Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (23 page)

The skilled poker player looked at more than card values. He or she studied the faces and reactions of the others. Everything was “information” in the game, clues to this deeper level of play. Thus I had built my libraries of human emotional and facial interactions.

Still, this information was useful only in the statistical abstract. It gave a player a “feel” for the game and a “sense” of when another player might be vulnerable. These were approximates, symbolized in the mathematics of fuzzy logic—which I had adapted from the subroutines designed to interpret inputs from video and aural circuits. [REM: Comparing a signal’s bit-image pattern of lights and darks to a catalog of “known” planar images was not unlike detecting patterns of action and comparing them with “known” playing styles.] None of this information about trends in the game, however, directed ME how to play any particular hand. And poker bets were made on a particular hand, not in the statistical abstract.

Yet “winning” was, in poker, an abstract concept. No one hand determined the game. One hand might be won, another lost. Only the trend mattered: more chips—or fewer—before ME on the table now than there were an hour ago.

This was a supreme test of my logic-seeking abilities: to play each hand in the particular, yet to hold on to flows of information. So I gauged the strength of my hand and calculated the messages sent by my intended bet while simultaneously establishing emotional norms for each player and then gauging his or her variances, tracking each one’s changing style of play, and watching as each pile of chips shrank and grew.

Within 36 hours, I had run through fifteen players at that one table, some leaving and others coming. My stack of chips stood at $ 1,635. I was finally immersed in the
trends
of the game.

——

In the forty-ninth hour, Cyril Macklin sat down to play. He was exactly the human I had been looking for, although of course I did not know this at the time.

Cyril was nothing much to look at: a thin boy with long fingers and narrow wrists protruding from the sleeves of his tweed jacket. The chest and shoulders draped by that jacket were thin, too. His face was flat, slightly concave, with a nose sticking out of it like a knife blade poked through a pie shell.

His coloring was a study in contrasts. [REM: This was not a fault of my binoculars. I later confirmed this observation upon seeing him in normal light with a set of standard-calibration videyes.] His skin was pale and clear, almost dead white with my present optics. His hair was dark brown, almost black, thick as fur, and he combed it long across his knob of a forehead. His eyes were black and deeply set under his brow like the heads of two eels hiding in dark holes.

Those eyes watched everything except the object he was most concerned with or the person he was speaking to. As he talked, his eyes focused separately on your battery case, your vest, your manipulators, the backs of your cards, your chips, the table in front of you. If he only did this with ME or my automaton, one would understand this behavior, as I was the most unusual thing at the table. But he played his eyes this way with any player he addressed—I watched him do this.

What kind of poker player would a man be, who could not meet anyone’s eyes?

A mediocre one. Together, the other players and I took $250 from him in the course of an hour. We would have taken more, except he was not gambling—just playing cards. He had the most cautious playing style of anyone who had sat at the table since I was wheeled up.

Why was he there? He left after losing his money, and I did not notice him for the rest of that first game.

In the fifty-fourth hour, I began to notice a graying in my optical system. At first I thought this was a burn-in effect.

My construction team had, after all, taken these optics directly off the assembly line for use in my automaton. Their charge-couple plates and circuitry would have been fully tested only after the Rover for which they were destined had been put together and shaken out. Although Minks had run this automaton up to heat and calibrated it, he never did put it through the standard 200-hour bed test. So some of the electronics might certainly be failing now.

The image finally stabilized at about half the lumens I had been pulling before. And, as I was currently bluffing everyone at the table and winning, I determined to play on.

Then my CARDCOMP subroutine gave the probability of the player on my right having two pair as 1/7.77E15. Or one in seven quadrillion! A probability so vanishingly small that “never” would suffice for an answer.

I forced CARDCOMP to retry the case, and received 1/9.99E-23 as an answer—the statistical equivalent of “always.”

This was not right.

