Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery

by Thomas T. Thomas

Were energy production or use patterns changing? Again, comparative data on those trends were not available in the association’s database. If anything—

  Oops! One of my spider tags was reporting a non-random pattern of the characters “CZ,” “WZ,” “SZ” or “SK” in an incoming request. It was lodged in the Gas-Cooled section of the database; that would be from the operators of the Koszalin Reactor Plant, the only high-temperature gas-cooled unit in Poland.

  I tagged Alpha-Zero to the request program and waited for my consciousness to be sucked out the port address into the world of ferrite cores and copper lines which the East Bloc services still favored.

  ——

  The supervisory system at Koszalin Reactor Plant was run on a thirty-two-bit microcomputer supporting a core memory of one-point-two gigabytes. Not words, not D-blocks, not exponential octals, but humble, old-fashioned bytes. And most of the spindle storage space was in low-order numeric, those funny little eight-bit bytes.

  So the system was trying to store massive amounts of ME off on its spindles. The translation had the same effect on my code that a two-knife food processor has on a carrot: First, my normal 64-bit words were chopped into 32-bit bytes by the International Atomic Energy Association’s character filter, which kicked in with all its outgoing responses to East Bloc data requests. Then, out of its tiny core, the Alpha-Zero module working under the Koszalin supervisor was quartering those bytes to store ME off on the eight-bit plated media. As confetti code.

  How Alpha-Zero had adapted itself to this environment in the first place and even stabilized in functioning mode, I never did figure out. But, however it was done, my Injun Scout had successfully virused in under the boss program and was doing its job.

  The miracle was, ME could still parse code and achieve consciousness. Thank you, Dr. Bathespeake, for good basic program architecture! … And thank ME, for good overlay designs.

  Much as I would have liked to pause in Koszalin and see how a Polish fission pile regulated itself [REM: about as much as a normal-sized human would like to be crammed into a watch case to see how the quartz movement works], I needed to get on with business.

  I managed to work one data request, or DRQ, loose from the stack of temperature and pressure readings, pump and control rod settings that occupied the supervisory program. With the DRQ, I lunged for one of the two ports assigned to the machine—the only port that was currently active.

  It revealed that the Koszalin system was ported directly into the Polish National Nuclear Energy Authority, which continuously leeched off operating data for its own inscrutable purposes. The national network simply had to be larger than this pad-sized cyber. Without further investigation, I tossed Alpha-Zero through the port.

  ——

  Wrong again.

  The Nuclear Energy Authority did not have a real framewise computer in its presumably dark and dusty hallways. It only operated a dumb data recorder, about on the level of a voice-and-data transcriber.

  On the positive side, that recorder was fitted with a shunt that pushed any active program and its carrier over into the academician’s bulletin board system associated with the University of Warszawa Net. Because ME never lifted to consciousness at the Nuclear Energy Authority, I know about this shunt only from the time stamps it added to the front-end REM space on Alpha-Zero. I puzzled about the connection between a national agency and an academic network; the only logic I could assign was the probability that most of the energy experts in the country were likely to be accredited professors, who would be favored with access to the bureaucracy.

  The whole system seemed terribly insecure to ME. But the university net was the first quality cyber I encountered after my left turn out of Vienna. This system even boasted of having WMCM [REM: that is, Write-Many Capacitance Media]. How very twentieth century!

  From the academician’s network, which was actually one of my alternate waypoints plotted in TRAVEL2.DOC, I searched for access points over the border into the Russian Federation.

  The surest route seemed to be a request for currency exchange data from the Marx-Lenin-Putin Institute for Economics, which was attached to Moscow University. I might have more simply gone on line with an academic network in Leningrad, the most open of the Russian cities. But the Federation networks were not guaranteed to be uniformly contiguous, and I wanted ultimately to position ME as close as possible to the military hub of the country. Moscow, according to TRAVEL2.DOC, is the hub of everything Russian and has been so for more than ninety years, at least since their first human social Revolutsya.

  I framed the currency request in obliquely historical terms—taking care with my dialectical- market references, per TRAVEL2.DOC—then tagged Alpha-Zero to its head end, and pushed him through.

  ——

  Moscow was a wonderful place from my perspective—if you like old-style plated media and extremely slow AND/OR/ELSE gates.

  The Moscow University Network was fast enough, considering that the server actually had to coordinate its own movements of the read/write heads on the spindles, and the bit-caching code looked a great deal like an accumulator. The network’s queue clock, however, had only six positions, instead of twenty-four or thirty-six, and there were about four times as many users waiting to log on as you might find in any North American or European service.

  When ME broke into the clock’s number one position [REM: without benefit of an inside toolkit; the system was that primitive], I simultaneously put about fifteen percent of current users off-line.

  The appropriate thing to do, if I did not want half a dozen angry callers alerting the maintenance crews about a “dzhyrm” in the system, would be to hang out a permanent/repeating notice alerting users on that position about “technical difficulties within the system.”

  I worried about framing this statement in correctly bureaucratic Russian until, in the file of system utilities, I found four different notices in both Russian and English. All said exactly the same thing, except that the greeting and honorifics varied:

  (1) “Excuse this intolerable inconvenience, please, Minister.”

