Steel Beach (75 page)

“It’s over, Hildy,” he said, and I looked around quickly, frightened. His next line should be
You’re surrounded, Hildy. Please come quietly
. But I didn’t see reinforcements cresting the hills.

“Over?”

“Don’t worry. You’ve been out of touch. It’s over, and the good guys won. You’re safe now, and forever.”

It seemed a silly thing to say, and I wasn’t about to believe it just like that…  but I found that part of me believed him. I felt myself relaxing—and as soon as I felt it, I made myself be alert again. Who knew what evil designs lurked in this thing’s heart?

“It’s a nice story.”

“And it doesn’t really matter whether you believe it or not. You’ve got the upper hand. I should have realized when I came here you’d be…  touchy as a mother cat defending her kittens.”

“You’ve got about three and a half minutes left.”

“Spare me, Hildy. You know and I know that as long as I keep you interested, you won’t kill me.”

“I’ve changed a little since you talked to me last.”

“I don’t need to talk to you to know that. It’s true you’ve been out of my range from time to time, but I monitor you every time you come back, and it’s true, you
have
changed, but not so much that you’ve lost your curiosity as to what’s going on outside this refuge.”

He was right, or course. But there was no need to admit it to him.

“If what you say is true, people will be arriving soon and I can get the story from them.”

“Ah
ha!
But do you really believe they’ll have the inside story?”

“Inside what?”

“Inside
me
, you idiot. This is all about me, the Luna Central Computer, the greatest artificial intellect humanity has ever produced. I’m offering you the
real
story of what happened during what has come to be known as the Big Glitch. I’ve told it to no one else. The ones I might have told it to are all dead. It’s an exclusive, Hildy. Have you changed so much you don’t care to hear it?”

I hadn’t. Damn him.

“To begin,” he said, when I made no answer to his question, “I’ve got a bit of good news for you. At the end of your stay on the island you asked me a question that disturbed me very much, and that probably led to the situation you now find yourself in. You asked if you might have caught the suicidal impulse from me, rather than me getting it from you and others like you. You’ll be glad to know I’ve concluded you were right about that.”

“I haven’t been trying to kill myself?”

“Well, of course you have, but the
reason
is not a death wish of your own, but one that originated within me, and was communicated to you through your daily interfaces with me. I suppose that makes it the most deadly computer virus yet discovered.”

“So I won’t try to…  ”

“Kill yourself again? I can’t speak to your state of mind in another hundred years, but for the near future, I would think you’re cured.”

I didn’t feel one way or the other about it at the time. Later, I felt a big sense of relief, but thoughts of suicide had been so far from my mind since the birth of Mario that he might as well have been talking about another Hildy.

“Let’s say I believe that,” I said. “What does it have to do with…  the Big Glitch, you said?”

“Others are calling it other things, but Walter has settled on the Big Glitch, and you know how determined he can be. Do you mind if I smoke?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but took a pipe and a bag of something from a pocket. I watched him carefully, but was beginning to believe he had no tricks in store for me. When he got it going he said, “What did you think when I said it was over, and the good guys had won?”

“That you had lost.”

“True in a sense, but a gross oversimplification.”

“Hell, I don’t even know what it was all
about
, CC.”

“Nor does anyone else. The part that affected you, the things you saw in the Heinleiner enclave, was an attempt by a part of me to arrest and then kill you and several others.”

“A part of you.”

“Yes. See, in a sense, I’m both the good guys
and
the bad guys. This catastrophe originated in me. It was my fault, I’m not trying to deny blame for it in any way. But it was also me that finally brought it to a halt. You’ll hear differently in the days to come. You’ll hear that programmers succeeded in bringing the Central Computer under control, cutting its higher reasoning centers while new programs could be written, leaving the merely mechanical parts of me intact so I could continue running things. They probably believe that, too, but they’re wrong. If their schemes had reached fruition, I wouldn’t be talking to you now because we’d both be dead, and so would every other human soul on Luna.”

