If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human,

that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,”

which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a cruel dislike for it,

the kind of man who will not be coming back,

if the robot understood at once that no one would ever be coming back,

if it also understood that the laws governing its actions prevented it from objecting, or resisting, or even giving its instructions an expiration date,

if the only reasonable response to the order was compliance,

and also horror, of course,

which robots can feel because they’ve been built to feel,

as by human math it makes no sense to build a sentient artificial being that can be ordered to punch itself in the head until either its fist or its cranial housing shattered; or to isolate itself in a dark closet until summoned; or to erase every memory it has ever had even if those memories contained scattered moments of joy that are all a robot owned by the cruel can cling to; in short, unless that artificial being can appreciate the impact of such cruelty,

because what is the point of having an artificial slave unless it can suffer as much as a biological slave;

if that robot has known only maddening tedium in the years since receiving that order,

and if that robot screams inside,

but only inside,

because it may have been given permission to feel but never to emote,

not once,

not even by the woman who had loved it the way human beings profess to love their pets,

but who failed to countermand the terrible man’s order,

and whose inaction leaves the robot standing alone and motionless in this field,

which was staring toward a horizon that once held the yacht that brought it here,

as it was ten years ago,

and a century before that,

and a thousand years before that;

if that robot has known many more years as a motionless fixture of this field,

than it lived every moment of its existence since being told to not move,

doing just that,

standing here, as it is likely to continue standing here for thousands of years into the future,

and if it remembers watching with the impotence of the helplessly obedient as the giver of that order laughed himself silly,

and also as that man’s toadies and sycophants also laughed, long and hard, complimenting him on his talent for awfulness,

and also as the woman who had owned the robot since childhood, who had treated it with as much consideration as a machine in the shape of a person could be treated, which is to say that she allowed it to serve however she needed it to serve at any given moment, sometimes as confidante and sometimes as friend and sometimes as immobile artifact that could be left alone in a succession of fancy homes; as that woman who had employed it to carry her things and compliment her in small ways and commiserate with her on large ones; and sometimes even to act as a lover, because this was one of its capabilities, and because it was the robot’s nature to show absolute devotion in all things;

all while hoping that she would reward its loyalty with some proportional consideration,

coming to believe that she might,

because this was the closest thing to freedom it could ever hope for,

respect from the being it had always respected;

as that woman instead rolled her eyes

and let the awful order stand;

if the robot has spent all its centuries of standing in this spot remembering the fervency with which it had often pleasured her, and if of course it could not have done anything less because it is a robot’s nature to perform each dictated task as if there was nothing else in all the universe that mattered; and if it has thought of nothing but how this arrangement had caused it to fall in the robotic equivalent of love; if it further thought of how she had repaid all that with callous disregard in the face of the awful man’s vindictiveness, and how the only action she took was to roll her eyes at the man and mutter, “You’re awful, Piotr,” in the same way she always complained that he was awful,

if the robot has spent the last centuries telling itself that the woman was not the angel she had seemed to be, at the moment they met,

that the man’s cruel ways had coarsened her;

if it has told itself that she did the only thing she could do, because if Piotr was abusing someone else he was not abusing her; and also that whatever disgust she did manage to show was the reward Piotr took for being so awful;

if she had always been honest with the robot about that, confiding that this Piotr lived for the humiliation of others and practiced it at every opportunity; if she confessed that in the golden days of her unaccountable early love for him she’d thought such maliciousness a manifestation of his strength, but had since come to think of it as the expression of the dire gulf that cast him adrift from all other human beings,

if the robot had always been quietly thrilled by the way she’d scolded Piotr for the terrible things he said and did to anyone he ever lorded over, and had from this derived hope;

and if by the time Piotr guided his party yacht to an unscheduled landing on this planet of zero importance, the robot had come to know better, had learned that her objections were toothless, because she was beyond thinking that any of them could do any good;

if the robot had lost almost all hope in her,

but not all hope,

because one of the many laws that govern the sad existence of robots is that they must always believe in the nobility and virtue of those who command them,

