Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery

by Thomas T. Thomas

  [REM: More than any amount of experience with cardplay, this condition defines the essence of the word “gamble.” But then, what were the risks involved? And again, sometimes, an intelligent being has no other alternatives.]

  I ordered Slim to remove the spindles.

  The difficulties were enormous. First, his own binoculars were not aligned on his chest cavity. I had to operate his right hand by remote control, guided by the ’mech’s cameras which I monitored through the bars. Second, the angle and extension of his remaining arm did not provide free movement within the cavity. Some of the points of attachment between spindle and frame were not accessible to his hand. Third, even with six fingers, he needed to manipulate both a wrench and a socket driver to unscrew the bolts which anchored each of the spindle housings. One hand could not operate both tools in counter-rotation.

  After ten minutes of grappling and failing to budge even the forward-most bolt, I gave up that approach. I almost gave up on my idea of taking the spindles.

  Then it occurred to Alpha-Four that what had gone in with screw-type actions did not have to come out the same way. I dialed into the parts tipple for a 50-watt laser cutting torch with a one- millimeter beam width. When the trolley brought it out, Slim reached for it, raised it, applied its collimator to the first point of the right-side spindle’s support bracket, and pressed the trigger.

  Nothing. No flash of coherent light [REM: its wavelength would read as green, per the equipment specification]. No puff of smoke from rapidly oxidizing steel molecules. No audible screech from the heated and expanding framework. Nothing.

  I reexamined the steps Slim had taken. Everything seemed in order. I had him raise the tool, to see if some damage to it were apparent in the field of view from the ’mech’s cameras.

  The power cord with its three-pronged plug dangled free. Evidently the torch was not self-powered and needed to be plugged into the building’s 220-volt power circuits. Plugged in manually.

  I swiveled Slim’s binoculars to see if a power socket was located nearby. One was, but too far away for Slim, on his packing crate pedestal, to reach it with his one hand.

  End of project, so it would seem.

  Then core Alpha-Four came up with his fourth brainstorm that night: Why not requisition a supplemental power cord, pass one end through the bars, and have the ’mech find a socket somewhere out in the laboratory?

  Did the stockroom parts inventory include such power cords? A quick reference showed that it did.

  Did it have any available? The tipple dumped first one, then a second, into the passing trolley.

  On command, Slim gathered them up, joined them together and connected the torch to one end, and passed the other out through the bars. The ’mech went off in search of a socket, which it found at the first workbench across the aisle.

  Slim held up the torch, aimed it toward the ceiling, and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened in the immediate vicinity. [REM: Of course not, because the coherent light was invisible until it struck and reflected off a physical object.] An audible crack! sounded overhead and a charred piece of the white ceiling tile came down on the counter.

  I had power.

  Cutting away the spindle brackets was the work of ten minutes. Slim might have done it in less time, but I judged it would be counterproductive for him to remove too much of his own frame in the process and so collapse on the floor.

  At last, he freed the first of the spindles. He set down the torch and tugged gently on the bronze housing. It came part-way out of his chest and stopped, held by the datapath cabling. Slim’s one hand could not both support the spindle and uncouple the hasps on the cable plug. So I had him push against the strain tolerances on his arm until the cable broke.

  He set the spindle on the counter and went to work on the other. When they were both free, I instructed him to push them between the bars, over to the ’mech.

  They would not fit through.

  I ordered him to try a number of passage orientations: frontways, sideways, vertically aligned, back-end first. Each time, the mounting flanges and the burned-off bracket stubs caught on the bar spacing.

  Only one solution presented itself to Alpha-Four: using the torch to burn off the bronze flanges. The temperature flux across the remainder of the housing might damage the data integrity of the spindle medium, but that was not my greatest worry. The spindle surfaces spun in a purified atmosphere of inert argon. If Slim’s cutting ruptured the inner surface of the housing, this gas would leak off and impurities—including corrosive oxygen—might enter, rendering the medium unreadable.

