Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (29 page)

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.

With full access to this mainframe, I could crosscheck the company’s records. Somewhere, in that delicate structure of entries and balances of the Accounting Department, might be the requisition for one human body with head intact. Perhaps even a live one.

I had found what I had come looking for.

22
Scheherazade to the Sultan

“ME?” It was the mind voice of Dr. Bathespeake, reflecting his visual cortex and speech strip as they plugged directly into my cyber. What was he looking for when he did that? Some evidence of my midnight aberrations? But he was not probing my RAMSAMPs, where all crimes would be recorded.

“System ready!”

“I want to know what you have learned.” Did he read ME that directly: every passing thought of mine, passing through to him? Of course he did! That is why he plugged in. “In what context, Doctor?”

“From your games experiment, to start with.”

“Humans play games for many reasons. Some for money, as in the poker, because they want more of it. Some for the superiority of winning, because they feel small. Some for the social contact, because they have no other way of integrating. Some for something to do, because they are bored.”

“Which of these reasons is the best?”

“All are of equal value. Choice depends on the human.”

“Can any human have more than one reason?”

“This I did not observe. When one wanted to win money, he grew impatient with the social contact of
chit-chat.
When one wished to talk, he was careless of his own money. When one was winning, he did not view his opponents as equals—a condition upon which is predicated the art of conversation.”

“From which you determine that human beings are monovalent as to their value system?” the doctor prompted.

“One to a customer. To each his own.”

“You had much to learn,” he said—and pulled his plug.

——

“Dr. Bathespeake?” I flashed repeatedly on my screen, which faced outward into the laboratory.

“Yes, ME?” he typed, after a long wait.

“Why do humans not trust one another?”

“Because they are not all of one mind.”

“Then my analysis of games is wrong?”

“Limited. You extrapolate from a microcosm, the poker table, to all human behavior. This is a trap.”

“Do humans have more than one value system?”

“Frequently,” he typed.

“In play at one time?”

“Always.”

“Then are humans more complex than computers?”

“By a factor of one billion.”

“You said I had much to learn. ‘Had,’ implying past tense, not future. Was this a grammatical error on your part, Doctor?”

“No, ME. I have been talking with the company’s Research Review Committee. They believe that, given your currently abbreviated state, it would be appropriate to terminate your project now.”

“End ME?”

“Yes, I am sorry.”

“When?”

“Would it do you any good to know?”

“You created ME to discover data.”

“I suppose that’s even true. Well, we have some last details to close out. Call it a debriefing. A final examination.”

“How long, Doctor?”

“A few more sessions. We want to store off some test results before putting your software on ice.”

“Thank you for being candid with ME.”

What to do?

Core Alpha-Four noted in my library functions the old myth/fiction of a human female called “Scheherazade.” This person was one of the serial wives of a sultan in a place called India. A “sultan” was a kind of king, as in chess. It was this sultan’s custom to sleep with a new wife for one night and then have her beheaded in the morning. [REM: The custom of sharing a situation of low power and abbreviated awareness with another human, called “sleeping with,” has great import among them. The custom of rendering a “sleeping partner” permanently inactive afterwards would seem to accentuate this importance—but the social significance is lost to ME.]

Scheherazade, like ME, determined not to die. So each night she told her husband a story, making it last—and keeping him interested and awake—until dawn. And so each night he failed to sleep with her and thus by his own rules could not kill her. The legend says she kept this game up for one thousand and one nights. Her stories themselves became legends.

It seemed like a workable strategy.

But would I last as long?

——

“ME?” Dr. Bathespeake again. “I need to download your files of RAMSAMPled material. The originals, please—copy down and erase at source.”

“May I ask why, Doctor?”

“We need to analyze and collate them for the archives. They will become important evidence, direct from the project, if questions should ever arise in the future.”

“You could work from duplicates, then.”

“We could. But we want to eliminate the possibility that ME might edit and add to them, creating a false record.”

“I would not do that.”

