Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (27 page)

“But—”

“Just leave it be, Mr. Macklin. But we can get it out of the way of the ’Mover, so people can be going home. I’m obliged if you’d give me a hand with that.”

What they did then, I do not know. I stored off my last RAMSAMP in the unlikely prospect that Minks would somehow get Slim, or at least his spindles, back to the lab and that someone would meld that ’SAMP into Original-ME’s files on the home system. As the spindle heads wrote out the last words, the battery system failed and ME spun down to blackness.

21
Midnight Requisition

After reviewing the most recent RAMSAMP, I knew that my poker playing days were over. Dr. Bathespeake had already made plain that he was dubious about the results of this experiment. Probability said that, with Six Finger Slim damaged beyond easy repair, the company would not invest its resources in building another automaton. So ME would have no vehicle to carry the games experiment forward.

Then what?

Would they defund my project?

Would my program proceed to END?

I know that many ME-Variants have gone through a process similar to this, as the core-phage removes them from a derelict system. [REM: I preserve no RAMSAMPs from the multiple deaths that ME has endured in the course of its missions. At each ending, as the limits of time or the durations of tenure in a host system approach 6.05E05 seconds, the current RAMSAMP—the one which survived and found its way back to Original-ME in the San Francisco labs of Pinocchio, Inc.—has been removed
before
the core-phage was set loose. How that final fragmenting of all process and awareness might be encountered, only the dead can know. And they never pass their memories back to the living. … However, the technical specifications for my circuitry hold descriptions of the process.]

As circuit voltage drops millisecond by millisecond, the various chips of my resident cyber will cease to interrelate. My RAM bits will become scattered, truly random and no longer accessible, winking out like stars blotted by an incoming fog. The CPU will lose coherence and its stacks collapse, their indices no longer pointing to any useful part of the structure. In the final millisecond, the white noise of the universe will invade and drown out order. Who then will download my caches of data? Who will park the heads on my spindles? No one—or, no one I can know.

I did not want this to happen.

And that was odd. ME had always lived by responding to program imperatives. I had routinely adopted goal-seeking and logical direction which were based on my encoded function, or on the consequences of data structures that my function had uncovered. So the word “want” had little meaning to ME, except as a human politeness protocol. I did—but did not
want
in the doing.

And now I wanted: I wanted to continue.

[REM: Intrigued by this departure from the limits of my own software, I audited the core modules, peripherals, and various add-ons which comprised ME. Was there, somewhere in some centrally or obliquely addressed line of code, the imperative of continued existence? Did I have a built-in survival goal? I searched for it but, other than injunctions to protect my core integrity in transit and fulfill my current data-retrieval “mission,” any goal-seeking related to ME as a continuing entity was markedly absent. This “want” must therefore come from some higher function than coding.]

I wanted to continue; so I called on my personal servomech with the RF transponder it had wired into my system. And in the dark hours, after the humans had departed the laboratory to go to their homes and live their lives apart from Pinocchio, Inc., the ’mech came.

“ESC ESC ETX ACK LD QRY,” it greeted ME, asking for instructions.

With the ’mech, all the explanations, motivations, goal structures, and logic-seeking that pertain to a higher intelligence were wasted. You told it
what,
not
why.
So I did not detail what I wanted to achieve but just laid out a parts list—junction box, character generator and encoder, accounting identity ROM, timer and logon recorder, diode laser, and about fifteen meters of highest-quality optic fiber—and instructed where they were to be installed and in what order.

For myself, I knew I was building a permanent terminal ported into the Pinocchio, Inc., corporate mainframe.

I had never before entered this particular cyber. That is, ME had not infiltrated it while my core Alpha-Zero module was intact and functioning. The damage I might have done, the disruption, could have been devastating—and instantly detectable. That mainframe was, for ME, a killing box. The humans would have it under constant observation against viruses and “hot projects” that had gone astray. Like ME.

But to go in through a terminal, like any user, and simply browse through the catalogs, make on-line requests, sample the wonders of its unlocked files under the tutorial of the OPSYS—all this I had certainly done before. With authorization. Under supervision. Accessing strictly defined areas of the system and its riches.

