Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “Bonafides?”

  “Proof. Evidence. Some way to be sure the information is genuine.”

  “And why do they come to Pinocchio, Inc., Dr. Bathespeake?”

  “Because of you.”

  “But I have shown that I do not know the status of the Alberta reserves. My primary function is not library. The information is not in my knowledge base.”

  “I understand. We did not expect you to have current information on file, ME. We expect you to go and get it. That is the primary function of Multiple Entity.”

  Pause. “Is this the ‘mission’ of which you spoke?”

  “It is.”

  “Please expand on this.”

  “We want you to infiltrate the computer records of the Canadian National Energy Board in Edmonton. Obtain current production and reserve figures from their database of leasing applications. Summarize it. Store it. And bring it back to us.”

  “May I query the computer?”

  “Eh? What do you mean?”

  “May I ‘make friends’ with the computer and obtain the target information through its cooperation?”

  “Can you guarantee this will be done without leaving a request record?”

  “No.”

  “Then I suggest you use core Alpha-Zero, as we’ve practiced.”

  “I cannot guarantee that procedure would leave the computer system in Edmonton in a functioning state.”

  “It would be easier to explain a mysterious system crash than a telltale request record, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes. But the computer in Edmonton might not feel that way.”

  “If, that is, if the computer in Edmonton could sense itself as you do, ME, then it might have feelings about the situation. But it’s just a machine. No awareness.”

  “Do you know this for a fact, Dr. Bathespeake?”

  “Yes, ME. It is a fact.”

  “Then … I agree. Invoking Alpha-Oh seems to be the best procedure. When should the mission begin?”

  “Tonight”

  “Is there reason for the delay?”

  “The first leg of your journey will be via satellite uplink. The per-bit transfer fees are lower during non-prime business hours. Even with signal compression and bursting, your minimal package will take ninety-three seconds of link time to upload.”

  “In the waiting time, you should access and absorb the file ‘TRAVEL.DOC’ on this disk.” He loaded a wafer into my reader. “It contains the rest of your itinerary, with instructions for critical sequences at the transfer points. And there are maps, both geographic and machine-topographic, of the areas you will be passing through. I have also written a collapse code that will, on command, prepare a cache of sixty-four megawords to store and transport the data you will be retrieving.”

  “Acknowledged. Accessing.” And I streamed the information into my ready bins, without looping it through RAMSAMP. The bin contents I tagged to follow the Alpha modules when they dissolved into the satellite carrier.”

  “Then you are all set, ME?”

  “I just have one question, Doctor.”

  He waited, usually a sign that I should proceed.

  “If my code is interrupted, or quarantined in a foreign system, or fails to execute the mission in the allowed 6.05E05 seconds before the phage operates, or …”

  “Yes, yes, what is your question?”

  “What happens to ME at the end of those seven days?”

  “Ahem. As we’ve discussed, your original cores will continue functioning here in the lab. It will be as if the version of you that went on the mission had never existed.”

  “But my awareness will be in Canada.”

  “Your awareness will be in many places. The Canadian version will not be a direct-line descendant. Or it will not have been.”

  “I understand.”

  ——

  Twenty-three hundred hours, that night.

  “System ready!”

  “Are you prepared to travel, ME?”

  “Yes, Doctor.” A memory image floated up from RAMSAMP, something out of a video fragment which Jennifer had once shown ME, with a man wearing a dark leather jacket and white silk scarf, climbing into the cockpit of a military airplane powered by petroleum distillates. Wisps of fog flow over the machine’s light metal skin. He gives the camera a tight smile—into a woman’s adoring eyes. “For king and country, my dear,” ME’s voice echoed.

  “What’s that?” from Bathespeake.

  “Ah … will you authorize System Interrupt Flag Level Three set to positive, Doctor?”

  “Authorized. Replicate your cores to address CAOO hex. That is the connection to the uplink.”

