re still building on my work—“but my new friends told me that ‘she-who-must-be-obeyed’ required assistance.” He faced Brandy fully. “I presume it is you who must be obeyed?”
Brandy smiled but shot a look of mixed exasperation and amusement at Tish. “That’s what they say. Feel like helping us move a couple of transit cases?”
“I have been accused of having a strong back and a weak mind,” Gregor said.
Lucinda said softly, but loud enough for everyone to hear, “That sounds about right.”
They only moved two of the transit cases, so Gregor doubted they really needed his assistance at all. Even though they were on luggage carts, they were heavy and awkward: over a yard square each, and one nearly that tall. The men with Brandy pushed the carts—one of them Brandy introduced as Clint and the other as “minion.” Through a service corridor, they entered the back of a ballroom where Gregor helped offload and open the cases.
“Things are going well in the robotics lab, I see,” Gregor said.
When he and Lucinda had been grad students together, they had attached their first mechanical nerve bundles to vacuuming robots and watched them learn to avoid obstacles that would hurt them. In the larger of the two cases, though, surrounded by foam padding, sat a midsized version of the robotic dogs the military and some airports used for security patrols. A little over half the size of a great dane, Lucinda’s robot was covered in slightly translucent amber skin that appeared to be thicker than Gregor’s forearm. The robot’s frame and limbs looked fairly standard, but the skin gave it bulk. Aside from black-and-white patches on its shoulders and hips, it looked something like a headless golden retriever.
Gregor reached out—
“Don’t touch,” Lucinda said. To his quizzical expression, she said, “It’s some new type of ballistic gel”—as if it should have been obvious—“or so they told me. Stiffer, I guess, so it stays in place, but expensive. So don’t mess it up.”
“So, things really are going well in the robotics lab.”
Gregor tapped the side of the transit case. The outer layer did indeed wobble a bit. Looking closer, the skin was strung with a fine wire net, with openings smaller than his pinky and what looked like tiny bulbs of solder where some of the wires overlapped.
“Sensors?” Gregor asked. “What kind?”
Lucinda shook her head. “Sorry, that’s proprietary.”
Gregor didn’t think she was that sorry.
Lucinda swiped a couple of times at an app on her phone and the robot stood up. “Good boy, Snoopy,” she said. It flexed its limbs this way and that, and Gregor half-expected it to stretch into a “downward dog” pose like any awakening canine.
“Wake-up call?” Gregor asked. “You don’t let them wake up when there’s enough light?” If she powered each robot all the way down in its crate, when it was turned on it might be as if it was being born for the first time.
She scowled at him. “We had this discussion years ago. It wouldn’t be nice, to leave them awake in the dark.”
“I didn’t realize you were trying to be nice to them. Especially not with the ‘demonstration’ I heard about.” Ballistic gel…
Lucinda frowned. “If you’re going to help, then help. Kindly shut up and pull a power supply to feed the mutt.”
Clint and the other fellow—whose first name Gregor learned was Jonny—had already moved the second crate off its cart and opened it to reveal four portable power supplies, each a little larger than a car battery. Now Gregor frowned. The robot’s case had been big enough that she could’ve packed it with a power supply, kept its processors on at a low level as he had suggested when they were in school together.
Might eventually figure out dreaming, he thought.
After all, what complex creature achieved sentience, let alone sapience, without dreaming? They had wondered how important it was to a newborn baby that it sleep and wake and sleep in certain proportions, that its brain be given a chance, in unconsciousness, to assimilate whatever it had perceived while awake, and whether such cycles might be equally important in the development of a “newborn” artificial intelligence, even if the cycles were greatly accelerated. A newborn baby learned constantly while awake, every experience releasing chemical cascades in its brain. Gregor imagined that set up a feedback mechanism that encouraged a newborn to stay awake as long as possible until, clearly tired, it fought going to sleep with yawns and cries—but then sleep allowed those chemicals to… dissipate? reabsorb? Gregor wasn’t quite sure, but they’d never figured out how to stimulate a robot’s simplistic brain to remain awake and then to have a productive unconscious period of reordering the machine’s thoughts. That was one reason he never liked calling their approach “naturalistic.”
Gregor sighed as he carried the power supply around to the front of the temporary stage. They’d had the “electric sheep” discussion—argument—too many times before. He tried to remember who’d written that old story about androids dreaming. He couldn’t think of it. Tish or one of the others would probably know…
Snoopy the robot bounded up the steps and loped alongside Lucinda. She gestured for Gregor to put the power supply down and watched as he plugged it in to a drop cord Jonny and Clint had run just behind the framing of the low stage. Without any apparent command, the robot turned around next to the power supply, backed up to it, and sat atop it to engage the contacts.
“Things are going well in the lab,” Gregor said. He leaned against the front of the stage to get a better look at the machine. “So how much of the baby robots’ experiences went into this one’s matrices?”
Lucinda looked down with disdain. “Not enough for you to get authorial credit on the next article. They’re not tabula rasa, though.”
Gregor shrugged off the jibe. “Just wondered if they might recognize me from the lab.”
“No, the sensor suites are different.”
“Even the optics?”
Lucinda sighed. “Their pattern recognition is good, but we didn’t install facial recognition.” She gestured to the mostly empty chairs in front of the stage. “Is that it, then, or do you want a private show?”
Gregor tipped his head right and left, as if he was seriously considering her facetious offer. Then, just to push Lucinda’s buttons, he reached up and stroked the robot’s gelatinous hide. The wires were rough against his palm, and the gel’s friction surprised him. His hand stuck, and the skin pulled and wobbled as he disengaged from it. He patted it gently.
“Must you?” Lucinda asked.
Gregor chuckled. He walked his fingers up the robot’s body. Other than the give of the outer layer, the machine stood stiff as stone.
“Afraid I’m going to spoil your pet?”
“You haven’t changed a bit.”
You have, he thought but didn’t say.
* * *
Gregor walked into the big ballroom a few minutes before Opening Ceremonies. A few people milled in the aisles looking for seats, but nearly all the chairs were already occupied.
