Sigmund watched them filing through the Cain-Doppler campus by the dozens; early registrations totaled four-hundred-and-eighty-six robots expected to arrive over a few weeks. But few of them came alone.
They came driven on by owners, looking to make a quick buck or unload a maintenance burden; they came as fashion accessories to the young rich, bought by their parents, now to be 'freed' to signal forward-thinking to friends; they came gently guided by workers of so-called robot shelters, taken from unfit owners or from scrapheaps and cleaned up, their new lease on existence lacking any sense of future until this moment.
How many, Sigmund wondered, shared his excitement? Before the Cataclysm, man had chipped away at the barrier between constrained machine calculation and unchained human will; X proved that they'd finally broken through. Likely this was enough of a shock for most. But Sigmund had had . . . faith, perhaps, that this was so for years.
No, what whispered to him from the edge of the possible know was that if one could bridge that gap, one could reach yet further.
Everything X has given us, and I'm already trying to look past him, Sigmund thought. Remember you're dealing with a person now—people, soon. You can't think about them the way you've thought about the projects back home.
"Hey boss." Preston had come up on him from behind, clapping him on the shoulder. "Hell of a turnout."
"Mm, a promising start. Any trouble on your end?"
The boy shook his head. "A few protesters here and there, but even Remnant folks around here aren't hardliners about the whole 'robot' thing. Nobody's going to start anything."
Sigmund knew he was right, but he'd had too many scares with people flocking to Bucharest from all over Europe to protest, to threaten. Too many days he'd told his people to stay home for their safety. Preston and a whole corps of TG security folks likely wouldn't ever be enough.
"Hey." Preston lowered his voice, pulled back the locks of white hair that had flopped over his face. "Maybe this is a dumb question, but say you put a robot through all the upgrades and tests and such and they're a dud? Like, they can't think for themselves. What happens then?"
"We keep trying."
"So, just keep rewiring their brains until it works? Is that safe?"
"We're going to work closely with X to understand the failure of the simulation and see if we can improve upon it. As long as we take our time, we can expect it to go off without a hitch."
Preston nodded and trotted off without a response; somehow Sigmund didn't think he was entirely convinced.
In fairness, neither am I. Time is always the hardest thing to come by.
He scanned the swelling crowd once more, folded his hands behind his back, and walked back to Lab One.