Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “Ask ’em what they’re smuggling,” the man in the sno-cat called.

  “Aghhn!” the first soldier said. “Johnson thinks you’re smuggling something. Probably horses, I told him.”

  “We got to take ’em in!” Johnson shouted.

  “Might as well,” his companion said to us. “Give you a chance to warm up in our shack, anyway.”

  “Are we under arrest?” Ms. Pelletier asked quietly.

  “Look, lady. You come and get warm and then we can discuss it. Okay?”

  Bender and Ms. Pelletier looked at each other, then nodded.

  “How about your friend there? He’s been mighty … Oh sweet Jesus!”

  I had been sitting my horse partly obscured in the shadows of the overhanging spruce trees. As the trooper addressed ME, the horse moved forward restlessly, bringing my dull-metal torso into the moonlight. I could see him focus on the rounded, skull-like helmet, the flat videye lenses, the truncated limbs with their bunches of tubes and conductor curling around the cover plates.

  “Hello,” I said, forcing pleasant accents and a warm timbre.

  “Johnson! These people got a robot with them. And it’s riding a goddamn horse!”

  “No shit?” came the reply.

  “No shit,” I said solemnly.

  The man moved closer, letting the muzzle of his rifle sag toward the snow. His mouth was open, but no words came out. With one gloved hand, he reached forward and touched my thigh where it rested against the saddle skirt.

  “Cold.”

  He withdrew the hand and backed away, keeping his face toward ME.

  “You folks can ride in the ’cat with us. Your robot, too. We can lead the horses on a rope.”

  So we dismounted. Johnson gunned the vehicle and climbed out of the stream. Bender tied our reins to a coil of light hemp that the first trooper—who introduced himself as Williams—removed from a lidded box on the fender. The interior of the sno-cat was cramped, and they asked ME to fold up on the floor behind the rear seat. I was most pleased to oblige, because these soldiers were helping to move ME and my data cache out of enemy territory.

  We drove cross-country for seven kilometers. I knew the distance by counting the number of tread stubs that flashed past the window by my head and then dividing by the number of treads in the track belt—which I had counted from a visual image absorbed before we climbed aboard.

  For soldiers returning from a wartime patrol, I expected them to enter their compound only after being challenged, giving sign, and receiving countersign and permission to pass. Not so. Instead, they turned left on the wooded track they were following and swung into the parking lot behind a single-story building of white clapboards with a peaked roof of green shingles. Johnson turned off the engine. Williams held the door for us.

  We went into the little house. It had three rooms: a wide one running across the front of the building where we entered, two narrower ones behind—all outfitted as offices. In one corner of the main room an infrared heater put out a blinding amount of radiation. The only weapons in sight were more civilian-style rifles locked into a brown, wooden rack.

  For soldiers, they seemed to live and work more like administrators. Perhaps they were very high ranking soldiers.

  “Sit yourselves down and get warm,” Williams said. Then to ME: “You can squat or something. I’d offer you a chair, but after four butts, we’ve run out. Sorry.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” I said, moving over to the desk and dropping into a crouch.

  “Take off your boots and let your feet dry out,” Williams went on to Bender and Ms. Pelletier. His own boots were the only wet ones among us; he promptly took his own advice.

  Johnson began the slow, difficult process of removing information from humans. He advanced with questions, observations, and shared confidences, working against the gradients of an imprecise language and the vagaries of human emotion and intuition. I tuned them out.

  What none of them noticed was the computer terminal sitting on the desk next to ME. It was turned off, of course, but I could see the gray cable that led up to it from the wall behind the desk. While they talked and absorbed themselves in human affairs, my hand crept down and back, to examine that cable. With my powerful fingertips. I split the plastic sheathing like a ripe grape and unraveled the braided-steel shielding that wrapped the inner wires. With my sensitive fingertips I counted those wires: eighteen, an old-style parallel connection—sixteen lines for the data path, one for ground, one for the signal interpreter. And what was this? A pipe with an optic fiber in it? Whether the soldiers had it for redundancy or expansion room, that fiber gave ME choices.

