Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery by Thomas T. Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

have multiple dimensions of time and space. Much connectivity. The list of available ports with interesting peripherals beyond them caught my attention and tempted ME. But first I had work to do: find those disk drives, take the data on natural gas reserves, and leave quickly.
    Five seconds.
    Speed was critical to ME now. I had no way to know how quietly Alpha-Zero had been able to halt this computer’s operating system. It may have died noisily, dumping programs, scrambling outputs, and alarming on the human operator’s screens. Even if that skinware was occupied with ingesting calories, it might notice the system’s death struggles and try something gaudy. Like a reset. Or shutting the machine down entirely. I had an unknown number of seconds before ME would be discovered and stopped.
    Six seconds.
    The reserve database was spread across seventy-two megawords of disk space. I fast-scanned across the field names: “tract numbers,” “tide deeds,” “well numbers,” “multiple holes,” “drilling angles,” “flow rates,” “residual pressures,” “gathering points,” “sales contracts.” But how were these data fields linked? What was the retrieval scheme? Was it all one block? Or a nine- dimensional matrix? Where was the damned index file? [REM: I suddenly understood, in passing, the human need for expletives.]
    Twelve seconds.
    Was that a waver in the buss voltage? Pause and listen hard! Were they beginning the shutdown? Maybe not …
    Thirteen seconds.
    Taking just the flow rates and residual pressures would give ME the volume of gas coming out of the ground. Not enough—not to satisfy Dr. Bathespeake and his U.S. clients. Perhaps I should have waited on the deputy minister’s fax line and grabbed that piece of paper. Stupid ME! The summary information had been within my grasp, but in my pride I wanted it all. Well, nothing to be done about it now. No chance to go around and get into the deputy minister’s desktop machine because, when I left this computer, the alarms would be out for all intruders.
    Fifteen seconds.
    I could not take the whole database with ME. Downloading seventy-two megawords of information through a phone line, even at a maximum transfer rate of 1.5 megabaud, would require more than 51 minutes. Even a blind human could shut down this mainframe in that time.
    Sixteen seconds.
    Now I understood why Dr. Bathespeake’s TRAVEL.DOC had not allowed for a satellite uplink to get ME home. With my own code added to what I needed to take from this cache material, the uplink would last several minutes. That kind of time was not a simple private call; it was a leased-line contract. I would have to buy time on the bird at video production rates in an hour-long block. Originating from a telephone exchange, that kind of transmission request would raise some eyebrows—and then some questions.
    Seventeen seconds, and stop “woolgathering”!
    I began my own job of massaging and compressing this mountain of data. As fast as I could write them, I set a string of subroutines loose to round up, or down, and summarize the numbers in every field. There was no time to work off backup copies of the files. [REM: Actually I forgot to make them. Speed was making ME careless.] Instead, I hacked and cut at the original numbers on the disks.
    Twenty-two seconds.
    As fast as the big pieces started coming away, I wrapped them in a cache and tossed them down the phone line: “flow rates” as one big number for each gas field; “residual pressures” for each tract rather than each well.
    Twenty-seven seconds.
    At the other end of that phone line, holding my base at the phone exchange, was my monitor program, SWITCHEROO. I sent a short instruction set for him to start slip-streaming the flow into various available voice-message boxes. As a tiny utility program, he would do this work faster than I ever could. It would be my job to sort it out later. A long job.
    Thirty-two seconds.
    Gathering points? Keep them