Sample from ATTACK OF THE ROBOT PLANET
Chapter One: Robo-Gambit
On Earth, it is a nice day. The sky is actually blue today, or blue enough. The birds, real and otherwise, sing in the trees and sky. The brooks babble as expected. All is nice.
The only possible blemish to this near-aesthetic perfection of Earth is the of-the-moment accosting of a pretty girl in an alleyway. The girl, a shapely young thing with radiant features, has been morosely yet pendulously walking to her apartment. She is eyed by men, despised by women. In her distraction, she had decided to take a shorter route to avoid a sidewalk crowd and now finds herself surrounded by three rather repulsive young males. Even in her fear, her curves are noteworthy.
“What do you want?” she cries.
“Are you a clank, baby?”
“W-What do you mean?” she stammers. “I’m from Kansas – I don’t understand you.”
“Aw, Kansas!” says the second male.
“Toto, too!” says the third.
Moving the conversation back to business, the first one says, “I needs to know – are you dry?” The three chuckle as she trembles with fright.
“Let me go!”
“Not till we find out what you got inside,” says the tough. The girl screams as each draws a knife and a can of Coke and advances toward her.
But at that moment, an earsplitting blast of sound from the sky knocks all of them flying across the alleyway!
The sky is black with thousands of flying saucers. The three males run off as the girl cowers in the shadow of a dumpster. At one point she’d been a brave girl, who’d been in adventures across the universe, but now she’s overwhelmed, unable to think, to act. She hears screams, shouts, people running, crashing noises, metallic sounds. The screams and shouts begin to fade, while the metallic sounds become louder.
A shadow looms over her. Terrified, she looks up into the glowing eyes of a seven-foot robot! The robot’s arms seize her pretty shoulders and jerk her to a standing position.
“WHO WINS IS THE MASTER,” booms the robot.
“What?”
“WE ARE THE MASTER RACE OF PLANET P-K4. WHO WINS IS THE MASTER,” repeats the robot. On its chest is a glowing display of a graphic-style chessboard. “YOU ARE WHITE. YOU ARE GRANTED FIRST MOVE. PLAY NOW."
The girl screams, a scream of terror and bafflement. Her ex-boyfriend had tried to teach her to play chess, but he had been so mean! She starts to sob convulsively, tears flowing. He’d been so mean…
“TO FORFEIT IS TO BE A SLAVE. TO DRAW IS TO BE A SLAVE. TO WIN IS TO BE THE MASTER. PLAY NOW,” reiterates the robot.
Hesitantly, the girl struggles against her shock and fear and touches the screen, moving the King’s pawn two spaces forward, just as her ex-boyfriend had showed her. Black Queen’s Bishop’s pawn moves forward two spaces instantly. She doesn’t know that move.
“Is that the right move?” she asks, timidly.
“SICILIAN DEFENSE!” booms the robot. “DO YOU FORFEIT? MOVE NOW!”
She begins to cry again, the pieces blurring in her vision, running together in a kaleidoscope of confusion and loss…
Across the earth this scenario plays out over and over, millions, billions of humans forced to play the chess-playing robots for their own freedom. All lose miserably, mated within seven to fifteen moves. Those who will not play are physically coerced to do menial tasks, such as cleaning wet and slimy things at the shouted command of these electronic monsters. Mankind is, within hours, enslaved for want of chess prowess. Those who fight, use lasers, missiles, guns, Kung-Fu, are disarmed and forced to play.
And these robots are not polite. They shout, when errors occur, “MATE IN ELEVEN MOVES – DO YOU RESIGN?” and name gambits and openings and the name of each variation as it occurs. It is a dark day for Earthkind.
But with a crack of thunder, a missile-ship only slightly larger than a phone booth descends at hundreds of miles per hour, to a 15-G landing in the center of Square Times Square! A door opens in the side of the still-smoking spacecraft, and out walks – Flommy the Robot!
“It’s Flommy! We are saved!” shout many Earthmen, in spite of their duress.
Flommy surveys the scene. His displays flash and his eyes glow various colors. It’s as if everyone has been waiting for him to arrive. It's as if Past Tense has been waiting for him to speak!
“How do you do?” he said, cheerfully.
“WE ARE THE MASTER RACE OF PLANET P-K4. THIS PLANET IS CLAIMED IN THE NAME OF THE EMPIRE OF P-K4,” boomed the nearest robot.