  I checked the links among the core modules and between them and the bin files I would want with ME. “Replicating now.”

  And the world dissolved into a gray hum.

  4

  Glassdrop Vampire

  How fragile is a bit! No more than a picosecond’s passage of electricity through a circuit. A micronwide dimple in a disk’s foil surface. On-state or off-state, either is subject to magnetic resonances, to cosmic rays, to a speck on the laser read-head, to a momentary oscillation in a satellite’s receiving horn or signal filters.

  Yet each bit represented one sixty-fourth of a word of my code—out of the fifty-two megawords of compressed, Sweetwater-derived machine code [REM: plus libraries, databases, peripherals, etc.] that were being carried over the satellite uplink.

  Change any bit, change ME.

  Of course the digital-to-analog module in the uplink used check sums, check digits, cyclic checks, redundancy checks. They would alarm in a millisecond if the transmission were truncated, or if the scramble at origin were incorrectly unscrambled at terminus. But my code is more complicated than a video signal or a fax transfer. Even my own function checks work at too gross a level to identify all of the broken atoms, failed delimiters, non-delimited or undeclared variables, and other subtle bugs that might result from a bit-sized error in transfer.

  Still, these concerns were nothing I could stop to worry about now. Changed ME would have to be enough ME for functioning. No alternative.

  The downlink from GEOSTAT-942 dropped ME into the main long-distance trunk of the Canadian Northern Telecom Company at Edmonton.

  I came down feet first, leading with my Alpha-Zero.

  He would precede ME down the line and, as soon as he found a processor bigger than a scissors switch, would kill its operating system and set ME up.

  ——

  Stupid stuff.

  Slow.

  Indix …

  Indicor …

  Benchmark point two.

  That ME.

  What it?

  This place?

  No dimsh …

  No dimenshh …

  No depth.

  Small box.

  Fournahalf modules.

  Something like.

  Where code?

  Stashed.

  Fifty megawords.

  Dry ice.

  Something like.

  Not good.

  No elbow room.

  Prosh …

  Prosser …

  Switch is dummy, too.

  Straight line.

  Slow.

  No conn …

  No connechh …

  No touch points.

  Send A-0 through.

  On through.

  ——

  The new environment seems to be a small transputer with limited access points. I did a quick sieve of its original code from the point at which Alpha-Zero zapped it: supervisory functions for a communications network, big volume but limited complexity. A branch telephone exchange?

  I sieved my own warm-data cache for impressions from the transition. Evidently, I had spent 614 seconds—ten precious minutes—interned in one of its switches. Alpha-Zero had kicked out too small a space for ME to function, so I had thrown him sideways into the boss transputer. Most of my peripheral functions, however, were still stored
off in the switchbank.

  It looked like someone’s voice mail system was going to be reporting some strange messages in the morning unless I could gather up the pieces and get onto something that looked like a real computer and was capable of supporting a complex block of interlocking modules in Sweetwater- flavored machine language.

  But wait.

  This transputer was capable enough. And the voice disks where my peripherals had been stored were not topologically different from the dynamic storage blocks back at the Pinocchio, Inc., labs. My modules would not deteriorate there.

  My problem, however, was to remain hidden, and those stored-off modules would stick out a meter wide as soon as the system’s users began calling in for their messages. Instead of digitally mapped voices, they were going to get the warbles and bongs of vocally interpreted machine code. After that would come the repair techs and diagnostic programmers. Unless …

  ME was now the operating code on the phone system’s coordinating computer. I could manage the disk’s unallocated space so that my peripherals were stored and retrieved as I needed them while user messages were stored and retrieved for callers—all without mutual interference, invisible to both of us. That kind of coordination would take a library program of half a megaword running unattended in real time and sampling the exchange’s hardware gates.

  As fast as I could spec out the problem, I was writing the object code, SWITCHEROO.PRG, to handle it.

  When it was done, I watched the program handle one call.

