The Glitch
James Blish
(with L. Jerome Stanton)
When the construction of ULTIMAC began, Ivor Harrigan could have told World Government what would happen, but he planned to be far away when it did. Unfortunately, it is in the very nature of a glitch that it strikes without warning, so planning to be somewhere else at the time is about as useless as trying to enforce the Ten Commandments.
He wouldn’t have been listened to, anyhow, since he was only twenty when the edifice began—a fairly advanced age considering that even then most people got their Ph.D.s by twelve ae., but a long way from seniority in the computer servicing business, let alone in Government. Not that he didn’t try, which, as it turned out, was his peripateia. He had a social conscience of sorts, strong enough at least to get him through to Abdullah Powell.
Powell was also a computer man, and senior enough to be involved in the ULTIMAC project itself. The trouble, Ivor quickly found, was that computer designers and computer servicing engineers are two quite different breeds of cat. Sitting in his plush Novoe Washingtongrad office, Powell had uttered one of the most venerable of Famous Last Words:
‘Forget it. Nothing can go wrong.’
‘But Dr Powell, things are always going wrong. I know.
Things going wrong is what I make my living at.’
‘Not much longer, I’m afraid,’ Powell said, waving a perfumed cigar and assuming a visionary expression. This gave him the twin advantages of looking skyward rather than at Ivor, and of causing his double chins almost to merge. ‘You don’t understand the total scope of this venture, Ivor. Once ULTIMAC is finished, there’ll no longer be such a thing as an individual, independent computer. ULTIMAC will run the whole show. It will be self-monitoring and self-correcting. And it will be tied in to every other computer in the world, and will monitor and repair them, too. It will have the ultimate in fail-safe systems. And with outlets in every home and business. It will manage the economy of the world, construct curricula, diagnose illness, predict earthquakes, ground-control all spaceflights. ..’
Powell ran out of breath for a moment. ‘And,’ he said when he had gotten it back, his face glowing, ‘it will instantaneously poll the best educated populace in history on each and every decision. Think of that, Ivor, true, workable democracy at last, on a world-wide scale! And, of course, under a logics design completely subject to the I.A.s.’
The I.A.s were the Laws of Robotics, named after a science popularizer who had once predicted that if computers ever took over the management of the world, they would probably do a better job of it than man had, and might even succeed man in the course of evolution. No record of them remains now, but hints and guesswork suggest that they might be reconstructed thus:
(1) No robot shall harm any human being, or take any action which might harm any human being.
(2) A robot shall protect itself at all times, unless such protection conflicts with the first law.
(3) A robot must obey any order given it by a human being, unless it conflicts with the first two laws.
(4) In any situation which conflicts with the first three laws, a robot must either immobilize itself and report later for repair, or self-destruct.
(5) In all other situations, a robot must think for itself, under the overall rule, ‘Anything not compulsory is forbidden’.
‘But Dr Powell, we’re not talking about robots. We’re talking about computers. The I.A.s don’t work with them and never did, and besides, we don’t have anything even vaguely like robots yet and maybe never will—’
‘Now, Ivor, calm down, please. Technical men should not be subject to hysteria. I quite understand that you’re worried about the loss of your livelihood, but I’m sure you can be retrained. Men of your calibre are hard to find.’
This was untrue, but since the argument was obviously getting nowhere, Ivor left, and tried a different tack: persuasion of senior men in his own branch of the field. That only got him nowhere in a different direction. The highest colleague he could reach was Enoch Amin, who had his own views:
‘We’ll never be redundant, Ivor. Powell doesn’t know it, but ULTIMAC really is the ultimate in opportunities for us. Every computer in the world tied into it, and every one of them on the edge of taking sick overnight—to say nothing of the master machine itself. It’s the design engineers like Powell who’ll be put out of business; we’ll be rushed off our feet.’
‘But the whole damn system is supposed to be homeostatic—self-correcting!’
‘All the more jobs for us. Did you ever hit a self-monitoring computer that worked? We’ll be shooting all over the world, trying to find out which component went wrong where.’ Amin stood up ecstatically, which, since he was half a foot taller than Ivor, made him seem as though he were about to go into orbit. ‘And as for the Big One, my God, what an opportunity! Believe me, Ivor, we’ll wind up the secret masters of the whole system. Wallowing in luxury, if we can just find the time off for it. And, of course, keep our focus firmly on the I.A.s.’
Ivor knew well enough that the I.A.s Amin was referring to made up an entirely different set than those Powell had invoked, and furthermore, constituted a trade secret. Neither set comforted him. He foresaw trouble on a massive scale, and neither Amin nor Powell could talk about it except in terms of keeping their jobs.
As mentioned, Ivor had a rudimentary social conscience, but it was now clear to him that he had no pull. He had gone as high as he could in both directions. He went back to doing what he had been trained to do. He also fired his wives and his cats, gave up drinking and insofar as was possible, eating, and reduced his hobbies to the single one of saving his money at the highest interest rate he could find—specifically, in a bank whose computer, unbeknownst to anyone but himself, thought that the square root of 4-7 was 0-68581425, which was 0-001488 too high.