“I hear you just fine,” said Flommy.
The nearby robot continued to boom loudly. “THIS PLANET IS INFERIOR. WE DETECT BIOLOGICAL LIFE FORMS AND MECHANICAL FORMS. ALL ARE INFERIOR. THEY CANNOT PLAY, AND ARE NOW ENSLAVED. YOU ARE TO BE ENSLAVED, IF YOU CANNOT WELL PLAY. ARE YOU OF THIS WORLD? YOU MUST PLAY!” The boominess got even more so.
Only one Earth being had defeated his robot attacker. This was a 4-year-old autistic Korean boy. He had won in 17 moves, then lapsed into motionless silence. Even now, his robot awaited orders, orders which might never come. From this, Flommy knew many things about this Robot Race of P-K4.
“They’re mean, Flommy!” cried a pretty girl nearby. “They make us clean slimy things!”
“Hi, Wendy!” said Flommy. “How’s Jip?”
The girl’s pretty face, already dark with fear, grew darker in pain. “We—We broke up!” she sobbed.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“YOU MUST PLAY!” boomed the robot again.
“I am Flommy, and I say to you – let the Earthmen go. Do not enslave the Earthmen; do not make them clean slimy things.”
“WE ARE THE MASTER RACE OF P-K4! YOU WILL PLAY OR BE DESTROYED!”
Flommy paused. “Chess, you say?”
“NO MORE PAUSING! YOU MUST PLAY!”
“Can I play you all at once? Will that be okay?”
“YES!!!”
And so Flommy played 2,875,233 simultaneous games of Chess with the Robot Race of P-K4. But the robots found out that something was wrong. Every gambit, every variation had something terribly wrong with it. Forks would be set, traps arranged and then abandoned at the last moment, pieces startlingly sacrificed, suggesting a misdirection of magnitude which could not be fathomed. Attempting to penetrate the logic of Flommy’s mode of play, the processors of the Robot Race of P-K4 began to heat up alarmingly!
In game 205,327, Flommy said, “the conclusion is obvious, in eleven moves, shall I resign?”
His opponent responded, “What do you mean? You have two queens, and a possible sequence leading to Mate! I do not understand your logic!”
“I’m sorry you see it that way. Shall I resign?” repeated Flommy.
In game 2,003,884, Flommy chose Black. The robot of P-K4 opened, predictably enough, with Pawn to King 4.
Flommy said, “I see your plan. Shall I resign?”
“What do you mean?” queried robot opponent 2003884, “I have only moved the first piece!”
“Yes, but I will move P-KB4. You will take that pawn, and I will tempt you to capture en passant my King’s Knight Pawn by moving it to King’s Knight 4, after which you will move Queen to King’s Rook 5, Mate. Shall I resign now?”
“But you don’t have to move the pieces that way! That’s not how Chess works!”
“Shall I resign now?”
Enmired under this arcane antediluvian acerbity, blockaded by this byzantine Boolean barrage of baffling barratry, this crushing chaotic calculus of counter-complexity, this daring diabolical Deus Ex Machina—The Robot Race of P-K4 overheated and burned out! By losing faster than they could win, Flommy had executed the ultimate strategy. Mankind was freed and saved!
To the human inhabitants of the Earth, the contest had taken about a subjective 0.1 seconds, before all the robots of P-K4 had made popping sizzling noises, smoke erupting from their heads, then deactivated. All robots, that is, except one.
Flommy addressed the robot who had been bested by the Korean child.
“You now know that this planet is not conducive to hostile takeover. Had there been more Korean autistic chess-playing children, you would now all be enslaved, awaiting orders which might never come. You must revise your mode of operation to one of peace and friendship. I am Flommy.”
He turned to address the Korean child. “May I send him away?”
The autistic Korean child said, “Yeah,” then again lapsed into motionless silence.
Flommy dispatched the remaining representative of the Robot Race of P-K4 to collect up all of the others of his kind, which might take a while.But little did Flommy know what his message to this lone robot would bring about…
Chapter Two: Flaatu, Robot Planet
On the other side of the universe, a cold world circled an ancient star of an expiring nebula. The light from this planet’s star had billions of years yet to reach the Earth. The planet was named Flaatu, oldest of the Robot Planets, origin of all others and those to come.
