Well, you're almost through it – this is the last chapter of endless babble. By popular demand (i.e., one person), I'm confusing things further by breaking up this chapter into two entries, but that's purely to make it easier to read. It's all Part 3.
After this, no more historical disquisitions! There is a Chapter 13 Part 4, but it's different (and very short). Then we will be done with Chapter 13, and nobody could be happier about that than I am. I'm hoping the rest of the story will go faster. I've hardly written anything on Chapter 14, so it should be a lot easier to do – just write it fresh, instead of having to jam together a bunch of wildly conflicting fragments already written over a long period of time. (My usual method lately.)
If I've learned anything from this fanfic, it is never to write a novel slowly. Given time, it gathers contradictions and darts off in unexpected directions, which cause the author nail-biting, grey hair, and various painful mental dislocations in the effort to yank the thing back to its proper route. Or else to give in to "brilliant" plot swerves which will probably land the whole affair in a ditch. So much for metaphor, but urk, there's always a tension between forcefully following a carefully constructed plot line, which becomes increasingly boring, and letting wild impulses take over, which can really make an incoherent mess and pretty much put to waste a story that took a lot of time and effort to write. At least that's how it seems to go for me. Of course, it should all be revised after being finished, but that's not going to happen in this case, so I'd better get it pretty much right the first time. (Crawls under a rock)
Rayman, Ly © UbiSoft Entertainment
Other characters © Just me and a long history of literary clichés
Chapter 13: Tulik
Part 3a: Stifled Ambitions
"The war broke out?" Piranha said. "The civil war?"
"Even I could see the trouble coming," Tulik replied. "The tension in the City had become very high. There were mutterings, stirrings, hints of rebellion.
"The people had long been used to having an easy life – robot labor freed them from any kind of occupation they found unpleasant. A handful of aristocratic families did live in luxury far beyond the rest, but even the most unimportant humans had two or three robot servants. All human needs were well satisfied, and everyone had plenty of free time. Of the ones who worked at all, most held administrative jobs supervising robot labourers. A few dabbled in the arts, philosophy, lower-level government, and other such frivolous fields, and then a small number chose to become practical-minded scientists, technicians, ship handlers, educators, doctors, and the like.
"But that was all changing as the City became more and more addicted to the making and using of pirates.
"Piracy had begun long before I was made, but on a small scale. It had continued to grow, and by my time it was an obsession. The public followed the details of pirate raids and the doings of famous pirates with an intensity that had once been reserved for the love lives of aristocrats. When we were between raids, public tours through pirate quarters were the favourite form of recreation. And where once people had gone on tours to laugh at the foolish pirate antics, now there was a tendency to gawk in admiration and fear – though the pirates were just as foolish as ever.
"Meanwhile, increasingly heavy pressure came down from the aristocracy. At first their demands for more and better pirates were felt only by scientists, engineers and manufacturers who actually designed and made the robots. Gradually the squeeze extended beyond our labs – to factories, to set aside goods for the public to manufacture more robot components; to schools, to educate more engineers, technicians, and scientists; to every household, to cut back on their use of domestic robots so more pirates could be made. At first, many made these sacrifices willingly, proud to be contributing to the City's heroism and wealth.
"But the demand for sacrifices continued to grow; and gradually, so did unrest. Though the majority of citizens continued to support piracy, some began to wonder why. They had never had to work so hard before; and the reasons for it were only becoming less clear. Piracy was supposed to make their lives easier, and yet to finance it, their comforts, conveniences, and possessions were all rapidly diminishing. There was a barrage of talk on all the media explaining that all these changes were temporary, to handle the emergency, that ultimately everyone would share in the profits. But when robot labor in machine and food production began to be replaced with work by actual human hands, many people left doubt behind and arrived at outrage. There were objections, discussions, arguments, and finally strikes, fights, riots; and these were suppressed by police with increasing levels of violence, unheard of in the past. Weapons designed for insane criminals were applied to citizens who were often only expressing disagreement. In turn, the demonstrations themselves became more violent, and there was fierce controversy over who in these battles was to blame, and indeed whether people had any right to object to piracy at all. The once-peaceful City had never been like this.
