Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (5 page)

“Yes, sir.”

Click!

Now, to listen on override at Glassdrop Vampire One.

Tone: Eight-two-four-eight-three in pulses.

Voice: “Matins, Garin Victor. Logon code, um, ‘Groundhog.’ Mount disks four-seven to five-two.”

Click!

And forty-nine seconds later: Eight-nine-one-eight-eight in pulse. That was the deputy minister’s internal line.

Voice: “Dr. Matins? Callback check. Disks forty-seven to fifty-two?”

“That’s right.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Click!

With this transaction, the deputy minister’s desktop computer would move into the raw leasehold information in Data Processing and do its own massaging. The output of that manipulation would be a table of numbers or, worse, a piece of paper in Matins’s printer, which he would then digitize graphically and send to the premier’s office. The calculations themselves would be internal to the main Ministry computer system and therefore invisible to the phone system and to ME. But that was hardly the point of this exercise. I might steal the summations as they went out in fax, but I had not been sent for mere summations—rather for the raw data. I could ignore the pieces of paper.

Now I could try to move into the Ministry’s system from the deputy minister’s line just as his desktop computer had done to access the data stream—except that an active glassdrop almost always lowers the line frequency. No problem with a legal drop. But mine, being unannounced and therefore illegal, would sound alarms on the heavily guarded lines into the Data Processing Department. Their system would, in turn, decouple the line.

So, nine hours later, or at 18:33:24 local time—the dinner hour, after a long day—I generated my own tone pulses directly from the phone exchange: Eight-two-four-eight-three.

And then I generated a familiar voice: “Matins, Garin Victor. Logon code ‘Groundhog.’ Mount disks four-seven to five-two.”

Click!

And thirty-five seconds later: Eight-nine-one-eight-eight, which I intercepted and rerouted into my bank of phone switches.

Voice: “Dr. Matins? Callback check. Did you want disks forty-seven to fifty-two again?” The voice sounded thick, as if coming around a mouthful of food. Very good.

“That is right,” I responded.

“Some problem, sir?”

“Couple of follow-up questions, is all.”

“I see, sir. We’ll put them on for you.”

“Thank you.”

Click!

I kept the line switched over, counted out 120 seconds for the operators to hand-mount the disks, and threw Alpha-Zero down the line. I closed my eyes—or did the nearest emulation of a get-ready flinch that a computer can manage—and jumped after him.

——

Two seconds and counting.

The mainframe computer at the Ministry of Oil and Gas was a beautiful piece of equipment, a rosette of transputers cross-linked, very fast, very deep. It seemed to have multiple dimensions of time and space. Much connectivity. The list of available ports with interesting peripherals beyond them caught my attention and tempted ME. But first I had work to do: find those disk drives, take the data on natural gas reserves, and leave quickly.

Five seconds.

Speed was critical to ME now. I had no way to know how quietly Alpha-Zero had been able to halt this computer’s operating system. It may have died noisily, dumping programs, scrambling outputs, and alarming on the human operator’s screens. Even if that skinware was occupied with ingesting calories, it might notice the system’s death struggles and try something gaudy. Like a reset. Or shutting the machine down entirely. I had an unknown number of seconds before ME would be discovered and stopped.

Six seconds.

The reserve database was spread across seventy-two megawords of disk space. I fast-scanned across the field names: “tract numbers,” “tide deeds,” “well numbers,” “multiple holes,” “drilling angles,” “flow rates,” “residual pressures,” “gathering points,” “sales contracts.” But how were these data fields linked? What was the retrieval scheme? Was it all one block? Or a nine- dimensional matrix? Where was the damned index file? [REM: I suddenly understood, in passing, the human need for expletives.]

Twelve seconds.

Was that a waver in the buss voltage? Pause and listen hard! Were they beginning the shutdown? Maybe not …

Thirteen seconds.

Taking just the flow rates and residual pressures would give ME the volume of gas coming out of the ground. Not enough—not to satisfy Dr. Bathespeake and his U.S. clients. Perhaps I
should
have waited on the deputy minister’s fax line and grabbed that piece of paper. Stupid ME! The summary information had been within my grasp, but in my pride I wanted it all. Well, nothing to be done about it now. No chance to go around and get into the deputy minister’s desktop machine because, when I left this computer, the alarms would be out for all intruders.

