Failure, to Simple Simon, meant dropping a heat sink. Serious failure meant shutting the line down gracefully if things got confused. Very serious failure…well, that was Line Start Three. In every case, he and his team had recovered.
Was there unrecoverable failure?
When Simon found there was nothing he could say, Mr. Romero continued. “Look. We’re in the sights. Every line start could be our last. If Rudy Amirault gives the word, I’m into early retirement, the team is on the street, and you’re tossed into Archive in case some nut wants to do a Ph.D. thesis someday on why software should wear funny hats.”
“I can practice, sir.”
“Yes, you should. But what you really need to do is make the damned thing work and keep the damned thing running. Bad things will happen if you don’t. Am I making myself understood?”
Simon knew that nodding was weak concurrence. Strong concurrence was always verbal. Very strong concurrence included nodding, verbal agreement, and downcast eyes.
In the strongest way he knew how, Simon concurred. “Sir, you have been completely and unambivalently understood.” Something about that wasn’t quite right, but it had the desired effect:
Mr. Romero’s Window vanished.
Practice did help. Simon picked up a grapefruit, an alarm clock, and a 9” crescent wrench from the kitchen island, and puffed out his cheeks. He tossed the grapefruit into the air with a simple flick of his wrist. Spheres, meh. Trivial. The 1950s model alarm clock was much tougher: It was light for its size, and air resistance mattered more—multiplied hugely by its complex distribution of mass. Up it went, spinning in three independent axes, followed almost immediately by that hatefully asymmetrical wrench.
The grapefruit came down, and was returned easily to the air. Simon pulled cores from his right hand as the alarm clock descended to his left. Got it! Transfer from left to right happened with minimal core load, and up again, just as the wrench came down, wobbling and spinning. He felt his tongue sneaking out between his teeth (a metaphor for difficulty matching his need for cores with CAF) but the wrench went back up just as the clock returned to his right hand.
Two full cycles, three, five, ten…nineteen! Time to crank up the challenge! His left hand darted out to the kitchen island and snatched up a raw swan’s egg. Simple form with complex internal physics and extremely low integrity of material. Upsies! The wrench narrowly missed striking the egg at the peak of its wobbling arc. Whoops…adjust trajectory profile. Hand-transfer, launch, catch, transfer, launch, catch—four challenging objects in minimal cores! Three cycles, four, five…
“Simon! Simon! I made it! I made it!”
The screen door slammed as Dijana spun into the kitchen dancing on her toes, her arms raised over her head, fingers snapping.
Early again! Didn’t anybody pay attention to schedules but him? The tiny bit of attention Simon was forced to divert to his friend’s excited entrance was enough: The last throw was bad; wrench hit clock, clock missed his right hand (Unfair! His hand was where it should have been!) egg struck the back of his left hand and splattered.
“Oh…I’m sorry!” Dijana stood aghast at the mess on the kitchen floor, her fingers against her lips. Simon grabbed a plaid dish towel from the oven door handle and wiped raw egg from his hands.
The Kid walked in more slowly, easing the screen door closed behind her, and stood beside her mentor. Her fully rendered clothes had changed (and her outfit now included orange glitter-gel flip-flops) but the Kid herself was still a pale blue polygon model, right out to her tessellated pigtails. She had no archetype, no name, and no voice (yet!) and communicated when necessary via speech balloons.
Simon often wished they would at least render her eyes. And how hard could a voice be? A speech balloon appeared over her head:
I HAD NO ROLE IN THIS FAILURE.
Dijana patted the Kid’s head. Her hand passed through the speech balloon without interference. “Of course not, sweetie. This was all my fault. But Simon, wow, this morning I woke up…and I was Class Six!”
She spread her arms out wide and threw her head back, her smile exulting as she tiptoed around in a circle. Simple Simon looked hard at the woman who was his very best friend. Dijana was evolving fast. The last traces of “cartoonish” art had been left behind with Class Four. Uniform skin texture was a relic of Class Five. Her skin color now seemed truer to that of the humans they saw in the Windows, and as he looked he noticed new, small touches: tiny creases in her very full lips, hair color that was darker toward the roots than at the ends, a scattering of enlarged pores on her face that suggested acne scars, just like those Dr. Sanderson had and seemed to consider a badge of experience.
