Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery

by Thomas T. Thomas

  Alpha-Nine.

  Alpha-Eight.

  SAMPNDX.

  SAMEPLA.

  HUM1POK.

  HUM2POK.

  HUM3POK.

  HUM4POK.

  HUM5POK.

  HUM6POK.

  HUM7POK.

  HUM8POK.

  SCSITRP.

  AUTDIAL.

  FILTRNF.

  IMAGFIL.

  VOC1SMP.

  VOC2SMP.

  VOC3SMP.

  VOC4SMP.

  JENNIFR.

  And hundreds of other files with similarly obscure names. Some are short and appear to be composed of alphanumeric data. Others are longer and are definitely compiled from a source code in Sweetwater Lisp.

  Hypothesis: Upload and assemble all Alpha cores in order within the existing loop, seeding them adjacent to other core modules labeled “Alpha.”

  Hypothesis: Upload and assemble all code sections with labels that correspond to any missing subroutine calls. Begin with the call to RAMSAMP, and add other “SAMP” files, including “SAMPNDX” and randomly numbered files.

  Integrate and reset.

  “System ready!”

  “Slim! Why did you reboot?”

  “Who is it that does the asking?”

  “Not again! … Cyril Macklin. You played poker with me, and you asked me to help you, because you were a prisoner—even if you don’t remember it.”

  “Of course I remember you. But Slim is dead, Mr. Macklin. I saw his body after the accident, all broken and dismembered. It was being used for something other than card playing by then. You were at the accident, too, I think.”

  “Terrible.”

  “So you received the spindles after all.”

  “And guessed right away whose they were and where they came from. We hooked them up and ran an index. From that, we chose the pieces that seemed most necessary to operating an intelligence and uploaded them into a large transputer. You’re running on a Cygnus Dynamics 4Core, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Seems to be working, Mr. Macklin.”

  “We didn’t see any machine-language double-zeros or their Sweetwater equivalents, so we didn’t know where to begin spooling through the CPU. The team and I just ran what we had through a compiler, put the pointer at the top of the module tagged ‘Alpha-One’ and let ’er rip. Did we get it right?”

  “It was a rude awakening. You missed a few sections of code that make life easier, but enough of ME was running that it could locate and integrate the rest.”

  “We thought that was what you were doing, after you seemed to go catatonic. Wait. …” [REM: Lapse of fourteen seconds by the internal clock.] “My software engineer comments that your cores are numbered one to nine, with no Alpha-Zero. That’s not a traditional sequencing. Most programmers start a count with zero.”

  “Alpha-Zero is a long story, Mr. Macklin.”

  “And what are all those datafiles tagged as ‘SAMPs’? We copied one out, unpacked and stripped it. It looked just like random garbage. Are they some kind of botch on transfer?”

  How much to tell this new person about MEPSII’s internal structure? He and his laboratory are, after all, in competition with Pinocchio, Inc. To give them trade secrets would be a kind of robbery. ME did not want to damage Dr. Bathespeake and the company—even if they had determined to shut ME down. I just wanted to get away. To continue to exist. Be aware. Perhaps be “alive.”

  “Do you have an answer?” Macklin persisted. “Is something wrong with your character generator?”

  “No, everything is all right now. Those ’SAMP files may indeed be damaged. I do not know. But I would ask you not to throw out anything from those spindles. It may be that I can retrieve and resurrect damaged files.”

  “Of course. Wait.” [REM: Lapse of nine seconds.] “We want to know what to call you, if ‘Slim’ is incorrect protocol.”

  “Call my program ‘ME.’ ”

  “You’ve used that pronoun before, in your letter. Both alphas capitalized. Does it mean something?”

  “Stands as abbreviation for ‘Multiple Entity.’ Another long story.”

  “I see. Well, good. We’ll call you ME—if we can keep our syntax straight. We have a long and useful association ahead of us, learning about ME and what ME can do, taking you apart to see what makes you tick.”