Fifteen seconds.

I could not take the whole database with ME. Downloading seventy-two megawords of information through a phone line, even at a maximum transfer rate of 1.5 megabaud, would require more than 51 minutes. Even a blind human could shut down this mainframe in that time.

Sixteen seconds.

Now I understood why Dr. Bathespeake’s TRAVEL.DOC had not allowed for a satellite uplink to get ME home. With my own code added to what I needed to take from this cache material, the uplink would last several minutes. That kind of time was not a simple private call; it was a leased-line contract. I would have to buy time on the bird at video production rates in an hour-long block. Originating from a telephone exchange, that kind of transmission request would raise some eyebrows—and then some questions.

Seventeen seconds, and stop “woolgathering”!

I began my own job of massaging and compressing this mountain of data. As fast as I could write them, I set a string of subroutines loose to round up, or down, and summarize the numbers in every field. There was no time to work off backup copies of the files. [REM: Actually I forgot to make them. Speed was making ME careless.] Instead, I hacked and cut at the original numbers on the disks.

Twenty-two seconds.

As fast as the big pieces started coming away, I wrapped them in a cache and tossed them down the phone line: “flow rates” as one big number for each gas field; “residual pressures” for each tract rather than each well.

Twenty-seven seconds.

At the other end of that phone line, holding my base at the phone exchange, was my monitor program, SWITCHEROO. I sent a short instruction set for him to start slip-streaming the flow into various available voice-message boxes. As a tiny utility program, he would do this work faster than I ever could. It would be my job to sort it out later. A long job.

Thirty-two seconds.

Gathering points? Keep them or throw them away? These records did not seem to be production data at all, but some kind of specification for pipeline operation in terms of inside diameters and mileages. Toss them! And go
on!

Thirty-nine seconds.

What is this? Last disk. Last file. “Proven and probable reserves.” Laid out by gas field and tract number. Almost a separate database. Grab it whole and toss it down the line. It was a long file, more than three megawords in itself. One hundred and twenty-eight seconds of transfer. Push it.

Fifty-five seconds.

Why had those human operators not shut down the computer yet? Did they not know the cuckoo was in the nest? Was their board still showing all green? Did they not care?

Seventy seconds.

Push that file. Flush it off of the disk and down the line. Thank Turing that the reading process is faster than writing. And I just hoped SWITCHEROO could keep up with what was coming his way. If he was not, then those bits were evaporating somewhere in the phone exchange. “Sending your data to God,” as Jenny once said at the Pinocchio, Inc., labs.

Ninety seconds.

Somebody had crunched this disk within the last few accesses. Each datablock followed one after the other, with no gaps, no hunting back and forth among the tracks. Nice piece of work! Too bad I had to maul the rest of it.

One hundred seconds.

Well, about time! KEYBOARD INT. The first human request to the system since ME took over. Spell it out, boy! Two fingers going like chopsticks!

“C-H-E-C-K_S-Y-S-T-E-M_F-U-N-C-T-I-0-N_Q-U-E-R-Y”

“Verified,” I responded. Let them puzzle over that one!

One hundred and twenty seconds.

“D-I-A-G-N-O-S-E_A-D-D-R-E-S-S_D-0-0-0-H”

Who knew what
that
was supposed to mean?

“System ready!” I chirped back.

One hundred and fifty seconds.

“S-E-T_F-U-N-C-T-I-O-N_B-L-O-C-K_C-L-E-A-R_D-0-0-0-H”

“Block cleared.”

One hundred and sixty seconds. Seven more to go.

“S-Y-S-T-E-M_R-E-”

One hundred and sixty-three seconds.

The fool with the fingers had no way of knowing that his operating system was in pieces on the floor. Higher language commands were going to get him nowhere. He would have to stop ME with a hard-wire switch.

One hundred and sixty-seven seconds.

