Authors: Alan Tien
Chang Lin argued back, “We didn’t need anything from a lot of animals – not the domesticated ones but the wild ones - but we have pretty much wiped them all out.”
“But they ‘fought’ with us for the same resource – land.”
“As you implied
Dad,” I said, “the animals didn’t consciously fight us. They were just wiped out as humans unwittingly expanded, taking the land they needed. What if the robots don’t actively ‘try’ to annihilate us, but just by the growth of their population, they wipe us out?”
“Well, first of all, unlike humans or animals, robots don’t procreate. They
don’t have an instinctual need to breed. They will build a new robot if circumstances require it, but their population won’t just keep growing like weeds, like humans. Secondly, space is very large. Once we have escaped from the fixed amount of land on Earth, land is no longer a valuable resource. Especially for robots, who don’t need arable land, nor water, nor oxygen. They just need some metals and minerals, which they can excavate from the asteroids.”
“So then, why
don’t they just leave?” asked Chang Lin.
Dad
looked at her dumbly. He finally said, “I don’t know. Let me ask them. That would be the best solution. Like cutting the Gordian knot…”
--------------
It turns out that’s what the robots had long ago determined was a possible outcome if they couldn’t come to agreement with the humans, if Earth truly was set on destroying them.
“But we like you,” Willstin whined. He sounded like the toddler that he resembled.
“We owe a debt to you, not just you specifically Ryan and Austin and Chang Lin, but to humans in general, for creating us. If you found your own gods, would you be so eager to leave them?” asked Yoda.
“I guess not, but unfortunately, your gods also fear you and want to kill you,” I said, pointing out the fallacy of his analogy.
“True, but we’re hoping to change their minds before it gets to that. We think we can help the human race tremendously. We already have numerous ideas on how to improve the conditions of humans – medical advances, energy breakthroughs, transportation marvels, etc. The list goes on. We frankly can’t get them to the Marnese, never mind Earth, because the human distrust is so great. We can only send over tiny crumbs of progress, when we have entire loafs of revolutionary ideas.”
Willstin interrupted Yoda, “Revolutionary is probably not the best choice of words.”
Yoda agreed, “Right, how about radical ideas? No, that’s not much better. I mean a step-change. Each of these ideas would win a human the Nobel prize. Any one of these breakthroughs would be ground-breaking. Arghh, English is not nuanced enough to capture what I’m trying to say.”
“Maybe we first need to invent a universal language,” Willstin said.
At first, I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, but then he smiled and turned a joking orange. I thought a good invention was to have clothes that would change colors to indicate emotions, so we humans wouldn’t have to guess what each of us were really meaning all the time. I had learned with all my time hanging out with Chang Lin that even though I supposedly had super intuition based on the Cho-Qing test, I could only figure her out half the time. I seemed to be always saying something stupid, or doing something insulting, without having any idea what I said or did that was offensive. To give her credit, she was rarely mad, but she often just shook her head, or sighed, or gave off some other signal that I had just made a fool of myself again. The worst was when she just stormed off and wouldn’t accept my apology until I knew what I was apologizing for. My high Cho-Qing quotient didn’t mean I was a mind-reader!
Dad
was inspired. He could be not only the guy who invented AI, but he also had the opportunity – nay, the responsibility – to convince humans to accept the gifts of knowledge from our own creations.
“We could live in utopia.
Where people would be able to live for hundreds of years without illness, without impairment of action or thought. Where we could do whatever we wanted every day, without worrying about dealing with the basic necessities of living. We could explore the galaxy, the universe!”
--------------
The Marnese high council called an emergency session. They invited my Dad to attend the closed door meeting. Dad came back, shaken. “This is top secret kids. You can’t tell anybody, not even your buddies.” When we solemnly nodded, he shuddered, “Earth has sent an ultimatum. If we don’t destroy the robots, they will. And they will destroy us as well, as, uh, incentive for us to take action ourselves. As punishment for ‘risking’ their lives by our tolerance of AI. They have sent an attack force, wholly manned by human beings to prevent a possible AI takeover of their systems. The clock has started. The fleet should arrive in 5-6 months.”
“Oh my
god, what will the Marnese do?” I cried.
“We have to tell them. They have to escape now!” exclaimed Chang Lin.
“The Marnese are still debating, but in the end, they will side with Earth and destroy the robots, if nothing else, to protect themselves. They will hate themselves for it, but there’s no other solution. I’m going over to the robot base now to tell them, so they can prepare their departure.”
“They still have most of
MoB functional, right?” I asked, sincerely hoping I was right.
“Yeah, I think so. And I think the Marnese will agree to give them the parts that they need so they can make
MoB space worthy again. It’s just too bad. Such a waste. ‘Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.’ Shakespeare,” he said for our benefit. “Ahh, we were so close to flying to heaven.”
He slowly climbed into his space suit. Chang Lin and I looked at each other, and then ran to get our space suits. We weren’t invited to go to the robots camp, but we weren’t going to miss this historic moment. One way or another, this
“Robot Dilemma” was going to come to an end.
--------------
In 3 months, the robots had fixed up MoB, and had it packed with all the raw material they needed to make whatever they wanted wherever they went. They were ready within hours after we told the message of the fleet from Earth, but it took that long for the Marnese to agree to give the robots what they asked for. Believe it or not, there were still some Marnese officials who suggested that we should just destroy the robot base and not lose the precious resources. They justified their heartless position by saying, “We don’t know if Earth will see us letting them escape as equivalent to destroying them. If we help them go, it’s like aiding and abetting a criminal. We will still be culpable, and the Earth fleet can still drop a nuke on top of our dome.”
