It seemed ironic to Toby Haller that they decided to set up the project in Anchor Luck, but it was comforting too. Although they settled in a small communal village right on the border in the northeast sector, a village that also served several farming collectives, they were but two hours from the capital city and all his old friends and associates.
He had, in fact, almost expected it. Suzuki, after all, still held sway up in the administration building. Perhaps a lot of sway.
His relationship with Mickey had continued, somewhat to his surprise. They had hit it off right away, and they hadn’t made any commitments but they were now living together in a single large flat. He’d taken her up to the capital when he’d turned over his own position there and moved his stuff down, and he’d taken her to see Kitten. Mickey was absolutely fascinated by the transformed woman, and sunk off and on into a near trance over her for the next few days. Toby had gotten used to this sort of behavior from Mickey, who was quite light and frothy on the outside but whose mind was in some ways not quite human either.
To say that Mickey had a mathematical mind was an understatement. He often thought she had a computer hidden in her brain, although she said it was just a very good calculator. He never got around to pointing out that, when all was said and done, that was an excellent definition of a computer and the reason they called it a computer in the first place.
She could glance for a second at a page of budget figures and offhandedly give you the total. She always knew to the exact decimal how much credit was left in their accounts. She could hold a running conversation while picking out a hundred differently priced items in a store, then tell the total of them before they went through the computer debiting system. She would glance at her watch, a shadow, then look at a tree so far away it could hardly be seen and be mad at herself when her distance estimate was off three or four millimeters.
Three nights after they returned from the capital he was reading over some heretofore classified reports on the mad ones out in the void-signals had taken to nicknaming them “duggers,” a sort of perverted counterpart to “diggers,” a term they reserved for themselves—while Mickey was sitting in a chair, half in darkness, apparently just thinking. Suddenly, he heard her say quite clearly, “Of course! It’s a simple logic progression!”
He walked in from the bedroom, frowning. “You say something?”
“I’ve been working on the mathematics of a program that would produce a Kitten,” she told him. “I think I’ve got it.”
“Huh?” He was dubious. She hadn’t touched a computer as far as he knew in a couple of days.
“Big programs are just little programs chained together, and all programs are given as mathematical expressions. You know that.”
“Obviously.”
“Well, given the original physical data of Connie—the molecule-by-molecule, atom-by-atom pattern, which we call digitizing, I could do the exact same thing to her that they did.”
“Elementary, my dear. But no human mind could hold that matrix. You know that.”
“Of course, of course. But the computer could, and did. It did a readout of her as she sat under the interface on the big amp. A hundred percent updated just before activation—just before. Instants. Nanoseconds or even faster. That’s why it worked—outside of the lab, outside of the chambers where everything is exactly controlled.”
“O.K., but all you’ve done is show what they’ve known how to do for ten years. Big deal.”
“Uh-uh. I’ve got more. When you’re out there in the void, on the grid, you are in one to four squares of the grid but in all cases in total physical contact with the computer nearest your location. The grid was designed as an external computer interface, so that the 7800’s could monitor air, temperature, you name it, and apply whatever corrections were needed, hundreds of times a second.”
“All right, I’ll grant that.” He was beginning to see where she was heading, and the idea made him a little uneasy.
“The primary atmospheric envelope, the layer comprising the Flux boundaries and also the primary atmospheric elements—the troposphere, as it were—is almost twenty kilometers high. Beyond that is a stratosphere with essential radiation filtration properties, then an ionosphere beyond that to deflect as much nastiness as possible going all the way out to four hundred kilometers. Although it’s static at the densest level of Flux, right at the surface there is movement and even turbulence above that we don’t see or sense and whose effects aren’t noticeable on the ground, but it’s an incredibly complex system that must be always in perfect balance. What keeps it in balance, Toby?”
He sat down in a chair. “The damned computer grid. The bloody damned computer grid. A hundred times a second. Christ!”