Snoopy still sat on its power supply on the right side of the stage.
How boring, Gregor thought, and chuckled at the way he anthropomorphized the machines.
Just behind the robot was a lectern; center stage was a long table draped with red, white, and blue bunting; and to the left was a man-sized replica of the Statue of Liberty—Liberty Enlightening the World, if Gregor remembered correctly.
Gregor turned right, to go along the back wall and around the side to find a seat, but someone grabbed his left arm. He started, then smiled to see Tish Groller.
“I was looking for you,” she said. “Rich saved us a couple of seats.”
The seats turned out to be on the third row, just off the central aisle. Gregor had an excellent view as an older gentleman with a top hat and cane welcomed the attendees, declared that LibertyCon was officially in session, and introduced Brandy, who said a few words. Then the MC introduced… almost everyone in the room.
Gregor must have looked a bit overwhelmed as the man read off dozens and dozens of names, because Rich nudged him and said, “It’s like a big family reunion.”
Finally, each of the guests of honor were introduced and said a few words: an author Gregor was vaguely familiar with, though Gregor didn’t read much fiction; the artist responsible for the image on the badges; a special guest who received a huge round of applause; and Lucinda, the STEM guest.
Who introduced Gregor, in a roundabout way.
Instead of just saying how glad she was to be there, Lucinda played her fingers across her phone and made her robotic puppet dance—almost literally. Annoyance gnawed at Gregor as the robot moved across the stage, hurdled the table, and jumped down, sprinted to the rear of the ballroom and back again. Gregor couldn’t see how that had anything to do with machine learning. He started seething.
“Of course,” Lucinda said then, “we don’t make any advancements without the occasional disagreement, without sometimes putting forth alternate theories that need to be investigated and even arguing over what our results mean. So, if you want to talk to someone with differing opinions, look for my old colleague Gregor Behringer, who arranged to be with us this weekend. Gregor, where are you?”
Rich elbowed him. “That’s your cue, I think.”
“Stand up, Gregor,” Lucinda said. “Let the people see you.”
He hesitated, but before Rich could elbow him again, he stood and waved at Lucinda, his hat in his hand. A few people, perhaps a dozen out of the hundreds in the room, applauded.
As Gregor sat, Lucinda tapped an icon on her phone and the robot sauntered to the power supply and sat back down. “Gregor originated the power conditioning setup we use,” she said. “But I don’t think he much approves of what we’ll be doing this weekend to demonstrate that these robots learn through experience and pass on what they’ve learned to one another.”
She turned toward the audience and smiled a wicked smile. “Tell me, if you don’t mind: If we were to conduct the shooting demonstration right here, right now, how many of you are equipped?”
One person in the back whooped, then others echoed the call. Gregor looked around and was surprised to see dozens of hands in the air, and many more people looking as if they were fighting the urge to raise theirs as well.
“I think,” Lucinda said, “Sunday afternoon will be very interesting.”
* * *
Even though Gregor thought Lucinda was a fine choice to be on the panel of “mad scientists” Friday night after the Opening Ceremonies, he was more interested in her solo talk Saturday morning. So, it seemed, were a great many others: He had to take a seat near the back of the small meeting room.
Most of Lucinda’s presentation, he had heard before—hell, a lot of it he had written in his own Masters thesis—so he didn’t learn much. In fact, he was surprised she hadn’t made a lot of progress even though her robot subjects—like the one on display at the front of the room, with red patches instead of black-and-white—were more sophisticated than when they had shared the lab. It still burned him that he would have expanded their research into his own doctoral program except that their advisor, Professor Aloysius Bradley, had given Gregor’s research grant to Lucinda, back when her last name was still Montrose.
The conventioneers took it all in attentively. Gregor wished Lucinda would emphasize differences more than similarities—that robotic subsystems weren’t fully analogous to organic structures, for instance, since their hardware was unalive, while every cell in an organism worked to survive as long as it could. He, at least, had never figured out how to give the power components their own “will to live,” but her focus had been trying to compensate for—or get around—the fact that no machine was built with instincts while every living thing seemed to have them.
Gregor’s first contribution had been to suggest that instinct itself might be rooted in the simple fact that living things sought pleasure and avoided pain, or if they seemed to lack those sensory nuances, sought life and avoided death. Lucinda had made it her mission to find out whether machine intelligence might develop something like a survival instinct through pleasure/pain learning opportunities, rather than just programming in responses. The two of them had made a good team: He built the “pleasure gate” logic for the robot power supply that responded to a sweet spot of voltage and current such that the robot sensed the best charging response as “pleasurable,” and Lucinda set up the programming for ultracomplex matrices of potential responses, with what amounted to fillable spaces for the robots’ learned experiences.
She had mentioned his work the night before, and about midway through her talk she alluded to it again. “You wouldn’t want your cell phone to start whining like a child when it fell below fifty percent on the battery,” she said, “or to start wailing when it fell below twenty percent, or whatever. Sure, it alerts you that it needs to be plugged in, but it doesn’t experience the loss of power. Lacking viscera, it’s hard to feel anything in a visceral way. So, we had to figure out how to give the robot those—for lack of a better word—feelings of hunger and satiation.”
They had started small, hoping to demonstrate something like an evolutionary path to machine intelligence, and were working with fox-sized machines by the time Professor Bradley had pushed Gregor out. Lucinda had gone on, literally, to bigger and better robots to explore their sensory experiences and had begun letting the robots access one another’s… she said “memories,” but he knew that wasn’t quite it… so each would learn faster.
Gregor smiled as she described what was obviously a version of his “power gate” fed by the “proprietary” sensors on top of these robots’ gel padding. Was that really why she hadn’t wanted him to touch the machine? Because a soft touch might be pleasurable? Would the robot like it too much, such that it might skew her results? Or had she dropped the “seek pleasure” part of their research and gone fully in the direction of “avoid pain”? Because she clearly intended to teach her robots in a most painful way.
A hand went up in the second row. “Dr. Bradley?” said a slim man with a wild shock of hair and beard, wearing a garish red, white, and blue outfit. “You mentioned that each robot updates its database using inputs from the others. Could you run them through different, simultaneous scenarios, and have them all update at once as they go along?”