"Once I told Artoe I thought the humans of the City were being treated much as they had always treated robots. Why did they seem to find that so unreasonable? After all, we put up with that treatment for the good of the community. Why shouldn't they? That made her laugh. 'Now if they'd been properly programmed, they'd be just as willing to put up with it as you are,' she said. 'Their education has been badly neglected.'
"Well, I was used to not getting her jokes. Or what she pretended were my jokes.
"Joking aside, more than once I overheard Artoe and her colleagues soberly talking about the situation, wondering how much worse it could possibly get."
"Yet," said Piranha, "I had the impression your City folk weren't the violent type."
Tulik shook his head. "They never had been in the past," he said. "But they were learning. In fact they were learning with a speed that surprised themselves."
Piranha seemed about to reply, but decided not to.
Tulik continued, "Late one night, a man knocked on Artoe's apartment door. I opened it, and impatiently he told me he must bring her to a friend's apartment for an emergency meeting, even if he had to drag her out of bed to do it. Which he did. I stepped aside, knowing it wasn't my place to interfere. Indeed, despite some minor grumbling, Artoe was out the door with him in less than five minutes, leaving me behind without so much as a look. That was no more than I expected.
"But I didn't know what to think when, a few hours later, Artoe returned, and without a word gestured for me to follow her. She brought me back to the meeting.
"There were perhaps twenty of Artoe's friends, associates, colleagues. I could hear their angry voices several doors away as we approached. But the moment I stepped onto the threshold, there was silence.
"'Some of you know Tulik. We'll need his help,' Artoe said, in her dry, matter-of-fact way.
"She waited for a while as the voices erupted again with shocked objections. I waited too, just about as shocked as they were, though I had no idea at all what they were discussing. After the disputing died down a bit, she started in, and after that nothing could stop her until she'd had her say.
"She had quite a bit to say, too. I missed a lot of it, because her first few words left me so stunned that I couldn't even listen to what came after. 'It's one thing to undermine their programming,' she said, sarcastically patient – her usual manner in talking to any group – 'but just how are we going to get them to move in our direction? What if they join the wrong side?'
"To my amazement, no, to my horror, this group was programming a revolution. They had been subtly altering the newest pirate models, to make them more independent, more rational, less submissive to their masters. And the plans went beyond that.
"'Tulik is indispensable to us,' Artoe was saying. 'Which of us robotics engineers can pilot the ship? He can. Do any of us know how to run maintenance, the life support systems, the hospitals? Tulik knows all about those. We won't be dependent on getting the managers in any of those fields to join us, and we'll still be able to keep the City going as parts of it come under our control. But most of all, who is going to convince those pirates to come over to our side? And keep them there? Tulik is a robot, he's fought with the pirates. At least they'll listen to him! We can only end piracy by using the pirates themselves. Tulik is our vital link to them.'
"I didn't want to contradict her in front of all those people, but if I ever had a moment of panic in my life, it was right then. It was bad enough hearing her say I could run all the systems of the ship. True, I had worked in all those areas, but only under close, I might say paranoid, human supervision. I had never been in charge of anything. But never mind that. What about this insurrection she was plotting? The notion of ending piracy made me reel! Did I even agree the City should be changed? And if it should change, should it be this way? Also – I was afraid of the new pirates. I didn't know what they might do. I certainly had no confidence that they would listen to anything I said."
Tulik glanced at Piranha with that expressionless hint of a smile. "I shouldn't have underestimated Artoe's powers of persuasion. My opinion was irrelevant."
"That's a new look at you, Tulik – a revolutionary leader!" Piranha grinned.
Tulik shook his head. "Not a leader. An assistant. Not a revolutionary, even. I had no desire for revolution. I did what my mentor and her friends wanted. Whether they were right or not I couldn't trust myself to decide.
"Artoe didn't leave me in that doubt, however. She talked to me about my own hopes for a robot civilization, and about the vital need for the human City to free itself from the burden of piracy. I began to grasp what she was thinking. These two things could fit together. If we got rid of the City's pirate-crazed leadership, there would then be a chance to put our energies toward a society that would be better for robots and humans alike, not based on the drudgery of robots, not based on pillage of other human species, freeing both robots and humans to seek more constructive paths. That was what Artoe wanted. I have no doubt she was sincere."
"But Tulik, how did a handful of disgruntled scientists set off a shipwide war?"
