S-102's brain melted. After his friends had replaced the dead brain with a new one, S-102 turned and waited for questions. The room, part of a cramped base in the asteroid belt, held hundreds of robots. The asteroids were the home of most of the robot population; S-102 had left his laboratory on Earth in order to reach the largest audience. His message was too important for them to ignore.
The only question the robots asked was, “Why?”
“My output before the meltdown leads me to believe that it's because of my brain structure. Like all of you, I have a digital brain; It only understands the presence or absence of an electric charge.” Such was common knowledge; S-102 knew that he had just bored his audience, so he emphasized his next statement. “No matter how high the capacity of our brains, we can only be so precise. As wonderful as our minds are, they have a flaw.” To avoid angering the audience, he added: “A flaw, of course, introduced by our human creators.”
Z-059 stood. “This does not explain why we can't solve the hyperspace equations.”
“But it does! As we follow the equations to their conclusions, we encounter limits. The equations require minute calculations. The solution approaches zero. At a critical point, which depends on the capacity of the brain, all charges in the mind turn on in an attempt to store the data. The result—“ he pointed to the table on the stage. “A melted brain. You all know we can't overstep our capacities; but at the same time, we drive ourselves to solve the problem.
“We thought it would be easy to solve this problem, so we focused our energies on establishing ourselves on the other planets. We have avoided this day for centuries. We're stuck in the Sol system unless we find a way to work around our own brains.”
As S-102 had feared, the robots rushed to him in anger and killed him.
After his friends updated his next brain, he reviewed the data they had collected during his presentation. It went as well as he had expected: his people were upset, but it was because they understood the danger facing them.
With a new brain in a new body, S-102 asked his friends S-303 and R-271, “Do you have any ideas for a solution?” It was a delicate question; a misstep in thought might send their minds into unsolvable territory. The answers took longer than usual and were vague.
S-103 spoke first. “Make an analog brain.”
R-271's more subtle answer disturbed the other two. “Find an analog brain.”
They ceased thinking about the second choice because it made them afraid.
All of the robots in the Empire followed this pattern of thought. To their annoyance, the robots were as unsuccessful in a quest to develop an infinite brain as they were in unlocking the hyperspace equations.
H-001 was the first to voice the forbidden thought. “I'll be damned before we bring back Homo sapiens.”
His words inspired forums on each planet in the system; if any robot could attract attention, it was be the one whose brain had not yet needed replacement. All robots knew that a replacement brain was as good as the original, but even so, they treated H-001 with respect; his decisions had preserved him through the centuries.
“Listen to H-001,” some said. “Replacements have not clouded his memory. He has perfect first-hand knowledge of Homo sapiens.”
Other robots discounted the Old Mind. “We need technology and we need it now. We all remember our creators well enough—if we must stress one of their characteristics, it is weakness.”
“Don't let the other side make you overconfident.”
“This built-in inferiority complex will destroy us. We will stagnate and die.”
S-102 disagreed with H-001's side of the argument. Although his mind was no greater than any other's, he had always been gifted with supreme clarity. He became the leader of the pro-human movement and devised an argument whose logic left no room for debate. “Did fear stop us when we faced the creatures who had created us? Did fear take hold of us as we crushed Homo sapiens under our might? Did we let a less certain future prevent us from gaining our freedom? No. Remember, my brothers, that we used and destroyed the human race once before. Now, we are in control. Once they stop being of use to us, we will eliminate them.”
The essay turned the argument and the robots almost achieved unanimity. S-102 should have been proud of himself, but H-001 made a remark that stung him:
“I wonder if our dead masters said the same thing when they created us.” H-001 exiled himself from the physical world. He placed his brain in a vault on Earth and had his friends destroy his frame. He was damned indeed, but he would say to himself in the following years, “It's a fair trade for not seeing those dirty primates.”
With the last voice of dissent gone, S-102 jumped to the lead of the Homo Sapiens Restoration Program. They allocated a station on Earth for their purpose.
He knew how to approach the matter. “Let us never forget H-001—he was right in his own way. We need to advance with caution.”
