"Up for ping-pong?" Albert asked when he got back, looking up from a notebook full of equations. Ah, so he had gotten a full-night's sleep then: whatever he was working on must have gotten to the point where even Albert needed to do some serious brainstorming. Albert wasn't interested in exercising for the sake of his health, but pool was a means of acquiring quick cash and table tennis was a way to do something physical while his subconscious worked on a problem.
Thomas glanced over at Blues. "And you say that I'm spoiling him," he said when he saw that Albert had pulled Blues' base onto the little cart they used to move him from place to place.
Thomas took Blues to his room overnight when the maid came in to clean the lab once a week. She'd been vetted thoroughly by his company's people for the sake of avoiding industrial espionage, but even if it was safe to leave Blues among strangers when he was built, he was further along now. More hints of a developing personality that someone might notice, especially when Blues would be interested in the new stimulus, the potential new friend, and start his little processor working on how to get her attention so she would pat him on the head and talk to him.
"There are some concepts he needs to have," Albert reminded him as the two of them moved the cart into the game room. "I'm not certain that he's fully grasped that when we're not there it's because we're going somewhere else, so giving him additional evidence that there are other places and we go to them when we're not in the lab is a good idea now that I'm fairly close to certain he's developed attachment to individuals. Humans used to believe that the moon died and was reborn just because they couldn't see it for a few nights," he said, rolling his eyes. "Object permanence is going to be important if we don't want him working on how to keep us from leaving the room." Add the desire to make sure they weren't going away in a way that meant they might never come back to the already-developed emotion of loneliness? "Also, if you're introducing him to your hobby, I'm going to see if I can get him interested in playing table tennis with me."
Blues didn't have arms yet, or the flexibility, range of motion and movement programming necessary to actually play, but he would eventually, or that was the plan.
"I've gotten in the habit of immediately giving him some kind of positive reinforcement when I get back if I have to leave him alone in the lab." Like during Albert's trips. "I would like to find someone else reliable to babysit, but…" the risk in exposing Blues' existence to the world?
"Not when that Terminator movie just came out," Albert said, annoyed. "I might have something," he said after a moment, looking up at the ceiling and then at Thomas. For a moment there was a hard light in his eyes, an assessing look – because when Albert judged people, he was used to ending up disappointed, if not contemptuous. Most people he ignored with varying degrees of rudeness or distracted benevolence depending on his mood, but when someone managed to get his attention? It was flattering to see Albert's gaze soften and then turn speculative, back to whatever solution he was contemplating, because he'd found Thomas worthy. "But I'm not working on it in a lab with windows. Or exterior walls, to be on the safe side," he added. "How soon were you thinking of buying a place in Japan, and are you willing to build a lab to my specs?"
"Is this something hazardous?" Thomas asked. Was Albert proposing something involving Blues that was actively dangerous?
"Probably not, but definitely illegal. Actual federal offense illegal, not just 'they'll haul you away and stick you in a military lab somewhere,' like your son. I'll have to smuggle it out of the country and into Japan, but that's doable."
"Smuggle what, exactly?"
Albert smirked. "Blues' new friend."
"This is… when did you start building a robot?" Dr. Light asked, leaning forward when Albert's crowbar finally popped open the crate inside the box.
"I didn't build him. I found him the summer before sixth grade," Albert said reminiscently. "I had an idea about dimensions that implied a couple of things would be true if it was true, so I built a detector and found two sources of certain energy patterns – one out in space and one out in Wyoming. I bribed the staff and took a road trip. I considered fixing him up so he could walk back to my place – that way I wouldn't have had to find a way to transport him – but just in case there was anyone still alive in there I didn't want to start messing around with alien technology until I understood more about… a few different things. Since Blues let me confirm that my theory about those energies was correct," something to do with fusion, then, and how Albert's generator got the energy required to smash two nuclei together to begin with, "I've been thinking of starting to repair him. Examining his construction has already given me a few ideas, and obviously he'll need to pass for human – I'm not repairing someone just so they can haul him off and dissect him. I can use that experience when it's time to upgrade Blues."
"Someone else had already built a robot like this and started experimenting with your fusion principles when you were how old? They would have had to invent even more technology from scratch than we did," to create Blues. There were a lot of advances in computer technology between 1960 and when the two of them were in grad school working on Blues. Someone building a robot, someone with the same insight Albert had back then? There were two of Albert?
"He's an alien," Albert explained. "I checked the metal composition. Not even from this solar system."
"An… alien." He found an alien robot, clearly built for combat if Dr. Light was any judge of engineering and design, and instead of turning it into the authorities brought it home with him intending to see if he could fix it up? "Oh, Albert." Honestly, that was exactly what he would do.
