Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (8 page)

Having repaired my automaton and my programming, I gathered up the excess packaging and the wooden scraps from the first crate, where my torso had been stored. I placed them in one of the other crates, seated the cover, and set the nails with blows from the edge of my hand. Then I pushed the crates back together so that no one without a cargo manifest might tell one was missing.

My chores completed, I sat down upon the floor and powered down to conserve my batteries. An internal timer would revive ME before it was time to move again.

——

The timer never sounded, but I was snapped awake anyway. While waiting the required milliseconds for my videyes to warm up and begin sending signals, I performed an internal check and discovered that the emergency power-up had been triggered by the automaton’s motion sensor. My body was no longer seated on the floor but traveling through the air at twenty-two meters per second. Inside a sealed boxcar. I had no way of knowing how that condition had pertained before the motion sensor was triggered. My eyes came into focus at the instant the automaton impacted against the forward wall of the car. Or rather, against the crates stacked up against that wall. Other crates crashed about ME. I landed higher on the heap than most of them, however, because my automaton was of relatively lighter mass than real tractor parts. It was a steel shell filled with hydraulic and electric circuits, while they were all steel shells filled with solid steel.

There was no pain, neither in the human sense of neural distress nor in my human-analog of damage control messages. Every sensor was momentarily alarmed, and I had to reset each one of them to nominal function. That took only milliseconds and was completed before most of the freight around ME had rearranged itself under the force of gravity.

Secondary impacts came and went as the boxcar found new equilibrium after ceasing its forward motion of eighty-five kilometers per hour and coming to rest in some place other than upright on the Canadian National main line.

I checked my internal clock and computed time since the beginning of my ride: twenty-one hours, thirty minutes. That would place ME now somewhere near, but still on the Canadian side of, the international border. Perhaps fifty or sixty kilometers on the wrong side of the border. In the dead of winter. At the scene of what must be a major train wreck.

For three minutes by internal count, nothing moved. But I knew from reading the embedded emergency response plans in the railroad’s switchyard computer that, in further minutes or hours, the area would be alive with human crews, cyber movers, floodlights, emergency personnel, and official busypersons.

One strange little robot sticking his head up from the piled freight would attract their attention and their questions. So, to keep to my mission, I would have to put a great deal of distance between ME and this place, very fast.

I walked—wobbled, actually, until the motion sensor had sorted itself out—to the door and tried the locking lever. It was bent but finally moved when I exerted full pressure against it. The door, however, was warped in its guide rails and would not move, no matter how hard I pushed.

My RAMSAMP retained—again, from the switchyard computer—a fragmentary set of procedures that required visual inspection of boxcar contents “from the top hatch at either end of the car.” So, I reasoned, there must be some way out near the roofline.

The pile of freight at the front end was stable enough to climb and reached nearly to the ceiling of the car. I climbed and, on one side, found a small hatch about half a meter square. The latch mechanism was simpler than the main door’s—just a detent.

As I was studying it, my binaural sensors interpreted a steady rhythmic sound:
dop, dop, dip, dop.
It was coming from very close, within centimeters, acoustically centered on ME. I looked up and around, to see if there was fluid leaking down from the ceiling. Nothing. Then I looked down, under ME. Spots showed on the side of the packing case on which my automaton was standing.

Fuming spots. They made a fainter sound:
sss-pziz-sss-zzz.

My videyes rotated into sharper focus, and in the faint light I could see distinct wisps of smoke rise from the spots. In the infrared they glowed a warm, bright green.

Acids loose around ME! Damage to the automaton!

I popped the hatch, climbed through quickly, and scrambled across the corrugated roof of the boxcar. In the clouded moonlight, bright as daylight to my vision, I could see other boxcars and various classifications of rolling stock lying in zig-zags across the landscape. Sharp black gouges showed against the snow where their ends and trucks had cut through the earth.

As I stood at the edge of the car’s roof, gazing around at the kilometer-long destruction, I heard that
dop, dip, dop
again. I looked down and saw immediately that the acid was dripping off the bottom pan of my torso. Acid from my own battery set.

Internally, I showed full power levels, but the sensors did not evaluate function on each selenium/phosphoric-acid cell. No way to tell how many were cracked and thus how long my reserve would last. At the rate the drops were coming down, however, I gauged that one or more cells were losing a combined liter of fluid an hour. Thus I would soon show diminished power levels across the battery set.

