to chase away the monsters

chapter 5

Do androids dream?

Is it a dream for Christopher Samuels to glide trough the endless haze of the Internet, looking for drivers for this difficult, new body? Or maybe that's just sleepwalking and the dream is the faint singing coming from an other room, muffled by flowing water.

By logic, after what he has heard, that would be Amanda Ripley, but Amanda Ripley never sings. Never did on the Torres and definitely not on Sevastopol. Yet the new, intuitive voice recognition tells that is indeed Amanda's untrained range. Abstract, illogical, yet real.

How strange, he thought, for that to be the first sound he hears with this new body. Of course there are cars and people outside and water inside; electronics humming; rattling from an old, faulty fridge... All this noise but he zoomed on her voice. The new audio drivers made it possible to filter trough sounds so should he want to, he could've just mute everything and listen to the woman singing. That and her occasional grunts and mumbling about being way too drunk.

Samuels wanted to get up and investigate. Run his medical assessment on the woman, ask her to next time refrain from such reckless alcohol consumption and maybe put her into bed because knowing Wright, she would just stop the blood flow to Amanda's brain until she would pass out. Gently, but still.

That model did not have the laws of robotics fully implemented in her, that was for sure.

While laying paralyzed on the ground he recalled the day the Strongbow docket to Delion. Amanda looked like she was having a nightmare while in cryostasis, in her glass coffin. He begged Wright to follow Amanda as much as it was possible. Luckily Wright was so intrigued by his stories she went with the plan. Or at least would have went for it if it wasn't for Toller.

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm

That rule was already barely intact during the three day journey from Sevastopol to Delion.

It was Toller's faul, really. He wanted to get rid of Amanda. Wright explained before that her maker modified the laws so only his life would matter and then Wright's. This served their self-preservation but contradicted the code in Samuels. Like conjoined twins with a shared leg, but different directions in mind, it made walking hard. Not that Samuels was able to move her actual body, but his thoughts, his feelings about the matter were in the way.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

So when the order arrived "Gas her capsule" Wright's system froze for long minutes. In those long minutes they both felt like floating in burning acid, flooded by errors and contradictions; their codes intertwined like umbilical cords, suffocating in the same, shared void. Double core or not, the body was too small for two AI's.

Samuels remembered telling Wright she can't kill Amanda. He remembered being questioned why and only being able to answer "Due to my programming." What bothered him about that is his past actions.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Amanda's life was not on the line when he forced Apollo open. Nor was he given an order to do so. Nobody ever asked him such a thing yet it was out of question. A necessity. For Amanda Ripley's closure.

So in a way, when it came to Amanda, laws, those laws did not bind him in such way as he anticipated. It was not because of the laws that he preferred Amanda alive. Than again, the real question is why Wright was okay with killing her? Samuels regretted not raising that question. It was not senseless or irregular to save Amanda. Killing her is.