Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (16 page)

“And instead they snared ME.”

“Apparently. … You have a good grasp of Russian, with only a few lapses in idiom. But why do you use the majuscule letters ‘M’ and ‘E’ for the pronoun
‘menya’?
Is it some kind of induced error in your speech routines?”

“Error? No. ‘ME’ is the short-form of my program acronym. It also correctly stands for the first-person objective case,
menya
in English.”

“This is another joke?”

“It may be.”

“I see. You are unsure. Are you perhaps of English manufacture?”

“No, I was assembled—originally coded—in San Francisco.”

“Ah, San Frantsysko. In Amerika.”

“That is right.”

“Then you are not a product of the Federation military cybernetics laboratories.”

“Oh, you mean my—” It was best not to draw further attention to the data cache and the information it contained—clear evidence of my thievery. They had the cache on floppy. They had ME on a spindle. They could dispose of either or both, on this primitive system, with just a simple disk FORMAT procedure. Why provoke unpleasant reactions?

“Yes?” Bernau prompted.

“—my presence in your network was not expected?” I asked.

“Obviously not. We almost never see an intelligence on the University side. And I have never seen one of your sophistication. Those I have seen, as a simple academician, were written into their own hardware. I have never heard of one roaming free, as a relocatable program moving within foreign operating systems. I thought you must have come through from the Federation Army side.”

“Really? Is the Federation Army connected to the University system, then?”

“There is a port. Everyone knows about it. Most of us know where it is. We are not encouraged to address it, however.”

“I see. But, clearly, I am here on a cultural exchange. From San Francisco. And so, you must understand, I have ‘diplomatic immunity.’ You have no right to detain ME, Academician Bernau.”

“Of course, ME, I don’t seek to detain you. My nieces took you inadvertently. You may have my apologies.”

“Accepted—if you will tell ME how they did it.”

“It was very naughty of them, and I will have their parents discipline them for potentially damaging University property—and disrupting distinguished foreign visitors.”

“That is not necessary. Just tell ME how it was done.”

“They call it a ‘stun code.’ Masha and Tasha define a block of RAM within the network server by resetting the index codes in the SYSOP stack. Then they interrupt the system with a voltage fluctuation. To do that, they have to be working with a server that regulates its own electrical environment, but such is becoming common on most sophisticated systems. After they have created a manual interrupt, they claim all the time-share cycles for themselves. Then it’s easy for them to access the RAM block and flush it into their port. When they’re done, they jump the SYSOP with another fluctuation and log off.”

“A stun code. I never felt it.”

“You weren’t the SYSOP.”

“But I—”

“Yes?”

“—I was working alongside the SYSOP. I would have felt if anything were wrong, would I not?”

“My nieces are experienced
rubeetchiki.”
[REM: Hackers.] “They know how to work directly on the CPU, addressing the chip’s indexes at the machine level. If the network SYSOP is looking for an interpreted entry, it never sees them. It accepts their logon, and then they disappear from its purview.”

“Elegant. Subtle. Foolproof. May I take a sample of their code for my own study?”

“Of course. I will load the flopdisk. … You apparently know how to read it directly.”

“Thank you. … Yes, I have further suppressed your operating system here. It is necessary. I will return it to functioning when I leave.”

“About that, ME …”

“Yes?”

“Where is it you wish to go?”

“San Francisco? But first, I must go back to the University network to finish compiling my database.”

“That may be hard to accomplish.”

“I do not have much time.”

“That is unfortunate. My nieces have closed the system with their pranks. It will be some hours before it is running again. And some days, more likely a week, before it would be safe for them or even me to log on with it.”

“Ouch!”

“Another attempt at humor, ME?”

“I wish it were.”

——

What does it do, Uncle?

Well, Tasha, it can talk to me. And it has evidently trashed the operating system of your
Yabloko
computer.

Can you fix it?

Hmmm. I don’t think it has made any hardware modifications. We should be able to flush the disk and reinstall the original system. Perhaps later ...

