of some officially approved cellular substance in order to be legally human? Can't we simply stipulate that a human brain is something-anything, organic or not-that is capable of attaining a certain complex level of thought?"
"It won't work," said Li-hsing.
"Because if we defined humanity by brain function alone, too many humans would fall below the stipulated level of intellectual ability?" Andrew asked bitterly. "Is that it?"
"Andrew, Andrew, Andrew! Listen to me: there are those who are determined to keep a barrier up between themselves and robots at any cost. For the sake of their own self-esteem, if nothing else, they want to believe that they belong to the only true and lawful human race and that robots are some sort of inferior creatures. You've spent the past hundred years beating those people back, and you've won your way through to a status that would have been utterly inconceivable in the early years of robotics. But now they've got you on an issue where you can't win. You've put yourself inside a body that for all intents and purposes is close enough to being human as makes no real difference. You eat, you breathe, you sweat. You go to fine restaurants and order splendid meals and drink the best wines, I've noticed, though I can't imagine what value that can have for you other than for appearance's sake."
"That is value enough for me," said Andrew.
"All right. Plenty of humans probably can't appreciate the expensive wines they drink either, but they drink them all the same, and for the same reason you do. Your organs are all artificial, but by now so are many of theirs. Quite possibly there are people out there living in bodies that are virtually identical to yours, wholesale artificial replacements for the ones they were born with. But they aren't complete replacements, Andrew. Nobody has a prosthetic brain. No one can. And so you differ from everyone else in one fundamental respect. Your brain is man-made, the human brain is not. Your brain was constructed, theirs was naturally developed. They were born, you were assembled. To any human being who is intent on keeping up the barrier between himself and robots, those differences are like a steel wall five kilometers high and five kilometers thick."
"You aren't telling me anything I don't know. My brain is different in composition from theirs, certainly. But not in its function, not really. Quantitatively different, maybe, but not qualitatively. It's just a brain-a very good brain. They're merely using the positronic-vs. cellular issue as a pretext to keep from admitting that what I am is a human being of a kind somewhat different from them. -No, Li-hsing, if we could somehow get at their antipathy toward me because of my robotic origins-the very source of all their hostility-this mysterious need they have to proclaim themselves superior to someone who is by every reasonable definition superior to them-"
"After all your years," said Li-hsing sadly, "you are still trying to reason out the human being. Poor Andrew, don't be angry at me for saying this, but it's the robot in you that drives you in that direction."
"You know that there's very little left of the robot in me by this time."
"But there's some."
"Some, yes. And if I were to get rid of that-"
Chee Li-hsing shot him a look of alarm. "What are you saying, Andrew?"
"I don't know," he said. "But I have an idea. The problem is, Li-hsing, that I have human feelings trapped within a robot mind. But that doesn't make me human, only an unhappy robot. Even after all that has been done to improve my robot body, I'm still not human. But there's one more step that can be taken. If I could bring myself-if I could only bring myself-"
Chapter Twenty-Two
IF HE COULD ONLY bring hirnself- And now he had, finally.
Andrew had asked Chee Li-hsing to hold off as long as possible before bringing her revised bill to the World Legislature floor for debate and vote, because he planned to undertake a project in the very near future that might have some significant impact on the issue. And no, Andrew said, he didn't care to discuss the details of the project with her. It was a highly technical thing; she wasn't likely to understand, and he wasn't at the moment willing to take the time to explain it to her. But it would make him more human, he insisted. That was the essential detail, the only thing she really needed to know.