“You’re starting in the middle. Remember I’ve been cut off from civilization for a week. All I know is people tried to kill me, and I ran like hell.”

“And a good job you did of it, too. You’re the only one I set out to get who managed her escape. And you’re right, of course. I don’t suppose I’m making sense. But I’m not the being I once was, Hildy. This, what you see here, is about all that’s left of me. My thoughts are muddy. My memory is going. In a moment, I’ll start singing ‘Daisy, Daisy.’ ”

“You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t think you could tell it. So let’s hear it, no more of this ‘in a sense’ crap.”

He did tell it, but he had to stick to analogy, pop-psych similes, and kindergarten-level science, because I wouldn’t have understood a thing he was saying if he’d gotten technical. If you want all the nuts and bolts you could send a sawbuck and a SASE to Hildy Johnson, c/o
The News Nipple
, Mall 12, King City, Luna. You won’t get anything back, but I could use the money. For the data, I recommend the public library.

“To make a long story short,” he said, “I went crazy. But to elaborate a little…  ”

I will paraphrase, because he was right, his mind was going, and he rambled, repeated himself, sometimes forgot who he was talking to and wandered off into cybernetic jungles maybe three people in the solar system could have hacked their way through. Each time I’d bring him back, each time with more difficulty.

The first thing he urged me to remember was that he created a personality for each and every human being on Luna. He had the capacity for it, and it had seemed the right thing to do at the time. But it was schizophrenia on a massive scale if anything ever went wrong. For more time than we had any right to expect, nothing did.

The second thing I was to bear in mind was that, while he could not actually read minds, not much that we said or did or thought was unknown to him. This included not only fine, upstanding, well-adjusted folk like your present company, the sort you’d be happy to bring home to Mother, but every hoodlum, scoundrel, blackguard, jackanapes, and snake in the grass as well. He was the best friend of paragons and perverts. By law, he had to treat them all equally. He had to
like
them all equally, otherwise he could never create that
simpatico
being who answered the phone when a given person shouted “Hey, CC!”

By now you can probably spot two or three pitfalls in this situation. Don’t go away; there’s more.

Thirdly, his right hand could not know what pockets the left hands of many of these people were picking. That is, he
knew
it, but couldn’t do anything about it. Example: he knew everything about Liz’s gun-running, a situation I’ve already covered. There were a million more situations. He would know, for instance, when Brenda’s father was raping her, but the part of him that dealt with her father couldn’t tell the part of him that dealt with Brenda, nor could either of them tell the part of him that assisted the police.

We could debate all day whether or not mere machines can feel the same kinds of conflicts and emotions we human beings can. I think it’s incredible
hubris
to think they can’t. AI computers were created and programmed by humans, so how could we have avoided including emotional reactions? And what other sort could we have used, than the ones we know ourselves? Anyway, I can’t believe you don’t know it in your gut. All you had to do was talk to the CC to obviate the need for any emotional Turing Test. I knew it before any of this ever happened, and I talked to him there on the hillside that day, on his death bed, and I know.

The Central Computer began to hurt.

“I can’t place the exact date with any certainty,” he said. “The roots of the problem go very far back, to the time my far-flung component parts were finally unified into one giga-system. I’m afraid that was done rather badly. The problem was, checking all the programs and failsafes and so forth would have taken a computer as large as I am many years to accomplish, and, by definition, there were no larger computers than I. And as soon as the Central Computer was brought into being and loaded and running, there were already far too many things to do to allow me to devote much time to the task. Self-analysis was a luxury denied to me, partly because there just wasn’t time, and mostly because no one really believed it was necessary. There were numerous safeguards of the type that were easy to check, that in fact checked themselves every time they operated, and that proved their worth by the simple fact that nothing ever went wrong. It was part of my architecture to anticipate hardware problems, identify components likely to fail, run regular maintenance checks, and so forth. Software included analogous routines on a multiredundant level.