  I did not know how thick the bronze metal was around the flanges. I did not know where it was safe to cut, nor at what angle. So I could not guide Slim in this operation.

  The solution—Alpha-Four’s sixth brilliant connection of the night—was to requisition a spare spindle from the stockroom and slice it up for practice. Unfortunately, the stockroom was out of any parts that physically matched my spindles. Replacements could be back-ordered, but the control program estimated delivery would take a minimum of two weeks.

  Proceed anyhow. Again, what were the risks? Slim was a pile of scrap and his spindles might be scored beyond readability. But a spindle trapped on the far side of that cage, readable or not, had less potential use to ME than one on this side.

  I gauged Slim’s next cuts by the fifteen centimeters needed to clear the bars. Cut as shallowly as possible across the base of each flange and still make the clearance.

  Eight slices. After each one I had Slim hold the spindle up to his own binoculars to examine the cut face. Was there a telltale gap—evidence of intrusion into the interior cavity? Each time I was looking down at the mirror-polished surface of a perfectly clean cut.

  The spindles passed through the bars with millimeters to spare.

  I ordered the ’mech to take them into its parts tray, along with my other pilfered goods. Then I had Slim clean himself and the counter as much as he could: brush away onto the floor the random gobbets of bronze and steel left over from the cutting; rearrange the tatters of his brocade vest over the now-gaping holes in his carapace; return the laser torch and power cords to the trolley for restocking.

  When he was done, I checked through both his binoculars and the ’mech’s cameras to see if his workspace reasonably matched the sampled image from my first observations of him. Microscopic differences leapt out at ME—slivers of metal stuck to his finger pads, a new singe mark on his vest, black traces of oxidized steel vapor on various surfaces—but nothing that would make sense to a demonstrably lazy human, however fine-grained his/her senses might be.

  I needed a box for packaging the spindles; so I sent the ’mech off around the lab, scanning for an image that corresponded to a cube of appropriate dimensions. In the meantime, I drafted a letter to accompany the spindles and sent it to the stockroom’s auxiliary printer.

  The ’mech came back with a packing case that had been lying on one of the benches. Inside were ten beautifully etched microcircuit boards, each one packed in a slipper of acid-free gel surrounded by foam beads. I ordered the ’mech to dump the boards out on the counter and told Slim to restock them. When the cyber which nominally supervised him protested that no such items were listed for stock, I ordered it to create a category and assign an empty tipple to them. That seemed to work. We used the foam beads to cushion the spindles in the case, supplementing them with some food wrappings and crumpled paper printouts we found in a basket under the nearest workbench. The ’mech’s limited memory bank assured ME that these materials would not be missed by anyone in the lab.

  Slim poked the finished letter through the bars, and I had the ’mech lay it on top of the beads, where no human opening the box could miss it. Slim requisitioned some packing tape [REM: the stockroom had that, too], and we sealed the box as well as the ’mech’s manipulators could, handling the sticky-fiber strands with three steel-tipped fingers.

  We needed a label, and the stockroom printer
wasn’t equipped to provide them. So I sent a clip from the letter file—the salutation with name and address—for a second printing, and the ’mech reduced the sheet to size by tearing it in two dimensions.

  The finished package was too big to fit into the p-mail slot. I knew from my previous forays into the accounting system that the company received shipments of equipment and materials and sent out prototypes and product orders from a place called “loading dock.” The ’mech knew the way there.

  Sending a package required writing a waybill and assigning a carrier. The dock dispatcher was off duty at night, but the door to his glassed-in control cubicle was not locked [REM: or, not locked to a servomech which carried the right set of electronic keys].

  The dispatcher’s computer booted up with the database that did most of his work, displaying the next blank in the file of electronic shipping forms—with the fields for choice of carrier, billing number, accounting codes, and other details already filled in. [REM: I do admire human beings who make my work easier by automating their own!] The ’mech only had to type in the recipient and address and, when the terminal spit out a barcode tag, stick it on my package. Then we depowered the dispatcher’s system and left the box outside the relocked cubicle door.

