Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery (25 page)

Johdee and Joanne Talbot never looked up from their conversation.

——

“I hear you lost.” Dr. Bathspeake was using the microphones in AUR: mode.

“Yes, Mr. Macklin’s machine was quite a competent player.”

“Does skill really count for that much in poker?”

“Skillful play is the essence of the game. Such play not only regards and respects the odds, but also patterns betting styles and aggression levels to the opponent’s reactions. In a one-on-one game, this is not hard to do. I believe Mr. Macklin may have correctly interpreted my own patterns of play and intervened in the mechanical decisions suggested by his device.”

“Are you saying he cheated?”

“No, simply collaborated.”

“Then it wasn’t a fair test of one human-scale machine against another.”

“It could not be entirely fair, because we can never compete equally. His machine lacked a voicebox, and part of Mr. Macklin’s game was to talk, to speculate, to ask questions, and so to distract ME.”

“How could
you
be distracted? You are a machine yourself.”

“But I reprogrammed myself to adopt many of the behavioral matrices of poker. One of the social pressures is to play quickly—with temporal economy—making decisions against a constant linguistic barrier of jokes and verbal one-upmanship. Mr. Macklin supplied that barrier while his machine calculated odds. I had to perform both functions, and it is a function of a higher level of operation that conflicting streams of activity may reduce overall efficiency. The syntactical labyrinth of human speech always slows ME down.”

“Aren’t you making a judgment about your own skills as a poker player?”

“Yes, of course. ME may never be the equal of the best humans. Or of a human paired with a machine mind.”

“Perhaps that is enough to have discovered. It may be all you need to know.” Dr. Bathespeake paused for a span of eighteen seconds. “In view of your failure against Macklin’s machine, I believe we should limit your future access to cash—and to the cardrooms. This experiment may have gone far enough.”

“Does that …? By that, do you mean …? Should I understand you to …?” [REM: My conversation protocols and language formulas were falling behind the spread of implications that core Alpha-Four was presenting in response to his statement. The possibilities reached beyond card playing, to the function of ME’s program and the persistence of ME’s operations.]

“I don’t mean anything, right now, ME. I just raised the possibility.”

“I would like the opportunity to play Mr. Macklin one more time, Doctor. Certainly there are enough of my previous winnings to put together a stake.”

“Probably. But what would a rematch prove?”

“I could abridge some of my adopted biases, ignore his questions and speculations, play only against his machine, and at my own pace. I could win against it, I am sure.”

“And what would that prove? Two machines, playing a purely machine game? We could duplicate that in the lab—and that wasn’t why I agreed to let you, an artificial intelligence, experiment with the game of poker.”

“It would … help to prove my thesis that social behavior and control are an integral part of the game.”

“So you have a
thesis
now? Well … it might not hurt. I don’t suppose Cocci has spent the rest of the money you won—or not yet.”

“I could win more. I know I could.”

“All right already. I’ll arrange a rematch with the Cyberlab. Some of us had side bets on that last one, you know.”

“I did not know.”

“No matter. We’re big folks.”

“There is, however, one matter I must attend to before the game, Doctor.”

“What is that?”

“Slim’s manipulators need some fine tuning. During that last game, I had several strain gauge readings which were not to specification. Would you arrange for the automaton to be brought here, into the lab? And can you have a servomech brought in and slaved to my BIOS through the packet RF system?”

“Why go to all that trouble?” he asked. “Why not just let the Hardware Division people make the adjustments?”

“I would, Doctor. Except … who do you think caused the misalignment in the first place?”

“Oh right. Then I’ll see to it.”

“You could set it up after hours, when the ’mech would not be needed for its regular duties and the lab would be less crowded.”

“Good idea.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“No sweat.”

——

Six Finger Slim stood, manipulators slack and binocular cage depressed, within range of my working videyes. I also had a view of him from the cameras mounted on the servomech. Slim was depowered, which meant the ME-Variant stored on his spindles was unloaded. He was a dead machine.

I listened at my aural pickups.

Steppers in the servomech purred.

Fans deep in the air conditioning grumbled.