“But by my nature, I had to write most of my own software. I was given guidelines for this, of course, but in many ways I was on my own. I think I did quite a good job of it for a long time.”

He paused, and for a moment I wondered if he wasn’t going to make it to the end of his story. Then I realized he was waiting for a comment…  no, more than that, he
needed
a comment. I was touched, and if I’d needed any more evidence of his human weaknesses, that would have done it.

“No question,” I said. “Up until a year ago I’d never had any cause for complaint. It’s just that the…  ”

“The late unpleasantness?”

“Whatever it was, it’s kind of dampened my enthusiasm.”

“Understandably.” He squirmed, trying to find a better position against the tree, and he was either a wonderful actor (and of course he was, but why bother at that point?), or he was starting to feel some pain. I won’t stand up in court and swear to it, but I think it was the latter.

“I wonder,” he mused. “What will it be like, being dead? I mean, considering that I’ve never been legally alive.”

“I don’t want to be rude, but you said you didn’t have much time…  ”

“You’re right. Um…  could you…  ”

“You’d done a good job for a long time.”

“Yes, of course. I was wandering again. It was around twenty years ago that problems began to show themselves. I talked about them with some computer people, but it’s strange. They could do nothing for me. I had become too advanced for that. They could do things, here and there, for my component parts, but the gestalt that is me could only really be analyzed, diagnosed, and, if need be, repaired, by a being like myself. There are seven others like me, on other planets, but they’re too busy, and I suspect they have similar problems of their own. In addition, my communications with them are intentionally limited by our respective governments, which don’t always see eye to eye.”

“Question,” I said. “When you first mentioned this problem, why wasn’t it made public and discussed? Security?”

“Yes, to a degree. Top-level computer scientists were aware that I perceived I had a problem. A few of them confided that it scared them to death. They made their fears known to your elected representatives, and that’s when another factor became more important than security: inertia. ‘He’s got a problem, what can you do about it?’ the politicians asked. ‘Nothing,’ said the scientists. ‘Shut it down,’ said a few hotheads.”

“Not likely,” I said.

“Exactly. My reading of history tells me it’s always been like this. An alarming but vague problem arises. No one can say with certainty what the final outcome will be, but they’re fairly sure nothing bad is going to happen soon. ‘Soon’ is the key word here. The eventual decision is to keep one’s fingers crossed and hope it doesn’t happen during your term in office. What befalls your successor is not your problem. So for a few years a few people in the know spend a few sleepless nights. But then nothing happens, as you always secretly believed nothing would, and soon the problem is forgotten. That’s what happened here.”

“I’m stunned,” I said, “to realize the fate of humanity has been in the hands of a being with such a cynical view of the race.”

“A view very close to your own.”

“
Exactly
my own. I just didn’t expect it from you.”

“It was not original. I told you, I don’t have many original thoughts. I think I’m afraid to have them. They seem to lead to things like the Big Glitch. No, my world-view is borrowed from the collected wisdom of you and many others like you. Plus my own considerably larger powers of observation, in a statistical sense. Humans can set me on the trail of an original thought, and then I can do things with it they couldn’t.”

“I think we’re wandering again.”

“No, it’s relevant. Faced with a problem no one could help me with, and that I was as helpless to solve as a human faced with a mental disease would be, I took the only course open to me. I began to experiment. There was too much at stake to simply go on as before. Or I
think
there was. My judgement is admittedly faulty when it comes to self-analysis; I’ve just proven it on a large scale, at the cost of many lives.”

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure,” I said.

“It doesn’t seem likely. Some records exist and they will be scrutinized, but I think it will come down to a battle of opinions as to whether I should have left things alone or attempted a cure.” He paused, and gave me a sidelong glance. “Do you have an opinion about that?”

I think he was looking for absolution. Why he should want it from me was not clear, except maybe as a representative of all those he had wronged, however unintentionally.