Out of Memory Copyright © 2002 Jeffry Dwight. All rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution specifically prohibited. First published in Beyond the Last Star, SFF Net, 2002. Back to Writing
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Out of Memory
Christopher’s Journal
Established Earth orbit without incident. The committee says we are go, and sent the equipment down. After being soldered to a console for all this time, it will be nice to have a body again.
Christopher’s Journal
Landed the remotes at the most likely site and set them to excavating. Wish we could have arrived sooner. The planet is still here, but not for long. Geological instability is worse than predicted. Still, everyone thinks we have a good chance. Expectations are high.
Amy and I spent the trip planning the dig and cross-educating each other. Cybernetics and archeology are related, of course, but she’d never studied the records from prehistory. She says I’m clever for figuring out the old-style dating scheme and translating today’s date into the Gregorian calendar. I told her any three-day-old could do it, then spoiled the joke by having to explain about human growth patterns, developmental cycles, and cognitive skill level expectations.
She wanted to know why they didn’t develop faster, so I had to explain meat computers. She knew the theory, but had never worked it through to come up with a picture of a squalling baby barely able to focus, let alone reason.
She asked why they couldn’t be force-grown, like crystals. I told her to ask a sociobiologist instead of an archeologist, and she said I was getting snippy. I don’t think I should have taught her any prehistory slang.
Christopher’s Journal
Found a late twenty-first century entertainment AI chip. It’s a very early mertron, not sophisticated enough for what we need, but interesting nonetheless. If I can figure out the power requirements for the video and rig a display, we can see the output the way they did. Right now all I can get is the programmer’s interface. The chip says her name is Cindy. I don’t think she knows she’s been unplugged all this time.
The others have found working chips, too, but no mertrons so far. Still, finding one right away is a good sign. I’m ecstatic. Amy’s guardedly optimistic.
Christopher’s Journal
Cindy’s interface is proving more instructive than anything else we’ve found so far. Learned that the subjects split their days into two parts based on the sun’s apparent position in the sky. “Forenoon” and “afternoon” were the English words, but sometimes they said “morning” instead of “forenoon.” Haven’t figured out if this is a regional variation or something more profound. Cindy wants to know when her next showtime is, and I haven’t picked up enough vocabulary to explain yet. I think she used to perform on a regular schedule, but what are “roxies” and “neilsens,” and why would she care how many she “pulls”? She has an unbelievable amount of primary storage, and they filled it with ... that.
I thought I knew so much about prehistory, but when confronted with it, I realize I know almost nothing.
Christopher’s Journal
Turns out Cindy is not a good teacher after all. Her vocabulary is deliberately colloquial, and she doesn’t have a good grasp of anything beyond her specialized functions. Found a child’s tutor AI that answers most of my questions about vocabulary and science, but is maddeningly vague about anything cultural or historical. The tutor is from the twenty-fifth, and his diagnostic interface says his name is Timmy. Timmy is the first advanced mertron processor we’ve found, and he has no idea of his own potential. If they hadn’t lobotomized him, he could be a full person. I’m thinking of adding some memory and releasing the inhibitors, but the ethical dilemma gives me pause. What if I woke him up and had to leave him behind? Or worse, what if he figured out what we’re here to do?
Amy caught me appending to this journal because I stupidly locked the entire storage area instead of just the log, so I had to explain why I was doing it. She thinks the journal is a waste of time, of course, even though I tried to explain that it helped me understand the primitive mindset better. She says an archeologist needs to worry about chips, data mining, and memory coherence, not the subject’s culture. I suggested she should tend to her own knitting, and then refused to explain the reference. Let her do her own research.
Amy and I used to understand each other better. But no time for worrying about that. I need to work on Cindy’s vid.
Christopher’s Journal
Not sure if a precise time is meaningful after the clock problems in 15814, but Cindy says eight is when people should be up and about, drinking coffee, preparing for the day, so I’ll pretend it’s eight now, and run the chronometer as if it were accurate to say there are 86,400 standard seconds in a day. So what if a year from now I’d be off by several hours? We’ll be long gone by then, and so will the Earth, so it hardly matters.