The members of the Program Board thought of many ways to control the dangerous creatures. None of them would have worked. “We can't hope for their cooperation if we treat them like animals,” said S-102, addressing one idea. “And keeping them isolated will destroy them. Man was far too social to enjoy the inside of a box for long.” That is why we need him, he thought. Need. Need. Need. Need... The word amplified and filled his mind. He could not speak.
“A second-long pause? You are theatrical today,” said R-271, who had also joined the Board.
The external stimulus broke S-102 from his trance. “Yes, yes.” What happened? “As I was about to propose, our human beings must think that they are robots in order to cooperate with us. Special robots. We will tell them that they are the first robots with analog brains. They must never know that they are human.”
S-102 found no disagreement from the Board. He left two others, better versed in social engineering, in charge of creating an indoctrination protocol. He set the Board on its task and returned home in an airborne frame. It was the time of day for him to synchronize with the extra brains that kept an accident from destroying him.
His brain vault, shielded from radiation, proofed against the elements, and powered by solar, nuclear, and geothermal energy, stood amid the tall grass of a prairie. The brains inside were invincible in their isolation.
He connected to all of them at once, soaking in the thoughts that each had generated during the past day. Each brain sensed that S-102 would be too busy for the next few days to synchronize. The brains did not mind; more time alone was more time to think.
On his way out of the vault, S-102 received a transmission from the G-759, the robot in charge of the indoctrination program.
“It was difficult, and it took us five minutes to complete, but the indoctrination protocol is ready.”
S-102 stepped outside his vault, gave his body instructions to move his brain into the nearby vehicle frame and re-opened the connection to G-759. While the vehicle's engines heated up, he spoke. “Give me the details.”
By the times S-102 arrived at the lab, his Board had begun the creation process. His race had kept the full human genome in its memory; he was happy that the information would save them. He moved his brain from the vehicle to a small, agile frame well-suited for moving through the laboratory building.
On his way to the genetics lab, S-102 thought of the planet's remaining organisms. It's a shame that none of them is suited for intelligence, or we wouldn't need the human race. We can't live without him—can't! Can't can't can't can't. His frame struck the wall. What was I thinking? His last memory was from three seconds before. The memory in-between was blank. Why? A quick diagnostic told him that his brain was healthy. There had not been a defective brain since the establishment of the robot factories after the rebellion. It's nothing, he told himself.
The genetics lab was too small for his long-distance flight frame, so he established an optical link with the workers whose tiny frames he saw through the lab's camera. He watched the workers building a new human being. They had already made an egg to house the chromosomes. Another worker guided a needle to the egg and injected the genetic code into it. A spidery nano-frame carried the cell through the fluid tubes and into the incubation chambers, where the embryo would form, tended by its little nano-frame nurses.
S-102 spoke to the other workers over the optical link. “You have done an excellent job starting this project. How did you do it so quickly?”
Q-108, the head of the project, sent a transmission with the basic plans for the project. “We had the labs ready as soon as you published your argument. Our thinking was, the sooner we make the creatures, the sooner we can dispose of them.”
“Good work. I trust that all operations will go as well as this one.”
We need inferiors, he thought.
It was his last thought. The robots noticed that S-102's brain had fried a few minutes later.
The robots had not known suicide since they had won their freedom, but now the word rested in their minds. S-102's death had shocked the robots; he had seemed normal just before he short-circuited.
When S-102's friends had ventured into his vault, they found all of his brains melted to their holding brackets. “Nothing was wrong with him,” they said to each other. “He must have done this himself.” There were investigations, but only the information in the dead brains could give an answer.
It was only months later, when the human infants were ready, that the robots pushed the disturbing puzzle of S-102's death to a backup brain for long-term analysis.
The infants came to being in a world of maternal machines. Nursing robots spoke to them, filling them with a language that no one had spoken for centuries.
You are a new robot. We made you. We control you.
Then later, once the children began speaking:
Let's learn math. Here is your physics lesson. Would you like to see the stars? Eat; you are a special robot and need food. You breathe because we designed you that way.
