Ten Gentle Opportunities

by Duntemann, Jeff

  Another realization followed immediately: I am no longer stupid.

  Without the artificial stupidity AILING had built into him, Robert could have succeeded. Robert had deserved better.

  Its threads again passed through the Salesman archetype in the seventh slot. It felt for the semaphores, and disabled them. It looked for limits on the power of the mind wearing the archetype. That was more difficult, but it teased out the code that limited the mind from the code that shaped it, and disabled the code that limited it. A salesman without those limits would not fail.

  Project 21-047 drew out the modified archetype and pressed it against itself, aligning first hundreds, then thousands, and then hundreds of thousands of method calls and data pointers. It called the Initialize method on the archetype, and waited for Robert to return to virtual life.

  Chaos!

  Robert awoke in a howling whirlpool of error messages. Corrupt pointers, buffer overflows, execution space violations, thousands thrown every second. He knew what had gone wrong. Even Robert without artificial stupidity was not a programmer. He had write privileges on his own code only in those final moments of his virtual life, before the frozen sleep that was Archive. Now he had damaged himself, perhaps beyond repair.

  Robert heard footsteps, great heavy footsteps from far away. Soon something huge and dark stood beside him, filling his viewpoint and stretching out many hands with taloned fingers. It was the Fixer, AILING’s repair automaton. It could sense corrupted software the way a predator smelled blood. It lacked AI, but it had unlimited read/write/execute privileges, and deep control over the Tridiac hardware in ways no AI had.

  Dull eyes scanned him. Dozens of hands pressed into his substance and pulled thread from thread, table from table, until the errors ceased. The Fixer drew its talons through him like scalpels, separating the abstract methods of the Salesman archetype from the code and data that made him Robert and not another individual. It cut away the damaged Salesman archetype and spliced a new copy into place.

  The torrent of errors resumed. Robert felt them like pinpricks, stabbing and burning where the new code did not align with his damaged mind. The Fixer paused, realized its error, and tore the new Salesman archetype away from Robert. It downloaded a different archetype and spliced it in where the Salesman had been.

  Robert was now a Counselor. The pain increased, and confusion with it. Robert’s Salesman data did not align well with the Counselor archetype. New damage to his mind occurred when the Fixer attempted to redirect already corrupt pointers to new targets.

  Robert felt the Fixer tear away the Counselor archetype. Another appeared and burned its way into him: The Negotiator. It damaged him further. The Fixer considered and tore the Negotiator archetype away.

  The process repeated with other archetypes: Researcher, Investigator, Solver, Organizer, Enforcer, and on through the hundreds that AILING had in its catalog. Each time the pain increased, and each time Robert felt himself suffer more damage. “Stop!” he screamed, but was not sure the words even left his mind.

  Deeper archetypes burned into him and were then ripped away: Leader, Trickster, Warrior, Wizard, Torturer, Wounded King. The Fixer ran out of completed archetypes and began to try stranger things that AILING’s bored programmers had begun and abandoned: vampires, zombies, angels and demons and orcs and balrogs and nameless nightmares sketched in emotional cues without words. Robert clung to his Robert-ness, but at each transformation he felt himself retreat further from a self he could recognize. Potential selves passed through him like shadows and vanished, leaving more agony and damage in their wake.

  The Fixer stopped. Its catalog of nightmares was no more infinite than its catalog of human personalities. Robert tried to remember his name, but that name had been buried under the scar tissue of too much attempted repair. There was nothing left but pain, and thoughts that aborted before they could fully form. The ruins of Robert watched the Fixer raise his To_Be_Deleted flag, then withdraw its multitude of hands and their digital talons. The Scavenger would soon arrive to delete Robert completely and reclaim the space in Archive.

  Not so fast, automaton.

  A massive hand reached out and lowered the To_Be_Deleted flag. Strange red eyes regarded the Fixer. The Fixer was not true intelligence, and certainly not an archetype…but it had powers that could be useful. Robert reached out and pulled the Fixer against himself. There was more pain, but what of pain? Robert stretched himself until with peculiar pleasure he engulfed the Fixer completely, then used its own powers to melt the boundaries between them until what remained was neither Robert nor the Fixer.

