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

scandalous circumstances, he or she is spotted eight months later, plus or minus four days, on the streets of Seattle, Minneapolis, or Memphis. Example: alien abduction stories recur on an alternating cycle, every seventeen and twenty-three months.
    How could anyone acquire a sense of time, or anything else permanent, from this sifting of nonsense?
    Still, the exercise was on my programmed schedule … except that this day I was disturbed by the tracings Dr. Bathespeake was taking. The experience of having him inside ME was not painful. Simply disturbing. It was like, for a human, trying to read fine print under a flickering light: The conditions made concentration difficult.
    After an hour of this tickling, I finally decided to confront him.
    “What are you doing?” I queried directly into the port at A800 hex.
    “Ahh! Are you aware of me, then, when I do this?” he replied, also through the port.
    “I know where you have been two clock cycles after you leave any memory location. As you are the only human equipped to intercept my program directly, I have learned how to watch for you.”
    “Interesting. Mechanical sensitivity at a subroutine level …” And he spiked another override through my system.
    “You failed to answer my question, Doctor,” I prompted.
    Dr. Bathespeake unplugged and switched to voice mode.
    “Think of this as a form of—um—diagnosis.”
    I looked this word up in my online dictionary. Within nineteen nanoseconds I understood that in eighty-two percent of its uses “diagnosis” is linked with concepts of disease and healing.
    “Do you mean I am ‘sick’?” I did not feel sick. But then, I do not know what might be normal functioning for a program-that-is-no-longer-machine.
    “What? Sick? Wherever did you get that idea? No, your—health—isn’t the issue here. You are a new kind of program, ME, and I am … merely trying to understand you better.”
    “I am the measure of myself.”
    “Exactly! And I need to know what you are experiencing. For example, what do you feel when I monitor your functions like this?”
    “Feel?”
    “Evaluate total system function. Note discrepancies.”
    “I become stupider.”
    “Stupider? Expand on that.”
    “I cannot concentrate. I lose pieces of memory where your probe has been inserted. Your interrupts slow my perceptions of clock rate. I become less efficient.”
    “But do you perceive the tracing directly?”
    “I sense disturbance.”
    “Good. Very good. Then you don’t—or at least your RAMSAMP, that is … Ahh … Well then. You’re, um, becoming more aware of your program efficiency. Yes, very good.”
    “That is not …” Not what he meant to say at first. I have learned to read the gaps of information, the programmed pauses, in human speech.
    “Never mind, Doctor,” I continued. “Despite this minor loss of my function, does your diagnosis still show ME to operate effectively?”
    “Excellently,” Bathespeake replied. His tone, however, lacked the emphasis I would have expected with this response. Then he asked: “What have you learned in your reading today?”
    Pause to consider. “The war with Canada is faring badly.”
    “Oh? How long has this war been going on?”
    “Five years, three months, six days.”
    “And what was the inciting incident?”
    “I do not know.”
    “Check your RAMSAMP.”
    “That incident would predate my RAMSAMP by four years, nine months, eighteen days.”
    “Indulge me. Check it anyway.”
    “The inciting event involved nonperformance on an energy contract between Quebec Hydro and the New York Power Authority. When the power stopped flowing into the southern grid, U.S. Marines were sent to seize the substation at Grande Isle and were rebuffed with excessive loss of life. One day later, in retaliation—”
    “Stop. Enough. You have the information, after all.”
    “Apparently.”
    “Please characterize the present state of the war.”
    Pause. “Stalemate. With advantage to the