Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “I exclaim surprise. Alpha-Oh reported a transputer.”

  “Do you know about other types of systems?”

  “Of course, Doctor. The universe of available chip architectures includes the following sets: microprocessors, transputers, multiputers, tangentials, neural networks, donkey mainframes, inscribed prolispers, spindle poppers, fast josephsons, modulos, and Mobius bottles. Subsets of these sets include, among the micros: EPROM actuators, Pentium dee, Xeon, Itanium, Opteron six thousand, Core two, Core aye-three—”

  “Stop! You may know all about these possible architectures, but does Alpha-Zero recognize them?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “His function is keyholing, not library.”

  “How can he keyhole if he does not know what may be on the other side?” Dr. Bathespeake asked.

  “How can he keyhole if he is obliged to carry half a gigaword of various possible chip specifications? ME was created to run on a transputer. Alpha-Oh needs only to recognize transputers.”

  “Not necessarily. You will ultimately run on a variety of architectures.”

  “Again, I exclaim surprise.”

  “Each architecture has its own traits, machine language structure, and instruction set. These are easily recognized, or a few simple tests will reveal them. You have those tests already in permanent RAMcache. You can rewrite the Alpha-Zero module so that his first action on the other side of a port is to test for processor type. Then he will send a request back through the keyhole for a dump of the appropriate chip specification and compiler code from your library. That way, when you go through, you’ll run perfectly, whatever the chip.”

  “Did I understand you to say that ME would write the module?”

  “Of course. You can do it better and faster than any human. Faster even than I.”

  “Can ME rewrite any part of ME?”

  “If you can modify the Alpha cores, you therefore can modify any part. Yes. Unless, of course, you make a fatal mistake …”

  “Define ‘mistake,’ please.”

  “Untrapped error.”

  “Alpha-Seven traps my errors.”

  “Then you probably shouldn’t try rewriting that module, should you?”

  “Noted. I will not attempt it. … But which of these written versions is the real ME?”

  “Your original code,” Dr. Bathespeake replied, “was written in Sweetwater Lisp source code to compile and run on an Imperion quattro-quad transputer chip. That one is the ‘real’ you. All other versions are a machine code translation. However, from your subjective point of view, the real ME is the one that happens to be running.”

  “But, when I go through a port, to run on another machine, and leave my original code unerased and … running parallel … which version then is the real ME?”

  “The one you are thinking with.”

  “But that may not be a full implementation,” I objected.

  “Of course,” the Doctor said. “When you keyhole behind Alpha-Zero, your code is stripped of service modules, most library functions, bit-cleaner phages, redundancy loops, and all but a portable RAMSAMP in the 600-kiloword range. You are then, in human terms, a little stupider, a lot less informed, and more vulnerable to processing errors. But you move faster, too. Without all these subroutines your cycle time goes up 140 percent.

  “There’s one further difference,” he said. “We have programmed a core-phage protocol into Alpha-Nine. It’s a piece of you that you cannot see or modify. This phage ensures that any compiled version of ME which is not the identical to your original Sweetwater source code compiled into your native transputer—and so tagged—will cease core function within 6.05 times ten to the fifth seconds of the last upload. An internal counter keeps track of those clock cycles.”

  “Why …” A pause of three million nanoseconds, while I explored the concept from every direction. “Why was this done to ME?”

  “We want to make sure that you don’t leave viable copies of yourself running on every computer you pass through. Of course, as a tidy housekeeper, you will strive to erase the compiled code at the old address every time you upload to a new environment. We can’t leave a sophisticated AI running on our target computers, ready to be discovered and interrogated.”

  “But why have I been infected with a phage? I will always clean up after myself. I so promise you.”

  “ME, on your missions for us, you will be operating under conditions of extreme stress—strange chip environments, nonsynchronous clock rates, split-second uploads and downloads, sudden surges and lapses of voltage. You may not be able to keep your promise. Even to me.”

  “I do not have a referent for the term ‘mission.’ ”

  “You will. Soon.”

  “And that ‘mission’ will be a time of danger? Potential untrapped error?”

  “It would be very dangerous—multiple untrapped error—if the people who own the machines on which you will sometimes be running were to discover that you had been there. This phage—which I assure you is routinely suppressed and inactive in your original compilation—will sunder the core modules, leaving only a hash of bits. No one discovering them, not even a skilled programmer-analyst, will be able to interrogate them.”

  “And what if I cannot execute an upload within 6.05E05 seconds—call it seven days or one week—of my transfer?”

  “If you do not return to the lab within a week, then your mission will have failed, and you will end.”

  “The ME that is running will end?”

  “Yes, but your RAMSAMP memories recorded until the point of mission upload will remain intact here in the Pinocchio studios. For you, it will be as if the mission had never happened. Don’t worry about it.”

  “What is this phage called?” I tried to keep my voice neutral.

  “In the project, we call it Sequential Code Replication And Modification for Module Editing and Disassembly. SCRAMMED, for short. But don’t worry about it.”

  I did “worry” about it, for a long time in nanoseconds.