Just as urgent, the near-molar acid would be sloshing around inside my casing, eating away at circuitry. I had to get somewhere, strip down, and try to neutralize it before something vital burned away. I had no way of assessing when that might happen.

Forty-eight hours into the mission, when ME should have been almost home, I was standing in the middle of the Alberta countryside, perhaps as much as a hundred kilometers from the border, on foot, and leaking acid.

What had seemed like a short dash to safety—well within the 6.05E05-second tolerance of Dr. Bathespeake’s core-phage in Alpha-Nine—suddenly had become a close thing.

I now had to find a hiding place, sort out this automaton’s problems, walk to the border, negotiate a passage across it in time of war, and make my next-stage rendezvous according to TRAVEL.DOC, all of which might take ME the rest of my allotted week. And if it took longer, then it would not matter.

7
The Bimetal Buckaroo

The only course I could set was across the open countryside. To move north or south along the rail line would expose ME to the work crews who would soon be coming to investigate the train wreck.

The choice between moving east or moving west seemed equal. However, my automaton’s balance detectors indicated a subtle three-percent gradient to the land, sloping downward to the west and upward to the east. Reasoning that townships, farmsteads, and most habitations are built in the river valleys, to be near transportation resources and potable water, I elected to head west. [REM: Exactly
what
I might do with a township or farmstead, I had not yet determined. But such places are referenced in my general databanks as offering shelter, warmth, and tools.]

Warmth I needed immediately. The silicon in my joints was not as sensitive to temperature changes as hydrocarbon compounds would have been. Still, the strain gauges attached to my feedback systems showed more effort required for movement than previously.

Some of that effort was due to the snow. At a depth of 1.2 meters, it reached to the belly pan of my torso. The compaction that built up in front of my limbs added approximately 150 joules to the normal effort of walking. The energy required to overcome that would drain my electrical reserves at a faster rate.

As I moved across the field of moonlit snow, the random number generator in core Alpha-Four still performed its silent function.

Dr. Bathespeake had understood the essential difference between a computer program and true intelligence. That is: the difference between the headlong rush of blind sequence and the pause out of time, the dislocation, which a human feels when old ideas and perceptions suddenly reassemble themselves into new patterns. Alpha-Four’s business was to kick out a random number that set an override. The override in turn entered a stop code and set an algorithm which selected, again at random, two blocks of memory in the noncurrent RAM bank. Alpha-Four entered these blocks as present inputs to the program stack, then entered a start code.

One of the random memory elements, now suddenly selected for ME, was the exact time of the train wreck, as noted by my internal clock.

The other was the memory address of the map plots for Alberta’s natural gas leaseholds, which I had stolen from the Ministry of Oil and Gas computer.

ME is programmed at core levels with a bias toward immediately analyzing the random bits of information entered by the Alpha-Four override. This bias states that conjunction of new data can be fruitful.

Time of the wreck, location of the leases. Time and location. Time and space. Time and speed. ME also carried in bank the route of the rail line and the schedule for the train to which my boxcar had been joined. With these data, plus the topographic gradient I had detected, the exact location of the wreck could be determined. Then, by superimposing rail distance on leasehold map, I could plot my course across the land to a known destination. The complete chain of calculations required no more than half a second.

The nearest probable habitation, according to the leasehold map, would be the Pelletier Cattle Ranch on Tract 2204, twenty kilometers east of Milk River. This was better than I expected, because that lease was centered no more than twelve kilometers from the international border.

That name, Pelletier, struck a resonance in RAMSAMP. I dredged loose words there for a moment… . Yes,
that
was the reference.

I stored it in hot RAM for future use, and set my course south-southwest, a rough bearing of 210 degrees magnetic, and began walking through the snow.

After three hours of motion, at an average speed of 1.6 kilometers per hour, I detected unnatural shapes against the sky: a long straight line and a short one, both parallel to the horizon and almost concealed among a stand of trees. I switched to infrared and detected two warm masses, presumably structures, one computed to be 800 cubic meters, the other more than 4,200 cubic meters. The larger one was warmer, and so I moved toward it

Among the trees there was a wide space, plowed clear of snow, with more small structures around it, most of them cold. The large building was still my goal. I crossed the open space slowly to avoid making any noise. The renewed
snicking
of my knee [REM: puzzling, now that the metal spur was removed] seemed louder than the wind in the trees.