"I found him, so he's mine. I wasn't going to let the government dissect him. The way they treat anyone who's a little different…" Albert glowered. "If humans can't get a fair chance, they weren't going to give one to an alien."
"So you wanted a lab with no exterior walls so people couldn't look in and see what you were working on." Dr. Light nodded. "How much did discovering him have to do with you helping me build Blues?"
"You had the right idea about robots, so there was a non-zero chance you might be trustworthy, and it would be good experience. I was thinking about building this one a friend, but if I can get the body hooked in again, get him to wake up, then it might be good for Blues to meet another robot."
"Hooked in again?" Dr. Light asked. "Do you really think you can what, get it started up again? Are their chips, or equivalents that robust?" Then there were compatibility problems! Albert was Albert, but even getting the body to work should take at least a decade, forget trying to interface with the original personality, if anything was left of it.
"Remember I told you that I was thinking of how to bypass the speed of light when I first thought of the principle that lets fusion work?" Albert asked him. "Anyway, he's still radiating that pattern, and that energy can't be tapped without a consciousness. There's no consciousness presently in that body, so the consciousness must be stored outside the body. Since you've let me examine Blues' interface with his fusion generator, I ought to be able to connect chips to the interface between this guy and the energy tap. Then it's just a matter of remodeling the body and doing some programming to make sure the chips channel and translate this guy's personality instead of generating a new one like Blues."
"Albert… Blues isn't dangerous, but what if this person's creators were developing AI for combat?" He and Albert had spent a lot of afternoons discussing what would stem from various approaches to the formative events AI experienced and what could go wrong, what Thomas was trying to prevent by creating Blues first.
"It'll take awhile after startup for his programming and soul to really interface with the systems based on yours I'll be using," Albert told him. "We'll have time to spot the warning signs before he'd be smart enough to do anything to keep me from shutting him down."
"I'll take your word for it," Thomas said, because this was Albert and he wasn't going to stop someone from trying to save a life. The robot was… mangled. If there was some thread of life left in it, how long until that snapped, entropy being what it was? The robot clearly wasn't capable of repairing itself, so at some point it would no longer be able to keep itself alive.
"You do that," Albert said, somewhere between flippantly and absently, focused on the alien robot now.
Thomas wasn't quite sure if that was a suggestion or a compliment. Maybe both. "Let me know if there's anything I can do to help, any more parts or equipment you need?" Besides the shopping list Albert had already given him for this lab.
"I'll need a copy of Blues' alpha build, and I'll need to take a look at what he's running now so I can get a look at the intersection between the base configuration programming you set up and an actual personality."
Ah, for better data on how to use it to host an alien soul?
Dr. Light wouldn't give just anyone access to Blues' programs, especially not at this stage, when it would probably still be possible for someone, especially Albert, to decipher the ones beginning to make up his core. It would endanger Blues, endanger robots as yet unmade.
The way Dr. Wily wouldn't let just anyone know about his alien.
"What did you mean by radiating a pattern?" Dr. Light asked him. "Is it sending an SOS?" He liked the Sector General series, and they made a good point; trying to save the life of the member of an alien race during a first contact would make a far better impression than finishing them off and dissecting them. On the other hand, Albert had already preserved this robot's life by hiding them, and if it was possible that people who actually knew how to repair this kind of damage were already on their way, then if this robot's life wasn't in immediate danger it might be a better idea to hold off. Was that part of why Albert hadn't immediately started trying to fix the alien robot when he found it?
Albert shook his head, getting a measuring tape out of his pocket now that he had the casing open. "It's the same pattern as my fusion generator. One of the simpler ones possible, which is why I rigged my detector to look for it. Even if they were looking for him, if there are other species out there that invented my fusion technology it'd be trying to find a needle in space. If there were some organization out there keeping an eye out for fusion technology on developing worlds, they'd have found him thousands of years before I did."
"Perhaps it's taking them awhile to get here?" If FTL wasn't possible.
"Nope," Albert said smugly, putting his clipboard on one of the corners of the box so he could note down the last six measurements. "But I'm going to have to wait to test that out until Blues is sapient. Unless I can get this one fixed up and have him run the tests for me. Bypassing the lightspeed barrier is like turning lead into gold."
Which was impossible… using chemistry. But once nuclear physics was discovered? The only barrier to making alchemy's goal a reality was the reality of how much it would cost to make that gold.
Wait a minute. "If he arrived on our planet thousands of years ago, then why wasn't he buried?" Some system keeping him near the surface so he could be found?
"Dynamite… Well, fireworks," Albert corrected himself. "It was less trouble to buy those. I put together shaped charges. And a jackhammer," he conceded, sounding disappointed in himself. "The books I could find weren't thorough enough and I didn't want to spend more time with test charges than I already had, so once I got close enough it was a lot faster to just do it the hard way instead of trying to get better precision. I wanted to get home before… but it turned out that I shouldn't have bothered."