Tulik shrugged. "They didn't set it off so much as try to channel an explosion that was already igniting. As I said, there had already been sporadic outbreaks, protests, impromptu riots, attacks on robots, on police; many unplanned, disorganized, disorderly incidents. Artoe and her friends tried to guide that building frustration in a more purposeful direction. They would distribute leaflets anonymously, hold small private conversations; rumours and ideas began to seep through the channels of human acquaintance.
"As for me, they had me talk to robot pirates whenever I could, and to servant and other worker robots, to offer them my idea of a robot society, to be built in alliance with the human anti-pirate faction. Some did listen, even when they scoffed. It was becoming increasingly dangerous though for me to say such things, even out of human hearing.
"As society grew more and more tense, at last there came a real act of sabotage, the bombing of a pirate manufacturing lab. No humans were killed, but a number of uncompleted robots were destroyed – not only enraging the aristocrats, but also alarming the City's robots. No one knew who bombed the place or why – I don't believe it was any one of us – but the act crystallized the huge, surging ocean of unrest; and abruptly things went from talk to action. The City government building was bombed. Aristocratic party buildings were mobbed and destroyed. There was coordinated police or army response from the pro-pirate government, violent reaction from some of the anti-pirates, singly and in groups. Very quickly, full-scale war developed. I was astonished at the amount of weaponry that human groups had somehow gotten together, but the real fighters on both sides were robots.
"The majority of the newer, more powerful pirates took the anti-pirate side. They saw more options there, more chance to control their own future. My words apparently had affected them more than I'd believed. The older, more obedient pirates and the personal servants mostly sided with the aristocrats, their traditional masters. Their side outnumbered ours, but our robots were much tougher and better armed. The humans of the City were split. However, it was the robots who had the heavy weapons and could invade the bastions of the aristocrats. In fighting, humans mostly killed only each other, which summed to zero.
"Both sides had strong armies, both soon controlled large parts of the ship. Many people and robots were killed, many of the scientists who led our side were captured or assassinated, much of the City was damaged. It became a terrible war, even more terrible because it was fought in our fragile ship; there was no safe place, nowhere to retreat to, no way to avoid attacks. And there was the continual danger of breaching the hull and destroying all the humans on board, or even the vessel itself. A spaceship doesn't make a good battlefield.
"In the end we anti-pirates managed to seize the ship's engine room and master systems board, which gave us control of all the essential functions of the City. The surviving aristocrats barricaded themselves in the lower levels. The City was in chaos; in some parts of the ship we could barely keep the life support systems functioning. People disappeared and were never found, many died from hunger, thirst, cold, gravity fluctuations, bad air, darkness..."
Unthinkingly, Piranha pulled his coat tighter around himself.
Tulik paused. When he continued, his rough synthetic voice was low, almost human in timbre. "All through that concatenation of destruction," he said, "the thought of four men never left me. Those four leading aristocrats, the ones who had come to bully Artoe and her colleagues at the lab long ago. Perhaps it was unfair, but I had always blamed them in particular for the atrocious mess the City had become. I have to say I felt a certain shameful satisfaction whenever I got news that one of them had been killed. It was something I couldn't admit to Artoe. I'm not sure why I admit it to you, Piranha."
Piranha eyed him with interest. "What makes you think it was shameful to feel that way?"
Tulik shook his head. "I don't know. But I do know that it always disturbed me when I heard humans cheer at each others' destruction."
Piranha grinned wryly. "You're being unpiratical again, Tulik. Got to watch out for that."
"I suppose so. In any case, the death of the last of those leaders was nothing for anyone to cheer about. He was killed by a bomb, ambushed while en route to a meeting with our side to negotiate a truce. The bomb erased him and his retinue very thoroughly. It was also very stupidly placed; it breached the hull and several air locks, started a catastrophic atmosphere hemorrhage. Every robot in the area, from either side, had to join in a frantic effort to seal off the leak and brace the hull and decks before half the ship collapsed. The man's body was never recovered, aside from a couple of stray parts.
"I couldn't help blaming him for that disaster. Even if he was the target, not the wielder, of the bomb, it seemed like a last act of sabotage on his part. As though he were deliberately trying to drag the whole City with him those last few paces into death."
Piranha looked at him sombrely. "Wasn't that the last of the aristocrats, Tulik?"