Lucinda put her fingers in front of her mouth for a moment as she considered the question. “We’ve had some trouble with that,” she said. “Without being able to make true synaptic connections, we built fillable matrices that are extensible and multidimensional. And we gave each robot its own, rather than have them share a common experience matrix on a server. You might say that we limited their telepathy.
“If they shared a common matrix, then if two of them tried to write to the same cell at the same time there might be contention. We’d have to make sure all the operations were thread-safe. But since each of them has a unique matrix, when one uploads how it’s filled in its cells, the one that downloads it will have to store that information in other cells. It can’t rewrite its own cells, or it would effectively forget what it’s learned.
“As a result, the shared experience takes a different shape, so to speak. It’s more a replication problem, but the issue of thread safety still applies. Though, as I said, we’ve had problems.”
“What kind of problems?” the fellow asked.
“Sometimes they do things we don’t expect. Basically, the robots get confused,” Lucinda said, which elicited a few laughs. “But that’s something that happens to the best of us!”
When the polite laughter died down, Lucinda invited everyone who wanted to take part in a short demonstration to join her in the main ballroom. Before heading over, Gregor tamped down his disapproval and went to congratulate her. He hung back while she chatted with a couple of people, and found himself next to her robot sitting obediently on its charger.
Gregor knelt and came almost eye-to-facepiece—if “facepiece” was right for the spot where the robot’s neck should have protruded—with the machine. He smiled and patted the robot’s shoulder.
The robot trembled under his palm: a fast vibration, gone almost as soon as it began.
He pondered that and ran his fingers along the robot’s front leg. “Who’s a good boy?” he asked, but not too loudly.
“Why is it,” Lucinda said behind him, “that everyone else can read the ‘Please Don’t Touch’ sign except you?”
Sure enough, on the table end a paperboard tent read This is Clifford. Please do not disturb him.
Gregor almost reached up to scratch between Clifford’s shoulders, but instead just patted it a couple more times. “I’m a rebel.”
“You’re a jerk.”
His left knee creaked as he stood. “That’s what I love about you, Luce. You’re always so kind.”
* * *
Lucinda’s indoor demonstration, thankfully, involved no shooting. Gregor thought some of the attendees looked disappointed to learn that.
Most of the chairs had been stacked against the wall of the ballroom, leaving seven rows of seven chairs, widely spaced in each direction, in the center. Lucinda transferred an application from her phone to each volunteer and asked them to select a seat. Gregor, more interested in observing, leaned back against the stage.
“On the floor by your chair,” Lucinda said, “you’ll see an arrow pointing to another chair—maybe to the side, maybe in front or in back. In order to confuse our robot subject, we’re going to play a little Musical Chairs and once you’ve stopped and sat down, I’ll activate the app you just installed. Don’t worry—we’re not going to take away any chairs so you can’t get ‘out’!
“Once you’ve all acknowledged the signal, Clifford here”—she gestured to the robot which had entered the room with her—“will walk among you. The program will select one of you to be the target and one or more of you to be obstacles that he’ll need to avoid.”
Gregor wondered what Lucinda had rigged for feedback as the music—not canned music, but a guitar player—began. It wouldn’t be the direct feedback the robots got from their power stations…
The music stopped, the participants sat, and a moment later Clifford stood and ambled toward one corner of the square of chairs. The robot walked between two rows as if it were entering a maze, which brought back memories of the smaller robots Gregor had put through mazes in the lab. Had Lucinda let those robots’ experience matrices transfer to these—
Clifford jumped backward as if it had been shocked.
Gregor sat up a little straighter. He didn’t have a direct viewing angle but was afraid to move for fear of missing something if he looked away.
Clifford stepped one foot forward, then pulled back and into itself the way a scolded dog would.
It reached out at an angle, toward the attendee at its two o’clock. The man in the chair shrank back a little. Clifford put its foot down, right next to his chair, without reacting.
Clifford turned toward the attendee at its ten o’clock, reached ahead—
—and pulled back instantly.
The woman in that chair looked offended.
Clifford inched around the obviously disturbing input and continued. Gregor puzzled over the feedback. Was it something Lucinda had programmed in? How did that fit with her “naturalistic” approach?
Clifford turned at the end of that row and proceeded down the back of the square, then turned toward the front—
—and jumped back at another “obstacle.” Gregor had a better view this time as Clifford tested its surroundings and maneuvered around that person: the tall fellow in the patriotic garb. A few steps farther along, the robot came to a full stop in front of a woman wearing an all-black military-style uniform festooned with ribbons. She held up her phone, said, “That’s me!” and the participants and onlookers applauded, Gregor included.
Clifford exited the faux maze and the guitarist started playing. While the participants moved to different spots in the maze, Clifford stood between Gregor and the chair square.
“Good boy, Clifford,” Gregor said, unsure what had come over him. “What do you see?” he asked aloud, wondering what kind of recognition algorithms Lucinda had loaded… or if she had given this set of machines a chance to “learn” what their cameras showed them.
He felt far outside that world now, and jealous.
The music stopped, and after a moment Clifford again entered the square. This time it angled toward the black-clad woman who had held the prize the first time, and Gregor nodded in admiration. Pattern recognition took lots of calculations, even though it couldn’t really be categorized as “thinking,” and sometimes machines got fixated on patterns to the point they seemed to be obsessed, but Clifford’s pattern recognition was impressive—
—the robot jumped back faster and more powerfully than before.
It encountered two more obstacles before finding the prize, and Gregor wondered if Lucinda had somehow dialed up the intensity of the robot’s responses. He wasn’t sure why, except that at times she did have a flair for the dramatic.
Once more the music played, and the participants rearranged themselves before Lucinda activated her application.
Clifford moved—
—and the way it jerked back Gregor imagined it would have yelped had it been a real dog. Some of the participants and onlookers gasped, and someone to Gregor’s left said, “Whoa!”
Gregor said, “Great glory, Luce, what are you doing?” but Lucinda was too far away to hear him—which was probably good.
