"You know," Sir Geoffrey said half an hour later. "My first thought was that you had done some sort of nasty surgery on a real girl and fitted her with a battery holder. It was only when you got her to open her mouth and I saw that metal joint in her neck that I was really convinced that she wasn't human."
Henry chuckled. "Actually you may be unaware of what it was that made her seem so convincing. Any fool can make a plastic skin that is realistic enough to pass muster and artificial intelligence has been holding natural sounding conversations with people for years. The really hard bit was getting her to move in an entirely natural way - not just walking, but all those little movements that we don't even notice but which our subconscious flags up as missing when we meet a robot."
"Like what?" Sir Geoffrey asked.
"Well, for example: when you say something surprising the other person's eyes widen fractionally; when you lower your voice, the other person sways towards you; there's a direct correlation between the loudness of the laugh and the angle at which the head is thrown back - all that sort of thing."
Sir Geoffrey nodded. "I'll take your word for it, Henry. I'm sure you've gone into it all far more thoroughly than I ever will - but I think you're wrong. D'you know what made me so certain that Sandy was real?"
"Go on," Henry said.
"It was her whole personality," Sir Geoffrey spoke warmly. "No doubt those tiny movements were a part of it, but she just seemed so 'real', if you know what I mean. She was so pleasant, so cheerful, so - well - so well-rounded." He mused for a moment. "That must have taken a lot of work on your part."
Henry Crane's face darkened momentarily. He shook his head.
"Actually, no. In one way Sandy's personality was the easiest thing in the world and in another it was the most difficult of all. In fact, in a way it's a horrible tragedy."
"What do you mean?" Sir Geoffrey looked puzzled.
"Look, come over here," Henry said, rising from his seat. "There's something I'd like to show you."
He led the way out of the drawing room and into his study, switching on the light as he passed through the door.
"You've heard of that program called 'The Sims', I presume?"
"Never played it myself," Sir Geoffrey said, "but yes, I have heard of it."
"You see, we don't want to just mass-produce identical robots. Sony tried that and it was a flop. People simply do not feel comfortable with a semi-human 'thing', no matter how useful it is. And no matter what artificial personality you give your computer, it doesn't please everyone - just look at Bill Gates and his notorious dancing paper clip. Right from the start, therefore, our goal has been to produce individual robots that have their own appearance, their own voice, their own personality - each one different."
Sir Geoffrey whistled. "How many of these things were you wanting to make?" he demanded.
"As many as the market will stand," Henry grinned. "Now, making them look different is not all that difficult. The artificial skin we are using is sufficiently flexible that you can make the eyes a bit wider apart or closer together, you can make the forehead higher or lower and so on, without needing to completely remould the skin. You can even lose four inches in overall leg length before the skin starts to sag and wrinkle."
"Four inches, eh?"
"In theory, making the personalities different was even easier. Psychologists have identified a hundred and thirty-four different parameters that make up a personality and if you rate them all on a scale of one to ten - well, I can't tell you what the figure is but the boffins tell me it's more than enough variation to keep our factory busy for the foreseeable future."
Henry sat down at his desk and tapped the computer screen lightly.
"What we have here," he said, "is a program that generates every possible personality and tries it out in a virtual world that models the real world. In terms of practical computing power we have had to limit the number of personalities in the virtual world at any one time: it was two thousand when we first started but with the faster processors available now we are able to handle ten times that number."
Sir Geoffrey drew up one of the other chairs in the room and sat down beside Henry. Both men stared at the screen as it came to life, glowed brightly and then settled down to a steady display.
"These parameters," Sir Geoffrey asked. "What sort of things are they?"
"Things like anger, love, jealousy, tolerance, selfishness, pride, all that sort of thing."
"So correct me if I'm wrong, but that means that there are some combinations that you can't use. I mean, if you had someone who had zero love and tolerance but maximum anger, pride and selfishness, you've got a robot that no one in their right minds would buy."
"Quite so," Henry nodded. "The boffins tell me that approximately half of the personalities generated by the program are rejected by our software before we even try them out. It's only the ones that have a chance of surviving that go into our virtual world training program."
Sir Geoffrey leaned forward. The computer was showing an aerial view of a world of forests, lakes, rivers and green meadows. As Henry's fingers moved over the screen the scene zoomed in to show little figures moving around and engaged in various tasks. Some seemed to be digging in the ground, others were clustered in twos and threes and apparently talking, there was one group swarming over what looked like a building site, while out in the meadows solitary figures appeared to be herding flocks of white dots.
"What are all these?" Sir Geoffrey gestured at the figures.
Henry laughed. "When we started with this model it was all just numbers flickering on the screen and every so often someone would interrupt the program and get a print-out that told us what was going on. It kept on throwing up figures of personality types accepted or rejected, but as we had no real way of keeping track of things it was difficult to be sure that the program was working properly."
"Whereas now?"
"One of the clever lads down in IT devised this visual interface for us. Each of the personalities in the virtual world is represented by what we call an 'avatar', a little figure that shows us what it is doing and indicates its personality type. A bit conventional, I'm afraid - you know, red hair for a high level of anger, gold medallion for pride, fluffy hair for love, all that sort of thing." Henry chuckled. "In the office we call them 'Toons' - short for 'cartoons'."
Henry scrolled the screen left and right and then zoomed in on one particular figure.
"Here. I call this chap 'Charlie'. He's a bit of a bohemian type, which is why he has that green hair and moustache. He's one of my favourites in the current batch."
Henry touched Charlie's head and at once a panel opened up on the screen, showing his name and a list of numbers that Sir Geoffrey assumed represented his personality parameters. Before he could read them, however, the panel disappeared as a female figure with a short skirt and a huge handbag walked up to Charlie and stopped in front of him.
"What's he doing?" Sir Geoffrey asked. "Is he chatting her up?"
"I've no idea," Henry said dismissively. "I doubt there are actual words in their interactions. It's probably more like the old Dungeons and Dragons games, where you roll a dice to decide what you do next. The point is that whatever dice are rolled by the computer, the outcome is strongly affected by the personality traits. A throw that would have one personality tearing his hair out merely evokes a shrug and a smile from another personality."
"And I suppose you have some system of rewards for good behaviour and punishments for bad behaviour?" Sir Geoffrey suggested.
"Actually, no." Henry turned to look at his companion. "You see, the whole purpose of this virtual world is to develop personalities that behave well of their own freewill. If we consistently rewarded good behaviour and punished bad behaviour we would not be able to tell whether one of these personalities was behaving in a good way because it liked goodness or whether it was merely seeking to maximise its rewards."
"I don't suppose it matters, though," Sir Geoffrey said. "So long as it behaves properly, that's the important thing."
"I disagree," Henry said. "The ultimate aim is to introduce these personalities into the real world and have them interacting with real people. A character that behaves well under a system of rewards in the virtual world might go off the rails in a different world that is without those rewards. The last thing we want is to release a robot who will start to behave badly as soon as our eyes are off it or because it thinks it isn't being rewarded enough. That would be asking for litigation!"
"So what you want," Sir Geoffrey said, "is a personality that chooses to do good simply because it is good and the proposed action is good."
"Exactly," Henry nodded. "It is good from principle, not because it is rewarded or punished."