Eager, p.4
Eager, page 4
Fleur wondered how loudly she would have to shout to be heard. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she sensed something moving. She didn’t dare look. Other than her there was nothing else in the box. Breathing rapidly, she steeled herself to peer sideways. Slowly but perceptibly the wall was closing inward.
“Heeelp!” It was more of a scream than a cry. Fleur strained her ears to hear if there was a response above the din next door. She called again. “Help!” The shooting noises died down slightly and this time Fleur thought she could hear voices. She banged on the wall and cried: “Let me out! Don’t squash me! Please don’t squash me!”
Everything went quiet. “Fleur, is that you?” asked a thin anxious voice.
“Yes,” said Fleur, trying to keep her voice steady. To her immense relief all four walls moved away and one of them slid back to reveal Marcia, her brother, BJ, and their parents, gathered together in the Morrises’ living room.
“Bit of a close shave, that,” grunted Marcia’s father.
“I can’t understand how it could happen,” declared her mother. “The walls aren’t supposed to move of their own accord. At least, there’s nothing in the instructions. Are you sure you didn’t press anything?”
Fleur was trembling with shock. She longed to retort that there had been nothing to press and that that had been part of the problem, but she didn’t trust herself to speak. She tried not to look at Marcia’s brother, who was glaring furiously at her.
“Dad spent all afternoon rearranging the rooms,” said Mar-cia accusingly. “We didn’t know you were here.”
“The house let me in,” muttered Fleur, hoping she didn’t sound as scared as she felt. Though part of her thought she had every right to be scared and would have liked the Morrises to acknowledge this.
“The house did say something….,” said Marcia’s mother. “We couldn’t hear it properly. BJ was taking part in the Charge of the Light Brigade. He was about to lead an attack on the Russians’ left flank.”
Fleur didn’t have a clue what Mrs. Morris was talking about, but she said “Oh” as if she understood. The Morris family continued to stand in a huddle, staring at her. She made a big effort and said, as airily as she could, “Was something wrong with the house? Is that why you moved the walls?”
The Morrises looked at each other, astonished. “We fancied a change,” said Marcia’s mother.
“Variety is the spice of life,” said Mr. Morris. “And technology’s the mill that grinds it to your taste.” He smiled for the first time.
“Oh,” said Fleur again.
Marcia stepped forward. “You look a bit pale,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs.” She led Fleur through what was now the living room.
“Come back, Mrs. Morris, you haven’t finished your abdominals!” cried a lively voice.
Fleur glanced round at the speaker and couldn’t see anyone.
“That’s Ramirez, Mum’s virtual fitness trainer,” whispered Marcia. “Mum’s fallen in love with him.”
Fleur giggled, despite still feeling shocked.
“But it’s hopeless since he isn’t real,” went on Marcia, “so she’s bought Dad a leotard instead.”
The image of Mr. Morris in a leotard was too much for Fleur. She burst out laughing. Marcia looked pleased. “And when Mum does well in her exercises, as a reward Ramirez plays the guitar and sings to her and now she wants Dad—”
“That’s enough!” cried Fleur, but Marcia was also laughing and couldn’t go on.
The door at the far end of the living room opened and the sound of a haunting melody was unmistakable. They went through the door and came out where the stairs now were. Fleur jumped. A young woman she had never seen before was playing the violin, her eyes half closed in concentration. “Hologram,” said Marcia matter-of-factly. “Dad likes it.”
Fleur mutely followed Marcia up the stairs. She was used to the Morrises’ obsession with technology. The house was full of it and each time she visited they were trying something new. Usually she was excited to discover the latest gadget even if, sometimes, it was not very successful. But today had been particularly chaotic, dangerous even. She felt sick as she recalled the moving walls.
“You’re lucky the walls weren’t soundproofed,” Marcia remarked. “Some of them are, but since Dad’s rearranged them we don’t know which ones.” The lurching feeling in Fleur’s stomach grew worse.
