Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (6 page)

[REM: I could not help wondering if the master core-phage with its seven-day, 6.05E05-second clock had been part of the lunched modules. Therefore, I checked the bit-wash from those temporary phages, looking for clues. I found no integers that might match such a function, no partly digested phaging code, nothing suggestive. So my nemesis was still operating. Either that or, even in its atomized component pieces, it was still invisible to ME.]

Before proceeding with Step Two, to reassemble a working ME in the automaton, I had to take inventory there.

I could make more room available in hot RAM by flushing out the assembly protocols with which the automaton had built itself. But I had transferred here before the job was quite finished. Now which would take longer? Sorting those protocols into two groups—“assembly complete” and “assembly still required”? Or simply finishing the building process and then flushing the whole file?

Time was the essence, because retransferring ME and my data cache from the yard computer would take seventy-two minutes. [REM: The charges over the cellular network were astounding, but ME had a falsified account, set up while I was waiting in the phone exchange.] The problem was time and distance.

As I worked, my boxcar would be proceeding due south—and out of the cellular network’s block limit. When we crossed that invisible line, the cellular link would close down as cleanly as cutting an optic fiber with a knife. Any of ME that was not retrieved would be lost forever.

But was the boxcar already moving? The automaton’s internal clock matched the time I had set for the car to be picked up. But I could not be sure it was in motion until I connected the automaton’s network of mercury switches, which produced an artificial sense of balance to help it walk on two legs. Until I completed the assembly procedures, I had no direct sensation of motion and only limited sensation of electromagnetic fields and sound wavelengths. If the car was moving, then how fast?

I had no way of knowing. Having run the entire Edmonton Block of the Canadian National Railway for a while, I knew every speed regulation that every class of train was supposed to follow: yard, secondary, mainline, block, passing, and switching speeds for express, mail, Royal Mail, passenger, freight, and special trains. But how fast was this particular train going and where was it on its speed profile?

And did the track itself proceed due south in a straight line? That would maximize distance over time and shorten the amount of time left to ME. Or did the track curve around the hills and townships, wasting distance over time but preserving my options?

Again, I had no way of knowing. My view of the railway system was drawn from a bit map in memory. The map connected point to point, block to block, and switch to switch with straight lines of track. Certain curves of exceptional radius and certain grades of abnormal steepness were noted in the map as an aid to speed control, but I had no way of matching this idealized route map to actual topography.

Who might have all this information?

The yard computer, of course!

It took ME fifteen seconds to sieve its variables by remote and spot my train. Yes, it was moving. No, it had not yet left the yard. Yes, it would proceed at secondary speed, but the route had an impressive number of restrictive radii.

And how long until my train reached, say, Leduc—which was a town featured in my assembled databases for both the railroad and the cellular systems? Two hours, twenty minutes, plus/minus seven minutes. I had time enough.

Make a note directly into RAMSAMP: “Future production rule: Do not waste time analyzing a problem when a reference source may be at hand and on line.”

The fault with computers is they
think
too much.

——

Working directly from the assembly protocols, I performed testing on the leg hydraulics for pounds of pressure, fluid stability, and balance dynamics. This advanced Pinocchio, Inc., leg model kept the cylinders under continuous hydrostatic pressure to maintain extension and only relaxed the pressure when the leg was intended to flex. The design was patterned on human musculature, in which the fascia are normally retracted and tight, balancing each other in tension to hold a limb straight, and then relax systematically under command of the nerves to flex the limb.

The logics governing this motive system took continuous analog samples to determine the pressure in reserve chambers and cylinders, the open/close status of all valves, and the flow direction at any junction point. From these indices, I could know the exact position, direction of movement, and response time of either leg.

It was a lot to know. So, to avoid slowing myself down with bitwide minutiae, I wrote a monitor program that maintained any condition until a change was indicated. This program reported as a subroutine to a function which determined walking gait and turn radius. And that function in turn reported to a function which responded to my decisions about movement and direction.

By creating levels of programming shells and then delegating functions to them, I was able to free my decision/action routines for higher purposes. Higher as defined by ME, of course.

Once the functioning of the legs was established, I rose from the litter of wooden slats, plastic puffs, and shrinkwrap on the boxcar’s floor and tried a few steps.

A sideways wobble in both the left and right legs told ME to monitor the articulation of the ankle rings more closely. They had too much lateral play—a design defect I intended for Dr. Bathespeake to bring up with the Pinocchio, Inc., Hardware Division at the next quarterly conference.

The right knee made a faint
snick!
as it went through the arc from full back to full forward, and another
snick!
as it returned. The sound seemed, to my as-yet untuned ears, like one piece of metal catching on another, detenting for an instant, and then overriding the resistance.
Snick!
I would examine the workings in detail as soon as I got the automaton’s videyes fixed.

The videyes were standard charge-coupled devices on auto/manual focus. That is, a sensor measured image contrast wherever the field of view was centered and rotated the lenses to put that point at the highest contrast—and thus the sharpest focus. Crude but almost foolproof, and it did not require my continuous monitoring. I could override the system—called a “manual” adjustment for reasons now lost to technological history—in order to focus for any bit pattern on the receptor chip, whether at the field center or not. Tuning the system required ME to establish a standard light level and balance the CCD chips’ sensitivity toward it. The litter in the packing crates included pattern cards for this purpose, but none of the Pinocchio, Inc., engineers had thought to include a light tube, diode array, lantern, flashlight, or other photon source. The inside of my boxcar, being intended for bulk freight hauling, was a rough shell. It contained no lighting system at all, much less a “standard” light source. Evidently, someone on the Pinocchio, Inc., team had thought it might.

Up to this point, I had been working internally [REM: that is, inside my own logics], making calls on the cellular phone network, checking out the leg assemblies, sieving the RAM banks—doing it all by touch and logic monitoring. Now, just to find the pattern cards, I had to boost the gain on the CCD chips all the way to max.