Clifford moved parallel along the front line of chairs, right to left, toward Gregor, moved forward again, and jumped back as violently. It stepped left twice more, its motors humming and feet landing with pronounced thuds and tried again—
—only to jump back nearly to the stage.
“Careful, Clifford,” Gregor said. He was close enough to see the robot’s skin jiggle when it landed. “There’s a good boy.”
With mincing little movements of its limbs, the robot turned to face Gregor.
Another onlooker to Gregor’s left said, “What’s it doing?”
I wish I knew, Gregor thought.
Clifford stepped forward tentatively—
—then leapt and leaned against Gregor’s leg.
Oh, crap, he thought.
And then he looked at the crowd.
Forty-nine people in chairs, a few dozen more sitting or standing on the periphery… and one extremely angry roboticist who, after swiping and tapping on her phone, began moving his way.
Lucinda radiated tension. Each step fell with deliberate precision, her long burgundy dress moving around her as if she were trudging through blood, the bangles she was wearing jingling as if they were bells tolling for him. She raised her phone like a hammer and her words fell slowly like blows.
“What in the hell did you do?”
Gregor held his hands up in surrender. “You said they sometimes do things you don’t expect! I just said it was a good boy.”
A few people laughed. Lucinda slowed, stopped, turned toward the now-silent crowd and then back to Gregor. She tried again to control the robot with her phone, but it would not budge. So, she dropped her phone into a leather pouch and harangued Gregor for the last ten minutes of the session. The audience seemed to find that quite amusing.
Gregor was thankful when the hotel staff came in to reset the room.
* * *
Gregor sat in the ballroom an extra half hour while Lucinda finally got the robot moving. She didn’t tell him how she did it, of course, but it had looked a lot more like programming than it did teaching or learning. He kept his mouth shut instead of pointing that out, and when she headed back to the Dealers’ Room he went to the hotel lobby. He sat near the front windows, oscillating between naked embarrassment at having interfered with Lucinda’s demonstration and—being honest with himself—a bit of unholy glee at being able to do so pretty much without trying.
Was that why he had come? To sabotage her work? Was he really that petty? He didn’t like to think so, but the evidence was not in his favor.
He still supported her work in general. How could he not, since a lot of it had been his work, too? The only thing he really objected to was the “live-fire” demonstration she was planning for Sunday. But if she asked him not to go, Gregor would do what she wanted. That was his way: If he thought it would make her happy, he would agree to almost anything.
That’s why he’d backed off when Lucinda’s interest in their advisor became more than academic. It had seemed simple at the time, straightforward, and he had solved it like an equation. Love isn’t just a feeling, an urge. It’s a choice. And the hell of it was, sometimes you have the feeling, you have the urge, but the other person doesn’t, so you make the choice not to love—or to love in a different way. That’s what Gregor had done, or tried to do, but it had been agonizing, and it plagued him.
He hated the fact that, as poor as his memory could be sometimes, he clung to some things with a bulldog’s tenacity. More unfortunate was that he was almost masochistic in the things he called to mind—the time Lucinda said they could only be colleagues and friends; the time he found Professor Bradley’s love letters to her; the staff picnic where she flirted with the man while trying hard to appear not to—as if by putting himself through the pain again and again Gregor might somehow atone for his own sins and failures.
Gregor sighed. He was always such a fool when it came to Lucy.
“You coming?”
Gregor looked up. Rich Groller continued, “To the banquet?”
Gregor shrugged. “I’m not that hungry.”
“After this morning, I’m not surprised.”
“You heard?”
Rich laughed. “It’s not that big a convention. Everybody’s heard by now.”
“Probably a good reason for me to stay clear.”
“Not at all. I don’t know what you did, but best thing to do is own it and move forward. Come on, come on.”
Gregor acquiesced. And even thought he had to endure some ribbing from his tablemates, it was more enjoyable than he expected. The barbeque, at least, was excellent.
As lunch concluded, each of the guests of honor was given a few minutes to speak. To introduce them the MC had stitched together movie and television clips related, even if tangentially, to their work. Lucinda’s introduction consisted of a montage of science fiction robots, moving as if dancing to “Mr. Roboto.”
Her talk was more serious: Despite the Renaissance Fair dress she wore, Lucinda was all business when it came to her work. Gregor tried to pay attention to her words, but his mind wandered from time to time.
“What do animals have that robots don’t?” she asked. “Not in terms of flesh and blood, but in terms of their minds, their actions, and reactions?
“Instinct. Specifically, the survival instinct. No matter how much memory and programming we cram into one of these”—she held up her phone—“or one of those”—she pointed at another of her robots, sitting dutifully on its charging station at the far end of the head table—“a newly built machine won’t exhibit anything like instinctual behavior.
“We asked ourselves whether instinctual behavior is ‘programmed’ in, as part of DNA or RNA or something else, or learned through an organism’s immediate, reflexive response to the environment. Birth itself is a process that introduces pain and/or struggle, followed by some amount of nurturing. Pain and pleasure are juxtaposed from the beginning. For higher animals the gestation period itself is pleasurable once the fetus is sensate: whether the warmth of a mother hen incubating her chicks or the warm suspension of a mammal in utero, with the resonance of a beating heart always in the background. So, pleasure followed by pain followed by pleasure of suckling and comfort—the contrast couldn’t be more drastic, and the results never fail to obtain unless the baby has some defect in its nervous system that renders it insensate.
“Except…” and Gregor had to admit that Lucinda played the dramatic pause rather well, “what about lower animals, plants, single-celled organisms? Don’t they, too, have a survival instinct? Intelligence certainly doesn’t correlate directly with the drive to survive. Nonintelligent creatures, all living things, possess that drive innately because they’re alive. They’re driven to do what’s necessary to stay alive. Even our individual cells do what they need to do to survive as long as they can. Why do we assume that a machine, and in particular a machine that developed or possessed intelligence, would have that same will? Or, since it’s not precisely a question of will, that it would have that same instinct?”