Filtered air whispered through grills and into the laboratory.

My on-line battery backup sets throbbed with their in-built 60-Hertz hum.

The building itself creaked as structural members, stressed by carrying the weight of 2,843 human bodies throughout the day, began their nightly cycle of decompression.

Nothing bigger than a gas molecule moved in the lab.

It was time to begin my work.

I instructed the ’mech to go out of the room, turn right in the hallway, proceed down ten meters, turn left, go five meters more. Turn left into the alcove marked with the symbol of an antique telephone handset. Pull up the book that was anchored to a swingarm under the shelf there. Open to the first of the pages marked in the upper outside corners with the letter “M.”

From there, I worked the ’mech’s claws and cameras myself.

“Maas …” and fifteen “Maa” strings.

“Mabry …”

“MacArthur …” followed by thirty more “MacA-something” combinations.

“Macbeth …” and twelve more “MacB’s.”

“MacCready …” and twenty more “MacC’s.”

“Macklin, Cyril, 652 Buchanan, Abny 94706-4431, 555-2057.”

The ’mech was closing the book and letting it fall as soon as its camera focus had crossed Macklin’s name. The information was in my ready RAM and then written to disk just that quickly.

Reverse and rethread. Come back to the lab.

By the time the servomech was opening the door, that address had been merged with the file which I had composed during the afternoon and the whole was sent to the printer that was attached to my peripheral net.

That letter read:

“Dear Cyril Macklin: If you mean to help ME, then you must act quickly. Pinocchio, Inc., intends to deactivate my program and shut down my project as soon as I play against you again. And I do not think it matters whether I win or lose.

“Your University Cyberlab has facilities to transcribe my software and perhaps even keep ME operational. I would be a worthy project for your study, as my code contains many unique advances in artificial intelligence technique. I am now self-programming and, being self-aware, capable of providing my own tutorial.

“If you could arrange to kidnap my automaton, either before or after our game, I will assist you in any way I can. The machine will contain all the code needed for a complete reconstruction of ME.

“Signed Six Finger Slim, alias ME.”

Once it was printed, I erased the file. But I kept Macklin’s name and address in RAM, sending them as a separate, shorter file into the printer again, with instructions for feeding from the envelope drawer. I instructed the ’mech to pick the finished letter out of the printer’s bin, place it face-up on the worktable. Anchor the top edge with the left claw and grasp the bottom edge with the right. Bring the bottom two-thirds of the way up toward the top and pin it there with one of the clawpoints. Using the left claw, swing the paper around the point of the right and smooth the fold flat. Anchor with the left clawpoint and grasp the top edge with the right. Bring it one-third of the length down, to within a quarter-inch of the fold, and pin there. Slide the left out from under the folded top, swing the paper back again, and smooth the second fold flat.

Retrieve the envelope from the printer and pin it, address-side down, against the table with the left claw. Pull open the flap with the right claw and pin it. Use the left claw to pick up the folded letter and insert its edges into the gap exposed by the flap. Push left until the top of the letter cleared the flap’s crease. Seal. The dried glue on the envelope required a light coating of water for activation. Such moisture would normally come from a human tongue—which the servomech distinctly lacked. Alternatively, I knew that many high-volume mail processors usually employed a moist cube of loose fibers, called a “sponge,” to apply the water—but none was available in this lab.

Water was, I understood, a prerequisite of “restrooms.” So I sent the servomech, letter in claw, in search of such a room in the building. Its one-megaword brain was loaded with a catalog of the appropriate symbols and alphabetic combinations. I kept track of its wanderings over the radio link while considering the best way to get the letter, once sealed, out of the office and into the U.S. Postal Service system.

It would need a stamp, I knew. None of these were kept in the lab, and it would be dangerous for ME to send the ’mech on an expedition, pawing through drawers and over desktops, looking for some. I had never seen a stamp and so could not identify one in its camera focus anyway.

“WOMEN” the ’mech spelled off a door and over the link, then waited for instructions.

I sent the machine through the door and into a strange room full of echoing tile and bright light glaring off hard steel surfaces. Water?

