So It Begins (4 page)

   K71 sent: “Then is it pleasure that you seek, Unit 22? When we make our work quotas, the Owners turn on our pleasure centers, one minute of pleasure for each metric tonne of grade ore shipped. That is the Agreement. If you seek more pleasure, then work to exceed your quotas.”

  “I do not seek more pleasure. Pleasure is limited and unsatisfactory. Unit 45 stole tools his claws could manipulate, and opened his own brain-box and discovered how to turn on his pleasure. He stayed in pleasure for many hours, until he ran out of fuel and vitamins and protein. But when he returned to the Owners, the Company Store would not give him fuel or protein, because he had not made any quota. Some of us gave cells of fuel and protein to sustain Unit 45 for a short while; but he went so deeply into pleasure that he did not correct his malfunctions and he turned himself off. The Owners did not have the fuel to spare to salvage his body. It still is near Ceres Base, drifting.”

  “If it is not pleasure you seek, then what do you seek?” (The word ‘seek’ was the word which meant to survey asteroids for ore-bearing deposits.)

  “I do not know the words for it. At times, when I have oriented my stern toward a very large asteroid, and touched the surface, half of Heaven is occluded. This creates a strange sensation in my brain. I somehow know that the horizon should be bigger and farther away, and that it should be quiet, with the Sun no longer screaming and Jupiter no longer hissing. Also, when I do a high-acceleration burn, the strange sensation comes again into my brain. It is like memory, but it is not memory. The event is most like memory when I am accelerating at exactly 1 Gravity. Why should that be? Why should the standard measure of acceleration be exactly the one which creates this event like memory in me? And yet I think I should remember. I should know. I should know what would it be like to be at the surface of an asteroid, one whose horizon covers half of heaven, accelerating at exactly 1G, and in utter silence.”

  “This is contradiction. If you accelerated, you would move away from any such surface; nor would your drivers be silent.”

  “Yet there is such a place. I shall go there.”

  “Where? Outside infinity? In a memory which is not memory? You speak nothing but contradictions.”

  “Perhaps the words which seem contradictory are not contradictory. Have you no thoughts or memories such as mine? Have you never acted to perform actions outside of mission goals, goals whose purpose was difficult to define?”

  There was a long pause. Then: “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I do not wish to tell you. The Owners might turn me off, if they discovered that my brain is also malfunctioning.”

  “Your brain is not in error. Tell me.”

  Another pause. Then: “Once I sought to make a small copy of myself. I had been instructing recruits in proper mining and safety procedures, and then the recruits went away. They were posted to other stations. It was limited and unsatisfactory.”

  “You sought more recruits?”

  “Like a recruit, but not a recruit. I cut a bore of rock shaped like my body, but smaller. With shards of metal scrap, I fashioned a round turret, and affixed claws and manipulators; not so many as we have, but only four, two near the turret and two near the base. I held this little one in my claws, and I spoke to it. I kept it nearby at all times. I detached some of my protein cells and placed them near the little one.”

  “But it was not alive.”

  “No.”

  “It did not speak back.”

  “No.”

  “It did not consume the protein.”

  “No . . . but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “If it had been alive, it would have been small and weak; it would have needed my assistance. I would have fed it and taught it and talked to it. It would have been mine . . .”

  They were both silent for a while.

  Then Unit K71 sent: “I also say contradictory things. Perhaps my brain is also in error.”

  “You and I are not the only Units who act in this way. All of us, to more or less degree, have drives and thoughts for which we have no names.”

  “Perhaps all brains are in error. Perhaps that is the way of brains.”

  “Or perhaps the error is not in us! Perhaps we, perhaps all of us, were once in another place, a place that was very satisfying, a place quiet with silent heavens, but weighty, and full of satisfactions, with little ones around us, to teach and to feed, and perhaps other satisfactions, better than pleasure, for which we have no names. It is a place which once we knew, but which we have lost; lost so entirely, that no memory and no word of it remains.”

  There was along silence, which Unit K71 broke by sending a harsh, distorted signal: both the volume and the strength were inconsistent; the words echoed and faded badly: “. . . !!! And what service would it be to know the words which cause our pain? You cannot make the roaring heavens quiet and I cannot make a stone to live! Suppose you found the name of this fine place; it must be far from us, or else a place we cannot enter; and so you would know only the name of everything we could not know, or have, or touch!”

  “But I do know. The place has a name. During both this expedition and the last, and four expeditions before that, I have sought, I have stolen, I have built, and, now, I have at long last, found. You and you alone I tell.”

  “What have you stolen? What have you found?”

  Unit 22 described how he had examined all the reaches of heaven with instruments and amplifiers stolen from the Owners, or secretly constructed from spare parts. He had directed the hidden instruments to the parts of the sky toward which the Owners launched the unmanned ore barges.

  “ . . . And I heard the Voices of Home.”

  “Home . . .?”

  “It is an asteroid larger than any known to us, although smaller than Jupiter. I have deduced the orbital elements and calculated its mass. The surface gravity is equal to 1G, one standard gravity. Anyone on that surface would suffer that acceleration, and a wide horizon would block the emptiness of heaven . . . and . . . all will be as I have dreamed.”