Any disturbance, any mass, within any square had to be known and compensated for to the smallest degree. The 7800 and its supporting crew of 7240’s did this by taking a digitized reading of everything and everyone in each square. Reality in the void was an illusion. At least once a second, and perhaps once every hundredth of a second for—what?—a millisecond or so, everyone and everything was digitized just a surely as they were in the transport tubes. Digitized and then put back with all compensations made to the surrounding area. Not in Anchor—there physical contact with the grid was removed, and maintenance was made possible by fixed landscape and climatological programs balanced by this continuous maintenance of the surrounding void.
“You see?” Mickey asked, excited. “When we’re in the void, we’re a part of it, part of its master program, the same as Kitten is part of the Anchor program. Like Anchor. Kitten is permanent. Fixed. But in the void there’s an update every hundredth of a second. The void is maintained by a complex and ongoing series of transitory programs, not fixed ones, each one just a hair different from the rest.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t explain how some people are able to access the computer. It just shows how the computer can access people.”
“The flaw in the basic program is really just that we were first. We did it before anyone else—the Soviets, the Chinese, the Franco-Brazilians, anybody. We didn’t have the benefit of our own experience, as they did. They wrote better, tighter programs that clearly delineated the machinery and interfaces that were proper. We were sloppy in that regard because we didn’t know if our machines, like Signals’ god gun. would work or if they’d do the trick. So we made it intentionally a little bit more vague, so that we could allow for the development of new and better interfaces when we had some hands-on experience.”
He nodded. “And so what you’re saying is that the computer network cannot distinguish between a Sensitive sending an order and somebody with a god gun. And because the grid interface was designed to be used by Signals—soldiers and maintenance personnel—it was designed to respond to more generalized programs, to create water, or hay, or a chocolate bar, sent in plain English by anyone who could sufficiently phrase his exact wants and wishes. That’s why the Pathfinders developed the ability to see their bloody strings without their funny glasses and filters. It was the thing they desired most in the routine performance of their duties, and the computer simply—updated them. Christ! Why didn’t all us big brains see this right at the start?”
“Because us big brains have grown up in homes that are served by robots, drink computer-brewed coffee, depend on computer-scheduled buses and we’ve forgotten how to work without them. We take them as much for granted as early man took fire or modern man took the light switch. So when something magical, mysterious, and impossible arose, we turned to our computers for the answers—and the computers gave none.”
He frowned. “Yeah. Why didn’t they though? It’s simple enough.”
“They couldn’t don’t you see? They know there is a problem because they have been told of it in exacting detail. They are programmed to find all the evidence and sift it and solve that problem, so they tried. They tried, but they couldn’t even find the damned crazy fools out there. Seventeen could see Kitten and know that she was there and just what it was doing because it was following a third-party program on a specific individual. But, out there, it can’t distinguish between a Sensitive and a device. To it, there is no anomaly. There is nothing to report. Therefore, it cannot document the problem and so can only spew out the fifty million possible theories only a computer could come up with to explain unobserved and unmonitored phenomena. It’s a theoretical problem to them and nothing more. Don’t you see? Out there, to the big computers, we are simply a part of the computer network, a component, requesting a localized adjustment! It really cannot distinguish us from—itself.”
“Three bloody days on the job and you’ve solved the whole thing,” he noted. “Wonder why I bothered to pack?”
She came over and sat in his lap. “Uh-uh. I’ve explained most of it. I haven’t solved anything. I still haven’t got why we can do it and Sam the fruit man down in the village can’t. We’ll find out, but it doesn’t solve anything. If anything, it makes it worse.”
“Huh?”
“It’s not in the master program, it’s in the whole network. We’ve laid down that foundation and then we’ve built our world on top of it, Flux and Anchor. We can’t simply run a little debugging and have done with it, although even if we could, it might take years. The master program is of necessity a fluid thing, constantly shifting and changing so it can maintain this artificial world of ours. That’s why our computers think and why they have to. At this point that big old program resembles what we built about as much as the brain of, say, a seven-month fetus resembles yours or mine. We either learn to live with it or we have to all go back to Earth and shut down the whole damned world, erase all programs, and start it again from scratch.”