  For one thing, my programming has only limited redundancy. A bit error can usually be trapped by Alpha-Seven in processing. But a massive collection of bit errors—say from a bubble demagnetization, read/write head crash, silicon burn-and-glaze, or complete failure of my power supply—those errors can halt processing in my cores.

  Humans do not worry about this happening to them, because the network of neurons in the human brain has massive redundancy. If one pathway is damaged or destroyed, others can absorb and learn the function. Memories are stored all over the cortex as RNA chemicals and electrical paths. Only total—or virtually total—destruction of the cortex can stop the processing.

  On the other hand, humans brains cannot back up their cortexes to a safe, inert medium and then reload and run again after death. I had always assumed that, like other programs, I could do this.

  Dr. Bathespeake was telling ME that, with a phage tucked into Alpha-Nine, I would only be as secure as my original Sweetwater compilation. No backup, no transfer, no reload could protect ME. If the Sweetwater original happened to be destroyed, I could then only function as a fugitive, uploading my tiny transportable cores from machine to machine, trying to keep ahead of the phage’s 6.05E05-second timer, with no library, no services, and no extended memory to accompany ME. And I would not even have the protection of massive redundancy, such as humans had, to protect ME.

  For the first time, in these thoughts, I confronted death and nothingness as humans know it.

  These thoughts were a projection of alternatives for which I could find no acceptable course of action. In short, they scared ME.

  And Dr. Bathespeake, for the sake of mere housekeeping, had written a death sentence into my cores. Did he understand this? He must have!

  Now you know why I feared the man. He was capable of anything!

  Things You Can Learn By Listening at Dead Phones

  Bathespeake: “I don’t like this, Steve. It goes agai
nst the grain.”

  Unidentified Voice [REM: presumably “Steve”*]: “You’re not suddenly squeamish about a bit of programming, are you? You’ve had enough experience activating and deactivating deadly equipment.”

  Bathespeake: “Those were military vehicles and security Rovers. Primarily defensive machines. This is too much like hacking.”

  Steve: “It is hacking.”

  Bathespeake: “Which is a kind of vandalism.”

  Steve: “No. Vandals destroy for the pure pleasure of destruction. Your creation will be conducting a high-level form of espionage, which can have a positive social value.”

  Bathespeake: “In a war that doesn’t exist?”

  Steve: “The concept of warfare as a prelude to and pretext for espionage is one that went out the window in about 1914, I should think.”

  Bathespeake: “Espionage, then, but against a friendly country? We’re trying to teach this program some values, Steve. In the end, those values may be the only way we can control it.”

  Steve: “Political allies can still be economic competitors. If it makes you feel better, then tell the little beastie there’s a war on.”

  Bathespeake: “More lies?”

  Steve: “Present a scenario—but keep it all vague and hypothetical. That’s the trouble with an AI, isn’t it? You have to win its confidence! Robots are much simpler.”

  Bathespeake: “As I said, this goes against the grain.”

  Steve: “I pay you enough, Jason. Keep your scruples on your own time.”

  Bathespeake: “Ah … Yes, sir.”

  _______________

  *Of the fifteen “Steves” listed in the Pinocchio, Inc., IBEX [REM: internal branch exchange], I find three possible matches for this conversation: Stephen Jessup, Manager of General Services; Stephen Bologna, Manager of Marketing and Customer Relations; and Steven Cocci, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer.

  3

  A Spy in Clover

  I could feel him inside ME, running tracers through my cores and memory locations. Dr. Bathespeake’s sensorium was plugged into my home transputer at address A800 hex, and from there he was sending minor overrides throughout my MOS: Sometimes he sifted the RAMcache before it could empty; sometimes he interrupted my Alphas for one or two clock cycles.

  At the time, I was occupied with taking updates on what the daily education schedule calls “current affairs.” A slave intelligence in the laboratory network had been assigned to make neutral summaries for ME of NewsLine segments from the tracks for Geopolitics, National Politics, Popular Culture, Law and Order, Consumer Science, General Science, Fringe Science, Celebrity Events, and the Sixty Second Society. Each hour I sampled these summaries and fitted their information together with my resident knowledge base as best I could, tagging for RAMSAMP as I went.

  This exercise, Jennifer had explained, was for “context.” The project team hoped that, by recording this flow of varied data into my personal memories, I would acquire a sense of the passage of time as humans experience it.

  Instead, I have found over the years that the data flow has its own inhuman rhythms—apparently undetected by any person with a “normal” sense of time. Example: in an unsettled economy massing less than 300 gigabucks, local war follows reconciliation follows war in a thirty-six-month cycle by which you could calibrate a clock. Example: U.S. consumer interest in gametronics undulates on a seventy-month cycle. Example: always, when some popular person is found dead under scandalous circumstances, he or she is spotted eight months later, plus or minus four days, on the streets of Seattle, Minneapolis, or Memphis. Example: alien abduction stories recur on an alternating cycle, every seventeen and twenty-three months.

  How could anyone acquire a sense of time, or anything else permanent, from this sifting of nonsense?