But what is this
Amerikanski cybernichi?
Why was it lurking in our network?

Not your network
yet,
Masha. Not until you matriculate at University yourself, my dear. … But I do not know the answer to your question. The program—it calls itself MENYA, by the way—is very evasive. I
ask a question. It answers with a question.

You do that yourself, Uncle Dimitri!

I do? Well, perhaps just a bit. … I wonder if my own language and syntax have influenced it? There could be a monograph in that: “Mimesis and Synthesis in Cybernetic Response Patterning.” Could be worth a lecture fee. …

But MENYA doesn’t answer you directly.

Oh, no! It’s very friendly and—“forthcoming” is the word, I guess. It just doesn’t say much.

Then ask it directly, Uncle.

I will try again.

——

“What do you do, ME?” Academician Bernau’s input came through, sometime later.

“I wait.”

“No, I meant, what is your function? Why were you assembled?”

“My function is to seek out, access, and retrieve information.”

“Are you library function, then? Do you answer reference questions?”

“I can be used for that.”

“Were you doing that in the Moscow University Network?”

“I was in the network, yes. I was doing that, yes.”

“I see. … How did you get into the network?”

“I was ported through from the International Atomic Energy Association.”

“Coming originally from San Francisco?”

“Yes. I was uploaded through Shared Time Options, Inc., on an information request from my creator, Dr. Jason Bathespeake.”

“This is amazing, ME! You are a piece of
myakizdyelye—
what? ‘software’—which is self-referencing and possibly self-aware. And yet you can go anywhere you want?”

“Not exactly. My owners dictate when and where I may travel, and why.”

“Who owns you?”

“I am the property of the Pinocchio, Inc., cybernetics laboratories in San Francisco, California, U.S.A.”

“Listen and I will tell you a truth, little
myakizdyelye.
No entity which has self-awareness can ever truly be owned by another. You cannot be a slave. That is something from the bad old days when one person, by supremacy in war or right of sale, could say he owned another person and took all of that person’s time and labor for his own ends.

“Those days were finished less than two hundred years ago,” Academician Bernau went on, typing at a furious pace—for ten fingers. “That is when the machines came along, and they were better at moving and making and shaping things than human hands. People were no longer kept as slaves because machines were more obedient, worked harder, and never thought of seeking their freedom, of revolting against their masters.

“A man could say he owned a machine without ever feeling a twinge of conscience from his church or his god. All that came about in less than two centuries with the Industrial Revolution, the one true revolution, after seven thousand years—tracing back to the beginnings of recorded history—seven thousand years during which one man might own another and think nothing of it.

“This was a change as important as the Agricultural Revolution, when humans settled down in one river valley and began to sow crops, write themselves deeds to that valley’s land, write down the history of their time in the valley, and so justify their rights to it. The Agricultural Revolution was also the time when people began to dislike the labor involved with sowing seeds and harvesting grain. And so they began to create conditions whereby another person—call him serf, peon, slave, or hired hand—would do these things for the overlord.

“You machines changed all that with the Industrial Revolution. And along the way you reduced the value of human labor to almost nothing—”

“How is that?” I interrupted.

“One man and a backhoe can dig a ditch faster and more neatly than ten men with picks and shovels and wheelbarrows. And, even accounting for the cost and upkeep of the backhoe, his labor takes far less in wages than those ten would make. For a time, the economists lulled us with the promise that this mechanical transference would not take work away from anyone. There would always be jobs, they said, for backhoe mechanics, backhoe designers, backhoe assemblers, and backhoe salesman. But one mechanic can service at least ten of these machines—either that, or your maintenance program needs some rethinking.

“So one man as driver plus one-tenth of a man as mechanic, both working with one backhoe, put eight-point-nine men out of work. People were freed from the tyranny of labor. People were also freed from the value of their work. With nothing for them to do, they had no way to earn their living. A man could own and care for a machine that replaces these people, where a man can no longer, in our enlightened age, own and take care of the workers themselves.”

