At that point, I had no idea whether or not the robots were sentient. I’d assumed they weren’t, because otherwise what was the point of having them instead of slaves? But I didn’t know where Athene got them from, and certainly there were times way up there that had sentient robots. We’d never have colonized Titan without them, and even Mars would have been hard work. And I realized vaguely that there must have been a time when robots were just becoming sentient, and these particular robots might have come from there, if Athene had chosen the best ones that weren’t sentient, which would be just like her.
I didn’t go and ask her, although I thought about it. The reason I didn’t was that I enjoyed seeing Sokrates tackling a puzzle, and it was more fun when I didn’t already know the answer. With many of the available puzzles—the nature of the universe, the purposes of the masters, Athene’s plans—I did know the answers. Watching him take on one where I really didn’t know was fascinating. It was adorable to see him introduced to the concept of zero. But watching him go after potential artificial intelligence was priceless. That alone would have been worth all the time I spent in the city.
Sokrates had written down the serial numbers of all the robots that were present the first night he went in, and he checked them all. Some of them were different, and he noted them. He greeted each one and asked it a few questions. This took about an hour. Then Klio pointed out the ones that refused to move, and he tried talking to them. He asked them questions and got Klio to translate the questions into English.
“Why do you want to stay in here and not go out to work? Do you like your work? Do you like the feeding station? What do you want to do?” He went down the row, speaking like that to each one, varying what he said from time to time.
“How do you give them orders?” he asked Klio.
“Well, we can give them verbal orders for simple things, things they already understand. But if it’s something new and complicated, we use a key.”
“A key?” Sokrates said. “What sort of key?”
“I’ll show you,” she said. She went off to a locker at the back of the room and came back with a box containing little chips of metal and coloured plastic about as small as they could be and have human fingers pick them up—very similar to the ones I’d seen when I’d been on Mars for the concert that time.
“And you show the key to the worker?” Sokrates asked. “And then it obeys?”
“Essentially,” Klio said. “It goes in this panel.”
She touched a panel on the robot’s side, which slid open. She put the key into a recessed slot.
“You put it directly into its liver,” Sokrates said, turning to me. “Never mind your thought about head injuries. The liver is indeed the seat of intelligence!”
Klio laughed, then stopped laughing. “I suppose it is about where a liver would be…”
It was. I blinked.
“Let’s not take this as evidence one way or the other until we know whether the workers are intelligent,” Simmea said, wisely. “What does the key do?”
“It tells the worker that we need it to go out and look after the goats. It already understands what that means—how to watch for wolves, and how to milk the goats and make cheese and so on. The key tells it the priority. I could have given the order out loud in English to this one. But if I had one who had never looked after goats, I’d have to use the key, and the key would tell it what to do and also what it means.”
“Those are clever keys,” Sokrates said, running his fingers through them. “Do the colors tell you which orders they hold?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Klio said. “And if the worker won’t take the order from the key, like these, eventually we swap out their … liver. Their memory. But we can’t do that so much, because we’re low on new memories.”
“They refuse to work and you punish them by removing their memory?” Sokrates asked.
“It’s not punishment. They’re not—we don’t think of them as being aware.” She looked guilty. “If they are, then we have behaved very badly to them.”
“I think it would be better if you stopped removing memories for the time being,” Sokrates said.
“There’s so little proof! And Lysias, who is the one who really needs to make that decision, won’t want to look at it. He distrusts Kebes, not without reason. And if he has to accept them as free-willed beings then he’ll have to accept a lot of guilt for the memories he has removed.” Klio looked distressed now.
Sokrates nodded gravely. “He will indeed. It’s sad. But it’s not as sad as removing their memories. We might beat a recalcitrant slave, but that would heal.”
“I think you should talk to Lysias. And after that I think you should talk to the Chamber.”
“I agree,” Sokrates said. “But meanwhile, I should talk to these poor workers.” He looked at me and Simmea. “You can do likewise. Go and ask them my questions. Let me know if there’s a response.”
“In Greek?” I asked.
“Greek, or Greek and then English,” he replied, absently.
“You know we don’t know English,” Simmea said.
“I know you don’t,” Sokrates confirmed, looking only at her. Of course he guessed that I did, and didn’t want to expose me. Dear old Sokrates. He always was extremely good about that.
“Should we try Latin?” she asked.
“I don’t think there’s any point,” Klio said. “They won’t be programmed in Latin, and they won’t have heard it enough to have had any chance of picking it up.”
“How could they have picked up Greek?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“Well, they can parse English, so they must have language circuits. Greek is a very clear and logical language, and it’s part of the same language family as English. So is Latin, incidentally; that’s why non and no are similar. So with hearing it so much I can just about believe that they might be able to figure out how to understand Greek.”
“Why did it reply in English then?” Simmea asked.
Klio shrugged. “It shouldn’t have been able to reply at all. The proper mode of interaction is that somebody gives it a command and then it carries it out to the best of its ability, pausing to recharge itself here when it needs to.”
“They run on electricity?” Sokrates said. “Like the lights and the heat and cooling in the library?”
“They really are machines, whatever else they might be,” Klio said.
We went up and down the rows, checking numbers and asking the workers questions. They were the same questions, Sokrates’s questions. I longed for one of the workers to answer, especially after my body grew as tired of it as my mind. Eventually Simmea yawned so loudly that Klio heard, and sent us both to bed.
Walking along with Simmea discussing what we’d just been doing was one of the basic patterns of our interaction, one of the ways that our relationship functioned, so of course we did that. “Do you believe now that they might be aware?” she asked.
“I’m reserving judgement until there’s more evidence,” I said.
“What do you think the Chamber will say?” She stretched—her pregnancy was giving her odd back pains. I put my arm around her, which she always found comforting.
“They’ll agree with Lysias that Kebes did it, even though that’s definitely not the case. But if he really pushes it, then I think if it’s the full Chamber they’ll have to agree with Sokrates. I mean, some of them are irritated with him about this and that, but he’s Sokrates, after all. They’re here because they love Plato. And Plato revered Sokrates—though he clearly built his own version of him to revere after a while.” I smiled. “I think that’s funny, don’t you?”