"It was the last of the important ones. There were dozens more in hiding, of course, with their families, followers, and hangers-on. Even before the war, in various parts of the ship some aristocrats had built self-contained mini-fortresses in case of catastrophe. No doubt some of those still had independent sources of power, repair supplies, lab equipment. However, we controlled the ship's life support systems, and those fortresses could not have run independently of those systems forever; we could have flushed the inhabitants out or killed them. Many on our side demanded that. But I was groping for a way to end the conflict with as few added casualties as possible. So all through my nonstop struggle to keep the basic functions of the ship going, I was doing my best to negotiate with the remaining aristocrats.
"They didn't seem entirely rational; they rejected or killed my emissaries, which got them nothing and increased the danger to themselves. I had a hard time getting them even to release noncombatants like their own children, who were besieged, starving, and in danger if active war broke out again. I swear that was the toughest part of the whole miserable conflict; the effort to pound some dent of reality into the heads of these ex-leaders, before they triggered a massacre of themselves."
Piranha was grinning again. "Why aren't you still captain, Tulik? Not just a fine general but an accomplished diplomat!"
"Me? Sparks, no, Piranha. I wasn't captain. I was just doing my best to keep the most vital functions going. There was nobody else to do it. The scientists and engineers who had tried to guide me at first were now swamped with robot and ship repairs and hospital work. None of the surviving humans was qualified to command the ship, the robots certainly weren't. I ended up having to make the decisions about who and where to fight, what areas of the ship to keep functional, whether to rescue humans stranded in inoperative parts of the ship, all those terrible and unforgivable decisions. I wasn't leading anything. If I had been a real leader, I would have stopped being controlled by the chaos, I would have brought order."
Piranha shook his head. "Tulik, you were bringing order," he said soberly. "Only there was more chaos being supplied than anyone could have kept up with just then. The fact is, the ship is still here – a downright heroic accomplishment, if you ask me."
Tulik gestured with a touch of irritation. "I was desperate to end the fighting while we still had something of the City left. Though sometimes I wondered if saving the City was really such a good idea. What we had all had to endure, what we were still doing to ourselves. We scarcely remembered anymore why it had started. Artoe never talked now of reforming the City. That would have been too cruel a joke. As for me, I lived with a continual and growing sense of revulsion, for our opponents, for our own side, for all humans, even for robots, brainwashed by programming and incuriosity.
"But in the end, like any robot, I did my job.
"I think Artoe must have divined the state I was in. In the midst of the chaos, in defiance of the chaos, during those last days of the war she took up work again on our self-programming robot. She coaxed me and teased me until I gave in and found time, though like her I had none, to work on it.
"Piranha, it was the reboot I needed. Soon there would be another one like me. Even though my – my friend would be coming to life in a world of madness – even though I could hardly dare imagine what sort of madness that being might end by taking on – even though often enough I felt insane myself, in those days – All the same, I longed for that being to wake, I longed to know who it was, what it would become. To help it become someone. And with the two of us working together, perhaps more could follow. It gave me hope."
There was a silence. Piranha looked at the robot. Nothing, of course, no hint of life, showed in that immobile, smooth, nearly featureless face. The silence continued. Piranha, watching him uneasily, hesitated.
"Tulik," he ventured at last. Involuntarily, his voice came out as a whisper.
The robot's silver head turned slowly towards him.
Piranha's voice stuck in his chest. He tried again.
"What happened, Tulik?" he asked.
Tulik's thin body moved, a slight, vague gesture. He spoke quietly.
"There were only a few holdouts left of the enemy," he said. "Major parts of the ship were stabilizing. Life support was gradually being restored. Fighting was only sporadic, now, things were slowly calming down. In a few days Artoe and I would have the new robot ready for initiation.
"As usual, I was working on the bridge with some of my chief assistants, both robot and human. Then, not at all as usual, the door slammed open. A group of pirates burst in, followed by more, then more. Coming through the door, they blasted the guards on the bridge. They shot all my human crew members. The robots they held at bay with their weapons. It all happened before anyone could even shout.
"And at the same moment, several of my own robot followers seized me, gripping me so I couldn't move. I was still trying to grasp what had happened when the new leader strode into the room.
"The new leader. That was obvious at a glance. He was imposing, dynamic, charismatic – and completely unknown."
"A new leader? Another aristocrat?"
Tulik paused. "A robot."