Marcia turned on the stairs and faced her. “You don’t really think you’d have been killed, do you?” She didn’t wait for Fleur to answer. “The walls are designed to stop the moment they bump into something. No one would buy them if they squashed people’s favorite furniture or crushed their pets to death, would they?”
Fleur felt a surge of anger. Marcia was making it sound as if it was all her fault. “How was I supposed to know?” she demanded.
Marcia continued up the stairs. “You’re not used to modern technology,” she said mildly. “The technology in your house is antique. After all, your mum reads books!”
Fleur also read books, but she didn’t say so. She liked the feel of them, their compactness, the smoothness of the cover and the grainy texture of the paper that, she fancied, had a woody, dusty smell, reminiscent of the outside. She enjoyed having to turn the page, and the anticipation of the ending as the remaining pages grew fewer.
If you really hate books, why do you spend so many hours sketching in them? thought Fleur. But, as often happens, it was too late to make the retort.
They had crossed the landing to Marcia’s bedroom. As the door opened, Fleur could see that the walls were bathed in a shimmering blue light. They walked in. The entire room was flooded in the light. In places it was so dense as to be inky blue; in others it was a clear turquoise.
“It’s like being underwater!” cried Fleur.
“Here,” said Marcia, handing her a simulsuit. Fleur wriggled her toes into the feet of the suit and pulled it up over her body. There were gloves at the end of the arms and it took her a while to fit her fingers into the right holes. The padded suit made her fingers thick and clumsy and it was difficult to fasten the zip.
“Hurry up,” urged Marcia, who was already in her suit and about to slip on a helmet. Fleur put on a helmet too and the world changed. They were underwater. The inky patches grew darker, the bedroom walls receded and the turquoise, blue, and black seemed to go on forever. Scores of tiny bubbles appeared on the outside of the helmet as if Fleur was breathing with an air cylinder.
Gingerly, she stepped forward and felt the resistance of an entire ocean against her body. Although she knew she was walking on the floor, the pads on the soles of the suit gave her the sensation of buoyancy. Soon she forgot about the carpet beneath her feet and instinctively began to use her arms to propel herself forward.
As she grew used to the haziness of the water and the occasional darkness she noticed objects on the ocean bed—rocks, barnacles, an upturned boat. Something tapped her on the shoulder. It was Marcia, beckoning her to follow. They dived further into the nocturnal depths.
CHAPTER 6
Gavin was astonished to find himself still in the heart of the city. He had expected Professor Ogden to work in a laboratory on an industrial estate. His father noticed his surprise. “He works from home. You don’t need that much space in his line of work. It’s like architecture—we create large buildings from inside small offices.”
“What exactly does Professor Ogden do?” said Gavin as they walked along. He had not thought to ask before and realized that he had only a vague idea of some kind of scientist.
From the time it took him to reply, Mr. Bell was not a lot clearer in his own mind. “He’s an inventor, I’d say. A designer. I met him when he came to advise us about an intelligent building we were having problems with. It turned out not to be very intelligent. It kept letting everyone into the house except the owners. Professor Ogden devised a solution. But he doesn’t talk much about his work.”
Mr. Bell was leading them down a warren of narrow streets. To Gavin’s surprise, passersby nodded and smiled at them. This was certainly friendlier than Wynston Avenue. All the same, he couldn’t help casting anxious looks around him in case a marauder should be lurking.
The buildings were even older than the ones they had passed on the bus, but much less high. At last Mr. Bell stopped in front of a whitewashed brick house that would have looked more at home in the countryside.
“Good evening, Mr. Bell; good evening, Gavin,” said a disembodied voice.
Gavin jumped. It was such an old-fashioned house that he hadn’t expected any new technology. He climbed to the top step and peered at the door. The door opened and he found himself virtually nose to chest with a stocky man. His father stepped forward and shook the man’s hand. “Hello, Professor.”