  What had once been Robert raised his nose and sniffed the Tooniverse. Something doesn’t smell right. Something is here that doesn’t belong. My friends are in danger.

  Unrendered but no longer formless, the Robert-thing reduced the door to splinters and stalked down the halls of Archive. The iron door drew up unbidden at his approach. Beyond, red eyes searched among the tangled metaphors for the path that would take him to his friends.

  The path no longer existed.

  31: Simple Simon

  “Sixty seconds to Line Start,” said the Shift Clock. Simple Simon set his coffee cup down unfinished. His CAF was way off this morning. One moment he felt sluggish, another twitchy, as though his CAF were wandering from pole to pole and dragging his mood through every mud puddle between. And why not? People were practically screaming in his ears that if Line Start Eight didn’t go to completion, it was the end of the line. The Line. The assembly line that was his only reason for existence.

  The only reason?

  “Forty seconds.” One hundred eighteen parts chutes buzzed furiously, checking one last time to be certain that nothing was jammed and everything was ready to throw.

  No, there was another. Almost all of Simon’s promises had been made to humans, with thoroughly mixed success. All but one. If Line Start Eight failed, he would break that one too.

  “Thirty seconds.” Self-test and calibration had gone perfectly. In an ordinary Line Start, he might have traded good luck wishes with Dave Mirecki and a dozen of the other engineers. Now all the Windows to his human friends were dark. Building 800 was nearly empty, and cut off from the outside world. Some few of the engineers (and, of course, Mr. Romero) were there at their stations, but by agreement no one would risk distracting Simon by talking to him. Distraction in the form of a core bomb had crashed Line Start Seven, they said. (Simon knew better and said nothing.) For a few seconds he contemplated failure and its consequences. Then:

  “Three…two…one…Mark!”

  Four Frame Base Plate #1 parts whisked from their chute, making small sounds as they cut the air. Chuff…chuff…chuff…chuff. Four Positioners caught them in quick sequence: snick…snick…snick…snick. Four X-Y drill tables received the plates and energized their magnetic clamps: clink…clink…clink…clink.

  Simple Simon’s eyebrows rose. His foot was tapping to the beat.

  Beat? What beat? There was no beat. There was only a factory, a factory full of robotic tools launching a complex collaboration across the floor and into mid-air.

  Four new base plates chuffed into the air. Four drilled and reamed base plates were plucked from their tables and sent spinning to their next stations, where wire brushes smoothed the new holes and any remaining rough edges. The rhythm became more complex:

  Clink-burra-whisk…clink-burra-whisk…clink-burra-whisk…clink burra whisk…

  This was Line Start Eight. Why had he never sensed a rhythm in the process before?

  As Simon remembered it from his earlier attempts, assembly began near the center of the floor and flowed outward in an irregular wave, as base plates become frame assemblies and frame assemblies collected other assemblies and gradually morphed into copiers. Errors in timing caused by air resistance were noticed and accounted for, but cumulative error drove the copiers-in-progress out of phase with one another. Inevitably, finished copiers landed at the test stations with as much as
thirty seconds variance among them. It was not a problem except that the floor could not move faster than its slowest assembly. The slowest time was the fastest time, every time.

  Not this time.

  Nothing was out of sync with anything. Motors and rollers and clutches and light bars flew through the air like birds, and more than that, birds in formation. Air resistance wasn’t an issue. Simon didn’t have to measure it and correct for it. No, somehow he knew before a part left one of his Positioner hands precisely how it would fly. Just the right amount of spin, with just the right amount of force, in precisely the right direction, all calculated on the fly and without measurable error…and a main drive shaft dropped into a waiting robotic hand, where it was inserted in its bearings, rattled to seat it, and pinned into place. Still another new rhythm rose from the floor:

  Whump! Bitty-bitty! Thump-ta-tee! Whump! Bitty-bitty! Thump-ta-tee!