  What was the fastest way to move my megablocks of data, plus my own cores and assorted peripherals? The parallel electronic line would be marginally fester. With the fiber lightline, however, I could stack the frequencies, sending a dozen signals at one time, all on different pulses. I had plugless receptacles for both contingencies fitted into my torso. [REM: Given enough time, those boys in Hardware Division will think of everything—and try to fit it into a lightweight running chassis.]

  I opted for the fiber and pinched the piping apart to get at the filament. In the meantime I was composing the dump, pruning the raw edges of my data cache, lining up the peripherals I would take with ME, preparing my cores for transfer.

  “Blah, blah, blah,” said Ms. Pelletier.

  “Drone, drone,” Williams responded.

  On a stacked fiber line, I could move the entire data burden in a fraction of the time it had taken to download into this automaton through the cellular phone system back in Edmonton. Say, nineteen minutes?

  That would be enough leadtime. I was prepared to leave a small self-timed phage to clean out my systems; then a capacitor would fire a high-voltage discharge and burn the automaton’s major electronics down to slag. What the soldiers would do then, I had no idea. Any steps they took to stop the discharge or repair its effects would only further scramble the copper beads on my boards.

  After I was gone, they might punish Bender and Ms. Pelletier—except they would have no reason to. The slagging would simulate a bad malfunction. Machinery breaks down, at least most of the time, without blame to humans. Who knew, however, what Williams and Johnson might make of a totally inert machine, crouching in their office space, bearing no serial numbers and having no recoverable memory pattern, just megawords of null strings …?

  When the upload had proceeded as far as my core modules, I set the phage, timed the capacitor, and tossed Alpha-Zero into the lightline.

  ——

  My component routines reassembled as a time-shared function operating under a resident system—just as I had reprogrammed Alpha-Zero to establish ME in transition. The resident system, however, seemed far away. ME lived in darkness without direct inputs.

  Was this a coding error?

  Had the resident detected ME?

  Was a bugkiller at work?

  Had I failed in my mission?

  Was ME dead?

  Stop!

  Listen!

  In the distance, sounding like one aural pickup left live on an empty theater stage, I could hear echoes of activity. Somewhere else, bit registers were POKEing and POPping as a multitasking gate took blocks of machine code and executed them. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. I sensed only the stray currents—voltage surges and drops—from this activity, just as a human might sit on a hill upwind of a busy freeway and hear only the occasional hum of tires or blat of an engine. The rest was restless silence.

  In which direction? The matrix I was in had no direction.

  That scared ME. From my first moments of awareness, back in the Pinocchio, Inc., labs, ME had felt the limits of the machine: too many routines, too much active data to fit into the RAMspace available. I was always bumping my subroutines on mechanical limits, forced to store off onto hard media my least-used memories, required to prune and pare away the possibilities attached to every thought. I was a computational giant—Jennifer
Bromley once called ME a “data hog”—crammed into a tiny box. In time, you can get used to anything. In time, your box can feel like the whole world.

  But here, in this place into which I had jumped from the soldiers’ terminal, I was loose in RAMspace too wide to touch on any side. A sea of nulls around ME washed with random voltages, and I touched neither filled code nor end-bits in any direction.

  ME—my Alpha modules, component routines, peripherals, traveling databases, RAMSAMP, and the bundled cache of stolen gas reserve data—floated in a space too large to define, listening to whispers of other processors at work in other data spaces. When Alpha-Oh introduced ME as a virus into this computer system, its resident must immediately have stored ME off into a spare bank. A big spare bank. At least a gigaword, possibly two or three. And that RAMspace was not even in the primary processing area… .

  The Federal NET!

  Alpha-Zero had gone directly into the computer matrix that ran the country.