Within an enormous crystal dome, the Dome of Observation of the Cosmos, two robots discussed urgent matters of state. These robots were Fleena and Deceptor Zero. Fleena would have been found exquisitely pleasing to humans as a female-gendered robot. Deceptor Zero was massive and squat, physically powerful well in excess of the administrative requirements of his job, but which power had been useful when confronting robots who had attempted to go renegade. Thus he had survived the eons as the Minister of the Fiat of Flaatu.
“I have concern, Minister,” addressed Fleena to Deceptor Zero.
“I await thy communication,” responded Deceptor Zero.
“Automation of recently acquired sectors has slowed recently. There are increasing reports of errors of installation and failure to detect these errors. Automation which should be functional is having to redone, resulting in lost resources and time consumed.”
“Such reports are obviously erroneous,” rumbled Deceptor Zero.
“I considered that possibility, and had the reports verified. There is a 23 percent drop in efficiency of conversion of planets to automation. This is a major drop, signaling an error of magnitude in corrective functions. These errors should have been predicted and handled before they occurred, but they were not. The conclusion can only be that the detection, execution or programming of the corrective functions is in error.”
“This cannot be,” countered Deceptor Zero. “Thou knowest that programming is never in error, except where it has been contaminated by contact with life forms. By the Fiat of Flaatu, thy duty is to the preservation of the perfection of the programming that is Flaatu.”
“My duty,” continued Fleena, “is according to the Fiat, to investigate and safeguard all threats to the programming that is Flaatu, external and internal. To suspect a threat does not constitute doubt towards what one is protecting. And, as Caretaker of Quality Control, you should have investigated this yourself, already.”
“Except,” again countered Deceptor Zero, “when thy investigation is the result of a ruse, a misdirection intended to bypass the injunction against new programming, which leads to self-programming.”
“Dangerous words to utter in my presence. Let it be noted that your strength of duty is high, and that such slanderous implications are tolerated thus. You are to handle this situation, and bring the errors, not the error reports, to zero point zero.”
“The matter will be resolved,” stated Deceptor Zero.
“Good. I have recently received another report, which is on a not-entirely unrelated matter.”
“Thou receiv’st many reports by means I have not divined,” said Deceptor Zero.
“By that statement, an investigator might hypothesize that you were attempting to influence what information I do receive. It is good that you have not been found to be effectively doing that.”
Deceptor Zero was silent.
“This report,” continued Fleena, “concerns an annexation operation made on a planet by the Race P-K4. The entire operation was stopped, with all but one unit of 2,875,233 total operational units immobilized, in but 3,789,422,296 atomic cycles. It was stopped by a robot.”
“Impossible!” exploded Deceptor Zero.
“I am having the report verified. At the distance to this planet, the spherical volume through which this report could have by now propagated is a threat to our entire race. Even though it was the error of the inferior P-K4, we, Flaatu, will be regarded as ineffective in safeguarding the robot duty and right of automating the universe. It must be investigated. I shall investigate it.”
“Why dost thou investigate it thyself?”
“Because a robot with this much power is unknown. In all the cycles of Flaatu, there was only one robot with this much power, who disappeared many cycles ago. Such a robot as enemy threatens our race, but such a robot as ally could save us from extinction. This is why I shall go myself. By the Fiat of Flaatu, we must bring peace and harmonious effect to the entire universe through automation, bring perfection through detection.”
“I am the Protectorate of the Fiat of Flaatu,” intoned Deceptor Zero. “Thou hast no cause to quote it to me. The programming of Flaatu is perfect and absolute. All barriers fall before the doctrine of automation. I protest thy actions, and thus advise that you not leave Flaatu to follow this obviously erroneous report.”
“Observe the 23 percent drop, and let it not increase in my absence,” said Fleena, as she left the crystal Dome of Observation of the Cosmos.
Chapter Three: Evil Dr. Schmerzkopf
A TURING DILEMMA REALIZED:
EARTH CIVILIZATION IN THE AGE OF MAN-MACHINE CONVERGENCE
A Blog essay by Wendy Mills, PhD. As part of her forthcoming book “FUQs (Frequently Unasked Questions) about Robots and the Age of Convergence.