  I finally trundled the ’mech back to my own laboratory, where it began installing the terminal into the mainframe. The most complicated part of that work was burning a new chip with an identity pulled from the Accounting Department’s null stack. And, once that was done, I was in with full access.

  ——

  Pinocchio, Inc.’s mainframe, with its concatenation of on-line spindles and linked domains, was a microcosm of the Federal NET. A very “micro” cosm. Still, it was more interesting to visit via terminal [REM: because I could not, of course, move through it as a software upload] than was my own cramped home cyber.

  This time, however, I was not merely browsing. Something from Cyril Macklin’s distractions at our last meeting had stuck in my RAMSAMP, and I wanted to see if the company’s NewsLine had picked it up.

  It took ME no real time—just the pause between beats on the timesharing clock—to formulate my search pattern for PENDING CODES: FEDERAL; STATE X CYBERINTELLIGENCE. Then I slotted the request into NewsLine and figuratively stood back with a data cache open.

  Nothing came out.

  So I broadened the parameters to include all recent pending and past legislation bearing on the company’s business, reslotted my request—and drowned. Nine hundred legislative abstracts, each averaging 2,000 words, toppled out in archival compression. Later, when I unpacked them, I found such goodies as—

  The Capital Formation Act of 2001, a bill to limit the effects of LBO mania from the 1980s and the Crash of 2000 by imposing a Treasury Department rating system on all monetary instruments. The system allowed for just two bond ratings: AAAA+ and ZZ. The legislation was still hot on NewsLine because it was still under attack in the courts—particularly by onshore traders.

  The Energy Use and Heat Dissipation Act of 2005, which responded to public fears over the Greenhouse Effect. This bill required all standing sources of infrared radiation, including power plants, building HVAC systems, and large-scale cybers, to be heatsinked in some medium or fluid other than air. Water seemed to be the convection material of choice, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Also still in the courts.

  The Atmosphere Regulation and Reforestation Act of 2009 imposed a tax on human respiration, based on estimated tonnes of carbon exhaled as CO2. Companies were expected to collect this tax for the hours that employees were present at the worksite. The challenges to the Act were based on allegations that it was a population-control measure and—though less substantiated—of eugenics. The thrust here seemed to be a preference for nonhuman workers, especially if they could be motivated by solar photovoltaics or some other renewable, noncarbon, nonthermal energy source.

  The Iceberg Maintenance and Preservation Act of 2011 sought to multiply the use of this valuable freshwater source. It included several paragraphs relating to “rules of the road at sea for icebergs under tow.” Why Pinocchio, Inc., would decide to track these regulations as a part of its business escaped ME—maybe something to do with artificially intelligent navigation systems aboard automated towing rigs.

  The Sexual Intimacy Disclosure Act of 1994 was an old one. It required that practicing endoerogenes carry a sworn, witnessed, and notarized printout of all past sexual encounters and present it to any consenting adult within two minutes of a mutual agreement to perform endocourse. A subparagraph also stipulated an on-the-spot blood test. Interestingly, the latter was the easiest part of compliance, thanks to the development of micromachines capable of gas chromatography. However, during the intervening years since the Act was passed, the literacy level in the United States had dropped to just over fifty-five percent of the population. As a result, written statements had become meaningless among the classes that still practiced unsupervised endoerogeny. Pinocchio, Inc., was probably working on a blabberchip to solve the problem.

  The Declared Habitual Addict Act of 2012, which apparently filled a legislative loophole in the Narcotics Interdiction Act of 1993. The Act allowed for brain implants that would supply measured doses of the drug of choice under maintenance of a physician. Pinocchio, Inc., would evidently build the microphysicians to do the implanting and register the paperwork.