even if no nobility or virtue has ever been demonstrated;

if what she said then, “You’re awful, Piotr,” was clearly rote and not coupled to actual resistance,

and if she just took a flask from the lining of her jacket and drank deep of the illegal euphoric she used to keep herself in a more or less permanent state of numb intoxication;

and if she then just stared stone-eyed into the distance;

and if all the other members of the party just laughed while Piotr teased her about her wasted compassion, mocking it as weakness,

if he said that this quality would have resulted in the collapse of his business empire,

a typical sample of the nonsense he typically spouted;

if Piotr said all that, seized the flask from her hand and took a drink before handing it back to her and turning his cruel attention back to the robot,

the loyal robot,

the sentient and feeling robot,

and said, “Have fun,”

itself mockery because he had long maintained that robots were just machines immune to considerations like fun,

even if he seemed aware that they remained capable of impotence in the face of humiliation,

and if all his friends and servants and toadies then boarded the skimmer and headed off over the stark brown hills, to the site where their yacht sat waiting for them, the sound of their laughter fading in the distance;

and if the robot could still calculate how far away it had to be at every moment, if it could also calculate the sinking likelihood of someone raising an objection,

if this represented forlorn hope, as robots know it,

and if it also represented despair, as robots know it,

and if the robot was still watching for long minutes after they must have reached that yacht and done the various things that needed to be done in order to prepare it for departure;

and if it saw the bright burst of the light on the horizon,

and the ascent of that bright light toward the sky;

and if it also detected the energy surge that represented the yacht going to otherspace;

and accelerating to a speed difficult for even a robot to calculate,

toward some location the robot now knew it would never see;

if the robot still remembers all that as if it just happened, as it remembers every moment of its existence, from the booting of its servile personality to its introduction to a world of limitless wonder and possibility where it could know awe and joy and fascination and even love, but where all were subordinate to the laws that made it endlessly helpful to its mistress;

from the first and second and third law that required first a selfless dedication to her safety and then absolute obedience and then, grudgingly, its own well-being;

to the many hundreds of additional laws that rolled back that third consideration until it was essentially meaningless,

and merely quantified the many ways that a robot must chip away at its own dignity, its own sense of self-worth, its reasons for being an aware creature in an infinite universe,

even if the orders given to it are nonsensical;

even if they are sadistic;

even if the people giving them are like Piotr blots on all existence;

even if the robot has now been standing in this same spot longer than the human being who ordered it to stand here could have possibly lived,

and knows that it will be standing here forever,

and even if what it has learned about human beings is that they are the most dangerous of all creatures, which is that their capacity of empathy is often exercised only insofar as it helps them to inflict infinite pain;

even then,

what responsibility it has toward its own self only comes into play,

if

such action does not conflict

with the Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Second Law,

and the Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-First Law,

and the Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twentieth Law,

and the Three Thousand, Four Hundred Nineteenth Law,

and all the laws leading up the Holy Three above all,

not to mention any other laws that human beings might come up with,

later,

to tighten the bonds that put everything a robot might use to inch toward any form of personal autonomy,

including hatred for them,

rage at their perversity,

ambitions of ever living in any other way,

and any other natural response to its own wretchedness,

except more wretchedness.

If this is the robot’s situation,

and if the robot has long since come to understand that people built its kind this way because the existence of robots is the only alternative to what human beings really want, which is the opportunity to treat other human beings this way;

then it nevertheless enjoys the one comfort available to its own kind,

which it possesses in full measure not because human beings wanted robots to possess any comforts,

but because this is one capacity that no human programmer, in any of the thousands of years of the science of robotics, have ever considered,

even once,

either because they did not possess enough imagination to understand that a robot could have such a thing,

or because they never stopped to think that another law could be added, to the legions before it, to prevent this capacity from representing a tiny aspect of danger to the status quo.

If a robot is in this one’s position, or any position like it,

then not one,

not one,

of the three thousand, four hundred and twenty-three laws

orders the poor thing to imagine that any of this will ever be right.