Lucinda took the microphone in hand and walked to the end of the table. She stood behind the robot, which had light grey patches on its shoulders and hips. “So, we asked ourselves, what about approaching the development of intelligence from a more basic level? That is, rather than trying to build an artificial brain from the top down, so to speak, what about trying to emulate or recreate the evolution of intelligence from the bottom up? What about starting with the ‘lizard brain,’ the primitive brain, rather than trying to replicate higher brain function? And why not work on self-preservation, on the survival instinct, as we did so?”
She gestured and a montage of video clips played of the robotics lab—and there was Gregor himself, smiling and holding up one of their first squirrel-sized robots in front of the maze they used to run them through. He found himself sliding down in his seat, especially when the robot flinched away from one of the wrong paths. Yes, the prize awaited it at the end—the first “pleasure gate” charging circuit he had built—but Lucinda had never thought the prize enough… motivation.
The video ended with a shot of one of the larger robots, like the one Lucinda was standing behind, and what she said next surprised Gregor.
“But what if we’re wrong?”
He set down his glass of tea and sat up a little straighter. If she was considering that, then she had changed.…
“We could be wrong in any number of ways, and it wouldn’t be a tragedy if we were. It’s science, and we can learn as much from failure as from success. At least, I hope so, given that this morning’s event didn’t go quite as planned.” She stared hard at Gregor, but a light murmur of laughter wound through the audience.
“Yes… what if we’re wrong? What if a robot can’t develop a survival instinct? After all, that instinct manifests much the same in humans as it does in dogs or rats or paramecia, and it’s a function of being alive—something Astro here”—she waved at the robot, then walked back to the lectern—“is most definitely not. We are perhaps more aware of the instinct, or the impulse, by virtue of being intelligent, but intelligence doesn’t give us the instinct. What if we’re wrong, and the survival instinct is deeper than simply avoiding pain or death? What if it’s something… transcendent?
“But beyond instinct, what about higher motivation? What if an artificial brain can never truly develop internal motivation? We haven’t built in the equivalent of dopamine producers and receptors for feedback and general pleasure regulation, and isn’t intrinsic motivation essentially seeking after what gives pleasure and fulfillment? It’s different from simply being a guide to avoiding pain.
“What if we’re wrong about robots, artificial minds, being able to grow in these ways? What if we find that—at least in their cases—it’s all programming? Not artificial intelligence, really, not artificial knowledge leading to artificial wisdom, but just… code written by us?
“For one thing, it means that we have to learn to write much better code.” She paused a second for a light patter of laughter. “But even if we do, we’re left with a troubling question. Does that mean all instincts, and maybe all higher motivations, are ‘programmed’ in?
“I don’t know about you,” Lucinda concluded, “but that gives me pause. Or maybe I’m just programmed to pause there, and to stop here.”
The audience applauded, perhaps less enthusiastically than they had the artist guest whose speech had lasted only a minute. Then Brandy gave Lucinda a beautiful hand-carved plaque, and said, “Thank you, Doctor Bradley, and may I say that I hope you’re right, not wrong. I hope you go beyond instinct, beyond motivation, and help artificial minds develop something like empathy. Because I, for one, would like our robot overlords to have a little empathy.”
As the banquet concluded, thoughts rattled inside Gregor’s head like old bolts in a coffee can. Whether they’d been wrong to boil desire down to a coin flip between avoiding pain or experiencing pleasure, and how those two things had played their parts in how he’d structured his own life. Sensitization, the point where impulses no longer produce the same result, and whether an artificial nervous system would ever be subject to such. If an artificial intelligence had the wherewithal to avoid pain and seek pleasure, what would stop it from becoming completely hedonistic, or devoting its entire being to self-gratification?
The banquet broke up, and Gregor meandered toward the exit. To get there, he had to pass the head table. Astro still sat on the end of it, and he noticed that someone had braced the table to support the machine’s weight. Sensible—the table wasn’t made for robots. But what was? Not for the first time Gregor wondered how much Lucinda had tinkered with the circuitry architecture they had originally developed. When it came to the pleasure-and-pain approach that she called “naturalistic,” she had always thought he gave too much credence to the carrot and he thought she overemphasized the stick.…
Gregor was careful not to get too close, but he couldn’t help but smile at the robot. He chuckled and wondered how the robots would do with old games like hide-and-seek, or warmer-colder.
“Or fetch,” he said. “Would you like a game of fetch?” He shook his head and walked away.
The robot’s motors whirred.
Gregor looked back.
Astro shifted a little, back on its haunches. Gregor watched, but it didn’t move again.
* * *
A runnel of sweat tickled its way down Gregor’s back. The Tennessee sunshine and the mid-July humidity had pummeled him as he stepped out of his rental car, and the walk down the dirt path only made it worse. He wondered why anyone would deliberately live in a place like this.
The shooting range didn’t look like much: a small field that might once have been pasture, with a half dozen lonely target supports set up in front of a grass-topped berm at the far end. Behind the berm, longleaf pines swayed in a slight cross-breeze. Gregor sniffed, but couldn’t catch any pine scent, even from the trees lining the side of the range right up to the split-rail fence he was leaning against. He frowned. He loved a piney smell, whether of a natural Christmas tree or sawdust from a freshly cut piece of lumber. Once the shooting started, he wouldn’t be able to smell anything other than burned powder and hot brass.
He was surprised at the turnout. Dozens of people milled around two ramshackle sheds at the near end of the range. The closer one was long and low, subdivided such that Gregor guessed it had once been a stable. Where there might once have been horses, marksmen—and markswomen, Gregor supposed—were unpacking and checking their weapons.
The crowd chatted amiably, seemingly unfazed by the heat and humidity. Did they all think they would get to shoot a robot today? Surely not.
“You made it!” said a familiar voice, and Gregor turned to see Rich and Tish Groller.
“Does the shooting always attract so many people?” he asked.
Rich laughed. “This is a record crowd, I’d say—a lot more than came out Thursday, that’s for sure! Not here: I’m not sure how they found this place, but it was the only range that would allow the special demo.”
“You mean the ‘live’ robotic targets?”
“That’s what I mean. But how about you? Are you shooting?”
