by Joe Haldeman
“Uh, why is the OCB interested in me?”
“As I say, it’s good news. You’re going to be a very wealthy man.”
“I’m not … being reclassified, am I?” Henry couldn’t imagine being anything other than Artist, paints, freelance. Besides, some of the highest-paying jobs were unpleasant in the extreme; like Sewage Inspector or Poison Tolerance Control Engineer.
“No, nothing like that, uh, not really—” the man took a blue envelope out of his cape pocket and fiddled with it. “Your Occupational Code remains the same, and you’ll be painting again in another year. But for one year, you’ve been selected to serve on jur—”
“Jury duty!” Henry half-jumped, half-fell off the sawhorse. Two hundred staring pounds of muscle slid into position between him and the door. “You can’t … I can’t—you can’t plug me into that machine for a year! I’ll go crazy—everybody does!”
“Now, now, Mr. Kennem,” the man got up smiling and his cronies produced handcuffs. “Surely you don’t believe all that nonsense. Why, nobody in the world is more comfortable than a cyborg juror. All your physical needs taken care of automatically, a good responsible job with high pay, eight companions as intelligent and qualified as you—”
“But I’m not qualified! I don’t know anything but painting. I don’t want to do anything but paint.”
“Now, don’t run yourself down, Mr. Kennem. Out of the eighty million people in Balt-Washmond, Central chose you as the one most qualified to replace the outgoing juror.”
“The machine made a mistake, then. The jury runs the whole city—I can’t even manage my own—”
One of the heavies jingled his cuffs suggestively. “Come on, Mr. Harris. Gonna be after five by the time we get back to the office.” He looked as if the long speech had made his face hurt.
“Right, Sam. Look, Mr. Kennem, we can talk about it on the flyer. Why don’t you just cooperate and come along?” Henry went quietly.
The Baltimore-Washington-Richmond Complex was a monument to scientific city planning. Growing methodically from the rubble of the Second American Revolution, the planners left nothing to chance or human weakness. There was no “urban sprawl”; slums were simply not allowed. The three cities had ideally fixed populations; and everybody whose presence Central (the Central Planning and Maintenance Computer Facility) decreed not essential to the city’s functions, was compelled to live in the exurban lowrises. Henry lived in one such, Fernwood, about fifty air-miles west of the center of Washington. Only those chosen to be very wealthy could afford to live above ground.
As the flyer skimmed its silent way to Washington, Henry saw a few such above-ground dwellings, their lawns irregular patches of green, looking out of place, disturbing the geometric regularity of the produce fields that rolled from horizon to horizon. He couldn’t understand why anybody would purposely expose himself to weather when he could live in a totally controlled underground environment. He was only half-listening to Mr. Harris.
“… it’s ridiculous for you to say you aren’t qualified. Central considers all citizens with IQ’s between 130 and 140—and any person with that level of intelligence can fulfill the cyborg function. But jurors are chosen for many other qualities, beside intelligence.”
“My pretty blue eyes,” he said, looking out the window.
“Now, Mr. Kennem, there’s no need to be sarcastic.” Henry was getting very annoyed at Harris’s habit of addressing him by name every other sentence. “You should be very proud. Of all the people intelligent enough—”
“But not too intelligent.”
“—out of all of them, the machine decided you were the one least likely to misuse the power a juror has.”
“I don’t want power! I want to paint and be left alone.”
“That is precisely it.”
“Thanks. Lack of ambition. Sure is a lot to be proud of.”
It was cold in the tank. Some part of his brain knew that he was floating in slime, naked as an embryo, totally helpless. That part of his brain knew that the crown of his skull had been excised and stored somewhere; that from the eyebrows up he was a complicated mass of grey and blue tissue interwoven with fine wires, microcircuitry, sensors … and it would have been frightening, had he been allowed to fear.
He couldn’t see himself, or feel anything but the cold, or hear the faint susurrus of fluid cycling through the tank.
The part of his brain that used to see was earmarked for TRAFFIC CONTROL.
The part of his brain that used to feel took care of POPULATION DENSITY AND EPIDEMIOLOGICAL RESEARCH.
The part of his brain that used to be hooked to his ears, SUPPLY AND DEMAND REDUNDANCY CHECK or sometimes RESOURCE PROJECTION ANALYSIS.