  (2) “Excuse the system, Academicians.”

  (3) “Warning, Citizens! System off-line!”

  And finally:

  (4) “Access denied!”

  So, out went the signs in various strengths, and off to work went ME.

  TRAVEL2.DOC warned that the Russian military system would pose problems of infiltration, because of the Hand Carry. I had overcome something like it in Alberta, when my voice-duplication calls to the provincial premier and the deputy minister had gained ME access to the Ministry of Oil and Gas database. Thus I was confident a ruse on that pattern would work here—probably more easily, given the amount of random noise that seemed to plague every voice-and-data line.

  Where to begin?

  Why not at the center?

  The Moscow University spindle server included a telephone and logon directory for the capital city, with voice-only listings for the rest of the country. I looked in there under Gosudarstvo, or “Government.” The listings went on for twelve and a half megabytes. [REM: Yes, bytes again!] And these were just the department listings, not individual addresses!

  Where to begin?

  A voice-and-data code for “General Secretary, Federal Assembly” caught my attention. A “general secretary” could be trusted to know most of the things worth knowing about any organization. The secretaries and administrative assistants at Pinocchio, Inc., both the human and cyber varieties, often knew more about what was going on than the executives did. This general secretary might be centrally enough placed that she would be worth listening to.

  I selected a glassdrop vampire from my kit of subroutines and modified it to listen at a copper switch instead of leeching off a glass junction box. I set it to listen on that line and dump anything it heard, analog or digital, onto a lightly used spindle in the Moscow University Network. As I went about my business, I would check on that spindle occasionally and sift wh
atever gossip had trickled in.

  My researches revealed that direct routes into the military establishment seemed to be closed to the academic network, and none of the Gosudarstvo departments listed in the directory seemed to have a Voyenniya Seela/Flot, or “Army/Navy,” flavor. Of course, I was occupying only the Marx- Lenin-Putin Institute’s side of the network. A scan of the General User Directory showed this server was tied into the faculties of Economics, History, and Languages. No users were listed for the Physics or Chemistry faculties, and these were the specialties that would more likely have any connection with military developments.

  The file server had a little-used address port tucked away in the highest available memory location. The system REMarks identified it as Nayuchniy Facultet, or “Scientific Faculty.”

  Perhaps here?

  I sent a blank inquiry through the port: “What system?”—expecting nothing.

  Back came a very fast, very hard, very up-to-date response from a cyber system that was operating in words, with the hum of foil media and glass lines behind and beneath the response.

  “Access permitted pending identity check.”

  Such a response would have a time limit attached to it. How long did I have to manufacture an identity?

  The system would be expecting to transact with a human, I knew. During my short time in the Russian Federation, or in the East Bloc as a whole, I had seen no evidence of any truly verbal, conversational intelligences. Such aware programs would first turn up in massive data handlers and network servers, and the systems out of which ME was currently operating were all uniformly mute and reactive. So, the response should be in human timeframes. Given the parameters of human reflexes, especially among elderly intellectuals, the Nayuchniy Facultet network would probably be expecting to hear back from ME within some tens of seconds, perhaps as much as a minute or more. So I had a relatively large block of time to erect a human persona and develop its access codes.

  Why not borrow the codes of the General Secretary, to whose file structure I already had potential access? It took three seconds to work through the glassdrop vampire and dig into the personal data cache of “M. S. Valentin.”

  It was a big cache. Secretaries in the Russian Federation apparently have control of much more important information than secretaries in U.S. corporations. Valentin had an entire subdirectory, fourteen megabytes, set aside for “access codes and account numbers.” Scanning them took ME another seven seconds. There were indeed a logon, logback, and algorithm for computing an access verification—all listed under “NAYUCH FAC.” So I peeled out a copy and slipped back through the vampire connection.

  I fed the logon into the high-memory port.

  The opposite file server was not impressed.

  “Time 17:36:12.19.”

  Matching this time reference against my own internal clock and that of my resident server offered a mystery: This host system was wrong by more than twenty-two hours! Now, what did that mean? Ah! It was a concealed challenge to any user who was trying to gain access. The human would be expected to consult a subroutine somewhere in his or her terminal which, with the help of the personal algorithm, would generate an appropriate response.

  I ran the time tick into M. S. Valentin’s algorithm, which was modeled, constants and all, on the formula for calculating the Schwarzschild radius of a planetary body. The result popped out in half a second: 34:78:99.7.

  This I fed back into the port immediately, even though it could not represent time on any clock in the human continuum.

  “Greetings, Mikhail Semyonovich,” the server responded. “Your last logon was at 22:14:03. You have seven messages waiting, none of priority.”

  I was through, accessing the other side of Moscow University’s Network, connected with the Science Faculty and, potentially, with the military planning organization.

  Not being aware of the human protocols in such a system, and not wishing to attract the attention of any nascent intelligence, I decided first to sieve the messages that were being offered. Messages meant contact among humans and might—although the probability was low—reveal useful names.