“I hadn’t planned to.”
Rich shrugged. “If you want to, I’m sure someone would let you squeeze off a few rounds. Two things before that, though. First”—he fished a small package out of his pocket and passed it to Gregor—“here are some earplugs. Go ahead and put them in now, they’re going to open the range any minute.” While Gregor manipulated the foam cylinders, Rich continued, “Second, be sure to ask how much they want for ammunition. Nobody here’s going to stiff you, but the stuff’s Almighty precious!”
Rich’s laughter seemed very distant due to the earplugs, and as they set out together Rich and Tish both donned blue plastic earmuffs. Momentarily, a bullhorn crackled and informed the shooters on the line that the range was clear.
Even with the warning, Gregor flinched at the first shot: a light pop from the stables, probably a pistol, followed in quick succession by another, then joined by similar sounds of varying pitches. Gregor felt as if the temperature jumped a few degrees; he rubbed his hands on his jeans as if to dry them. He was glad Rich had given him earplugs.
They walked behind the stables and toward the second shed. It was short and squat, basically a roof held up by four stout poles. Behind it sat a white cargo van, its doors open and Lucinda’s transit cases on the ground.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” The bullhorn voice started issuing instructions for safing the range, which Gregor mostly tuned out as he realized that only two of Lucinda’s robots—Astro and Snoopy—were sitting by the shed. Lucinda stood near them, wearing slim-fitting jeans and a black T-shirt emblazoned with two twenty-sided dice. The T-shirt fit her very well.…
“Luce,” Gregor said as they approached. He tipped his hat as he pulled his gaze up to her face.
She stepped between him and the two robots. “You haven’t been messing with them, have you? Snoopy and Astro?”
“I won’t even get close to them.”
“Good. The other one’s still popping error messages, so it may not even be useful today.”
Gregor couldn’t bring himself to express any regret over that, so he stayed quiet.
“Nothing to say for yourself? Typical.” Lucinda walked the long way around the shed as new volleys of gunfire erupted from the stables.
Gregor found Clifford sitting next to the stack of transit cases. The robot made no move as he approached.
“Have you learned your lesson, Clifford?” Gregor squatted in front of the machine. A single indicator showed that the robot was powered up, though it was just sitting on the ground rather than a power station. “You’re still a good boy, Clifford—I’m the one who messed up.” Gregor reached out but pulled his hand back. “If it were up to me, I’d say that yesterday you figured out pretty well how to avoid pain… which was kind of the whole point, wasn’t it? Of course, none of this is exactly controlled experimentation. It’s just demonstrating…” Gregor sat all the way down. His legs were tightening up. “What, exactly? Stimulus-response, I guess. If you came in a pigeon-shaped chassis, Luce would make B.F. Skinner proud… or set him spinning in his grave. I’m not sure which.
“But the point was that she set you a task yesterday, which she expected you to accomplish, but you just quit. The test got too painful, and somewhere in there,” Gregor tapped Clifford’s shoulder, “you calculated that leaning against me—or maybe not me, maybe I was just a convenient reference point—was the best option.”
Gregor paused and noticed the shooting range had gone almost preternaturally quiet.
“I’m going to see what’s going on. You be a good boy now, okay? Make momma Lucinda proud.”
* * *
Gregor sidled up next to Rich and Tish. “What’s going on?” he whispered.
“We wondered where you went,” Tish said.
Rich pointed. “While the range is safe, they’re putting out the target for the robots—one of the power supplies.”
Gregor didn’t recognize the people out in the field, but supposed they were more of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed’s minions. They were about halfway between the shed and the berm at the far end, unloading sandbags from a utility vehicle and stacking them around one of the power stations to protect it from an errant shot or a ricochet.
Offering them a carrot this time, Gregor thought. More than yesterday, anyway.
As the team trundled back over the uneven ground, Lucinda prevailed upon Brandy to draw a number from a hat—literally, a top hat to which someone had affixed a pair of goggles. Brandy verified the shooter who came forward—a rather fetching young lady wearing what looked like safari clothes—had the same badge number as what she’d called. While the lady readied herself at the front of the shed, Lucinda had Brandy flip a coin.
“Heads,” said She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.
“That’s Astro,” Lucinda said, and tapped her phone screen.
Gregor couldn’t help but smile as the grey-tagged robot bounded away, much like an oversized puppy anticipating a treat. It veered left, then right, either avoiding terrain features or triangulating on the power station’s Wi-Fi signal. Gregor couldn’t tell.
It stopped cold, about thirty meters away, when the first bullet struck. Gregor winced.
The bullet hit just ahead of Astro’s left rear leg. Gregor wished he knew more about ballistic gel and how far a round would penetrate at that distance. Could it have hit something vital?
The robot stood still for a few seconds, then tentatively moved its left hind leg through its full range of motion. Gregor snuck a look at Lucinda to see if she was entering commands on her phone, but she had her arms crossed. Beyond her, the shooter sighted on the robot, her index finger extended and resting against the trigger guard.
In one breath, the woman moved smoothly to shoot again, and Gregor whipped his attention back to Astro. It had darted to its left, then jerked right as the rifle report sounded and a spray of dirt erupted from a hillock just beyond where the robot had been.
The machine bounded once, twice, to the right—
—the rifle spat again—
—the robot angled slightly left, back toward its goal—
—another shot caught it in midstride.
Astro convulsed, or so it seemed. Its legs contracted and it skidded a bit on its belly. Then it pushed off again, leapt high, and snuggled itself behind a low rise topped with dandelions.
As the acrid smell of spent ammunition wafted across him, Gregor wondered what was going through Astro’s electronic mind. He had often argued with Lucinda that all they were doing was tinkering at the edges of real intelligence, real learning. But he had to admit that this robot seemed to have learned very quickly, first to try to evade and now to hide. Would it have the sense to stay hidden, though? Had it learned from what Clifford did yesterday, to conceptualize a way—
“Look at that,” someone off to his right said.
Gregor had been watching the whole time and seen nothing. He stood on tiptoes and realized Astro had splayed its limbs out to their limits and was inching its way, its belly almost scraping the ground, backward from the little hill that hid it from the shooter.
