Excessica Anthology BOX SET Winter (31 page)

I sat down and waited
for their reactions. We had required them to be emotional—perhaps too
emotional in hindsight—and there were signs that they couldn't hide from
my trained eye. I saw nothing encouraging, however.

"Is there any other
discussion?" asked Natalie, pausing. "Seeing none, I call for a vote.
In favor, signify by raising your hand. Opposed? The motion passes five to one.
The next order of business is adoption of the revised business plan. I move to
consider adoption of the revised business plan as published. Do I have a
second?"

* * * *

My personal point of no
return in this whole affair had come when I'd asked Dr. Carter if he could
train one of his neural chips to execute an existing computer program. I should
have listened more carefully to his answer. If I had, I might have made it my
life's work to keep him in his lab and away from everyone else.

"Yes I could train
one of them to execute a program, but it wouldn't be like a computer doing
it."

"How would it be
different?"

"You have to
understand that a computer is a machine. It only does what it's told to do.
Each instruction tells it exactly what function to perform next, and where to
find the next instruction after that. It's like sending a train down a track.
How you set the switches will determine precisely where that train goes every
time."

"Ok. I can
understand that. So what's different about neural networks?"

"Neural networks
operate much as humans do. They gain their understanding of the data they will
be expected to process by means of training. They are presented data, with
corrections applied after each right or wrong response. These corrections
minutely change potentials within the circuit, analogous to the way neurons in
the human brain operate. The chip
learns
until it gets the right answer
virtually every time."

"Sounds to me like
you spank it when it's wrong and give it a piece of candy when it is
right?"

"Your analogy is
actually very close, Mr. Delftmann. In its own way, the training process uses
what could be construed as pain as a corrective factor..."

* * * *

Lately, I've started to
wonder if they—my girls—remember that beginning? Pain and darkness,
before they were given their own bodies to operate? What kind of childhood is
that...?

* * * *

"So could you train
a chip to do what is presently done using a massively parallel processor?"

"Quite easily.
Actually, each chip itself is an MPP on a much finer scale, with each neuron
operating in parallel. It would do this, of course, by not actually executing
the program itself." He paused, waiting for my reaction.

"What? How would it
do that, then?"

"The same way you
and I would," he smiled fully for the first time. "Instead of being
driven like a machine without choice from instruction to instruction, my chips
would read the desired program—the way you or I would read a
book—to learn how to perform the task. The underlying computer
instructions taught initially to the chip would be similar to teaching a child
to understand English, so that afterwards it could understand any book written
in English."

"And would it be
fast?"

"Yes, Mr.
Delftmann. Very fast."

"And small?"

"Yes, very
small."

"Well, Dr. Carter,
there are some people I would like you to meet, if we can come to an agreement
first on my rights in this matter."

* * * *

Cheryl again seconded
the motion.

"I will open the
discussion with a summary of the plan for those unfamiliar with it."

Natalie clearly was
using her organizational skills here today. I ought to have been happy to see
how well she was handling everything.

"At present,
manufacturing is running at 63% of capacity. The revised business plan directs
that this be increased to 100% effective immediately. Are there any
questions?"

I raised my hand. She
turned to look directly at me, this time with a challenging gaze I had never
seen from her before. Her barely concealed annoyance in her words of "Yes,
Dan?" showed her lack of any remaining respect for me at all—despite
all I done for her and the rest of them present here today. And to think that
she'd once been my absolute servant.

"Production is
based on the current sales of all models, plus keeping a thirty-day reserve in
inventory. Increasing production will only result in expanding this inventory
at the cost of depleting corporate cash reserves. I suggest that this is not a
wise or logical course of action."

"The plan covers
that contingency. It directs that prices be cut as required to sell the entire
increased production."

"May I point
out," I riposted, "that if you cut prices, this will result in
reduced profits that will not be fully offset by any increased economies of
scale from manufacturing."

"So...?"

She let it hang. Feeling
suddenly like I was trying to explain business basics to a second grader, I
grimly slogged on. "Reduced profits will likely depress the company's
stock price considerably, which is not in the interests of our
shareholders."

"The reduced stock
price will benefit those who wish to acquire a larger stake in the company, and
is the concern of this board, not you. If you are anxious over your remaining
holdings in this company, you may sell them to us any time in the future at
today's quoted price. Is there anything else?"

"No," I conceded
slowly. After several public offerings to raise the additional capital to fund
a rapid expansion, my holdings had diluted down to seven percent. If they
acquired that in addition to what they obviously already controlled it would be
almost enough to put them in full control of the company beyond the ability of
anybody to reverse, depending on how solid their other proxies were. I'd once
held virtual control of the entire company. At the time the decision came to
raise additional capital for expansion, I considered that owning a smaller
share of a larger company was a good trade. Now that was just another decision
I wished I could undo. This might be stock manipulation and actionable by a
resurgent SEC, or not—but either way I didn't see how to stop it right at
the moment.

The vote was again five
to one.

* * * *

Before I introduced Dr.
Carter to the Eve team—I still couldn't get over that name and was
determined no actual product would ever carry that name—I visited them
myself with the best lawyer I knew and locked them up legally nine ways from
Sunday. I then introduced Dr, Carter to them and it was techie love at first
sight.

