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RODERICK AT RANDOM.

or.

THE FURTHER EDUCATION OF.

A YOUNG MACHINE.

I.

Dead or dreaming? It seemed to Leo Bunsky that he had come out of retirement. Somehow he was back in his old office, working on Project Roderick again. And somehow the old heart condition had decided to stop tormenting him: gone was the breathlessness, the tiredness, the draining of fluid down into his feet until they doubled in size and burst his shoes. Without any medication or surgery, he was now cured. Everything was back to normal now, if that word could be used in these miraculous circumstances. Calloo, and also Calais! But what was the explanation?

He was dreaming. He was dead. Dreaming but dead. Neither. He had slipped through a 'time-warp' into a 'parallel universe' (Dr Bunsky was a reader of science fiction), probably through a 'white hole'.

It didn't matter; in any case there was plenty of work to do. He could live an unexamined life, until Project Roderick demanded less of his time, okay? Okay, and great to be part of this real-life science-fiction dream, a project to build a 'viable' robot. Roderick would be a learning machine. It would learn to think and behave as a human. All the team had to do was solve dozens of enormous problems in artificial intelligence that had defeated everyone else; from there on, it was science fiction.

Bunsky's job at the moment was teaching simple computer programs to talk. So far he'd got a program to say Mama am a maam, but not with feeling. If Roderick the Robot was ever going to think as a human, it would of course need to learn and use language as a human: Mama am a maam was not exactly Miltonic, but it was a start.

How did people learn to talk? No one really knew. There were those who thought it might be a matter of training, like learning to ride a bike. Others seemed to imagine a kind of grammar-machine built into the human head. Still others tried teaching chimpanzees to talk while riding bikes. Chimps, so far, had articulated no theories of their own.

Bunsky found it easier to scrap general theories and consider the brain as a black box: language stuff went in and different language stuff came out. In between, some sort of processing took place. What Roderick the Robot would have to do, then, was to mimic the hidden processing. The robot would have to learn as human children learn, and that meant making the same kinds of childish mistakes. And only those kinds of mistakes. It was okay for Roderick to say Me finded two mouses on stair. It was not okay to say I found two invisible green guesses on the stair.

Leo Bunsky lifted his gaze to a file card tacked to the wall above his desk: TO ERR (APPROPRIATELY) IS HUMAN.

There was something he couldn't remember, that made his head ache.

The door opened and one of the younger men in the project came slouching in. It was that interdisciplinary disciple with the unfortunate name, Ben Franklin. Bunsky didn't know him well.

'Leo, how's tricks?' He slumped into a chair and started flicking cigarette ash on the floor.

'Fine, uh, Ben. Fine. Wish you'd use the ashtray, I know the place is untidy but '

'Yes, I found two invisible green guesses on the stair. Yours?'

'Very amusing. Now if you'll excuse me ...'

Franklin stood up. 'Busy, sure. Sure. I don't suppose you need any help with anything?'

'Sorry, no.' No one ever wanted Franklin's help. No one really trusted him, with his strange background: a hybrid degree in Computer Science and Humanities. A little too eclectic for serious research work. Dr Fong had hired him as project librarian and historian, but so far there weren't many books and no history. Ben Franklin just sort of hung around dropping ash on the floor. 'Sorry, Ben.'

'Sure.' After a pause, he sat down again. 'Leo, you ever have any doubts about this project? About Roderick?'

'Doubts?'

'Kind of an ethical grey area, isn't it?'

Bunsky felt the headache settling in, deepening its hold on him. 'What grey area, for Christ's sake? Building a robot, is that grey? Is that ethically suspect, to build a sophisticated machine? Is cybernetics morally in bad taste?'

'Well, no, if you put it like '

Bunsky was shouting now. 'We're not violating anybody's rights. We're not polluting any imaginable environment. We're not cutting up animals and we're not even screwing around with genetic materials!'

Franklin flicked ash. 'Come on, Leo, what about long-term consequences? Don't tell me it never crossed your mind that Roderick might be dangerous. First of a new species, of a very high order, has to be some danger in that.'

'A mechanical species, Ben.'

'But on a par with our own. And what if robots evolve faster and further? Where does that leave us? Extinct!'

Bunsky made his voice calm. 'Let's not be too simplistic there. Humans wouldn't be in direct competition with robots, would they? Both species would use, let's see, metal and energy. But robots wouldn't need much of either resource. Should be enough to go around, eh?'

'Eh yourself, what about intangible resources? What about things like meaning?' Franklin put out his cigarette on the floor. 'I mean look, it could be that humans feed on meaning. It could be that we only survive by making sense out of the world around us. It could be that this is all that keeps us going. So if we turn over that function to some other species, we're finished.'