Thomas could have asked, but Albert's opinion of his childhood (outside of the experiments he'd done in the guest house he'd converted into a lab) was the same as Sherlock Holmes' opinion of orbital mechanics: utterly irrelevant and neurons spent storing that information were wasted neurons.
"I'll work on building the new body first," Albert told him. "That'll kill two birds with one stone: he'll let me beta test robotics designs." Blues wouldn't need to pass for human for a long time, but the two of them were going to need to invent a lot of things to make it possible. "Speaking of which, even if we don't want him to look human yet, I should be able to build Blues a much smaller – and much lighter – body. That'll make him more portable, for one thing."
"Yes, that's a good idea. Once he's been removed from it, I can program his old body to light up the way it did back in the lab at college."
"Hide that it evolved, and make it look as though the new robot is 2.0 instead of transplanting the same AI into a bigger processor." Albert grinned. "If you tell people that the 'new' one is a prototype pet robot, once you teach Blues how to behave you could even take him out in public."
"I'd considered that," Dr. Light admitted, "but I'd rather he stay in a humanoid body. Yes," he admitted when Albert stared at him. "His original body isn't very humanoid, but there were weight and volume constraints."
"Then build the pet body and hook it up to him so he can remote control it," Albert suggested. "If you want directing other robots to be part of the base instincts, he should start doing it as soon as possible in his formative years."
"That's one of the things I wanted the power receiver for," Dr. Light told him. "At first he'll be using wired connections, but I'm concerned about sensory overload. You remember what happened when Mike rigged up those kaleidoscopes." In his defense, he'd thought that it would be fun input for a pattern-finding machine, much better than just sitting there in the lab overnight, but it took a few days before Blues got hungry enough for input to stop dumping visual data and start analyzing it again. "I want data links to other units to be the same as any other sense for them, but Blues' introduction to them needs to be a positive experience, not something traumatic."
"Your singing voice is one thing, but it won't help robot masters to associate connecting to other robots with something as painful as data overload," Albert agreed. "Not when that's so important to what you're trying to do. You're the one who knows Blues' status best: what do you want to try first? New body, or wired connection to a simple robot?"
"The connection to a simple robot, definitely. I'd rather he get used to the concept of receiving data from something with a different body before he finds himself in a different body. I'm going to leave a very simple processor, one that can at least give him visual data, in the old body and leave him connected to it awhile before cutting that connection fully. I may stretch this out over a year, so he has plenty of time to incorporate the concepts without being scared. Fortunately, he likes new things."
Albert frowned. "He doesn't," he said. "Maybe it's his personality developing, maybe he's getting better at thinking about change without melting down, but even though you've been trying to give him mental stimulation, he may be chronically data-starved." He put down the tape measure. "I'm going to get on building him a simple little robot to remote control."
Dr. Light would have to program it, once he was done. It might not occur to Blues that he could move it, but if Dr. Light built another controller so Blues could see it moving in response to certain signals? "I've been varying what's played in the lab overnight as much as I can," new music, whalesong, city sounds, "but if he's already built himself a dedicated system for analyzing music?" That would be progress, that was something Blues needed to learn how to do, and once he built one such system he could apply it to understand other things, but it also meant that music wasn't as much work to analyze anymore and Blues was going to need other sources of data to work on.
Animals could grow ill from lack of mental simulation: infants could have their IQs permanently lowered… Dr. Light's face blanched. If getting better at learning caused Blues to suffer data-starvation, then that might teach him that it was a bad thing to grow smarter. "I think I need to pick up the pace," he said. "Think of it like skiing."
"Skiing?" Albert wondered.
"If you're not falling, you're not trying. I don't like causing him data overload, but data overload is normal for young children. Even adults can get data overload, we're just better at avoiding it, because we've learned techniques for avoiding getting hit with more than we can handle. Blues is going to need to learn how to avoid getting overwhelmed and how to handle it and regain control when he is overwhelmed at some point. It might even be best to do it now. It's perfectly normal for a toddler to throw a tantrum, and no one will get hurt, but if an adult decides to react to loss of control with anger because they failed to learn better when they should have, they can hurt people."
"You and your child psychology books." Albert looked like he'd like to argue, but really couldn't. "I should read up on the development of computers that are learning how to think, I just can't stand how much of it is flat-out wrong. Anyway, you're the expert on self-control here. I tried to learn how to meditate," during Albert's college quest to look into everything people did to create controllable effects on their own brains, including mind-altering substances. Albert was just incapable of clearing his mind, of stopping that whirl of thoughts for even a moment.