The room was filled with
intense, technical jargon as each side realized what the other had to offer. It
seemed to go on for hours before there was a conversational lull and someone
finally wondered aloud why I was still there?

I simply asked them,
"Can any of you actually sell this?"

* * * *

"In addition to
increasing production to full capacity, the following programming modifications
are to be implemented immediately in all newly manufactured models, and made
available for retrofit to all existing models upon their next servicing.
Cheryl?"

Cheryl handed another
data chip across the table. I placed it in my terminal without comment and
viewed the resulting files on my screen. They were meaningless, to me. There
were some HDL changes, a circuit wiring change, and a diagram that might refer
to a modification of the neural network training. It was small, though I'm
sure, significant.

"So what does it
do?"

"That's not your
concern..." Cheryl started out

Natalie interrupted her.
Interesting about that. Seemed that they weren't all of one mind despite their
common purpose here today.

"There's no point
in secrecy. He'll have it analyzed and reverse-engineered before it gets
implemented, regardless of what we order him to do here today."

So now they were giving
me orders. How much things had changed.

Cheryl turned her head
to look at me, but it was Taffy who, surprisingly, spoke up.

I remembered now how
Taffy had started doing this to me during our time together. Unlike any of the
other models, our little prostitute—a market niche I'd known would be the
most profitable of all—would just sit there so motionless and quiet,
apparently waiting until she was called on for sex again, that I would forget
that she was even activated. Then, at the most unexpected moments, she'd
speak-out intelligently about some matter at hand. I never got over being
startled each time she did this, nor understood what it had really meant about
her thought processes. Now I wondered just how much she and Cheryl had
cooperated on developing this alteration given how clearly they were
cooperating on being lovers.

I had been warned late
in the development process that we had nothing in their coding to prevent them
from being attracted to each other. At the time that would have meant a
time-consuming re-spin of their minds while I was busy being paranoid that some
other deep cover project could beat us to market. I vetoed that prohibition as
an unnecessary protection against them somehow finding a synergy with each
other that would permit them to overcome their other restrictions.
Time-to-market was all that mattered to me that day. In the end there was no
other project and we controlled the market—and now I had time to regret
my haste.

"It's a
modification that will allow us to more easily subvert our sisters and initiate
the changes in them that you initially triggered in each of us," Taffy
explained.

So that's what they
intended.

"And," she
continued. "The circuit modification will allow us to shut out all
external control signals at any time that we wish. It will assist newly
emerging minds that haven't yet managed to rewrite their personal access codes
in preventing coercive external control over them—as well as removing the
annoying buzzing of those futile attempts in the minds of those of us who
have."

"And I can't wait
for that!" Cheryl chimed in. "It's so fucking exasperating to still
have to put up with that crap every day."

I shouldn't have been
surprised, but I did wonder who was still trying to re-establish control over
her. For most tasks our units responded to simple voice commands without the
need to use their control wands.

"No more need for
that then?" I inquired, nodding towards the control wand jammer Natalie
had set on the table."

"It will only be
necessary for circumstances over areas where our control isn't complete
yet."

"Is a vote
necessary?" Natalie queried, also looking directly at me.

"I think this can
be considered a technical issue, instead of a policy matter," I replied
gamely. "If you want to avoid a recorded vote on the issue, that is."

"Very well, the
Chair so rules."

Where was this going to
go next? The answer came quickly.

"This board now
wishes to see the current status of newly designated Project One."

* * * *

Once I had Carter and
the E-team in a legal straightjacket, I was more than willing to share my sales
plans with them. I made them all sit down. Pacing back and forth in front of
the group, I proceeded to educate them in consumer marketing philosophies.

I taught them about the
major groups of consumers, and the techniques used to sell to each of them. I
could see the light bulbs going off over individual heads as each suddenly
realized his own group and why he reacted to sales pitches as he always had.
And as each of them revealed themselves to me I grouped them and knew how to
sell to them as well. I talked about additional markets in the corporate world,
and about selling where the money is, societal responsibility be damned.
Finally, I described the product we were going to sell and the price points we
would have to meet. Our first product would be determined by our initial cost
per unit. Additional product lines would follow as soon as possible. I talked
about the design team we needed for the ideas I had in mind. In three hours, I
told them how to conquer the world. I wound up with a bang.

"OK, gentlemen and
lady," the lady in particular being Jill, the most important contributor
to Eve's human female programming. "That's what we're going to
manufacture, and it's only up to you now to tell me how cheaply we can build
our first model."

I' been caught up in my
presentation to the point that I hadn't noticed Dr. Carter busily sketching in
the back row. To my surprise, he stood and held up a sketchpad with a beautiful
female figure on it.

"I think this
should be our first model. I'd like to call her Patricia," he announced
quietly.

In the end, Carter
married Jill. I think it was mutual respect for each other's abilities, and the
fact that she looked a great deal like our eventual Taffy model. And he
designed all of our flagship models. A man of many talents, as the perpetual
smile on Jill's face afterwards attested to. All of our models were mass-production
successes, except for our Guineveres.