“And about the third Asimovian law,” Xander said. “Protecting one’s own existence… implies a sense of purpose. Which means that the creature is capable of independent thought?”
“Not really, it could just be instinct,” Sam said. “Any number of creatures in any given terrestrial ecosystem know well enough to respond to danger in a self — preserving way.” He grimaced at his own words, and qualified them immediately. “All of which is horribly Homo — sapiens — centric, because we know that there’s plenty of evidence that animals — at least a higher order of animals, above amoebas and earthworms — have a sense of purpose. I think I just implied that only people can ‘think’, which I don’t actually believe. But it’s how you think that matters, possibly, not whether you think. If you’re implying that mere instinct confers sapience, it isn’t enough. Sapience requires being able to articulate just why you think you might be in that danger, not just be a zebra knowing that zebras are food for lions, that a lion ate your auntie for dinner, and that therefore you yourself should probably think about avoiding crossing that lion’s path when he gets hungry again.”
“And anyway,” Marius said, “it really was just in the very early stories, where people were feeling their way around mechanical intelligences and not understanding them very well, that the whole laws or robotics thing could be even remotely accepted as a principle. They were superseded a long time ago.”
“We have drones,” Vince pointed out thoughtfully. “Right now. Theoretically they’re robots — machines — it is true, they are guided by human hands, but the time is coming when they can just be programmed to go somewhere and kill somebody. So where does that leave the First Law of Robotics? And the business of protecting your own existence — what happens when a drone refuses an order because of protecting its own existence inasmuch as it doesn’t like the idea of potentially being blown into smithereens by someone who might take issue with its mission?”
“That’s kind of pushing it,” Xander said, leaning back.
“Okay, but, I mean, someone said it this morning, back in the panel,” Marius said. “Leaving drones right out of it — what was it they said — don’t feed the robots after midnight because they’ll turn into the Terminator…?”
“Ah, I was wondering how many people got the point of that,” Sam murmured.
“So Terminator is sentient, or sapient?” Vince asked. “Hang onto that thought, here comes dinner…”
They waited until their meals were sorted out and delivered to the correct destination on the table, and then Vince, tearing a corner off his garlic bread and stuffing it into the corner of his mouth, lifted a finger for attention.
“So where’s the line?” he asked.
“A Terminator is programmed to harm a human being,” Marius said. “There goes the first law, up in smoke. It does not obey a human’s orders — there goes the second.”
“It did obey John,” Sam said, playing Devil’s advocate.
“Because it chose to!” Marius said. “And that was pretty much reversible — if a Terminator got a reboot it went back to kill mode anyway, so it was immaterial to begin with. The only thing that you might point to as the Laws of Robotics being preserved in that Universe is that you could possibly make a case of the machines rising up to somehow protect their own existence…”
He abruptly closed his mouth, as though he were trying to keep the rest of the words that had been on the tip of his tongue from escaping. But Xander had suddenly remembered that morning’s panel and the moment in which he had seen the expression change on Marius’s face — and that same change had just washed over his features right at the moment at which he decided to stop speaking. And the same chill washed over him, and he said, very softly,
“The gap in the memory banks.”
Marius whipped his head around. “You got that too?”
“I got it because I was watching you,” Xander said. “You… just… heard it… and then when I ran it back I could not believe I had not heard it the first time, but it was right there staring me in the face…”
“What in the world,” Vince said, reaching over to prop up Angel who looked like she was on the verge of falling asleep and sliding right off the bench and under the table, “are you talking about?”
“Do you remember when someone asked Boss about what actually happened in the theoretically shared future that their kind and ours had — and how come in their timeline they existed and he had already said that Earth was empty of us — ”
“Oh yeah — the Skynet question,” Vince said. “I remember. But what about it was it that you guys ‘saw’, then, exactly…?”
Marius hesitated, glancing across the table, but Xander shook his head mutely in a way that indicated unequivocally that there was no help to be had from that quarter. Sam was staring at his protégé with a quizzical frown — he had not been close to the front, at the panel, and had not observed the exchange with Boss very closely. And now Vince had caught the scent of something that might have been important, and his own expression, when he turned back to Marius, was expectant and watchful.
Skewered, Marius gathered his shoulders into a tight fold, tucking his head down protectively.
“He lied,” Marius said, his voice very low.
But it was loud enough for everyone to hear clearly, and the words were electric. Xander’s gaze sharpened, and Sam and Vince both sat up abruptly and leaned closer in.
“Are you telling me that you think that an android uttered a deliberate and considered thing that could somehow measurably, empirically, and logically be proved not to be true?” Vince demanded. “How is that even in the realm of possibility? A mind created with straight logical pathways like that cannot take the curved road, by definition — they should not be capable of it…”
“You are talking about robots again,” Sam said. “Machines created by us, for us, according to our rules. Our laws. You’re talking about that slave race for which the original laws were made. We might well have created the creatures, down the line, with minds just like you just described — but what’s to say what happened when those mentalities started to evolve? At what point do they stop being created by us and — well — become us…?”
“But what did he lie about?” Vince said helplessly.
“We can’t know,” Xander said. “He was speaking from the point of view of knowing something, some fact that he was coldly and deliberately not telling us. For whatever reason.”
“First law,” Marius said faintly, with a strange little smile. “Preventing us from coming to harm.”
“They never even heard of the first law,” Vince said. “They’re literally generations away from it. If it ever played any part in their, er, programming… I’m willing to lay down good money that the original set — up has been superseded a long time ago, anyway.”
“It’s fiction,” Angel said, apparently completely appropriately, as though she had been coherently following the conversation all the time.
Vince gave her a startled look, and then decided that pursuing this would take too much time at that moment. There were other things he wanted to know. “What harm could we have come to?”
“Truth hurts,” Sam said, his voice a shade more bleak than he had thought he had permitted himself to show.
Xander, although not directly accused of anything, actually flushed and looked down. There were a lot of truths and half — truths and lies — at least those of omission — that had changed the face of this particular convention, that had put him in the position that he held and had ousted Sam from the one that had been his.