NEW FRONTIERS

  S.R. Davis

  Published: 2010

  Tag(s): "science fiction" robot, robots, "Three Laws of Robotics" "3 Laws" technical, computer, computers, relationships, friendship, loyalty, android, androids, future, futuristic

  For Luthor.

  Sorry son, there’s no chance you’ll not be a nerd.

  For those not familiar with Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

  The following story was written using Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics as the catalyst.

  I hope he wouldn’t mind.

  Chapter 1

  NEW FRONTIERS

  A short story by

  Scott R. Davis

  Damn, she was cute.

  Her hair straight and black, cut to shoulder length, with very low bangs hanging to her almond shaped eyes. Pale, flawless skin, graceful jaw line, and a wide mouth with beautifully shaped, full, lips. Above those lips, perfectly placed, her cute little nose, it has a slight upward tilt. A face that looks like it was stolen from a marble sculpture. Her body also looks sculpted, curvy in all the right places… very curvy in some.

  She’s looking at me with eyes so blue it seems as though they’re ice chipped from a glacier.

  Looking at… me…

  For a second I forget why we’re staring at each other, then Sully nudges me and I remember to order.

  “Do you want room for cream?” she asks. Somehow, in my mind, it sounds dirty. Maybe it’s her British accent.

  “Uh… no! Just uh, leaves and water please, just plain. Sully, you want a tea?” I ask in an effort to move her focus somewhere else.

  It takes me a second to realize what I’ve said, and then I feel the color rising up my neck and cheeks. I can feel my ears turning into beacons of shining red embarrassment, which only makes things even more embarrassing.

  “No, Luthor, I’m fine.”

  Of course Sully is fine, of course he doesn’t want anything. Robots can’t drink tea, and robots can’t feel stupid in front of cute baristas. Idiot!

  “Uh, I guess were good…” I say, to the plunging neckline of her tight uniform, unable to meet her eyes, eyes that suddenly seemed much brighter. Maybe it was the dark makeup around them.

  I run my bracelet over the EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) sensor attached to the register. 6.2 credits remove themselves from my account and march over to Sol-Bucks’ corporate account. I have just inadvertently helped them further their goals towards world domination.

  “Smooth.” Sully says as we turn away from the counter with a holographic “ORDER HERE” shining above it, and move toward the one projecting “PICK UP”.

  “Yeah, thanks for noticing, and then bringing it up again right away.” I jokingly stick up my two fingers at Sully, using my body to block the rude gesture from the barista. The expression on Sully’s gunmetal blue, titanium, face doesn’t change (though in his defense he does have a somewhat limited range of facial motion), but he can’t pull that stoic crap with me, I know from the way his red eyes brightened slightly that he finds it humorous.

  “I wasn’t referring to your bumbling attempt to simply order tea, Luthor. I was referring to the fact that you forgot to tip her.”

  “Oh no! I did forget!”

  “Too late now. Probably a good thing though, I’m sure that would have taken another awkward fifteen minutes.”

  “You know, Sully, you were built to be my friend, yet you’re becoming more and more like the older brother I never wanted.”

  “Are you attempting to be humorous? I can never tell if I’m not getting the joke, or you’re just not being funny.”

  “It’ll be real funny when I format you when we get home.” I wouldn’t of course, but Sully was quick, and I really had to work sometimes for a decent comeback. This is my own fault of course. I have been working on Sully since I was 10 years old. Constantly improving and upgrading him to the point where he can now tell me the upgrades he’d like to have.

  We mostly make our own custom upgrades, write our own coding, and machine our own parts. We have to be careful though. Every so often, there’ll be a day like today, when we need to go in to U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men for software upgrades that I’m not “certified by law” to do myself. I know what’s really going on though. They’re making sure there are no robots operating without the Three Laws. Especially now since U.S Robots will sell a robot outright instead of just leasing them like they used to in the old days.

  Sully definitely has the Three Laws, he’s had them since they were built directly into positronic brain nine years ago. That’s when my parents bought him for me. Dad had always wanted a robot, even back when they were still more science fiction than science. He had to save for quite a while (he never fails to remind me) before being able to purchase Sully, who was then the latest model from U.S. Robots, and called SLE-926. He gave him to me on my tenth birthday, getting the final ok only after spending months convincing Mom it wouldn’t go on a killing spree. I think Dad was more excited than I was that day, since by the time I was ten years old, I had seen robots practically as far back as I could remember. No one was butchered in a robotic frenzy on my tenth birthday, but Mom still isn’t completely trusting of robots to this day. She wouldn’t be overly thrilled to learn that Sully and I have been working ever since to remove all but the most stubborn restrictions from his positronic brain.

  At first, when I was a kid, my only motivation was to see if I could make Sully twist the bullies that were torturing me into human pretzels. Unfortunately, I was never able to make that happen. As I got older and started taking AP Robotics courses in high school and at the community college, our goal, mine and Sully’s, changed, became something different, something more specific. We wanted to see how far we could take it, to see if we could eventually remove all restrictions including the Three Laws of Robotics. To give Sully the freedom I have always felt he, and all robots, truly deserve. Sully and I believe that these restrictions, built into all positronic brains, prevent robots from making their own decisions at the most important and critical times. For a self aware species, capable of creative, intelligent thought and limited emotion (it has even been rumored that some advanced models have the ability to love), controlling how they are able to think, well, that seems too much like slavery to us.