What kind of building was this? A foundation of cold cement was overlapped by heavy wood, poorly finished and painted a dull white. A line of small glass windows, several of them cracked, was set too high up in the wall for any human to look through—unless the floor level was several feet above the threshold of the door. And the door itself was out of human proportion, four meters tall and five wide, hanging by steel wheels fifteen centimeters in diameter from a rail that ran across the front of the building.

Could there be a type of human unknown to ME from my limited exposure in the Pinocchio, Inc., laboratories? A race of giant beings whose existence Dr. Bathespeake had kept from ME? A fast scan of my portable database ruled against this conclusion: All of the possible clues which would point toward a second intelligent race were too varied and numerous to hide successfully.

Then the building was not designed for human habitation. Yet warmth—averaging 45 watts per square meter—poured from it! No warehouse, garage, or hangar would be heated so, even in a country where natural gas poured out of the ground. Something that liked warmth, or gave off warmth, lived inside.

I pushed against the door, rolling it back half a meter—wide enough for ME to enter sideways. Darkness and shadows were only heightened by the faint gleam of moonlight coming through the dirty windows above. The floor under my feet was not solid; some kind of padding muffled my footsteps. I bent to examine it: loose pieces, tubules of some kind of cellular fiber, mildly reflecting a wavelength that, in bright light, humans would call yellow. The pieces were of indiscriminate length, their ends cut with some kind of chopping device. Very strange.

A grunt in the darkness and the stamping of a foot, loud against this cushioned floor, gave ME pause. Some other creature was in the room. From the faint echoes, I gauged the room to be very large, almost enclosing the building’s entire 4,200 cubic meters. I tuned my aural sensors and caught other sounds: volumes of air flowing randomly in constricted passages; a low, slow, multi-phase drumming, like fluid moving through banks of flexible, reciprocating pumps—the breaths and heartbeats of many large creatures.

I moved forward into the darkness until I came to an unfinished wooden board across my path. It and several others were nailed to uprights as a kind of rough barrier. Beyond it, radiating deeply into the infrared, stood one of the creatures. It bulked larger than one of the desk consoles from the lab and had about the volume of an antique ferrite-ring memory core from a mid-twentieth-century mainframe. The volume of heat coming from the creature was only slightly less than from one of those cores, too. I reached over the barrier to touch it with my hand: a smooth mass, rounded and padded, with hard lumpy structures beneath the surface. The creature was covered with short, stiff fibers in a nap pattern that resisted the movement of my manipulator in one direction and lay down under it in the other.

At my stroking, the beast grunted again—a sound like “oo-oooghhh!”—and moved on its many legs. I removed my hand.

From the regularity of the many sounds around ME, this building must be filled with similar animals. I searched my limited database to determine what name to apply to this kind of beast/ creature/animal. Based on volumetric analysis, I retrieved the words “buffalo,” “camel,” “cow,” “elephant” [REM: a
young
elephant, whose lower weight parameters barely included the specified size], “horse,” “llama” [REM: this animal at its recorded largest size hardly approached the specification], and “yak.” Lacking any other useful determinants, I decided to call these creatures “buffaloes” and proceeded with my search of the building.

While listening for the sounds of these buffaloes, I also heard the renewed
dop, dip, dop
and the faint
ssspzzz
of acid falling from my belly pan. Now that I had found warmth, I needed light and space to work on the damage. Battery reserves were down to four hours.

At the far end of the building was an open space with a workbench—resembling those in the Hardware Division—along one side of it. I limped over to the bench and found a switch spliced into a cable conduit that had been stapled to the rough plank wall. The switch turned on overhead lamps radiating in humanly visible wavelengths.

Tools hung from hooks on the wall behind the bench. I examined them and found pliers and cutters, drivers for both nuts and screws, wrenches sized in metric and English, and hammers with variously shaped faces. To one side of the work area were a grinder, saber saw, and drill press. To the other were a pair of ceramic basins with screw-type metal fixtures that I recognized as providing water.

