The Positronic Man

CONGRESSWOMAN CHEE LI-HSING was considerably older now than she had been when Andrew first met her. No longer did she indulge in the coquettishness of shimmering transparent garments. She was dressed in somewhat more chaste tubular coverings, now. Her once lustrous black hair was streaked with gray, and she wore it cut much shorter.



Andrew, though, had of course not changed at all. His face was as unlined as ever; his soft, fine hair was still brown. And he clung, as closely as he could within the limits of reasonable taste, to the loose style of clothing that had prevailed when he first adopted clothing over a century before.



It was late in the year. The harsh chill winds of winter were blowing through the ancient canyons of New York and faint wisps of snow were swirling through the air above the giant gleaming tower that housed the World Legislature. The Legislature's wordy struggles were over for the season.



But for Andrew the struggle never seemed to reach its end. The debate had gone on and on-the angry, baffled Legislators had tried to take all possible sides of the issue-the voting public, unable to come to any clear philosophical position, had fallen back on emotion, on primordial fear, on the deepest-rooted of uncertainties and prejudices



Congresswoman Chee had withdrawn her bill, had modified it substantially to take into account the stubborn opposition that it had run into. But she had not yet offered it again to the Legislature.



"What do you think?" Andrew asked. "Will you introduce the revised bill in the new session or not?"



"What do you want me to do?"



"You know what I want you to do."



Li-hsing nodded, a little wearily. "I told you once, Andrew, that your cause was not really my cause, and that I might have to abandon it if I felt my career was at stake. Well, my career is at stake. And I still haven't abandoned you."



"And do you still feel that my cause isn't your cause?"



"No. It has become my cause. I have no doubt that you are human, Andrew-perhaps made so by your own hand, but human all the same. And I understand that to deny the humanity of a single member of our kind is to raise the renewed possibility of denying humanity to whole multitudes, as was done all too often in our ugly past. We must never permit that to happen again. But even so-even so, Andrew-"



She faltered for a moment.



"Go on," Andrew said. "Now comes the point where you tell me that you have to abandon me despite everything, isn't that right, Li-hsing?"



"I didn't say that. But we have to be realistic. I think we've gone as far as we can go."



"So you won't introduce the revised bill."



"I didn't say that, either. I intend to give it one more try after recess. But to be honest, Andrew, we can't win. Look at the numbers." She touched a button and a screen came to life on the wall of her office. "The group on the left side of the chart, the section in green-those are the members who are unalterably opposed to any kind of loosening of the definitions. That's just about 40% of the Legislature: immovable, permanently committed to opposing you. The segment marked in red: there are your supporters. 28%. The rest are the undecided ones."



"In two different colors? Why is that?"



"Yellow is the group that's undecided but leaning in your direction. That's a 12.5% slice. Blue is undecided against you. That's 19.5%."



"I see."



"In order to get a majority, we need to keep every single one of the undecideds in the yellow slice of the chart, and win over more than half of those who are still on the fence but currently thinking of voting against you. Plus, of course, retaining the solid support of your basic 28% group. Even if we can manage to win over a few of your diehard opponents, I don't think we can put together the vote, Andrew."



Andrew said, "Then why bother even bringing the bill up for debate?"



"Because I owe you that much. As you can see, it isn't going to work, and I'm afraid this is going to be my last try. Not because I'm walking away from the fight-not at all-but because I'm not going to be in a position any longer where I can stay in it. Everything that I've been doing on your behalf is going to be wrapped around my neck at the next election and it's going to pull me down to defeat. I have no doubt of that. I'm going to lose my seat."



"I know," said Andrew, "and it distresses me. For your sake, not for mine. You saw it coming long ago, didn't you, Li-hsing? And yet you stayed with me. Why? Why, after telling me at the start that you'd drop me if you found that I was endangering your career? Why didn't you?"



"One can change one's mind, you know. Somehow, Andrew, abandoning you involved paying a higher price than I was willing to pay for the sake of winning just one more term. As it is, I've been in the Legislature for over a quarter of a century. That's long enough, I think."



"But if your mind could change, why not the minds of the others?"



"We've changed all that are amenable to reason. The rest-and it's a majority of them, I'm sorry to say-simply can't be moved. It's a matter of deep-rooted emotional antipathy."



"Theirs, or the people who voted for them?"