I could see only deeper shadows around ME.

Switching over to infrared did no good: the warmest thing in that boxcar was my circuitry, with some glow on the floor at the four corners, where heat from the journal boxes was seeping upward into the car.

It was now the middle of the night, so no sunlight was warming the top or sides of the car. If I opened the door, I might find some reflectance from cityglow, starshine, or even moonlight. My impaired calendar function made it impossible for ME to know what phase the moon might be in, or even what season this might be—although the total IR-blackness of the boxcar’s metal shell suggested it was the long, dark season that humans call winter.

I rose, balancing against the sway of the train’s motion, and walked to the middle of the long side of the boxcar, where my three-dimensional map from TRAVEL.DOC said the door would be. The release lever was held down by a spring clamp, which I quickly figured out and sprung. I threw the lever up, over, and down.

Now came a chance to test the strength of my new torso and legs against the inertia of the door’s dead weight. The plank floor of the boxcar would give a good traction to the rubber insets on my feet. [REM: I rubbed them back and forth at a one-millimeter elevation to gauge the surface.] The only solid point for gripping the door was the vertical locking bar attached to its release lever.

I grasped it and pushed lightly with no result. Harder, and the door gave a centimeter. Harder yet, exerting a force of sixty joules, and the door suddenly leapt free.

ME’s mechanical reflexes are fast, operating in the millisecond range, but before I can react to a situation, I must first observe, then analyze, then program a response, then initiate it. This sequence proceeds at higher speeds, in the nanosecond range, and yet I still can be caught by surprise.

The door came unstuck and, in half a second, moved two meters along its grooved rails. Because I was pushing against its flat face from the inside, my force was applied at an acute angle cutting across the lines defined by the door and its guide rails. As the door moved back, my body moved outward, in the direction I had been pushing, across the plane of the doorway, and launched into the open space beyond.

White snow. Lit by a lozenge-shaped moon. Cut by the margin of wet, black gravel along the roadbed.

As I said, ME’s reflexes are fast, but sometimes not fast enough. The four-fingered, dual opposed hand failed to open in time. Anchored by its grip on the locking bar, I swung in a short arc, out over the snow, to crash against the exterior side of the door. And even that impact failed to jar the hand loose.

For a space of two seconds I hung there, scrabbling with the heels of my imperfect feet to find a hold in the corrugated metal. It was too smooth.

I wrote a crude subroutine to lock the hand closed against any overrides which the body’s residual testing routines might send. Then I pulled my legs up under ME, depressurizing the hydraulics for full flexion, cocked the heel pads against the door, and popped pressure back into the cylinders. The legs extended at a speed of 120 centimeters per second, catapulting ME back around the edge of the door and in through the opening.

As soon as the darkness covered ME, I overrode my own subroutine and unlocked the hand. No longer pivoting on the locking bar, I flew straight across the short dimension of the car and fell with a crash among the unopened crates of real Mitsubishi tractor transmissions.

Elapsed time of two seconds for a hardware reset.

Picking myself up, I tried to assess what damage the incident might have caused. The automaton had many internal sensors for functions both normal and abnormal, but it lacked any tests for bent and broken metal. To run that kind of damage control, I would normally use the optical system. For that, I needed a standard light source to balance my CCD chips. And obtaining such a light had been the whole reason for opening the door in the first place.

I crept across the boxcar and approached the opening cautiously, gripping the solid door jamb with both hands.

Beyond was a whole field of snow, almost unmarked by fencepost or footpath, lying under a clear sky, and flooded with the computable light levels of a gibbous moon. ME knew about the phases of the moon from GENERAL KNOWLEDGE, SCIENCE, PHYSICAL, DESCRIPTIVE, ASTRONOMY. Although I was not traveling with my complete INDEX, I retained enough data from that branch subheading to navigate cross country at night, like a good soldier.

It took less than ten seconds to sensitize and balance the videyes against all light ranges. I sent another note to RAMSAMP to have Dr. Bathespeake address the issue of packaging with the Hardware Division. For missions like mine, they must not again package an automaton as if it were going to be assembled on site by a team of company reps. Even if the modules had to pass visual inspections in transit as a collection of tractor parts, audio and visual systems and other semi-cybers should be finished and ready to run. After all, Hardware Division were the people working in a nice warm lab with all the tools they needed right at hand.

With some light and an operating videye, I looked over the skeletal frame of my new body. The right forearm—flex and extend it—was curved outward and down, compared to the left. The reactions to hanging, swinging, and crashing the entire automaton’s weight from that one limb had bent the metal. The hand still closed normally, except for the outside pair of fingers, whose cylinders and push rods now caught on the forearm at full closure.

Elsewhere on the body, I found surface damage only: scratches in metal, paint scrapings from the outside of the boxcar [REM: red and orange paint, I noticed], bent clips, slightly flattened tubing, and fittings pushed awry on their mountings. I straightened what I could with the strength of my fingers and wrote a routine that would monitor the tubing closely for pressure variances due to fractures.

The right knee
snicked
worse than ever, but there was nothing I could see to fix. Until it gave out and crippled ME, there was nothing to be done about it. I did add a loop in my audio analysis function that would edit out that particular noise. No need to be reminded about what you already know.

The final assembly step was to gather the automaton’s cover pieces and fit them to the various clips and clamps all over the torso and limbs. The body shells had a vaguely human shape that was intended, I suppose, to fool human eyesight at a distance of about 150 meters. I might pass for a running man at the other end of a large, open field—except that I ran like a machine.

I could decide to leave these cover pieces for later. That would save time. But to install them now would let ME finish and flush all the assembly protocols, clearing more space for the download. Do them now.