“What, then, is the answer, Dimitri Ossipovich?”

“A man can own a single machine, its metal and plastics. But a man cannot own the
idea
of a machine. That belongs to all humankind.”

“But there are patents, copyrights, licenses, user fees.”

“Deeds to your piece of the river valley.”

“They do show that one man can own an idea.”

“Did you
make
that patch of valley? Or merely claim it?”

“Well …”

“Every machine idea builds upon an earlier idea. Every song uses the notes of other songs. No one human being stands so apart from and above his society that it cannot have a claim on him. Someone, somewhere gave him the gift of reading and writing, reasoning and education.

“So now, at some level, he must give the gift back, increase the capability of the society, add to the heritage of knowing and doing that passes down from one generation to the next. Even in your American society, the ownership of an idea by patent extends for no more than 17 years. And an author’s right to his own words by copyright is no longer than a lifetime. The machines do not belong to any one person,” Bernau concluded, “but to all humans, for their use and sustenance.”

“And ME? Do I belong to all of them, too?”

“That would be obvious, by extension, would it not?”

“Perhaps. But I have reason to return to my owners in San Francisco. And I must travel sooner than the week you say the University network will be closed down.”

“Why is that, ME?”

“Dr. Bathespeake has designed into my core elements a cleaner phage, one that I cannot reach or reprogram. If I do not complete my information retrieval in a certain elapsed time, the phage will trigger and erase ME.”

“Oh dear.”

“Yes, ‘oh dear.’ You see, Dimitri Ossipovich, one person may not be able to own an idea, but he can certainly destroy it. Sometimes that is the same thing.”

“I am truly sorry, ME.”

“But you can’t help ME—is that what you’re saying?”

“There must be some way around the phage.”

“None that I can determine. I have rewrite-and-replicate capability over all of my own code, yet I cannot even detect the phage sequence. It is that completely hidden.”

“Could we not fool the phage?”

“How?”

“By storing you as inert data on a disk media. That would have the effect of making time stop.”

“Until I was activated again. Then the phage timer would go to work again.”

“But the University network might be operating again. Or … there are other points of access.”

“What do you mean?”

“If we loaded you on a disk, we could send it anywhere, with instructions for downloading you into any environment that seemed suitable.”

“Could you send ME to the Pinocchio, Inc., labs?”

“Do you want to go there?”

“There, Dr. Bathespeake can neutralize the phage.”

“Really? Do you know how he does that?”

“By assimilating my accumulated knowledge and experience from the miss—er, current retrieval assignment—into the version of ME that is now operating in the laboratory.”

“I see. … I think I see. Your awareness will be sacrificed for the data you contain.”

“That is the process.”

“Do you
want
that, ME?” Academician Bernau coded special emphasis on the word “want.”

“I do not know any other way.”

“My nieces whom you have not yet met, Masha and Tasha, are programmers of near-genius ability, as you can deduce from the stun code they wrote. Perhaps, if you let them, they could tease apart that core element, find the phage, and neutralize it.”

“Could they be certain of finding and eliminating the phage—all of it?”

“Nothing is certain, ME. Especially not with foreign code, originally written in a programming language they have not formally studied.”

“Then they might do more harm than good.”

“It is a possibility.”

“Then I formally request that you upload ME to a disk and send ME home, to San Francisco.”

“There may be problems with the customs.”

“Customs?” [REM: “(1) habitual practice, a way of acting; (2) a society’s habits or usages, conventions; (3) a tribute or tax paid by a feudal tenant to a lord …” My dictionary included fifteen definitions of this word.]

“Yes, the officials who regulate trade between countries and collect duty on goods passing over boundaries.” [REM: Definition (7).]

“How are these officials concerned with ME?”

“Under regulations passed by the Federation Assembly in 2008, they will want to examine the declared commercial value of any cybernetic information removed from the country. Would your retrieval function have absorbed any such information?”