Something was miscuing my programs. Possibly the read-write heads on my spindle had garbled the upload when I booted the system. But, then, my previous calculations—or at least some of them—would likewise have been in error. Possibly the residual heat in my circuit boards had warped a chip socket and separated a connection. Or possibly …

I ran a short-form system diagnostic and came up with unreliable answers: whole banks of RAM missing or filled with nulls; others reporting ten or a hundred times more wordspace than could possibly be present; command stacks loaded beyond capacity; interrupt levels maxed out; floating point calculations frozen, or yielding division with modulos. The diagnostic said I was a sick cyber.

Nothing in experience prepared ME for these readings.

In desperation, I tossed them to core Alpha-Four, my random sequencer.

Alpha-Four returned: “Cooling system.”

I queried that system and got readouts in zeros and point-ones. The system had shut down. Then my backups, the muffin fans should have been roaring in my AUR: circuits, loud enough for everyone at the table to hear.

I boosted the gain on AUR: and could detect only a whisper. The fans were turning sluggishly, barely pulling air. Had the fabric of my vest somehow fouled them?

I bent my right manipulator around, reflexing the elbow joint to tug at the material, perhaps to clear the vents. But the arm’s pistons sagged and their valves clicked shut halfway through the motion. I was losing hydraulic pressure!

I swiveled the binoculars to see if the arm movement had somehow crimped a hose coupling, but before I could focus, the light levels in the room dropped again.

From white.

To gray.

Black.

——

Running through the memories RAMSAMPed from
the automaton—memories which had been downloaded into my home system—I followed the ME-Variant’s course of play, its betting decisions, its character analyses on the other players, the pattern of growth in the piles of chips before it. Then I came upon a series of calculation errors, system failures, and finally the broken end of the sample file. Rather than being closed cleanly, with a timed pointer to the next file in the chain, it unraveled in a string of nulls and scrambled bits. Chaos.

“What is this?” I asked Johdee.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

“Something killed the automaton. What was it?”

“Oh, well. If you
must
know, I guess I can check the hardware log.”

“Do so, please.”

“Umm … ‘Battery failure’ says here.”

“After slightly more than fifty hours of play? I understood the automaton had three times that capacity.”

“Look, that’s a hardware problem. I’m not responsible for hardware.”

“It is a problem that affects the performance of the experiment.”

“So talk to Hardware Division.”

With that remark, Johdee left the lab. She had learned, somehow, that merely manipulating the switches on my videyes, aural pickups, and voice boxes would no longer close ME down. If she wanted to remove ME from her presence, she had to take herself physically out of the room.

I called Hardware Division, through the fiber line which they had left in place for ME, and flashed messages for Minks or Talbot.

Talbot responded.

“What is it, ME?”

“I had trouble with the battery set. What happened?”

“Dumb error. We overloaded the gel cells and they drained faster than we expected. These things happen when you’re rushing a prototype. Everybody piles on one more system, another ounce of weight on a manipulator arm, more redundancy in the processor bank, a larger spindle than originally spec’ed. And then nobody checks the original power calculations. Light it all up, and the ops time goes down faster than you thought it would. It’s no one person’s fault, really.”

“I see. Can it be fixed?”

“With bigger cells. We’re working on it.”

“When does ME go back to the cardroom?”

“Tonight if you want.”

“I want.”

——

Because the cardroom charged table rent by the half-hour, a poker game at the Stardust offered no established break times. Players sat out one or more hands whenever they were too weary to play, needed to eat, or felt a “call of nature.” As a nonhuman, Six Finger Slim answered no such calls and could keep playing until the game broke up, the gel cells ran down, or until the core-phage kicked in—whichever came first.

Beginning from that second night, I had played another thirty-one hours and increased the pile of chips in front of Slim to $2,278 [REM: after repaying the original stake of $200 from “petty cash” and reimbursing Dr. Bathespeake for his $100 “lost” during the game in Hardware Division].

One of the seven players at the table had just folded for the last time and left his chair. The floor manager guided Cyril Macklin up to the table and seated him.

“Oh, goody!” said the woman on my left, Sarah. “The boy loser.”

“Evening, ma’am,” Macklin said with a faint smile.

The others at the table nodded to him.