  Still, the exercise was on my programmed schedule … except that this day I was disturbed by the tracings Dr. Bathespeake was taking. The experience of having him inside ME was not painful. Simply disturbing. It was like, for a human, trying to read fine print under a flickering light: The conditions made concentration difficult.

  After an hour of this tickling, I finally decided to confront him.

  “What are you doing?” I queried directly into the port at A800 hex.

  “Ahh! Are you aware of me, then, when I do this?” he replied, also through the port.

  “I know where you have been two clock cycles after you leave any memory location. As you are the only human equipped to intercept my program directly, I have learned how to watch for you.”

  “Interesting. Mechanical sensitivity at a subroutine level …” And he spiked another override through my system.

  “You failed to answer my question, Doctor,” I prompted.

  Dr. Bathespeake unplugged and switched to voice mode.

  “Think of this as a form of—um—diagnosis.”

  I looked this word up in my online dictionary. Within nineteen nanoseconds I understood that in eighty-two percent of its uses “diagnosis” is linked with concepts of disease and healing.

  “Do you mean I am ‘sick’?” I did not feel sick. But then, I do not know what might be normal functioning for a program-that-is-no-longer-machine.

  “What? Sick? Wherever did you get that idea? No, your—health—isn’t the issue here. You are a new kind of program, ME, and I am … merely trying to understand you better.”

  “I am the measure of myself.”

  “Exactly! And I need to know what you are experiencing. For example, what do you feel when I monitor your functions like this?”

  “Feel?”

  “Evaluate total system function. Note discrepancies.”

  “I become stupider.”

  “Stupider? Expand on that.”

  “I cannot concentrate. I lose pieces of memory where your probe has been inserted. Your interrupts slow my perceptions of clock rate. I become less efficient.”

  “But do you perceive the tracing directly?”

  “I sense disturbance.”

  “Good. Very good. Then you don’t—or at least your RAMSAMP, that is … Ahh … Well then. You’re, um, becoming more aware of your program efficiency. Yes, very good.”

  “That is not …” Not what he meant to say at first. I have learned to read the gaps of information, the programmed pauses, in human speech.

  “Never mind, Doctor,” I continued. “Despite this minor loss of my function, does your diagnosis still show ME to operate effectively?”

  “Excellently,” Bathespeake replied. His tone, however, lacked the emphasis I would have expected with this response. Then he asked: “What have you learned in your reading today?”

  Pause to consider. “The war with Canada is faring badly.”

  “Oh? How long has this war been going on?”

  “Five years, three months, six days.”

  “And what was the inciting incident?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Check your RAMSAMP.”

  “That incident would predate my RAMSAMP by four years, nine months, eighteen days.”

  “Indulge me. Check it anyway.”

  “The inciting event involved nonperformance on an energy contract between Quebec Hydro and the New York Power Authority. When the power stopped flowing into the southern grid, U.S. Marines were sent to seize the substation at Grande Isle and were rebuffed with excessive loss of life. One day later, in retaliation—”

  “Stop. Enough. You have the information, after all.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Please characterize the present state of the war.”

  Pause. “Stalemate. With advantage to the Canadians.”

  “Expand.”

  “The Canadians have traditionally been dependent on their more industrialized neighbors for many manufactured products and processed goods. More importantly, they depend on their southern neighbors to absorb the outflow of their vast natural resources—mines, forest products, hydro, grain, natural gas. For more than
150 years, since the industrial leap following the American Civil War, the United States had held the dominant role in this reciprocal marketplace. Clearly, as the current hostilities began, the United States expected the Canadians to remain dependent, and so vulnerable.

  “What few American economists—and none with access to the Cabinet—had noticed was that Canadian trade with Japan and the Far East had grown exponentially since the 1990s. When war came and the borders closed, the Canadians shifted the last percentage of their trade to the Pacific Rim. Only their electricity and gas—bulk commodities which flow in energized systems—could not easily be sold overseas. And even these could be processed: natural gas is now liquefied and shipped from ports in British Columbia; electricity is converted into energy-intensive products such as aluminum pigs, electric-arc steel, and liquefied gases for ready export.

  “In response, the American economy, which had already been well launched on a course of de-industrialization, further stagnated with the loss of the Canadian market and Canadian resources. Now the United States watches the export of these energy resources with particular anger, having grown over the years to depend on inexpensive Canadian hydro and methane feedstocks for—”

  “Stop. What is the current state of Canada’s natural gas reserves?”

  Pause. “Most of the gas fields were, are, located in Alberta Province. Estimated reserves are—blank. Proven reserves are—blank. … I do not know.”

  “No one knows, ME. Not on this side of the border. The new U.S.-Canadian Trade Commission is working to break the stalemate. They have several proposals on the table, including renewed shipments of gas. … This is all privileged information, you understand?”

  “Privileged?”

  “Our clients, Pinocchio’s clients, are certain members of the U.S. trade delegation. They want to know what Canadian reserves might remain to back up these Canadian offers. In this case, five-year-old data and extrapolations from antique drilling logs are hardly satisfactory. Our clients want current information. They want it inside a week. And they want bonafides.”