The Positronic Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

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Three
    THE TIME OF YEAR arrived when Miss celebrated her birthday. Andrew had already learned that one's birthday celebration was an important event in the annual round of human life-a commemoration of the anniversary of the day that one had emerged from one's mother's womb.
    Andrew thought that it was strange that humans would choose the day of coming forth from the womb as the significant thing to commemorate. He knew something of human biology, and it seemed to him that it would be much more important to focus on the moment of the actual creation of the organism, when the sperm cell entered the ovum and the process of cell division began. Surely that was the real point of origin of any person!
    Certainly the new person was already alive-if not yet capable of independent functioning-during the nine months spent within the womb. Nor was a human being particularly capable of independent functioning immediately after leaving the womb, so the distinction between birth and pre-birth that humans insisted on drawing made very little sense to Andrew.
    He himself had been ready to perform all his programmed functions the moment the last phase of his assembly was complete and his pathways had been initialized. But a newborn child was far from able to manage on its own. Andrew could see no effective difference between a fetus that had completed its various stages of fetal development but was still inside its mother and the same fetus, a day or two later, that had emerged. One was inside and one was outside, that was all. But they were just about equally helpless. So why not celebrate the anniversary of one's moment of conception instead of the anniversary of one's release from the womb?
    The more he pondered it, though, the more he saw that there was some logic to either view. What, for example, would he select as his own birthday, assuming that robots felt any need to celebrate their birthdays? The date when the factory had begun assembling him, or the date on which his positronic brain had been installed in its case and initialization of somatic control had been keyed? Had he been "born" when the first strands of his armature were being drawn together, or when the unique set of perceptions that constituted NDR-113 had gone into operation? A mere armature wasn't him, whatever he was. His positronic brain was him Or the combination of the positronic brain properly placed within the body that had been designed to house it. So his birthday
    Oh, it was all so confusing! And robots weren't supposed to be plagued by confusion. Their positronic minds were more complex than the simple digital "minds" of non-positronic computers, which operated entirely in stark binary realms, mere patterns of on or off, yes or no, positive or negative, and that complexity could sometimes lead to moments of conflicting potential. But nevertheless robots were logical creatures who were able to find their way out of such conflicts, usually, by sorting the data in a sensible way. Why, then, was he having so much trouble comprehending this business of when one's birthday ought to be?
    Because birthdays are a purely human concept, he answered himself. They have no relevance to robots. And you are not a human being, so you do not need to worry about when your birthday ought or ought not to be celebrated.
    At any rate, it was Miss's birthday. Sir made a point of coming home early that day, even though the Regional Legislature was embroiled in some complicated debate over interplanetary free-trade zones. The whole family dressed in holiday clothes and gathered around the great slab of polished redwood that was the dining-room table and candles were lit, and Andrew served an elaborate dinner that he and Ma'am had spent hours planning, and afterward Miss formally received and opened her presents. The receiving of presents-new possessions, given to you by others-was apparently a major part of the birthday-celebration ritual.
    Andrew watched, not really