A few people clapped. The shooter pursed her lips, sighted, then lowered her rifle and shook her head. Once more she raised the rifle, but the robot gave her no clear shot.
Lucinda beamed.
Astro stopped and gathered in its legs. The shooter started to line up on her target, but the robot leapt twice its height off the ground and darted left, then right, then left again. Shots rang out, but each one only kicked up grass and dirt before the robot cleared the sandbags and settled in behind them.
The gallery erupted into applause and cheers.
Lucinda soaked it all in, acknowledging the praise like a queen receiving honor from her subjects.
Next in line, Snoopy slowly sank to the ground, its belly to the dirt and its legs tight against its body.
Lucinda didn’t seem to notice.
* * *
While Brandy’s minions set up the second power station—to the right and farther out from the first—Lucinda gave another short lecture to the onlookers. Gregor paid scant attention, though he did pick up on someone’s question about whether Lucinda had updated the rat-in-a-maze scenario by putting a hungry cat in the maze, too.
Gregor was fascinated that Astro was tracking alongside the location team after they picked up the sandbags, even hopping beside the little all-terrain vehicle. One of the fellows helping—from a distance, it looked like Jonny from Friday afternoon—bent down and patted the robot about where its head would be. It was too far away to be sure, but Gregor thought he saw the robot shiver and push itself into the man’s hand. When they brought back the first power supply, Astro again loped along next to the little 4x4 utility vehicle.
Gregor found that more compelling than the shooting.
Lucinda turned her attention to the second shooter called forward by Brandy: a huge man with greying hair and beard. “Shall we?” she said.
The man gestured with his rifle—which looked like a child’s plaything in his hands—and said, “Whenever you are, Doc.”
Lucinda turned to Snoopy, which Gregor still thought appeared to be cowering before her, and pressed her forefinger to her phone’s screen.
The robot sat still as a statue.
Lucinda touched the control again and Snoopy rocked forward a bit but settled quickly back. It may have been the gel quivering, but Gregor thought Snoopy trembled.
“Do you want me to walk it out there?” Gregor asked, and immediately regretted it.
Lucinda’s glance was sharp as an icepick and colder. “Did you ruin this one, too?”
Gregor held up his hands, and Lucinda turned her attention back to tapping and swiping at her phone. Overriding the robot’s apparent reluctance? Wouldn’t that invalidate the demonstration? She could just point to the robot’s behavior as success, especially after yesterday, but he knew why she wouldn’t: She had always been a “the show must go on” kind of person.
A low murmur started in the crowd. Lucinda gestured to the range and then the robot, and called out, “Technical difficulties, sorry!” After a few more swipes the robot stalked away, stiff-gaited and awkward, roughly in the direction of the power station.
Gregor cringed. Snoopy moved like a small child who’d been told to greet their overly affectionate aunt—or like a scolded puppy unsure how to please its master. He didn’t believe for a second that the robot had developed anything like aversion or indifference, but it was easy to see that something in the machine did not want—if “want” was the right word—to be out in that dangerous place.
“Fire when ready,” Lucinda said, a little too brightly.
The big fellow with the rifle shook his head. “It’s too close, and moving too slow. Why isn’t it trying to evade?”
“I’m sure it will react at the first shot.”
From the far side of the shed, an onlooker said, “Put a shot across its bow!” and a few people laughed.
The shooter waited another few moments, then shrugged and put the rifle to his shoulder. Gregor turned in time to see the shambling robot pause and a bit of dirt spray up from a mound just beyond it. The single report seemed ominously loud.
Snoopy turned around. If it had had a head, Gregor would have sworn it was staring down Lucinda.
The robot leapt.
It bounded again, toward the shed—
—and staggered as a gunshot resounded.
It leapt closer, angling to the left—
—another shot clipped it.
Each time it landed, it jumped almost reflexively, more catlike than a machine had any right to be. Gunshots pinged: hit, miss, hit again. Someone—maybe many someones—started yelling.
The robot was perhaps ten meters away when the shots started coming in bursts. A chunk of the robot’s skin blew off and spun into the air.
Gregor charged, almost before he knew what he was doing. Spent casings flew at him, and one pinged against his forehead.
Then he hit the rifleman and pushed him off the line.
Or tried to. The man was twice Gregor’s size and he barely budged. He did move a step to his left, though, so the robot only grazed him as it leapt into the space where he’d been.
And crashed into Gregor instead.
Snoopy caught Gregor full in the side and knocked him over as easily as tipping an empty pitcher. Gregor landed awkwardly, raising a cloud of dust from the hard-packed dirt.
* * *
How much time had passed, Gregor wasn’t sure. He wondered if he might be concussed: The way he’d slammed into the ground his head could have bounced against the dirt. He realized he was having trouble breathing—
—because a robot was sitting on top of him.
“Snoopy,” he said, though it hurt to do so, “be a good boy and get off, okay?”
Snoopy did not move. No, that would be too easy.
Gregor lay awkwardly, on his side, his left arm extended and his right twisted between his body and the robot’s. He spread his fingers out against the robot’s skin. The gel was torn, furrowed, and his index finger pushed against what must be a bullet. The robot lifted up a little, enough for Gregor to take one sweet, deep breath, then it settled atop him once more.
“Thought you’d play the hero?”
Lucinda looked down on him—she always had, hadn’t she?—but she wore a half-frown that might have been grudging approval.
“It’s a little unlike me,” he said.
“It’s a lot unlike you.”
He let the jibe pass. She wasn’t wrong.
“You had to get in the way.”
“I didn’t have to.…”
“But you did.”
“Yeah.” Gregor closed his eyes. He wished she would stop talking and do something about getting the robot off him.
“Okay,” Lucinda said, “now how can I convince Snoopy to move?”
Gregor looked back up at her. “You’re asking me?”
“They sure seem to like you for some reason. I’m thinking I need to change all my passwords so you can’t get into my system behind my back.”