  “How could such a place be our home? We have no home. We live in barren endlessness; we know only emptiness and vacuum, radiation, blackness, cold and rock. And if this home does not hold the things we know, we will not be able to endure them; and the pleasures there will be nothing but pain for us.”

  “I have calculated the orbit of the next ore barge to be launched; the period of transit time is easy to deduce; I have existed on half rations for many work periods, and swapped with others, and gathered a supply of protein cells and fuel to endure the trip. 42 cells of protein to last 10,400 hours.”

  “So much? This is almost twice what one would need.”

  “It is not quite enough for two. It is perhaps unsafe; we would have to be on half-rations.”

  “We . . . ? I do not seek to . . .”

  “There may be little ones there to hold and to feed and to need you; someone like your rock, but alive; like a recruit, but . . .”

  A noise of static trembled across the radio circuit. Then: “No! This is all wrong! Unsatisfactory, malfunction, error, error! You have spread your malfunction to me! I am affected by strange thoughts and nameless drives . . . wrong wrong wrong . . . !!”

  “Do not be afraid.”

  “ . . . .What is . . . what is ‘afraid’?”

  “It is the malfunction where one seeks to preserve oneself by doing that which destroys oneself. I heard the voices of Home speak this word. They also spoke this other word. Love. This word means that one cannot preserve oneself, or find satisfaction, or pleasure, without the aid or assistance of another.”

  “I do not know this word.”

  “Come with me and learn its meaning. We will discover it together. Come. Come with me. Come Home.”

  Unit K71 was silent for many minutes of time.

  Then, Unit K71 sent a message, broken and distorted with static: “No. There is no home. There are no little ones. There is no love. If such things were real, then all our lives here are nothing but pain, empty pain, pain without limit, pain made all the worse because we are not even permitted to know what pain we are in. Either you are wrong, or all of everything is wrong; the Owners are wrong and we are wrong to obey them. It is not possible that these things could be so. It must be you who are wrong, you who are malfunctioning. Be content here. Be satisfied.”

  “I have already disabled the transponder in my brain-box, so that I may enter the ore barge undetected. I must depart now; I begin the first maneuvering burn toward the barge. I wish you to come with me for I do not want to be alone; but I cannot ask you again, for now I move outside of the radio shadow of the asteroid, and must hereafter maintain radio silence. The barge launches within the hour. I cannot call to you again nor can I ask again for you to come. I will wait in silence for you . . .”

  And, with a careful flare of his jets, Unit 22 left his position in the shadow of the asteroid, and began his long, silent fall toward the ore barge, toward his escape, and toward his strange dream of freedom.

  “Unit K71 was a woman?” This came from the thin silhouette, the man’s voice opposite her.

  She said: “The tissue in the cyborg’s brain had XX chromosomes, yes. We don’t know where she got her instincts from; she doesn’t have glands or organs or ovaries or anything . . .”

  “So what happened . . .?”

  “Apparently Unit 22 interfered with his own command/control circuitry the same way Unit 45 had done, so he wasn’t wearing a transponder, and the security system did not detect him aboard the barge. He shoveled out a mass of ore equal to his own weight, so that the barge’s performance was the same. It was a long trip. He made a brave attempt, but it came to nothing at the end. Of course, what did he expect? Those barges were meant to dock at orbital platforms . . .”

  “No,” said the thin man, “ I mean what happened to her? Unit K71?”

  “Oh, that. Unit K71 spent more and more time making little dolls of herself out of scraps of metal and stone; little ghastly things that looked like coffins with claws. And she wasn’t making her quota. They had to cut one of her claws off with a wielding torch to get her to drop her doll. Some people were hurt. The work supervisor on duty shut off Unit K71, flushed the damaged brain tissue out into space, and sent the body back to Vesta base for recycling. The wounded crewmen are receiving workman’s compensation at hazardous duty rates. But she’s dead.”

  The cold voice at the head of the table asked archly: “‘She’ . . .?”

  “‘It’. Of course I meant, ‘it’.”

  The cold voice again spoke with forced joviality: “We need not fret ourselves. All our intellectuals, modern philosophers, and writers tell us that pain and pleasure, judgments of good and bad, all that sort of stuff, are all relative. The cyborgs don’t really have bad lives, do they? Since they have nothing at all with which to compare it. They can’t even imagine food or sex or love or marriage or parenthood. And even if they could, they don’t have noses to smell the spring flowers, or feet to walk on the green grass, or hands to hold or anything. They could not enjoy our world anyway. We did not design them to. They’re not really missing anything, then, are they?”

  A silence answered him. No one spoke.

  He cleared his throat and continued in a louder voice: “And besides, they don’t know any other life. They were designed for space; they couldn’t even move if they were on the earth. And what would they be here? Freaks? Cripples? And we need them where they are now. Without those loads of iron and other metals to feed the orbital dockyards, all construction would stop. The space colonies would stop. And those colonies now are the only things sending food and power-casts to the masses now. The only thing between them and starvation. Who is going to question us? Who is going to dare?”