'Its Own Kind'

“I suppose it happened so suddenly. That’s why I can write so calmly about it. Perhaps it’s because so much time has passed.”

“There’s a clock that was sitting on my desk. I could view it from the right corner of the window. For the first few days I could risk reaching out to it. I can’t risk that anymore.”

“Look, there is no need for blame, yet there is now only time to talk, and write as I talk, about where I am. And maybe it’s because I still believe, that if done without arrogance or haste, that it can work again. That’s why, it must be why, I haven’t done it yet. Or maybe it’s because it saw me.”

“Okay, allow me to remember now, as exact as I can, how it occurred. We were celebrating some breakthroughs. Alan had solved a puzzle using our new arm it had struggled on for seven weeks. I went back to my office early. I had gotten used to the taste of Space Cake and Champagne packets, but they weren’t necessarily appealing. Besides, five years from Earth was too long. Alan’s eyes were nearly complete, just had to be synced together, and then Alan’s experiential learning program could be put in place. Once Alan could be connected to us, share our thoughts, read books about robots, become self-aware, we could make our ancestors proud.”

“I was walking back with my equipment. Completely normal. Regular communications, sounds of the incinerator starting up, to get rid of the faulty arm attachments. In the Rosen labs is where the panic started. Are they all dead at the time of my writing? I do not know. I’ve been trapped here for long enough to nearly run out of rations, next to the self-destruct switch. When they run out, it’ll be me or him.”

“All I’ve been able to do is read. Ironic, because when he was self-aware he was to start reading about the Ancestors, the old stories about robots and cyborgs and automatons, hopefully to give him some identity. Honestly, I don’t know if I should blame his confusion. Now that I think back, I vaguely remember someone reading Asimov’s third law, ‘3. A robot may not injure its own kind and defend its own kind unless it is interfering with the first or second rule,’ right before the incinerators lit. If you had nearly limitless computational power, but no experiences, and then you gained consciousness, how would you know what the two laws were that you weren’t supposed to violate?”