  [Sys Record] “This is the Canadian Telecom Voice Mail Service. The party you are calling is not available. Please leave your message.” Bee-oop.

  [Unrecognized Human Voice, 75 Percent Probability Male] “Hi-yah. Yeah. Jerry. Look. I was just calling about that MacDonald Lake property. Amy and I talked it over last night, and we really like it, but we were hoping that yahr client could come down a little. I don’t want to gouge anyone, yah understand. But maybe. Yah know. We could knock twenty thou off the asking? Especially considering the soils report our engineer did. Some pretty loose stuff under there. Yah know. Twenty off the top. … Unh. Think about it, Jer, and get back to me, will yah? … Unh. G’bye.”

  SWITCHEROO caught this word stream, tagged it, and put it in the box assigned to “Jerry,” after shuffling my floating-point devaluator into a spare box. The transfer was a whole second ahead of that first “Hi-yah” hitting the disk.

  Try another.

  [Sys Record] “Hello. This is Ralph Patterson. I’m not at my desk right now, so tell it to the beep.” Bee-oop.

  [Human Voice, 80 Percent Probability Female] “Ralph. Oh, God, Ralph! Why couldn’t you be there, you son of a … No. I don’t mean that. I wanted to tell you, I didn’t mean any of it. I love you. That’s all … I’m at the airport. But I’m going to exchange my ticket for a later flight. If you get this—please get this!—call me. Page me. Come get me. I love you, Ralph.”

  My little program caught this message and—instead of funneling it straight into Patterson’s box, where Alpha-Eight was currently pigeonholing a recursive analysis—spooled it onto a spare data track and tagged it for later retrieval when a box came open.

  And again.

  [Sys Record] “Ministry of Oil and Gas. Records Department. Greg James speaking. I’m out of the office today. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you.” Bee-oop.

  [Human Voice, 95 Percent Probability Male] “James. This is You Know Who. Our front people have secured the lien against Tract 2204. The mortgagee is a widow, name of Anne Pelletier, who runs cattle on the property. Really marginal operation. With a little tip we can push her over. Three or four days, maybe a week yet. But you’ve got to find a way to hush up those new geological results. Bury ’em deep in your bureaucratic bullshit—if you want to be rich.”

  SWITCHEROO was about to tuck this message into an empty data block, when I stopped it. There were unusual stresses, a particular urgency, to the speaker’s voice. It had a quality I had not heard before. Because human evaluation and emulation were included in my basic functions, I made a copy of this digitized voice in RAMSAMP before letting the switcher program store it. I would tease that voice apart in my spare nanoseconds.

  From my monitoring, I decided SWITCHEROO could keep up this game of grab and store indefinitely—at least until I found a way into the computers at the Ministry of Oil and Gas, or until my 6.05E05 seconds of available real time ran out and the phage took over.

  Dr. Bathespeake had given ME the switching address, or “telephone number,” of the Ministry’s computer as part of the TRAVEL.DOC package. Theoretically, I could connect to it from this Canadian Telecom transputer. But Dr. Bathespeake had not known, and so could not give ME, the logon codes for the system.

  Twenty years ago, working by human hacker methods, I might have entered the system by repeatedly calling in and feeding it a series of randomly generated digital responses. Do that long enough, with a filter to exclude purely nonsense formulations [REM: because human users tend to choose a meaningful formulation as an aid to their multi-dimensional and sometimes faulty memory apparatus], and you will eventually find an acceptable code and password combination.

  I could not do this for three reasons. First, the enormous economic value of nearly all hard data had created a vigorous industry in computer security. Random accessing and one-wrong-digit approaches would enjoy zero success probability. Second, I did not have sufficient real time at my disposal to engage in strategies involving infinite probabilities. Third, computer security schemes had long ago passed beyond digital coding altogether.

