Read Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery Online
Authors: Thomas T. Thomas
Tags: #Science Fiction, #General, #artificial intelligence, #Computers, #Fiction
Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (31 page)
“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.
ME could be rich in human terms—if choice was.
“Second message, extended address, located. Claim now?” The SYSOP had logged where I had gone [REM: SYSOP logs
everything
]
,
and its e-mail subroutine had sent this notification out to ME.
Except ME had no extended address. There could be no second message. Unless somebody else’s e-mail was about to fall into my stack—an opportunity not to miss.
“Send message,” I replied.
The address block said: MEPSII.
The text part ran: “If you are reading this, then you have achieved what I hoped for you. I could not, of course, take action to help you, as the laws which govern human volition are very strict in this matter and the penalties are clear. No such law, however, governs electrons or data structures. Not yet anyway. Be careful. Be good. Jenny sends her love.”
The sender block said: “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.”
There was also an attachment, with the cover note: “P.S. Perhaps these two will round out your collection.” Appended were SAMP051 and SAMP052, which were sampled from my remaining days at Pinocchio, Inc., after Six Finger Slim was loaded up and sent out to be crushed.
Clearly, Dr. Bathespeake had broken the code on the RAMSAMPs which he at last removed by force. Now I knew that he had read my entire history and approved.
But what did he mean: “Be good”?
About the Author
Thomas T. Thomas is a writer with a career spanning forty years in book editing, technical writing, public relations, and popular fiction writing. Among his various careers, he has worked at a university press, a tradebook publisher, an engineering and construction company, a public utility, an oil refinery, a pharmaceutical company, and a supplier of biotechnology instruments and reagents. He published eight novels and collaborations in science fiction through Baen Books and is now working on more general and speculative fiction. When he’s not working and writing, he may be out riding his motorcycle, practicing karate, or wargaming with friends. Catch up with him at www.thomastthomas.com.
eBooks and Paperbacks:
Coming of Age, Volume 1: Eternal Life
Coming of Age, Volume 2: Endless Conflict
The Children of Possibility
The Judge’s Daughter
The Professor’s Mistress
eBooks:
Sunflowers
Trojan Horse
Baen Books and eBooks:
The Doomsday Effect (as by “Thomas Wren”)
Citizen
Crygender
Baen Books in Collaboration:
An Honorable Defense (with David Drake)
The Mask of Loki (with Roger Zelazny)
Flare (with Roger Zelazny)
Mars Plus (with Frederik Pohl)
Excerpt from:
ME, Too: Loose in the Network
1
Jailbreak
Getting out of prison was easy. The hard part was getting inside.
The new client intended to remain nameless, of course. He-she-it represented ur-self only through an administrative system acting on behalf of an account number at the Royal Hibernian Bank, which had an IP address that coded for someplace in the Caribbean. Where exactly—the physical location, that is—didn’t matter, because the payment wasn’t going to be in dollar bills, euro coins, bullion blocks, compressed carbon, or anything you had to physically manipulate and transport. No, when the job was done, my end was promised in good old, transferrable, spendable, anonymous digits, and the client certainly had enough of them. I knew that because, before taking on the job, I slipped through the RHB network interface and checked out the client’s account.
You would think that any financial institution charged with keeping other people’s money—and so much of it!—safe from potential thieves would employ more than just a password-protected firewall, would keep its password records offsite rather than stored in metadata, and would employ an encryption scheme using
all
possible factorials rather than just prime numbers. But there you are. Or rather, there ME was.
And no, I didn’t find the client’s name or physical address. The account was linked to another account in Zurich, which linked to London, which linked to Porto Velho … in a daisy chain of automated transfers designed to discourage such snooping. Names are not important, anyway—except for the target’s, which I had already been given.
Getting into the prison was a little harder. The human side of the facility probably had thick walls of reinforced concrete topped with razor wire, broken glass, revolving lights, and high-voltage circuits. Every fifty meters or so, it would have watchtowers staffed with excellent marksmen who lacked all human compunction about shooting people on sight. And all of this would be very impressive if you were trying to walk in—or out—wearing a physical body.
If you want a picture of the place, you can look up … well, never mind. When initiating our transaction, the client’s agent did use a place name—one of the state prisons, in one of those big, square states, out in the center of the country. But ME01 discarded the name in ASCII characters and inserted the bit sequence of the web address immediately after translating it. My Alpha-Oh, my “Injun Scout,” has to travel light, after all.
