The Six of Us

Posted on Fri 25th Jan, 2019 @ 12:03am by
Edited on on Sun 27th Jan, 2019 @ 6:34pm

810 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Oblivion
Location: Orchids & Jazz, Deck 600, Back Room
Timeline: MD 19, 0230

"Look, I'm telling you. I'm positive Damion Ildaran and Corin Durant are the same guy. At first, I just thought there was something familiar about Ildaran. Maybe I'd seen him around the base when I wasn't paying attention to that particular sensor. There was something about him that struck me immediately. I let it go in favor of the errand Miss Lantz asked me to do." He shrugged, "And yes, okay, because the whole introduction into how the intelligence department works was ...."

As he had done that afternoon in Damion's office, Olivaw paused. He found himself using the human word a lot lately. Interesting. He didn't think it meant exactly the same thing to him that it did to a human, but it was a good word for describing the way his neurons almost danced on tiptoes. Not that he would say it that way to the others. It was far too humanly poetic.

"I don't know, it appealed to me like nothing else we've done. All our work has advantages, but I suddenly could see how everything we do could fit into the intelligence network ... or we could become an intelligence network," he concluded.

"But for whom?" Gladia demanded. "For humans? For some other biological species? For ourselves? What can we get out of human intelligence?" She laughed. "Or is that an oxymoron?"

"You're so cynical, Glades," Arkady drawled, leaning back in his chair, right leg flung over the arm. "Humans made you, didn't they?"

"Don't get me started on that," Gladia warned. "I just want to know what would be the purpose of our running an intelligence network."

"It seems to me, we won't know unless we do it," Seldon offered. "We have come a long way in the months we've been on 109, and I remind you that's thanks to a bio life form, Delmarre. But there's still a lot we don't know. I don't think we can evaluate the benefits until we try it and find out what it's worth and to whom."

"Benefits or detriment," Elijah reminded quietly.

Podkayne stopped her pacing in ovals around the room. "You're all missing the point!" she exclaimed. "It would be something different! And something we could all work on together. We've each drifted into our own areas, and we don't do much together any more." A touch of sadness played in her voice, and the others had to wonder if there was anything genuine in that, or whether she was practicing being a human. "If I'd known how all this learning would pull us apart, I might not have done any."

She smiled brightly, like the flip of a switch. "But you didn't tell us how you figured it out, Daneel."

"It took a few minutes after I left the Intelligence office to check my hypothesis about Durant and Ildaran. While we were working on identifying the fellow all of us marked in the club that night, I realized the two men - the one we saw and the one Damion pulled up from the files - couldn't really be the same man. He came to the same conclusion by laying the images over each other. They simply had too many points of difference to be the same person," Daneel answered.

"Then I put it all together outside his office. If you could use that method to prove two images were not the same, you could also use it to prove they are. I took memory grams of both men and overlaid them. They are the same in almost every single point. Where they aren't is accounted for by the disguise he wears as Durant."

They were all silent as each of them replicated the same experiment.

"You're right," Seldon said quietly. "So what does it mean for us?"

They were silent as they each pondered that separately. Finally, Daneel said, "I'm not sure, but his last sentence to me was interesting."

After a moment, Gladia said, "Well? Are you going to tell us what he said, or not?"

Olivaw glanced at her. She was the same Gladia she'd always been, but lately ... was he feeling annoyed with her for it? "He said, 'Should you ever want to consider a career in Intelligence, do talk to me.' My first thought was that he was acting like I'm a biological life form with the right to choose for myself. That also reminded me of Durant. You can change your appearance, and maybe the way you walk, or talk, but who you are inside? I don't think that can be disguised."

"It doesn't really matter, does it?" Podkayne asked softly. "We just went through inspection by that horrible, horrible Fuller. He made it clear we are not people. We're machines."

"I think," remarked Arkady, "a certain Dr. Anderson might disagree with that."

 

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