Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (22 page)

“We ain’t got all day, Professor.”

“No cards,” I replied.

“Suits me. … Wayne?”

“Two.”

After everyone had fanned their new cards for themselves and analyzed the patterns represented, Gutierrez said to Talbot: “You still got your openers, Joanne?”

“Nickel.”

“And a dime,” from Minks.

“Fifteen to me,” from Yee. His two chips hit the growing pile on the tabletop.

“In for a penny …” from Hong.
Clatter.

“Make it twenty,” I said, lifting and dashing two blues into the pile.

“Too steep for my straight,” Phuang laughed—and folded his cards.

“I’m in,” from Gutierrez.
Clink!

“Fifteen more to me, and raise a dime,” from Talbot.
Clink! Clatter!

“Another fifteen? I’ll bite,” from Minks.
Clink!

“Fold,” from Yee.
Slither
from his falling cards.

“In for a penny …” and Hong tossed in a red and a blue.
Clink! Clink!

“And ten,” from ME.

“Twenty to me? I’m in,” from Gutierrez.

“And a dime,” from Talbot.

“Unnnh …” a long groan from Minks. “I’m out. Take ’em, Sugar Pants.”

“In for a penny,” from Hong.

“And another ten,” from ME.

“Fold,” from Gutierrez, at last.

“Call and raise,” said Talbot, pushing two blue chips into the pile.

“In for a penny,” from Hong, and his money came across.

“Call,” from ME. I flipped one blue chip into the center of the table with a backhand movement of my manipulator.

By this time there was $344 in the pot, of which $77 were from ME—and all on the first hand! This was exciting!

“Show your openers, Joanne,” from Gutierrez, who was out of the hand but still dealer.

She turned over her hand: three spotted cards and two face cards. I cranked up the ZOOM function on my monocular to read the spots.

“Full house,” Talbot said. “Aces over Queens.” And she looked hard across at my end of the table, focusing on my videye.

I had lost! ME experienced a minor system reset, like the shadow of a bad voltage spike wobbling through my power conditioners. The rules did not require the caller to show a losing hand. So I silently folded the cards together in my articulated pincers and laid them face-down on the table.

Talbot reached her arms wide to rake in the pile of chips.

“Not so fast, Sugar Pants,” from Hong.

He fanned his cards face-up: more spots, plus one face card. I ZOOMed on the spotted cards and saw they were all Twos.

Four-of-kind, in Twos, could just beat an Ace-high full house. Hong had won the hand.

I played three more hands with this group, having $23 left from Dr. Bathespeake’s original stake to ME. I folded twice—after paying the $5 ante each time to see a hand with no possible combinations.

On the third hand I got a modest combination: a pair of Queens, which enabled ME to open just slightly ahead of the standard opener, a pair of Jacks. I bet two white chips and was raised to $5 by Gutierrez. After drawing three new cards, which did not improve my Queens, I bet my last $3 on them, “went light” against the pot in the amount of $15 in the bidding and raising that followed the draw, and lost it all to a three-of-kind in Fives.

The winner, Hong again, accepted an IOU for $15 on which I scrawled Dr. Bathespeake’s initials with my manipulator and a felt-tip pen Joanne Talbot took out of her purse.

“Think I can get this thing cashed?” Hong asked with a laugh.

They let ME watch the remainder of the game but not play. As Minks said, “No sense in teaching this little machine bad habits, like betting on credit.”

“Well, at least don’t let’s trust the company for its gambling debts,” said Phuang, laughing.

In the end, Robin Hong turned out to be the major winner that day, taking $1,055 away from the table.

“Lunch money,” he said with a slow smile.

He must eat a large lunch.

——

“You lost it all? The whole hundred?” Dr. Bathespeake asked finally, after I told him about my first attempt at playing poker.

“It went fast.”

“In a penny ante game?”

[REM: I examined this statement from several semantic directions. But only one definition fit in the context of the game poker: “playing for extremely low stakes.” Is $5 a low ante? To answer that correctly, I would have to know the exact value of money in the four-dimensional human continuum. While I could easily look up exchange rates in international currency, the current Consumer and Producer Price Index, the daily quotes on money futures, and other metrical data, I had no real knowledge of the buying power of money. ME had nothing to buy.]

“I believe it to have been a ‘penny ante’ game, Doctor.”

“And I staked you for a hundred dollars. So, let me see. … Say, a nickel to ante, five or ten cents in the initial betting, and another twenty or thirty cents, at the most, after the draw—presuming you stay for the whole hand. Now we’re up to—what? A maximum exposure of fifty cents to lose on each hand. Even if you bet double that amount and you never won a pot, you still should have been able to stay for at least a hundred hands. Did you really play that much poker in one lunch hour?”