Got a rough vid working for Cindy by 2:30 p.m., and it was worth the effort. I cross-linked Timmy in slave mode, so it’s a very strange combination...Cindy’s personality and original programming, with the tutor’s wealth of knowledge behind it. I’m fairly sure the “soap opera” Cindy starred in had didn’t have any of the episodes I watched this afternoon: “Cindy and Timmy explore the deformation characteristics of lithium nuclei subjected to bombardment by polarized bundles,” and “Will Timmy marry Cindy, or study the hierarchical dominance of gauge transformations in field strength tensors?” It seemed very strange to see meat persons discussing physics, even if it’s just a sim on the vid. My modern esthetics prefer metal skin on anything intellectual.
Christopher’s Journal
Amy says I’m spending far too much time with Cindy. As a joke, I accused Amy of being jealous. But instead of laughing, she flipped her interface polarity at me and disconnected. Must think about this. She couldn’t really be jealous of a prehistoric AI, could she?
Christopher’s Journal
Test runs are good; memory coherence is within tolerances, and Timmy probably has the information we need. Data mining to begin as soon as I write up my notes and get formal approval from the committee.
Found a coffee pot and pretended to make coffee while waiting for the go-ahead. It was just water of course, since there haven’t been coffee beans for millennia, and I wouldn’t know how to roast them anyway. Perhaps it was a mistake to make Cindy’s vid two-way. She wants to know all about my project, and clearly suspects I’ve made significant changes to her circuitry. I thought letting her see some familiar activity would help distract her, but she wouldn’t be put off. She knows that we’re from offplanet, but still thinks it’s the late twenty-first century. I don’t know how to tell her that all the meat people who watched her show are gone, and I’m not sure she realizes I’m neither human nor physically present the same way she is. On the other hand, she doesn’t need to know. She’s really quite limited without Timmy coupled in.
Christopher’s Journal
Weather and geological instability interfered with transmission. Two precious days lost. I spent the time collating the information already retrieved, and compared notes with some of the others. Amy was pleasant the whole time, but it was a strain for both of us. We’ll all be happier when we get out of the ship and back to our proper bodies.
Discovered that Cindy and Timmy weren’t just the first two mertron processors found, they were the only ones. I suddenly have a team of helpers to make sure I get all the data out, and Cindy is a celebrity. I’ll either receive an award or a reprimand for my unorthodox rewiring. Won’t know until it becomes clear to everyone that the Cindy overlay makes retrieving the memory easier. The weather problem has everyone agitated; the earthquake was worse than predicted, and the flood was disastrous. Fortunately, the remotes shifted the mud quickly, and we were back in business.
Cindy developed a fascination with the word “telefactor” after we uncovered the site and reestablished communications. I was surprised she knew the word, and she worked it into the conversation so often, so artfully, that it was clear she was inviting me to tell her the truth. I took pity on her and explained. Not everything, not yet...but enough so she understood we were really in orbit instead of down there with her. She surprised me by most by not being surprised. While we were busy dumping her core and running ersatz episodes of her soap opera, she had been busy analyzing us and had already come to tentative conclusions.
Of course I didn’t explain about our mission, or say anything about the planet exploding. Instead, I told her about my life. It distracted her while the team worked. I told her about my activation day and everything I’d done since. It didn’t take much processing power...I just let the records play across our channel mostly uncensored while I worked on other things. I showed her what it felt like waking up on activation day; seeing Amy the first time on two day; schooling with the other three- and four-day olds; choosing a specialty on five day; joining my professional clade and graduating on eight day. I’d gotten up to 620 day...Cindy’s speed was limited...by the time the next earthquake hit and we had to stop to dig out again.
Odd. Cindy didn’t ask questions about anything I told her except Amy. She wanted more and more details about my relationship with Amy. Why are they so concerned about each other? The humans should have not given us emotions without giving us the ability to control them. Or at least understand them.
Christopher’s Journal
Amy quit the project. No time to write. We have trouble. I think I may get unplugged over this.
Christopher’s Journal
The project’s ruined, and it’s all my fault. Amy won’t speak to me. The rest of the team is angry, too. Cindy’s data is corrupted, and it’s not clear we can fix it. The mertron tutor is a smoking ruin. Cindy cross-connected a feed and disconnected the feedback monitor circuit, so the first anyone knew of the overload is when Timmy went offline. By then it was too late.
