Mr. R.I.N.G. - Recap

I don’t know when exactly I was in this office last. In some ways it seems like I never left. But no…that’s not right. For at least a few days I was away…far away…in the hands of men with no faces and no names. They broke me down, broke my story down, told me it hadn’t happened the way I claimed. At least I think that’s what they did…between injections. Memories fade fast enough without chemical help. If I don’t tell the story now I don’t think I ever will…

Professor Avery Walker is working late on Sunday, April the second. A fastidious man, Walker intends to carry out orders he has just received. Near him in the lab is a long table on which lies a humanoid figure. Its skin is flesh colored but not like human skin and it has no face – just a circuit board at the front of its head. As Walker makes notes on a clipboard the figure clenches and then relaxes its hand. When Walker pauses near the table the figure sits up silently and crushes his neck with one hand. It leaves the table and then the room.

Later that night postal worker Arnold Tekman empties a mailbox. As he unlocks the mailbox the humanoid figure from the lab steps around the corner. It grabs Tekman and hurls him into a pile of debris, then steals his clothes. Moving to a nearby store window it breaks the glass and seizes a blue mask to cover its circuitry “face”.

Carl arrives late for work but in time to catch an uncharacteristically happy Ron Updyke leaving. Carl is immediately suspicious and quizzes Miss Emily. Ron hasn’t got a raise or a promotion – he’s happy because Carl is in trouble. Vincenzo witnesses this exchange from his office with a scowl on his face. Carl hurries in to see what the problem is.

Vincenzo comes right to the point. He wants to know where Carl was all day yesterday. Carl explains that he felt the need to check out the Brindizi killing because the details didn’t seem right. So he went to the crime scene at the lake to check the facts and discovered they were correct. Vincenzo isn’t fooled. He knows Carl really went to the lake for a day of fishing. Had Carl been at work he would have been given a plum assignment: the Mendenham trial in San Francisco, where Ron is going right now. Instead, Carl must write Avery Walker’s obituary. The material in the INS files is out of date and poorly written. Carl will have to research a new obit.

Carl visits Walker’s widow first. An agent watches Carl pull into the driveway and makes a telephone report. Inside, Carl meets the widow. She has clearly had a few drinks and offers Carl refreshment several times during the conversation. From her Carl learns that Avery Walker did classified work for the government at the secretive Tyrell Institute. He also learns the government wouldn’t allow her to see her husband’s body. It claimed seeing the body “would only upset her,” and that the cause of death was a heart attack. The Walker marriage wasn’t in very good shape. Ms. Walker describes her husband as “a colossal bore.” Pressed, she does mention “ring” as one of the projects her husband worked on. And she mentions one of her husband’s colleagues, Leslie Dwyer, with whom she believes Avery was having an affair.

Carl leaves, stopping to chat with the agent outside – chiefly to let him know he’d been spotted and to tweak him about it. Disgusted, the agent turns around and drives away, stopping briefly to confer with another agent nearby.

En route to Winnetka to see Leslie Dwyer Carl hears a radio report of a robbery in progress and detours to that location. A thief has broken into the Glengarry Mortuary. He bursts through the plate glass window carrying a metal suitcase – it is the humanoid figure from Avery Walker’s lab. Scene commander Captain Akins orders the officers not to shoot. The humanoid easily overpowers officers forced to rely on hand-to-hand combat. It escapes into an alley and climbs a fire escape ladder, pausing near the roof to tear the ladder from the wall. The police are unable to follow and it escapes.

Carl first tries to question Captain Akins but the veteran cop makes him as a reporter and won’t answer questions. So Carl finds Carmichael, the head cosmetologist of the mortuary, learning from him that the intruder broke into a storage closet and stole facial putty and cosmetic color base. At about that point Akins advises Carmichael not to speak to the press. Prior to this Carmichael believed Carl was a police detective. Carl moves off but stays nearby keeping a low profile. He observes Akins speaking to the agent Carl saw outside of the Walker home.

Carl tries the Tyrell Institute next. He fences verbally with the guard there before a veiled threat of lengthy interrogation convinces him to leave. He has just one lead left: Leslie Dwyer. At Dwyer’s apartment Carl learns she was laid off from the Tyrell Institute and nothing else before her boyfriend runs him off.

Elsewhere, the humanoid figure is using the stolen cosmetology supplies to craft a more human-like face atop its blue mask.

Out of leads, Carl next researches the Tyrell Institute and learns little more than he knew, but does get the name of an important political backer: Illinois Senator Duncan LeBeau Stevens. Like everyone else Stevens won’t say much. He says the Tyrell Institute is working on ways to miniaturize computer systems but Carl doesn’t buy it. Stevens denies knowledge of any project named “Ring,” and has his severe-looking secretary escort Carl out. As soon as Carl leaves Stevens contacts General Brody at the Tyrell Institute and someone named Peter Vreeland in Washington.