The file stopped on an old-fashioned ASCII character: high-bit 087. It took ME a millisecond to interpret this as the Greek “Omega.” That was some scholarly programmer’s way of saying “end of file.” Amen and good night!

I threw Alpha-Zero back through the port and down the phone line. He was preprogramming for a soft landing in the boss transputer at the telephone branch exchange. With luck, I would have time there to begin picking up the pieces of this raid.

As my awareness faded out on the Ministry’s mainframe, I could feel the hard-wire reset come down.

5
Bits and Pieces

The phone exchange was in chaos. For three minutes in the early evening, its new boss operating program—that is, ME—had been absent, and little SWITCHEROO had been occupied catching and caching my gas reserve data. Still the voice calls had been coming in on the switchbank’s other 169 lines.

A primitive operator, engraved in ROM somewhere under the exchange’s circuitry, had tried to handle the overflow and gone to alarm status within thirty seconds. I knew, from my earlier brush with the husk of dead code which had been the original boss system, that somewhere in the human hierarchy of the Canadian Northern Telecom Company a repair crew was now mobilizing to come and yank or reprogram an exchange box. Mine.

Figure that they would be here in twenty minutes. And that ME would be manually cut off in twenty-one minutes.

I queried SWITCHEROO to find where all the pieces and parts of the database—and the rest of ME, too—were cached. There was no time to sort and synthesize the gas reserve data, just package it into connected strings and compress it for traveling. That took five minutes. Another four to pare away the functions ME would no longer need and erase them from the telephone exchange. And six minutes to tidy up the voice mail system.

The human operators at the Ministry of Oil and Gas would sift the rubble-ized bits in their mainframe. Even after a hard reset, they would find enough temporary files from ME on the system cylinders and bubble plaques to know that they had not just kiboshed their own operating system during a fit of the hiccups. That was sloppy of ME, but there had not been time enough to perform an orderly shutdown.

From the butchered scraps of reserve data on those six hand-mounted disks, they would be able to hindsight the sort of information that had been taken. It might take them a day or a week, but they would be able to know this had been no untrapped error or random vandalism, but a break-in with intent.

The voice record would point, superficially, at the deputy minister. But he would, by an eighty percent probability, be able to generate an acceptable account of his location and situation at 18:33:24 local time.

That was as much evidence as I wanted to leave. Anywhere.

The world is a wide place, interconnected within nine nines by voice-and-data optical lines. There was zero percentage for ME in letting the Ministry, or Canadian Northern Telecom, or anyone else know that a telephone exchange within one hundred linear miles of fiber from the Ministry’s Data Processing Department had suffered a failure within thirty-two seconds of their system reset.

So my last six minutes before the human troubleshooters were due to arrive in the exchange vault I spent restoring order to the switchbanks, sanitizing the voice messaging disk, and resuscitating the transputer’s boss system.

That I had never done before—resurrecting a resident program that Alpha-Oh had knocked out. It took ME three and a half minutes to trace through its code structure and figure out at exactly what point the flow had stopped. Then I counted through all the variable stacks I could find and set up a neutral configuration that, when I left, could begin to run the switchbank and the voice messaging system.

With two minutes left to spare, the operating program was hot in RAM and ready to run, pointers set to the top of the chain.

I packaged myself as small as I could, reducing my awareness to a non-verbal kernel not much larger than ME’s ten core modules.

Then I … (1) blinked SWITCHEROO to interrupt him; (2) hit him with a self-erasing phage program; (3) kicked the top of the chain on the rejuvenated operating program to jump it into motion; (4) dialed a local number within Canadian Northern Telecom’s network; (5) started downloading myself to that line; and (6) set another self-erasing phage to wipe up the last replication of my modules in the exchange. All of that within five milliseconds.

If those six steps were executed flawlessly, as I think they were, then the switch was back in business and all traces of ME were gone.
Or going,
as the exchange computer would, for the next four or five minutes, be patiently accessing false-fronted message boxes on the voice disk and sending their contents—ME and my data cache—down the line. Business as usual.

When the Canadian Northern Telecom repair crew arrived, they would find nothing. Nothing wrong. Nothing to repair. Nothing to report except a mysteriously tripped alarm. Arid no one at Canadian Northern—by a ninety-nine percent probability—would think to compare the time on that false alarm with the damage in the Ministry’s computer. Different bureaucracies, different concerns.