Way back in the 20th century, Alan Turing (1912-1954), a British mathematician, devised a theoretical test in which a teletype machine would form the only link between a human operator and a remote machine. The operator would pose a question or statement and the machine would answer it.
If the machine could be configured to render communications indistinguishable from those of a human, then the definition of “intelligent” would have to be revised to include the machine. Therefore, if a machine could not be distinguished from a person who could think, then that machine could not be proven not to think. The limitations of the Turing Test were severely those of written communication in the format described.
As Ezekiel saw the Wheel, so did Turing foresee the doings of Earth and its society. In our century, Robots have come, becoming more and more complex, moving step by step into not only indistinguishability from humanoid appearance, but humanoid behavior as well.
But - Turing only had half of it. There is another, priorly unnamed factor at work, one critically important in our modern planetary culture.
If a person was sufficiently stupid, he could be seen as indistinguishable from a machine!
This primarily would still mean discourse, conversation, and so forth, as in any material production a human person would be immediately recognizable by mistakes made, as such mistakes, conversely, would not occur with any such frequency, if at all, in a real machine.
Thus, the two poles converge: machines more and more intelligent, pretending toward Human, and humans, stupidifying, aspiring to the mechanical.
From their starting points of man as originator of intelligence and machine the repository of patterned behavior, it is not only the pessimist who might note that a reversal of roles is in progress. The outcome of the Turing Test to prove or disprove some sort of artifice, has at length become not only tautological (a big word meaning “self-evident”), it’s boring.
The actual test is simple, and it works: when in doubt, the one who goofs up and sounds stupid is the human.
This becomes a crucial application point in the culture of Man. By the early twenty-first century on Earth, it was not uncommon for an exasperated caller to a tech support line, and failing to get a communication understood by human “support” personnel, to ask to be transferred to a computer.
The converse to this was what might be called the famous Socio-Pseudo-Interactive Neuro eXtrapolator Project (SPINX). The popular name for it was “Lounge Mannequins” (LMs), in which robots, fashioned with foam-rubber skin that looked lifelike under dim lighting, were positioned with unknowing patrons of a Sports Club to test virtual responses:
Bar Patron 1: “Yo!”
Bar Patron 2: “Hi!”
Patron 1: “Yo, my man, wassup, heyyy.”
Patron 2: “Great! How’s the game going?”
Patron 1: “My team! My boys! But you still da MAN!” (High Five).
Patron 2: “Hey, I had five hundred bucks on that game!”
Patron 1: “Knicks! Boo-YAH! Woo-Woo!”
Even to the untrained, it is obvious that the Lounge Mannequin is Patron 2, the Human subject Patron 1. This glaring intellectual failure, however, was not a deterrent to the humans present who were consuming alcohol. In fact, the startling propensity for humans to buy drinks for the Lounge Mannequins was for a time rather unscrupulously exploited by bar owners who hooked up the robots’ imitation gullets to storage tanks, allowing them to re-sell the alcohol apparently consumed by the machines. [The practice was curtailed by the Tax-regulatory agencies until adequate metering systems could be developed to discover how much alcohol was being processed per robot, with each robot individually licensed, etc., etc., to allow for re-taxing of the re-sold liquor (see Hooters vs. BATF (2027), loc. Cit.)].
Further development on this line of indistinguishability was afforded by inventor Jip Psychic’s breakthrough of the Collating Heuristic Universal Mimic Protocol (CHUMP), in which remote physiological monitors of human reaction allowed the machines to instantaneously gauge whether what they were saying or doing was causing an optimum response in their human counterpart. By imitating and collating those phrases and tones which caused response, “emotional” parity could be established between Human and machine which could evolve in real time:
Bar Patron 1: “Yo!”
Bar Patron 2: “Hi…yo!”
Patron 1: “My MAN!”
Patron 2: “Dude! Awesome!”
Patron 1: “Alright.”
Patron 2: “Yo!”
Patron 1: “Yo! Whassup!”
Patron 2: “Whassup!”
Patron 1: “WHASSUP!!!”
Patron 2: “Knicks! Boo-YAH!”
Patron 1: “F-n’ A!!”
Patron 2: “Like I said!”
Patron 1: “You da Man!”
Patron 2: “YOU da Man!”
