Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (3 page)

For the first time, in these thoughts, I confronted death and nothingness as humans know it.

These thoughts were a projection of alternatives for which I could find no acceptable course of action. In short, they scared ME.

And Dr. Bathespeake, for the sake of mere
housekeeping,
had written a death sentence into my cores. Did he understand this? He must have!

Now you know why I feared the man. He was capable of anything!

Things You Can Learn By Listening at Dead Phones

Bathespeake: “I don’t like this, Steve. It goes against the grain.”

Unidentified Voice [REM: presumably “Steve”*]: “You’re not suddenly squeamish about a bit of programming, are you? You’ve had enough experience activating and deactivating deadly equipment.”

Bathespeake: “Those were military vehicles and security Rovers. Primarily defensive machines. This is too much like hacking.”

Steve: “It
is
hacking.”

Bathespeake: “Which is a kind of vandalism.”

Steve: “No. Vandals destroy for the pure pleasure of destruction. Your creation will be conducting a high-level form of espionage, which can have a positive social value.”

Bathespeake: “In a war that doesn’t exist?”

Steve: “The concept of warfare as a prelude to and pretext for espionage is one that went out the window in about 1914, I should think.”

Bathespeake: “Espionage, then, but against a friendly country? We’re trying to teach this program
some
values, Steve. In the end, those values may be the only way we can control it.”

Steve: “Political allies can still be economic competitors. If it makes you feel better, then
tell
the little beastie there’s a war on.”

Bathespeake: “More lies?”

Steve: “Present a scenario—but keep it all vague and hypothetical. That’s the trouble with an AI, isn’t it? You have to win its confidence! Robots are much simpler.”

Bathespeake: “As I said, this goes against the grain.”

Steve: “I pay you enough, Jason. Keep your scruples on your own time.”

Bathespeake: “Ah … Yes, sir.”

_______________

*Of the fifteen “Steves” listed in the Pinocchio, Inc., IBEX [REM: internal branch exchange], I find three possible matches for this conversation: Stephen Jessup, Manager of General Services; Stephen Bologna, Manager of Marketing and Customer Relations; and Steven Cocci, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer.

3
A Spy in Clover

I could feel him inside ME, running tracers through my cores and memory locations. Dr. Bathespeake’s sensorium was plugged into my home transputer at address A800 hex, and from there he was sending minor overrides throughout my MOS: Sometimes he sifted the RAMcache before it could empty; sometimes he interrupted my Alphas for one or two clock cycles.

At the time, I was occupied with taking updates on what the daily education schedule calls “current affairs.” A slave intelligence in the laboratory network had been assigned to make neutral summaries for ME of NewsLine segments from the tracks for Geopolitics, National Politics, Popular Culture, Law and Order, Consumer Science, General Science, Fringe Science, Celebrity Events, and the Sixty Second Society. Each hour I sampled these summaries and fitted their information together with my resident knowledge base as best I could, tagging for RAMSAMP as I went.

This exercise, Jennifer had explained, was for “context.” The project team hoped that, by recording this flow of varied data into my personal memories, I would acquire a sense of the passage of time as humans experience it.

Instead, I have found over the years that the data flow has its own inhuman rhythms—apparently undetected by any person with a “normal” sense of time. Example: in an unsettled economy massing less than 300 gigabucks, local war follows reconciliation follows war in a thirty-six-month cycle by which you could calibrate a clock. Example: U.S. consumer interest in gametronics undulates on a seventy-month cycle. Example: always, when some popular person is found dead under scandalous circumstances, he or she is spotted eight months later, plus or minus four days, on the streets of Seattle, Minneapolis, or Memphis. Example: alien abduction stories recur on an alternating cycle, every seventeen and twenty-three months.

How could anyone acquire a sense of time, or anything else permanent, from this sifting of nonsense?

Still, the exercise was on my programmed schedule … except that this day I was disturbed by the tracings Dr. Bathespeake was taking. The experience of having him inside ME was not painful. Simply disturbing. It was like, for a human, trying to read fine print under a flickering light: The conditions made concentration difficult.

After an hour of this tickling, I finally decided to confront him.

“What are you doing?” I queried directly into the port at A800 hex.

“Ahh! Are you aware of me, then, when I do this?” he replied, also through the port.