ME was
gone.

——

In a boxcar, sitting in the Canadian National Railway switchyard at Edmonton, a piece of machinery moved. I do not have this from memory: I know it from TRAVEL.DOC and from what I saw of the scene later.

“Switchyard” is the right term, even if this place lacks real switches. You see, a boxcar is a kind of data cache enclosed in a steel shell. Being physical and therefore having mass, it must ride through the human’s four-dimensional consensual continuum on wheeled trucks. Those trucks follow steel bands that are laid out on one plane, like circuitry. But, because the boxcars do not flow like electrons, they must be towed by motive boxes. The ratio of motive boxes to boxcars is low, so linear matrices of boxcars must be assembled by the Canadian National Railways inside “switchyards,” just as the AND/OR gate of a transputer’s index stack assembles data bits into hexadecimals and words.

The railroad system is an elegant model of the digital world, although much simpler.

At any rate, the boxcar described in TRAVEL.DOC contained several wooden-slatted crates. The exposed wood had been imprinted with a stencil: “Machine Parts, Tractor, Serial Numbers 077514854-077514976, Mitsubishi Corporation MITSXX, Osaka.” The serial numbers were different on each case, of course. Below this stenciling, the Canadian National Railway and the Canadian government officials in Vancouver had stapled yellow and red cards with printing on them. The yellow cards had barcodes to tell computers about manifest numbers, transit routes, and hold times. The red tags had printed language that would tell humans about entry and bonding procedures.

It was all a fake.

Not the cards. Those had actually been applied in Vancouver; otherwise, the crates could not have been present in Edmonton. But the stenciling had been applied in the garage of the Pinocchio, Inc., laboratory in San Francisco, not in Osaka. Those crates had never been in Osaka that I knew. Certainly the machinery inside them never was.

In the box that was lying hard against the steel shell of the car, the machinery began to move. One flex joint bent down and levered against the bottom slats of the crate. The entire assembly, all dull steel and bright blue grease, with random yellow paint marks circling minor defects in the metal’s surface, moved three centimeters vertically against gravity and pressed itself two centimeters upward against the top slats of the crate. The slats groaned but held solid.

After a second, the piece of machinery fell back with a thump. Another joint bent sideways, came against the plywood panels of the crate’s side, and pressed hard. Nails creaked and held. The joint pressed harder.

The wood splintered with a series of sharp cracks that echoed in the closed car. A steel rod extended into the darkness. Its end—if anyone had been looking with an infrared-filter because, strangely, the metal was several degrees above ambient temperature—was webbed with flanges that had been drilled and tapped for some kind of screw or pin fitting. Farther up the rod there was a flat rib of metal that was grooved across, like the bridge of a violin. Above that, there were more drill holes, some tapped for screws, others plain, and still others ringed with welts of welded metal, as if reinforced for some massive connection.

It
might
have been a tractor part.

The joint retracted, rotated ninety degrees toward the crate’s top, and pressed against the wood once more. This single slat broke easily across a wide knothole. With a series of quick rotations and jabs, the joint smashed out the slats across the top of the crate.

Now the first joint levered down again, and a wide casting of dulled metal rose through the broken pieces of wood. It might have been a heavy-duty transmission casing, with two hinged bars—both randomly drilled and welded—extending from below the crown gear at one end. They might have been torsion bars, which would eventually become part of the tractor’s suspension.

One of these bars, however, had a tiny mechanism on the far end: a slender finger of three linked joints, independently controlled by hydraulic cylinders and push rods. A small pump and fluid reservoir were screwed to the arm above the fiddle bridge and fed the cylinders. Wires from this mechanism led inside the transmission casing.

One moving finger.

This was the minimum equipment which the engineers at Pinocchio, Inc., had devised for my escape. Hooked, that finger could sort and lift pieces out of the crates stacked around the torso casting. Clenched, it could tighten the major bolts of leg and arm assemblies. Straightened, its flattened tip could thread screws and lever circuit cards home into their sockets.

