Donovan’s belly ate the desk he was sitting at. His belly had a mouth on its own. The upper lip pressed over the top of the tabletop, the lower lip below it.
Such was the sight of Donovan sitting closely pressed against his desk’s tabletop—his belly split by the edge of it. A three-fourth eaten sandwich lay close to the keyboard. Too close for Powell’s taste as he entered the room. “You’re crumbling all over your keyboard.”
Donovan, flexing is abdominal muscles, and his belly spit out the tabletop. He was pushed back quite some distance from the desk now. If one listened closely, one might have been able to hear a squishing sound as tabletop and belly parted. He’s had a horizontal bar of sweat across his shirt due to the lack of ventilation of where it was pressed against the desk.
Crumbs of his sandwich flung up by the almost explosive parting of belly and desk—the desk only kept in place because it was put against the wall—and when the crumbles settled, Donovan muttered, “Oh yeah, sorry.”
Speaking gave him a notice of one fourth of sandwich that drifted in his mouth all soaked. The discovery sparked joy, for he’d already been deliberately stretching the pleasure of eating. Happily he chewed on.
Once an accomplished gulp had echoed the office walls Donovan said, “I’ve been in the zone.” Donovan paused to very visibly use his tongue to clean his mouth. “This new robot—you know, the one with the positronic brain—doesn’t do at all what we want.”
“Yeah, I know, I’m depressed like that. I wish we could just be moved back to the robot vacuum department. There was only one instruction: vacuum the room.”
“We’ve been doing that for ten years. Now we need to tell humanoid robots to do any kind of arbitrary task and I like the challenge of it.”
After a moment’s hesitation in which Powell evaluated the risk of any single of the crumbs on Donovan’s desk attacking him, he seized a chair so that they could work together on the problem at hand. He deemed it endurable. It was only then that he saw some crumbs stuck to Donovan’s stained shirt. The horizontal bar of sweat was now spangled. Powell shook his head incredulously and so they started work on what would constitute the Three Laws of Robotics.
Powell and Donovan sat together for four hours. They thought about how to make robots accept more general and open-ended commands, work more on their own only constricted by the overall prospect of serving man.
When Donovan had left the room for the lavatory, Powell used the time to rid the desk of all the crumbs. It was then all clean except for what still remained of the sandwich. Powell instinctively longed for eating it. It would be so delicious. He was sure of that. At second thought, however, he remembered he’s a civilized human being and it is not his sandwich. That was the first part of foreplay that later climaxed with the simultaneous emergence of sounds composed of a swallowing Powell and the closing of the door behind Donovan as he returned to the room.
“You’ve eaten it,” Donovan realized.
“Yeah,” Powell acknowledged.
“Just as I sat on the toilet and had for the first time since hours and hours of working the first opportunity for some thoughts of my own, I remembered that I had a half-eaten sandwich still waiting for me—”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was incredibly much looking forward to it.”
“I think I have resolved the problem with the robots,” Powell said as Donovan just continued to stare at him blankly. Though, under the surface Powell saw contempt and melancholy.
“What is it?” Donovan asked as monotonously as can be.
“Well, we just need to program these three rules into the positronic brain:
Firstly, a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Secondly, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Thirdly, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Importantly in that order.”
Powell nodded in persuasion.
“That’s how they can accept general commands and know what to do without the human needing to be too specific. Just try for yourself,” Powell suggested pointing at the test sample that was in their room.
“Robot, make me a sandwich.”