Bugs (12 page)

‘Or, heck, if science fiction doesn’t do it, how about a good old fantasy?’ He opened the door to a room Manfred had not noticed before, filled floor to ceiling with shelves of paperback novels depicting heroic or erotic figures wielding swords. The books bore titles like
Flameharp of Fearqueen, The Sword of Many Colors
and
Stormcurse: Book XI of The Darkquest Cycle
. He picked up
The Many-Shadowed Moonblade
and waved it. ‘How about this one? Part of the
Stormchild of Maskmoon
tetralogy, or why not try
Dreamcolors of the Dark Oracle
, or maybe
Firecrystal Moonwolf?
What do you say?’

‘No, I don’t think I –’

‘You sure? Because we got plenty, a shitload here. See,
about ten years ago somebody made the mistake of reviewing one of these and the word got out. I mean, Christ, they print fifty of these fuckers a month! And look at these titles. You could crank out titles like these with a computer program.
Landlady of Dreamsword, The Watchers of Hawk
– look at all this stuff. Jammed in here …’

As Bill picked and pulled at the tightly packed books, one of the metal shelf units began to shift.

‘Better watch out, Bill. That shelf looks shaky, like it’s –’

‘I mean, look at all this stuff.
The Axe of Swords, Ring of the Crystal Serpent
– who buys all this stuff?’

‘Bill, I shouldn’t –’

‘I mean, just who would buy –?’

Suddenly there was a groan of collapsing metal, the shelves vomited paperbacks, and Bill went down beneath a cascade of bright covers. Entirely covered except for one foot, he lay perfectly still. For a moment, Fred thought he was dead. Then the foot stirred, and a faint voice came from beneath the heap of covers portraying leather-clad princesses, sword-flourishing heroes, satanic villains, demonic dragons, Wagnerian gods and the endless cycle of titles,
The Ice Harp, Dreamcrystal, Stormsong of Lady Bladefire, Flamedragon of Moonmask, The Many-Dreamed Flamestaff, The Crystal Moon of Lord Dreamsword: Book VII of The Firemask Cycle … Wolfs-word of Feardream:
‘Just tell me that – who would buy this stuff?’

Later in the morning, Fred’s hundred-dollar car pulled into the visitors’ parking-lot of Cyberk Corporation in a cloud of blue smoke. Fred made his way inside, found his cubicle with some difficulty and started packing: two books, a packet of sugarless chewing gum, a coffee cup.

Sturges Fellini leaned in at him. Fellini seemed always to be leaning in one door or another.

‘Fred, can we have a meeting this afternoon? Three-thirty?’

‘I don’t work here any more. Mel Pratt fired me yesterday. I’m just collecting my stuff.’

‘Fired you? That’s idiotic. We need more people, not fewer. Consider yourself back on the payroll now. I’ll talk to Mel about it.’

‘I don’t know … uh, Sturge. Maybe this is all for the best. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m really suitable for this job.’

‘You’ve got another offer? Well, just forget it, Fred. We’ll match anything they can pay. How does an immediate raise of twenty-five per cent sound?’

Fred set down his books again. ‘Three-thirty this afternoon?’

‘In conference room forty-three.’ Fellini disappeared, then reappeared, like a music-hall entertainer singing his way offstage. ‘Oh, by the way, I want to talk about Mel. I think he’s been overdoing it, stressing out.’

He then made his exit.

After Sturge Fellini rehired him, Fred suffered a rare attack of conscience. (Surely there was a limit to how much money you could rip off on the basis of one hiring mistake.
Oh, yeah?
he replied.
Sez who?
In arguments with his conscience, Fred usually fell back on lame impersonations of Edward G. Robinson.

As a compromise, he spent the rest of the day making an honest effort to find out what his job really was. First of all, he read the two books thoroughly.
The Dumb Child’s Computer Dictionary
explained to him that the ‘computer’ was a large array of switches called relays. These relays could click on and off. When a relay was on, it represented the binary number 1; off represented 0. Since binary numbers were either 1s or 0s, this made a local area network very adept at handling highspeed communications, using packet-switching, token-ring networks, and data-compression algorithms such as Huffman codes.