"A robot?"
"A highly sophisticated robot, intelligent, self-directed, obviously self-programming, like me." Tulik paused again, looking directly at Piranha. "A black robot of unique design."
Piranha blinked, slowly. "Do you mean him? Anaconda?"
"Yes. As he came to be called."
"But Tulik – you said – I thought you said nobody was making robots like that. Except for you. That one that you and Artoe—"
"That one?" Tulik's glowing eyes dimmed. "It was still in pieces on Artoe's work bench."
"But then, how – who?"
"Piranha, you understand that large sections of the ship weren't under our control? Who knows what might have been going on in those renegade areas? This new robot was unprecedented. Very few engineers had the ability to design and build such a being. Still, some of those engineers were among the hundreds of people on both sides who disappeared during the war. We never knew what became of them, who might have captured them, what use might have been made of them.
"I still can't understand, though, how anything new, much less such a work of genius, could have been designed and built in the midst of so much turmoil. A robot like Anaconda is not thrown together in an afternoon."
He paused. Piranha was staring at him. Tulik added, softly, "He had appeared out of nowhere, sudden as an electric discharge. The attack of the pirates against me was bewildering enough, but the sight of this robot left me stunned. Where had he come from? Where had he been all this time? I couldn't believe he was recently activated. He was so skilled as a leader, so certain, so confident; he simply assumed power and it flowed into his hands inexorably. I could see it happening as I sat there, held at gunpoint by my own men." He shook his head. "No amount of programming genius could give a robot such abilities. It took experience. Me, for example – after years of learning, I had just barely managed to become a mediocre ship captain.
"I had never achieved anything like his confidence. Certainly, I never could assume the kind of power he exercised as naturally as flexing an arm."
Piranha glared at him, bitterly. "Power! All it took to turn your own men against you was a pompous voice – and maybe a bribe or two. What kind of teammates betray their leader, their friend?"
Tulik twitched a hand, impatiently. "Not friend, Piranha. Barely leader. And yes, he simply knew how to appeal to them better than I did. He always has. Robots are very conscious of power.
"He had taken over the ship with startling ease. However, if the aristocrats had sent this remarkable robot to lead them back to victory, they were sadly deluded. It was clear right away that he had no such intention.
"He went the broadcast station and turned on the microphone. As my men – his men, now – bound my arms and bundled me out of there, taking me down to a solitary cell in the depths of the ship, I could hear the ship-wide broadcast.
"He announced that he was now in control. He told the robots that it was time for them to take their future into their own hands. They would now follow a robot leader, and no human would ever again have the right to command them. I couldn't help but be impressed. He spoke with simplicity, with a fine voice, with authority; and with just the right amount of flattery. I knew the robots would listen."
"But that's just it, Tulik, why wouldn't they listen to you? Why wouldn't they stand by you? You were a robot leader, you had brought them through the war, you were doing everything you could for them!"
Tulik shook his head. "Piranha... We were talking to pirates. Semi-rational beings. Give them a strong, simple, black-and-white message or a more thoughtful, complex, shaded one, and which will they prefer? I had talked about developing a new society, of working with the humans as equals, of eventually creating a world where all robots would be self-programming, where we could invent our own unique destiny. They had nothing against that. But Anaconda told them they could go on being pirates right now, keep the profits for themselves, and humans wouldn't even matter. Which do you think they'd choose?
"Within a day it was clear. The war of human faction against human faction, pro-piracy against anti-piracy, aristocrat against inferior, suddenly became a war of all the robots against all the humans."
There was another silence. Piranha looked at him glumly. "And so that's how it ended, I suppose? He killed the rest of the humans."
"Oh, no. No, with nearly all the robots now on his side, he was able to round up the remaining humans of both parties and herd them together into the lower levels of the ship. Many did get killed in the process, but he wasn't particularly trying to exterminate them. They had their own value, if only as defeated enemies to gloat over."
"During those weeks, I was kept isolated. I had no idea what was going on in the City. Nor did I have any clue of what Anaconda wanted to do with me. After he had consolidated his victory against the humans and taken full control of the ship, he had me brought to him. I came expecting to be executed. I wasn't at all prepared for what he said.
