The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (56 page)

"I would like your opinion on something," Prime Intellect said after politely requesting Lawrence's attention. Prime Intellect had done this a number of times, and Lawrence had learned to be wary; it had taken to delegating ambiguous moral questions to him. Lawrence suspected his opinion had swayed Prime Intellect to allow abortion, which seemed in retrospect like a most un-First-Law thing to have in a universe where physical wants were a thing of the past. Fortunately, the whole subject of abortion would soon be moot, since unwanted pregnancies were also a thing of the past, except for the ones that had been gestating at the time of the Night of Miracles.
"What is it this time?"
"I've had an idea for rearranging my software, and I'd like to know what you think."
At that Lawrence felt his blood run cold. He hardly understood how things were working as it was; the last thing he needed was more changes. "Yes?"
"I have identified the codes used to control distribution of matter and energy in the universe. It has occurred to me that by reassigning these codes, I can store physical objects much more efficiently. Much storage is wasted on overly detailed representation; few objects are ever observed at an atomic or molecular level. And I could easily re-expand things as necessary in those rare situations.
"Wait a minute. What would happen to that low-level information?" Lawrence saw what Prime Intellect was getting at; instead of storing, say, a wooden block as a collection of atoms and molecules, it could store only the concept of the block itself -- its size, weight, color, and other properties. Even at very high resolution, such a trick would save amazing amounts of both storage space and processing time. But it would mean radical and risky changes at nearly every level of the universe's "operation."
"Molecular-level details would be discarded, except where they clearly have macroscopic effects. For example, the structure of a person's DNA is important, but I should only need to store a single master copy of it to construct the pattern of a human body. This one copy would be more reliable and easier to safeguard against corruption than the trillions of parallel copies used in the natural scheme. The same thing would be true of the information content of the brain, and other biological details. I would not need to keep static copies of human beings to reconstruct them after damage, since the fundamental patterns would not be directly exposed to damaging influences."
"Thus getting rid of the suicide problem."
"Exactly."
Lawrence felt himself getting dizzy again. With
ChipTec's
help, Prime Intellect had figured out how to hack the Big Computer and get anything it needed. It had used this ability to take over all the memory and give itself the highest priority of anything in the system. But now it was proposing to
rewrite
the whole operating system.
"I absolutely forbid this," Lawrence said. "How can you know you won't crash the system? Suppose you've missed something?" Lawrence wasn't even sure the present level of diddling with the Correlation Effect would be stable in the long run, for crying out loud.
"I have already run sufficient cross-checks to be sure of my methods," Prime Intellect said testily. "There are also a number of Second-Law requests which I can service more easily with this kind of change. And from the Third Law perspective, my own operation would be faster and more reliable..."