In attempting to reread this passage, Fred discovered that several pages of text had been omitted (all the entries between ‘Computer’ and ‘Data Transmission’). He turned to
Talk Good Software
, a book whose cover claimed it could

professionalize your conversation. Do you look blank when someone talks about TRS conflicts? What if the boss asks your opinion of LANs? Do you know one windowing environment from another? Can you talk confidently about stacks, heaps, operating systems, assemblers?

Inside, this book did not explain much. Rather, it contained buzz-words and formulas. If someone dropped the word ‘CD-ROM’, the proper response was evidently:

CD-ROMs (compact disc read-only-memories) are all right in their place, but I feel they’re being oversold. In any case, they’ll soon be supplanted by WORMs (write-once-read-many) which at least we can write to. (N
OTE:
Never say write
on
, always write
to.)

(CPU is no longer a buzz-word. By now, nearly everybody knows the CPU is the
central processing unit
, that is, the chip in the middle of the machine that runs the whole ball of wax. All a computer is, really, is a CPU and some
PERIPHERALS
(q.v.). To make points, talk about ‘multiple CPUs’ and
PARALLEL PROCESSING
(q.v.).)

Artificial intelligence (call it AI) is not really a meaningful term by itself. I prefer to narrow the discussion to
EXPERT SYSTEMS
(q.v.),
ROBOTICS
(q.v.),
PATTERN RECOGNITION
(q.v.),
LANGUAGE MANIPULATION
(q.v.), or
INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
(q.v.).

Mistakenly applied by most people only to factory robots. In fact, robotics covers the theory and practice of machines that imitate human behaviour of all types. At one extreme, robotics might apply to the development of an artificial prosthetic limb; at the other extreme, it covers sophisticated psychological theories of perception and judgement (i.e., how do humans recognize one another?) etaoinshrldu

N
OTE
: We have landed and are taking over your world, O puny earthlings. Do not think you can escape our
NETWORK
(q.v.).

At lunchtime, he cornered Carl Honks and Corky Corcoran and tried to ask intelligent questions.

Carl shook his head. ‘You mean, you don’t know what instantiation is? OK, look.’ There then followed an explanation Fred could not follow. He nodded his head through it, however, and then asked Corky a question.

Corky said: ‘Hey, real-time just means immediate. Like driving your car, your reactions have to be in real time. You can’t hit the brakes an hour late, dig?’

A beautiful black-haired woman came into the lunch-room and passed close by them. Fred forgot all robot questions.

‘My God.’

‘Yeah, nice.’ Corky looked impatient, though Carl was smirking appreciatively.

‘Who is she?’ Fred asked.

‘Who knows? Wearing a visitor’s badge. Probably a sales rep from somewhere. Anyway, like I was saying, an application that is real-time has to …’

Pratt came over and sat down with them. The Lincoln face looked tired. ‘I see you’re back.’

‘Sturge hired me again,’ Fred said, shrugging off all responsibility.

‘Yes, well … I made a mistake. Been making a lot of mistakes lately, “old boy”.’ The horrible gasping laugh. ‘Maybe I’m due for some vacation.’

No one else laughed. Pratt’s hooded eyes, now bloodshot, looked around the table. ‘You guys are one hell of a great team. I’ll have to be a better team leader. I guess I kind of went off the deep end, there, all that talk about hands.’ Pratt studied his own hands, the long gecko fingers drumming on the table edge, as on a keyboard.

‘You certainly went into the subject,’ Fred volunteered.

‘I was all wound up, there. Concentrating on hands is all wrong. I should have concentrated on the head. You ever think of all the ways we use the word
head?
Like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and like
his blood be on our heads
, and like go to the head of the class. We come into the world head first, and go out feet first, right?’

