Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (26 page)

I powered up Slim just enough to take downloads from my disk library. One of the spindles in his chest I loaded with my current cores—in collapsed form, ready for boot-and-retrieval. Onto the rest of that spindle’s storage area I dumped as much of my cached survival skills and general knowledge [REM: including my poker playing ability] as would fit. Also on that spindle was a short, automated program I had just written: a combination modem autodialer and file transfer routine, preloaded with telephone numbers, access codes, and filenames to upload.

The other spindle I purged of all its backup files and loaded with my archived memories, starting with those I had carefully selected and ending with everything else, taken at random, that I could cram onto the spindle’s free sectors. All of ME as would ever be.

When this was done, I powered down Slim’s electronics and ordered the ’mech to pull the connector plug.

For the sake of form—and on the chance that Dr. Bathespeake would actually check—I ran some mechanical tests on Slim’s manipulator arms [REM: which were actually working perfectly and had never given a bad strain gauge reading—except when I broke Macklin’s poker chip]. I made sure that the ’mech disassembled and reassembled the outside pulleys and swivel joints, just to leave some fresh scratches on the bolt heads.

Finally, before I relinquished the ’mech for the night, I had it perform one more chore.

It made a permanent hardwire connection between the building’s packet RF system and my BIOS panel. The wires were hidden under some other, preexisting connectors so that they would not reveal themselves to a casual inspection. Then I programmed the ’mech to respond on a channel separate from the usual maintenance and operational frequencies preselected for the Pinocchio, Inc., ’mechs. This channel, which I took at random from the backlist of auxiliaries, would put this particular servomech at my personal call.

Dr. Bathespeake may not have had valid reasons for distrusting ME before this. Now I gave him plenty.

20
Collision Course

From the moment Wendell Minks rolled Six Finger Slim out of the Pinocchio, Inc., building, I was expecting Cyril Macklin to make his move. Without exactly swiveling the binocular cage from side to side, I tried to keep track of everything that was happening on both sides of the street, up ahead, and even behind ME.

But only the same level of bustle as we had previously seen was now coming toward us and passing us: bodies human and mechanical, streaking within centimeters of us and each other, dodging lamp fixtures, signposts, safety islands, waste containers, and other street furniture. These bodies were propelled by the pumping of their own legs, the spinning of their spidery springwheels, the hiss and clatter of hydraulic walkers. [REM: Jennifer Bromley once told ME that this street and most of the others in the city used to carry only closed vehicles called “cars” or “auto-motives.” Each of them had massed more than a thousand kilograms and rode on low, fat wheels of rubber and pressurized air, driven by huge engines burning hydrocarbon fuels. Considering the dense crowds of human and machine traffic routinely jamming the street now, those cars must have spent most of their time sitting in line, waiting to move.]

The colors of the human clothing and the automata bodywork reflected the bright sunlight, causing my optics to streak and flare with iridescent coronas. Out of this glare, which wavered with the movement of each overpowering image, I tried to analyze the clues that would show Macklin’s developing attack. Core Alpha-Four churned out patterns of how the beginning stages of a potential “kidnapping” might look and sound, and I tried to match them with inputs of image and wave frequency from VID: and AUR:.

Was this human hand, reaching toward my left manipulator, the beginning of struggle? Was that pushcart full of edible meat sandwiches and disposable battery packs—“$3 apiece, 4 for $10”—drawn across Minks’s path as a means of slowing us up for an attack from the rear?

None of them ever quite matched.

We arrived at the BART station without incident, other than a few brushes and curses from clumsy passersby. Minks signaled for the elevator down to platform level. If ME were to coordinate this kidnapping, it would be here. Arrange a switching error in this elevator’s controls. Have it deliver us to a less-traveled level of the concourse. Be there to overpower Minks and whisk ME away.

Nothing happened. We rolled out onto the platform, waited with the other passengers for the train to the East Bay, and then rolled aboard when it came.

I projected that Macklin would make no attempt to take ME during the train ride. Unless he overcame Minks completely, probably by depowering him [REM: which, I understand, has a permanently bad effect on the human nervous system], Macklin would be unable to remove ME from the immediate area of Minks’s influence. Minks would then be able to raise alarms and fight to take ME back, and Macklin would have no means of leaving the train until it came to a crowded station stop. So, I would be “safe” until we arrived at MacArthur Station and waited to board the PeopleMover for Emeryville.

In fact, I was secure all the way until the PM deposited us at the Stardust Cardroom. None of the activity around Slim matched any hostile scenario which Alpha-Four might project. We rolled into the now familiar foyer, up to the cashier’s cage, and out onto the playing floor, where the floor manager had set aside another table for Macklin and his machine.