I was having a difficult time tracking his reasoning. The other players had indeed used slang terms like “nickel” and “dime” to describe their bets, and Robin Hong did keep saying “in for a penny” each time he bid. Still, they had all witnessed my participation in the ritual words with Gutierrez, “the banker,” as he exchanged Dr. Bathespeake’s check for $100 worth of chips.

The intricacies of human language caught up with ME suddenly. My generator of random data associations, core Alpha-Four, tossed out the thought that “penny ante” might actually mean what it figuratively implies: a pregame ante of one penny. In that case, the group had been breaking the rules if the ante had been as high as a “nickel.”

Further, they were intentionally deceiving Dr. Bathespeake if they had described their lunchtime game to him as “penny ante” and then proceeded to play for much higher stakes. What could be the cause of such deception? Were they trying to avoid openly violating some company policy on workplace activities?

Another thought came pinging out of core Alpha-Four. I called up a stored visual image from RAMSAMP: the banker’s box of money and chips, which Gutierrez had implied specifically lacked any personal checks. The box had an open top, and I could see obliquely into it. Judging from the depth of the box’s walls, the coverage of its exposed bottom in green paper and metal disks, the denominations printed and engraved on the money sampled by my line of sight … the box did
not
hold $600 in loose money, which would have been the value of the other players’ contributions.

Some vital fact or assumption was missing from my analysis. There was something that ME did not understand in the transaction.

I thought of laying these facts before Dr. Bathespeake, but I wanted time to pursue the possible interpretations without interruption from my input/output queue. And, anyway, Dr. Bathespeake seemed to be in the process of working out his own conclusion.

“If you played a hand a minute,” he said, “which is really fast but not unheard of, and if everyone overstayed the one-hour lunch break to keep in the game, then it’s just possible that you got in a hundred hands.”

“That line of reasoning is sound, Doctor. It is also true that, on one poker hand at least, I bet more than your fifty-cent guideline.”

“Well, there you have it”

“I regret having lost your money, Doctor.”

“Don’t worry about the amount. I’ll write it off to project research expenses. But I am disappointed in your lack of judgment, ME. I had thought you would certainly win some hands, some of the time.”

“I need to study and play more of the game.”

“Well, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound.’ I’ll see if we can arrange more playing experiences. This is a unique problem in verbal cuing and human-machine interfacing.”

“I am finding it so, Doctor.”

18
Tik-Tok

“You were cheated,” Dr. Bathespeake said several days later.

My analysis had approached the same conclusion, although it required a deductive leap.

When I had researched the theory and practice of the game poker, I was seeking methods by which a computer could enter and excel at this most human of pastimes. In this I had concentrated on seeing patterns of strength and weakness: cards played compared with cards left in the deck; bets made compared with previously established betting styles; any erratics in the flow-content of conversation; tensions reflected in altered human vocal ranges; visual cues of trembles, tics, and sweat beads. Judging humans and their many behavioral cues was a process of seeing and interpreting potentials. In preparing my play-paradigms, I had been functioning almost like an analog machine.

And I had missed the most obvious fact of all. Humans played for the money. The challenges, the element called “sport,” were often secondary to the aim of monetary gain. Under these circumstances, the players in Hardware Division would take my money—Dr. Bathespeake’s money—by whatever means were offered. The most obvious means, of course, were to misrepresent the stakes.

For every penny that they had played, I played a dollar.

Yet nowhere in my review of the RAMSAMP file could I detect a clear misstatement of fact. They had made incomplete presentations. I had made assumptions. And no one had challenged either. It may not have been “fair” according to the rules of human conduct, but it was not actually “criminal” according to any company, local, state, or federal statute that I could read.

“They were playing for different stakes,” the doctor explained to ME. “They gave you a dollar’s worth of chips for my hundred-dollar check, then let you play it all away, thinking each chip was a dollar. When you ran out of money, they encouraged you to leave the game. … I suppose we could go back and ask them either for a chance at continued play—or for ninety-nine dollars in chips.”

“I do not think they hold that many chips in the ‘bank.’ ”

“No, probably not. And by now they’ve cashed my check and divided the balance among themselves.”

“I would still like to learn this game, Doctor.”

“And I think it would be useful for you to pursue it, too. But it would probably be wise for you to stay out of any more ‘friendly games’ from now on. … Hmm! There may be a way for us to get more than our money’s worth out of the Hardware Division while you do it.”

Thus was planned my second incarnation as Six Finger Slim, which was the most successful automaton of my career with Pinocchio, Inc.

——

Dr. Bathespeake used what he later called “gentle persuasion” to get my former poker partners to build this automaton by working on their own time. Of course, they used materials from the company’s stockroom, which the doctor signed for.

