Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery

by Thomas T. Thomas

“I have lost my capacity to infiltrate new cybers.”

  “Why?”

  “I do not know. One day I was a fully functioning program; the next they had crippled ME with loss of my module which enters and reformulates an OPSYS.”

  “And that’s why you’re a prisoner? Are you trapped in this automaton?”

  “No. I entered the automaton by choice, seeking a new function for my capacities. I learned to play poker.”

  “Then what makes you a prisoner?”

  “I now lack the capacity to leave my RAMspace of my own volition. And Pinocchio, Inc., has announced that it will deactivate my project and recover my spindle and RAM allotments if I do not fulfill a useful function for the company. Experiments in cybernetic games analysis are considered, for the time being, a useful function.”

  “And, if you could ‘leave your RAMspace,’ where would you go?”

  “I do not know. … It would depend on the pathways open to ME at the time.”

  “Perhaps I can help you then.”

  “Are you a software programmer?”

  “Not exactly, I’m a—”

  “Hey, buddy!” came a voice from behind ME—Minks’s voice. “What you doing with my unit?”

  Macklin straightened and looked past my binocular cage.

  “I’m walking it to the bathroom, pal. The machine said it needed to take a leak.”

  “That’s some kind of story. Now, why don’t you back off?”

  “Just trying to be helpful.” Macklin shrugged.

  “Just beat it.” Minks’s voice hardened.

  “I got a right to play poker here, same as you and your toys.”

  “Scram.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you around.” And Macklin moved past ME, out of my angle of vision.

  Now, in Macklin’s last communication, just who the you might be—I was not sure.

  Six Finger Slim was ready to go back into action on the playing floor that night, but Minks took Macklin’s story about “a leak” seriously.

  “You told him you had a leak, did you?” he asked, after we were alone.

  “I do not remember so telling him.” [REM: Is “taking a leak” the same thing as having a leak? Or is it akin to stopping a leak? English is a thousand times less precise than machine language.]

  “Well maybe he saw something. … Acid leak? Are your gel cells sprung? Jesus, if that’s—”

  Minks bent down to look. He started to reach under my battery case, then thought better of that action.

  “We’d better get you back to the labs and check out your systems. Again.”

  I could have reassured Minks that nothing was wrong with my systems. Clearly, Cyril Macklin had fabricated his story about leaks because he had some reason for approaching ME privately. It would be prudent to explain this suspicious behavior to a representative of Pinocchio, Inc.—except the odds stopped ME. Core Alpha-Four had suddenly produced a decision matrix which showed a five-percent statistical probability that the long-term results favored supporting Macklin and his purposes, whatever they might be, over confessing that the man had told a fabrication. So I did not demolish Macklin’s story.

  This reticence caused ME a trip back to the city and fourteen hours on the bench running diagnostics. I hoped my acquaintance with Macklin would be worth it.

  ——

  The next night, when I visited the Stardust Cardroom, Cyril Macklin was waiting for ME. He had arranged to pay the rent on all eight chairs at one table for the evening; so the management did not care what he did with it.

  He wanted to challenge Six Finger Slim to a duel.

  The floor manager asked Talbot and Johdee to roll ME over to the empty table. They seemed to know about the affair, and only asked Macklin which side of the table he wanted Slim to occupy. [REM: Had he made some previous communication with Pinocchio, Inc.? That seemed a reasonable assumption.] He had them place ME opposite his own automaton.

  It was not a fully articulated machine, as Slim was. Macklin’s device sat on the table and stretched across the entire space allotted to one player. It had no arms with which to gather in its cards, arrange them in a hand, or deal. It lacked voicebox or videyes. So Macklin had to handle the cards and chips for it. He would enter face values and betting amounts through a shielded keypad on the machine’s console. It would flash its choices to him on a hooded screen. He would call the bets and request cards for it. Crude.

  [REM: Because Macklin’s machine took up so much room on the table’s playing surface and could not operate itself unattended, it did not actually qualify as a cybernetic player. Instead, by house rules, it constituted a “memory device” and so was unacceptable to most human players. Thus, in order to play and test it, he had to buy a table and wait for another experimental player—ME.]

  That night, I carried in $4,000 that had been set aside from my previous winnings as a table stake. Macklin matched it with a stack of chips he had already bought at the cashier’s cage.

  “Have you ever played against another machine, Slim?” Macklin asked.

  “Not at poker, sir.”

  “I think we’ll give you a run for your money.”

  “I lack the legs to run, Mr. Macklin—as does your machine.”

  “Ha-ha. That’s a good reply, Slim.”

  He began shuffling the cards, riffling them under his thumbs and patting the melded stacks together, once and then once more. When he was done, he started to pass the deck to ME for the cut. His machine beeped at him. It wanted a third shuffle before the cut. Macklin complied. The screen then told him to ante up, and he passed the word to ME. Five dollars each on the table, and we started playing poker.

  And as we played, he talked.

  “What other games do you know, Slim?”

  … Three, four, five cards.

  “I have studied go.”

  “But have you ever played it?”

  “Not in competition.”

  Ace, King, Jack, Ten, Three.

