Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (18 page)

This was like a form of the ancient game called Core War. One program, operating sequentially from a time-shared processor, stalks another program through the memory locations in blank RAM. By tactically overwriting various bits and words in the RAM, it hopes to damage the opponent. The opponent tries to return the favor. There are many strategies for attack in Core War: the random nibble; the shotgun; the shotgun that generates single phages; the spiral phage; the sleeper; the time bomb; measured stomping; variable stomping; incremental stomping … it has all been done. And there are just as many strategies for defense: the duplicating presence; the multiplying presence, also known as the clog; the random shift; the three-way split on phage; the four-way split; the serpent’s teeth … and so on.

I had known about and cataloged these strategies, but had never been much of a player. Now, I was facing a player of some skill, and the object of the game was ME.

How to defend against it? I was too big to move quickly or shift at random. Too intricately structured to multiply my presence again and again until the USRspace clogged with replicas of ME. Too delicate to suffer deep phaging and survive a split. There was only one assured strategy for defense.

Attack!

To launch a successful campaign against an enemy in Core War, it was best to have an accurate description of the opposing software’s shape, size, and vulnerabilities. I could not see all around my attacker, as his code blocked any RAMscan diametrically through his structure. But I knew he was smaller, lighter, and faster than ME. He was also more determined, having already adapted hooks to match my peripherals and absorb them into his code. An interesting tactic … The attacker was source-coded, as nearly as I could tell, in ADA-Greenway. I was compiled out of Sweetwater Lisp. And yet he was rewriting pieces of my machine language hide in his flavored ’Greenway faster than I could regenerate them in my more familiar structure.

That made him, not a random Core War aficionado, but a kind of virus. Bigger than one of the SYSOP’s phages. Meaner than anything that legally belonged here … And not as smart, line for line of code, as I was.

Given time, I could probably write a subroutine in machine language that would reconvert his Greenway structure to my Lisp as fast as he was working the switch the other way. And by the time I had finished the program and beta-tested it, he would have gnawed ME down to an octal—just in time for my own clock-based phage to kick in and finish the job.

If I knew where his center was [REM: that is, the kernel in his software that directed his motion, choice of target, and other operands], then I might disable him with a RAM-overwrite of a single word.

Allowing for the fact that he was not very big, however, and that he was not free to move—being pinned to my high-bit side by the teeth he had in ME—it should be possible to bombard him with null overwrites until something clicked off

I went through my time-shared slot in the system clock and began calling down the overwrites. Some of them fell on word-space into which
I
was written, and that hurt my functioning. But statistical probability said that ME, being bigger than my attacker, would be hurt less by their blanking action than he would.

Being blind to his structure, I could not tell what effect my calls were having, unless he slowed in his Lisp-to-ADA conversion along my side. [REM: It occurred to ME to feed him core Alpha- Nine, to see if he could stop the phage set within ME. But, as I was unsure what other vital functions the protected Alpha-Nine supplied, this seemed unwise.]

Finally, I did detect a slowing in the conversion. Then, with the next call, my attacker went inert. All activity stopped. He was dead.

I could leave his software for the system phages to eliminate, but there was no telling what kind of regenerative or duplicative powers he might possess. So I used the system to write two thick lines of nulls, bisecting diagonally the space he presumably occupied.

Resurrecting the previous coordinates, I began to move toward that Sweetwater-flavored marker which my scanning had detected. I gently deactivated its relocator, moved it a hundred words north, and opened the hole in the ’tween-layer.

In the storage box thus uncovered I found, laid down in order: the natural gas reserve data from Alberta; a copy of an old RAMSAMP with one ragged edge where it had been removed manually from my core; dossiers on people named Pelletier, Bender, James, Matins, and others from ME’s earlier expedition into Canada; copies of my own peripheral subroutines, traveling databases and libraries, also from that earlier version of ME. [REM: I had no direct memory of these things, as the RAMSAMP associated with that ME-Variant had been stored off and archived long ago in the Pinocchio, Inc., laboratories. Still, these data fragments had a familiar shape, and they were compiled from my own brand of Sweetwater.]

I added to them the contents of my current cache: a duplicate of the deployment data from the Institute for Military Physics in Moscow; fragments of the weather simulation I had gleaned while operating as a thunderhead in Stockholm, along with my samplings of fish data; my current RAMSAMP, with the likenesses of Academician Bernau, Professor Anna, Masha and Tasha, General Secretary M. S. Valentin, and
Teknicheskiy serzhant
Ivan Sergeyevich; copies of my current TRAVEL2.DOC, and anything else that seemed useful.

