not over the asteroid?'
'Stormed out of that meeting and right off the island, if what I'm hearing is true. Some of my own people, too — people who should know better! The damn asteroid is probably what held on to the few hundred who stayed — that and Gray's talk. You should've heard him. What it's going to be like after a ten-thousand-fold increase in human productivity. Humanity relieved from drudgery and dangerous jobs. There were people with tears in their eyes. I would've thought more would want to stay and be a part of it.'
'A part of what?'
'Of phase two,' Griffith said as if she was missing the most elementary of his points. 'Of the expansion.'
'Of the colonization?' Laura asked, feeding him Janet's word.
He frowned. 'It's not exactly colonization. It's more of a natural… progression. An expansion, like I said. Building on everything that has come before.'
'A tower to the sky,' Laura said under her breath, but Griffith paid no attention to the comment.
'It's like we take everything known right now and… grow it. Information grows exponentially, you know.' He shook his head. 'You really should have heard the speech. It's too bad nobody recorded it.'
'Well, maybe somebody did.'
Griffith shook his head. 'It was the first time I ever saw metal detectors on this island. Hoblenz's men ran 'em like airport security. Wouldn't let any recording devices — camcorders, recorders, anything — inside the gym.' Griffith shook his head and said, 'Anyway, I'm sorry. As I said, this has to be a short tour of necessity.' He headed back toward the work area, and Laura followed.
They passed by the last [unclear] darkened one.
'What's this room?' she asked, pausing at the thick glass.
'Oh?' Griffith replied, stopping but not turning fully to face her. 'That's another tactile room.'
It was pitch-dark inside. 'Can I see?'
He clearly didn't want to show her. 'I wish I had enough time to explain all we go through in a course — how much we have to teach these robots before we can dare set them loose in the world.'
He looked down, shuffling his feet.
'Why don't you just show me the room?'
'But you won't understand,' he said in a plaintive tone. 'You can't. You haven't had to make all the discoveries we've made or design the programs necessary to deal with—'
'I know you're busy, Phil,' Laura interrupted, 'and I don't have all day either, so if you'll just turn on the lights down there I'll be out of your hair.'
He frowned, but after a moment's hesitation walked over to a panel just below the window. With a flick of his wrist he threw a switch.
The room below was flooded with light. The empty chamber was about the size of the tactile room on the far side of the [garbled] area.
'Like all young… creatures,' Griffith continued in a voice drained of inflection, 'the robots are fascinated by moving things. There were two doors leading into the room — one large enough for the robots, the other too small even for humans. The room was empty save a huge drain in the middle of the floor and thick metal sprinkler heads protruding from the ceiling. The white concrete had clearly been scrubbed, but no amount of detergent seemed capable of removing the faint but indelible brown stains.
'It's absolutely essential that we let them get the curiosity out of their system.'
'Whose are those bloodstains,' Laura said.
'There's no other way. They're just fascinated, absolutely fascinated, by animals. Goats and sheep, mostly, but dogs, cats, other wildlife.'
'My God,' Laura said. 'They rip them limb from limb.'
'Not on purpose, Laura,' Griffith said with true emotion. 'They don't mean to hurt their toys. They're really quite gentle, as much as they can be. And' — he shook his head—'it's not a pleasant part of the course for any of us, or for them. Some of the robots get quite distraught after… after they've broken one of the animals. But that's what we want, don't you see? The experience is so traumatic that the connections their nets develop are strong and long-lasting. I swear after this course you could put them in a room full of babies and they wouldn't move till they dropped to the ground with dead batteries.'
Griffith watched Laura intently, as if waiting for her to absolve him of his guilt. She could say nothing, however. It was all merging into a single disgusting picture. The soldier, the animals led to slaughter what else in the name of progress? In the name of Gray.
Griffith threw the switch to extinguish the lights in the room.
Laura walked back to the window overlooking the first, brightly lit room. The Model Eight now played with a chrome faucet, and water shot up from the sink. The robot banged the metal sprayer against a man's suit that it had draped over the back of a chair. When the robot lost interest, the fixture fell to the floor.
He looked up with a start at the observation window — directly at where Laura now stood. When Griffith stepped up beside her, the robot flung its arm out violently, knocking the chair and the jacket across the room.
'He can see us,' Laura said.
'Nonsense,' Griffith replied. 'It's one-way glass.'
'He looked right at us, and then he lashed out.'
'He looked up at what to him is a mirror. He can't see us.'
'Don't they have thermal imagery? Maybe he detected our heat through the glass.'
Griffith looked down at the robot, squinting, but then shook his head. 'That's not it. They hate mirrors. Every last one of the Model Eights. Before they learn to control their behavior, they tend to lash out whenever they're the least bit irritated.'
'And he became irritated just by looking at the mirrored glass?' She chuckled. 'So you fill their world with mirrored observation windows even though it pisses them off?'
'I'm sorry, I wasn't being clear enough. It's not just mirrors that aggravate them. It's their image in those mirrors. They hate seeing themselves.'
Laura tilted her head. 'Why?' Griffith shrugged, but said nothing.
'You know they've been getting out of here,' Laura said.
'Now that has been blown way out of proportion,' he replied, bristling. 'They're just isolated incidents.'
Laura looked up at Griffith, and he turned away. 'They're each different, remember. There are going to be some bad seeds.'
'I'd like to see one of the 'bad seeds,'' Laura said. When Griffith started to object, she interrupted with 'Then I'll get out of your hair. I'd just like to observe a Model Eight who's not a showpiece like Hightop for a few moments.'
Griffith headed off to the work area with a frown on his face. Laura turned back to watch the young Model Eight below. It was sitting quietly and holding a colorful green-and-blue globe in both arms, staring at the details on the orb. She felt unsettled — on a wild ride she wanted to slow down but knew would only go faster. There was too much, too many new ideas. It was impossible to keep up.
There was one thing, however, that Laura knew with certainty. Soon, very soon, Gray's revolution would sweep across the green-and-blue orb the young robot held in his hands, and it would change everything… forever. It meant a spurt of growth — a period of unparalleled advancement for mankind. She already had enough truly novel, revolutionary ideas to write a dozen, two-dozen breakthrough papers. She could take her science to new heights, and then walk triumphantly down the halls of her department. In her mind she could hear the pleas for her time and her thoughts that would come from the very same people who had judged her unworthy of tenure.
Somehow, the thought seemed petty. Publishing papers? For whose benefit? Whose critique? As long as Joseph Gray lived, no one would equal his brilliance. He was a once-in-a-million-year phenomenon, and this was her chance to be a part of his world — the society of the mind.
'We call him 'Auguste,'' Griffith said, using the French pronunciation—'Owgoost.'
The robot sat on the floor of his cell, and Laura and Griffith watched him on a computer screen from the underground monitoring station. 'His formal name is 1.2.09R.'