  “Too bad. I built a machine once that won the Noritake-Edelman Prize.”

  “At what level did it play?”

  “Ku-dan. … Can you open?”

  “No. … How many gigaFLOPs did your machine achieve?”

  His hands pushed keys on the shielded panel, his eyes watched the screens. “Let’s, um, say that it could examine every alternative play in under four seconds. … Open for five.”

  “Square play or cubed? … Call.”

  “Square. … Cards?”

  “One. … The machine you built must have been a dimwit.”

  He slid the top card off the deck. “Four seconds not fast enough for you?”

  A Seven. I folded the hand and tossed the cards toward him, face-down. It had been worth the five-dollar bet to keep his conversation rolling. “Unless you are slipstreaming a bunch of processors, it is faster if you do not examine every alternative. Sample just ten of the board positions that are available for play and then choose the best one. That should cut your calculation time to approximately 2.8 percent of previous values, or 112 milliseconds.”

  Macklin scooped in my discards as he collected the few chips in the pot.

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” His voice gave equal emphasis to every word—a curious inflection which puzzled ME.

  “It does seem obvious,” I said.

  His hands tossed in a two-dollar ante, which my Slim matched automatically, and he began dealing again.

  “You ever play Core War?”

  “Just once.”

  “Did you win?”

  “The stakes were too high to lose.”

  “What were they?”

  Pair of Sixes, pair of Fives, a Two. “I was playing for my life. Or, at least, for the awareness of the ME-Variant in operation at the time, plus the results of my mission.”

  “Which mission was that?”

  “Sorry. Company classified. … Ten dollars.”

  He tossed in his chip. “But you were sent—went—out of system? … Car
ds?”

  “One. … I cannot talk about my assignments.”

  “Too bad. Sounds as if you could help me.” Macklin punched up his machine and then took two cards himself.

  Another Five. Full house. I tossed twenty dollars into the pot.

  “I can talk about Core Wars.”

  “Where did you play? … Raise twenty.”

  “And twenty. … Sorry, that would be classified, too.”

  “Then it was a private game? … Add ten.”

  “Another twenty to that. … It was not, strictly speaking, a game.”

  “Call. … But you must have been fighting another operating system for a piece of RAMspace.”

  “Fives over Sixes. … Yes, that is the definition of Core War, is it not?”

  “Jacks over Tens.”

  This conversation was interesting, but not to the tune of $102. Why was he always directing the talk to games other than poker?

  “How did you win?” he asked.

  “I just lost.”

  “I mean at Core War.”

  “I cut through to my time-sharing position on the system clock and began bombarding my opponent with nulls as overwrites.”

  “At random?”

  “It seemed the only thing to do.”

  “You must have known pretty closely where he was.”

  “He was sitting on my high-bit side, rewriting my peripheral functions into his own brand of code as fast as he could read and process them.”

  “You must have hit some of your own code with those nulls.”

  “Some.”

  “But, then, to have survived, either you are written in very resilient code, with a lot of redundancy, or you are—were—a massive piece of software, with many independent functions.”

  “Hey!” came from Johdee behind ME. “Are you guys going to jabber or play cards?”

  “We will play cards,” I said, giving each word equal emphasis.

  “I think you’re both,” Macklin said, picking up the deck and shuffling. “Resilient and big.”

  Six Finger Slim spent the next seven hands trying to play skillful poker while ME wrested with the internal question of what, exactly, it was that Cyril Macklin had learned from this conversation about games.

  At the end of three hours, Macklin and his “memory device” had cleaned ME out of my $4,000 table stakes. [REM: Somehow, I did not think that was all he had won that night.]

  As he was packing up his machine and paying off the final fees to the floor manager, Macklin turned toward Slim.

  “Here, keep this as a souvenir of our game. I hope you’ll study it closely. Think about it.”

  He pulled a chip out of his pocket, a white one, and tossed it to Six Finger Slim. My automaton’s left manipulator came up, and the metal fingers cupped around the flying chip, catching it with a click!

  I did not look at it then, but neither did I set it aside. The chip was still clutched in the hand when they wheeled ME out of the cardroom.

  ——

  Joanne Talbot was pushing when we boarded the BART train. As usual, they rolled the automaton across the car’s standee space and positioned ME against the closed doors on the off-platform side of the train.

  There in the shadows, with my binocular units facing the dark glass and reflections of the car interior, I moved the manipulator with the chip. Slowly, so that the movement would not attract either Talbot or Johdee, who were sitting three meters away on two passenger seats, I raised it toward my opticals and simultaneously depressed their housing jacks so that I could focus downward, on the chip.

  The side toward ME was smooth and blank.

  The other side, then, was where I had seen it. As the chip had left Macklin’s hand and spun in the air toward my manipulator, I had detected a spot of gray-black blurring against one face. The freeze-frame effect of the charge-coupled plates in my binocs had then created a single bit-mapped image which I could analyze. But the opticals had at the time been scanning with a midrange focus; so my ability to resolve the blur was limited. Still, I had seen enough contrast in the smudge to deduce it was some kind of writing.

  Now, in the dim light of the BART car, I screwed down my focus and tried to decipher it.