The headache began to throb, roaring waves of pain breaking over him, trying to drag him under. There were moments of dizziness and deafness, moments when Bunsky could hardly make out the empty smirking face before him. Franklin looked a little like a ventriloquist's dummy sometimes.

'You have a point, Ben. Too bad you're such a goddamned jerk.'

'What?' Franklin paused, a fresh cigarette halfway to his smirk.

'I said you have a point. Yes. I believe we do have a need to make sense out of the world. We see by making pictures, no? By sorting out the "blooming, buzzing confusion". And of course we hear speech by making sentences out of it. I believe that the essence of human intelligence is that kind of hypothesis-building. Life is making intelligent guesses, you agree?'

'Of course, Leo. Hypothesis-building.'

'Then don't you see? The robot is the ultimate human hypothesis. What better way of making sense out of the world, than through complete copies of ourselves? How better to model our inner and outer world? Ben, we need the robot we need the idea of the robot.'

Franklin lit his cigarette and tapped it. 'The idea, maybe, but I'm not worried about the idea. It's the embodiment.'

'Yes, we're building a real robot. We're doing what everyone has always wanted to do, down through the ages. If the Jews could have built a real golem, do you think they would have hesitated? Or the Cretans, wouldn't they want a real Talos? If myths are just wishes, isn't it obvious what they were all wishing for? Dolls and statues from the terra-cotta past ... puppets and manequins today ... The idea of the wish for the robot is so, so very powerful ... What child doesn't like Punch and Judy? What grownup won't pause to watch a ventriloquist at work? My God, when I was a kid, do you know they even had a ventriloquist on the radio on the radio!'

Franklin flicked ash. 'I don't get it.'

'Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy on the damned radio. You see, the novelty of a talking doll was so powerful, we didn't even need to see the doll. There didn't even have to be a doll! All we needed was the idea of a Charlie McCarthy!'

Flick, flick. 'Okay sure, you think the robot idea is powerful. Only it still might be kind of tough on us, having all these puppets around who are also our intellectual equals. We won't be able to shut them up in their boxes after each performance, we'll have to live with them. Could make quite a rip in the old social fabric, Leo.'

'But maybe an inevitable rip. Anyway, we're the team to make the historic incision.' Bunsky briefly saw them all gathered around an operating table, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp. Then he saw another picture ...

'Something funny?' Ben Franklin asked.

'Nothing really, just remembered a notion I had for a science-fiction movie well it's nothing.'

'I'd like to hear it.'

'All I really have is this opening scene. There's a human brain floating in a tank of water and pulsating with light. These scientists in white lab coats are leaning over it, looking grave, with the pulsating light reflected in their eyes. Then the camera begins to pull back, so we see the tank is an office water cooler. One of the scientists takes down a paper cup and gets himself a drink.'

'He's laughing now,' said the older of the two men in white lab coats. He pointed to a screen where a jagged line bobbed and danced. 'There, he just told a joke.'

'Really? A joke? How do you know?' The younger man kept turning away from the instrument panel to look directly into the tank where Leo Bunsky's brain floated in water.

The older man pointed to a different screen. 'We know everything he thinks. See right now he thinks he's in his old office, back at some jerkwater Northern university, still working on a big secret "robot" project. And he thinks he's talking to a colleague named Franklin. Franklin must have been a pretty good friend of his, because we never have any trouble producing him. We use Franklin as an input dummy.'

'Input dummy? Afraid I don't understand the technical side of this. Do you mean we can talk to this this guy?'

'Precisely. Now I'm not entirely familiar with the technical details myself. The wiring must be unimaginable. But I gather that we somehow stimulate vision and hearing centres to produce an hallucination of this Franklin, and then we somehow manipulate the hallucination. Of course we get output from Leo's speech centres too.' He pointed to another screen. 'There, his joke is just coming up now.'

The younger man kept craning around to peer at the brain itself, but now he turned back to see: Scientists are leaning over, looking into a grave. A watery grave. One of them has to be pulled back. He lowers his cup to get a stiff drink.

'Not much of a sense of humour,' said the younger man.

'Well it probably loses something in the processing,' said the other, pushing a few buttons. 'Now we can also monitor his general thoughts, read his mind so to speak.'

am a maam a man of parts Dr Gulp hands of a murderer drip drip riverrun or creektrickle O Rijn maiden God's immerse anatomical babies in jars drip drip father fathomful drip are those pearls eyes of an artist pools 'Interesting,' said the younger man. 'But you know I keep wondering why? Why go to all this trouble to find out what one computer scientist is thinking?'

'Oh Leo isn't just any computer scientist, he's very special. A first-class brain, if you'll pardon the expression. Let's take a pew and I'll tell you about Leo.'

There were comfortable theatre seats banked along one side of the room. The two men took seats in the front row, a pair of critics. The older man folded and unfolded his liver-spotted hands a few times before he began.