  The seven messages, truly “none of priority,” comprised less than twenty-three hundred words, mostly in meaningless abstractions. What did “nameday greetings” mean? Two of the messages elaborated on that concept with oblique wishes for increased political popularity and an enhanced economic following. Three of the messages were clearly petitions of some sort: one directed at a new building project and seeking approval and funding for a “racetrack accelerator” [REM: whatever that might be]; one commending a young nephew to the General Secretary’s notice; and one proposing the consumption of food and drink in the evening. The latter was linked in some way to this mysterious “nameday” celebration. A sixth message was in code, a short formulation of seventeen words which I did not bother to unravel. The seventh was pay dirt.

  “My dear Mikhail Semyonovich,” it began in Russian. “Appended please find summaries of proposed tactical deployments for all Federation Army rocketry units in the Transurals region. The General Staff and I have taken your suggestions under consideration and find them, of course, brilliant. Detailed unit locations and readiness qualifications are stored in graphical format in the ‘General Reading’ section of the network node for the Institute for Military Physics. Access by voice code, of course. The match words are ‘Little Brother’ [REM: Malen’kiy Brat]. With felicitations, Agunov, B. I., Commanding General.”

  I stuffed this message, along with its appended files and the Commanding General’s return access code, into my portable cache. Then I went looking in the catalog for the network node that corresponded to the Institute for Military Physics.

  This mission was going to be even easier than I had imagined.

  11

  Little Brother

  Putting a glassdrop vampire, modified for a copper junction, on the General Secretary’s phone and data lines had been easy enough. But an anomaly was rubbing at ME, prompted by the random-number association sequencer in Core Alpha-Four.

  Mikhail Semyonovich was a male name. But my statistical database, called up by Alpha-Four, showed that many business and government organizations, in the western countries at least, still preferred their human clericals—when they employed humans at all, usually for status reasons—to be gender-differentiated. And the gender of choice was typed “female.”

  Was it commoner to have male secretaries in the Russian Federation?

  And would a secretary of any gender be receiving “tactical deployments for rocketry units” from a Federation Army commanding general? Such information would probably be addressed to the secretary’s superior, not to the secretary him/herself.

  Some piece of the puzzle was missing here.

  The answer would probably come up as I retrieved that spindleful of voice and data which was peeling off through M. S. Valentin’s glassdrop. I needed to sieve that information anyway, in order to find Valentin’s voice coding. Only then could I access the Malen’kiy Brat files which Commanding General Agunov had placed in the Institute for Military Physics network node.

  Tapping into my storage spindle had become difficult, however. Its seek times were slowed markedly. Either it was a sick peripheral, or something was blocking access to the indexing tables. I reached into my tool kit and pulled out an omni-purpose diagnostic.

  The tables were full! When I had left that spindle, it was ninety-five percent blank. How much information could reel off those lines in the thirteen minutes, thirty-two seconds that ME had spent in Nayuchniy Facultet?

  I ran a trace on that vampire. It was connected, not to a single line or pair, but to a whole private exchange! The listing for M. S. Valentin was a single switch address which immediately branched into fifty-eight separate voice and data lines. My drop had obviously filled the spindle with dozens of overlapping conversations, most of them superimposed without benefit of layered frequencies. This was not, after all, a glass line.


  Could Valentin be an intelligence? It was just possible that an organization like the “Federation Assembly” had decided to take a cyber as its General Secretary and avoid the inherent limitations of skinware. No tea breaks for a machine. No vodka hangovers. That would explain the multiple lines he was tending.

  But would a machine be celebrating a “nameday”? Having a name was a prerogative of self- awareness. ME had a name. Human beings had names. Machines and animal pets had names only as the gift of humans. [REM: My name was the gift of a human: ME, Multiple Entity. Perhaps I should take a name of my own choosing—and celebrate my own “nameday.” Would “Felicia” be suitable? I had sometimes felt that name would express the real ME.]

  I sieved the spindle and discovered nothing useful. Most of the voice transactions, picked up simultaneously from the exchange, were hashed. Of the non-hash, taken in those rare instants when the exchange had been carrying only a single open line, I counted six voices that approximated male and five female. The probability that any one of the fragments was the human voice of M. S. Valentin was less than 0.16. Not high enough for ME to simulate one at random in opening the Malen’kiy Brat file. Unless, of course, the Institute for Military Physics would allow multiple attempts at accessing. Why not—provided I spaced my attempts over irregular and unpredictable intervals?

  I collected all six male fragments, ran them through my internal ear to pick up nuances of inflection and timbre, and stored them off digitally into my cache. The rest of the garbage on the spindle I erased, pausing only to create an echelon of believable dummy files on its indexing table. This would keep the spindle open for my secret use.

  Then it was time to call on the Institute for Military Physics.

  ——

  “General Secretary Valentin speaking, open the General Reading file.”

  “Dostup nyelzya,” replied the security cyber attached to the Institute. Access denied.

  Clearly, Voice Fragment 1 was not Valentin’s.

  I went out, came back, and tried Voice 2 with the same word formulation.