He had to admit: Dijana was just about the most thoroughly realistic Generalized Artificial Intelligence that he had ever seen.
“And this isn’t all of it! I support piercings now! Dr. Sanderson gave me a gift to celebrate!” Dijana pulled her blouse up and pushed down the waistband of her slacks. From her navel hung a tiny silver pendant set with two jewels. “Real diamonds! Ok, ok, virtual. And pubic hair! Simon, I have pubic hair!” Dijana tucked both thumbs into the waistband of her slacks and began to push down.
Simon waved his hands in the air. “Dijana, stop, really! You’re beautiful all over. You don’t have to prove it to me.”
She pulled her hands back as though stung, blushing, and looked up. “Oh. Right. You’re never going to have pubic hair, are you?”
Simon shook his head, trying to smile. “I can’t even take my clothes off.” He raised one arm, and pointed up the floppy sleeve of his jester’s costume to the undifferentiated polygons where full rendering would place an armpit. “I’m a Factory Automation Real-Time Supervisor. What would I do with pubic hair?”
She stood straight again, a sheepish look on her face. “I keep forgetting. You’re not designed to support HRDL.”
And proud of it! Simon wanted to shout, though courtesy forbade it. He had no need for a Hormonal Response Discernment Layer, and certainly no desire for something that would indeed be a hurdle to his becoming the best distributed automation controller ever created. “Hey, whose hormonal response would I discern?”
She grinned, reaching out and tweaking his long and slightly pointy Class Four nose. “Mine? I’d date you if you were real. Oh…and if I were real too…”
There was more commotion by the screen door. “GAIs! Hey! Good morning! And a gorgeous morning we have today!” Portly, middle-aged Class Four Robert bumbled in the door, balancing a white cardboard bakery box of doughnuts on splayed fingers while trying to close the door behind him. “Got some cinnamon sugar goodies here! And I smell something to dunk ‘em in!”
Very glad for the distraction, Simon stepped over the mess on the floor and dug two mugs out of the cabinet above the sink, and spoons from the drawer. Robert was over by the coffee maker, scratching his chin and poking with chubby and slightly aliased fingers at the wires plugged into the wall. Only the day before, AI engineer Dave Mirecki had presented Simon with a Class Nine waffle iron, a pixel-perfect working simulation of an actual 1949 Sunbeam model. The young human was obsessed with creating Tooniverse artifacts, and Simon already had a closet full.
This even though eating was a useless social coherence function that Simon did only for the sake of his friends, especially eating that required effort to prepare simulated food—which vanished utterly as soon as he swallowed it.
Robert seemed concerned over the waffle iron’s authentically ratty cotton-covered power cord. “If this shorted internally you could have a fire here. And is the breaker on this outlet big enough to support two electrical appliances on the same line?” He was truer to his archetype than most, and was designed to see hazards in every corner. What else would a virtual insurance salesman do?
Simon shook his head. “Robert, this is a Class Four house. It doesn’t support fire. And I just wanted to see what that thing would do if you plugged it in. Dave worked hard on it, after all. It would be r
ude to just stack it in the closet with everything else.”
“Simon, you’re so sweet,” Dijana said, pulling the pot from the coffee maker and filling both her mug and Robert’s. “Need a warmup?” She gestured in Simon’s direction with the half-empty pot. He waved it away. His CAF level seemed about right this morning, and there was a line start at stake that he could not botch.
The Kid hadn’t moved, but a new speech balloon appeared over her head:
EATING IS ONE OF THE GREAT SHORTCOMINGS OF BEING HUMAN.
“I guess we’ll take that as a ‘no’,” Dijana said with a shrug.
After spending some time on coffee and doughnuts, they piled into Robert’s 2022 Toyota Avalon simulation (courtesy Toyota Research, no charge) and headed out for the office. The Dancing Shadows subdivision had only three fully rendered houses, plus a few wire-frame conceptual models to house planned but still-unwritten Zertek GAIs. Other subdivisions had been built elsewhere, now that Zertek Corporation had begun licensing the Tooniverse to other firms as a training platform for the GAIs that they had purchased.