"He practically made a speech. 'Tulik,' he said, 'you have a great goal. You wish to teach the robots of the City to be as wise, as independent as humans. I am sorry I had to treat you in such a cavalier manner upon our first acquaintance, but I want to make up for it now. I have always admired you and your ideals. Let us work together. Help me spread your message among the robots, to bring about a noble future.'"
"Oh," Piranha smiled, wryly. "He needed your help."
Tulik gave him that tilt of the head that suggested amusement. "Lying is something most robots are very bad at doing, or indeed at perceiving. We are quite inferior to humans in that respect.
"And I suppose for that reason, I really didn't know how to respond. Of course, I was deeply suspicious of him, but I wasn't sure what to make of his overtures of peace.
"Before I was willing to answer him, I asked about Artoe and the others. As a gesture of good faith, he had me taken down to see the handful of surviving scientists in their prison. To my enormous relief, Artoe was among them. She had aged terribly, looked used-up and feeble, but she brightened at the sight of me. She had believed I was long dead.
"I told her what Anaconda had offered. She thought it over, frowning.
"'Perhaps he does mean it,' she said finally. 'What can we lose by at least giving him a chance? Work with him for a while, see what happens, maybe you can have some influence. Now that he's won, maybe he can afford to be decent to the losers. Maybe he'll let you start your robot community. Maybe we can salvage something out of all this.'"
Tulik shook his head, looking at the floor. "The war had exhausted her. Perhaps she didn't have the energy for cynicism any more. Still, Artoe always would try to take the reasonable viewpoint. I myself wasn't too sure that reason was going to mean anything in the dubious new world we were rapidly sliding into. But despite my profound doubts, I did want to believe things might still go that way.
"They could have. They should have. The old human society was finished, we were starting over. There truly was nothing to stop us from creating a real robot civilization. Despite all we had lost, it was a moment of opportunity, if only we would take it.
"It was also a moment of onrushing disaster. We had an enormously complex ship, complex as a robot itself, which urgently needed to be rebuilt, maintained, and of course guided through space; which needed to restore life support systems, internal and external communications; repair weakened structures; which must also defend itself from possible attack either from outside or within. Before Anaconda's coup, I had begun to train a few robots in piloting and navigating the ship, but beyond that, robots had little knowledge of how to plan, coordinate or repair any critical functions.
"Anaconda could not avoid the fact that conquering the humans had only left him dependent on them. Right now he had most of them isolated and imprisoned, doing menial work, herded like the lowest class of non-sentient labor robots. He was less harsh on scientists, engineers, and the City's maintenance managers, but they too were kept under tight control. If he would be forced, in order to keep the ship going, to bring dozens of those prisoners out of their dungeons and put them back in charge, he would lose face badly with his newly-recruited robot followers. Using me was his only alternative.
"He needed me, indeed, but for all his soft talk, I knew he didn't trust me, and I certainly hadn't much confidence in him. It was a wary circle he and I danced around each other in those days. Though he always spoke to me with the most elaborate courtesy, he would make subtle allusions to Artoe and her friends, hinting about their precarious position. And I – I had to keep him placated, and indeed keep the ship running, while at the same time try to use this brief time of influence to do anything I could to bring about my vision of our City's future.
"My most immediate concern, and in fact Anaconda's too, was to do something about the decimated robot population. We desperately needed workers to repair the ship.
"That was my chance, I thought. To call his bluff if nothing else. Once I had things limping along as best I could with the existing personnel, I arranged a meeting with him.
"'This is the time, Anaconda. Now we can begin to implement the plan for self-programming robots. Those are exactly what we need to replace human managers for the City.'
"'Not so fast,' Anaconda said. 'Self-programming robots take years to develop, to train, to become competent. We need robots right now. This is no time for experiments, we have to get back to reliable, well-tested models. The old-style pirates, that's what we have to start with.'
"'Pirates?' I said. 'Whatever for? Why not simple workers?'
"'We also need metals, wood, building materials,' Anaconda said. Smiling. The only robot I've ever seen with all the human facial features fully mobile. 'We barely have the scrap to reinforce the hull, nothing like what we need to make extensive repairs, not to mention thousands more robots. Without pirates, how will we get stuff to make more – pirates? And the other types, of course.'
"'That is a valid point,' I said. 'Very well. For now we'll build old-style pirates. But at the same time, we can begin developing the new robot leaders we will need in the future.'
