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"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."
- George Orwell
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| Perimeter Robot | ||
| A purpose-designed robotic sentry, looking for aliens. |
This story provides a cautionary tale for all those who would make use of robots to guard the perimeter of their campes.
| After landing on Regulus V, the men of the Yarmolinsky Expedition made camp and activated PR–22–0134, their perimeter robot, whom they called Max. The robot was a voice-activated, bipedal mechanism whose function was to guard the camp against the depredations of aliens, in the event that aliens were ever encountered. Max had originally been a regulation gun-metal gray, but on the interminable outward trip they had repainted him a baby blue. Max stood exactly four feet high. The men of the expedition had come to think of him as a kindly, reasonable little metal man—a ferrous gnome, a miniature Tin Woodman of Oz.
They were wrong, of course. Their robot had none of the qualities which they projected onto him. PR–22–0134 was no more reasonable than a McCormick harvester, no more kindly than an automated steel mill. Morally, he might be compared to a turbine or a radio, but not to anything human. PR–22–0134’s only human attribute was potentiality. |
| Technovelgy from The Cruel Equations,
by Robert Sheckley. Published by Playboy in 1969 Additional resources -
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