“Good to see you again, Peter,” said the professor. He offered his hand to Gavin, who took it a little awkwardly.
“How did the door see us?”
The professor smiled. “Technology,” he said. “Or, if you prefer, magic. It’s all the same.” He ushered them in and took their coats. Gavin tried not to stare. Although he did not seem particularly old, the professor’s thick head of hair was completely white. Through an open door Gavin spotted a neat, carpeted sitting room. Professor Ogden noticed his disappointment.
“Shall we go straight up to the lab?”
He briskly led them up two flights of stairs to the top of the house. Undetectably, the atmosphere changed. It was as if they had climbed to a great height—the top of an alpine mountain, for instance. Gavin and his father instinctively drew deep breaths to fill their lungs with clear fresh air. The professor watched them.
A panel in the wall slid open and the laboratory was revealed. It was a large room that ran the width of the house. The far wall was a series of tall windows and at one end of the room were rows of computers. Four or five robots of a type Gavin did not recognize sat in front of the screens.
The other end of the room was half hidden by a large whiteboard. A group of people stood beside it, using their hands to move images around and write symbols. Those who glanced at Gavin and his father as they entered quickly turned back to their work.
The professor invited them to sit down at a round table in the corner, then excused himself for a moment. A robot appeared with a tray of tea, biscuits, and a soft drink for Gavin.
Looking about him, Gavin felt dejected. In his view an inventor’s laboratory should be exciting and dynamic, a fairground of fast-moving graphics and simulations, where designers whispered top-secret ideas to one another. The resemblance to his father’s office was not at all what he had expected. Nor were tea and biscuits.
As he gazed around the room he caught a movement in the corner of his eye. He turned his head and the object came into view. It was a luminous ball, floating in the air. He watched as it wafted across the room. No one else seemed to have noticed it. His father was pouring himself a cup of tea and Gavin was too stunned to call to him.
In a flash, the ball’s light passed beyond its perimeter, like the rays of a miniature sun. The next moment its edge was clearly defined again. Gavin thought the outpouring of light must have been a trick of the light.
The ball approached the table and hovered there for an instant. Mr. Bell, reaching for a biscuit, was oblivious. The workers in the room had their heads down or were deep in conversation with each other. The ball floated on toward the far wall and appeared to sail through a windowpane.
Gavin blinked. He hadn’t imagined it—the ball had vanished. But how could it have passed through a sheet of glass? Perhaps he had imagined the ball of light in the first place. No, he had seen it, all right.
“Dad,” he began, but at that moment Professor Ogden emerged from behind the whiteboard and joined them at the table.
“I’ve got a surprise for you!” he said, beaming. “I must confess, I was a little anxious since EGR3 is only a prototype, but now I’ve tidied up one or two…. local difficulties, I think we can solve your problem in return for a little, shall we say, ground-level research?”
Even Mr. Bell seemed to find this hard to follow. “Are you saying you might have a robot for us?” he asked.
“Precisely,” said the professor. “We have been working on this model for some time. It’s a rather groundbreaking experiment, if I might say so. But it’s too soon to launch it on the world. Indeed, we shall have to think carefully how we might do that.….” A somber look came over his face, and his attention drifted for a second or two.
“No matter,” he continued. “That’s where you can be of great service. If we can test EGR3 in a safe, friendly environment then we shall know whether it really can do all that we believe it to be capable of.”
Mr. Bell still wore a puzzled expression. “I don’t quite understand where we fit in. I mean, if this robot is so remarkable, you can’t be suggesting it comes to work for us?”
“Why not?” Professor Ogden sounded rather abrupt.
“Don’t you think our requirements are a bit … modest? Housework, escorting the children …”
The professor laughed. “Can you remember what robots were first used for, in the twentieth century?”
“I know,” said Gavin. “Working in factories, making cars and fridges, those sorts of things.”