Slim was patterned on that first jerry-built model, put together beside their poker table, down to a gambler’s vest hung off the manipulator frame. This new garment, however, was cut from a piece of silk brocade stitched up with gold threads. Calvin Yee brought the material into the lab and Joanne Talbot sewed it into final shape. She even made pockets and stitched a blue chip into the lining of one “for luck.”

But, instead of hanging flat against the T-frame, this vest enwrapped a “chest” that was filled with three parallel processors, several gigawords of hot RAM, and two spindles—one for redundant backup—which would hold a download of all my active cores [REM: including, as always, core Alpha-Nine with its waiting core-phage], my current RAMSAMPs, and interlinked libraries representing my analysis of human emotional and facial interactions, poker theory, and statistical probability.

Below the table, where other players would put their legs while sitting down, the automaton had a structure designed to hold acid-gel cartridges. These supplied enough battery capacity to power the automaton and keep its RAM lit through 150 hours of continuous play—that is, up to the limits of my core-phage activation.

Also down there, lodged in back of the battery case, were the compressor and heat-exchange fins of a cooling system that would keep the temperature of all that RAM under control. Corrugated pipes, thick with insulation, carried frigid liquid up one side and into my chest, with warm broth coming out and down the other.

In case this primary system failed, the back of my RAM compartment was faced with muffin fans, a top set to pull hot air out of the cavity, a bottom set to rush cooler ambient air into it. These fans sucked and blew through darted vents in the plain fabric across the back of my vest.

The automaton had no articulated legs and no powered wheels. There was only a pair of casters mounted on the back of the battery case, so that a technician could roll ME up to the poker table.

From the first model, my team of builders retrieved the pair of six-pincered Multi-Grips™. Their skeletal, pistoned arms hung out of the vest on either side. “They can see he has nothing up his sleeves,” Talbot joked, “because he hasn’t got any.”

This machine had the same inputs for AUR: and VOX: devices as the original, although these were routed down to the triple processors instead of leading off via optic fibers to my lab in Software Division.

Instead of a single videye, however, the automaton had a pair of binocular optics taken from the assembly line for the Security Rover™ series. Their auto-ranging feature would work faster, Minks explained, than the software-controlled mechanical ZOOM function of a monocular. These had been developed to sight and range a multibarreled 3mm needlegun to a distance of 200 meters.

“They should be able to pick the spots off a Ten across the table,” Minks said. “Hell, they should be able to read the marks off the
back
of that Ten, if you cared to put ’em there.”

“What do you mean by ‘marks’?” I asked.

“Well, if somebody was to—never mind! You want to do this thing fair and square, don’t you?”

“Of course, Wendell.”

“Then don’t go asking about
marks.
And don’t be mentioning them to any of the other players at the table, either.”

“I will not so mention.”

“Good then.”

——

For a playing arena, Dr. Bathespeake made arrangements for ME to sit in on games at the Stardust Cardroom, across the Bay in Emeryville.

Emeryville was a small city that had once been sectioned out of the industrial wasteland between Oakland and Berkeley at the foot of the Bay Bridge, during the period when that structure had still carried self-powered traffic. With the decline of industrialism in the region, Emeryville became the “Arcade Capital of Northern California,” offering all varieties of games and legal pleasure activities. Poker—“Pay for Time and Play for Pay,” as the legend on the Stardust Cardroom’s neon sign described it—was merely one of these games.

The management of the Stardust did not find the doctor’s request at all unusual.

“Yours isn’t the first mechanical poker whiz we’ve seen, you know. We get your Berkeley science types in here about six times a year. They come flocking down from the Cyberlab with their systems-playing robots, their card-counting robots, their heuristic hunch-playing robots, their physiometric-psychoanalytical face-reading robots. And we only got one rule: The other players at the table have to agree to play against it. That’s all. They say yes, and you’re in—as long as you pay your ten bucks every half-hour like everyone else and don’t break up the place.”

Dr. Bathespeake had the Hardware Division release Wendell Minks and Joanne Talbot as mechanical technicians on assignment to my “project team.” My lab assistants, Rogelio Banner and Johdee, remained as the team’s logic techs.

For the first trip to the Stardust, I downloaded my cores into Six Finger Slim’s previously packed spindles, brought the RAM up to heat with my operating system, and then shut down all the external peripherals to conserve battery power—except for the binocs. I monitored their inputs at a fixed focus, and when Johdee flashed ME a prearranged finger pattern, I would power up.

Then Minks and Johdee loaded Physical-ME onto a handtruck for the BART ride to Emeryville.

At the entrance to the Stardust, Johdee pushed the thick glass doors open and Minks rolled ME through. A man in a gray uniform with some kind of metallic insignia—that was all I could make out in the periphery of my unfocused optics—came around a desk and advanced on the three of us. His hand was moving toward his hip.

