The Darkside Of The Sun

three sixes.
    ‘Again?’ he asked mildly. Asman smiled weakly, got up and shook his hand.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You know how it is.’
    ‘One day I’ll make a mistake. Have you thought of that?’
    ‘Ways, the day you make a mistake like that you won’t be Ways any more, and you know I’ll fire, because you’ll be an imposter.’
    Asman rounded the table and clapped him on the shoulder.
    ‘You’ve been doing well,’ he said.
    ‘How else?’
    Ways had seen his own specification, just once. He had been halfway down an inspection shaft at the time, one that was flooded with chlorine gas when not in official use, and gaining illegal access to personnel files was not official. He had never bothered to remember the precise purpose of his visit – it was just one of the many assignments that filtered down to him via Asman’s office – but while the little inspection screen was warming up his specification had appeared among the random images. He had memorized it instantly, even through the chlorine haze.
    It was a standard requisition for a Class Five robot, with certain important modifications concerning concealed weapons, communicators, and appearance. Designing a completely humanoid robot was twice as complex as building even a high-grade Class Five. It involved intricate machinery for tear ducts and the growth of facial hair – and, if the robot was designed as a spy and might be faced with every eventuality, an intriguing range of other equipment also …
    But most of Ways’ specifications had been in probability math. It took him some time to realize why. Class Five robots were legally human. They had been designed to be everything a man could be, and Ways had been designed to be lucky.
    Asman led him to the mural that occupied one long wall of the large, low-ceilinged room. The room itself was featureless, as were the men tending the machines. It could have been the security room of any Board-run world. But there was something about the quality of the air, even of the light, that suggested an underground vault – Ways in fact sensed the layer upon layer of shielding around him – and there was something in the confident, unthinking way that the Earthman Asman moved that suggested in which planetary crust the room was buried.
    The mural was a brightly lit tangle of coloured lines, circles and blocks of p-math, that shifted slightly as he watched.
    ‘You’ve done well,’ Asman said again. ‘He’s moved along the right equation.’
    ‘As to that, how do I know? I just keep trying to kill him, just like the others. Do you want me to try on Band?’
    ‘No, your next point of intervention should be …’ he glanced along the rainbow lines ‘… oh, not till he visits those Creap. We’ve got contingency plans for that. It’s all in the equation, anyway. We’ll be hot on their heels then, if they have heels. The math says so. One more intervention when he gets to Laoth and we’ll be in the Joker universe.’
    Ways blinked slowly. ‘Is this information I need to know?’
    Asman returned his gaze. ‘What do you mean by that?’
    ‘Look,’ said Ways, sitting down, ‘you made me. Not you, precisely, but someone on Laoth or Lunar. They made me. I’m a robot.’
    ‘That’s not held against you. If we were Creap we’d have simply bred up a Creap with the required characteristics, in some vat. But you can’t wamp up a man, so you …’
    ‘Okay, but I’m a robot, even if I’m a special one. I’ve got everything from toenails to offensive underarm odours, but that’s all faked. So what does it matter what a robot knows?’
    ‘You’ve made your point. Now, are you interested?’ Asman was growing impatient.
    ‘Certainly. Why doesn’t he die when I kill him?’
    ‘The universe alters.’
    Shoot a man from point-blank range, so that your beam dislodges every organic molecule from hair to feet. All the rules postulate an outcome of, say, a monomolecular mist, a few zips and geegaws on the floor, and a faint smell of burning. But there is always the outside chance. The stripper goes imperceptibly out of sync. Or you hallucinated that you pressed the stud, and didn’t. In a shifting universe there is no such thing as a rock-hard certainty, only a local eddy in the stream of total randomness. Just occasionally the coin comes down on its edge, or doesn’t come down at all.
    ‘Dom Sabalos is likely to discover Jokers World in …’ Asman glanced at the far end of the mural …