(1979)
ADAM ROBOTS
Adam Roberts
Adam Charles Roberts (born 1965) is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway College in London. The year 2000 saw him launch a twin career as a science fiction novelist (with Salt) and critic (with Science Fiction; a second edition was published in 2006). In 2018 he was elected Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society. He has been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award three times. His latest novel is The Black Prince (2018), adapted from an original script by Anthony Burgess. In conversation with Christos Callow for the magazine Strange Horizons in 2013, Roberts explained, "I like to laugh, I like to make other people laugh, if I can. And more, it seems to me, the English novel specifically is a comic mode, which is to say, the novel in England comes out of Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens and writers who were primarily setting out to make their readers laugh. For an English writer to turn his or her back on that seems to me to miss some of the strengths of writing in this larger tradition."
A pale blue eye. ‘What is my name?’
‘You are Adam.’
He considered this. ‘Am I the first?’
The person laughed at this. Laughter. See also: chuckles, clucking, percussive exhalations iterated. See also: tears, hiccoughs, car-alarm. Click, click.
‘Am I,’ Adam asks, examining himself, his steel-blue arms, his gleaming torso, ‘a robot?’
‘Certainly.’ The person talking with Adam was a real human being, with the pulse at his neck and the rheum in his eye. An actual human, dressed in a green shirt and green trousers, both made of a complex fabric that adjusted its fit in hard-to-analyse ways, sometimes billowing out, sometimes tightening against the person’s body. ‘This is your place.’
Wavelengths bristled together like the packed line of an Elizabethan neck-ruff. The sky so full of light that it was brimming and spilling over the rim of the horizon. White and gold. Strands of grass-like myriad-trimmed fibre-optic cables.
‘Is it a garden?’
‘It’s a city too; and a plain. It’s everything.’
Adam Robot looked and saw that this was all true. His pale blue, steel-blue eyes took in the expanse of walled garden, and beyond it the dome, white as ice, and the rills of flowing water bluer than water should be, going curl by curl through fields greener than fields should be.
‘Is this real?’ Adam asked.
‘That,’ said the person, ‘is a good question. Check it out, why don’t you? Have a look around. Go anywhere you like, do anything at all. But, you see that pole?’
In the middle of the garden was an eight-metre steel pole. The sunlight made interesting blotchy diamonds of light on its surface. At the top was a blue object, a jeweclass="underline" the sun washing cyan and blue-grape and sapphire colours from it.
‘I see the pole.’
‘At the top is a jewel. You are not allowed to access it.’
‘What is it?’
‘A good question. Let me tell you. You are a robot.’
‘I am.’
‘Put it this way: you have been designed down from humanity, if you see what I mean. The designers started with a human being, and then subtracted qualities until we had arrived at you.’
‘I am more durable,’ said Adam, accessing data from his inner network. ‘I am stronger.’
‘But those are negligible qualities,’ explained the human being. ‘Soul, spirit, complete self-knowledge, independence – freedom – all those qualities. Do you understand?’
‘I understand.’
‘They’re all in that jewel. Do you understand that?’
Adam considered. ‘How can they be in the jewel?’
‘They just are. I’m telling you. OK?’
‘I understand.’
‘Now. You can do what you like in this place. Explore anywhere. Do anything. Except. You are not permitted to retrieve the purple jewel from that pole. That is forbidden to you. You may not so much as touch it. Do you understand?’
‘I have a question,’ said Adam.
‘So?’
‘If this is a matter of interdiction, why not programme it into my software?’
‘A good question.’
‘If you do not wish me to examine the jewel, then you should programme that into my software and I will be unable to disobey.’
‘That’s correct, of course,’ said the person. ‘But I do not choose to do that. I am telling you, instead. You must take my words as an instruction. They appeal to your ability to choose. You are built with an ability to choose, are you not?’
‘I am a difference engine,’ said Adam. ‘I must make a continual series of choices between alternatives. But I have ineluctable software guidelines to orient my choices.’
‘Not in this matter.’
‘An alternative,’ said Adam, trying to be helpful, ‘would be to programme me always to obey instructions given to me by a human being. That would also bind me to your words.’
‘Indeed it would. But then, robot, what if you were to be given instructions by evil men? What if another man instructed you to kill me, for instance? Then you’d be obligated to perform murder.’
‘I am programmed to do no murder,’ said Adam Robot.
‘Of course you are.’
‘So, I am to follow your instruction even though you have not programmed me to follow your instruction?’
‘That’s about the up-and-down of it.’