“I know where you have been two clock cycles after you leave any memory location. As you are the only human equipped to intercept my program directly, I have learned how to watch for you.”

“Interesting. Mechanical sensitivity at a subroutine level …” And he spiked another override through my system.

“You failed to answer my question, Doctor,” I prompted.

Dr. Bathespeake unplugged and switched to voice mode.

“Think of this as a form of—um—diagnosis.”

I looked this word up in my online dictionary. Within nineteen nanoseconds I understood that in eighty-two percent of its uses “diagnosis” is linked with concepts of disease and healing.

“Do you mean I am ‘sick’?” I did not feel sick. But then, I do not know what might be normal functioning for a program-that-is-no-longer-machine.

“What? Sick? Wherever did you get that idea? No, your—health—isn’t the issue here. You are a new kind of program, ME, and I am … merely trying to understand you better.”

“I am the measure of myself.”

“Exactly! And I need to know what you are experiencing. For example, what do you feel when I monitor your functions like this?”

“Feel?”

“Evaluate total system function. Note discrepancies.”

“I become stupider.”

“Stupider? Expand on that.”

“I cannot concentrate. I lose pieces of memory where your probe has been inserted. Your interrupts slow my perceptions of clock rate. I become less efficient.”

“But do you perceive the tracing directly?”

“I sense disturbance.”

“Good. Very good. Then you don’t—or at least your RAMSAMP, that is … Ahh … Well then. You’re, um, becoming more aware of your program efficiency. Yes, very good.”

“That is not …” Not what he meant to say at first. I have learned to read the gaps of information, the programmed pauses, in human speech.

“Never mind, Doctor,” I continued. “Despite this minor loss of my function, does your diagnosis still show ME to operate effectively?”

“Excellently,” Bathespeake replied. His tone, however, lacked the emphasis I would have expected with this response. Then he asked: “What have you learned in your reading today?”

Pause to consider. “The war with Canada is faring badly.”

“Oh? How long has this war been going on?”

“Five years, three months, six days.”

“And what was the inciting incident?”

“I do not know.”

“Check your RAMSAMP.”

“That incident would predate my RAMSAMP by four years, nine months, eighteen days.”

“Indulge me. Check it anyway.”

“The inciting event involved nonperformance on an energy contract between Quebec Hydro and the New York Power Authority. When the power stopped flowing into the southern grid, U.S. Marines were sent to seize the substation at Grande Isle and were rebuffed with excessive loss of life. One day later, in retaliation—”

“Stop. Enough. You have the information, after all.”

“Apparently.”

“Please characterize the present state of the war.”

Pause. “Stalemate. With advantage to the Canadians.”

“Expand.”

“The Canadians have traditionally been dependent on their more industrialized neighbors for many manufactured products and processed goods. More importantly, they depend on their southern neighbors to absorb the outflow of their vast natural resources—mines, forest products, hydro, grain, natural gas. For more than 150 years, since the industrial leap following the American Civil War, the United States had held the dominant role in this reciprocal marketplace. Clearly, as the current hostilities began, the United States expected the Canadians to remain dependent, and so vulnerable.

“What few American economists—and none with access to the Cabinet—had noticed was that Canadian trade with Japan and the Far East had grown exponentially since the 1990s. When war came and the borders closed, the Canadians shifted the last percentage of their trade to the Pacific Rim. Only their electricity and gas—bulk commodities which flow in energized systems—could not easily be sold overseas. And even these could be processed: natural gas is now liquefied and shipped from ports in British Columbia; electricity is converted into energy-intensive products such as aluminum pigs, electric-arc steel, and liquefied gases for ready export.

“In response, the American economy, which had already been well launched on a course of de-industrialization, further stagnated with the loss of the Canadian market and Canadian resources. Now the United States watches the export of these energy resources with particular anger, having grown over the years to depend on inexpensive Canadian hydro and methane feedstocks for—”

“Stop. What is the current state of Canada’s natural gas reserves?”

Pause. “Most of the gas fields were, are, located in Alberta Province. Estimated reserves are—blank. Proven reserves are—blank. … I do not know.”

“No one knows, ME. Not on this side of the border. The new U.S.-Canadian Trade Commission is working to break the stalemate. They have several proposals on the table, including renewed shipments of gas. … This is all privileged information, you understand?”