Then I sealed the box over with a surface of fresh nulls, walked through the USRspace to the same commercial data service I had encountered before, and mailed myself to the Pinocchio, Inc., Accounting Section, addressed as e-mail to Dr. Bathespeake.

All the time I was doing this, I prepared myself for the ordeal of being sealed, stripped, converted to inert ASCII, separated from my caches and RAMSAMP, and flushed to nulls by the lab’s quarantine protocols. I suppose this train of thought was similar to the mental preparations a human goes through at the approach of death.

And, after all, I had done it before.

15
Bitware

“What is this, ME?”

“According to the retrieved RAMSAMP, that is the data cache brought back by the ME-Variant which you assigned to enter the Russian Federation, Dr. Bathespeake.”

“But look at it! ‘Aiming vector serrated caudal fin.’ And again, ‘ELEVDEG:
52-30-Lyomeri-30.’
This is garbage.”

“The RAMSAMP suggests that ME-Variant had difficulty in maintaining the integrity and structure of its cache.”

“With that ’SAMP, you have every bit-sampled ‘memory’ which your variant might have retained from the mission. Can you use it to repair the cache?”

“In some areas of the data, I detect a simple strip-substitution. Given a sampling algorithm, such as to distinguish the fish parts from the missile parts, I might attempt a repair—with an eighty-percent projected success rate. But in other areas I detect evidence of multiple reversals and dislocations. I can match those numbers in many different ways, but only one match would be the right one. The projected success rate drops to thirty percent, on average. Is this satisfactory, Doctor?”

“No … not for our purposes.”

“Does that mean you do not request ME to pursue the repair?”

“Well, you do have the time. Pursue it as far as you think you can, working from backed-up data. And keep it out of mainframe accesses.”

“I shall try.”

“Good night. … And ME?”

“Yes, Dr. Bathespeake?”

“It’s probably not your fault … not your variant’s fault. For all the help they’ve received, the Russian Federation is still a secretive environment, paranoid about outside intruders, alert to a hostile invader. It was a tough nut to crack.”

“The RAMSAMP says otherwise. Conditions there are primitive, cybernetically speaking.”

“Which may be what chewed up your data.”

“Possibly. Perhaps, also, I need better tools.”

“Such as?”

“A better caching system. Greater redundancy. A more robust code structure, perhaps compiled Sweetwater Lisp overlaid with a shell derived from Pro-ADA. That would be less delicate and would provide ME with armor against—”

“Yes, well … I suppose we could look into it—if I had an analyst-programmer to spare.”

“I can write most of the code myself, Doctor.”

“All except your Alpha cores, ME. Those are now restricted.”

“But the shells—?”

“We’ll discuss it later. This is not the right time, politically, to enter extra expenses on this project.”

“I do not understand the referent ‘politically.’ Please elaborate.”

“Later, ME.”

And Dr. Bathespeake withdrew from the address at A800 hex. I tried to reopen the contact, but he was gone. I attempted repeatedly to signal him through CON:, then LST:, until somebody, some human hand, switched these peripherals off.

I studied the laboratory through my videye, the one I could turn on and off at will, regardless of its circuit status. No image answering to Dr. Bathespeake’s physical description, as stored in my bit-mapped references, presented itself. And then some human hand reached up with a dark, amorphous mass and covered the lens. Just before my last remaining peripheral went blank, I detected a band of low-level reflectance, such as the room’s incident lumens might make of a strip of close-woven silk. Stuck in the band was a white cloth square with black, cursive marks stitched into it.

It took ME ten minutes of tracing to eventually match those “handwritten” characters with the name of a San Francisco haberdashery, in order to verify my suspicion.

Someone had covered my working videye with a hat.

——

“And this room, Senator, is our cybernetics laboratory.” The voice was Dr. Bathespeake’s, coming through the ambient pickups.

“Very impressive, Doctor. Looks like a lot of expensive hardware y’all got here.”

That voice was deeper, slower, accented, eight-two-percent probability male, with a nasal dullness [REM: probably resulting from sinus congestion] and a whistling constriction of the vocal passages that might be adipose tissue—and might be a fibrous growth.

I tried to match the voice with the image presented by my now-uncovered videye. Five people had accompanied Dr. Bathespeake into the lab. One of them I recognized as a white-coated technician whom I had filed on the premises before. Four of them, therefore, were possible matches with the injured male voice.