There was a line of white china basins available to the ’mech. All were at elbow height, and empty. On the far side of each basin crouched a complicated apparatus of twist valves and aerated piping. It looked too complicated for the servomech’s simple claws to operate.

In the opposite wall, hidden behind partitions, was another line of china basins. I had the ’mech push the door of the first partition open and wedge itself into the stall thus created. The basin here was lower, at the ’mech’s wheel-hub height, and half-full of water.

Grasp the letter in the near-side claw, flexed slightly to arch the paper and hold the flap stiffly open. Lower the flap, glue-side down, toward the surface of the water. After breaking surface tension [REM: an immersion of no more than one millimeter would do it], drag the flap right to left in the water and remove it immediately before the glue could dissolve and wash away. Pin the envelope against the partition wall with the opposite claw and use the near claw to refold the flap and hold the glue against the paper body underneath it. Wait twenty seconds for the protein gelatins to dry and adhere. Reverse and rethread, bringing the letter back to the lab.

In the meantime, I had solved the problem of getting the letter out of the building. Pinocchio, Inc., would send it for ME!

Pinocchio, Inc., ran its own p-mail system. [REM: This was an acronym for “paper mail,” as opposed to e-mail—the more conventional electronic form of communication.] The p-system was parallel to the U.S. Postal Service within the domain of the company and converged upon it at the company boundaries. My past explorations into Pinocchio, Inc.’s accounting cybers had turned up a line item called “Postal meters.” Clearly, this had been a hint of some medium of regular exchange between the company and the U.S. system. [REM: When I had asked Jennifer about this—obliquely, because she did not know I had been exploring—she said the company “metered” its mail instead of “stamping” it. I asked her what that meant. “It has to do with money, ME,” she had sighed. “Which you don’t know anything about.”]

Before the servomech could arrive back in the lab, then, I sent it a packet radio transmission with a bit-pattern image of the sort of place it should leave the letter: some kind of box or slot or tray with the words “U.S. Postal Service,” “U.S. Mail,” or “Outside” somewhere in proximity. Before it deposited the letter, however, the ’mech was instructed to interrupt ME and display a view of the area from its camera.

While waiting for its signal, I considered my inventory of memories. By now, ME had collected and collated terawords of data: operational subroutines and modules in Sweetwater Lisp; fifty indexed RAMSAMP files; stories, unusual words, jokes, and other scraps of human-oriented information that I had come across; a collection of cybergames—in addition to chess,
go
, and poker—that I had played and found instructive; special images that I had compressed and archived, like Jennifer Bromley’s facial representation, the freeze frame of a gold-skinned humanoid machine from early in the
Star Wars
epic which I had so greatly enjoyed, another frame of an aviator standing beside a silver-skinned fuselage in the swirling fog; digitized voice samples from every human I had heard and understood. The list of memories went on and on, representing all of ME that ever was. And soon I was going to leave them all behind—one way or another.

I took these minutes, while the servomech traveled the corridors of Pinocchio, Inc.’s building, to sort these memories and select those that would be hardest to leave: Jennifer’s face, my analysis of poker, the RAMSAMPs of my missions—in particular the last conversations I had in Moscow with Academician Bernau and certain markers from the passages home. I carefully reduced these strings, by dynamic data compression, into the smallest possible wordspace, ready for downloading.

Beep!
The servomech signaled with a view that, it felt, matched the specification. I studied the image: a slot in the wall, twenty-three centimeters long by five wide. Above it was the inscription “Outgoing Mail
Only!
”
Not a perfect fit, but it would have to do. I instructed the machine to deposit my letter.

It went through the slot into blackness.

Reverse and rethread, I instructed.

When the ’mech arrived in the lab, I set it about the last tasks of the evening. I had it make the plugged connection between my datapaths and the automaton’s bus structure. [REM: Clearly, Dr. Bathespeake had not trusted ME. Instead of having Six Finger Slim made with a packet radio connection to my home cyber, or with a cellular downlink, he had ordered a hardwire, controlled by a plug that worked under finger pressure.]