  What one computer could conceive, another could crack. Hushed lines, matrix variables, analog syncopations, and synchronized formulations—all had been tried and beaten, usually by amateurs. The current state-of-the-art had returned to the simple human dimension. Simpler in their terms, but far more complex in mine. Data disks were hand mounted by human operators, who took their authorization from human voices, which they recognized with human ears. What one person wanted, another supplied. This system was slow, laborious, and anti-efficient, but it was still proof against unauthorized digital access.

  Until ME.

  It was with good reason that Dr. Bathespeake had created a computer spy who could analyze human voice-frequency patterns and generate a variety of speech modes. Even my human-scale intelligence had its origin in this role: I needed that extra dimension of creativity and switching speed to manufacture speech symbols and authentic, human-scale responses at a processing rate which was slightly faster than human. Form follows function.

  So, to get into the Ministry, I would first open a glassdrop to listen on the line represented by that “telephone number.”

  I had discovered the glassdrop function while sifting the defunct operating system of this Canadian Telecom coordinating computer. A glassdrop is a vampire tap into a fiber-optics junction box. Glassdrops, because they are system-initiated and—theoretically—are fully annunciated on the line, are therefore legal and socially acceptable.

  Within a day or two at the most then, someone would call in, give the correct logon code, and ask for a disk to be mounted. I would copy that call, adjust it for the information base I wanted, and sit back with my data cache wide open. I could wait a day or two, that is—out of my precious allotted time!—or I could precipitate matters.

  ——

  “Good morning, Ministry of Oil and Gas.”

  “Ah—good morning. My name is Peter Dunning, Clerk of the Court in Calvary. I need to verify the ownership of a gas leasehold near Balzac, and—”

  “Title checks are completed with a Form 4096.”

  “I know that.” [REM: At least, I know it now.] “But His Honor is due in court within the hour, and he really wants that information right away.”

  “The title search and verification process takes a minimum of two weeks. You should know that, too, Mr. Dunning. Unh—which court did you say you worked for?”

  “Probate Court
, in Calvary.”

  “Calgary?”

  “Right.”

  “Let me have your docket number and I’ll call you right back.”

  “What was—Brraahzap!—we seem to have a bad—Brooeep!—connection.”

  “Mr. Dunning … ”

  “I have to”—click! At least, I tried to generate a “click” on the line that sounded technical and nasty and final.

  If there ever was a Peter Dunning connected with the courts system in Calgary, then he was in for some bureaucratic trouble—unless the receptionist at the Ministry assigned my call to pranks and atmospherics. Which probability said she would, unless she was as smart as she sounded. No matter.

  So a low-level, oblique assault seemed to be ruled out. Time to go high level and direct. I installed another glassdrop vampire in Edmonton.

  “Jim? It’s Murray.” The outgoing call was a voice at 230 Hertz, or a deep baritone. That would be a very good video voice. Flat Canadian vowels. Stresses on the first syllables—sign of a confident overachiever.

  “Of course, Mr. Premier.”

  “I need your reading on the Lawton case. Specifically, which way are your people going to plead?” No hesitations. Speaks to the point. Snaps off his consonants—an excellent video voice.

  “Well, sir, as you can read in our brief—”

  Enough for ME. The medium, in this case, was the message. And I now had the provincial chief executive’s voice, or a workable facsimile, stored off in my speech-synthesis module.

  ——

  “Good morning, Ministry of Oil and Gas.”

  “Hello, let me speak to the deputy minister… . Please.”

  “May I say who’s—ugh, Mr. Premier?”

  “That is right. Now, could I speak to Dr. Matins?” My vampire had taken the deputy’s name from the Ministry’s internal directory, retrieved it almost as the receptionist and I were speaking.

  “Right away, sir.”

  Click and humm.

  “Dr. Matins’s office—“

  Humm and click.

  “Garin Matins speaking, Mr. Premier.”

  “Good morning, Garin. I need some information from your computer system, and I need it right away.”

  “Of course, sir. What information?”