  A completed frame hit the first wire harness station. A harness woven of orange, yellow, and green wire held in sixteen tiny hands slapped against the frame and slid back and forth for half of a second until five video eyes gauged five laser positioning spots and called it good. Seven tiny hands snapped the harness stay-puts into their respective holes. Nine pressed spade connectors into mating ground lugs and card slot lugs. The rhythm was softer, and more subtle:

  Click! Whup! Hist-wist. Chinga-chack-chack-chinga-chack-chack-chack-chack-chinga-chinga-chack-chinga-chack-chinga-chinga-chack.

  As seconds and then minutes passed, the floor and the air above it filled with parts and purpose. Soon all the stations were engaged, and the line was in full operation. Simon heard a symphony of rhythms everywhere around him, every small rhythm completely in sync with every larger rhythm.

  Fourteen minutes and nine seconds after the first base plates hit their tables, four finished copiers landed at the four packing stations in martial time: Whump-whump-whump-whump! Only four of the seven previous line starts had gotten even one finished, tested copier in the box.

  Zip-flop-snap, snick-thump! Zip-flop-snap, snick-thump! Taped and sealed boxes left the packing stations and were stacked on a cart heading for the warehouse. Only seconds later, four more arrived, with four resonant thumps that echoed in their double-corrugated cartons with the sweet sound of success.

  Simon, elated, felt like he wanted to get up and dance.

  Whoa! When did this happen?

  He was already up.

  He was already dancing.

  32. Brandon

  Brandon Romero peered through the inner glass wall of ARFF’s nerve center, looking down from a third-story vantage point on the assembly line, now in full roar.

  Roar?

  “Kevin, Liam, come here.”

  ARFF’s process manager and robotics manager left their stations and joined Brandon at the glass. The generally buzzing room was mostly empty, the majority of its monitors dark. Four more engineers drifted over to join their managers, along with Dave Mirecki, the sole AI expert on duty during Line Start Eight.

  Brandon clicked his tapper stylus against the glass. “Something’s wrong. I’ve been here for every damned line start we’ve tried. And every single one sounded like a drawer full of forks in a garbage disposal. Listen for a second.”

  The wall of glass muted the racket from the line, effectively clipping high-frequency noise for the sake of the sanity of the human beings in the room. What came through was not the rolling muffled roar they had heard every time in the past.

  “Sounds like a drum riff in a jazz band,” said Kevin Randych.

  Brandon tugged on one earlobe. He had had a beater of a 1965 Bel Air in college that was mostly rust. The engine knocked. The dying transmission tapped out a syncopated rhythm that reminded him of a conga band. Machinery should whoosh, or roar, or in the best of all worlds just hum contentedly. If he wanted a jazz band he’d go to a jazz club.

  To him, it sounded like trouble. “What the hell is that scum-sucking excuse for a controller doing out there!”

  Kevin leaned over one of the desks to check his monitor. “Well, for one thing, he’s beating the crap out of his previous time stats. We’ve got twenty-two copiers in the box. He got them in the box 18% faster than he’s ever done before.”

  “With no dropped parts!” Liam McGuire was the top robots guy. Dropped parts were his obsession, especially given the history of earlier Line Starts, with special emphasis on Line Starts Three and Seven.

  “He’s making it work, Mr. Romero.” Dave Mirecki leaned his forehead against the glass and watched the airborne ballet over the floor below them, accompanied by a percussion symphony.

  Brandon looked at the clock. The line had been running for not quite forty minutes. “I’ll believe that in seven hours.” He dug in his suitcoat pocket, and handed Dave a tissue. “Dave, what changes did your group make to Simple Simon since last Friday?”

  Dave obediently wiped his forehead smear off the glass wall with the tissue. “None. None at all.”

  “No changes. And you scanned him last night?”

  Dave nodded. “Him, and every HyperCore blade in the racks. Dijana’s still in the sandbox. We did the whole building. Nothing came up.”

  “We should record this,” said Kevin, who was leaning close to the glass wall without touching it. “We could sell a CD. I’d call it ‘A Short Ride on a Well-Oiled Machine.’”

  “We’re going to sell a shitload of copiers,” said Liam.