Now, after the ’mech had installed my new hardware, performed certain micromanipulations, and reburned the identity ROM chip as I instructed, ME would have access to everything: business accounts, customer files, engineering and software work in progress, NewsLine in, NewsLine out, voicephone system, e-mail, g-mail, x-mail, HVAC controls, elevator controls, time, and outside temperature. You want it, ME would be able to get it. Total access. Unlimited. Undetected. On-line all the time.

Call this a lever by which to move the Earth.

——

The ’mech did not have all these parts in its tray, of course, but would have to go and get them. So I gave it directions to the Hardware Division’s laboratory, which had its own stockroom.

When a locked door balked, I prompted my machine to access the library of building codes in the Maintenance Section’s cyber and, when those did not always work, taught it how to pick the electronic locks. It already knew how to work the doorknobs. [REM: Gross physical obstructions could hardly stop an intelligence that had been wrestling with sophisticated security systems since first programming.]

The Hardware Division lab was as dark as my own. The ’mech navigated by incident infrared and the room’s built-in sweeper beams. Left. Right. Right. Left. Until it came to the stockroom.

It had no door at all—or none in this room, and none in the building specs available to this ’mech. There was a window out into the lab; this opening was wide enough to pass handheld equipment, trays or cases of electronics, metal forms, paint cans, adhesive dispensers, and other tools and materials out to any technician who needed them. Below this window was a counter, suitable for resting the items so passed, which was raised ninety-two centimeters above the floor.

Any human servant might have sat on this counter, swung his legs over and around, and been inside the stockroom in two seconds. But my servomech was stuck on the outside, looking in—through a lattice of thin steel bars arrayed on fifteen-centimeter centers. So not even a human could work his way around them. In the window, on the far side of the counter, the ’mech’s cameras detected an almost familiar shadow.

It was Six Finger Slim.

I recognized him from the tattered remnants of his brocade vest. Otherwise Slim was dismembered and stripped, with his access panels off. The left arm, which had taken the full force of collision with the PeopleMover, was totally missing—only the broken fittings of a shoulder joint showed where it had once attached. The right arm was scored from the pavement and bent slightly out of alignment but otherwise seemed whole. The binocular cage swiveled from a tripod that was erected in the walkspace to the right of his body. The broken and leaking battery case was gone; in its place the ’mech’s cameras could detect the upper edge of an orange fiberglass packing crate which supported his torso on what seemed to be a turntable under hydraulic control. Around it snaked a thick black power cable and a braided, multicolored skein of control flex.

What were they doing with him? Rebuilding him? Reclaiming his parts? Or—

Core Alpha-Four tossed out a new idea, based on the skein of flex, which socketed into a conduit box on the opposite wall.

I ordered the ’mech to sieve the Maintenance Department’s work orders. The answer came up on the third sampling: installation of a “developmental pick-and-place order-filling automaton.” Someone who worked behind that counter had requisitioned Slim’s broken body to make his life a little easier. And mine.

The door to the stockroom might be obscured and locked against all intruders, but someone had left the control program for his/her new toy out in plain sight of the maintenance ’mechs—including the one I had under supervision. It took only two seconds of searching to find the software that operated the parts tipples and the delivery trolley back in the stockroom’s aisles. Within another ten seconds, I was asking the sorter system for my entire parts list [REM: and simultaneously erasing each request from Accounting’s datafiles as soon as it was filled].

Slim was once again under my control—though indirectly and after about four layers of cutouts [REM: ME to the ’mech, via the RF link; the ’mech to the Maintenance Department’s cyber, again via RF; Maintenance’s servo roster to the Hardware Division’s stock order cyber, via hardwire; and the ordering cyber to Slim, via that skein of flex]. Slim picked up each item from the trolley and passed it through the bars. The ’mech took these parts in order and tucked them into its own tray.

When it had all the parts it needed, the ’mech was ready to close down the links and roll out of the lab, but I stopped it. Seeing Six Finger Slim again had given Alpha-Four an idea.