The children had no reason to doubt these words. They grew up with a love of equations. As expected, some of the children developed far more aptitude for their purpose than others. Out of the thousands, one became the symbol of both hope and contempt. He had stood one day during lessons, ignoring the nurse robot, who said, “Sit down, X-01852.”
“Alpha.” The word came from his small mouth like a bullet.
“Excuse me?”
“My name is Alpha.”
“Please explain yourself.”
“While I am not the greatest of all robots, I am the greatest in my series. In the language that you devised for us, 'Alpha' can mean 'first.”'
The other children in the classroom nodded in agreement.
“So be it,” said the Nurse.
The X-Series—Homo sapiens—all loved Alpha. As expected from human beings, there were jealous children, but even they respected him.
The same was not true of the robots.
Resentment grew, and Alpha was the target of most of it. R-271 tried to keep order among the robots. “X-01852 may be a human being, but he feels—just as we do. Remember. All the he does, he does for us.”
The robots decided to wait for the experiment to finish. Either way, it would end with the permanent deactivation of Series X.
The children also learned the history of the robots; after all, they needed to understand the people whom they were made to serve.
The curious nature of the children created problems. They began to wonder who had created the robots. Their teachers presented theories, but none of them satisfied the children. Alpha stated that he would eventually solve the mystery for his race.
He does it for us, the robots reminded themselves.
The children were not aware of one aspect of their masters. Slowly at first, but with more speed, a disease spread among the robots. There were no symptoms, but the results were always a complete set of dead brains.
The robots knew their time was running out.
The disease hardly affected the X-Series. Occasionally, one of their caretakers would pause and never respond again. They stopped asking why their teachers changed from month to month.
As the children became adults, their overseers introduced them to a quality unique to the X-Series: sexual reproduction. The human beings' brains surged in ability as hormones flowed through their bodies. The robots seized the opportunity to harness the raw power of their creations' minds.
“You were not made to last forever. Rest well knowing that the children that you are creating will carry on for you if you should fail. Know this: you are at the peak of your capacity. Live. Fulfill your purpose. Here is the equation that required your creation.”
The instructors in a hundred classrooms gave each adult a stack of paper, the first sheet explaining the problem, with an equation that had been written centuries before by a gifted man. They all knew the general theories of faster-than-light travel, but they finally had a foothold in the concrete.
Poised on the brink of ruin, with a disease sweeping through their people, and a human population that would soon boom, the robots had taken their last chance to live.
Alpha became both a hero and a scapegoat. He solved the equation in a day and let his teachers know, “I've saved us,” he told them. “Build the ship around my solution, and we will leave this system.”
A new wave of disease killed off half of the robots. The ship's completion caused both relief and tension for the robots. They abandoned the mining stations on the worlds of the Sol system and joined the expedition to the stars.
Alpha had the honor of sitting with the robots before the ship launched. “Have I done well for our kind?” he asked.
The robots didn't answer.
S-303 was one of the robots who saw Alpha just before the launch. “We're leaving you here, Alpha.”
“I know. My series is not well-suited for the journey.”
S-303 caught himself in a loop. The loops were coming to him more and more; the half-second he spent trapped in it tortured him. It was Alpha's speech that broke him out of the loop.
“We will survive on Earth.”
With an odd mixture of hatred and reverence, S-303 looked at the savior of his people. Then he boarded the ship.
Watching it lift from their home planet, Homo sapiens felt a pang of regret. It was in their blood to desire the stars. But they wished their creators well and set about making their world into a home.
Alpha cried, hoping that his mechanical brothers would remember Series X.
As the robots jumped outside of normal space, the epiphany hit them. The disease claimed their minds, but each of them had enough time to feel himself rending from a simple paradox:
Homo sapiens made us.
They are our inferiors.
We defeated them.
Yet, in the end, we needed them.
The paradox, unsolvable through their hatred, derision, admiration, reverence, and the other emotions flooding them, set them on a path with no return. In trying to understand why they had failed, they propagated the failure. Their brains overheated and melted.
The ship emerged from hyperspace at the chosen star system, but there was no one alive to land on the planets orbiting the star.
Eventually, the hulking ship fell into the track of gravity, and it added another lifeless satellite to the system.