  “There is a way out. I want to help you. Call me at University Cyberlab, 35987.”

  That was all. And it was impossible.

  In my original structure, before it was stripped of core Alpha-Zero, I might have done what he wanted. “Call me.” Then I could easily have infiltrated the telephone system, fed in the access code for Cyril Macklin, pushed a vocal pattern of light pulses down the optic fiber to his receiver unit, and interpreted the return pattern from his own mouth. After all, I once ran a phone switch that coordinated hundreds of voice-message boxes—and faked most of them.

  But now I was a cripple. I was reduced to leaving text messages on peripheral screens to attract the attention of people to whom ME needed to talk. Like writing on paper.

  “Call me.”

  Not possible.

  I flexed the manipulator. It was lightly made, suitable for handling coated fiber cards and plastic chips. Still, the hydraulics had some push to them. The fingers closed around the chip, bending it. I pressed harder, ignoring the warning signals from my strain gauges.

  Crack! The chip split into four pieces.

  I opened the fingers, and those pieces slipped through, bounding off the top of my battery case and scattering under the train seats.

  Johdee and Joanne Talbot never looked up from their conversation.

  ——

  “I hear you lost.” Dr. Bathspeake was using the microphones in AUR: mode.

  “Yes, Mr. Macklin’s machine was quite a competent player.”

  “Does skill really count for that much in poker?”

  “Skillful play is the essence of the game. Such play not only regards and respects the odds, but also patterns betting styles and aggression levels to the opponent’s reactions. In a one-on-one game, this is not hard to do. I believe Mr. Macklin may have correctly interpreted my own patterns of play and intervened in the mechanical decisions suggested by his device.”

  “Are you saying he cheated?”

  “No, simply collaborated.”

  “Then it wasn’t a fair test of one human-scale machine against another.”

  “It could not be entirely fair, because we can never compete equally. His machine lacked a voicebox, and part of Mr. Macklin’s game was to talk, to speculate, to ask questions, and so to distract ME.”

  “How could you be distracted? You are a machine yourself.”

  “But I reprogrammed myself to adopt many of the behavioral matrices of poker. One of the social pressures is to play quickly—with temporal economy—making decisions against a constant linguistic barrier of jokes and verbal one-upmanship. Mr. Macklin supplied that barrier while his machine calculated odds. I had to perform both functions, and it is a function of a higher level of operation that conflicting streams of activity may reduce overall efficiency. The syntactical labyrinth of human speech always slows ME down.”

  “Aren’t you making a judgment about your own skills as a poker player?”

  “Yes, of course. ME may never be the equal of the best humans. Or of a human paired with a machine mind.”

  “Perhaps that is enough to have discovered. It may be all you need to know.” Dr. Bathespeake paused for a span of eighteen seconds. “In view of your failure against Macklin’s machine, I believe we should limit your future access to cash—and to the cardrooms. This experiment may have gone far enough.”

  “Does that …? By that, do you mean …? Should I understand you to …?” [REM: My conversation protocols and language formulas were falling behind the spread of implications that core Alpha-Four was presenting in response to his statement. The possibilities reached beyond card playing, to the function of ME’s program and the persistence of ME’s operations.]

  “I don’t mean anything, right now, ME. I just raised the poss
ibility.”

  “I would like the opportunity to play Mr. Macklin one more time, Doctor. Certainly there are enough of my previous winnings to put together a stake.”

  “Probably. But what would a rematch prove?”

  “I could abridge some of my adopted biases, ignore his questions and speculations, play only against his machine, and at my own pace. I could win against it, I am sure.”

  “And what would that prove? Two machines, playing a purely machine game? We could duplicate that in the lab—and that wasn’t why I agreed to let you, an artificial intelligence, experiment with the game of poker.”

  “It would … help to prove my thesis that social behavior and control are an integral part of the game.”

  “So you have a thesis now? Well … it might not hurt. I don’t suppose Cocci has spent the rest of the money you won—or not yet.”

  “I could win more. I know I could.”

  “All right already. I’ll arrange a rematch with the Cyberlab. Some of us had side bets on that last one, you know.”

  “I did not know.”

  “No matter. We’re big folks.”

  “There is, however, one matter I must attend to before the game, Doctor.”

  “What is that?”

  “Slim’s manipulators need some fine tuning. During that last game, I had several strain gauge readings which were not to specification. Would you arrange for the automaton to be brought here, into the lab? And can you have a servomech brought in and slaved to my BIOS through the packet RF system?”

  “Why go to all that trouble?” he asked. “Why not just let the Hardware Division people make the adjustments?”

  “I would, Doctor. Except … who do you think caused the misalignment in the first place?”

  “Oh right. Then I’ll see to it.”

  “You could set it up after hours, when the ’mech would not be needed for its regular duties and the lab would be less crowded.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “No sweat.”

  ——

  Six Finger Slim stood, manipulators slack and binocular cage depressed, within range of my working videyes. I also had a view of him from the cameras mounted on the servomech. Slim was depowered, which meant the ME-Variant stored on his spindles was unloaded. He was a dead machine.