“Good to see you, Slim,” the pale man greeted ME.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Macklin. I hope your machine is performing well.”

“Never better.” And he patted its flat case. Then he craned his neck to check the screen. “Ante five.” And he began dealing.

So once again we played poker.

When it was my turn to deal, and I was already down $1,000, Macklin leaned back in his chair and locked his hands in his lap.

“I got an interesting letter the other day,” he said while I shuffled and straightened cards. “From a friend,” he added.

“What did it say?” I asked under my best politeness protocols, expecting nothing more than another barrage of his distracting conversation. “Cut the deck?”

“No thanks. … He wanted to engage my help in a venture of some importance to himself.”

“That is interesting. … Ante five.”

“This friend seems to believe that I can command resources—and an air of resourcefulness—which I really don’t have.”

Our respective poker hands were on the table. I put down the deck and reached for my cards, arranging them in order. Pair of Twos. Three. Nine. Jack. Mixed suits.

“Can you open?”

“For ten.” And he tossed in the chip.

“Your pot.” I folded and dropped my cards, picked up the deck to deal the next hand.

“This friend thinks that I can do crazy things, like ordering up a commando raid, breaking into a bank, or engineering a kidnapping against a valuable and heavily guarded personage.”

The word “kidnapping” struck a match with my AUR: input stack. Core Alpha-Four made the immediate connection. My manipulators slowed to half-speed in the deal while I examined his previous conversation up to that point—which I had been storing off in a dead cache for ultimate disposal.

“Does your friend print his letters on a lasersheet with Letter Gothic typeface?” I asked.

“Why, yes! But that’s a common office typestyle, isn’t it?”

“But not for use in
friendly
letters.”

“No, I suppose not,” he conceded.

“Then has your friend asked you to do something which you will not do?”

The cards lay before us on the table again and neither of us reached for them.

“You didn’t specify an ante,” Macklin said.

“Ante ten.”

“That’s steep.”

“Your friend is probably—what is the human word?—
desperate
to have your cooperation.”

“My friend has impractical ideas. He doesn’t understand that direct action, such as he suggests, will get a lot of other people upset and will leave them filled with misunderstandings. They might even go looking for their lost property—or, er, person. And they would know exactly where to look, too.”

“Your friend was probably very cautious with that letter, taking care not to have file copies lying around, nor making his posting through human agents.” I ventured this thought to reassure Macklin. “He would not leave such evidence for the owners—or, er, guardians … to find.”

“Still, other people might not be limited to looking for such clues. After all, they can make deductive arguments based on analysis of who it is that’s likely to benefit from the loss. You see, Slim, people are not always as fixed in their patterns as machines can be—must be. Do you understand any of this?”

“I understand that you will not help a … person … who needs it. Even when you said you would.”

“People say the strangest things, Slim.”

“I am learning that.”

Macklin’s talk went on to other subjects: advances in artificial intelligence, pending legislation governing their duplication and use, the potential for creating human-scale intelligence, the likelihood of bans on
that
—he talked on and on.

But the implications of his first conversation, about the letter from his “friend,” were so disruptive that my focus remained with what had already been said. Core Alpha-Four fed ME new potential connections, new interpretations.

Macklin had been speaking in the presence of a Pinocchio, Inc., representative—Wendell Minks—who sat behind Slim. As a Hardware Division technician, Minks would concern himself more with the free play in my manipulator joints than with the free talk at the playing table. Still, Macklin had to use oblique terms, as if making general observations about a third party, his “friend.”

Was it possible, then, that ME had misunderstood him? Was it probable that Macklin had been speaking about an actual situation separate from mine and from his desire to help ME? Because my continued existence was at stake, and the wrong things said now could either enhance or diminish the possibility of his help, I spent more and more of available capacity in weighing these odds. How should I respond to his apparent negative? How might I change it? How to avoid reinforcing it with my arguments? How, as his conversation went on to new and less centrally focused topics, to drag it back to the subject of my kidnapping—without arousing Minks’s suspicions?

As these concept strings propagated, proceeded from RAM through the CPU, and were channeled back into warm cache, the acuity of my poker play decreased. My betting style became rigid and automatic. My count of past cards shown and projections of cards to come became erratic. My analysis of the odds on each hand sank to the level of human guesses. My own offensive conversational gambits and lines of defense returned to a dull silence.

In the succeeding thirty-six hands of poker, going nine times through the deck, Macklin and his imperturbable machine took ME for everything I had. When I folded on the last hand, unable to improve a pair of Tens, I lacked the necessary five dollars to meet his ante.