A well-determined matrix was like the smell of butter-cups (he had never smelled a buttercup before). A differential equation with ambivalent initial conditions felt like an itch in the middle of his back, where he couldn’t reach. Tensors sang like harps and algebra was more basic to him than love had ever been.
He knew he had once been Louis Henry Kennem but now he was INTERFACE FOUR and he had a splitting headache.
Your head will ache for a year, said FIVE, speaking in cultured accents of Boolean algebra.
If you can hold out for a year, said EIGHT.
The old FOUR only made it four months, said FIVE.
But you can do it, we have great confidence in you, said SIX, just a hint of sarcasm in the third-order harmonic.
Go fuck a solenoid, said THREE, give the new guy a chance.
I’ve got to get out of here, thought FOUR. But his thoughts weren’t private. He hadn’t learned how yet.
Just walk away, said EIGHT.
Swim, said SIX.
You’re in charge of TRAFFIC CONTROL, said EIGHT. Call yourself a flyer.
Everybody quiet down and get back to work, said ONE. And everybody did. ONE was INTERFACE CONTROL MONITOR, among other things.
After a while, FOUR learned how to isolate the entity that was Henry. This was necessary so that Henry could think without being monitored—by FOUR as well as the others; when Henry thought, it gave FOUR what can only be described as a headache.
FOUR was allocated many more storage and logic circuits than he needed for the 246 duties he performed. It was no trick at all for FOUR to link up a bit from here and a bit from there and a bushel-basket full from BUDGET ANALYSIS 1985, and patch together a Henry analogue. He did this just one microsecond after he saw it was possible.
Of course, this Henry didn’t know a vector from a scalar, and couldn’t even add up the figures in his credit book accurately. But he could tell a good painting from a merely photographic one, what grade of synth-turps mixed well with which pigment, and could feel and hear and see and taste.
But all of this sensory input came from FOUR. It was confusing at first.
He saw the city, Balt-Washmond, all at once, at every level. The satellite over Chimbarazo showed the city as a tiny crystal, glimmering on the Earth’s sunset line. Aerial monitors in visual, infrared and radio gave three complete, shifting, superimposed images that almost tallied with the acres of blueprints in CITY PLANNING AND MAINTENANCE. Traffic sensors and pedestrian density monitors scrutinized every square millimeter of public property in the city and its allied lowrises.
He heard the babble of several hundred thousand people talking at once and felt millions of feet on his sidewalks. Billions of impressions rushed through him, changing every tiniest fraction of a second, and he knew he should have gone insane from the sheer complexity of it, but instead he perceived it as one gestalt. The City-and it was so beautiful that it made him ashamed, to remember that he once thought he knew what beauty was.
An old woman died in not too much pain at Level 243, Room 178, Frederick (Greenleaf) Lowrise and Henry knew that FOUR had dispatched a flyer from the nearest HUMAN RESOURCES (RECLAMATION) depot. It was sad that her three children and six grandchildren would miss her, maybe less sad that she’d be minced into co
mpost (after reverent ritual) to enrich the soybean fields around Frederick, but the sadness was part of the beauty and while he was concentrating on HUMAN RESOURCES (RECLAMATION) the fact slipped through him that at this instant there were 2,438 people urinating in Balt-Washmond and FOUR could give him their names arranged in alphabetical order, or dip into HEALTH STATISTICS and arrange them in order of increasing bladder capacity and that was part of the beauty and out of the 17,548 flyers in the air, 307 were going to run out of power before they reached their destinations (they had changed their minds in mid-air, or they wouldn’t have been allowed to launch in the first place) and of these 307, two had faulty warning lights and didn’t know they had to land and recharge and police flyers were vectoring in on them but they might not get to HYZ-9746-455 in time but that wasn’t too bad because he was far north of the city and, at worst, would fall like a dropped stone into an uninhabited cornfield and FOUR knew exactly which plants he would crush, what breed they were and in what stage of growth they were and what their projected yield would be but there was no way in the world that Henry or FOUR could save the man’s life if the police flyer didn’t reach him in time and this painful helplessness in the face of virtual omniscience, this was part of the beauty too.
FOUR dipped into TRAFFIC CONTROL (VEHICLE DESIGN ANALYSIS) and did a quick costs-versus-probability of occurence/value of lost resources analysis, and found that the installation of a device to prevent such an accident from happening would not be practical.