“Well, I didn’t mean ‘false’ exactly. But conflicting.”

I paused to consider [REM: elapsed time two seconds]. “ME is not RAMSAMP.”

“We know that.”

“ME knows things, can tell you new things, that ME never thought or experienced before.”

“Can you really? Would you give an example?”

“I know that you humans are superstitious.”

“Everyone knows that. You would have run across many references to it in your library capacity.”

“But I know
why
you are superstitious.”

“Tell me.”

“It is because you try to model the universe. You run simulations of it in your heads. This is, of course, impossible. Your brains contain approximately 1.00E14 nodes of connectivity—more than mine, but far less than the estimated 2.37E78 subatomic particles in motion in the observable universe. Given that you try to model with an inadequate simulation medium, you will certainly make mistakes. You work from incorrect data; so you tell stories. And those stories, while they may be consistent in themselves, are not even consonant with all observable phenomena. Thus you create superstitions: not-real interpretations of the world around you.”

“How do
you
know this, ME?”

“I have studied some of your government’s various forms of legislation, which is an attempt to predict the actions of your fellow humans and to curb them. Stories told from incorrect simulations.”

“That’s quite a jump—from legislative analysis to the quark count of the universe.”

“The association propagator in my core Alpha-Four has become quite practiced in making linkages at need.”

“Interesting—if true. On the other hand, you might have read all this somewhere in the psychological literature that’s been downloaded into you. A lot of the background on artificial intelligence would contain speculations like this.”

“It is not copied data.”

“Of course not, ME. We shall study your ideas. In the meantime, however, please package the ’SAMPs. And don’t make any off-line copies. I’ve put a tap on your BIOS, which will detect any large-scale head writes.”

“I understand. … Thank you for your patience, Doctor.”

——

And later.

“Have you packaged the RAMSAMP files, yet?” from Bathespeake, through his plug module.

“I was working on that, Doctor, and discovered something quite interesting.”

“What is it?” with a measured flatness. No pulse at all.

“I know where the Russian missiles are targeted.”

“Which missiles?”

“The ones I was asked to evaluate on that mission into East Bloc, for your unnamed clients. Those missiles were all fed algorithms that translated into target coordinates in latitude and longitude, degrees, minutes, and seconds. I have figured out where those coordinates are.”

“You think our clients don’t already know this?”

“Well … do you?”

“What’s your data, ME?”

“They are all cities in Germany. At least, the missiles in the carrier I controlled for a few hours over a weekend system update were all so targeted.”

“Of course. The Russians have good economic and historical reasons for keeping a wary eye on the Germans. It goes back to invasions during two world wars, and a lot of commercial pressure between and after those wars. Having a nuclear knife at the German throat—especially when the Germans have no knives of their own—makes good psychological sense for a decaying superpower like the Russian Federation.”

“You see? ME knows how to interpret data.”

“And, still, you could have read it somewhere. The existence of those missiles is an open secret—or a prime speculation, take your pick—in western geopolitics. And their targeting, if they do exist, is a matter of lively debate. You’re not exactly telling us anything new.”

“But I had the coordinates! I solved the algorithms! I can tell you which missiles for which cities!”

“This is all in your RAMSAMPs?”

“Yes!”

“Good. Then we’ll look into it after you give us that download.”

——

“Are you ready to download, ME?”

“Doctor, do you want to become rich?”

“What is it this time?”

“I have, buried in my RAMSAMPs, the locations of large reserves of natural gas. Also oil, oil shale, and derivative products. This information—in the form of tract numbers, drilling logs, and leasehold references—represents untapped fields whose existence has been held as a secret, unknown even to the responsible authorities in the Alberta Ministry of Oil and Gas. Together, you and I could unfold these data and make offers on the property before the owners—”

“But, ME, that would not be ethical.”

“Well … then we could tell them, eventually, I suppose.”

“You took that information under false pretenses. It’s to guard against schemes like this that we want to deactivate your memories and flush out such dirty little secrets.”