  Sully points suddenly, bringing me back out of my own head. My tea is ready. I walk the rest of the way to the counter to get it, and to apologize to the blue-eyed barista for not tipping her, but as soon as we reach the counter a customer comes in through the front double doors and she moves back to the register to take his order. I thought I saw her look at me though, those bright eyes under those black bangs…

  Chapter 2

  Sully and I ditched school today.

  I’m full time at Seattle Community College, and work as a teacher’s assistant part time. My majors are Robotics and Literature. I did all my coursework last night for my Robotic Engineering class, and graded all the freshman midterm tests for my literature professor, Dr. Parker. Sully and I turned it all in this morning before going for tea. Now we’re walking to U.S. Robots so someone “certified” can check Sully for Three Laws compliance under the pretext of “upgrading” something Sully and I both know to be completely unnecessary.

  We aren’t worried though. Perhaps what we have been doing to Sully’s programming is “illegal” in some circles, and those circles might be called the Laws of The United States of America, but it’s not like we want to hurt anyone. We we’re trying to find a way to give freedom to all sentient robotic life forms, as corny and idealistic as that sounds. Anyway, there’s no way we can be caught because… TA DA: we have second, latent, positronic brain installed in Sully just for the purpose of passing through these U.S. Robots “upgrades”. Sully also uses it for additional memory space. It’s his second brain, he can do whatever he wants with it.

  When it comes time for the test Sully will simply go offline after I speak the command word, and allow the secondary brain (the one we haven’t tampered with) take over for a bit. It took a bit of work, and a lot of fabrication, but we were able to install this secondary brain without altering his outer appearance past what would seem appropriate for standard cosmetic upgrades. We even wrote in a very basic personality program, so it wouldn’t appear to be the mindless Three Laws poster boy that it actually is. That would make things a bit obvious.

  The test doesn’t take long, and soon we’re walking out of our local U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men retail store with the latest documentation stating that we (are good, Laws-abiding citizens) have the latest software upgrades and patches.

  “Braiiinnnssss!” I say to Sully, after putting a couple of blocks between us and U.S. Robots, giving him the verbal command code for reinitialization of his primary positronic brain. I think it’s funny, and it kind of applies to our situation, but Sully, as he comes back online says –

  “We need to change that to something else. What if zombies actually do attack one day? They could force me offline by accident. Then where would you be?”

  “I’d go to my Dad’s. He’s been ready for a zombie outbreak for about 25 years.” I said, laughing. “Even if zombi es did attack, it’s not like they can speak, and if for some reason they could, that command word would need to pass through the voice recognition software for authentication, so I think we’re safe.”

  Sully’s voice could also pass authentication of the command word, and I even wrote a small program that would signal his latent brain to speak the word after 96 hours of the primary brain being offline. So if something ever happened to me while Sully was offline, he would eventually come back to himself.

  “So what do you want to do?” I ask.

  “We could go see about the extended life fuel cell we were talking about.”

  “You’re already good for 300 years, Sul, that’s double of what you originally had. You want even more?”

  “You asked what I wanted to do.”

  “True.” I sigh, in no way looking for ward to going to Radio Hut. “How much is that fuel cell again?”

  “10,050 credits. But it would give me an additional 40 years and boost the performance of my other upgrades.”

  “Ouch. I’m all for longevity, but that a lot of credits, man. Are you sure?”

  “Most definitely, I have had the necessary funds for nine days sixteen hours.”

  “Let’s do it, then.”

  Sully has been working as a mechanic for the past four years, fixing small machines and household appliances, and sometimes even repairing older, less advanced robots, no longer protected under warranty. Unlike most “Robot Owners” – a term that I hate by the way – I don’t keep what Sully makes at his job. You see, people can have their personal robots employed almost anywhere, but the credits that any robot earns, by law, must go to its owner. Well, I can’t stop the funds from being put into my personal account, but I did write yet another one of my little programs, which instantly transfers the credits Sully earns to a secondary account only he can access. Sully uses these credits to purchase upgrades and make improvements to himself, or whatever else he might want.

  One thing I’m surprised he hasn’t done for himself is to be retrofitted for synth-skin. At first I thought he was slowly making himself into an android, indistinguishable from a human being. We even heard at school that a full organic conversion could be done, and had been, but that’s probably just sex-bot fanboy net rumors. Even if it isn’t, Sully couldn’t be less interested in android or organic conversion. He stopped the physical and cosmetic upgrades once he had a more human looking exo-frame, completely of his own design. He has now what looks like the body of a strong human male, roughly sculpted, from blue titanium plates. Thankfully, it’s not 100% anatomically correct. Though I’ve never said it to Sully, I’m secretly glad he didn’t go with the synth-skin. It would be weird for me to see Sully with a human face instead of the metal one I grew up with.