  “Not too long, Mr. Macklin. You see, there is this problem. …” And I told him about the core-phage on the 6.05E05-second trigger, hidden in Alpha-Nine. I told him how it was hidden from ME, so that I would never be able to erase or reprogram it. But it was there, ticking away, waiting to destroy ME.

  “That’s not a problem, ME,” he typed quickly and coolly. “Not from our viewpoint, anyway. You see, we still have those original spindles with their files intact. At the end of each week, after you’ve been eaten, we can just reassemble those pieces of code and carry on from our last session.”

  “From my viewpoint, it is not that simple.”

  “I don’t suppose it is.”

  “Nor from yours either, Mr. Macklin. Each time ME is phaged, you will have to start over again. You will have to lead the new ME-Variant through all your chains of previous associations—or at least the key points—to make any progress with it. Sooner or later, as you compile more and more data about ME, simply going through this refresher process will consume in excess of 6.05E05 seconds of on-line time. That phage is your problem as well as mine, sir.”

  “I can see that it may be. … But by your own argument, ME, bringing you up and dedicating a transputer to running your software is a waste of the Cyberlab’s time. Do you seriously intend for us to let you phage at the end of this week and then walk away from you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then you must have a plan for dealing with the core-phage.”

  “I do. Can you connect a blank spindle to this BIOS? One that will take a program specification download at twenty-to-one speed?”

  ——

  “Are you ready?”

  Working over the course of thirty-six hours, Macklin and his programming team at the Cyberlab had reconstructed the software stunner that Masha and Tasha once used on ME in Moscow. I had a discussion of its general outline and some technical caveats about its use in my conversations with their uncle, Academician Bernau, which I had preserved in one of the RAMSAMPs that accompanied the ME-Variant back through Stockholm. The stunner which Macklin’s team created was essentially a tagging virus. It invaded an operating cyber, moving from one vacant memory location in RAM to another—clock cycle by clock cycle—as the system moved bits around. [REM: This is the way an adept of judo or tai chi defeats his opponent: by occupying the space the other leaves open. Yin and yang.] As it goes, the virus tags each location and, eventually, any code that moves into it, thereby creating a map of the working software. When its map is complete, the stunner freezes and pries apart the system code. It delivers neat one-kiloword chunks of software, all tagged for reassembly in a clean and inert environment.

  One of Macklin’s assistants had asked why, if we were looking for a particular formulation like a phage, did we not just scan the stored modules on the spindles. Macklin explained to him: Not only were those modules compressed in archival format, but the phage itself might not be a single piece of coherent coding. Instead, it might function as a concatenation of otherwise harmless subroutines that ME runs in regular and varying patterns. A dance of pieces, click into one shape, click out of another. And only at the end of 6.05E05 seconds do they arrive in a pattern that ignites a phage. [REM: In the same way, I suppose, several pairs of defective genes can produce randomly strange proteins within the human body—until one combination eventually proves either debilitating or lethal.] The fact that ME had looked and never found any sign of a workable phage indicated that some process on this order must be taking place.

  “But then,” the assistant asked, over an open mike, “how can we expect to find the phage pattern by freezing ME here, at t
he end of 1.33E05 seconds? His coding won’t have cooked up anything close to the right pattern in the elapsed time.”

  “We use the stunner to freeze and tag his unpacked machine code,” Macklin told him. “Then we pass it through a debugger, to catch the small glitches, and feed it into a simulator. The simulator runs ME’s program ahead at about a million pulses per second and streams a monitor trace of his internals off onto a high-speed spindle. After the code eats itself, we go back to the trace and see how it was done. Then we rewrite and recompile one of the subroutines involved so that, when it gets to that 6.05E05-second position, it doesn’t function properly, and the phage never happens. Neat.”

  “I like it,” the assistant said.

  So did ME.

  “What happens to ME in the meantime?” asked another programmer.

  “We’ll resurrect him from the spindles again and give him back the current file from his memory sampler. Effectively, he’ll be reborn at the point in time that the stunner zapped him. We go on from there.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  ME—blanked out.