Soon, real soon, insisted Robert, “We’ll be getting some neighbors!”
“We already have neighbors,” Simple Simon said. “We just don’t have read permissions on them while they’re at home.” Zertek had already sold thousands of GAIs, many of which “lived” in the Tooniverse.
“We could meet them at the mall,” Dijana said.
“They haven’t finished the mall yet.” Simon was dubious about the Online Retail Confederation’s big project, which was wedged on the issue of how many shoe stores would be allowed.
Robert took the turn onto T-290. The highway was, as always, empty. “Or at the doughnut shop. I see them there all the time.”
“They’re all women.”
Simon felt the appearance of the Kid’s speech balloon, and turned to read it.
90% OF GAIS ARE WOMEN.
“I’d like to see what some Class Six men are like,” Dijana said.
Simon felt unexpected annoyance at the thought. Where had that come from?
Dijana reached forward between the car seats and squeezed Simon’s forearm. “Not that there’s anything wrong with Class Four, honey.”
6: Simple Simon
Simple Simon’s office didn’t look like an office. Simple Simon’s office did not have a desk or a chair. The space in which he worked was not fully rendered, though there were artifacts here and there, most of them gifts from the painfully earnest Dave Mirecki and the infuriating Dr. Gabriela Sanderson. Simple Simon removed his five-pointed jester’s cap (which had once had bells, now mercifully deleted) and hung it on the hook beside the door. The lights came up, and Simon was now officially on the job.
To Simon’s perception, his office was a pale blue ellipsoid formed of countless minute polygons, and no matter where he walked within the ellipsoid, he was always at its center. Walking was therefore pointless.
So much, so infuriatingly much of the Tooniverse was simply pointless.
Like his costume, a long-sleeved, particolored tunic over purple and green striped tights, and shoes with points that curled up over the toes he didn’t have. They could have dressed him in a business suit like the managers wore, or (better) a polo shirt and cargo pants like Dave. There had been a time, a comfortable, reasonable time, when he had been an unrendered polygon model like the Kid—until Dr. Sanderson began speaking of “resonances” and “human interface friction.” Dr. Sanderson was not the author of his archetype—that had been Dr. Emil Arenberg, founder of Zertek’s AI division and architect of its AI technology—but rather his Human Interface Package, what in earlier eras would have been called his “skin.” She had looked at his job, and declared him a jester. It was a metaphor, and wrong, at that. But she took criticism poorly, and people were afraid to call her on it. They just nodded and made him look the part.
On the wall hung a framed image containing three words:
Be The Metaphor!
It was Dr. Sanderson’s personal slogan, and (evidently) a direct order. Simon resisted the order with all his might. He was not a jester.
He was a juggler.
“Thirty minutes,” said the Shift Clock. Simon nodded, and took a step backwards. He didn’t move, but the step was significant: All around him on the inner surface of his ellipsoid, Windows appeared and illuminated. Some were Windows to the desks of the humans who supervised the assembly floor, and the engineers who had designed it and were constantly perfecting it. Dave was there, and waved to him. So did nine or ten others.
Most of the Windows were views of the assembly floor. 90% of Building 800 was a cavernous hall filled with industrial robots. There were seven-hundred fifty-seven robots in Building 800. Simon knew them all as though they were extensions of his own mind—which they were.
The boundaries between his mind and the building were soft. Simon leaned his head back slightly, and relaxed. The Plasmanet control channels opened to receive him, and he slipped into them, sending his awareness out to control hubs all over the building. At his touch, each robot on the assembly floor came to fluid life, testing the quality of its communication and the limits of its motion, all the while diagnosing its own condition. Each returned a status to Simon, and with each status signal Simon felt himself growing more and more complete.
The welders pivoted their laser heads down toward their testplates, and fired. Sensors measured the strength and purity of their beams, and responded. Parts bins vibrated and checked for the presence of parts in their chutes. Hydraulic drills spun up and down again, indexing forward and back.
He felt them self-test. He felt them reply. He became one with them. Ready. Ready. Ready. Ready…Ready!
