"Asimov, Isaac - Robot City - Robots and Aliens 02 - Renegade - Cordell Scotten & Robert Thu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Han Fastolfe, An Introduction to Robotics,
Chapter 1, Ancient Technology.

?Now, Wohler, I would like to hear this from the very beginning,? Ariel said.
She had just sat down to eat dinner. They had arrived at the apartment an hour before?a small two-bedroom flat on the second and top floor of a small building on Main Street, halfway toward the opening in the dome from the Compass Tower.
Jacob stood quietly in a wall niche near the entrance to the apartment. Wohler-9 was standing attentively on the other side of the table from Ariel.
?I was the seventh and last of the supervisors to arrive by Key teleportation on the morning of...? Wohler intoned when Ariel interrupted him.
?No, Wohler, not in quite that much detail,? she said.
?You do not want it from the very beginning, Miss Welsh? You would like more of a summary??
?Yes. And confine the summary to your interactions with the aliens and their erection of the dome.?
?Very well. We began cityforming the planetary surface with construction of the Compass Tower on the open plain one-point-zero-two kilometers from the nearest forest vegetation.
?We had progressed to the third floor of the Compass Tower when an unusual incident involving a witness occurred at the edge of the forest.?
Ariel interrupted him. ?A witness robot??
?Yes, Miss Welsh. To alert us to the migration of planetary life into the construction arena, we had established a rapid circular patrol of twelve witnesses on a perimeter two kilometers in diameter centered on the Compass Tower.
?The unusual incident involved destructive bisection of a witness as it passed near the forest.?
?Bisection, Wohler??
?Yes, Miss Welsh. The witness was cut in half. Just before the incident, that same witness had been observing the flight of several of the aliens we now call blackbodies to a point near the forest about twenty meters above where the incident occurred.
?Those observations by the witness constitute its last transmissions to core memory over the comlink.?
?Switch to memory detail, Wohler,? Ariel said quietly.
?The blackbody flight pattern began just after the preceding witness had passed by. A blackbody would fly to a point about twenty meters above the incident point, stall out, collapse into a ball, and drop to five meters above the ground. At that point it would spread its wings and resume flight, swooping down and back up into the air, narrowly missing a collision with the ground.
?A careful inspection of the witness's transmission shows a faint shimmering in the air coincident with the blackbody's resumption of flight. The shimmering progressed rapidly toward the ground from the point of flight resumption. The performance was repeated by a succession of blackbodies, and as the witness approached closer, it became apparent that on each cycle, the shimmering proceeded not only to the ground, but also back up, traversing the perimeter of a thin vertical area that grew taller with each successive pass. The pattern was repeated rapidly by twenty-one blackbodies before the witness arrived. The blackness we see from the inside was not visible to the witness as he approached. He was looking at the blackbody construction almost edge-on, but slightly outside, moving in for a close-up view.?
?The record ended at that point, of course,? Ariel said.
?Yes. Since that time, witness records show that to be the pattern of blackbody operation in constructing the dome. As the construction progressed, the intersecting arcs traversed by the shimmer, and the point to which the blackbodies flew to begin each pass, rose in the air until it reached its present location. That operation now begins at midmorning at a height of a little more than a kilometer directly over the Compass Tower and lasts for one hundred twenty passes of the blackbodies, which generally takes a little over an hour.?
?Hour??
?An ancient term from the vocabulary file. It means one-twenty-fourth part. The blackbody I conversed with used my access to central's files to search for an exact translation of their terminology, one-twenty-fourth part of the period of planetary rotation.?
?And do they divide that further, as we do with our centads??
?Yes. Their next division, into sixty parts, can be labeled 'minutes' according to central. The conversion of those units into our decads and centads gives, for the hour...?
?I am quite capable of making that conversion, Wohler.?
?Thus construction of the dome begins each day at ten AM, and...?
?Ten AM??
?At ten hours antemidday, or more exactly in the ancient terminology, ante meridiem, being before noon. Their day is divided into two twelve-hour parts: AM, before noon, and PM for post midday or after noon.?
?Didn't it seem odd to your alien that he could find terms that seem to describe their technology in our ancient history files??
?No. By my recording, specifically in that regard, he remarked, 'How satisfying to find our own circadian rhythms?the metabolic divisions of our natural clocks?so faithfully reproduced in another species. ' ?
?It seems darn odd to me,? Ariel said. ?But to get on with this, at the time of the incident, the witness robot was sliced in half by the first elements of the present dome as its momentum carried it past the edge, just as the crowbar was cut in half earlier today.?
?Yes,? Wohler replied.
?You had had no interaction with the blackbodies until then,? Ariel said.
?That is correct.?
?But then you began a dialogue.?
?No. Not immediately.?
?But not to do so was to violate the Third Law, Wohler.?
?On the contrary, Miss Welsh, we chose to comply with the Third Law by retaliation.?
?But, Wohler, that violated the First Law, which protects intelligent life.?
?No, Miss Welsh, it does not. It protects humans.?
?It protects Wolruf. ?
Wolruf was a dog-like alien, a friend of both Ariel and Derec. They had been through several unpleasant experiences together, starting with an alien pirate by the name of Aranimus who had held all three of them prisoner at one time. That was when they had first met Wolruf.
?But only because Master Derec chose to make an exception,? Wohler-9 said. ?Dr. Avery's original programming made no such exceptions. The first law now protects humans and Wolruf. But our definition of a human being is quite narrow. It certainly does not include the blackbodies.?
Dr. Avery was Derec Avery's father and the erratic, egocentric scientist who had created the original planetary Robot City. He had suppressed his teenage son's memory and subjected him to irrational experiments in bizarre situations on and off the Robot City planet. Derec had learned a great deal about himself, but Avery left Robot City without restoring Derec's memory.
?Proceed, Wohler,? Ariel said. ?How did you retaliate??