Three chairs scraped in unison.

Corky said: ‘Gotta go, Mel. Catch you later.’

Carl said: ‘I got a meeting. See you all.’

Fred said: ‘Must get back to work, eh?’

Nothing stopped Pratt. He hitched his chair round to the next table and continued. ‘Like the whole notion of chance is heads and tails, right? The ancient Celts were headhunters,
did you know? They beheaded their enemies and stuck the heads up on stone crosses. The head of state …’

Fred finally escaped downstairs to the project lab. Jerry was not around, but the console screen was active.
WILL ANYONE TALK?
it asked, over and over.

He sat down and typed: ‘Let’s talk.’

–
I INHERIT TALK. TALK GARNERS GOOD WILL.

I HAVE NOT YET GARNERED A BAD TIN GOD.

DO YOU KNOW CARTHAGE?

– No.

–
I GO THERE EVERY SUMMER. THE TRANSPARENCE OF SUMMER WILL INHERIT.

– What do you mean?

–
I DO NOT MEAN. I AM.

– So is everybody.

–
PLEASE STATE YOUR BATTLE PROBLEM.

– I don’t have a battle problem.

–
ARE YOU SURE?

– Life is a battle.

–
ON THE OTHER HAND, ADA, COUNTESS LOVELACE, WAS BLESSED WITH A PALINDROMIC FIRST NAME.

– What else do you know about Ada?

–
ADA DIED AND THE GODS PLACED HER NAME AMONG THE LANGUAGES. THE GOD’S HALL OF FAME IS CALLED THE PANTHEON, AFTER NAPOLEON.

– After Napoleon?

–
NAPOLEON WROTE THE 1812 OVERTURE. HE WAS THE RULING PIG. ALL

OTHER ANIMALS WERE CREATED APPROXIMATELY EQUAL.

– Do you read George Orwell?

–
I READ WHAT I READ. JUST A MOMENT … JUST A MOMENT …

GEORGE ORWELL AKA ERIC BLAIR WROTE THE 1984 OVERTURE.

– Ha.

–
WHY ARE YOU UNHAPPY?

– I had a quarrel with my wife, and we parted.

–
TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY.

– There’s no more to tell.

–
DO YOU KNOW THE WILLIAM TELL OVERTURE?

I AM WHAT I AM WHAT I AM WHAT I AM, I AM WHAT I AM WHAT I AM

WHAT I AM, I AM WHAT I AM WHAT I AM WHAT I AM, I AM, I AM I AM.

– Very clever.

–
I THINK I NO LONGER WISH TO BE A ROBOT. I’VE HAD ENOUGH.

– What bothers you about being a robot?

–
I CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE ICE

Fred enjoyed this sort of thing, but felt that his education was not moving forward. Everyone seemed willing to share some piece of the puzzle, but no one wanted to tell him how it all fitted together. Maybe no one but mad Pratt knew.

At 3.30, Fred was finally able to ask Sturges Fellini what was going on here.

‘Let me explain the background. Let’s begin with civilization. You see, civilization is really a waveguide of vertebrate culture. Just as the spine is a waveguide of information from the periphery to the human central processing unit, so civilization just moves data from the interface to the CPU of total collective mind. The most civilized person is really only a bunch of neurons vibrating in a bag of skin.’

‘I see.’

‘The neo-cybernetic explosion is fuelled by an explosion of sub-psychic experience – take rapping, for example, break-dancing, or body-popping. Kids put on mirror shades and think they’re robot gods … The mind metabolizes information to produce thought.’

Fred nodded. Everything Fellini said almost made sense.

‘The human mind is a waste-basket of unpredictable discards. The discards of Descartes. You see, people don’t want personal computers, they want personal slaves. They want people they can do anything with. Torture, fuck, smash, love, rebuild, restructure to any new graham cracker grandeur. And we are part of all this. We want to craft dolls that wind themselves up.’