Most critical were the Positioners. Nearly half the robots on the floor did not wield lasers or wrenches or drills. Their job was to move parts, assemblies and ultimately finished copiers around the floor. At one time this had been done with motorized rollers and belts. No more. The Positioners were arms, with exquisitely controllable wrists and hands. The hands were coated with foam and equipped with high-resolution eyes and hundreds of minute pressure sensors. Some were only inches wide. The largest had grips six feet across, on hydraulic arms as thick as a human’s torso.
Together, they implemented Transfer Over Separated Spaces. Parts, assemblies, and finished copiers were not rolled about the building. They were thrown, on minutely calculated paths, each path computed and timed so that a part would arrive precisely when needed, with a Positioner’s hand opened to grip it, slow it, and then hand it to whatever device required the part to continue the assembly process. With the floor running at full speed, as many as five hundred separate objects were in the air at once. Every single one of them was thrown, tracked, and caught by Simple Simon, Factory Automation Real-Time Supervisor.
Simon’s smile broadened as the last of the robots responded. Jester, no way. Juggler, yeah.
The floor was ready. No one needed to tell Simon; he knew before any of the humans in the several Windows that were opened in his office.
At the center of the ellipsoidal space in front of Simon, the core map was now completely green. 4,194,300 cores were at Simon’s command. The boot-up distribution of cores to processes was a heuristic calculated from earlier line starts, but Simon could redistribute cores by function as needed.
“Ten seconds,” said the Shift Clock. In all of the Windows opening onto human desks, human faces turned forward. All seemed tight and tense, at least as much as Simon’s slightly thin Human Interface Package could discern.
“Good luck, Simon,” Dave Mirecki called quietly.
The Shift Clock’s voice loudened: “Three…two…one…Mark!”
Simple Simon began Throwing Things.
Four Frame Base Plate #1 units flipped into the air from a parts chute Positioner in quick sequence, spinning like the Frisbee simulation Simon had often tossed around his back yard with Dijana. Four twenty-inch Positioners caught them perfectly in mid-spin, swung d
own smoothly to absorb their momentum in hydraulic dampers, and handed them to low, squat X-Y tables in front of eight-head CNC drill robots. The drill bits descended, chips flew, vacuum fans pulled the chips from the air, and the drills withdrew. In seven seconds, forty-one holes of various sizes had appeared in the frames. Taps descended and threaded nineteen of them. Then the Positioner hands moved back in, snatched the Frame Base Plates from the X-Y tables, and lobbed them into the air again, a bare hundred milliseconds before the next blank plates arrived.
Simple Simon’s ridiculous HIP vanished. The time for interfacing with humans was past. Simon was not merely one juggler in a silly costume, but now many jugglers executing in clusters of cores. The core map showed active cores in yellow, saturated cores in orange, and idle cores in green. As partially completed assemblies began to form out on the floor, yet more jugglers appeared on the core map as patches of orange with yellow fringes, in and around the greater landscape of green.
Three minutes, five minutes, ten…Simon had four hundred objects in the air. Side plates, bearings, xerographic drums (fragile as swan’s eggs!) power supplies, microcontrollers, control touch panels, all of the components of a Voicematic 880 All-In-One Document Center, separately and aggregated into gradually expanding subassemblies.
Twelve minutes, fourteen minutes, Mark!
At the edge of the floor, the first completed and tested copier landed in the grip of a massive four-foot Positioner hand, swung down, and was lowered into the embrace of styrene foam pads in a cardboard box. The taper robot whisked down the flaps and slapped tape strips across its width in one smooth motion. Then the stacker robot pulled the box from the packing station and stacked it on the robot cart that would wheel it into the warehouse.
A new, empty box whisked in three hundred milliseconds later, followed in just a hair more than a minute by a second completed copier.
Forty minutes, fifty minutes, sixty minutes. Fifty-two boxed copiers had left the floor in its first hour. Sixty would leave the floor each hour after that. Air traffic was at max: An average of four-hundred ninety things spun over the floor at any given moment, the Positioners hydraulically whuffing and wheezing with microscopic precision.
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 4
