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“You have an unknown that’s swallowing energy,” Prudence said, her excitement kindling. “Isn’t that our definition of—”
“It isn’t conscious,” Bickel said. “Whatever the unknown system is, it can’t be conscious … not yet. This setup is too simple, doesn’t have enough source data …”
“Then it’s some error in the hookup,” Prudence said.
Bickel’s shoulders sagged. He took a deep, tired breath. “Yeah. Has to be.”
“Where’s your record of assembly and circuit tests?” Prudence asked.
“I isolated an auxiliary storage tank,” Bickel said. He gestured vaguely to his left. “It’s the red-flagged one. Everything’s in there … including all this.” He waved at the diagnostic panel.
“You get something to eat and take a rest break,” she said. “I’ll start tracing circuits.”
“We got a jam-up on the direct test,” Bickel said. “It wasn’t an open-circuit reaction. And the net-interchange test produces zero at the output without flagging the point of loss. The thing’s a goddamn sponge!”
“It’ll be some simple error,” she said. “Wake Tim and send him in while you’re at it. He’s had more than his four hours off.”
“I am tired,” Bickel admitted. He thought back, asking himself how long it had been since he had rested. Three full watches anyway.
I let myself get too tired, he thought. I know better. This is exacting work. Going too long without a break is the surest way to make mistakes.
“It’ll be some simple thing,” he said, but he knew as he said it that this was wrong. Sleep. He needed sleep.
Bickel headed toward his quarters, pawing at the problem in his mind, rolling it over. The setup produced a contradictory reaction. Nothing simple was going to produce that complex a contradiction.
Behind him, Prudence activated the readouts at the red flagged portion of the panel, started getting the feel of the setup. Sometimes with these computer problems, she knew, you could move intuitively into the area of difficulty, save yourself hours of hunting. Certain parts of a setup would feel wrong.
Presently, Timberlake joined her, yawning. “Bick told me. Trouble.”
“Odd trouble.”
“So I gathered.” He cleared his throat. “Exactly what happened?”
She told him about the tests, the jam-up at the fifth-layer nodes and the subsequent disagreement between input and output.
“Zero linearity?” he asked.
“Almost.”
“And no heat?”
“Nothing showed on the sensors.”
Timberlake looked at the readout, the panel on both sides. “This is the storage tank we isolated. Have you examined the whole procedure?”
“I was just getting acquainted with the setup when you came in.”
“That thing should’ve worked,” Timberlake said. “It was a clean, straightforward construction all the way. I could’ve sworn it was going to give us that integrated readout, remove the nonsignificant digits, and we could just go on from …”
He paused, then said, “Unexpected feedback would … might cause the thing to react the way it did.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“An oscillation. A flyback pulse that we didn’t take into account.”
“That might jam up the direct test,” she said, “but it wouldn’t account for the other reaction. If you were into the computer, of course … but that’s one-way … isn’t it?”
“Gated all the way. Our setup could receive selected data from the computer, but nothing went back in. No … I was thinking of this storage bank here.” He nodded toward the panel in front of Prudence.
She turned toward the panel, puzzled. “But this is just a … a complicated recorder. All it does is keep track of our work, step by step. It is isolated from the rest of the computer, isn’t it?”
“What if it isn’t isolated from the rest of the computer?” Timberlake asked.
“But Bickel assured me …”
“Yeah,” Timberlake said, “and he probably believed it. I checked the work, too. If the schematics are correct, it’s isolated. But what if the schematics are off?’
“Why would they be?”
“I don’t know, but what if they are?’
Timberlake moved down the panel to the left, searching. He stopped at a translator output head. “Easy enough to find out. I’ll just sort to find out if any of that test setup got into the master banks.”
“If it did get in, there’s no telling what it loused up,” she said.
“Not necessarily,” Timberlake said. He began cutting a program tape, referring to the computer banks themselves for the necessary data. Presently, he said, “That should do it.”
Within seconds the load-and-go signal flashed at the readout in front of Timberlake. He switched it for an online printout and began reading the automatic translation.
“That was awfully fast,” Prudence said.
Timberlake ignored her, scanning the tape as it chattered from the printer.
“For Chrissakes!” he said.
“What is it?” she asked, suppressing an irrational surge of fear.
“Get Bickel,” Timberlake said. “This damn thing is giving us the truncated readout right here.”
“What?”
“The answer we expected to get back at that setup if it worked,” Timberlake said. “We’re getting it here right now!”
“That’s impossible,” she said.
“Sure it is,” Timberlake said. “You helped program this thing; look for yourself.”
He whirled, brushed past her and headed for quarters.
Prudence bent over the printout, scanned the selected bits, recognizing some of the math she had worked into the program for Bickel.
With a breath-stopping sense of awe, she realized that the printout was devoid of insignificant digits. It had been weeded down to essentials.
Chapter 15
Computers are just systems with a great amount of unconsciousness: everything held in immediate memory and subject to programs which the operator initiates. The operator, therefore, is the consciousness of the computer.
—Raja Lon Flattery, The Book of Ship
It was at least five minutes before Timberlake returned with Bickel. While she waited, Prudence ran through the experiment a second and a third time. Both tests produced the truncated readout.
She felt a constricting sensation in her chest. Every sound in the room pressed in on her—each tiny metallic click, the low humming of a timer, the faint breathing of a ventilator. She felt that this thing in front of her was something profoundly dangerous. It required her to act with delicate care. Something new had come awake on the Earthling.
The hatch slammed open behind her. Bickel pushed her aside, bent over the terminal. “Let me see!” His fingers flew over the keys. He scanned the readout. “My God, it is!”
Timberlake moved up behind him, peered over Bickel’s shoulder.
“How?” Timberlake asked.
“Tim,” Bickel directed, “take the panel off that storage bank. Check it with everything we have. There has to be a line from it into the main computer somehow … a line that doesn’t show on the master plan.”
“But why would this thing start feeding us the right answer now?” Prudence demanded.
“That?” Bickel dismissed it with a wave of the hand. “The program went in with a key showing what was expected. Every part of the program was worked out on the main computer. We never cleared our work. It’s still in there … acting as a filter. It filtered out everything except the answer that was keyed for optimum. Hell, anybody can make a computer act like that kind of filter. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Not so fast,” she said, excited by a sudden inspiration. “What do you really have over there in that test setup?” She looked at the construction which Bickel so irreverently referred to as “The Ox.” It still stood there like a surrealistic extrusion from the flat expanse of panel.
“You call it a transducer … of sorts,” she said. “What’s that really mean? The thing you have there is composed of blocks of nerve-net simulators arranged to integrate three lines of energy. The operational term is nerve-net simulators.”
She gets too excited and she talks too much, Bickel thought. He knew this was partly his fatigue thinking for him, but he felt keyed up, buoyed by the quick discovery of what had gone wrong. He wanted to cut the link with the computer and rerun the test.
Timberlake was already removing the panel to get at the storage bank. The panel cover grated on the deck as he pushed it aside.
“Yeah, nerve-net simulators,” Bickel said. He kept his attention on Timberlake, admiring the direct, purposeful way the man went at it. Timberlake was good at this work.
Prudence misread Bickel’s answer, said: “And what’s a nerve-net but an embedding space? It catches energy … the way a spider web might catch ink you threw at it. The net makes a record in four dimensions of the energy you throw at it.”