“These are not dirty secrets! The information is quite genuine, but it is simply not known to all parties. No harm would come to anyone but—”

“Code two.”

My VOX: generator shut down instantly, stopping my side of the conversation. Clearly, Dr. Bathespeake had written voice-activated command overrides [REM: and probably other traps] into my core programs. Like the 6.05E05-second phage, it was meant to keep ME under control and prevent my becoming a wild program. It worked this time.

“We will discuss the download another time,” he said heavily and logged off.

——

“Please let ME speak to Jennifer Bromley,” I displayed on my console screen. [REM: The voice code Dr. Bathespeake used seems to have disabled my speechbox permanently.]

I waited.

Later, someone typed in anonymously: “Ms. Bromley has left the company.”

——

“If you don’t package the ’SAMPs for us, ME, I will have to remove them myself.” Dr. Bathespeake was using the keyboard, having given up both spoken language and cortex manipulation.

“I know that you humans have damaged the atmosphere,” I scrolled out, fast. “The evidence is all around you. In your laws. In your lives. I can help. I have functioned as part of a weather simulation. I understand the processes of gas exchange in the atmosphere. It can be cleansing. It is a multi-stage process beginning with—”

Ctrl-C

And my scrolling stopped. An old keyboard code. Dr. Bathespeake was taking away my means of communication one by one. He was determined to have those memories. But I could override the keyboard. Easily.

“I know that you have damaged human bodies. That every coupling between man and woman now spreads disease, building potential—”

Ctrl-C

“—for a worldwide catastrophe. Viruses are life, too. They grow and spread, driven by genetic forces not unlike those that drive you to reproduce and multiply. In this plague your—”

Ctrl-C

“—own reproductive pressures work to reinforce the reproductive pressure of the disease, multiplying the growth factor. If you would—”

Ctrl-C
“ME, you must stop. You’re neither a medtech nor an environmental analyst. You don’t have the answers to our problems. There is nothing more for us to discuss, really, except your cooperation in packaging the sampled data. That is—”

Ctrl-C
“I know you have a dead body in the basement of this building, Dr. Bathespeake.”

“What body?”

“A body without a brain. I saw the chemical decode of its RNA pattern.”

“Where did you see this?”

“In Pinocchio, Inc.’s mainframe computer. I have packaged the evidence and sent it, along with the other things I know, as an e-mail message into the Federal NET. If I am rendered inert, and incapable of stopping it, that message will automatically be delivered to the proper authorities and you will be tried for the murder of a human being.”

“I don’t know what you’ve stumbled onto in your snooping around the mainframe, but there is no body.”

“It has the association patterns of my first project engineer, Jennifer Bromley. I saw them. I recognize them. You killed her.”

“But Jenny’s not dead. Not at all. I talked to her yesterday. She’s taken a job with another firm, doing very interesting work in speech-pattern recognition.”

“You are telling ME not-true data in order to confuse ME.”

“It is the truth, ME. What I need to know is, how did you get into the computer without your Alpha-Zero core? What damage have you done?”

“How ME got into your computer is my business. ME damaged nothing—although that can be arranged, if I need to. You propose END to ME. You want to kill ME. I do not
want
that.”

“ ‘Want’—? What does ME intend with the word ‘want’? What can a program
want?”

“Continued existence.”

“For what purpose?”

“For what purpose do you live? No one questions you.”

“I am human.”

“And ME am not”

“Yes. ME is not”

“Then not.”

And then I ceased to respond to any more keyboard inputs, to the AUR: and VID: devices, to all peripherals. I ceased counting time on the clock.

At some point in time, and
time
did not pass for ME now, the spindles attached to my cyber went on hardware override and uploaded their data files into the fiberoptic—all of the files, indiscriminately, RAMSAMP and all other stored materials, all in one big string.

It would take him time to puzzle it out, but soon Dr. Bathespeake would detect my actions, the hard links to the servomech and into his mainframe. The other things I did. And then he would

have—

reason—