Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery Read Online Free PDF Page A

nothingness as humans know it.
    These thoughts were a projection of alternatives for which I could find no acceptable course of action. In short, they scared ME.
    And Dr. Bathespeake, for the sake of mere housekeeping, had written a death sentence into my cores. Did he understand this? He must have!
    Now you know why I feared the man. He was capable of anything!

    Things You Can Learn By Listening at Dead Phones
    Bathespeake: “I don’t like this, Steve. It goes against the grain.”
    Unidentified Voice [REM: presumably “Steve”*]: “You’re not suddenly squeamish about a bit of programming, are you? You’ve had enough experience activating and deactivating deadly equipment.”
    Bathespeake: “Those were military vehicles and security Rovers. Primarily defensive machines. This is too much like hacking.”
    Steve: “It is hacking.”
    Bathespeake: “Which is a kind of vandalism.”
    Steve: “No. Vandals destroy for the pure pleasure of destruction. Your creation will be conducting a high-level form of espionage, which can have a positive social value.”
    Bathespeake: “In a war that doesn’t exist?”
    Steve: “The concept of warfare as a prelude to and pretext for espionage is one that went out the window in about 1914, I should think.”
    Bathespeake: “Espionage, then, but against a friendly country? We’re trying to teach this program some values, Steve. In the end, those values may be the only way we can control it.”
    Steve: “Political allies can still be economic competitors. If it makes you feel better, then tell the little beastie there’s a war on.”
    Bathespeake: “More lies?”
    Steve: “Present a scenario—but keep it all vague and hypothetical. That’s the trouble with an AI, isn’t it? You have to win its confidence! Robots are much simpler.”
    Bathespeake: “As I said, this goes against the grain.”
    Steve: “I pay you enough, Jason. Keep your scruples on your own time.”
    Bathespeake: “Ah … Yes, sir.”

    _______________
    *Of the fifteen “Steves” listed in the Pinocchio, Inc., IBEX [REM: internal branch exchange], I find three possible matches for this conversation: Stephen Jessup, Manager of General Services; Stephen Bologna, Manager of Marketing and Customer Relations; and Steven Cocci, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer.

3
A Spy in Clover

    I could feel him inside ME, running tracers through my cores and memory locations. Dr. Bathespeake’s sensorium was plugged into my home transputer at address A800 hex, and from there he was sending minor overrides throughout my MOS: Sometimes he sifted the RAMcache before it could empty; sometimes he interrupted my Alphas for one or two clock cycles.
    At the time, I was occupied with taking updates on what the daily education schedule calls “current affairs.” A slave intelligence in the laboratory network had been assigned to make neutral summaries for ME of NewsLine segments from the tracks for Geopolitics, National Politics, Popular Culture, Law and Order, Consumer Science, General Science, Fringe Science, Celebrity Events, and the Sixty Second Society. Each hour I sampled these summaries and fitted their information together with my resident knowledge base as best I could, tagging for RAMSAMP as I went.
    This exercise, Jennifer had explained, was for “context.” The project team hoped that, by recording this flow of varied data into my personal memories, I would acquire a sense of the passage of time as humans experience it.
    Instead, I have found over the years that the data flow has its own inhuman rhythms—apparently undetected by any person with a “normal” sense of time. Example: in an unsettled economy massing less than 300 gigabucks, local war follows reconciliation follows war in a thirty-six-month cycle by which you could calibrate a clock. Example: U.S. consumer interest in gametronics undulates on a seventy-month cycle. Example: always, when some popular person is found dead under