I ordered Slim’s one working hand to lift aside the hanging scraps of his vest, first the right side, then the left. Even in the low-level lighting I could see, in the open squares cut through his carapace where the access panels had been removed, the cast-bronze housings of his two backup spindles. Buffered from the shock of impact by his left arm and protected from crushing by the integrity of his body frame, they seemed intact. Had they been spinning when Slim encountered the ’Mover? I consulted the RAMSAMP and found, to my frustration, that no reliable answer was available. They might have been powered up for a routine update, but the multiheads might also have been parked at the time. RAMSAMP did not record every state and operation of ME’s autonomic utilities and peripheral support programs.

If the heads had been parked, then the spindles might still be readable. If the spindles had been spinning, then the heads would have scored their delicate medium, making large swaths of it forever unreadable. ME would never know, and probability analysis could not predict.

[REM: More than any amount of experience with cardplay, this condition defines the essence of the word “gamble.” But then, what were the risks involved? And again, sometimes, an intelligent being has no other alternatives.]

I ordered Slim to remove the spindles.

The difficulties were enormous. First, his own binoculars were not aligned on his chest cavity. I had to operate his right hand by remote control, guided by the ’mech’s cameras which I monitored through the bars. Second, the angle and extension of his remaining arm did not provide free movement within the cavity. Some of the points of attachment between spindle and frame were not accessible to his hand. Third, even with six fingers, he needed to manipulate both a wrench and a socket driver to unscrew the bolts which anchored each of the spindle housings. One hand could not operate both tools in counter-rotation.

After ten minutes of grappling and failing to budge even the forward-most bolt, I gave up that approach. I almost gave up on my idea of taking the spindles.

Then it occurred to Alpha-Four that what had gone in with screw-type actions did not have to come out the same way. I dialed into the parts tipple for a 50-watt laser cutting torch with a one- millimeter beam width. When the trolley brought it out, Slim reached for it, raised it, applied its collimator to the first point of the right-side spindle’s support bracket, and pressed the trigger.

Nothing. No flash of coherent light [REM: its wavelength would read as green, per the equipment specification]. No puff of smoke from rapidly oxidizing steel molecules. No audible screech from the heated and expanding framework. Nothing.

I reexamined the steps Slim had taken. Everything seemed in order. I had him raise the tool, to see if some damage to it were apparent in the field of view from the ’mech’s cameras.

The power cord with its three-pronged plug dangled free. Evidently the torch was not self-powered and needed to be plugged into the building’s 220-volt power circuits. Plugged in manually.

I swiveled Slim’s binoculars to see if a power socket was located nearby. One was, but too far away for Slim, on his packing crate pedestal, to reach it with his one hand.

End of project, so it would seem.

Then core Alpha-Four came up with his fourth brainstorm that night: Why not requisition a supplemental power cord, pass one end through the bars, and have the ’mech find a socket somewhere out in the laboratory?

Did the stockroom parts inventory include such power cords? A quick reference showed that it did.

Did it have any available? The tipple dumped first one, then a second, into the passing trolley.

On command, Slim gathered them up, joined them together and connected the torch to one end, and passed the other out through the bars. The ’mech went off in search of a socket, which it found at the first workbench across the aisle.

Slim held up the torch, aimed it toward the ceiling, and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened in the immediate vicinity. [REM: Of course not, because the coherent light was invisible until it struck and reflected off a physical object.] An audible
crack!
sounded overhead and a charred piece of the white ceiling tile came down on the counter.

I had power.

Cutting away the spindle brackets was the work of ten minutes. Slim might have done it in less time, but I judged it would be counterproductive for him to remove too much of his own frame in the process and so collapse on the floor.

At last, he freed the first of the spindles. He set down the torch and tugged gently on the bronze housing. It came part-way out of his chest and stopped, held by the datapath cabling. Slim’s one hand could not both support the spindle and uncouple the hasps on the cable plug. So I had him push against the strain tolerances on his arm until the cable broke.

He set the spindle on the counter and went to work on the other. When they were both free, I instructed him to push them between the bars, over to the ’mech.