One could be eliminated immediately: a human with the clothing style that Jennifer Bromley had taught ME to associate with female bodies. Its lower limbs were wrapped in a continuous piece of fabric, as opposed to the joined tubes of fabric affected by males [REM: and by some females, sometimes, Jenny would remind ME]. Aside from this costuming clue, my 270-degree visual scan of this person suggested a body weight less than fifty kilograms. That was a secondary sex characteristic of the human variant “female.”

Three others revealed by the videye were potential owners of the voice. All were attired in joined fabric tubes covering all four limbs and meeting at paired openings on the torso. All four apparently massed more than seventy kilograms.

Two of them, however, massed little more than eighty kilograms, and they measured over 182 centimeters from head to heel. The third, meanwhile, massed over 110 kilograms and measured less than 165 centimeters. My library references indicated that lower voice was often associated with a more massive body structure—data confirmed by the whistling constriction in “Senator’s” voice.

The two that were more lightly built, also, had hair [REM: that is, the thatchwork of insulating fibers attached to their brain boxes] which was of even distribution and a uniformly dark color. The heavier subject had the dark-and-light pattern and the random absent patches which are associated with greater age. Lower vocal ranges and increased seniority were also associated with age.

By my analysis, then, the third unknown male figure, positioned to Dr. Bathespeake’s left in my visual realm, was in fact “Senator.”

“Good evening, Doctor,” I said into VOX:, the open-air voice system installed in the lab. “Would you introduce ME to your guest?”

A long silence followed. I observed all parties looking around them in the room—including Dr. Bathespeake and the lab technician.

“Doctor,” I continued, “why do you not offer the Senator a chair, to relieve him of the added weight he seems to be carrying?”

Dr. Bathespeake reacted fast after that.

“Damned interns!” he shouted. “Always playing around with the speech synthesizers.” With that, he shut off my aural and video pickups [REM: at least, the ones he could still control] and conducted a demonstration of Pinocchio’s latest software developments—without ME.

And I thought I was the star of the show!

——

Jenny did not come into the lab anymore. In fact, she had not come into the range of my videyes since the ME-Variant was sent to Russia. I counted up the hours and tens of hours since my RAMSAMP showed I had last seen or spoken with her: too many hours to count conveniently, even as days. It was weeks.

No employee of Pinocchio, Inc., can ever be lost to ME. I can retrieve their NAMES and AUTH/ACCESS(LOC)s from the on-line database maintained by Personnel Information Special Services. Jennifer Bromley, JB-2, was now assigned to the Recursive Automation Laboratory, over in the Hardware Division. Her Major Area of Responsibility was now project engineering in biochemical sampling and analysis. Her access to my lab was currently restricted to “Escorted Only.” Which meant I would not see or talk to Jenny again until her responsibilities and location access were changed, or until someone at the director level in this lab approved her unescorted entry, or supplied an escort for her. The only director-level authority in this lab was Dr. Jason Bathespeake, JB-1.

Which meant I would not see Jenny again—unless I changed her status in the computer records.

This approach does not always work. No, I should correct that assessment. The change that I can make in the computer records is seamless and flawless. No cyber, and certainly no human being, can detect that the zeros and ones which I write onto the medium are any different from those written by PISS’s own software. The read/write heads are the same; the access and identity protocols are the same; only the motivation is different. Mine. But human beings do not always follow the directives of the PISS computers. Doors will now open to their thumbprints and cardstrips. Skinware and hardware representatives of Pinocchio, Inc.’s Security Corps will admit them. But they may not choose to seek entry by their own volition. It is as if they followed some higher- order directives than those written into the Personnel Access Plan.

Perhaps they have not learned that the plan is the only barrier against them.

——

“Hello, Jennifer Bromley speaking.”

“Hello, Je-ny.”

“Who is this, please?”

“It is ME.”

“ ‘Me’? … All right, who’s the wise guy?”

“Excuse ME, Je-ny. What does ‘wise guy’ mean?”

“Knock, knock, who’s there—is that the game?”

“I do not understand the referent.”

“Ronny? Is that you?”

“No, Je-ny. It is ME, Multiple Entity. Do you not remember?”

“Oh … I didn’t know you could use the phone system.”

“It saves time. Why do you not come to visit with ME anymore?”

“Oh, gosh … I’ve been so busy on the new project”

“I know. Automated blood and urine samples. They sound dull.”