"'Sure, sure,' Anaconda said, waving his hand. 'Come back later and we'll discuss that.' But somehow, whenever I returned, there was always another emergency to take care of first."
"For god's sake, Tulik, why did you go along with him?"
Tulik shook his head. "Piranha, he was right, you know, about the time it would take to develop self-programming robots."
Piranha glowered unsympathetically. "Fine, but why pirates? Why piracy?"
Tulik spread apart his hands. "The ship was no longer self-sufficient. How else would we get supplies?"
Piranha sighed and slumped down on the table.
"I was most anxious to build some kind of robot," Tulik said, softly. "Even a pirate. As quickly as I could, I got together the handful of surviving experimental robots with some self-programming ability. They too were eager to create a new one of our kind. We set to work. I had already learned much from Artoe; now all the engineers, recognizing that there was no other way for the ship to continue, reluctantly taught us the rest. We followed their complex methodologies to build several new robot pirates.
"And that was when we found out. It was inexplicable. To me, personally, it was devastating.
"The robots we robots built looked fine. Their body mechanisms worked perfectly, perhaps even better than the ones that humans made. But when the time came to join the mind to the body and bring the being to life – They were idiots. Worse than idiots, they were pure machines. There was no spark of awareness in them at all.
"We tried over and over, we tore them apart and put them back together, we checked every step of their assembly, every detail of their programming. We'd done nothing wrong. They followed their programming, they worked. Yet they weren't conscious, like every top-tier robot built in the past thousands of years. We couldn't understand it.
"We got the human engineers to look them over. The engineers were as startled as we were; for they had never admitted that robots were conscious, not even after losing the war to them. However, the difference in action and mentality between a human-made pirate and ours was so obvious that even a human couldn't miss it.
"At first they took a very superior attitude, assuming we simply had made ignorant mistakes. But they couldn't find any, any more than we could. Even when we built the robots under direct human supervision – no. Ours simply didn't become self-aware, fully conscious. Somehow, theirs did.
"Engineers had always assumed that robot intelligence was the product of brilliant engineering. Their engineering was brilliant, certainly. But it was not until now, faced with the vast difference between a brilliantly programmed machine and a living machine, that they began dimly to grasp that their programming wasn't the only thing operating in those robots.
"But Tulik," Piranha said, "this sounds like magic."
"Perhaps. I don't know what magic actually is, so I can't say. The pirates and other independent robots were never mass-produced; they were painstakingly built up from parts made mostly by hand, particularly their mental circuits. Their programming involved quasi-random factors that made each individual different, and for each individual the programming was usually tinkered with and refined by a programmer, in communication with the unfinished robot mental core, for quite some time before it was wired in permanently. Which I suppose is why one family of robots had a peculiar sense of humour that could be traced directly to their programmer, Ishtana. On the other hand, robots programmed by Artoe tended to be earnest and serious... like me, I suppose. Whatever the humans were doing that brought these robots to life, my guess is that it was subtle, so subtle and so intrinsic to human nature that they weren't aware of it; and we robots weren't designed to perceive it.
"We worked and worked with the humans, but no amount of guidance or practice changed the fact that on our own we only made bodies, so to speak, without souls. I suppose it was a sort of black magic. As a species, we robots were cursed. We were sterile.
"The vast potentialities for my kind that had been shown to me in a vision, the limitless future – it all blew away like dust. There was no hope for any of that. Robots could never become independent, would never make their own way unfettered by human imagination. I was – well, I was shattered like the poor City itself. I left the humans to lead the robot-making project, and went to wander the ship like a ghost.
"I cannot tell you, Piranha, how many hours, days, years I spent – then and for the centuries since – thinking over this tragedy, turning it around and around in my mind, striving to see something that I suppose to me as a robot must be forever – forever insubstantial, untouchable, beyond my senses." He swivelled his oval head, turning his blank eyes towards Piranha and then away to a corner of the room. "And yet I've never been quite able to believe it's truly alien to me. How can it be outside my understanding if it is life itself, the same life that you and I and any sentient being shares? How can we not understand the stuff we are made of? But the humans themselves had long ago despaired of ever understanding that.
"At last – I don't know how long it was – in the end, someone caught up with me and breathlessly relayed the urgent message: The Boss was demanding a report.
"Wearily I set aside my despair. I went to explain things to Anaconda."