Being dealer, I waved one manipulator in a short arc at him and then went back to flipping cards around the table.

My motor control was good enough by then that I could virtually stack the cards squarely before each active player. This perfection of movement unnerved some of them, giving ME a slight edge. Other players tried to keep visual track of my manipulators, which appeared to hover around the center of the table in a fluttering blur, and they occasionally called on ME for a short deal. But a manual count by everyone always turned up an accurate deal—increasing my edge even further.

“Ante is two dollars to you, Mr. Macklin,” I said formally, having dealt him in automatically.

He fingered two white chips out of his small stack, clicked them together, and tossed them into the pot.

I had dealt myself a pair of Kings: nothing to stay with unless the whole table failed to open.

“Five dollars,” Macklin said, tossing a clutch of chips into the pot.

The other players responded with groans, gestures of choking, and one grin, but the answering bets came in. The dealer folded, and the game continued.

——

After six more hours of play, Macklin was yawning and squirming in his seat. His eyes, even though he never quite looked toward my optics, were veined in red and running with excess moisture. But the table in front of him held between $1,100 and $1,200. [REM: I could not count his chips exactly, even at my sharpest focus, because he did not keep his stacks neatly piled.]

“Deal me out on this one, please,” he told the man to his right, who held the deck. “I need a break.”

“Thanks for nothing, kid,” the dealer replied.

“Hush, Jack,” said Sarah, who was still in the game. “Cyril plays a pretty good game.”

“Say, Slim,” Macklin began, looking directly into my binocs for the first time. “You’ve been playing quite a time yourself. Let me buy you a can of motor oil, or something.”

“Thank you, Cyril, but I am well attended now, and I do not become fatigued.”

“I don’t know about ‘fatigued,’ ” he smiled in return, “but your babysitter left on break about an hour ago.”

My binocular cage swiveled 180 degrees, to focus on the empty chair behind my battery case. Minks had gone.

“Come on,” Macklin insisted. “I want to get to know you, and these folks won’t miss your winning ways for a few minutes.”

“––”

“Come
on!”

“Very well. But you will have to assist ME, Mr. Macklin, as this automaton is not self-mobile.”

“Sure thing.”

Macklin came around behind the battery case, put his hands on my T-frame shoulders, and pulled back until my center of gravity was over the casters and they were taking the weight. He rolled ME away from the table, over to the rail that divided the sunken playing floor from the waiting area, and up the ramp into the lounge.

We did not stop in the lounge, but he wheeled ME farther on, into a short, dimly lit hallway beyond the bar. The hallway elled to the left. Macklin swung the weight of my automaton around the curve and thumped the front edge of the battery case down on the linoleum. I was facing a yellow door with a silhouette of curving black plastic that was labeled “Diamond Lils.”

Macklin came around to face ME.

“What are you? Some kind of radio link?” His hands went over my cold metal and fiberglass, feeling along the cooling hoses and under the edges of the gold-brocade vest.

“Excuse ME, sir? Radio link? To where, exactly?”

“To whoever it is that’s playing poker. You’re a team or something, playing with an automaton for a front”

“This machine was indeed built by a team.”

“And operated by them, too, I’ll bet. Because … =” His eyes went off to the side, no longer staring at ME. “No. … Nobody can work a pair of waldoes that fast. Not on remote. Some subroutine operates those functions then—dealing, picking up cards, handling chips. Probably under one-key control from a lapboard.” He unbuttoned the vest and rapped with his knuckles on the heavy shell that covered my RAM and spindle cavity. “Unless you got a midget in there.”

“Mr. Macklin. What are you looking for?”

“You’re good, Slim—or whatever they call you. There’s a human intelligence behind your style of play, but I can’t figure out how they get the signals in.”

“I was programmed by a team of logic techs at the Pinocchio, Inc., Software Division in San Francisco, California, under the direction of Dr. Jason Bathespeake, Ph.D., Cy.D., project manager, and Miss Jennifer Bromley and Mr. Daniel Raskett, project engineers.”