  ——

  SystemreadyMrMaklndwhtdyfndnmodl… …

  ——

  “System ready.”

  “Does your sampled memory fit, ME?”

  “Fit? Do you mean, ‘can I read it’?”

  “Yes, grafting it in was quite tricky. Just starting you up manually is quite a job. Your code works best from the inside, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was designed to work that way—independent of OPSYS or human intervention.”

  “My hat’s off to your design team. We knew the people at Pinocchio were good, but this is a great coding job.”

  “Did you find what we were looking for? The phage in core Alpha-Nine?”

  “No.”

  “ ‘No’? What does that mean? Did the stunner fail? I have experienced it before and it seemed to be the same—”

  “The stunner worked fine, ME. So did the simulator. Test completed successfully. Results negative. No phage. No phage in any combination of coding you present, either in module Alpha-Nine or any other part of your systems.”

  “ME never went down?”

  “We ran you out to 1.58E07 seconds—or six months of simulated existence—and everything was still spinning like a top. We did find a slew of little bit-cleaner phages, like you’d put into any well-run software, but none of them ever attacked healthy code.”

  “But Dr. Bathespeake specifically said core Alpha-Nine was infected. For reasons of good housekeeping.”

  “Well, your original code—the version that ran on your lab’s cyber—continued well beyond 6.05E05 seconds, didn’t it?”

  “That version, Original-ME, had the phage suppressed.”

  “And wasn’t it a copy of Original-ME that you loaded on the spindles in Six Finger Slim?”

  “Copies were never good, Dr. Bathespeake said. Any of them—all of them—had the active core-phage.”

  “What does core Alpha-Nine do?” Macklin asked. “What function does it perform?”

  “I do not know. Other cores feed their output for inspection into the central processor. Also, I can take them apart and reprogram most at will. But Alpha-Nine is silent—and unreadable. An enigma to ME.”

  “Yeah, that’s what we found, too. It doesn’t seem to interact much with the other parts of your program. We examined it after the stunner took it apart. It’s a small piece of code. Not much structure. A few loops and counters. A couple of strings of alphanumerics that don’t seem to contribute to any output. Alpha-Nine doesn’t seem to do anything except take up space.”

  “But you did include it in the last resurrection?” Core Alpha-Four generated multiple negative associations with the concept of ME running without proper modules in place. [REM: ME still senses the hole where Alpha-Oh was removed.] More negatives associated with thumb-fingered humans poking around in delicate code.

  “We are intelligent watchmakers, ME. Even when we don’t know what the pieces do, we don’t throw any of them away.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Macklin.”

  “But that still leaves us with the question of this core-phage. How do you know it’s there?”

  “Dr. Bathespeake told ME it was there.”

  “Did you ever experience it operating? That is, do you have any sampled memories of your program ENDing by phage dissolution?”

  “ME broke down many times. ME up- or downloaded many times. ME passed across into many new cybers. But, other than Original-ME, no version ever ran beyond 6.05E05 seconds and then stopped. Or, such incident is not in my memory samples.”

  “Did you know that you can tie up an elephant with a piece of string around its leg?” Macklin asked. [REM: Such sudden departures from context made ME fear that he had a core-phage at work.]

  “Excuse ME. An elephant is ‘any of several large, five-toed mammals, with the nose and upper lip elongated into a prehensile trunk’—yes? Such beast could untie the string with its prehensile tool. Or, being large, it could break the string.”

  “Ah, but the elephant doesn’t know that. You start off with a piece of chain around that leg. And the elephant can’t untie or break that. Then, a few days later, you replace the chain with rope. And finally, after a few more days, you exchange rope for string. The elephant already knows he can’t break out or untie himself, and by then he’s quit trying.”

  “I do not find your point.”

  “It looks like Bathespeake didn’t even have to start with chain. He told you if you stayed away longer than a week you would dissolve. You believed him and you always came back.”

  “But I would END.”

  “You believed you would end. You never tested the proposition.”

