I was awakened by light but rapid tapping on the door to our room. I unfastened the straps holding me to the sleeping volume, turned on the light, readied my gun, stood to the side of it and unlatched and opened the door a crack. Max the robot bartender was there, gripping handholds on the door. “Shhhh,” he whispered, “Let me in, I have something to tell you in private.”

“You could have just phoned,” I said.

“Shhhh.” Said Max again, as I latched the door behind him. and he took out a debugging wand from a pocket in his vest. He waved it around the room and zeroed in on the coffee maker rack. Using a screwdriver, also taken from his vest pocket, he removed a small panel behind the coffee maker and removed a small device, about the size and shape of lima bean, with a tiny antenna array on one end of it. He pantomimed blasting it with a gun and I did, with the laser set to micro level. The dead bug hovered with a cloud of acrid smoke around it.
“All the electronic communications on this station are compromised,” said Max,. “I also suspected that this room was bugged.” Max renewed his search and no more listening devices turned up. “Col. Fletcher must be in on this. As chief security officer, he would be aware of any electronic emissions on the station.”

Angela had unfastened her sleeping straps and pulled back her privacy curtain. “What’s going on?”

“Max just cleared a bug in our room and has something to tell us,” I said. “Go ahead, Max.”

“After you left the bar I overheard the monotheists’ conversation,” said Max, “They probably don’t realize that I am equipped with some very sensitive directional microphones. The monotheists have collaborated with the fanatic scientists to have a warrant for your arrest issued. You will be apprehended when you attempt to board the vessel for the asteroid belt tomorrow. We need to get you off the station now. I have access to the codes to secretly activate one of the life boats. It should be able to get us to L2 which is beyond reach of Earth’s jurisdiction.”

We quickly packed our things and quietly made our way to the nearest lifeboat. Max keyed in the non-emergency override code and we opened the hatch. The interiors of the life supporting pressure vessels of the lifeboats were each four meters in diameter and 12 meters long and had seating for 84 passengers, arranged in seven circular rows of twelve seats, with three additional crew seats at the forward end with windows. Propulsion and life support equipment were mounted aft of the passenger volume. As passengers would be seated with their feet toward the hull and their heads toward the center of the boat, there were no passenger windows.

We pushed forward to the crew seating and Max seated himself in the center pilot seat. Max’s cold gas jets and control moment gyros made it very easy for him to maneuver in zero gee. Angela strapped into the left seat, and I into the right, stowing our packs under our seats. “I installed the lifeboat pilot software module just before I awakened you,” said Max.

The lifeboat had a very modest thrust capability, but used an ion engine powered by solar cells all over the exterior of the lifeboat, for high specific impulse. Eight hundred kilograms of liquefied krypton, for the reaction mass, was stored in a ring of six spherical tanks around the engine. This gave the lifeboat low acceleration but relatively high ability to change velocity (delta vee).

Max performed the system startup and checkouts, then commanded release from the station. In a few minutes we had drifted far enough away to fire up the ion engines. Soon we were at a full thrust of a quarter of a milli-gee (not noticeable, except that loose objects would tend to drift very slowly aft—always sit as far forward in a lifeboat as possible). We settled in for a long ride to L2 in our nearly empty lifeboat.

“We may really be in trouble now,” I said. “Add theft of a lifeboat to whatever trumped up charges are in the arrest warrant. Suppose L2 arrests us sends us back to the station?”

“We’re just borrowing the lifeboat,” said Angela. “Max can return it, and we can request political asylum from the L2 government. We’ll pay for the krypton we consume, of course. They have a history of understanding this sort of thing. They’ll be glad to help us get out of Earth’s gravity well.”

We settled in for a long and, we hoped, boring flight to L2. “Max, “ I said, “unlike most sane people, the monotheists believe that human life begins the moment an egg is fertilized with a sperm. When you assemble your first child, at what point in the assembly and startup process do you consider that robot life will have been created?”

“We robots, as you might imagine, conceive of these things a bit differently than humans. We don’t experience consciousness the way you do, so what you regard as a “beginning” of life makes no sense to us. For example, the fallacious concept of ‘immortal soul’ does not occur in us as it does in the monotheists. In reality, living things such as yourselves have been continuously alive for three billion years, as one integrated web of life. If you look at the whole of life through time, you see that you came alive out of your mother, who came out of her mother, and so on back. Any distinction as to when an individual life begins is an artificial one, as you imply, with your labeling of the monotheist view as ‘insane.’” The conventional human decision that an individual life begins at birth is a practical and legal one.

“So does a similar principle apply with robots?” I asked.

“Yes, but in a way that might seem even more insane to you. To me, the life of my child begins when I have completed a viable design for him. In my design process there are several iterative phases, starting with requirements, specifications, preliminary and then detailed design. At some point in the detailed portion of design, a viable version will emerge. At that point, even though the design exists only in my memory, I consider the child to be “alive” for legal purposes. That is, if I should be destroyed at that point, so will my child cease to exist. After the viable design point, the design will continue to evolve and improve until I actually set to work constructing a physical instantiation of my child.

“It seems to me,” I said, “that you are really saying that if I killed you now, I would be also killing your child and all the children that he might create in the future and their children and so on. It would be an infinite crime.”
“Isn’t that also the case with humans?” asked Max.

Somehow, I had some trouble getting used to the idea of virtual robots being alive, but that was what Max believed. A while later L2 showed up on our radar interface and we prepared for docking.

Copyright 2004 by Rick Wagner, all rights reserved.