"Some of each. Even those members of the Legislature who are more or less rational themselves tend now and then to assume that their constituents aren't. But I'm afraid that plenty of them have powerful antipathies of their own, when it comes to anything robotic."



"And is relying on emotional antipathy a valid way for a Legislator to decide how to vote?"



"Oh, Andrew-"



"Yes. How terribly naive of me to say a thing like that."



"Naive isn't the right word. But you know that they'd never admit they were voting their emotions. They'd offer this or that carefully reasoned-out explanation for their decision-something about the economy, or an analogy from Roman history, or some antiquated religious argument-anything but the truth. But what does it matter? It's how they'll vote that counts, not why they do it."



"It all comes down to the question of the structure of the brain, then-isn't that so?"



"That's the problem, yes."



Andrew said cautiously, "I don't see why that should be such a sticking point for them. What a brain is made of isn't the essential thing: it's how the brain functions. Its thought patterns, its reaction time, its ability to reason and to generalize from experience. Why does the whole issue have to be drawn down to the level of organic cells versus positrons? Is there no way of pushing through a functional definition?"



"Functional?"



"My brain does everything that an officially legal human brain can do -does it better, in many ways, faster, more directly, more logically. Perhaps that's what bothers them. Well, it's too late for me to start hiding my intelligence, if that's the problem. But must we go on insisting that a human brain has to be made of some officially approved cellular substance in order to be legally human? Can't we simply stipulate that a human brain is something-anything, organic or not-that is capable of attaining a certain complex level of thought?"



"It won't work," said Li-hsing.



"Because if we defined humanity by brain function alone, too many humans would fall below the stipulated level of intellectual ability?" Andrew asked bitterly. "Is that it?"



"Andrew, Andrew, Andrew! Listen to me: there are those who are determined to keep a barrier up between themselves and robots at any cost. For the sake of their own self-esteem, if nothing else, they want to believe that they belong to the only true and lawful human race and that robots are some sort of inferior creatures. You've spent the past hundred years beating those people back, and you've won your way through to a status that would have been utterly inconceivable in the early years of robotics. But now they've got you on an issue where you can't win. You've put yourself inside a body that for all intents and purposes is close enough to being human as makes no real difference. You eat, you breathe, you sweat. You go to fine restaurants and order splendid meals and drink the best wines, I've noticed, though I can't imagine what value that can have for you other than for appearance's sake."



"That is value enough for me," said Andrew.



"All right. Plenty of humans probably can't appreciate the expensive wines they drink either, but they drink them all the same, and for the same reason you do. Your organs are all artificial, but by now so are many of theirs. Quite possibly there are people out there living in bodies that are virtually identical to yours, wholesale artificial replacements for the ones they were born with. But they aren't complete replacements, Andrew. Nobody has a prosthetic brain. No one can. And so you differ from everyone else in one fundamental respect. Your brain is man-made, the human brain is not. Your brain was constructed, theirs was naturally developed. They were born, you were assembled. To any human being who is intent on keeping up the barrier between himself and robots, those differences are like a steel wall five kilometers high and five kilometers thick."



"You aren't telling me anything I don't know. My brain is different in composition from theirs, certainly. But not in its function, not really. Quantitatively different, maybe, but not qualitatively. It's just a brain-a very good brain. They're merely using the positronic-vs. cellular issue as a pretext to keep from admitting that what I am is a human being of a kind somewhat different from them. -No, Li-hsing, if we could somehow get at their antipathy toward me because of my robotic origins-the very source of all their hostility-this mysterious need they have to proclaim themselves superior to someone who is by every reasonable definition superior to them-"



"After all your years," said Li-hsing sadly, "you are still trying to reason out the human being. Poor Andrew, don't be angry at me for saying this, but it's the robot in you that drives you in that direction."



"You know that there's very little left of the robot in me by this time."



"But there's some."



"Some, yes. And if I were to get rid of that-"



Chee Li-hsing shot him a look of alarm. "What are you saying, Andrew?"



"I don't know," he said. "But I have an idea. The problem is, Li-hsing, that I have human feelings trapped within a robot mind. But that doesn't make me human, only an unhappy robot. Even after all that has been done to improve my robot body, I'm still not human. But there's one more step that can be taken. If I could bring myself-if I could only bring myself-"