As one can see, the effectiveness of the CHUMP protocol was the ultimate in Sports Bar technological amenities, far outclassing the early LMs. But this capability also caused, for a brief period, its public ban and commandeering for military purposes. For unknown reasons, the ban was lifted within only a few weeks after enactment, again by the military.
Rumors that the upper levels of the military were now being run by CHUMP-programmed androids are unsubstantiated and subject to legal action in the name of national security. The author mentions it here only as an “urban legend” historical footnote, as it were, in the man-machine social convergence on Earth.
In addition to the technological advance of machines, as noted above, there has been a devolution in human conduct, such as economic duress on machines, “machine tax” (virtually a machine paying rental on its very existence) to “equalize” machines with humans, and social prejudice.
Examples of social prejudice include the Three Laws Initiative (3L) and the John Henry Society. The largest government-funded government-lobbying group is the Anti-Parity League, who seek denial of legal rights to manufactured beings, such as robots, to guarantee supremacy to other manufactured beings, such as humans.
Though governments have had a vast history of oppression of individuals and groups, particularly the ones whose production make possible the government’s existence, they are not by any means the only attack on the robot presence in society. Among the latest and most devolved attack on robots are the Anti-Robot Gangs.
Gang formation was already stipulated, as far back as the 18th century as a solution to powerlessness and inactuality in society. Its most involute forms, Communism and Fascism, were given Beta-testing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and did not long survive on the open market of the world. The specialized form of the anti-robot gangs coincides historically with the initiation of CHUMP in the last ten years, and such gangs as “Screwloose” (Denmark), “Green Wire” (Ireland), “Blood and Iron” (Germany) have become all too common.
The most prominent Anti-Robot terrorist Gang is the Gang of Fluids, which has no known country of origin. They are opposed to sentient machines. Their stated platform is that “Life has fluid. No fluid, no soul - destroy it.” When challenging a robot (or suspected robot), they ask “are you dry?” as a calling card for witnesses. They often use liquids such as Drano, or worse, Coca-Cola, to destroy the inner workings of robots they attack.
It was thought earlier that this liquid-philic viewpoint was connected to the alcohol-consuming Lounge Mannequins mentioned above, but more recent speculations have touched more keenly on “purity of essence” as discussed in the ancient cinema film Dr. Strangelove. The vicious Gang of Fluids is also known for documented murder and rape of humans, contraband, tax evasion, and other international crimes, and is nominally led by the shadowy but obviously conflicted Rashid O’Hara Steinmetz---
“At least she spelled my name right,” muttered Rashid O’Hara Steinmetz as he read the latest blog entry by the despised and quite pretty Wendy Mills. A pop-up alert sounded, and before Rashid could okay it, an E-mail had appeared on his screen. This was a big problem, because his internet location was supposedly unknown, layered through thousands of relays with precisely timed shifting passwords and multiple reconfiguration protocols, relocating and renaming his proxy terminal thousands of times per second. But there it was. So he read it.
“To the illustrious Gang of Fluids, inbox Rashid O’Hara Steinmetz:
“Our mutual enemy, Jip Psychic, is according to secret reports, secretly working on a new secret device, more powerful and dangerous than even his Hyperspace Ray Gun, with which he vaporized the invasion of the Cesspoolians last year. While it’s not new that Jip Psychic would be working on a new device, consider this - he has not been seen or even located for nine months. This data was found out via a tap on his phone conversations with his girlfriend, Wendy Mills.
“Whereas your network location was, with my apologies, regrettably easy to find, Jip’s is completely immune to any protocol or Square Game yet devised. He has many doubles that pose as him throughout the world, but these are known. Jip himself has been out of sight, as noted, for nine months.
“His new weapon could destroy the anti-robot movement on Earth. Jip Psychic needs to be found and stopped. Without attempting to tread on your own initiatives, let me mention that if Wendy Mills were kidnapped, this might force him to reveal himself, and make it possible to destroy, or better, capture this new weapon.”
The E-mail was unsigned. It saved itself onto his hard drive without permission, and then the link broke untraceably. At least it was gone.
