A Choice of Gods

"But you said…"

"That was in the begi

"But now," said Hezekiah, "you work for yourself."

"You can understand that, Hezekiah. You and your companions now work for yourselves."

"No," said Hezekiah. "We still work for Man."

The robot Stanley paid no attention to what Hezekiah said. "We were confused at first," he said, "and lost. Not we, of course, but each of us, each one separately. For we had never been one people; there had been no we; just each of us alone, doing what was expected of him, doing what he'd been fabricated for, and happy in the doing of it. We had no life of our own and I think that is what confused us so much when the People went away. For here suddenly, not we, but each of us alone, found that he did have a life of his own, that he could live without his human master, and that he still was capable of functioning had there been anything to do. Many of us stayed on for a time, in some cases a very long time, in the old households, performing the tasks we were supposed to do—as if our people had only gone off on a trip and would soon be coming back. Although even the stupidest of us, I think, knew this was not the case, for not only our own people, but everyone, had gone and that was most peculiar, for never before had everyone gone away at once. I think that the most of us grasped immediately what had happened, but we kept on pretending that it wasn't so, that in time the people would all come home again and, true to our conditioning and training, we continued in the tasks that now were no tasks at all, but simply senseless motions. In time we gave up the pretense, not all of us at once, of course, but a few of us at first and others a little later and others after them. We took to wandering, hunting for new masters, for tasks that were not senseless. We found no humans, but we did find ourselves, we found one another. We talked with one another; we laid our little, short-range, meaningless plans by consultation with others of our kind. First we sought for humans and finally, when we knew there were no humans who would take us in—for your people, Mr. Jason, had all the robots that you needed and your people, Chief Red Cloud, would have none of us, and there was a small band out West, on the coast, who were frightened of everything, even of us who tried to help them…"

Red Cloud said to Jason, "That would be the tribe from which your wanderer came. What was it he said they were afraid of? The Dark Walker, wasn't it?"

"They were field workers to begin with," Jason said. "He didn't tell me this, perhaps he doesn't know, but from what he told me it is very plain. Agricultural people who worked continually in the fields, following the plantings, the tending and the harvest. Ground down in poverty, living hand to mouth, tied so close to the soil they became the very soil. They had no robots, of course. They may only have glimpsed robots from a distance, if at all. Even having seen them, they may not have fully understood exactly what they were. The robots were far better off than they. They would have been frightened of a robot."

"They fled from us," said Stanley. "Not from me. I wasn't there. But from others of our people. We tried to make them understand. We tried to explain to them. But still they fled from us. We finally no longer followed them. We had no wish to frighten them."

"What do you think they saw?" asked Red Cloud. "This Dark Walker of theirs…"

"Perhaps nothing," Jason said. "They would have had, I suspect, a long background of folklore. They would have been a superstitious people. To people such as they, superstition would have been an entertainment and perhaps a hope…"

"But they might have seen something," insisted Red Cloud. "On that night when it happened, there might have been something on the Earth. There may have been netters who swept up the People. In times past my people had their stories of things that walked the Earth and we, in our new sophistication, are too ready to discount them. But when you live as close to the bosom of the Earth as we do you come to realize that some of the old stories may have some shreds of truth in them. We know, for example, that aliens on occasion now do visit Earth and in time past, before the white man came with his fury and his noise, when this continent was quieter and less boisterous than it became, who can say they did not visit then?"

Jason nodded. "Old friend," he said, "you may well be right."

"We came to a time," said the robot Stanley, "when we knew there were no humans we could serve and we stood with idle hands and there was nothing we could do. But through the centuries the idea grew, slowly at first and then with greater impact, that if we could not work for humans, we could work for ourselves. But what can a robot do for himself or for other robots? Build a civilization? A civilization would be meaningless for us. Build a fortune? What would we get a fortune from and what need would we have of it? We had no profit motive, we did not thirst for status. Education we might have been capable of and even have enjoyed, but it was a dead end, for except for a questionable self-satisfaction it might have given us, we had no use for it. Humans used education for their self-improvement, to earn a better living, to contribute to society, to assure themselves of more enjoyment of the arts. They called it self-improvement and that was a worthy goal for any human, but how could a robot improve himself? And to what purpose and what end? The answer seemed to be that we could not improve ourselves. No robot could make himself appreciably better than he already was. He had limitations built into him by his makers. His capabilities were predetermined by the materials and the programming that went into him. Considering the tasks he was designed to do, he served well enough. There was no need for a better robot. But there seemed no doubt that a better robot could be built. Once you thought of it, it became apparent that there was no limit to a robot. There was no place you had to stop and say, this is the best robot we can make. No matter how well a robot was designed, a better one was always possible. What would happen, we asked ourselves, if an open-ended robot should be built, one that was never really finished…"

"Are you trying to tell us," Jason asked, "that what you have here is your open-ended robot?"

"Mr. Jason," Stanley said, "that is, indeed, what I have tried to say."

"But what do you intend?"

"We do not know," said Stanley.

"You don't know? You are the ones who are building…"

"Not any longer," Stanley said. "It has taken over now. It tells us what to do."

"What use is it?" asked Red Cloud. "It is anchored here. It can't move. It can't do anything."

"It has a purpose," said the robot, stubbornly. "It must have a purpose.."

"Now, just a minute there," said Jason. "You say it tells you what to do. You mean that it has taken over the building of itself? That it tells you how to build it?"

Stanley nodded. "It started twenty years or more ago. We have talked with it…"

"Talked with it. How?"

"By printout. We talk back and forth, like the old computers."

"What you really have built is a big computer."