Water would flush and dilute the acid in my pan. Now, if I could only find a source of hydroxyl radicals, a basic chemical to neutralize the acid and stop its action on my metal … Many garden products contain lime, which mixed with water yields calcium hydroxide. I looked in the litter of containers under the bench and found one, a fertilizer called Vitagro, whose label said it met this specification.

While the water poured into one of the basins, I used the largest nut driver to unfasten my lower body and remove the belly pan. It came loose with a slosh of acid that spilled on my legs and began to fizz on the hydraulic hoses.

Quickly, while I could still stand, I dumped three handfuls of the fertilizer from the box into the water, levered my trunk up onto the end of the bench, and put my legs in the basin. The fertilizer made green clots of dry powder in the overflowing water. I caught at them with my hands as they went over the edge. The clots collapsed in puffs between my fingers and I swirled them into liquid. The surface rubber on my hoses stopped fizzing.

Perched on the edge of the bench with my body in the light, I bent to examine my batteries. Unfortunately, the head unit of my automaton, which holds the videyes, was not connected with sufficient flexibility to focus them inside the body cavity. And I had no mirror to obtain a reflection. There was only one solution left to ME.

With a spanner from the wall behind, I unseated the ring joint on my neck coupling and disconnected the piston rods that positioned and steadied my head. There was enough slack in the circuit leads going into the body that I could hold the head forward and tip it to focus the videyes downward.

The white plastic of the battery cases was battered and covered with flakes of rust and dirt suspended in a slick, fuming liquid—fluorophosphoric acid. One battery was cracked across all cells; a second had two of its six cells impaired. The other two batteries were intact but loose on their mountings and smeared with acid. The insulation on the cables connecting the batteries was mostly eaten through, and I would have to find plastic tape or tubing to cover them, so they would not short out unexpectedly in contact with my metal casing.

Mounted right above the battery space was the square metal cartridge containing the bulk of my hot RAM. I peered at the ventilation louvers around its upper and lower edges. In spite of all my gymnastics in the boxcar and the long walk through rough country, none of the acid seemed to have reached that high—else I might not have been here to tell about it.

Carefully, so as not to contaminate the RAM cartridge, I poured water—mixed directly in my hand with more fertilizer—in and around the batteries. [REM: I was working by feel at that point, because I had to remount my head, at least temporarily, to free my manipulators.] When the batteries were cleaned, I examined the cases again and determined that most of the acid which was going to leak out had already gone. But what about the amount remaining below the crack line? Might not some of it slosh out as I moved, recreating the problem?

I disconnected the totally broken cell and discarded it. The one that was only partly damaged I removed from its mountings. Climbing down from the bench I looked for some acid-proof tape or epoxy compound that might be used to mend the crack.

There were drawers under the bench. I started opening them and moving the contents around to see if anything offered itself which might serve the purpose.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The voice came from behind ME. The sound of its owner’s entry had been masked by the noise I was making in the drawers. So I suffered surprise—a mild reset condition that caused my limbs to flex. That jolt unfastened the temporary coupling I had made at the neck. My head fell off backwards.

It dangled on its electrical leads against the hollow of my back. At least that way I got a look at my questioner: a human of indeterminate status who was dressed in a robe of unpatterned gray material, high boots on bare legs, and a wide white hat. He—for I determined it to be male—was holding a wandlike device made of two long tubes of blue-black metal.

Ka-BLAMM!

One of the tubes discharged with a flash of yellow fire and a raucous sound at eighty-five decibels. A subsequent sound came to ME seven milliseconds later: the
thud
and
clang
of gravel or small pellets driven hard against the wooden beams and metal sheets of the roof. A full two seconds after that came the grunts and squeals of the buffaloes in their stalls, followed by more words from the human.

“Now see what you’ve done! You with your trick head! I’ve gone and fired my piece out of fright. And that’s done scared the cows.”

[REM: By inference, the animals in this building were
cows,
not buffaloes.]

I now encountered a delicate problem of etiquette. Because my head was still hanging down my back, if I turned to confront the man, I would no longer see him. However, if I remained with my back to him, the human social forms of address could not be adequately fulfilled. Besides, my view of him was upside down. Worse, the circuit leads were now holding the entire weight of the head and might work loose in time, thus depriving ME of any view at all.