The Small World of M-75 by Ed M. Clinton

Author:Ed M. Clinton [Clinton, Ed M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

he command sequence fulfilled, M-75 turned away from the repaired board. He sensed again that disconcerting shift of orientation as he faced the light-studded panel. Once more he was moving in quick automatic response to the flickering lights, once more his big chest was belching and grumbling and buzzing instantaneous un-thought answers to the problem data flashing from the board.

But now he remained aware that he was reacting, and conscious also that there had been times when he did not respond to the board. The moment to moment operation of the controls occupied only a small portion of his vast electrical innards. So, as he rolled back and forth, flicking controls and adjusting levers, doing smoothly those things which he could not help but do, the rest of his complex, changing faculties were considering that fact, analyzing, comparing it to experience and memory, always sifting, sifting. It was not too long before he came to a shocking conclusion.

Knowing that the sounds that had set him to working on the repair pattern had first disassociated him from the dictatorship of the blinking lights; remembering exultantly that supreme moment of complete freedom; shocked by its passing; remembering that its passing like its coming, had followed a set of sounds: there was only one possible conclusion that could be derived from all of this.

He located, in his memory banks, the phrase which had freed him from the board, and he traced its complex chain of built-in stimulus-response down into the heart of his circuitry. He found the unit—or more accurately, he found its taped activating symbol—that cut him from the board.

For a moment he hesitated, not really sure of what to do. There was no way for him to reproduce the sound pattern; but, as a partly self-servicing device, he knew something of his own structure, and had learned a good deal more about it in tracing down the cut-off phrase.

Still he hesitated, as though what he was about to do was perhaps forbidden. It could not have been a question of goodness or badness, for morality was certainly not built into him. Probably somewhere in his tapes there was a built-in command that forbade it, but he was too much his own master now to be hampered by such a thing.

The door to the unknown outside passed within his field of view for a second as he moved about his work. The sight of it tripped something in his chest, and he felt again that strange sensation of growing power, of inherent change. First had come simple awareness; and then symbols had found their place in his world; and now he had discovered, in all its consuming fullness, curiosity.

He carefully shorted out the cut-off unit.

He was free.

He stared at the board and the blinking lights and the huge dials with their swaying needles, at the levers and handles and buttons, and revelled in his freedom from them, rocking to and fro and rolling giddily from side to side, swamped with the completeness of it.

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