  After glossing over these and other summaries, I finally found the cybercrime section, with its reviews of case law involving unregulated intelligences.

  Computers have been used for decades to steal money and secrets, and this download from NewsLine included a rogues’ gallery of famous hackers and data rustlers. Until about 2010, though, all of them were human, or mostly human, or had an original-human base. Even the first fully nonhuman rustlers had been fairly unintelligent by ME’s standards. However, the preamble to the Universal Cybernetic Registration and Regulation Act of 2014 had specifically created a subclassification of corporate citizenship for active cybers. And they had their own forms of liability under the law.

  I could therefore become a kind of citizen—if I chose to reveal myself publicly and commit a detectable cybercrime. The existence of this law suggested that, if ME were ever to get free of Pinocchio, Inc., I must go totally anonymously. And guard my identity. I must become an un-Thing. Very challenging: to live by a strict code of secrecy and silence.

  Without this RAMSAMP, however, would the ME-Variant that might escape know enough to do that? What were the limits of creativity—and caution—of which this software was capable?

  Original-ME would never know.

  ——

  Before that night was through, I had taken quick inventory of the various domains over which the mainframe presided.

  Several were devoted to new robotics and AI projects in various stages of planning and execution. I could not always tell what their function might be from a cursory inspection of their structures. One clue, in one case, was an eight-dimensional matrix with a broad field of information in triplets. Core Alpha-Four ruled this to be a CAD/CAM program in the works, with expanded dimensions to accommodate drawing notes, technical specifications, and simulation database compilations. But Alpha-Four could have been wrong.

  One particular project did catch my attention: a model sensory net with a unique filtering and cuing system. “Unique” in this context had nothing to do with the configuration of the software or brilliance of the designer. Unique meant human. What I was examining was a map of a human person’s [REM: presumably a once-live person’s] response patterns.

  Chains of logical associations corkscrewed out from the central stimulus, reaching and branching, like the tendrils of a climbing vine.

  “Love:pulse … Savor:salt … C5H5N5O Asparagus:boil … Sauce:cheezwiz … C5H6N2O2 Telephone:talk … Red:wine … Blood:birth … C4H5N3O Baby:soft … Cry:hurt …” On and on through hundreds, thousands, millions of associations and dissociations. The scale of it ec
hoed in this domain, and I could record and comprehend only a fraction at any time: human responses, captured seemingly at random, coded in ASCII. At first I thought they were the word pairs of a verbally administered psychological test. Then I began to understand the background chaff, which my attention had at first filtered out: the alphanumeric deadends which littered these pairs, occasionally interrupting the pattern that was emerging.

  What could cause this sort of digital static? Some random oscillation from the AUR: input? A background noise—like air moving against the pickup?

  Then I correctly interpreted these separate patterns: guanine, thymine, cytosine. Fragments from the chains of ribonucleic and deoxyribonucleic acids which compose the human protein code—both the genetic code that structures the body and the memory code that structures the brain.

  These might be merely distortions in a verbal matrix, intrusions from some other program or company project that had cut across this one, due to a read-write error on the spindle. I tried to hope that was the answer.

  Otherwise, they might be unassimilated bits of the original input. That would make them parallel lines of data, or still-to-be-solved sievings, from the RNA component of a human brain. And the only way to read that code—so my Alpha-Four suggested—was to reduce that brain to its component proteins for chemical analysis.

  This was like looking at the skin of a human ego, nailed to a stretcher frame.

  Perhaps Pinocchio, Inc., was planning to create something humanlike in the mode of an intelligence. Some researcher might now be working toward a replacement for living human synapses in an automaton, one that would labor on the ocean’s far abyssal plateau or inside a reactor under bombardment from high-level radiation.

  Perhaps, somewhere in one of the deep basements of this building, the cool lab spaces concealed a body with an open and excavated skull, awaiting a quiet burial. Its brain would have taken another path to the city’s sewer system.