'You know, Otto Neurath once said science is a boat you have to rebuild even while you're at sea in it. In Leo's case he was launched as an electrical engineer, drifted into communications theory and finally rebuilt his boat as a linguist. And so it was that Leo turned out to be the right man at the right time for a very special project. Building a so-called robot. Or as we prefer to say, an Entity.'

He paused for effect. But the younger man was watching an attendant polish the glass front of Leo's tank, wiping away fingermarks.

'They called it Project Rubric was it? Roderick, I believe, though what's in a name, they had cover names galore, a very secretive bunch. And no wonder, because it turned out they were swindling funding out of NASA, heavy funding.'

'They were just crooks?'

'On the contrary, they had plenty of genuine talent. The team was headed by Lee Fong '

'The pattern-recognition guy? I've heard of him.'

The liver-spotted hands were folded again. 'You may know the others too, all first-class br- people. So they had heavy funding, heavy talent, and I guess heavy luck. Because they blitzed through some incredibly tough problems and actually got their Entity built.'

The younger man was now listening with his full attention. 'Go on. What was it?'

'It was a "viable" learning machine incorporating some of Leo's best ideas. By the time they built it, Leo Bunsky himself was officially dead, but his ideas lived on. The Roderick Entity was a great success if you can call it a success to endanger humanity and it was Leo Bunsky who made it possible for the thing to talk.

'Of course there were the others, Fong and Mendez and Sonnenschein, all brilliant, but Leo made it talk. I wish sometimes we could tell him about his success.'

'He doesn't know?' The younger man looked to the tank.

'All he knows is, he went into the hospital for open-heart surgery, came out wonderfully well, and went back to work. In fact he died on the table. Our people were there, and they managed to get his brain and now Leo works for us!'

'As a kind of devil's advocate, I suppose.'

'Precisely. Precisely.' Wrinkled reptilian eyelids came down over bright reptilian eyes. 'Leo sits in his office, "Franklin" comes in and asks him some questions about the future of artificial intelligence research. He tells "Franklin" what he thinks, and we have our answer. We know what has to be stopped.'

The younger man watched the attendant breathe on the glass to clear a fingermark. 'Of course I'm new around here, but frankly I don't get it. Why does the Orinoco Institute keep on spending money to sabotage robot research, Entity I mean, when every year there's going to be more and more new research? I mean it sounds like a holding action that isn't even holding. Aren't Entities inevitable? Aren't they becoming a fact of life?'

'That's certainly one of Leo's arguments, inevitability. But you know, in all of our scenarios, Entities are a decidedly negative development. Ultimately they signal the collapse of our way of life, the death of our culture. I do not mean just American or Western culture, I mean human culture. And if we at the Institute have one over-riding loyalty, I believe it must be to our own species.' His head swivelled sharply, the lizard eyes opening in a hypnotic stare. 'Don't you agree?'

'Well sure, naturally. But are we really sure that humanity is threatened by, by Entities?'

'Oh, we've worked it out. In all eight scenarios.'

'In all three modes?'

'Yes, yes. To six significant figures.'

The younger man shrugged. 'Six? Then that's that. I can't argue with six significant figures.' He was silent for a minute, staring at the backs of his own hands. On the right one was a small blemish that might in time become a liver spot.

'So poor Leo Bunsky helped us sabotage his own work. I suppose we did shut down this Project Rubric?'

'Roderick. Let's just say, events shut it down with a little help from us. We managed to get the director, Lee Fong, deported to Taipin. I understand he now fixes old poker-playing machines in a low gambling den. And he'll never have a better job; we dissuaded all reputable firms from hiring him. And let me see one or two of the others are confined to mental wards for the nonce. Yes, Project Roderick is certainly shut down.'

'And the Entity? You said they actually built something. Did you destroy it or what?'

There was a hesitation, an Adam's apple leaping in a wrinkled reptilian throat. 'Well, in fact ... one or two problems there ... Entity was taken outside the project and raised more or less as a human child in a human home. We had trouble finding it.'

'Raised?'

'As I said, it was a learning machine. And what it learned was to play human. It "grew up". Became much harder to find and neutralize. The Agency did find it and sent someone, but they ran into some bad luck.' A throat cleared, with the sound of tearing paper. 'Bad luck. And now the thing has dropped out of sight again. It is still at large.'

'I'll be damned. Still clanking around on the loose. Still chugging up and down the streets, a free robot. Sounds like your worst scenario is about to be realized, and so what?' The younger man thought of saying this and more. He thought of saying, 'What could be worse, anyway, than our scenario for poor Leo here? Poor unfree Leo would any robot do this to him?'

But aloud, all he said was, 'Still at large, hmm.'

'At random, one might say ...'

II.