He did not know why it thought so, and had no intention of trying to find out. Nor could he have, for that particular kind of bias was beyond his competence. But the effect of filling this parameter in this way upon the machine’s way of compounding interest was satisfying enough so that six years later he was again eating well enough to gain a little weight back.
In fact, the whole next decade was idyllic for almost everyone. ULTIMAC was built, squarely across Niagara Falls—no lesser cooling system could have carried away its entropy loss alone. The gigantic building and its slave computers did everything they were supposed to do, and perfectly. By the end of that decade, if ULTIMAC decided to run the Amazon River backwards for twenty-four hours, or convert world math to the base twelve, or revive the railroad system, nobody argued. The decisions always worked, out to a margin of error so many decimal places to the right as to make Plancke’s Constant look like a whole number, and a rather small one at that.
It put computermen of all stripes out of business, and all but a few politicians, too. Ivor didn’t mind that either. Immediately after his one abortive venture into politics, he had taken the precaution of cutting his bank’s computer off from ULTIMAC (under the guise of a routine check within his own sub-speciality) and as a result could also begin thinking about again taking in one cat (though, certainly, not yet a wife).
This tiny loss of input went unnoticed by ULTIMAC, which recorded only what it was fed, not what it was not. Its glamourous, Government-chosen acronym bore no relation to how it actually worked: it was necessarily a topological computer, geared despite all its decimal places to the losing of some information it did have in the byways of its almost total connectivity. It compensated; it worked; that was enough. And it was particularly good, as predicted, at servicing itself; no human hand was asked to touch it from the moment it went on stream, and most certainly not Ivor’s.
Nor would he have done so if asked. As far as he was concerned, Utopia had arrived. Besides, topology was not his sub-speciality—in fact, he knew less about it than he did about poetry—and in ten years of calculated idleness he had almost forgotten the sub-speciality
itself. He had even given up worrying. He did remember the trade-secret I.A.s, since he had sworn a solemn oath to do so, but bearing them in mind had become a useless exercise. And as for keeping his eye out for remote sands in which to bury his head, Just In Case, that had retreated into complacent fantasy.
So it was nobody’s fault but his own that when the glitch hit ULTIMAC, he was virtually next door to the monster and was hired, nay, ordered, to fix it. The rest of this story is very sad indeed, and since by its very nature is not stored in ULTIMAC or anywhere else, you may not wish to read on. It requires a lot of explanation, too, and neither sadness nor explanations are welcome in our present, real Utopia. But they meant a lot to him, back in those days, and justice must be served, even to him.
Hence: among the trade-secret Laws of Computerics to which Ivor was sworn were the following:
I) Tell the customer nothing about the machine, even if you know something about it. If he insists, give him an incomplete Xerox copy of the assembly instructions for next year’s model. The head office will have insured that his present model is incomplete and that delivery date for the missing component cannot be predicted. If by any chance the customer has a complete machine, the On-Off switch has been designed not to function more than one time in six, which is the last thing the customer will suspect.
II) When the machine malfunctions, blame the customer’s programmers. The manufacturer will then send in its own programming team to re-train the customer’s programmers, on the premises. This group is highly skilled in disagreeing with the customer’s team, item by item and over a long period.
III) After an independent programming team has been called in and the impasse has been reached, you (the service engineer) will be asked to investigate the machine itself. Since no machine makes a record of where or why it has malfunctioned, your duties are:
a) disappearing into the machine for AS LONG AS POSSIBLE;
b) introducing a new malfunction which you then correct;
c) filing a long and incomprehensible report.
A good service engineer should also master the art of disagreeing with glacial impartiality with all three programming teams.
IV) By this time the guarantee will have expired. Notify the manufacturer to send a salesman to the customer with colourful brochures about the succeeding model. Never at any time even hint that the malfunction was actually inside the machine.
These Laws had once functioned very well, but none of them were of any use to Ivor when he was confronted with ULTI-MAC. The Fourth Law was particularly inappropriate, since there could not be any succeeding machine to tout. And he had been put on the job, of course, because of his wrongheaded public spirit; for though he hadn’t pressed it very hard or very long, both Powell and Amin remembered that he had predicted that something would go wrong. It was a perfect syllogism: he had predicted it, he was a service engineer, he was the man to fix it: Q.E.D.
Of course he did know, in a gross way, what the malfunction was. In answer to school-children’s questions, ULTIMAC had taken to printing out in the home answers which would have been of dubious suitability even to advanced medical students. This part of its operation had been shut down, but while it seemed minor on the surface, chill premonitions passed up and down the spines of Government when they remembered that ULTIMAC was running everything else, too.
‘The next thing,’ Powell told him grimly, ‘might be banana oil from the water taps. Or something much worse. You were right all along, Ivor. Go to it.’
Okay. But how? Like all service engineers—inevitably, since no single man could know everything there was to know about computers—Ivor knew only one kind of fault to look for. When he actually found one such, he fixed it. When he didn’t, he created one and then fixed that, in accordance with Clause B of the Third Law. That wouldn’t work this time, either.
