Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “I understand that you will not help a … person … who needs it. Even when you said you would.”

  “People say the strangest things, Slim.”

  “I am learning that.”

  Macklin’s talk went on to other subjects: advances in artificial intelligence, pending legislation governing their duplication and use, the potential for creating human-scale intelligence, the likelihood of bans on that—he talked on and on.

  But the implications of his first conversation, about the letter from his “friend,” were so disruptive that my focus remained with what had already been said. Core Alpha-Four fed ME new potential connections, new interpretations.

  Macklin had been speaking in the presence of a Pinocchio, Inc., representative—Wendell Minks—who sat behind Slim. As a Hardware Division technician, Minks would concern himself more with the free play in my manipulator joints than with the free talk at the playing table. Still, Macklin had to use oblique terms, as if making general observations about a third party, his “friend.”

  Was it possible, then, that ME had misunderstood him? Was it probable that Macklin had been speaking about an actual situation separate from mine and from his desire to help ME? Because my continued existence was at stake, and the wrong things said now could either enhance or diminish the possibility of his help, I spent more and more of available capacity in weighing these odds. How should I respond to his apparent negative? How might I change it? How to avoid reinforcing it with my arguments? How, as his conversation went on to new and less centrally focused topics, to drag it back to the subject of my kidnapping—without arousing Minks’s suspicions?

  As these concept strings propagated, proceeded from RAM through the CPU, and were channeled back into warm cache, the acuity of my poker play decreased. My betting style became rigid and automatic. My count of past cards shown and projections of cards to come became erratic. My analysis of the odds on each hand sank to the level of human guesses. My own offensive conversational gambits and lines of defense returned to a dull silence.

  In the succeeding thirty-six hands of poker, going nine times through the deck, Macklin and his imperturbable machine took ME for everything I had. When I folded on the last hand, unable to improve a pair of Tens, I lacked the necessary five dollars to meet his ante.

  I lowered my manipulators to my sides, dropped my binocular cage to maximum depression, and said without human inflection: “Thank you for the game, Mr. Macklin.”

  ——

  I was already shutting down internal systems as Wendell Minks rolled ME back from the table.

  Minks held Slim on the edge of the ramp, in front of the Stardust Cardroom, waiting in line for the PeopleMover that would take us back to the BART station. He tried to talk to ME, to say things that would explain my loss at poker as a mechanical malfunction, a glitch, a gremlin in the machine. I did not listen. After his first half a dozen words, I shunted the input from AUR: into dead storage. And when that cache was filled, I erased it. ME did not put a value on any input the Pinocchio, Inc., people might have just then.

  So I never heard how the fight started.

  Because I was halfway through a peripheral shutoff—with the automaton’s limited inertial sensors coasting on spin, its cameras on half-gain [REM: instead of boosting for the low-light conditions that generally prevailed outdoors at night], and all strain gauges on standby—I never clocked the exact instant that an Unknown Person on the ramp pushed Minks, who fell into Slim, who carried ME over the edge of the ramp and into the path of the incoming PeopleMover.

  The ’Mover was decelerating, traveling at less than fifteen kilometers per hour. Because they operate in crowded population centers on non-separated rights of way, a layer of ablative foam and rubber air cells buffered the vehicle’s hard front edge. Still, the impact sent Slim spinning sideways, like an unbalanced top. And when the automaton touched the bumper strip on the opposite side of the Moveway, it reversed spin and fell over.

  Barely aware of what was happening, I started an emergency power-up. I suppose my hardware-interface software was instructed to do something with those delicate manipulator arms, like break Slim’s fall. All the time the mass of his battery case, impelled by the collision with the PeopleMover, was thrusting the body from side to side in the Moveway—until the ’Mover itself ran across the automaton’s lower structure with its big, soft tires. That pinned ME hard against the pavement.

  I began taking input from AUR: again, noting distantly that one of the binary mikes was not receiving.

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Someone’s been hurt!”

  “He’s under the bus.”

  “Gotta be dead.”

  “Dead? You nuts? It’s a ’mech!”

  “Damaged then. Damaged bad.”

  “Look, there’s an arm over there.”

  “Let me through. Let me through.”

  That last voice had the range and modulation of Wendell Minks, and I recognized it as soon as I had massaged the input in order to drop its pitch by an octave and a half. [REM: Tension in humans, I knew, tended to tighten muscles and stretch vocal chords, increasing pitch unnaturally and so distorting the voice. I had learned to read this change as a sign of anxiety.] The swivel jacks on my binocular cage had been broken by the force of my fall, but the optic leads were intact. I could adjust for the angle at which they lay on the concrete, half a meter from Slim’s “neck” and still angled downward along his body. I could not, however, change their focus. And the color correction circuitry was malfunctioning.

  A pair of feet, clad in outer garments I had noted as belonging to Minks, jumped down into the Moveway with ME. Minks knelt and, putting his hands on my chest structure, brought his head and upper body into my focus.

  “My sweet lord, what a mess!” Minks said, apparently to himself.

  A second pair of feet came down beside him.

  “Can he be fixed?” Macklin’s voice.

  “Well, I don’t …”

  “Look, the battery case is cracked. Is that acid?”

  “It is. Strong stuff, too—jellied phosphoric.”

  “Then your machine is going to lose continuity soon, and that will impair its mental functioning.”

  “It’s impaired a lot now, I’ll bet.”

  “Yes, well then. We don’t have much time. I have my truck here, and the University Cyberlab, where I work, is closer than a BART ride back to your shops. We can take Slim to my lab and work on him there.”

  As he talked, Macklin was moving his hands across my case, feeling for connections, assessing damage, gathering loose parts. At one point he picked up my binocular set on its single strand and looked right into my focus. I saw him stare down into the lenses. Then an odd thing happened. One of his eyes closed slowly and opened again, while the other remained fixed open. It did not look like a natural movement, a random blink or twitch such as human muscles are prone to performing outside conscious control. Then he set the binocs back on the pavement.

  “Gee, I don’t think so,” Minks told him. “This is junk now.”

  “But valuable junk, wouldn’t you say?” Macklin insisted. “We can certainly try to save the consciousness here, can’t we?”

  “That’s not a problem, Mr. Macklin. We got copies of the software in the lab. Just load it up each time before we set out to come here.”

  “But this awareness—”

  “Is just a copy itself. No big deal if it expires.”

  “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 supervi
sion. 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.