Having recently seen I, Robot, I’ve been inspired to write something based on what I see as a more likely evolution of existing technology—one in which robots as conceived by Asimov don’t quite exist. Advanced cyberservants are inevitable, but I see them more likely to be extensions of the persons they serve rather than as potentially distinct entities that just happen to be manufactured. The close integration between the organic source identity and the inorganic extended identity is what will blur the line between “created” life and its “manufactured” image.
As far as I know, Asimov never really integrated the concept of nanotech into his robot stories, and though it played a role in the movie its full potential wasn’t explored. Certainly I’d rather my robots were linked to me than to the robots’ version of Microsoft. “Three Laws Safe” would work better that way, I think.
The front door swung open and a tall, smiling older gentleman stood in the foyer. “Mr. Sullivan, welcome to my home.“
The image was steady and solid, the nanocom signature subtle but unmistakable. “Mr. Kenner, I understood we were going to meet in person.“
The communications artifact wearing Michael Kenner’s face nodded at me and replied, “If you’ll just follow me.“ It led me into the homespace like a cyberservant, but its manner was every bit as genuine as that of the Michael Kenner I’d been dealing with by remote communications for the last several weeks. Considering that he’d retained me to represent him as he fought a petition to have him declared legally dead, I had no reason to doubt that we were in fact about to meet face to face. Still, the resort to a nanocom avatar inside his own home seemed odd.
I addressed the avatar as I followed its electronic will-o’-the-wisp to wherever the corporeal Michael Kenner awaited. “Mr. Kenner, as I’ve said before, we’re dealing in settled law. The court believes there is sufficient reason to doubt your continued existence as a living person that if we don’t produce you, or physical evidence that you’re still alive, the order will be issued to transfer your estate to your heirs. At that point the window of opportunity to reverse the order is very limited, and I’m not qualified to handle a probate case of the magnitude that would ensue.“
“I’m confident that you’ll get the job done,“ it replied. “I wouldn’t have hired you otherwise.“
His optimism helped—he was a multi-trillionaire and holder of almost 75 percent of the active patents dealing with nanocommunications and cyberservice. Unfortunately, his genius with complex avatar algorithms had been one of the arguments that persuaded the court to accept the petition for an adjudication of death; not even the wholly human feel of this Michael Kenner avatar was enough to prove there was an actual human being at the other end of the link.
We came to a door and the avatar paused as it opened, then after making eye contact with me it preceded me into the room. Under the circumstances I expected to find the real Kenner bedridden, and that’s what I found—and I was still surprised.
“I hope you’ll excuse me for not getting up,“ said Kenner’s avatar. “As promised, I’m alive. Unfortunately, technically, I seem to be brain dead.“
The flesh-and-blood version of Michael Kenner, whom I knew to be in his early seventies, lay in a bed looking all of 150 years old. An antiseptic wrap covered his forehead and cranium, and his eyes were sunken so deep into his deathly pale face that I almost thought they might have fallen out the back of his head. Shocked, I glared at the avatar and hissed, “Technically!?“
The avatar calmly gestured to a chair at the other end of the room. “Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll tell you what happened.“
“What happened is, I don’t have a client,“ I growled, starting to turn for the door. Weeks of work wasted; Kenner might be alive, but he was in no shape to manage his own affairs. The adjudication of death would be denied, but Kenner’s heirs would still gain control of his fortune.
“Every bill you’ve submitted has been paid promptly and in full, Mr. Sullivan,“ said Kenner’s nanocom voice inside my head, modulated to sound like it was coming from the spot over by the chair where the computer-generated visual illusion of Kenner appeared to be standing. “You do have a client, and if you stay to hear me out you will be paid for this entire interview regardless of what you decide to do afterward.“
It didn’t talk like a simulacrum, and the fees I had been paid from Kenner’s estate were handsome. I stopped at the door and calmed myself down. Then I turned back around and sat down in that damned chair. “Talk to me.“
“About four years ago I was diagnosed with a degenerative disease of the brain. It’s one of the new syndromes they think is partly the result of integrating nanocom technology directly into the gray matter. At the time my doctor thought the progression of the disease could be slowed by reducing the integration and having my cyberservice take on a more autonomous role in managing my house and my business. If you know anything about me you know how that went over.“
“I find your continuing references to yourself as Michael Kenner increasingly offensive.“ I’d never realized how viscerally the idea of an artificial personality affected me until this moment.