I lowered my manipulators to my sides, dropped my binocular cage to maximum depression, and said without human inflection: “Thank you for the game, Mr. Macklin.”

——

I was already shutting down internal systems as Wendell Minks rolled ME back from the table.

Minks held Slim on the edge of the ramp, in front of the Stardust Cardroom, waiting in line for the PeopleMover that would take us back to the BART station. He tried to talk to ME, to say things that would explain my loss at poker as a mechanical malfunction, a glitch, a gremlin in the machine. I did not listen. After his first half a dozen words, I shunted the input from AUR: into dead storage. And when that cache was filled, I erased it. ME did not put a value on any input the Pinocchio, Inc., people might have just then.

So I never heard how the fight started.

Because I was halfway through a peripheral shutoff—with the automaton’s limited inertial sensors coasting on spin, its cameras on half-gain [REM: instead of boosting for the low-light conditions that generally prevailed outdoors at night], and all strain gauges on standby—I never clocked the exact instant that an Unknown Person on the ramp pushed Minks, who fell into Slim, who carried ME over the edge of the ramp and into the path of the incoming PeopleMover.

The ’Mover was decelerating, traveling at less than fifteen kilometers per hour. Because they operate in crowded population centers on non-separated rights of way, a layer of ablative foam and rubber air cells buffered the vehicle’s hard front edge. Still, the impact sent Slim spinning sideways, like an unbalanced top. And when the automaton touched the bumper strip on the opposite side of the Moveway, it reversed spin and fell over.

Barely aware of what was happening, I started an emergency power-up. I suppose my hardware-interface software was instructed to do something with those delicate manipulator arms, like break Slim’s fall. All the time the mass of his battery case, impelled by the collision with the PeopleMover, was thrusting the body from side to side in the Moveway—until the ’Mover itself ran across the automaton’s lower structure with its big, soft tires. That pinned ME hard against the pavement.

I began taking input from AUR: again, noting distantly that one of the binary mikes was not receiving.

“Oh, my God!”

“Someone’s been hurt!”

“He’s under the bus.”

“Gotta be dead.”

“Dead? You nuts? It’s a ’mech!”

“Damaged then. Damaged bad.”

“Look, there’s an arm over there.”

“Let me through. Let me through.”

That last voice had the range and modulation of Wendell Minks, and I recognized it as soon as I had massaged the input in order to drop its pitch by an octave and a half. [REM: Tension in humans, I knew, tended to tighten muscles and stretch vocal chords, increasing pitch unnaturally and so distorting the voice. I had learned to read this change as a sign of anxiety.] The swivel jacks on my binocular cage had been broken by the force of my fall, but the optic leads were intact. I could adjust for the angle at which they lay on the concrete, half a meter from Slim’s “neck” and still angled downward along his body. I could not, however, change their focus. And the color correction circuitry was malfunctioning.

A pair of feet, clad in outer garments I had noted as belonging to Minks, jumped down into the Moveway with ME. Minks knelt and, putting his hands on my chest structure, brought his head and upper body into my focus.

“My sweet lord, what a mess!” Minks said, apparently to himself.

A second pair of feet came down beside him.

“Can he be fixed?” Macklin’s voice.

“Well, I don’t …”

“Look, the battery case is cracked. Is that acid?”

“It is. Strong stuff, too—jellied phosphoric.”

“Then your machine is going to lose continuity soon, and that will impair its mental functioning.”

“It’s impaired a lot now, I’ll bet.”

“Yes, well then. We don’t have much time. I have my truck here, and the University Cyberlab, where I work, is closer than a BART ride back to your shops. We can take Slim to my lab and work on him there.”

As he talked, Macklin was moving his hands across my case, feeling for connections, assessing damage, gathering loose parts. At one point he picked up my binocular set on its single strand and looked right into my focus. I saw him stare down into the lenses. Then an odd thing happened. One of his eyes closed slowly and opened again, while the other remained fixed open. It did not look like a natural movement, a random blink or twitch such as human muscles are prone to performing outside conscious control. Then he set the binocs back on the pavement.

“Gee, I don’t think so,” Minks told him. “This is junk now.”

“But valuable junk, wouldn’t you say?” Macklin insisted. “We can certainly try to save the
consciousness
here, can’t we?”

“That’s not a problem, Mr. Macklin. We got copies of the software in the lab. Just load it up each time before we set out to come here.”

“But this awareness—”

“Is just a copy itself. No big deal if it expires.”