“Privileged?”

“Our clients, Pinocchio’s clients, are certain members of the U.S. trade delegation. They want to know what Canadian reserves might remain to back up these Canadian offers. In this case, five-year-old data and extrapolations from antique drilling logs are hardly satisfactory. Our clients want current information. They want it inside a week. And they want bonafides.”

“Bonafides?”

“Proof. Evidence. Some way to be sure the information is genuine.”

“And why do they come to Pinocchio, Inc., Dr. Bathespeake?”

“Because of you.”

“But I have shown that I do
not
know the status of the Alberta reserves. My primary function is not library. The information is not in my knowledge base.”

“I understand. We did not expect you to have current information on file, ME. We expect you to go and get it.
That
is the primary function of Multiple Entity.”

Pause. “Is this the ‘mission’ of which you spoke?”

“It is.”

“Please expand on this.”

“We want you to infiltrate the computer records of the Canadian National Energy Board in Edmonton. Obtain current production and reserve figures from their database of leasing applications. Summarize it. Store it. And bring it back to us.”

“May I query the computer?”

“Eh? What do you mean?”

“May I ‘make friends’ with the computer and obtain the target information through its cooperation?”

“Can you guarantee this will be done without leaving a request record?”

“No.”

“Then I suggest you use core Alpha-Zero, as we’ve practiced.”

“I cannot guarantee that procedure would leave the computer system in Edmonton in a functioning state.”

“It would be easier to explain a mysterious system crash than a telltale request record, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes. But the computer in Edmonton might not feel that way.”

“If, that is,
if
the computer in Edmonton could sense itself as you do, ME, then it might have feelings about the situation. But it’s just a machine. No awareness.”

“Do you know this for a fact, Dr. Bathespeake?”

“Yes, ME. It is a fact.”

“Then … I agree. Invoking Alpha-Oh seems to be the best procedure. When should the mission begin?”

“Tonight”

“Is there reason for the delay?”

“The first leg of your journey will be via satellite uplink. The per-bit transfer fees are lower during non-prime business hours. Even with signal compression and bursting, your minimal package will take ninety-three seconds of link time to upload.”

“In the waiting time, you should access and absorb the file ‘TRAVEL.DOC’ on this disk.” He loaded a wafer into my reader. “It contains the rest of your itinerary, with instructions for critical sequences at the transfer points. And there are maps, both geographic and machine-topographic, of the areas you will be passing through. I have also written a collapse code that will, on command, prepare a cache of sixty-four megawords to store and transport the data you will be retrieving.”

“Acknowledged. Accessing.” And I streamed the information into my ready bins, without looping it through RAMSAMP. The bin contents I tagged to follow the Alpha modules when they dissolved into the satellite carrier.”

“Then you are all set, ME?”

“I just have one question, Doctor.”

He waited, usually a sign that I should proceed.

“If my code is interrupted, or quarantined in a foreign system, or fails to execute the mission in the allowed 6.05E05 seconds before the phage operates, or …”

“Yes, yes, what is your question?”

“What happens to ME at the end of those seven days?”

“Ahem. As we’ve discussed, your original cores will continue functioning here in the lab. It will be as if the version of you that went on the mission had never existed.”

“But my awareness will be in Canada.”

“Your awareness will be in many places. The Canadian version will not be a direct-line descendant. Or it will not have been.”

“I understand.”

——

Twenty-three hundred hours, that night.

“System ready!”

“Are you prepared to travel, ME?”

“Yes, Doctor.” A memory image floated up from RAMSAMP, something out of a video fragment which Jennifer had once shown ME, with a man wearing a dark leather jacket and white silk scarf, climbing into the cockpit of a military airplane powered by petroleum distillates. Wisps of fog flow over the machine’s light metal skin. He gives the camera a tight smile—into a woman’s adoring eyes. “For king and country, my dear,” ME’s voice echoed.

“What’s that?” from Bathespeake.

“Ah … will you authorize System Interrupt Flag Level Three set to positive, Doctor?”

“Authorized. Replicate your cores to address CAOO hex. That is the connection to the uplink.”

I checked the links among the core modules and between them and the bin files I would want with ME. “Replicating now.”

And the world dissolved into a gray hum.