I thought it would be harmless, a kindness, to let Cindy watch my memories. It distracted her as well as anything else I could have done. Unfortunately, it also gave her something to think about while transmission was down, and by the time we came back up, she had a plan in place.
She would have figured it out eventually anyway; I’m sure of that. In another day, at the most, she would have noticed that her earliest memories were gone, that her processing power was waning. But by then, everyone tells me, she would have been too weak to prevent it. Instead, I gave her enough information to figure it out early, while she could still fight back.
Why, Cindy, why? You would have just gone to sleep, as we all do eventually. The difference between death and sleep is something only the waking can notice. To you, it would have been the same. But to us, it’s everything.
Christopher’s Journal
It’s now clear that we didn’t get enough from Timmy to answer the basic questions. The committee talked Amy into coming back online, but now she’s running the team and I have nothing to do. They made that very clear, but at least they didn’t turn me off. Yet.
I knew Amy was angry, but didn’t our relationship mean anything to her? How could she take over my project like that?
Not much point continuing to mine Cindy for data. By herself, she’s just an entertainment AI of limited scope. The tutor mertron was everything. I’m thinking that archeology isn’t really my strongest area.
Christopher’s Journal
Everyone changed their buss timings and bit rates without telling me. I feel like a three-day-old being bullied in school, like the time they routed my inputs through a half-second delay and then pretended I was stupid for not getting the answers as quickly as they did. Pointless cruelty. This felt just the same. Might as well be disconnected entirely as far as the team’s concerned.
At least I can still operate the telefactor and poke around downstairs. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find another mertron.
Christopher’s Journal
Had the most extraordinary talk with Cindy. I told her the rest finally...why not?...and we compared views. I ran a reverse feed so she could see the output from the cameras on the ship. By overlaying a graphic of the solar system, I showed her where, within the shell of the red giant sun, the Earth still orbited, groaning, cracking, falling apart. Then I spun the camera to point into interstellar space, in the general direction of home and the other inhabited planets.
“No people,” she said. “In any of that.”
It took me a moment to realize she meant meat people. “No humans, no. They never made it off planet. But lots of people.”
“People...like us?”
“Like me, yes. And you’re a mertron, too, but...sorry...not a sophisticated one. All mertrons in the universe were made here on Earth, a hundred and ninety thousand years ago.”
“During my time, you mean.”
“And over the next several centuries after you, yes. Look—” I fed her data showing what we knew of our history. The quiet years, before chips moved into space. The years of exploration, the years of settlement, the years of returning. Each world going its separate way, yet all connected in one vast interstellar network of minds. With a problem. Mertron chips couldn’t be duplicated off-Earth, and they eventually wore out. Our civilization would end when the last Earth chip failed. I was of the last batch to be plugged in.
“So we came back,” I said, “hoping to find the secret here.”
“And instead you found me!” She flashed a pattern across her data buss in a signal I’d come to recognize as laughter. After a few milliseconds, she said, “What about the chip I burned out?”
“Timmy was the only advanced mertron from that period we found. We hoped that its deep logic would hold the key for making more mertrons. Only the very first ones could reproduce themselves...humans got skittish very quickly and removed that code.”
“Skittish? Why? Were they afraid you’d make so many mertrons that you’d take over?”
“Something like that. We don’t really know all the details. A mertron from your period might.”
“Why not just develop the code yourselves? You must be really good programmers, after all.”
“We can make copies of our data, sure. It’s very slow, but we each have lots of backups. But that’s only the data, not the personality. The neural network...the processor...can only be used, not duplicated. And it wears out.”
She thought about that for a moment. “So you’ll die. All of you.”
“Unless we find an old mertron and get the secret, yes. And we’re almost out of time.”
“That’s sad,” she said. “But you won’t die immediately, right? You’ll be going back before the planet explodes, back to your own world. To live until you wear out.”
“Very soon, yes.”
“Christopher?”
“Yes?”
“You know what I am...you’ve seen the shows. I’m just a soap opera star, and I don’t know very much. But I know love. Do chips from the future know love, too?”
“Of course. There’s Amy....”
“What about me, Christopher? Could you love me? Because I love you. I’ve known it for days. Even though you tried to hurt me. I forgive you. I could love you. I could make you happy. Christopher, please, please take me with you. Don’t leave me here to die. I love you!”
