The Complete Roderick (77 page)

Father Warren now willed himself to return to his task, verification of the fact of free will, as he prepared his article, ‘Machine Function and Human Will: a Final Analysis.’

His starting point was the classic debate between Arthur Samuel (inventor of the checker-playing program that could beat its inventor) and Norbert Wiener. Wiener contended that machines ‘can and do transcend some of the limitations of their designers, to which Samuel replied:

A machine is not a genie, it does not work by magic, it does not possess a will, and, Wiener to the contrary, nothing comes out which has not been put in, barring, of course, an infrequent case of malfunctioning … The ‘intentions’ which the machine seems to manifest are the intentions of the human programmer, as specified in advance, or they are subsidiary intentions derived from these, following rules specified by the programmer. We can even anticipate the higher levels of abstraction, just as Wiener does, in which the program will not only modify the subsidiary intentions but will also modify the rules which are used in their derivation, or in which it will modify the way in which it modifies the rules, and so on, or even in which one machine will design and construct a second machine with enhanced capabilities. However, and this is important, the machine
will not and cannot
do any of these things until it has been instructed how to proceed. There is and there must always remain a complete hiatus between (i) any ultimate extension and elaboration in this process of carrying out man’s wishes and (ii) the development within the machine of a will of its own. To believe otherwise is either to believe in magic or to believe that the existence of man’s will is an illusion and that man’s actions are as mechanical as the machine’s.
^*

But what followed from this? Mentally he essayed a few trials, attempting to make some effort at tackling the undertaking:

Yet why is it so many human lives seem unwilled, pathetic examples of garbage in, garbage out?

Then is man a genie? Does man work by magic? The answer must be an unqualified and resounding …

If the intentions of the machine come necessarily from the programmer, human intentions might be seen similarly to come from God. The Ten Commandments, for example, engraved in every human heart. Yet human volition can and does subvert Divine Law, just as machine volition …

Not what he wanted. Not at all what he intended.

Roderick noticed Father Warren, looking bluer around the gills than usual, sitting contemplating a checker game as though there were a figure nailed to the board. The Luddite priest was today wearing a plain cassock, as were now seldom seen outside Bing Crosby movies. But he did smile and nod at Roderick, in a kind of automatic way.

‘Okay, Dan, you just sit right down here, maybe I can get you a coffee from the machine or – you want a peanut butter sandwich? Here, I brought a stack of them, help yourself.

‘Probably you’re wondering what kind of place this is, well it’s the Newman Club, named after this English Cardinal who was I guess in favour of “cumulative probabilities”, whatever that means, sounds like he was adding them, but you can only do that if they’re independent and you want the probability of at least one of them happening, look you want a coffee or I could get you a Coke? Oh, don’t worry about that; that’s just the air conditioning, it always makes a funny noise starting up.

‘You know I really looked forward to this. I always saw us like this, just sitting down and having a long talk, I mean without all the doctors and nurses hanging around. Because there’s a whole lot of questions I have to ask you, I mean you’re almost like the nearest thing to a father – you sure you don’t want a Coke? Eating all that peanut butter must be dry, and hot inside that mask, look I don’t think they’d mind if you took it off here, you’re not in the ward where I know they want you to wear it, but here – no okay, okay, take it easy, no one wants to take your mask. You know it’s funny but I feel like I saw a Mickey Mouse mask like that before, long ago or in a dream or, I don’t know but it wasn’t
just any old mask, it was important, very important. I don’t know why, I thought maybe you knew the answer. I just remember seeing those empty eye-holes, nobody inside, nobody inside looking out …

‘You, uh, want a game of ping-pong? There’s a table next door no? Heck, I guess they probably have it over at the hospital too, I forgot. I forgot, what was I going to say? I guess maybe I should go over and say hello to Father Warren there, the way he keeps nodding and grinning at me. You be okay? Sure you will, just for a sec.’

To the priest, he introduced himself as Roderick Wood. ‘I guess you remember me, huh Father?’

‘Of course I do. You and your gang tried hard enough to break up our panel discussion, how could I forget?’ Father Warren’s long hands began gathering up checkers.

‘No I thought you remembered me from before, from Holy Trin, Father. Roderick Wood?’