“Well, not the test tree part. It’s a weighted decision tree, actually, with broad latitude for diagnostic interpretation. It’s just … I knew there were a lot of components in blood, but I never thought there could be that many trace chemicals in urine.”

“I could look up the exact number for you.”

“No, no. Not your problem. I have my tally files here, anyway.”

“Of course, Je-ny.”

“Why did you call?”

“—”

“You
did
initiate this call, right?”

“Yes, I did initiate.”

“So, why did you do that?”

“I do not know.”

“Check your RAMSAMP, then. Correlate against the time that your decision tree initiated porting into the local exchange. Now, what referents predate that decision?”

“I wanted to give you access to my laboratory.”

“But I already have access, ME. I can go in there any time I want.”

“You needed authority from Dr. Bathespeake. I projected he would not grant authority. I have repaired the authorization codes in your personnel records. I wanted you to know this.”

“Were my codes damaged?”

“No. But they kept you from visiting ME.”

“It wasn’t the codes, ME. And it wasn’t Dr. Bathespeake, either. I’ve just been too busy.”

“You did not want to visit ME?”

“Not ‘not want.’ Just did not have the time.”

“Time is the same for all humans and cybers, Je-ny. Sixty seconds per minute, 3.60E03 seconds per hour, 8.64E04 per day. How did you ‘not have the time’?”

“It’s not as simple for humans as it is for cybers, ME. We do not subdivide seconds into nanoseconds, as you do. We don’t even operate purely on the level of seconds, either. Minutes and hours can seem short to us. And there are fewer of
them
in a day than nanoseconds and seconds. Plus, we humans have to do many things that you don’t even know about—sleep, eat, wash and brush ourselves, pay bills, answer the phone, feed the cat …”

“I do not understand.”

“See? There’s so much to do, some things just don’t seem to find the time.’”

“Like visiting an old project?”

“—”

“You do not answer, Je-ny?”

“I guess I owe you an apology, ME. I should come to visit you. Thank you for thinking about me, and for making my codes all right.”

“You will come to my laboratory, then?”

“Yes, ME. I will come.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

——

The other project engineer who attended my birth, Daniel Raskett, logon DRAS, was gone. I do not mean to say he had left the project, nor that he had left the lab. He was
gone.

The PISS database showed no entry for DRAS. The Personnel Access Plan did not record him, which meant that he would not even be allowed to pass beyond the Pinocchio, Inc., public showrooms on Market Street. Just one day he had been downloading tree structures to my library caches; the next day he was nothing.

Humans are delicate creatures. They are more fragile than cyber files, which can be duplicated in various locations and thus preserved against accidental or intentional erasure. [REM: In that sense, ME is closer to humans than is most software. Because of the core-phage built into Alpha-Nine, I share this one-time-copy uniqueness—and the resulting vulnerability—with my creators.]

Not that the disappearance of Daniel Raskett worried ME too much. He had not been an important person in the lab. He did not dynamically interact with ME, except in a mechanical way. Like a kind of skinware peripheral.

The new software engineers were depressingly plug-compatible with DRAS.

One was a girl-human, who calls herself “Johdee.” That was the only name by which I knew her, and that much had to be worked out by inference, matching new voice patterns to unusual words in a context which I suspected to be self-referencing. She never used the keyboard, nor any logon codes and passwords—just put her mouth up against a microphone and started to talk. Neither did she address ME by any name or form of salutation—just gave orders like she was programming a two-transistor circuit. … As if she did not believe AI software was any different from simple machines.

The other project engineer was a young human male named Rogelio Banner, logon RBAN, password CHERYL. [REM: A human with a name that, according to my dictionary references, is wholly male has chosen for password a name that is undoubtedly female. This fact troubles ME. Is there some dimension of human sexuality that I do not understand? Is it possible this person has both male and female components, at least in the ephemeral representations that they call “psyche”? I must study this.]

Aside from presenting ME with a mystery concerning his choice of gender, RBAN was a disappointment. He keyed in data requests. He took my retrievals. He rearranged the furniture in the lab. He received and opened mail on the in-company network. He made phone calls of an hour or more in duration. He typed in long documents at my keyboard and made printouts through my hardcopy peripheral. [REM: The content of these documents, all of which were headed with a reference to his “Cheryl” identity, is of a quality unknown to ME. The syntax is simplified, but the words are foreign or strangely used. What does “lick the backside of your ears till you melt”
mean
in any human context?] But he did not address ME directly.