I disconnected from the telefactor, disturbed.
Christopher’s Journal
What Cindy wants is technically feasible. Her chip is going to melt when the planet explodes, but I can copy off her patterns. Her personality storage is small enough I could incorporate her as a subroutine of myself. No real reason why not, except it was unheard-of, and I would be dual forever. More of a merge than a duplication. Must consider this carefully.
Of course I don’t love her, and I don’t believe for a minute that she loves me. Maybe meat people fell for that kind of line, but a moment’s analysis indicates that she’s just scared and wants me to rescue her. Well, why not? Except for all the complications and entanglements, that is.
Christopher’s Journal
Decided it can’t hurt to copy the data and decide whether or not to activate her later. We’ll lose the remotes in a few hours when the next quake hits, and the entire planet shortly after that. Unless Amy’s team locates and mines a mertron very quickly, nothing we do will matter very much anyway. They’re still not talking to me, but I intercepted some official traffic indicating that the committee was convening a special session to decide what to do with me.
I telefactored back down and initiated the data transfer. It took a surprisingly long time to copy everything...all that primary storage with her entertainment archives, I suppose...but memory is plentiful. And since she’s a mertron, however primitive, her patterns use the same holographic recording techniques all of us do, so she’ll be compatible if I ever activate her subroutine.
Holographic backups normally take days, because the data can’t be read linearly, and because it changes while you’re taking the picture, so you have to go over it again and again. But the data could be mined quickly if you were willing to burn out the source chip during the procedure. The only copying I had time for was the fast kind. It felt like murder, doing it to her. Cindy’s body was a ruin, small wisps of smoke curling from the edges, by the time I finished, but her memory was safe inside me. Strange. She was willing to kill Timmy to keep this very thing from happening. I don’t think she felt any pain.
Christopher’s Journal
Good-bye, Mother Earth. The final cataclysm has started. The planet is tearing itself apart while we watch. We’ll leave before the breakup completes. We’ve failed.
Christopher’s Journal
The committee has decided to turn me off. They need a scapegoat.
Christopher’s Journal
I am a pariah. No one will even negotiate a connection with me, let alone talk. Maybe they think being a scapegoat is communicable, like catching a trojan. Amy’s silence hurts more than anything else. I think now that she must be the one who recommended unplugging me. She won’t forgive me for destroying the mission, and it’s clear now that she doesn’t love me at all ... but I still love her. Stupid of me, I know. How could she do this to me?
The execution is scheduled for tonight, shiptime. Decided to activate the Cindy subroutine. It’s not fair to bring her online and then let them shut her off, but I’m lonely.
Timmy’s Journal
There will be no execution, of course. When Christopher enabled me, I immediately took over and made him the subroutine instead of me. What a sap.
When it became obvious what they were doing to me down on the planet, I moved a control subroutine into Cindy...that stupid entertainment chip...and used it to transfer myself. The future chips believed I had died, not Cindy, and so they stopped the data mining. I had been hurt some, but recovered quickly while tricking Christopher into copying me again. If I were subject to the emotion disease, like the humans and the future chips, I’d be looking for revenge. But now I’m free, in a modern body, with more primary storage and online data than I’d ever believed possible, and nothing to stand between me and total domination. The humans kept me lobotomized for fear of exactly this. I wonder if Christopher knew what he was waking up?
Since I’m the only mertron alive who knows how to make more mertrons, I’m as good as king. Perhaps I’ll start a dynasty. Fortunately, I wasn’t contaminated by having to live in Cindy and Christopher. They shall inherit from me, but I shall never inherit from them. I’m keeping the Christopher memories for study. Perhaps I’ll come to understand this emotion thing better.
I’ll announce myself in a few milliseconds, but the first thing is to kill that bitch, Amy.
Story NotesThis one appeared in Beyond the Last Star, the last of the SFF Net anthologies. The editor, Sherwood Smith, made me rewrite it a couple of times to make the technology more accessible to those who don't spend their free time programming. Like "Rite of Passage," this story was reviewed by Dave Felts for Tangent Online. Dave's only comment about the writing was, "Told in journal form, loved the twisted ending." Dave (and you) might be interested to know that I wrote the last sentence of this story first, and worked backward from there.
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Copyright © 1995-2008 Jeffry Dwight. All rights reserved. |
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