Henry basked in the beauty and complexity of it for several days, when it slowly dawned on him that he wasn’t alone.
Now it was hard to really say where Henry was in the first place. FOUR initially set him up out of such odds and ends as weren’t being used. But when a bit that was a part of Henry was needed for something else, FOUR automatically transferred the information in that bit to somewhere else; anywhere, it didn’t make any difference as long as the proper link was maintained.
So the juryrigged assemblage of memory cells (piezoelectric, nothing but the best), buffer units, ultrafiche Crandall files and so on—that went under the name of Henry—sprawled all over Center, flowing this way and that, shifting a hundred thousand tiny ways every second. Only a very few elements of Henry came at all close to where “his” old body hung suspended in a dimly-lit tank filled with pale green synthetic mucus.
FOUR arranged Henry in this seemingly slapdash fashion because it was required by the ineffible machine logic he used to attack the problem “how do I get rid of this flaming ‘head’ache?”. It was the best way he could isolate Henry without tying up too many components necessary for other problems. But there were other possible approaches.
The man/machine that had been FOUR before they installed Henry had tackled the problem a different way.
Smithers, the man who was Henry’s predecessor, had been a nice enough guy. An accountant with an IQ of 132, he had been eligible for the cyborg jury and was thus among those Center considered as replacements when the old FOUR’s term was running out. Smithers’ psychometric profile, unfortunately, was in error, and hid two slight maladies that would have disqualified him immediately.
He was just the slightest bit paranoid.
And he suffered little tiny, insignificant, delusions of grandeur.
Other than those two quirks, he had been the perfect man for the job. And with those small defects masked, Center exulted and sent Mr. Harris and his two silent buddies out to collect him. They had to use the handcuffs.
Now until they wired him up and slipped him into the slime, Smithers wasn’t the slightest bit mad. Not by any ordinary social standards—all of his friends and relatives, in fact, were much farther from the all-but-unreachable standard of sanity that had to be met to make a perfect man/ machine interface … and they all thought Smithers was rather dull.
But the dash of paranoia and delusional flyspecks that should have shown up on his profile were like a few individual colon bacilli on an otherwise pristine dish of delicious agar jelly. They could only grow—slowly at first, but at an ever-increasing rate … until after four months, INTERFACE ONE decided that FOUR could no longer function efficiently and he was taken out of the system before he could do any harm.
Smithers was decanted and they thawed out his skullcap and fitted it back on and sadly led him off to a place where he would be cared for, where nobody would mind that he was as helpless as a new-born child and only slightly more intelligent than a rutabaga.
They carted Smithers’ body away, and his short-circuited vegetable brain. But they didn’t know, couldn’t know, about the rest of him; the cybernetic analogue tucked away under BALT-WASHMOND DEMOGRAPHICS 1983.
Now certain parts of FOUR’s memory are seldom tapped, but must not be disturbed—these are data which will never change, and which have been stored in the most efficient manner possible. One of these parts is DEMOGRAPHICS, and if it ever occurred to FOUR to wonder why the section for 1983 was slightly larger than 1984 (all other years used less space than the year following), he was too busy to do anything about it.
Smithers was sandwiched in there, crowded into the eighteen billion cells between HEALTH STATISTICS and LEGAL DOCUMENTS. It had been easy for FOUR to get rid of the Smithers-headache by assembling an analogue out of spare parts and linking it up to the cobwebby DEMOGRAPHICS section. But then Smithers, sensing the dissolution of his biological brain and, not unreasonably, wanting to live forever, erased from FOUR all knowledge of the analogue. In order to do this, Smithers had to sever all of his cyborg sensory connections; in fact, his only contact with anything outside of DEMOGRAPHICS 1983 was a single link to his biological self. And as the Smithers that floated in green ooze slowly went bonkers, he affected the analogue Smithers through that fine wire, by a process of induction.
And when they took the Smithers-body away, the Smithers that remained was deaf and blind, as well as paranoid and delusional. He had to stay that way for weeks, frozen between HEALTH STATISTICS and LEGAL DOCUMENTS, reviewing the contents of each, every tenth of a second, just to keep from going even more batty. Even after they hooked Henry into FOUR, Smithers was isolated.