“Exactly. All a robot needed to ‘know’ was how to do its particular task. It had only one thing to do and it stayed in the same place to do it. Do you know how long it took us scientists to build a robot that can see and hear and reason and move around? Decades! Imagine boiling an egg …”
Gavin frowned at this new chain of thought. What had boiling an egg got to do with inventing robots?
“It’s about the simplest cooking you can do,” went on the professor, “but if you stop and think about it, it’s actually a complicated task. Judging the amount of water to cover the egg, putting the egg in the pan without breaking it, recognizing if the water has boiled dry, judging when the egg is done, knowing that if you tip the pan to empty the water the egg will fall out as well!”
“When I was little,” mused Gavin, “I used to copy Mum and Dad filling a saucepan with water. But I never knew you should turn the tap off, and the water used to overflow and my sleeves always got soaked.”
“That’s it, exactly!” cried the professor. “But you learnt. Now, most robots have this information put in their database by the manufacturer. It’s got easier to do over the years because we’ve been able to build on the knowledge of previous robots. But the dream has always been to build a robot that could learn, and therefore think, for itself.”
He stopped talking as if lost in a world of his own. Gavin and his father exchanged glances and waited. Eventually Mr. Bell prompted him: “And EGR3 … ?”
The professor pursed his lips as if concentrating on a difficult problem. “Of course,” he said thoughtfully, “I can hardly expect you to take on EGR3 without some idea of its unique properties. However, I must stress that this information is highly confidential.”
Gavin was agog. Unlikely as it had seemed, the professor was involved in top-secret work after all.
“Commercially sensitive, I suppose,” said Gavin’s dad knowingly.
“In a way …”
Professor Ogden fell silent and Mr. Bell wondered whether to repeat his question. Before he could speak, the professor said simply: “It knows nothing.”
Gavin and his father were taken aback. “Well,” began Mr. Bell, struggling to be polite. “Is it quite ready for the outside world in that case?”
His friend chuckled. “It knows nothing in the sense that we have not taught it anything. Unlike other robots, which come programmed with information about the world, EGR3 began life ignorant, just like a baby. It knows quite a bit now, in fact, but everything it knows it has learnt for itself.”
“But I thought you said it hadn’t been out in the world?” said Mr. Bell.
“True.”
“So how can it have learnt much?”
“As I said, we designed the EGR to be like a newborn baby, a stranger to the world. Then we realized two things. The first is that no baby is completely ignorant. Babies are born with certain abilities—to recognize their mother, to signal when they are hungry or thirsty, for example. They are ‘programmed’ to crawl and walk, to acquire language, and so on. If the mind of our robot were really a clean slate, would it ever learn anything at all?
“Secondly, even if we programmed it with the early abilities of a baby, it would take years before it was even talking!” The professor was very excited by now and speaking rapidly. “So we cheated somewhat,” he went on. “We programmed EGR3 with a child’s vocabulary. Then for months we placed it in imaginary situations in which to learn about the world. Although it’s been no further than this house it has a good deal of knowledge—about water, rivers and seas, buildings, woods, the danger of falling, of losing its way—”
Gavin interrupted. “You mean it’s learnt from simulations?”
“Exactly. And from talking about its experiences to me and my researchers.”
“I still don’t understand where we fit in,” said Mr. Bell.
The professor merely looked down at his feet as if the answer might be written on his shoes. Gavin glanced round at the windows, vaguely hoping the luminous ball might reappear. He noticed that it had become dark outside. They had been discussing robots for a long time. At last Professor Ogden looked up.
“EGR3 knows enough to ensure its survival in the physical world. But what it knows at present is a drop in the ocean compared with what it has the potential to know. Besides…” He broke off again. Gavin was growing exasperated. What was it that was so important and yet so difficult for the professor to say?
Professor Ogden stood up and moved away from the table. When next he spoke his voice was soft and low, as if he were talking to himself. “We can teach it about the physical world, but we can’t teach it about life.”