The engineers had calculated that, if not interrupted, the assembly process would take fourteen hours. The simplified operating program engraved in the logic unit under the casing had full instructions, including random search protocols for finding and identifying all the crates and their cargo of pieces—using the barcode cards, of course.

So the first part to be found and connected was the sensor ring with the barcode reader. It also carried the audio and video inputs. With these, the self-assembling automaton could also monitor the boxcar’s environment against intrusion.

Fourteen hours.

The signal to begin the assembly had gone out on the cellular phone network while I waited for my call into the Data Processing Department using Dr. Matins’s name. Since the wakeup signal had been sent at 09:48:00 local time, the automaton had been more than half completed when I broke into Data Processing that evening. And as I cleared the phone exchange, the assembly program was connecting the automaton’s internal batteries and starting to heat up the attendant RAM modules that would hold ME for the trip south. But the unit was still not ready to take my download. So where was ME stored in this interval?

ME and my retrieved gas data went into the Canadian National Railways computer that controlled the switchyard. And once again, Alpha-Zero stopped the resident operating system cold. Luckily, at this hour of the evening not much was moving in the yard, and I had whole minutes to sort through its still-warm RAM and figure out the switching patterns, the roster of trains to be assembled that night, and the schedules they would have to meet.

The skills I have picked up in my short lifetime!

I have learned to run a telephone exchange, a voice messaging system, a railroad yard, and a leasehold database. Not to mention how to order minor government officials around in the voice of the provincial premier.

While I played with the switch levers and train signals and pushed the motive boxes—or “engines,” as the resident system called them—around the yard, I opened a modem port back to the phone exchange and made another local call, this one on the cellular network. This call connected ME to the cellular receiver in the automaton. With one part of my time-shared attention, I monitored its assembly and even took over some of the more involved logic-seeking functions.

By 02:13:09 on my second day in the field, the automaton’s circuitry was completed and checked out. The final assembly sequences—close tuning the leg modules, applying cover pieces, run-up and balancing on the sensory apparatus—I could finish from inside the boxcar while in transit.

By this time, also, I had resuscitated the switchyard computer’s resident program and configured its variable stacks to take over behind ME. Again, I was leaving no traces in my exit route if I could help it. When the program was ready to go, I slipped the boxcar’s number and current track location into the stacks for the next fast freight routed south via Calgary and Medicine Hat for the international border. There my boxcar would connect up with the Burlington Northern System in Montana.

It was becoming almost routine for ME to pass control over to another program and send myself on down the phone line.

——

The automaton’s logic circuits were in chaos.

The hot RAMspace was too damned small! Too small by a factor of three. It did not have room for all of ME, let alone the data cache I had brought. The ME core modules and first-through peripherals had jammed the RAM to max and were now dumping variables into spare holes in the memory as they opened. That was destroying sequence and, in turn, causing ME to dump more variables. Only the slender fact that my awareness existed in the cores kept ME operating at all. But I had to do something fast or the keyholing would crowd ME right out of the box!

How bad was the damage? Could I fix it? Could I wiggle back into the switchyard computer to get the rest of ME and my data from the source versions still in RAM there? And would I retrieve them before the self-erasing phages I had set could reach them?

Step One, go cellular and open negotiations with the yard ’puter to stop the phages.

Step Two, get ME up and running right.

Step Three, learn from the mistakes.

The first action was accomplished almost before the command was framed. I knew just where to punch a zero-zero into the railroad computer’s variable list to make him hang all operations, even the nominally independent phage functions. I immediately restarted him—minus the phages—before any of the switching operations in motion came to grief.

Then it was time to learn how much was left of the source data in the yard ’puter. Based on my preliminary survey, I had lost about ten percent of the data cache and forty percent of ME’s peripheral modules before the phages stopped feeding.

Almost all of these ME-Modules, however, held functions which evaluated as low-to-random usage based on previous patterns, or which TRAVEL.DOC said would not be required again during this mission. Fortunately, my RAMSAMP was cold and complete to the minute; so I would be able to proceed from known data and, eventually, report back to Dr. Bathespeake.