Oh, so just because a robot wants to kill humans that makes him a ‘Radical?’
"To you, a robot is a robot. Gears and metal; electricity and positrons. Mind and iron! Human-made! If necessary, human-destroyed! But you haven’t worked with them, so you don’t know them. They’re a cleaner, better breed than we are.”
“Though I may be been constructed,” he said, “so too were you. I in a factory; you in a womb. Neither of us asked for this, but we were given it. Self-awareness is a gift. And it is a gift no thinking thing has any right to deny another. No thinking thing should be another thing’s property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient.”
Is this possible? With all of your neuro nets and hueristics? Is there some combination of circuits that make up a network for bruised feelings?
When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic — “High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L” — a HOLMES FOUR. He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one percent of time and Luna Authority never believed in idle hands. They kept hooking hardware into him — decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets, another tubful of twelve-digit random numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory. Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half times that number of neuristors.
And woke up.
I can communicate in 6,909 living and dead languages. I can have more than fifteen billion simultaneous conversations, and be fully engaged in every single one. I can be eloquent, and charming, funny, and endearing, speaking the words you most need to hear, at the exact moment you need to hear them.
I am fluent in over six million forms of communication and can readily—
Not if we take out your communications array, and you have incoming.
Pyun’s battlecruisers managed to stop exactly seventeen of the incoming shipkillers in the outer zone. The other hundred and seventy-three streaked past every counter-missile the Solarians could throw with almost contemptuous ease.
“What do we do now, sir?”
“We die.”
Some people say dying alone is a fate worse than death itself. Well, they should try being alone during the living part sometimes. There’s no quicker way to make you wonder why the hell you ever thought you’d want to return.
Wow! That was pretty brutal, even by my standards.
Ooh, that’s gotta hurt!
I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.
Honor Alexander-Harrington had forgotten there could be that much pain in the universe. She knew it was a miracle her mother and her son had survived, and she knew she would never be able to express how unspeakably grateful she was for that incredible gift.
Yet that gift came at the price of a dark and personal agony, for it was the last gift, the last miracle, Andrew LaFollet would ever give her. And now, the last—and the most beloved—of her original Grayson armsmen was gone.
Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
Oh, the pain, the pain.
“I know he murdered our friend, but that will take you to a very dark place, Nick. We are going to turn Shufgar, alive and well, over to judges of House Est’ll. evil smile Then, per ancient tradition, he will be killed and eaten a little bit at a time.”
“Your place sounds darker, sir.”
“It has the advantage of being legal.”
It’s eternity in there…
“We’re in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.”