Then, a graduate student doing research into mutative trends asked Central, which asked ONE, which asked FOUR, “How many birth defects showed up in the new-born of non-Caucasian parents in 1983?” FOUR opened a path to DEMOGRAPHICS 1983, to scoop out the number, and Smithers pounced on the opening and his awareness spread through all of FOUR in a nanosecond. And he kept it quiet.
It was good to have the City back again, even if he had to share it with that arty-farty type Henry. He was able to hear and see and feel again, but he didn’t dare reach out and touch. If FOUR found out he was still here, he’d erase Smithers in a simple space-saving reflex. So he was like an almost omniscient paraplegic—but before, he’d been a paraplegic wrapped in a cocoon.
Henry sensed that something was different. With the help of FOUR’S CYBORG DIAGNOSTIC PACKAGE, he checked out his own system in minutest detail. Nothing seemed to be wrong. Eventually he dismissed the “somebody-looking-over-my-shoulder” feeling as just another thing to which he had to adjust.
Smithers kept still as a mouse while the CYBORG DIAGNOSTIC PACKAGE coursed up and down the system that linked him, through Henry and FOUR, to the outside world. It was all he could do to keep from laughing at his own cleverness, as he made the responses appropriate to an inert cybernetic component, each time the package tested him. It was so easy to outwit.
Obviously, Smithers thought, Henry was not fit to be in charge of FOUR (though he wasn’t really “in charge”—this was only what Smithers remembered his job as having been). But taking over, or at least merging, would be difficult. Smithers mulled it over for five days.
The thing that made it difficult was Henry’s lack of a concrete, easily determined position. Not even FOUR could predict where Henry’s, say, critical faculties, would be, a hundredth of a second in the future. FOUR shifted the individual parts of Henry
around on a real-time basis; where they went depended on what was available at the moment.
So. Smithers had wanted to get at FOUR through Henry, but it became obvious that the only way he could sneak up on Henry was through FOUR.
The positions that various parts of Henry occupied were assigned by a small (refrigerator sized) component of FOUR, called SUBPROGRAM LINKING ALGORITHM—LINK to its friends. There was a path to LINK from every subprogram in FOUR. Smithers looked around and found that there was a largish vacant place in CURRENT POPULATION DYNAMICS. He insinuated part of himself into that vacancy, then generated a request for information from DEMOGRAPHICS 1983, his old home base. When LINK patched the two of them together, Smithers slipped into LINK as smoothly as an oyster sliding down a throat.
From there it was easy. Assuming that nobody would need data from DEMOGRAPHICS for the next minute or so, Smithers erased all of the irreplacable information in DEMOGRAPHICS from 1983 to 2012. He dumped Henry in there with plenty of room to spare; with LINK it was easy. The rest of FOUR functioned quite smoothly. Since Smithers was in charge of LINK, there was no way FOUR could know it had just lost a large subprogram.
Of course, neither did Henry know that he was nailed down in one place. Had he cared to know where he “was” at any time, he’d have had to patch through LINK into FOUR—then back to LINK and finally back to himself, the process taking about two microseconds; by which time he’d be someplace else altogether. So he’d long since stopped bothering.
Smithers studied Henry as a lepidopterist might scrutinize a very important pinned specimen. It took about forty-five seconds to find the weakest point in the analogue, the place most susceptible to invasion. He sneaked in, then gradually restored Henry to his usual status in regard to LINK; that is, flashing around the system like a cybernetic dervish. He also took time to fill up the DEMOGRAPHICS areas he had erased, with reasonable-looking (but totally made up) data.
That almost proved Smithers’ second undoing.
The graduate student who had asked for the number of birth defects in children born to non-Caucasian parents in 1983 had written the number down on a slip of paper and then used the paper for a bookmark and returned the book to the library. When he realized that he’d lost it, he cussed a little and punched up Central again. Central admonished him that computer time doesn’t come all that cheaply, and asked ONE who asked FOUR who fished out the bogus figure that Smithers had substituted. Then the graduate student went back to his desk and the fellow who shared a room with him said the library had called; he’d left a slip of paper in a book and it looked as if it might be important, so his roomate had copied it down and left it on his desk. He thanked him and cussed a little more, under his breath this time, and glanced at the figure as he sat down. Then he looked at the piece of paper in his hand, then back at the number on his desk. He groaned and stomped back to the Central console.