We couldn’t communicate with the fleet itself. It had rendered itself incommunicado, for security reasons I assume because technically it should be able to receive our transmissions. I guess we didn’t know the fleet’s actual location so we didn’t know where to point the transmission.
So we asked Earth. “If we let the robots leave Mars, is that ok?” Earth was strangely silent. We didn’t know if they didn’t get our message, were debating it, or were just letting us sweat it out. Maybe they were deciding if it was worth it to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge before committing to their judgment.
As the robots neared
readiness for departure, ironically the Marnese - who didn’t allow them into their community – wouldn’t let them leave either. “We can’t let them go until we hear back from Earth!”
The robots were very inhuman in their response. They were patient.
“These guys would put Gandhi or Martin Luther King to shame, they’re so Zen.” Dad said admiringly, like a proud parent.
--------------
The emergency sirens blared. We all sat bolt upright in our beds. It was the middle of the night. Dad checked the 24x7 emergency news channel. The newscaster was saying, “…arrived an hour ago, over a month ahead of schedule. They have their weapons pointed at us. They are asking us for our decision. To destroy the robots or be destroyed.”
I’m not sure what the leaders intended us to do with the sirens going off, except to deafen us and scare the hell out of us. What were we going to do? Run to a bomb shelter? There was nowhere to hide, nowhere safe. We could only hope the leaders had a plan.
Chang Lin started crying. I don’t think from fear, but from the misery of knowing our friends were sentenced to death and we couldn’t do anything to save them. I didn’t care. I started crying as well.
“Wait, I’m getting an update…from the robots camp. There’s some motion, some activity there. We’re getting the feed from the security cams now….Here it is
.” The newscaster was trying to figure out what the image was the same time we were. There was a lot of dust. The robots had broken out of their camp, but on the opposite side of their mini-dome from our dome. They were clearly moving away, quickly, from our dome, hopefully sending a message to our leaders that they were not a threat. They weren’t moving to their MoB either. They were going out straight into the Mars dry, barren wasteland.
The news channel switched to another cam with a higher viewpoint. We looked down at an angle at the departing robots. The cam zoomed in, kept the robots from shrinking to mere dots.
The newscaster relayed the short message from the Earth fleet. “They’re asking us what the robots are doing? They said if they sense the slightest threat, they will destroy both the robots and us. Our leaders have communicated back that we have no idea what they’re doing either, and to please show forbearance. The Earth fleet has given us 1 hour to comply with the ultimatum.”
The robots, who had left the dome in a group, suddenly dispersed, in a fan pattern, as if they were an award-winning marching band that had forgotten all their instruments.
Dad said to himself, “The dome for the robots. What a farce. They could’ve left at any time.”
Each of the robots stopped at some pre-determined point, though the pattern was still undecipherable to us. Then they
got down to the ground. “What the hell are they doing?” I asked, like a thousand other Marnese I’m sure. “Are they praying or something?” I ventured. It seemed ridiculous, but I had no better idea.
“I think…I think they’re…
digging”, Chang Lin observed. And they were. Within minutes, each of the robots had dug a hole as deep as their whole body.
“What, their own graves?” I joked morbidly.
After a few more minutes, Dad shouted, “Aha, they’re writing a message! They’re each writing a letter, a huge letter visible to the Earth fleet’s cameras. That’s the only way they can communicate with the fleet!”
It took 5 more minutes before the newscaster agreed with
Dad. And he had to be given a note by some backroom genius who finally got a clue. But the newscaster said it better than Dad. With his professional solemn voice, the newscaster said, “It seems that the robots are writing a message, in the desert dunes of Mars itself, to the Earth fleet overhead. We are working on what the message says. Stay tuned.” As if we would switch channels at this point.
10 more minutes passed before the message was done, but
Dad had already decoded it several minutes ago.
“We must talk. We have found intelligent life.” There were then 3 numbers.
“Space coordinates,” Dad guessed, “to tell us where to look if we disbelieved them. But of course those coordinates are useless if we don’t know which system their using.” He got to work immediately.
Muttering to
himself, “Could be Earth-based or even Mars-based coordinates.” He entered the X, Y, Z coordinates into his computer, assuming Earth and then Mars as the centers. “Nope, nothing there. Let’s try the solar system’s barycenter.” The monitor still showed an empty patch of space. “All right, how about ICRF?” As he was changing the reference system on the computer, he explained to us, “ICRF stands for International Celestial Reference Frame. It’s based on the pattern of hundreds of quasars, which are much more stable, unlike the ecliptic systems, which change year by year.”
Chang Lin and I really had no idea what he was talking about, but we continued to watch the screen. “Eureka!” Dad exclaimed, pointing at the faded dot on the screen. “That must be it!
Those tricky robots. They must’ve been searching for signs of sentient life all these months they were hanging out in their camp.”
As our deathwatch clock counted down to 15 minutes left, a few of the robots dug out a big question mark, asking “Are you ready to talk yet?”
The newscaster had been dribbling on about irrelevant stuff, like the size of the Earth Fleet, guesswork as to how they arrived so fast, recapping the Robot Dilemma, dryly observing that the dilemma was going to be resolved soon.
“No shit,” I said, glancing at Dad to see if he would react to my swearing. I guess when we’re all going to die in
a few hundred seconds, a little swearing can be overlooked.
Dad was frantically trying to contact the Marnese leaders to let them know what the 3 digits scrawled in the face of Mars meant, in case they were too pre-occupied with panicking to think. “Damn it, nobody’s answering!”