As Carl returns to INS, Tony finishes a telephone conversation. He hangs up and tells Carl to pack for San Francisco. Evidently Ron has run into a problem and Tony wants Carl to help him out. Tony promises a first class hotel, fine dining, and other incentives. Carl immediately realizes the truth: someone has pressured Tony to kill any investigation of Tyrell and ring. Carl works on Tony with an allusion to pie ala mode and finally convinces him not to knuckle under to government pressure.

A disturbance at the Windsor branch of the public library draws Carl there. Captain Akins and several detectives are examining the scene. The library wall is smashed open and materials have been scattered. The flustered librarian tells the story: a humanoid figure was examining material in the philosophy section. When confronted it smashed through the brick wall and fled. Carl notices that a number of “books for the blind” tapes on philosophy are missing.

Meanwhile, Leslie Dwyer returns to her apartment. She makes herself a cup of tea and carries it toward her living room. As she rounds the corner she nearly runs into the strange humanoid figure...

The following morning Carl is unable to reach Leslie Dwyer by phone, so he visits her apartment. There he discovers the police already busy. Someone wearing a mask broke into the apartment the previous night; the officer thinks this is a sex crime. His last real lead gone, Carl is forced to return to the only person who could possibly help: Mrs. Avery Walker.

Mrs. Walker has sobered up, sold the house and collected the insurance. She mentions some more of the terms she overheard Avery discussing with Leslie Dwyer: autonetics, microcircuitry, stress patterns, siliconized limb plates, intelligence programming and joint malleability. All this together convinces Carl that the people at Tyrell have built a robot. He believes this robot killed Avery Walker and perhaps now Leslie Dwyer. Tony dismisses the idea and tells him to leave the jokes to Charlie McCarthy.

With Miss Emily’s help Carl locates several libraries that offer “books for the blind” – tape recordings of popular books. Remembering that Leslie Dwyer had several philosophy books like those the robot stole, Carl works to learn where she got these. Once he’s got the name of the library, a little social engineering and a helpful contact yield the address Dwyer gave when she borrowed the books – a summer home north of Chicago.

The house is dark when Carl arrives and no one answers the door, so he forces a window and enters. He walks the unlit rooms but does not encounter anyone or anything. At various times the robot lurks behind doors but it leaves before Carl enters a room. Eventually Carl realizes the first floor will not yield answers and climbs to the second.

On the second floor Carl gently opens a closed door. On a couch lies Leslie Dwyer. On a table nearby a reel-to-reel tape player spins idly producing small slapping sounds as the tape trailer strikes the case. Carl reaches to check Dwyer’s pulse and the contact startles her – she was only asleep.

Finally Carl begins to get some answers. R.I.N.G. stands for “Robomatic Internalized Nerve Ganglia.” The people at Tyrell have indeed managed to build a robot. And Avery Walker died because R.I.N.G. wanted to live. Walker was ordered to shut down the project and destroy the machine. He died while carrying out those instructions.

There were many conflicts during the design of R.I.N.G. The military wanted aggression installed and fired Leslie when she opposed this. She was removed so quickly that Avery Walker never really understood how far Leslie’s software team had gone. He never understood that R.I.N.G. had a survival instinct.

As Leslie reaches this point in her account, R.I.N.G. smashes the door in, frightening Carl. Leslie hastens to reassure him by telling him that R.I.N.G. could have killed him while he was still on the first floor but chose not to. It is trying to learn about the world and Leslie is trying to teach it. At Leslie’s urging Carl asks the machine a number of questions that demonstrate its reasoning power. But when he asks it the difference between good and evil it cannot answer. Leslie jumps to its defense by pointing out that no human has exhaustively answered that question either.

Engines can be heard outside. Through the window Carl sees jeeps and police cars approaching the house. He volunteers to go talk to the military men. Colonel Wright is in charge of the detachment; he orders Carl seized and held and demands that Dwyer and the machine come downstairs. Dwyer leads R.I.N.G. to the top of the stairs and begins descending. Wright orders soldiers to grab her and the machine. It fights back, tossing soldiers about the room easily until a single gunshot staggers it and draws a scream from Leslie. She races back to the stairs as R.I.N.G. collapses. The machine is clearly finished; only garbled sentences come from it now. Finally, the last of its indicator lights go dark and it ceases moving.

That’s the end of R.I.N.G. and the end of the story, to the best of Carl’s now hazy recollection. Of one thing he is certain: someone will someday build another R.I.N.G without Leslie Dwyer and her ethical considerations. And who, he wonders, will program it then?

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