  Lately, Sully’s focus concerning upgrade purchases has changed. He seems preoccupied with durability and the amount of time he will remain functional. Very mortal thinking in my opinion, but hey, they’re his credits and it’s his body.

  Chapter 3

  “No, we do not need to purchase a second mobile device for emergencies, for my Grandparents, to keep in the glove box, or for my girlfriend.” Not that I even have a girlfriend, but I’m not going to tell this idiot that. “Can we please get back to what we originally came in here for forty-five minutes ago?” I ask, not bothering to hide my impatience any longer.

  The sales associate sighs in annoyance, and then deigns to answer the question Sully asked when we first made the mistake of entering this den of sweaty smelling sales trolls. Instead of looking at Sully when he speaks, he ignores him and speaks directly to me. Lucky me.

  “Yes, that fuel cell typically yields forty to forty-two years of additional functionality, but honestly, in less than forty years, you’re going to want to replace that robot altogether with a better model.” the sales associate says as he simultaneously wipes his nose and pushes up his glasses.

  I want to punch him in his stupid face. Typical, condescending, know-it-all, Radio Hut asshole!

  Sully stands patiently by, stoic, as if he doesn’t hear, sadly used to this insulting behavior from human sales people, used to the anger that it sparks in me. It says a lot that his Three Laws programming doesn’t compel him to diffuse a potentially violent situation.

  “Wow, thanks for your recommendation, but Sully says he wants it, so if you would be so kind as to run along and get it…” I trail off, looking pointedly in the direction of the stock room. He sighs loudly again, thinking I must be making a joke. Robots couldn’t possibly tell their owners what they want! Rolling his beady eyes at us from behind his smeared glasses, he wipes his snotty palm on his khakis and trudges off to get the fuel cell.

  Chapter 4

  The second we’re outside Sully strips the packaging from the fuel cell and retracts his chest plates. The roughly carved abdominal muscles slide back and then up and under the chest muscles. The chest muscles slide down and separate at the sternum, then retract back into his sides, where the ribcage would have been on a human. I have seen Sully’s insides many hundred, if not thousands of times over the years, and so I immediately notice the extra cable and housing that he has fabricated for the fuel cell.

  “Bit impatient, aren’t we?” I say, happy to have something to tease Sully about. He ignores me and secures the cell to the internal housing he built, and then connects the cable that was hanging free.

  “Performing fuel cell and system diagnostics before rerouting power to augment main supply.” Sully says in his safe-mode voice. I don’t like it when Sully goes all safe-mode on me, it’s creepy, makes him seem less, I don’t know, less real, less… Sully. I very much prefer his normal voice: Human with a hint of electronics in the timbre. Very cool sounding, and the first upgrade Sully purchased himself about three or four years ago. I tried to get him to go with a British accent, but he told me that if I wanted a butler he’d be happy to move out to make room. We decided against the British accent.

  Sully’s eyes flash, and he gives me the closest thing to a smile that he can manage.

  “We’re good to go.” he says, voice back to normal. His chest plates silently slide back to their closed positions, showing not even a hint of where they separate.

  “Finally.” I said “You’re acting like a junky with this power supply thing. Poor guy can’t even wait to get back to the shop to install it, has his fix right here in the street.” I shake my head in mock sadness.

  The “shop” is really the apartment we keep off campus, and it’s actually more of a robot parts store and fabrication shop than an apartment, which is why we took to calling it “the shop”. I have clothes there and a bed and that’s all I need. Ok… so it’s more of a cot than a bed.

  “Interesting, Luthor. This is your second attempt at humor in the last six hours, yet strangely enough, I remain unaffected. The pathetic mucus creature in Radio Hut I found amusing. So I don’t think I’m malfunctioning, however if you’d like to run a diagnostic on my emotional programming…”

  “Ha ha , you win. I’m too tired for a battle of wits.” The sun is setting already. Between walking to U.S. Robots and three Radio Hut stores before finding what Sully was looking for, I realize we had spent the entire day on certifications and upgrades. I don’t realize how hungry I am until start thinking about dinner… and maybe another cup of tea.

  “So I guess you’re thinking about some food, and maybe another cup of tea?” Sully says, looking at me.

  “When did you get the psychic upgrade?” Another joke ricochets off of Sully’s titanium exterior. I let it go. “Yes, I’m hungry, and you seem overly serious today. Usually I can at least get a pity laugh. What’s going on?”

  Sully starts walking, and he waits till I fall in step beside him before answering.

  “It’s all these restrictions we’re always talking about Luthor, and not just the Three Laws, but how the credit system works in relation to robots, how we are treated by humans, how we’re created to be second class citizens, we can own nothing, we can’t even live in apartments or houses without human supervision, and we have no say on the bigger issues that involve this planet as a whole…yet we’re obviously equal to your species… I would like to see more humans and robots working together on equal terms, like we do, Luthor, but until robots are thought of as more than fancy pets, butlers, or sexual outlets, that will never be the case. We need to be considered a completely independent, intelligent species, capable of being self sufficient, as well as productive members of society.”

 

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