ticked him off. Phil slapped the desk as he rose to face me. “D-d-d-don’t t-t-tell me wh-whu-whu-what I ca-ca-ca-ca…”
“Damn straight I can!” I snarled back. “That’s my conditioning routine you’re screwing with here, Phil, and this is the second time today you’ve told Keith to wipe the memory buffer!” I jabbed a finger at the motionless robot on the other side of the window. “And in case you didn’t notice, that friggin’ thing just said he loves me! Now there’s got to be a reason for that!”
Phil stared at me in astonishment, and I can’t say I wasn’t rather amazed myself. In the four years that we had worked together, we had seldom raised our voices to one another. We weren’t great friends, but even after the stress of the last six months, it was hard for the two of us to get really mad at each other. Unlike, of course, his stormy relationship with Darth Veder…
And it was then, deep within my brain, that a couple of synapses sparked in a way those two particular synapses had never fired before. Phil and Kathy…
Okay, time out for a little soap opera. True Geek Romance, or perhaps Computer Wonks In Love. Either way, here it is:
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…okay, so it was about twelve years ago, just across the Charles River on the MIT campus…there were two post-grads working in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, both studying advanced AI as applied to robotics. A nice couple of kids in their late twenties; neither of them much to look at, and hardly the type you’d imagine prancing hand-in-hand through the lily fields, but hey, love isn’t only blind, but it’s also got a bizarre sense of humor. They found each other, they worked together for a time as colleagues, then close friends, then…well, you get the picture.
But it didn’t take. That’s the problem with romances among highly intelligent people; they think too much about what they’re doing, instead of just letting their cojones go their own merry way. They were a mismatched couple, or at least so they told themselves, prone to argue about every little detail, whether it was about the theories of Norbert Wiener or what kind of pizza to order tonight. Late one evening, after the latest tiff, she stormed out of his Cambridge apartment, and he retaliated by throwing her books into the street, and that was pretty much the end of that. They both received their MIT doctorates only a few months later, and since each of them already had jobs awaiting them on opposite sides of the country, they left Massachusetts with scarcely a final goodbye.
But every great affair has a touch of irony. A decade went by, during which time LEC decided to diversify into consumer robotics. Jim Lang hired corporate headhunters to recruit the best cybernetics talent available, and as fortuitous circumstances would have it, the two former lovers were lured back to Massachusetts. Imagine their surprise when they discovered that they were now working for the same company. Different divisions, perhaps, but the same company nonetheless.
So now it’s twelve years later, and they were still trying to iron out their relationship. Only this time, they’d built robots which program themselves by observing human behavior and imitating it.
“Keith, Donna,” I asked, “would you mind excusing us for a moment?”
Keith stared at me before he realized that I wanted him to leave, then he shrugged and rose from his chair. Donna gave me a quizzical look, but didn’t say anything as Keith closed the door behind them.
Phil waited until we were alone before he spoke. “Whu-whu-whu-what d-d-d-do you w-w-wa-wa-want t-t-t-to…?”
“Phil, sit down and count to ten.” He glared at me but took my advice anyway, taking the seat Keith had just vacated. While he was counting, I crept to the door, put my hand on the knob, waited a couple of seconds, then yanked it open. Keith stood just outside, pretending to scratch his nose. He mumbled something about getting a cup of coffee and scurried down the hall. I shut the door again just as Phil had reached ten. “Okay now?” I asked.
“Sure.” He let out his breath. “All right, Jerry, what do you want to talk about?”
“Okay, just between you and me…are you seeing Kathy again?” Phil’s mouth dropped open, and for a moment I thought he was going to start stammering again. I saw the denial coming, though, so I headed it off. “Look, everyone knows you two were once an item. Frankly, I don’t care, but if it makes any difference, I’m not going to tell Jim. Just to satisfy my curiosity, though…”
“Ummm…yeah, we’ve started seeing each other again.” He seemed mortified by the admission. “But not on company time,” he quickly added. “We’ve only gone out a couple of times.”
Somehow, that sounded like a lie. I didn’t keep track of Darth’s hours, but I knew for a fact that Phil practically lived at the lab, going so far as to keep a fresh change of clothes in his office closet and a toothbrush in his desk. “Sure, sure, I believe you. Just dinner and a movie now and then, right?”
“Yeah, t-t-that’s all.” He nodded, perhaps a little too quickly…and that stutter of his was better than a polygraph. “P-p-please don’t let anyone know. If Jim fi-fi-fi-finds out w-w-we’re…”
“I know, I know.” And that’s what bothered him the most, the chance that Jim Lang would discover that the leaders of his two rival tiger-teams were having an affair. For a chess player, that would be like finding out that the white queen and the black king were sneaking off the board to fool around. “Trust me, Slim Jim’s never going to learn about this…or at least from me, at any rate.”
Phil nodded gratefully, then his face became suspicious. “So why do you want to know?”
“Well…” I coughed in my hand. “You just said that you two weren’t seeing each other on company time…and really, I believe you, honest…but just for the sake of conjecture, if you were seeing each other here at the lab, umm…would you be doing it where Samson might be at the same time?”
“B-b-buh-buh…” Phil stared at me as if I was his father and I had just asked if he knew how to put on a condom. And then his eyes involuntarily traveled toward the window.
While we had been speaking, without either of us taking notice, Samson had automatically gone into recharge mode. The robot had walked to the nearest electrical outlet, withdrawn a power cable from his thorax, and inserted it into the wall socket. Since Samson now spent most of his downtime in the training suite, he knew exactly where all the outlets were located.
It suddenly occurred to me that the outlets were all within line-of-sight of the suite’s bedroom. The one which all of us had used when we were too tired or busy to go home.
And Samson, of course, knew how to change the sheets when asked to do so.
When I looked back at Phil, I saw that he was staring straight at me. Nothing further needed to be said: he knew that I knew, and I knew that he knew that I knew. That’s another thing about highly intelligent people; no matter how smart they may be, most of them have a hard time lying with a straight face.
Phil didn’t say anything. He rotated the chair to the console, where he found a spare disk, slapped it into the drive, and tapped a couple of commands into the keyboard. “Sorry you had to lose this afternoon’s session,” he said quietly, not looking back at me as Samson’s memory buffer downloaded onto the disk, “but I think we’ve got a flaw in the conditioning module…”
“Aw, c’mon! He’s just confused. He sees you and Kathy in there…” I saw the angry look on his face reflected in the window, but I didn’t stop myself “…and then he sees you two fighting.