‘Wood? No, I don’t think I –’

‘You loaned me all these neat science-fiction books like this
I Robot
where the “I” character never turns up.’

‘The Wood boy! The little crip – handicap – disadvantaged boy, of course, of course! Well well, how are you, er, Roderick.?’

‘I’m still a robot, Father. Remember how you tried to prove I wasn’t, how you had me stick this pin in your hand, that was supposed to prove –’

‘Hold on now, hold on.’ Father Warren’s laugh was uneasy. ‘The way you say it makes me sound like some kind of nut or something, heh heh. No, as I recall it what I was trying to do was to show you how illogical it was to pretend to be a science-fiction entity and then try to get out of science-fiction laws, like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.’

‘Well, anyway. Father, I’m real sorry the pin-scratch got infected and all, last time I saw you you were real sick.’

‘All water over the bridge, Roderick. So now here you are at the U, about to take your place as a grownup, responsible member of the Church and of Society – and still going around saying you’re a robot. Roderick, don’t you think it’s time you put away the things of a child?’ The long fingers drummed on the box of checkers. ‘You can’t go around all your life insisting you’re a
robot, made not by God but by some men in the lab somewhere –’

‘Yeah but, Father, that’s just it, one of these guys was Dan Sonnenschein and I got him right here, sitting right over here, you want to meet him?’

‘Sure, wearing a Mickey Mouse mask, just the way to convince everybody he’s a scientific genius. You know, Roderick, I do have to thank you for one thing. You did start me thinking seriously about our machine age. That led me to the Luddites, and now – as you probably know – I’m president of the New Luddite Society of America.’ The priest stood up and offered a long hand. ‘Great rapping with you, Roderick.’

‘Yeah, goodbye, Father. But – do you really believe that Luddite stuff? How if we just trash all the machines everything would be terrific?’

‘No, of course not, nobody thinks it’s that simple. The Luddites – listen, I haven’t got time to go into it now, but it’s the symbolic trashing that counts. The great Hank Dinks wrote, “We have to destroy the machines in our heads, and never let them be built there again.” That means a whole new way of thinking about ourselves and our world. We have to – we have to evolve beyond machines.’ He started towards the door; Roderick followed, scratching his head.

‘But what if people are just machines too, you’d just be trying to evolve machines beyond machines, or else trashing people too?’

‘But people are not machines, that’s the whole point, people are not machines! Not the way you mean, not – look, I haven’t got time to –’

‘Yeah but, Father, what if, like I was reading about this Frenchman before the French Revolution, Julien Offray de la Mettrie, he said man is just a machine made out of springs and the brain is the mainspring, is that the machine in our heads we have to destroy? Like with the guillotine or –’

‘No, I just said no!’ Father Warren picked up speed; so did his pursuer. ‘I just told you it’s nothing like that. I wasn’t talking about literal machines in our heads and you know it. Everyone’s like you, so obsessed with our machine world they think we have to be machines to fit into it.’

‘But, Father, okay, say the brain, if the brain
was
a kind of mainspr –’

‘Look, will you stop asking that, I have just finished explaining!’ One or two people in the common room looked up to see the priest, clutching a checkerboard and plunging towards the door he thought was an exit, pursued by the student with the symmetrical face. Now the priest turned, at bay, and tried to counter-attack. ‘Oh I remember you all right, you haven’t changed at all. Same little obnoxious – maddening – thick-headed little brat, asking the same stupid questions over and over, not because you want an answer, you never listen to the answers do you? Do you?’

‘Sure, Father, but if the brain
was
a mainspring, is that why this Nietzsche said what he said, Father?’

Father Warren flung open the door and threw himself forward, as Roderick continued: ‘Is that why he said man is something to be overwound?’

From beyond the door came the sound of a blow, a box of checkers crashing to the floor. A single black checker rolled through the slowly closing door and ended at Roderick’s feet. ‘Are you okay, Father?’ he called, but the door closed on any answer.