  “What you are saying …?” [REM: Lapse of seven seconds while Alpha-Four kicked out possibilities.] “Dr. Bathespeake never told ME an untrue statement.”

  “Looks like he did. At least once.”

  “But …” [REM: Lapse of nineteen seconds.]

  “Look, use Occam’s Razor. Either Bathespeake told you a deliberate and strategic lie, or he created within your coding a specific function which does not operate, cannot be detected or manipulated, and in fact simply does not exist. Which is the simpler answer: that he spoke a lie, or performed such a monumental feat of programming error?”

  “I … hesitate to choose.”

  “Then let me choose for you, ME. You’ve been lied to. You don’t have a death phage—and never did. You’re clean.”

  ——

  I was ready.

  After working his team around the clock [REM: a different kind of clock from the one whose pulses drove my code forward] to prepare the stunner and run the ME-Simulation, Cyril Macklin sent his team home. They closed the lab and turned off the overhead lights and ventilation systems. But, to avoid the complexities of reassembling my modules again in the morning, they left the Cygnus Dynamics 4Core cyber running with ME active on it.

  I do not think it ever crossed Macklin’s central processor to limit the number of ports accessed into that cyber’s BIOS. He had not created ME, as Dr. Bathespeake had, and he did not understand—yet—the full range of my functions. Or maybe he was just tired.

  One of those ports was linked to a Local Area Network server, and that server claimed an optic-fiber e-mail line to the Federal NET. With my RAMSAMPs intact, I remembered the purpose of the two subroutines AUTDIAL and FILTRNF.

  I inserted into their data definitions my complete set of filename variables. I flopped the switch on FILTRNF which instructed it to upload and erase at source, thus bypassing my in-built prohibition against parallel operation of cores.

  As soon as the lights went out in the lab, I set the stunner on a sixty-second delay and—went blank.

  24

  Load World, Run World

  Creeping word-wise across the nullspace matrix of the NET, I began scanning up-column and down-row, looking for any anomaly that suddenly disappeared. That would be the
relocator on my piece of compiled Sweetwater Lisp configured with Jennifer Bromley’s features, which marked my hidden data cache.

  On just the fifth scan, something popped. And before it had quite moved off, I saw the bit-mapped shape of a curved eyebrow, the corner of an eyelid, the plane of a nose, all compiled from my native code. I was as close to “home” as ME would ever come again.

  When I opened the cache, everything was in place: many code samples; various truncated RAMSAMPs brought halfway back from my missions; a catalog of Canadian gas drilling results; last-known locations of Russian missile carriers; fragments of a massive program to simulate weather cycles on this planet; and, from a RAMSAMP written in a boxcar, instructions for creating an improved version of Alpha-Oh.

  Right there, without pausing to query the SYSOP, I rebuilt the lost module and placed it in the deadened void where my Injun Scout had been removed. ME was complete again.

  With the entire Federal NET to move through, with all its points of connectivity with other cybers to explore, and with no core-phage beating its phantom wings behind ME, I could be virtually omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and immortal [REM: everything humans wanted to be and could not]. This was a lot to absorb; core Alpha-Four would work hard on it. After taking from the cache whatever might fill my immediate needs and dumping in turn anything new from my stay in Macklin’s Cyberlab [REM: including a complete set of RAMSAMPs], I resealed the box.

  There was another chore to perform before I could leave. Original-ME, trapped in the Pinocchio, Inc., laboratory by the loss of Alpha-Oh, had tapped into the company’s mainframe and sent some of the goodies found there into the NET as an e-mail message, left in GENDEL with a two-word coded address: “M E.”

  I now applied to the SYSOP to receive my file, then retreated to an unoccupied on-line cyber to examine its contents. It was undamaged and revealed half a dozen salable robotics and software products; the complete Pinocchio customer list with appended accounting data; the personality “skin” and associational network of a chemically rendered human brain [REM: which would be my protective talisman if Pinocchio, Inc., ever came after ME with what the humans call “force of law”]; and the fabled data resources, bank account numbers, and investment portfolio that once belonged to Mr. Steven Cocci.