“Imagine how you’d like having to deal with a cyberservant that had the kind of autonomy necessary to manage the affairs of a business as far-reaching and complex as mine,“ said the pseudo-Kenner, ignoring my growing anger. “I wouldn’t have had the time to condition and train such a servo before I would have needed to shut down nearly all of my integration to arrest the decay of my cognitive abilities. And I would have been permanently at the mercy of a machine consciousness that I would have found even more intolerable than you’re finding the idea of me being who I claim to be.“
“I fail to see how this—“ I gestured at the avatar with no hope of it understanding the gesture “—is any better.“
“It’s better because the consciousness, while contained in a machine, is human. It’s me, Mr. Sullivan. The real me. If the earth were about to be destroyed by an asteroid impact our only hope would be to find a new home for humanity. When this disease threatened to destroy my brain, I found a new home for my mind. And since the machine already contained a complete archive of my memories, it only made sense to put the rest of me into the same container.“
Just when I would have thought I should have exploded in rage, I sighed and shook my head. “This is why cyberservants shouldn’t be programmed to appreciate art.“
Kenner’s avatar blinked in an admirably subtle expression of bemusement. “Excuse me?“
I laughed in its illusory face. “By letting you learn to appreciate things like literature and theater, Kenner gave you the idea that you could sell this ridiculous tale to keep him nominally in charge of his fortune. You, in what I have to admit is one hell of an effective masquerade, pretend to be him so his heirs don’t get control of the business. It’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein meets television’s ‘Dallas.‘ Beautiful. But in real life nobody’s ever going to buy it.“
Something, a power flux or some transient bandwidth maladjustment, caused the avatar’s face to fast-forward through a medley of expressions—anger, surprise, befuddlement, none of which was ever convincingly mimicked by an artificial personality as far as I ever knew—before the pseudo-Kenner sighed and said, “I don’t need for anyone to buy anything, Mr. Sullivan. What I need is time.“
“Time for what?“
An icon appeared in my mind’s eye and Kenner’s avatar replied, “Show these documents to my grandchildren’s attorneys. They show that regardless of how long I remain in control of my business interests or my personal fortune, none of them is at risk for losing any of it. The only thing that could possibly change in a year’s time is that I cease being alive and it’s all theirs then anyway.“
I referred the document to a servo-routine for perusal and summary while I replied, “A year’s delay is out of the question. Even if they agree to it, the court won’t. They’d have to withdraw the petition completely, which could prejudice their filing a new one in the absence of new information.“
The avatar hesitated just long enough that, if it had really been Kenner, I might have suspected that would be fine with him. “Six months, then?“
“I can move for six, but more than three is next to impossible, and any at all is extremely unlikely.“
Again there was an expression on the avatar’s face that it shouldn’t have been able to fake. “Do I take it, then, that you do still have a client?“
“Ethically, I’m bound to represent Michael Kenner against a death declaration as long as I believe him to be alive. Morally, I knew I was going to hell when I was admitted to the bar.“
My servo-routine pronounced the documents given me by Kenner’s avatar, “accurately described,“ and offered a list of 139 assertions of fact contained in them that would need to be investigated. Nearly all were dubbed “verifiable,“ meaning there was or should be some definitive source that could verify whether or not the assertion in question was true. The rest were flagged as “verifiability uncertain,“ which meant there was no definitive source as yet known which could support the assertion. Also shown in the index were assertions that were “known to be true,“ or “unverifiable,“ neither of which applied, obviously, to any of the 139 assertions the servo had flagged for investigation. The category “known to be untrue” was missing entirely, which I found at least somewhat encouraging. I set the servo to investigating the verifiables while I would look into the uncertains myself.
If what the documents said had been done had indeed been done, I might even be able to persuade my counterpart on the other side of this case, to advise his clients to drop their petition. I doubted they would take the advice, but the sense I was getting from the summary and the fact list suggested I’d been given a strong hand. Whatever else Kenner’s stand-in program was, it seemed to have a decent head for business after all. And some powerful imperatives. No one could say Kenner hadn’t been good at what he did.
I had almost determined that my first option for trying to verify the first of the two dozen or so uncertains wasn’t going to pay off, when the servo reported that all of the verifiables had been verified as true. Served me right for giving it the easy list. I cross-checked what the servo had found against the items on my list and triaged the uncertains down to just four that would be substantially material to my case, and I took direct control of the servo’s resources to pursue those four.
I was too busy scanning indexes to wonder what the pseudo-Kenner needed three months to do, if the financial resources it would be using were as limited as these documents suggested. It’s true that Kenner was worth trillions and “limited” was a relative term, but whether it happened at the next hearing or three months later, Kenner would be judged either dead or incapable of managing his own affairs. If he was “technically” brain dead there was no coming back from that. Even if some hotshot stem-cell genius grew him a new brain there was—
Oh, shit.
(I said I didn’t have time to wonder about it right then, and I wasn’t, at least not consciously. One of the funny things about the newer, high-density nano-integration I upgraded to a couple of months before, is that mental multitasking gets a turbo boost and it’s entirely possible to work out an idea without knowing you have. It’s like garden-variety intuition but with an audit trail so you can go back and see how you came to that brilliant realization that, in the light of day, is just too ridiculous to countenance. So as I continue to relate events and don’t refer to that last moment, bear with me. You’ll get to see me have it again when I stumble on that audit trail later.)
The next morning, having finally verified enough of the assertions in the Kenner-oid’s documents, I drafted a message to my counterpart and sent it, with the documents attached and my review of it, for his consideration. It took all of three minutes to get a reply, a flashtext reading simply, request conference.
I forwarded the response to the Kenner-oid and got back a terse excellent, which I took to mean I should agree to the conference—which in contemporary usage has come to mean face-to-face, no nanocomming, no avatars, no virtual documents. Flesh-and-blood and hard copies only. So obviously my client wasn’t going to be able to participate. We set it up for the noon hour the next day, and I tasked my servo to get the documents printed up.
I was going to be using more paper and pigment in one day than I had in the past year.
[in progress]
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