From R.I.G.S.

R.I.G.S.
Part One

There is nowhere lonelier than the vast unexplored tracts of space. There, among the stars and the infinity of the void, there is no sound, and even if.there were, there is no-one there to hear it. Even the nearest stars, twinkling welcomingly when viewed from earth, are so far from our world that it would take a man most of his lifetime just to reach the nearest one. It is cold, dark and unwelcoming; it is an airless ocean of loneliness for the unwary traveller.

RIGS felt lonely too, which might be expected, except for the fact that RIGS wasn't human. The initials which made up the name stood for Robotic Intelligence Gathering System, and RIGS had been traveling in space for almost two hundred years. How could a robot be lonely? The answer was quite simple really. RIGS had been programmed not only to explore the known galaxy and to communicate with any life-forms it might encounter, but its programming included all the knowledge and emotive input of its creator, Professor Herman Liebowitz, one of the greatest scientific minds on Earth in the late twenty second century. Not only had RIGS been built with a human appearance, but he, (it sounds reasonable now to refer to him that way), had been designed to think and make decisions in the same way a human astronaut would have done.

When first launched into space via the Tucana Deep Space Launch Delivery Vehicle in the year 2166, RIGS had been able to maintain daily contact with Liebowitz and his team at the Canaveral Space Centre in the USA. He completed progress reports, and sent back data which was invaluable in furthering mankind's understanding and knowledge of our nearest neighbors in the galaxy. Flying through space at speeds previously unheard of by man, RIGS became an overnight phenomenon. Telecasts kept the population of Earth apprised of his progress, children played with RIGS toys, and digital images from space became a daily staple in the newspapers of the day. 'The RIGS Report' became everyone's favorite televiewing. For a while it seemed that every child's bedroom on Earth was decorated with posters of the wonder robot, the artificial intelligence that would be Earth's first point of contact with intelligent life in space, if such a thing existed.

Unfortunately for RIGS, who, powered by a revolutionary and previously unheard of self-regenerating bio-mechanical motortronic matrix developed by the professor was virtually immortal, those who had invented, developed, and monitored his progress were not!

Professor Liebowitz, already sixty when RIGS left Earth, died twenty years after RIGS was launched and most of his team of dedicated scientists and researchers gradually followed him into the afterlife. Replacements were always found of course, and the new head of the RIGS project, Professor James Barclay showed himself to be every bit as enthusiastic about RIGS as Liebowitz, but gradually, as the people of Earth found other things to occupy their newscasts and their daily lives, and the children grew older and took the posters down from their bedroom walls, a new generation grew who had hardly heard of, let alone hero-worshipped, the little robot who by now was over thirty light years from home. Very soon, as the team on Earth grew smaller, and interest in the data coming back from space gradually waned until even the scientists lost interest, the project was mothballed, with just an automatic databank set up to receive input from RIGS in digital format, and eventually RIGS became Earth's forgotten ambassador to deep space.

So it was that after two hundred years, it became perhaps understandable that RIGS--inhuman, though with human thoughts and emotions programmed into his central matrix--had indeed become very lonely. He could remember the last time he had spoken to a human being, (over a hundred and ten years ago), and he had grown tired of speaking to the ship's onboard computer, which he had, himself, modified to enable it to communicate by voice. RIGS found the computer's conversation quite boring and monotonous. Even playing chess with it had lost any sense of achievement. Being of almost equal artificial intellect, almost every game resulted in stalemate! He'd tried programming other games, Backgammon, Mah Jong, even poker, into the machine but nothing could satisfy RIGS. Truth be told, there was far more of Professor Liebowitz in RIGS's make-up than even the professor realised at the time he put the robot together. It would probably be unfair even to describe RIGS as a robot any longer.

The professor of course had never thought of, or indeed described, RIGS as a 'robot', preferring to look upon him as an android with human characteristics. At the time of RIGS's inception, however, the thought of human-like androids was still something that made a number of people in high places on Earth uncomfortable, so he allowed them to think of RIGS as just what they wanted to, a robot.

Now, however, it would be fair to say that RIGS had evolved! How else could one explain his very human boredom, his feelings of loneliness and isolation, his need for companionship? Surely an android shouldn't need the solace of another voice, or need to play games in order to occupy his time. RIGS had himself pondered upon these questions until he'd concluded that he was indeed the subject of some form of evolutionary change. He even considered the possibility that such a development could have been part of Liebowitz's intention. Of one thing, though, there was absolutely no doubt. RIGS, no matter what his creator had intended, was becoming more sentient with every passing day.

Outside the Tucana space vehicle, the emptiness of space flashed by in an almost never changing panorama. Far from the light generated by our own sun, the darkness was only spasmodically broken by the occasional flickering of a distant star. After all these years, RIGS continued to send daily data streams back to Earth, knowing that they'd take many months to arrive there, and also suspecting, due to the lack of reciprocal communication from the planet, that no-one appeared to be listening anymore.

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