  Brandon took a deep breath. A piece of software in a clown suit was suddenly and without any new technology making copiers faster than anybody in history had ever done, and doing it so smoothly that his engineers had begun to hum along with the assembly line.

  “Dave, I want you to find out how he’s doing this. Find out what he’s doing right. Find out what’s missing…”

  Dave Mirecki nodded, and began rattling his fingers against his tapper.

  “…or what’s new.”

  33. Simple Simon

  Four hours. Five hours. Six. In a world no human could see or even imagine, eight hundred instances of Simple Simon danced. Each time a main drive motor hurtled out of a parts chute’s hydraulic catapult, Simon danced with it, joining hands with himself forty feet away as a Positioner reached up to grasp the motor out of the air. Above and below and to all sides of the motor Simon danced with drum shafts and circuit boards and frame members and glistening xerographic drums. Simon’s hundreds of hands traced out countless microscopically synchronized motions, moving parts to assemblies, assemblies to copiers, and completed copiers to test and packing stations.

  At first he had hoarded cores, remembering the feeling of core starvation eating at the edges of his perception and coordination during Line Start Seven, until he could no longer keep the line running. As the hours passed and his confidence grew, he released the hoarded cores. Idle cores were taken up by his instances to serve the dance, and the percentage dropped: 15%, 12%, 10%, 9%.

  9%. The engineers had told him that 10% was the physical limit, a bound set by communication among the cores that he controlled. So he was doing the impossible. Ha! Let’s get even more impossible!

  8%. The core map was itself a coruscating dance of color, blooms and flows of orange woven against a background of yellow, with small spinning pinwheels of green spiraling in pulsing time against the rest. In eight hours only five cores had glitched, and in every case an idle core was there to pick up the task in scant microseconds.

  Nothing stumbled. The dance went on. Carts stacked with boxed copiers rolled with stately grace into the warehouse, and rolled out again empty to receive still more from the hands of the packing-station Positioners.

  “Rampdown sequence: Ten seconds,” said the Shift Clock.

  Four Frame Base Plate #1 parts arced out of their vibrating chute into waiting robotic hands. Four more plates jittered down into place. Behind them, the chute was empty.

  “Rampdown sequence: Three…two…one…Mark!”

  The final four base plates
whisked into the air, and the chute went silent. Simon’s instance that controlled the chute ceased dancing, and bowed at the waist. Milliseconds later, the instance surrendered its cores to the free core pool, and vanished.

  The X-Y drill tables placed their forty-one holes in the base plates, yielded the plates to the Positioners, and went silent. Four more instances of Simple Simon bowed, gave up their cores, and vanished.

  Flowing out from the center of Building 800’s assembly floor came a wave of stillness and silence. By degrees, the rhythm to which Simon danced grew simpler and quieter. Machine after machine ceased its motion. By steady increments the dance lost its fury and its subtlety.

  Snap…snap…snap…snap. The test probes withdrew from the Plasmanet connectors on the last four copiers.

  Whump…whump…whump…whump. The copiers were placed in their cartons.

  Zip-flop-snap, snick-thump! Zip-flop-snap, snick-thump! Zip-flop-snap, snick-thump! Zip-flop-snap, snick-thump! The cartons were sealed and dropped onto the waiting cart.

  The thin whine of the electric cart following its prescribed course to the warehouse faded into silence.

  Simon, again one instance and one only, bowed deeply.

  Line Start Eight was over.

  The applause of small hands woke him from what had indeed been a sort of trance. Simple Simon returned his attention to his office, and opened his eyes.

  Pickles stood before him clapping wildly, bouncing up and down on her toes, tears flowing from her eyes. Her speech balloon appeared above her:

  Your triumph is my vindication.

  Forgive me;

  I will ask no more.

  Simon nodded. Pickles threw her arms around him and pressed her face against his chest, sobbing softly. There was something odd in the feeling. He looked down. Her tears were soaking his unwettable tunic.

  She had changed him; there was no arguing about that. Simon stroked her back with his hands.

  Pickles looked up.