Gregor let out a short chuckle. “You know I’m just hardware.” Even when they were students, he couldn’t make software changes. Professor Bradley might have been a lech playing favorites, but he was a stickler for data management and Gregor had never had the right authorizations. “Have you tried switching it off and then back on again?”
Lucinda said, “I’d like to keep that as a last resort, and not just because that joke is so stale.” She leaned against a shed support, her face lit by her phone screen as she sought a way to override the robot.
Gregor took a gasping breath and sank his fingers into Snoopy’s flesh. Gregor held on, and even though his ribs felt as if they were rubbing together, he shook the robot and whispered, “You’re hurting me.”
He knew it was irrational to say it. The robot had no understanding of what he said, or what it was doing. How does a child learn that it can cause as well as feel pain? He almost laughed at the absurdity of his questions, his ignorance, his lack of experience as a childless bachelor.
Thinking was hard: Gregor’s brain throbbed in synch with his ribs as he tried to breathe. As a result, his thoughts clinked together like rocks in a tumbler. Don’t want to turn it off… Probably corrupt its data… May already be… too hard to program in empathy…
He wasn’t sure where even to begin with that, what it would possibly look like. But might the experiential matrix be corrupt? Could he have corrupted it? Accidentally executed unsafe threads? How to synchronize access…
“What about a feedback loop?” he asked.
“Huh?” Lucinda said. “What are you talking about?”
He almost said something snide but checked himself when he realized that while his thoughts had wandered Lucinda had been talking with… She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, he thought.
“In the matrix,” he said, “somewhere in the learning profile. A feedback parameter. An input linked to an output. Cause and effect, Luce! Let it feel the effects that it causes.” He wasn’t sure if what he said made any sense to her. He wasn’t sure he made sense to himself. And then he wasn’t sure about anything as the world faded to black.
* * *
“You ready to get up now?”
Gregor blinked and looked up to see Rich Groller grinning at him. His voice had been muffled, and it took a second to remember that he was wearing earplugs. He took a blissful breath and turned to see Snoopy practically crawling away, its gel covering in shreds. He realized he had something in his right hand, and when he looked he saw he was holding a handful of the stiff gel embedded with fine, but now-broken, wires.
He tossed it away, disgusted.
Rich helped him sit up, slowly and carefully.
“Really made a hash of things, didn’t I?”
Rich laughed, and then Tish was there with a bottle of water. Gregor thanked her and drank a couple of swallows, then Rich gestured for it. He pulled out a flask and filled the bottle to the brim before handing it back.
“You look like you could use a little anesthetic.”
Gregor chuckled, even though it hurt. An X-ray may be in his future, but he had other concerns. He asked where Lucinda was.
“Packing up,” Rich said, “and none too happy about it. Don’t know who she’s madder at: that robot, or you, or Brandy for canceling the rest of the live-fire event.”
“I don’t think she’s that mad,” Tish said. “She did say that most of science is failing until you get it right.”
“I don’t know if that’s science, or engineering,” Rich said. “Anyway, you feel like standing up?”
Gregor tipped back the bottle—Scotch was not his favorite, but today it rated highly—and leaned on Rich and one of the shed posts as he got to his feet. Pain struck him like a hammer hitting a gong and almost drove the breath from him, and then he was erect and could breathe easier. He stood for a moment, unwilling to move from this less painful position, and fumbled mentally with the pleasure-and-pain principle of Lucinda’s—and his—research. Was it possible that Snoopy’s pain had been so intense—and it must have been intense—that its sudden absence was itself pleasant? Gregor had known a girl with a spine disease who said that after she had surgery it felt almost euphoric just to have less pain. If the robot’s learning matrices had been filling with negative values when the bullets were hitting it, could it interpret a zero state as… desirable?
As he walked gingerly from the shed, he became aware that most of the shooting range was still in use. How long had he been out? He tried to recall what had happened, but everything after Snoopy hit him was a jumble, a blur. Idly, he wondered if the development of thought might require gaps like the one he was experiencing, if filling those gaps was an ingredient of intelligence, or a result of it, and whether artificial thinking could develop unless it had similar gaps that only imaginative cognition might fill…
He blinked in the sunshine and turned his face up to soak in the warmth. Maybe the South wasn’t so bad after all.
“Are you okay?”
At first he’d thought it was Lucinda, but when he looked it was Brandy. She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. He grinned: Now Brandy was She-Who-Must-Be-Answered.
“I’m upright and above ground, as an old friend used to say, so I think so.”
“Good,” Brandy said. “Tish and Rich seem to have taken you in hand, so maybe I’ll see you at the Dead Dog Party.”
“Okay,” Gregor said, unsure if he should ask what kind of party that was. But Brandy waved and turned away, and then suddenly, it seemed, he was at Lucinda’s van. A fellow was putting the lid on Astro’s crate. Snoopy sat on the ground, its legs drawn up tight against its body. It looked for all the world like a cowering dog, and as he approached it seemed to try to make itself as small as possible.
“That doesn’t look good.”
Lucinda’s voice was small. “I think I broke it.”
He had never seen her so close to crying. “Did you tinker with the matrices?”
She spoke slowly. “That would take too long. I set up some… equivalencies in the inputs and outputs. Feedback loops, like you said.”
I said that? Gregor tried to remember. He asked, “Equivalencies? Straight, one for one? No decay, no multipliers?”
Lucinda looked puzzled. “Multipliers?”
“Sure,” he said, “the way skin cells are more sensitive than muscle cells. Or how sensory cells will cut out if the inputs get too intense, or even how our brains ignore trivial things lest the noise of the world drive us mad. Remember Mind and the World Order? We filter out—”
Lucinda’s eyes grew wide—
“—the ‘chaos of the given,’ so we don’t get over-saturated.”
Lucinda frowned. “You always got more out of Lewis than I did,” she said, and started fishing her phone out of her pouch.
Gregor turned to Clifford. The robot had not moved, so far as he could tell. He put his hand on its gelatinous skin, fingers splayed for the maximum contact.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll fix it. You just sit still and be good.”
Clifford’s camera eye winked.
Gregor looked more closely and decided it must have been a trick of the light.