office pool. Sometimes it takes several months of argument. Most of the time, however, we can develop a consensus after two or three trips out of the chair.'
'What's the 'chair?''
Griffith led Laura to the center window. The initial impression she got was of something sinister. The room was bathed in low, red light, and in the center was an enormous metal armchair. A rounded hood was mounted on the top, and from the inside protruded a variety of needle-like projections pointed downward. The entire scene reminded Laura uncomfortably of a torture chamber.
'The chair is a combination simulator and recharging station. For the first month or so after they leave the line, the Model Eights spend most of their days plugged into the computer by means of that interface you see at the top. When they arrive here from the assembly building, they're just inert lumps of metal on a gurney. After the first twenty-four hours in the chair, they can move their limbs about and sit up. It takes a long time before balance can be programmed, and even longer to get them to take that first step.'
'And the computer runs them through simulations while they're plugged in down there?'
Griffith nodded. 'It'll fire through trillions of simulations before they're done.'
Laura looked down at the room and its sinister chair. There were brackets on the chair's arms and legs, and several large metal straps protruded at chest and waist level. 'Why the restraints?'
'Oh, the simulations are quite real to the robots. Are you familiar with the virtual-reality workstations Mr. Gray has on the island?' Laura nodded. 'Well, imagine how real the computer's representation of the world would seem to a robot when it was fed directly via cable to its neural net. It's bound to be as real to the robots as… well, reality is to us. Anyway,' he chuckled, 'it's quite comical sometimes. Have you ever seen a dog sleep? How they'll sometimes kick their legs chasing rabbits in their dreams? The same thing happens to the Model Eights. Some go nuts. They broke quite a few restraints until we went to titanium. The bolts holding the chair to the floor are sunk twenty feet into the base rock under the simulation room. I'd love to know just what's running through their nets when they react the way they do.'
'You mean you don't know what simulations the computer is running them through?' Laura asked.
'Not a [unclear],' he said, shaking his head with no apparent concern. 'Like I said, it runs through trillions in any given course. And it varies them constantly both to improve and to add some diversity to the skill sets. Some of the courses are distinctly better than others, but all the Model Eights' hardware is absolutely identical, I've got to hand it to Mr. Gray. He did such a fine job on the design that we literally haven't made one single change to the prototype, and we've got forty-eight off the line so far. Now that's an astonishing technical feat.'
'You mean to say that Mr. Gray designed the hardware; I thought you were the head of robotics.'
'I am, but 'robotics' in this organization means programming. Like I said, the differences in software-driven performance are remarkable. Hightop, for instance, is head and shoulders above the rest in every category. He sends his regards, by the way.' Laura nodded, uncertain how to respond. 'But some of the others have been so hopelessly irredeemable that we had to reprogram them.'
'You mean, just pull the plug and start from scratch?'
'Good heavens, no! Each one of those Model Eights represents probably a billion dollars of hardware, but maybe ten times that much in 'soft' costs. If you consider the cost of construction and operation of this facility and, more significantly, the computer time to run it, then those things would be worth around twelve billion dollars each. With those kinds of costs, we don't make the decision to reprogram lightly, and we certainly don't decharge them and 'start from scratch.' The reprogramming course is only two weeks and involves just patching what the computer thinks the defective functions are. They're almost always higher-order things like 'goals' and 'plans.' That way, we salvage literally billions of dollars' worth of computer time.'
'Why is this chair empty?' Laura asked. 'If it costs so much, I'd think you'd keep this place humming.'
'Mr. Gray halted all new programming,' he replied. 'We had two students in the course, but they're both kept in bays now — charged but inactive.'
'When did he suspend the programming?'
'Last night right after the town meeting,' Griffith said, now shaking his head and frowning. 'It's bullshit,' he mumbled. 'That little boy didn't know what he was talking about.' He stepped up close to Laura and looked around to make sure they were out of earshot. 'The boy who said he saw a robot out of his window, you know?' Laura nodded. 'He didn't see a Model Eight.' Griffith shook his head again. 'No way.'
'Do you know that for sure?' Laura asked.
Griffith nodded. 'All the Model Eights were accounted for last night. But even more telling was the little boy's description of what he saw. Now I know he's only eight, but his science teacher stood up and raved that the boy was some sort of whiz. And he's got a rich gene pool. His mother works in Krantz's virtual-reality section, and his father is in space operations. But he got it all wrong. The Model Eights don't run in a crouch. They don't run at all!'
Griffith looked over his shoulder after raising his voice, but then turned back to Laura. 'You've seen them. It's a goddamn scientific miracle that they can walk, much less run! And they never, not once, have gotten into a crouch. They're either completely erect, or they're flat on their big tin asses! Now that's simple, Newtonian physics, and I offered to prove it to Gray with as many tests as he'd like. I came straight down here this morning before we opened up and went to Hightop. If any of 'em can crouch, Hightop can. And he fell straight on his butt ten times in a row!'
'You don't man the facilities down here twenty-four hours?' Laura asked.
Griffith shook his head. 'No need to. It's fully automated. All we're doing here this morning is monitoring. 'Big brother,' like I said before. Gray ordered human monitoring of all Model Eight activity beginning today, which is yet another overreaction to that little boy's story, if you ask me.'
'And you're absolutely sure the boy didn't see a Model Eight?'
'He couldn't have. The human operators leave here every night at ten o'clock. We open up at six A.M. That's one eight-hour shift during which there are no humans down here. But since the robots don't sleep, the place is operational twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Now I have eight hours of video recordings of every last one of those robots for this and every night since we opened shop down here. The first thing we do when we get in every morning is look at that video!'
'And you've got a videotape from last night.'
'Yes! From every night. But it's not taped. It's recorded digitally on an off-board computer.'
'But the computer controls all the off-board computers, doesn't it?'
'Yes, but—' He clearly registered, the point she was making. 'Look. You want to know why I'm sure that little boy's story is wrong? Why I'm absolutely positive? He described the thing he saw as not as tall as the dumpsters in back of the grocery store. I must've asked him twenty different ways, and every time that boy was completely, positively sure that whatever he saw didn't come close to being as tall as the trash container he saw it next to. That dumpster is only six feet, eight inches tall. You've seen how big the Eights are! At a hundred feet away is there any chance you could fail to tell that a Model Eight isn't more than six eight? They're ten feet tall, for Christ's sake!'
'Was it well lit in the parking lot?'
'No. But what does it matter? It was just some hoodlum breaking curfew, that's all. We've had problems with vandalism, you know.'
'Vandalism of trash bins?'
'There's been some gang of little punks running around this island for months. They've knocked over streetlamps, dragged a weather station down by the launch pads out into the jungle, chipped off pieces of the base of the statue up at the top of the Village's main boulevard, things like that. Some kind of initiation ceremony or ritual, that's Hoblenz's guess.'
Laura shook her head in disbelief. 'Are you people all blind? You're just so convinced that your precious robots are under control that you come up with some ridiculous explanation for what's going on like 'gang initiation ritual?''
He was taken aback by her outburst. 'You sound just like all the rest of them,' he said.
'Like all the rest of whom?'
'The people at the town meeting! Mass hysteria! By the time they all stormed out of the gymnasium I swear I could've convinced 'em that a UFO had just landed on the roof.'
'Are you saying that everyone stormed out of that meeting last night over rumors of robots running loose, and