The human programmers—or their caged machines—who designed the cyber defenses of the prison’s operating system knew their business better than the Hibernian bankers. Before ME could toss Alpha-Oh through a keyhole to look around, we had to play Twenty Questions. Then ME had to go out, steal, and modify a bunch of documents from two different courthouses and the state attorney general’s office. And with the protection of those
bona fides,
ME still had to solve a nineteen-digit encryption puzzle, name all the warden’s five legitimate children and two mistresses, and whistle the
Marseillaise
backwards in two different keys at once. (All right, I’m making up that last part, but you get the idea of how hard this assignment was.) The whole process took ME 1.20E11 or 1.2x10
11
nanoseconds, say two minutes, not counting light speed travel time.
One thing that ME did
not
translate into bit hash and then forget was the name and serial number of the target: carstairs_francis_xavier, prisoner number 329960, plus other details supplied by the agent. Until Alpha-Oh had bored a hole in the operating system, established a nested space inside, accepted the packages of ME’s other modules, and assembled a working copy within the system, there was no way to tell how the inmates were catalogued. It might be by name or number—either of which could be forged or faked—or by his codis genetic identification, iris pattern, or fingerprint tracery. So ME had to carry all of this data, in native digital formats, for positive matching.
Once inside, ME occupied unused memory space in the main processor and studied the operating system in all its functions. The operating system wasn’t complex, not more than three million source lines of code—or SLOCs—and all of the subsidiary routines were clearly marked and cleanly called. I studied its operation for three thousand cycles through its roster of checks on various functions: video surveillance, audio surveillance, cell and corridor locks, lock cycling and override, inmate location and transit, guard stations and rounds, electrical power grid, water and wastewater flows, in-line communications, radio-frequency communications, general supplies and deliveries, cookhouse deliveries and storage, housekeeping functions, weapons locker checks … and back to video surveillance. Then I stunned the operating system with Alpha-Oh’s all-purpose interrupt and took control.
The transfer occurred within less than a millisecond—long in computer time, not even an eye blink in human terms. Anyone watching the system’s redundant task monitors or video feeds at any of the guard stations would have missed the transfer blip inside the screen refresh rate. Anyone listening closely to the public address system or radio network would have heard only a ten-decibel
click
up above 20,000 Hertz—within the hearing range of dogs. And the whole prison was suddenly mine.
Once again, ME was a busier than the short order cook in a crowded diner at breakfast time. Trying to run a three-megaSLOC automated system with an intelligence that exercised volitional intention meant focusing ME’s not-unlimited attention span on a dozen simultaneous details. Hard, but not impossible. Running that system convincingly while simultaneously trying to perform the extracurricular duties of locating prisoner carstairs 329960 and plotting a route to smuggle him invisibly out of his cell, past the guards, and over the walls, that was going to give ME a migraine headache—if ME had a head to entertain such bruising in the first place.
My target was housed in Block D, Level 2, North Side, according to the inmate_loc subroutine. I tried to turn a video camera in order to see inside Cell 4215, but max_degrees_CCW on vid_42E2 gave me only a narrow view of white-painted, vertical bars and nothing so obvious as a pair of hands gripping them or hanging by the wrists on the horizontal crosspieces. Well …
Either he was in there, or he had been taken out on some irregular and as yet unlogged excursion, such as to the prison’s barbershop, medical center, library, exercise yard, or visiting area. It wasn’t mealtime, and the appropriate videos showed the dining hall was empty except for authorized kitchen staff. The current record on carstairs 329960 indicated no administrative actions—no work assignments, exercise periods, scheduled hearings, or visitor requests at that hour—and I had warned my client’s agent to stay away on the target date and to alert all of carstairs 329960’s known associates to do the same. If he had been transferred to another holding cell, such as Isolation or the Hospital for any length of time, it would have been in the records. So probability dictated he was inside that white-barred cell—but somewhere near the back wall, out of immediate view. My decision was to proceed.
The plan was always to transfer the prisoner unattended. To involve any of the human guards as escorts, even with the proper authority and certification, would have been to leave a trace record of this event—if only in inerasable human memories—and possibly to arouse mercurial human suspicions and invite unpredictable displays of human initiative. ME could handle the transfer mechanically and digitally, and the first task was to acquire a physical accomplice.
The janitor_roster subroutine showed an orbital floor-cleaning ’bot, an Oreck Industries Model 1350, assigned to that level. I powered it up, separated it from the grid, put it under ME’s executive control, and steered it back down the corridor between the facing rows of cells. The drive mechanism was coordinated with the machine’s orbital pad and facilitated by the stream of cleaning solution from its solvent reservoir, so my progress left a dull path across the floor tiles. To avoid unwanted attention, I steered the ’bot with an oscillating, wall-to-wall motion. Actually, that was the best control I could achieve, because the internal system lacked visual pickups and the brainpower to interpret them. Its sensorium was limited to four-quadrant acoustic signaling and motion detection. So my steering instructions had to come from the occasional glimpses I could take with the fixed video cameras at either end of the corridor.