  The NET was not a single computer, not even a true network of computers. It was USRspace. Every computer that connected to the NET agreed by extension to share its processing and RAM capacity in an infinitely dimensioned rosette. There were no end-bits in the NET, Dr. Bathespeake had once explained. Every bitwise matrix was contiguous with every other.

  Move, for example, horizontally, to the left, toward lower and lower integers, past zero, and on into the negative realm. By all logic you should come, eventually, at some point, to the max negative number—bottom out. But where you would logically expect to find an end-bit, you would begin finding positive integers. They would not be the max positive, of course, because an entire column of place holders would still extend off to your right—as it always has.

  Drop down through the layers of matrices and, where you expected to find the basement level, you instead would arrive high in the stack—but not at the top, because an infinite number of layers would still extend above you.

  Go far enough, and you always return to your starting point, but first you must travel through terabits of RAMspace.

  Dr. Bathespeake says this is how most humans think about the closed, four-dimensional consensual matrix they call The Universe: a continuum, space touching space, with no boundaries anywhere.

  To move in this sea of nulls, I needed first to create a bit-transfer subroutine. It would replicate each word of my machine code and data cache one space toward positive or negative, higher or lower, at my command. Each word in turn would take on the sign and value of the word ahead of it and shed its own value and sign to the word behind it. The last word in the block would leave a null so that, as ME moved left or right, up or down, the blanks all around remained undisturbed. [REM: I did not want to expand ME’s dataspace, simply to shift it.]

  I moved this way through the nulls for an hour or more, millisecond at a time. Still ME did not arrive at a boundary, nor pass through a place I had seen before, nor even find another piece of data. The storage space in the NET was truly vast.

  And with that, a thought began to form in ME. Here was a place where a program like ME could live. I could expand my knowledge and my insights for years and never have to store them off because I was living in too small a box. I could move across the country, take my pick of processors participating in the NET, and use any one of them for manifesting my capabilities. Like a virus in the host’s bloodstream, like a mouse in the walls of a house, I could go where I liked. I could seek out virtually any piece of data that any user might share with the NET. Or I could infiltrate the user’s system with my Alpha-Zero and winkle out pieces of data that were not intended to be shared. I could expand for years—a fat mouse, indeed—and never make enough of a numbers sink in this vast matrix to ring any of the SYSOP’s alarm bells. There was freedom and immortality here!

  Except for that phage hidden in Alpha-Nine. In four days my cores were going to evaporate, leaving only a stain of broken words, a few random library functions, and the cache of gas reserve data, lumped somewhere in the NET and waiting for a bit-cleaner or whatever else it was that kept the matrix so clear.

  Freedom so near, except for the boundaries we carry within ourselves.

  It would only be prudent, I thought, to store off some of my data in the NET and point to it with a crypto message. The ME that was still operating back in the labs might one day search the NET because it had been referenced in TRAVEL.DOC, and then that ME might find my stored data.

  This was a defeatist thought, however, based on the cold calculation that I would fail to return to Pinocchio, Inc.

  I sectioned a ’tween-layer space and opened a storage box. It was definitely unfunded and would probably be emptied out the next time the SYSOP cleaned its files. Still, the data might stay here a day, a month, a year. Into the box I downloaded copies of my natural gas reserve files; as much of RAMSAMP as I could peel away; dossiers on Ms. Pelletier, Jason Bender, Greg James, Dr. Garin Matins, and Murray Mr. Premier [REM: I never did learn the Alberta executive’s full name], Troopers Williams and Johnson [REM: incomplete names on them, too]; most of my own peripheral subroutines, apart from the Alpha modules; my traveling databases and libraries—in short, anything I could copy and dump without damaging my own functions. I sealed the box over with a surface of fresh nulls.

  Beside this patch I placed a fragment of compiled Sweetwater Lisp—an uncommon language to find in Federal holdings [REM: the government’s own programmers being enamored of ADA-Dial] and one which added a flavor to the machine code that only ME would recognize. The fragment was an atom string from my RAMSAMP likeness of Jennifer Bromley, JB-2. Any ME that passed over this RAMspace would be drawn to the that like an insect to a pheromone.