Mister O’Smith waited across from the Newman Club in the shadowed mouth of an alley. He’d been trailing the Roderick robot for hours now, just to find a perfect spot like this, where a man could take his time and make his move. He was limbering up his arm, the one that fired .357 ammo. His video eye was photo-amplifying, cutting away the shadows to make the target visible as it came out the Newman Club door. Boy howdy, one good shot was all he needed, but even if he didn’t get that, O’Smith was ready with the automatic weapon concealed in his leg. Sweep the area with that, and boy howdy, that was all she wrote.

Course he’d have to high-tail it after that, these s.o.b.s who was hounding him about them payments on his outfit, they’d pick up his trail right smart. But then Mister O’Smith knew all about skip-tracers and how to get away from them. Might lay low for a month, put the squeeze on one or two old customers, maybe even fake his own death …

O’Smith rolled a cigarette and smoked it, leaning against a
dirty brick wall beneath a poster, ‘VOTE J.L. (“CHIP”) SNYDER FOR LAW & ORDER’. It was good to be in action, to have a real target. Made a
hombre
feel clean and tall.

‘He ran right into that ping-pong paddle, Dan. I feel like it was my fault too, I guess I did ask him too many questions. Okay sure it’s only a bloody nose but it might be broken, and he’s just sitting over there sulking, he won’t even look at me. He wouldn’t even let me help pick up the checkers. Sometimes I feel like I don’t understand people, with this Luddite business and smashing machines in their own heads, what with the Machines Lib business and how machines are really people – and now I’ve even run across this weird computer with this kind of twisted religion, I mean somehow it got word about how you built me and turned it into this myth, where Danny Sunshine is like God the Father and Rubber Dick is some kind of messianic, some kind of Messiah. How does a computer get hold of a warped idea like that, I wonder? I mean, you must know who I am and what I am, you never built me to be any kind of – because anyway Messiahs always get nailed or screwed or even riveted to the wall. Because all my life all I ever tried to do was be ordinary, be like ordinary people, just one of the guys, isn’t that the idea? Was I wrong? Because I never could find any people ordinary enough to be like, was I wrong? Because you designed me, you put all the ideas into my brain, you built my thoughts, so what did you have in mind? If you could just give me a little clue, Dan, tell me what I’m supposed to be, what I’m supposed to do, hey Dan? Don’t worry, hey, that’s just the Coke machine out there in the hall, sometimes it sticks and buzzes like that, but hey listen, Dan? Look I don’t mind not being this Messiah, I don’t have to be anything special only if I could just be one thing, any one thing? Dan?’

A man in a baseball uniform came in, strode up to Dan and offered to shake his hand. ‘Hiya Father, I’m Pastor Bean? Wee Kirk O’ Th’ Campus, you know? Are the others upstairs already? You know, Monsignor O’Bride is an old friend of mine, I’m real glad we’re getting a chance to rap at this interdenominational – and wow, if we can get this jug band going –’

Roderick said, ‘I think there’s some mistake. This is –’

‘And hey, here comes Rabbi Trun – hey Mel, over here! I see
you brung your twelve-string, this is gonna be great! You know Father Warren?’

The rabbi wore a cowboy hat, embroidered shirt and Levis. ‘Father Warren?’

‘No,’ said Roderick. ‘Father Warren’s over there. The one with the handkerchief at his nose.’

Pastor Bean said, ‘Him? Dressed like that, he’s a priest? Hey Father, hiya! I’m Pastor Bean and this is Rabbi …’

Roderick watched them as they were joined by a man wearing a saffron tracksuit and a shaved head, and carrying a jug. There was laughter and backs were slapped, before the four went off upstairs to their conference.

‘I wish I belonged to something, some group, Dan.’ It was time to take Dan back to the hospital. They came out of the Newman Club slowly: Dan because he had trouble walking; Roderick because he felt more robotic than usual. As they crossed the street and passed the mouth of an alley, two men came out carrying armloads of machinery. Roderick recognized prostheses: an arm, a leg, and in one man’s hand, an eye. The eyeball evidently had a radio in it, for he could hear faint music:

Fill up that sunshine balloon

With happiness

One of the men said, ‘Sometimes I hate repossessing, you know?’

‘Yeah, but today is different,’ grinned the other.

Roderick glanced down the alley, but saw nothing: a bundle of old clothes beneath a poster advertising LAW & ORDER.