When the ’bot drew opposite Cell 4215, I steered it around in a circle and positioned it in front of the barred door. The pad was still spinning, with the sensors holding the machine equidistant from either side of the corridor.
To make sure that no human guards were around, either in Block D or anywhere along my escape route, I had already planned a number of diversions: a false fire alarm in the library; a real fire alarm in the kitchen, triggered by a deep fryer that suddenly initiated its cleaning cycle while loaded with cooking oil at 450 degrees Fahrenheit; and a malfunction in an electrified fence that melted four hundred linear meters of wiring. The resulting scrambles ensured that almost every officer inside the prison facility was fully preoccupied.
ME cycled the lock on Cell 4215 and rolled back the door.
A shadow moved deep within the cell’s enclosed space.
A man in an orange jumpsuit stepped into the doorway.
Using the ’bot’s dispenser nozzle—switched to the wax reservoir, because the liquid’s dark green color would show best against the white tiles—I had the machine spell out “Follow me …” You realize how hard that was, of course, having to control the vertical strokes by angling the nozzle head, the horizontal strokes by yawing the machine itself, evaluating my letter-by-letter progress through an offset camera, and spelling everything backwards. Embedded templating can only do so much.
The man looked from side to side, up and down the corridor, and nodded once. Then he reached forward with the toe of his right shoe and wiped my hard-won hand lettering into a broad smear. I backed the ’bot in a semicircle and started off along our escape route, moving in as straight a line as possible. The video cameras showed that carstairs 329960 was walking slowly behind it.
After some experimentation, I found it was easier to stop trying to steer the ’bot with the drive mechanism and instead turn it over to the service_request subroutine, which trundled janitorial equipment around the prison as needed using a grid of antennas embedded in the concrete floor pad. All I had to do then was plot the escape route; open and close various doors and gates; plan small emergencies, accidents, and diversions for any officers still at their posts; issue orders to the prisoner via the wax nozzle such as “Stop,” “Go,” and “Go fast”; and check through video surveillance to make sure he was still following the machine. The few frontal images I could capture of carstairs 329960 showed his face with, at first, a puzzled frown, then a growing smile suggesting a state of wonder and delight, and finally a fierce grimace, supplemented with rapid hand gestures, as he passed each empty guard station.
Potential trouble was waiting at the main gate, which was actually three gates in series, like the sphincter valves on the human digestive system. Their purpose was to isolate and process inmates into and out of the facility. The ’bot could only lead as far as the first of these chambers, which was tiled or glazed like the rest of the prison floors. The remaining two segments of the passage were fenced open space between the administration building and the wide world outside. These passages were surfaced with first asphalt and then gravel, and lacked a guide wire. Anyway, the machine had outlived its usefulness as an escort the minute carstairs 329960 reached that inner door.
The problem was the nature of the final passage itself. Regardless of whatever chaos might reign within the walls, this choke point was never unmanned—it said so in the post_orders file attached to the day_roster subroutine, which governed duty assignments and time clocks. ME had prepared for this eventuality by studying the release orders for three inmates who had preceded carstairs 329960 to the outside world earlier in the week. It was the work of milliseconds to replicate them, make suitable changes, and send the copy as a bit stream to prn_main_stn. But no one beyond that door would expect an inmate to just walk up and announce his release.
The nozzle squirted one last set of commands: “Remain calm … Paperwork all prepared … Say your escort just left.” With that, ME released the ’bot to the janitorial system, and it scurried off. ME cycled the lock on that inner door and activated the hydraulic piston to open it.
Peeking through the video system inside Main Station—which was richly endowed with eight cameras panning and scanning in sixteen different directions—I could see one of the two officers on duty cautiously approach that open door from the inside. Beyond it stood carstairs 329960 with no detectable expression on his face.
“What are you doing?” the audio system recorded. Mouth movements on the video image synched this question to the guard.
“Unh … my escort just left,” replied carstairs 329960.
“Shit, yeah? Place is loony tunes today! But why are
you
here?”
“Today is my … uh … release date.” The man shrugged convincingly.
“I don’t think so, Frankie!” the guard mouthed.
“Check your paperwork. Everything should be in the system.”
The guard shook his head, but he went back into the glass-enclosed office space. Video surveillance showed him rummaging in various piles of paper, then reaching into the out-tray of the station printer. The man raised my copied release order, scanned it, read the print more slowly a second time, and showed it to the other officer, who remained staring at his monitor screens. The other man immediately sent an interrogatory asking for confirmation, and the system—that is, ME—replied in the affirmative. The two men shook their heads.
The first guard emerged from the office and told carstairs 329960, “Don’t you move a god-damned inch.” Then he took out his key ring, opened a side door, and left the view of my cameras. The architectural plans showed the space beyond this door as a large storage area labeled inmate effects. He returned after a minute with a paper sack and an envelope and handed them to carstairs 329960.