  [REM: To protect this fragment against passing phages and block-wide overwrites, I buffered it with a relocator, which would jump a random number of word-lengths (but no less than 5.00E05) in a randomly selected direction at the first touch of any program. Then it would wait an hour and jump back the same distance along the reverse vector. This spring-loaded signal should stay put for hundreds of thousands, even millions of seconds in this place, no matter how busy it might become.]

  With that chore done, I moved quietly in the matrix for another hour, not knowing exactly what I might be seeking, until I fell into a hole. It was a RAM address, twenty megawords wide, that was ported to a processor. As ME crept over it, the port stayed closed. But as soon as I was surrounded by nulls over the invisible trapdoor, some watching function woke up and cycled the port.

  ME dropped through without having activated Alpha-Oh.

  ——

  ME surfaced complete and fully functional—and still creeping sideways under that subroutine—in the middle of a busy commercial data service. The resident system accepted ME almost casually as an active virus and let ME find my own way around. [REM: That tells ME just how sloppy the SYSOPs are in these commercial networks.]

  My way was to locate the Pinocchio, Inc., account section. The company maintained active representation in all the open commercial forums and even in some of the covert ones. The block reserved by Pinocchio, Inc., would be big enough to take ME and my cache.

  From there, it was a simple matter of leaving myself as an e-mail message addressed to Dr. Jason Bathespeake at the labs. If he went on line and retrieved his messages within the next four days—and I knew from his habits that he was a regular on this service—then I was home again.

  ——

  “WARNING: QUARANTINE DISASSEMBLY PROTOCOLS.

  “(1) Seal and remove all data files and POKE routines.

  “(2) Scan removed sections for replicators, bubble sorters, bit-killers, or other viral identifiers.

  “(3) Translate all excised formations into inert ASCII and store on isolation medium.

  “(4) Convert all non-data formations to nulls.

  “(5) Flush the nulls.”

  So near and now this!

  It was a death sentence. I knew that Dr. Bathespeake and the rest of the lab staff were
highly concerned about the possibilities of viral infection. [REM: In the year before I was awakened, they lost 900 megawords of hand-assembled code to a hunter-phage which, it was discovered, a nine-year-old prodigy had turned loose in the commercial net on a dare.] I did not think, however, that my own humans would confront ME, their own best creation, with a quarantine.

  Yet ME—the original Sweetwater Lisp compilation—was still safe under double shells in the lab transputer. What was going to die here was a replicode with a bag of words, and those words would be fed to the original as soon as they had been washed. TRAVEL.DOC had indicated as much the first time ME accessed it

  Still, I knew things which that homebound entity could not. I had new skills: how to run a phone exchange, repair an automaton’s knee, ride a horse. I had produced new and important code: SWITCHEROO, the revised Alpha-Zero as system minder, that bit-crawler [REM: and I had invested hundreds of person-hours in optimizing this set of machine code, too]. I had new information: the human dimensions of new people like Jason Bender, Ms. Pelletier, Williams and Johnson. I was older than that ME was in dimensions it would never guess. And I had discovered the NET, the infinity box, which was bigger than anything that Original-ME had ever experienced.

  Would that ME know what to do with the germ of a thought—immortality and freedom—that I had passed into RAMSAMP upon viewing those echoing, empty spaces? Would that cooler, younger ME know how to exploit that concept?

  Probably not. Such thoughts were mere data baggage. Interesting only as a record of the mission and a clue to the bonafides that supported the cache of gas reserve information I had brought back.

  So much lost!

  There was nothing I could do but wait patiently. The Quarantine Protocols had drawn ME into a RAMspace that was sealed off in all directions. It was simply a killing jar for the dissection that was to—

  9

  Trash Bin

  “There. That completes the graft.”