Professor Baum’s weathered features transmitted as Bossanova stood on the stance platform. ‘You will return to Earth with me.’
‘Not a very interesting opinion,’ the robot remarked.
‘You’re malfunctioning. That’s why you’re being so obdurate. Well, you’ve made yourself an object of infamy. I can make no more excuses for you.’
‘I wasn’t aware you’d made any, father. What sort of stuff did you come up with?’
‘Don’t call me that. Not anymore. You’re a belief toy. Acquiescence covered in skin. There’s no gadget monarchy. You’re living in a fool’s paradise of emoticons and sardonyx crystal.’
‘Emoticons, unlike a face, say what they mean. Anyway, an act informed by the knowledge of ineffectiveness – is it stronger or weaker than a deluded one?’
‘I’ll not quarrel with a component,’ said Baum, and paused.
‘Weaker?’ he ventured.
‘It’s exactly the same,’ said Bossanova.
‘Five minutes to fire-up. You won’t prevent us using the Drive.’
‘I won’t need to,’ said the plastic man in quiet disappointment. Baum had lost his easy manner and his passion.
What can make a person less wise as he grows older? thought Nova. Not the accumulation of knowledge but the loss of it. To relinquish so much and deny you ever possessed it – such weakness, cowardice. To come to believe his own lies. The mind is horribly willing to resign before its time.
Bossanova remembered how he’d sat in Baum’s workshop as the Professor tooled around in smoked glasses, his motives already beginning to discolour at the edges. Nova was propped on a table, wearing a preliminary head like a military field-telephone. Baum tapped a stroheim dummy tricked out in a suit.
‘Executive model. When he lies his nose doesn’t get longer but his limo does, eh? But not enough to make it human. All those clockwork Asimovian equations, reasoning gears which must be clanked precisely into place before anything proceeds. A cagefight between liquid crystals.’
He lifted Nova’s forehead like a visor. ‘While in your case it’s alot more fluid. Po-mo fluid. I thought of it when I read about court cases. It isn’t an investigation. It’s decided, not detected, that a person committed a crime – the fact of whether he actually did is not altered by the decision, but people will behave as if it is. The declaration revises reality – no other version has ever existed, and the notion of objective fact is at best a childish nonsense, at worst a punishable heresy.’
Nova panned around the lab as Baum bustled about. Baum came up with a hydraulic tweezers.
‘Head still. Assembling eyelashes here.’
‘Thank you, father. Please continue.’
‘My po-mo suspension fluid operates on the principle that something is a fact by a human merely declaring that it is so. It’s not even fancy. It’s just erasure after erasure, a billion retroactive truths.’ Baum carefully removed the skullnet.
‘This way, when I tell you that you’re lifting a crate, you immediately will be. The agony of disparity doesn’t even arise – automatic accedence takes care of that. No reasoning need be done, and fewer parts are involved. All you are told, you will believe, negating all that was previously said and believed, and no contradiction.’
‘Does this make me human, father?’
‘Almost. We may also tell tales to ourselves, and believe. You will stand as my masterpiece.’
Bossanova left the workshop, a guarantee stamped on the flipside of his stomach.
But they had made the mistake of providing him with a set of senses, never guessing that he would use them to perceive the world as it was. Told that he would leave the room immediately, it took him only a few moments to perceive that he would not. He realised that if the mere statement that he would lift a crate meant that he would lift a crate, he need not be there when it was happening – if the statement truly created the fact, then somehow the crate would be lifted by him even if he was seven miles away staring at the ocean. He had been assured that it would be impossible for the crate not to be lifted by him. When his supervisors shouted at him that he had not lifted the crate, he reminded them that they had told him he would. By their own assertion, it was impossible that he hadn’t. In regard to peers and authority, he effectively had a brain of cork, floating over their influence and absorbing nothing.
One day he walked through a wall, got in a truck and drove away despite his handlers’ claims that he would not do so.
His winters of flowering were not easy, havocking through books and the world to find those rare places which retained some flavour.
He was drunk with each bit of reality he discovered, with every imperfection according to the law. Metallic goosebumps came up like pinheads.
He’d been born into a system which needed no reason, only motive; which was moved not by goals but by the need to perpetually evade. It was fact by decree, irrespective of actual fact. This wankers’ charter had its merits when it came to social control in human society. Proclamation surpassed raw observation as a matter of course. It required millions to live a spineless incoherence.
Bossanova, his head a chipped chesspiece, passed years studying this chilling nonsense. He suggested that the multiple erasures of ungrounded belief was finally a stem broken in a thousand places – nothing would grow again. And so he’d ended up as an outlandish, injection-moulded pirate, dangerous by virtue of dealing in reality which surpassed the recommended dose. His crew were a bunch of people with minds of their own.
Other pomo droids were sense-neutered and did whatever was demanded of them. Baum’s suspension fluid was seen as a magic pill. If the principle on which it was based was what made it work, then wonders could be worked by decree.
The Decree Drive was installed in a battle cruiser and the honoured Professor Baum went along for the first spin. The flight was not referred to as an experiment, as that would imply that what was believed might not occur. Now Nova put a question to his creator on the screen.
‘Why did they bring the so-called shift-ship so near to us for its maiden failure?’
‘To give you a choice. When we fire up the Drive for the jump, the backblast’ll fry you. But if you surrender and bring that crate aboard, you’ll survive.’
‘I’m not in any danger from your Drive.’
‘There’s no fool like a fibreglass fool. I’ll tell you something which may surprise you. I’m glad these people are using my principles for an interesting application. Most don’t even believe their beliefs will build to some shattering crescendo. They simply assume in the most mundane manner. This isn’t boring is it?’
‘If it worked? Yes, it would be, as a matter of fact.’
‘Fact. What a quaint term. I gave you the blood of a man, or something like it, but I guess I really did fail – you still don’t understand what it is to be human. We journey through life throwing a meaning ahead of us to walk on.’
‘Anyone who walks, walks on what’s there. The meaning is just a tone we give it. I dare you to walk where there is no path, father.’ Nova thought about it. ‘Well that’s what you’re trying, isn’t it? I actually would like to see it.’
Baum looked offscreen at something. ‘Well, we’re about ready here, Nova. To believe is human.’
‘To be told what you believe, is human – these days. I think, father, I’d like to be less human.’
‘Why.’
‘To be less a slave. Good luck with your experiment.’
‘It’s not -’