Little Lost Robot
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Little Lost Robot (1947) is science-fiction short story by Isaac Asimov.
At Hyper Base, a research station on a asteroid, scientists are working to develop the hyperspace drive - a theme that is explored and developed in several of Asimov's stories and mentioned inter alia in the Empire and Foundation books. One of the researchers, a man named Gerald Black, loses his temper, swears at a NS-2 (Nestor) robot and tells the robot to "...get lost". Obeying orders, it does just that. It is then up to US Robots' Chief Robopsychologist Dr Susan Calvin, and Mathematical Director Peter Bogert, to try and find it. The problem is that they know exactly where it is: in a room with sixty-two identical robots.
So, why was this individual robot so important? The answer is that it had had its First Law of Robotics modified, to read "No robot may injure a human being", i.e. it could happily (happily? Can a robot experience happiness?) leave a human to die by other means. Again, we explore the ambiguities of the English language; a technician who wanted a robot to leave told it to "Go Lose Yourself", and the robot assumed that the order meant that it should hide itself. In Little Lost Robot, the Frankenstein complex is again addressed. The reason that the robot must be found is because people are still by and large scared of robots, and if they found one with a different First Law there would be an outcry, even though the robot is still incapable of directly harming a human. However, Dr Calvin added further urgency by hypothesising a situation whereby the altered law could allow the robot to arguably harm or even kill a person. The robot could feasibly drop a weight it knew it could catch before it would land on a human. Upon releasing the weight, its altered programming would allow it to simply let the weight drop, since it need no longer prevent a human from coming to harm.
This story was homaged in a scene from the film I Robot, which otherwise bore no resemblance to the stories.