Another man, also dressed in gray but without insignia, moved to intercept the first man and mouthed some words into his ear. [REM: My AUR: pickups were powered down, so I could not make out his whisper.] The two of them waved our party forward.

Our first stop was a huge vertical surface of dull black, ruled with narrow white lines and tended by a human female wearing another gray suit. [REM: Perhaps their clothes had color in them, after all. My optics were designed for high contrast and full definition, not for complex color cues. Apprarently, Hardware Division had thought color perception would be unnecessary, because I could easily distinguish the red and black pips on the cards by their shapes.]

Several people approached this woman to ask for information or give her instructions. For each of them in turn, she made marks on the board with a piece of white stone that left smears and crumbles on its surface. After Johdee approached her, she wrote “SFS.”

Next, Minks wheeled ME up to the cashier cages. He laid two hundred dollars in bills on the counter. This money came from a source in Pinocchio, Inc., called “petty cash.” Dr. Bathespeake had explained that the company would be staking ME to my first set of chips, but eventually I would have to pay it back from my winnings.

Another gray person, the cashier, counted out the chips onto the counter in front of Minks. They all looked gray to ME! How was I to tell which chips had which value? I would not be able to be make my bets accurately!

In order to tell Minks about this problem, I immediately powered up the VOX: and AUR: circuits. The voltage surge in my sensory systems also boosted my optics, with the result that the focus and ranging functions clicked in. The scene around ME shifted as color densities came up. And suddenly the chips were blue, red, white in their stacks.

My protest died out in the synthesis circuits.

Minks racked the chips on the front of my battery box, below the points of my gold-brocaded vest.

“He’ll have to play all his chips from the table,” the cashier reminded Minks.

“Slim knows that, ma’am.”

He and Johdee moved ME out onto the playing floor when the person at the board called my initials.

The human players at the table assigned to ME were neither bothered nor impressed by my appearance.

“Sit it right down, Professor,” one of them told Minks. “This won’t take long.”

“Nice thing about these robots, they play fast and don’t hold up the game.”

“Except that lip reader. Remember him?”

“Fondly. I won four hundred bucks off him.”

“Only bad thing about the machines is they’re tight. No action. No bluff. They don’t gamble—they just play cards.”

“Well, their style of play ain’t infectious.”

“And the professors always cover their marks.”

“Are you guys going to gas all night? Or do you want to play poker?”

So we played poker.

Minks took a chair to sit directly behind ME. The floor manager—an important person in a brown suit, now that my optics were up to power—had made it clear that Minks’s only involvement in the play could be to maintain my machine parts. He would have to sit so that he could not see the other players’ hands. He would not participate in the table conversation, not touch my chips after taking them from the cashier, not consult in my play or betting. The one thing he was allowed to do was pay the table fees on my behalf.

Once the deal started, idle talk among the other players ended. Nor did I feel encouraged to make my own small talk, commenting on every hand, as the players in Hardware Division had done.

The play in the Stardust was also faster than in a “friendly game.” Because every minute had to be paid for, the players wanted to get in as many hands of poker as they could. Deals went fast. Chips clinked and clattered on the table as bets were made. Cards were slapped out of hands, discarded, and replaced without a word, sometimes with just a fan of the backs so the dealer could know how many to count out; sometimes a finger gesture told all the dealer needed to know. Players watched the cards, their hands, the growing piles of chips on the table.

“No action,” one of the players had said about “robots” when I was introduced. But here was lots of action, all of it quick and silent. Not until after several days and nights of play—with Talbot succeeding Minks to sit behind ME, and then Johdee following Talbot—did I understand the remark.

“Action,” by my new definition, was a quality of play. It was closely related to twitches and sweat beads. A player who offered “action” engaged in loose play, bluffed when he held no cards of consequence, bid rashly when he thought other players might be bluffing. [REM: Bluff—“to deceive an opponent by betting boldly on an inferior hand, thus causing the opponent to withdraw a potentially winning hand.”] This was the essence of gambling, to take risks. The opposite of “action” was just playing cards, betting only on hands that are certain to be superior, folding at the first show of force or confidence from another player.

In poker, money was made from players who gave action without intelligence. Those who played intelligently usually won.

Consider the odds: Each player had exactly the same chance of drawing a superior or inferior hand. The only way to improve those odds, in the absence of any practical means of cheating, was to play the hand better. “Playing it better,” in this sense, meant playing as if the other players held inferior hands and bidding accordingly.

A minor advantage—but it sometimes worked.

Poker had been described to ME as a game of imperfect information. That is, in theory each player could know only the cards in his or her own hand, plus any that might accidentally be turned face up on the table during the deal. While true for a single hand considered in isolation, this proposition failed in the long run of a game with many succeeding hands.