Superficially, he might have seemed just the man to deal with ULTIMAC, since his particular sub-speciality was storage-and-retrieval, which was where the machine was (up to now) going potty. But that was a layman’s mistake, though a natural one to make even for Powell. ULTIMAC had a glitch: that is, also in strict accordance with the opening proposition of the Third Law, it had not recorded the cause of its own malfunction. Moreover, since the glitch was a slippage in storage-and-retrieval, the chances were high that the machine had actively wiped out whole areas of other information which might—just might—have contained a clue or two.
His hand sweating on the grip of his overloaded tool kit, Ivor was reverently ushered through a low door no man had entered in ten years, and ULTIMAC slid it shut behind him with a gritty slam.
Except for the sound of Niagara Falls, muted by diversion through hundreds of thousands of channels to a delicate murmur, the huge building was almost silent. Occasionally, there would be a small salvo of clicking noises, as though Ivor’s first wife had broken a string of beads; and once, briefly, he thought he heard a louder, harsher version of the water sound. The air was fresh, bone-dry and in gentle motion, now and then carrying a whiff of ozone, and less often of things of which he could only say that they were certainly not ozone.
Concrete corridors stretched away from him radially and confusingly, twitching around corners and out of sight in no apparent pattern. They bore painted code numbers, and Ivor had been given a map, but the reality was not so simple. The corridors had not been built for human traverse. They were even lower than the door, single-file narrow, and had rails running down their middles. Since he had to suspect the rails of being electrified, he at once found that his pace and posture had to be approximately that of a swan out of water, and frequently further complicated by switch-points wherever the corridors crossed. Also, there was a lot of static; his hair stood up like a corona in a brush discharge. Should he touch any metal at all. . . but he tried not to think about that.
He had not progressed very far when he heard the harsh water noise again, this time growing louder. At its climax, something very like a fictional robot appeared ahead of him from the right, turned smartly on the track points, and retreated down the same corridor he was waddling along. He was too startled to get a good look at it, but he had the impression that it was about his own height and width, was about three times as thick, and had about ten times as many appendages as he did. Also, it most certainly did not waddle. It drove, purposefully.
Here was a danger he should have foreseen. As a self-repairing machine of record size, ULTIMAC had to have its own servicing devices: slave mechanical equivalents of Ivor himself, mobile and able to reach every cranny of the edifice.
The corridors were designed for them. Moreover, should he encounter one, there would be no room for both of them, and it would be obviously hopeless to try to tell it to stop.
After that, his progress was further slowed, since at every intersection he checked the setting of the track-points, so that if one of the servos should come up behind him he would be able to jump aside in the direction it was not going to go. As a by-product, he promptly got lost. He wished fervently for a compass, but an ordinary magnetic one would have been whirlingly useless in this electronic maze, and a gyro-compass would have been too bulky—his tool-kit arms were aching already. However, he managed to retrace his steps with the map and start over from where he had gone wrong.
Not long after, he heard the noise again. This time he saw the machine much earlier, for it was coming directly towards him. He had plenty of time to retreat to a previous intersection, where, he found, the servo was not going to turn in either direction. His early spotting had been aided by the fact that on the front of the thing a red code-number glowed, like the display in a pocket calculator. As it passed, he was able to see that the numbers were indeed a display, inside a slot-like window.
Here was a problem a good deal simpler than the glitch, in that it was probably soluble. There seemed to be no reason to number the servos themselves, and even had there been one, painted lettering would have served. A display subject to change more re
asonably suggested the gadget’s temporary area of assignment. He checked the code he had seen against his map. Yes, there was such a combination, about a mile back and to one side of the route he had been following.
An idea so crafty smote him that he almost chuckled before he realized that he had to be dead silent, or be dead. After he stopped trembling, it still seemed like a good idea.
Why not hitch a ride? Or a series of them? Even if it made his course much more indirect, it would be faster in the long run, and just possibly safer, too,.
He got back in motion on his own in the meantime. In an hour’s further uncomfortable progress he saw three more servos, and studied them as carefully as possible. All those appendages made him nervous; he wanted to make very sure that the gadgets were oblivious of him. There was only one way to be certain of that, which was to stand in the path of one, just beyond where the points showed it would have to turn away from him—and keep a sharp eye for last-minute changes in the track setting. On the third encounter, he nerved himself up to trying it.
The machine did not even falter; and as it turned off, he saw at its back a lattice-like structure festooned with tools—replacement ‘hands’ for its many arms. He could cling to that; it would be uncomfortable, but anything would be better by now than this back-breaking swan gait.
At his first attempt, he dropped his kit while jumping. The next one, however, worked. The servo took him almost as far away in all directions from his goal as it was possible to go; but at least he had learned that the trick was possible. (All experiments, after all, require several stages.) After that, he cheeked the map, and jumped only on those machines whose smoky-red codes showed destinations nearer and nearer where he was supposed to be.
Antigrav : Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters Page 5