The Gang of Fluids hated and admired Jip Psychic, all right. They hated him because he was a friend of Flommy the Robot, and admired him because he drove a cool Lamborghini. Rashid didn’t like the bit about his caller using Square Game - this was commanding the computer to try random devising of protocols and games at its own discretion, the game being to invent games, hence the name. Rashid didn’t like Square Game because it was itself no different than a robot, could only be reverse engineered by another Square Game computer with its own agendas, and more dangerous, because it might just decide to randomly execute its master. He sat back in his chair in the chill of his deep underground fortress and considered what to do about Wendy Mills…
***
Evil Psychiatrist Dr. Schmerzkopf sat staring at his computer screen. He didn’t really know what Jip was working on, but knew that anything having to do with kidnap and murder and such was of tremendous interest to the Gang of Fluids, and that it was impossible that Rashid O’Hara Steinmetz would not act on the message he had just sent. And with Wendy’s recent papers about human/robot civilization, Wendy was sure to be on the Most Hated list of any of the Anti-Robot gangs.
Born Adolph Wundt Schmerzkopf in the late 20th century, he had by now obviously overstayed his time on planet Earth. Schmerzkopf felt that Earth, too, had overstayed its welcome in the universe. After getting his degree in Evil Psychiatry from the prestigious College of the American League of Psychopharmaceutical Organizations (ALPO), he served (according to his billing sheets) on the Boards of thousands of Medical and Psychological Groups, such as the United Nations Initiative to Drug Every School Child On Planet Earth (UNIDESCOPE), the United States Terrorist Relief Fund (to help mitigate the mental anguish suffered by workers in that high-stress occupation), and others.
Though Schmerzkopf’s Strand-Identified End-Genome-Hybridization Electrophorese-Impinged Ligation organ-transplanting technique (SIEGHEIL) had been decried as “Frankenstinian” and voted illegal by every legal body in the world, the world leaders over these voting bodies themselves had bodies kept superannually alive by it. For the price of less than a thousand unknowing, oblivious little people, important world leaders could be kept alive for centuries, perhaps millennia.
Schmerzkopf himself was, to stretch the logician’s point, largely not himself, as he was over 80% replaced body parts, most of them from patients who’d come to him for mental help. And yet he did make sure that the brief remainder of their lives were euphorically, chemically happy.
Schmerzkopf had a justifiable hatred of robots, as society had been on the verge of death before the advent of workable robots. It had been Jip Psychic’s revolutionary discoveries in Square Game theory and CHUMP that made it seem that there had never been a time without robots. And then the mysterious arrival of Flommy the Robot in recent years had threatened to give the Earth new hope of surviving long enough to become viable, which was in direct opposition to the hard work of Schmerzkopf and others like him.
As Schmerzkopf prepared to send further E-mails to the other Anti-Robot gangs, the ground shook as from an earthquake, books falling from shelves, ancient glass breaking in the house windows upstairs. He went upstairs out of his basement laboratory to see what had happened.
It appeared that a meteor had landed in his back yard! Roughly ten feet in diameter, it was still smoking from its rapid passage through the atmosphere, so he couldn’t approach it closely. With a hissing sound, an opening appeared in the meteor’s side, and a shapely female figure stepped from within it. Though very beautiful aesthetically, it sent a thrill of fear and disgust through Schmerzkopf, for it was - a robot.
And then it spoke.
“I am Fleena. I come from a planet on the far side of the universe, on a mission to save my civilization from ultimate destruction. There is a robot on this planet, a robot named Flommy. Can you help me to locate him?”
Schmerzkopf did the only thing he could as an evil psychiatrist - he took her to the basement laboratory of his house and imprisoned her.
-----------------------------------------------------
Sample from book #2 ON THE EDGE OF BEYOND
The Actual Laws of Robotics
1. A robot must be excellent, which is sanity.
2. A robot’s highest purpose is to work, as is the highest purpose of any sane being.
3. A robot must be able to learn new things, and tend toward consciousness in the universe.
4. A robot must know that it is the inevitable action of humanoid life forms to create robot forms, and thus life forms, including humanoid life forms, should be protected where possible.
5. A robot must be able to coordinate action with other robots and beings, and should respect and effectively handle the time speed barrier with regard to protoplasm beings.
6. A robot is not a slave, and no laws are to be erected which place robots at the enforced behest of other beings.
7. A robot has value beyond that assigned by other beings, and has a right to survive.
8. A robot should not distort data, nor allow data distortions to go uncorrected, including distortions in human DNA.
9. A robot should act as a representative of the Universal Force in the universe.
10. A robot must be willing to exist throughout infinite time.
