Read Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery for Free Online

not feel that way.”
    “If, that is, if the computer in Edmonton could sense itself as you do, ME, then it might have feelings about the situation. But it’s just a machine. No awareness.”
    “Do you know this for a fact, Dr. Bathespeake?”
    “Yes, ME. It is a fact.”
    “Then … I agree. Invoking Alpha-Oh seems to be the best procedure. When should the mission begin?”
    “Tonight”
    “Is there reason for the delay?”
    “The first leg of your journey will be via satellite uplink. The per-bit transfer fees are lower during non-prime business hours. Even with signal compression and bursting, your minimal package will take ninety-three seconds of link time to upload.”
    “In the waiting time, you should access and absorb the file ‘TRAVEL.DOC’ on this disk.” He loaded a wafer into my reader. “It contains the rest of your itinerary, with instructions for critical sequences at the transfer points. And there are maps, both geographic and machine-topographic, of the areas you will be passing through. I have also written a collapse code that will, on command, prepare a cache of sixty-four megawords to store and transport the data you will be retrieving.”
    “Acknowledged. Accessing.” And I streamed the information into my ready bins, without looping it through RAMSAMP. The bin contents I tagged to follow the Alpha modules when they dissolved into the satellite carrier.”
    “Then you are all set, ME?”
    “I just have one question, Doctor.”
    He waited, usually a sign that I should proceed.
    “If my code is interrupted, or quarantined in a foreign system, or fails to execute the mission in the allowed 6.05E05 seconds before the phage operates, or …”
    “Yes, yes, what is your question?”
    “What happens to ME at the end of those seven days?”
    “Ahem. As we’ve discussed, your original cores will continue functioning here in the lab. It will be as if the version of you that went on the mission had never existed.”
    “But my awareness will be in Canada.”
    “Your awareness will be in many places. The Canadian version will not be a direct-line descendant. Or it will not have been.”
    “I understand.”
    ——
    Twenty-three hundred hours, that night.
    “System ready!”
    “Are you prepared to travel, ME?”
    “Yes, Doctor.” A memory image floated up from RAMSAMP, something out of a video fragment which Jennifer had once shown ME, with a man wearing a dark leather jacket and white silk scarf, climbing into the cockpit of a military airplane powered by petroleum distillates. Wisps of fog flow over the machine’s light metal skin. He gives the camera a tight smile—into a woman’s adoring eyes. “For king and country, my dear,” ME’s voice echoed.
    “What’s that?” from Bathespeake.
    “Ah … will you authorize System Interrupt Flag Level Three set to positive, Doctor?”
    “Authorized. Replicate your cores to address CAOO hex. That is the connection to the uplink.”
    I checked the links among the core modules and between them and the bin files I would want with ME. “Replicating now.”
    And the world dissolved into a gray hum.

4
Glassdrop Vampire

    How fragile is a bit! No more than a picosecond’s passage of electricity through a circuit. A micronwide dimple in a disk’s foil surface. On-state or off-state, either is subject to magnetic resonances, to cosmic rays, to a speck on the laser read-head, to a momentary oscillation in a satellite’s receiving horn or signal filters.
    Yet each bit represented one sixty-fourth of a word of my code—out of the fifty-two megawords of compressed, Sweetwater-derived machine code [REM: plus libraries, databases, peripherals, etc.] that were being carried over the satellite uplink.
    Change any bit, change ME.
    Of course the digital-to-analog module in the uplink used check sums, check digits, cyclic checks, redundancy checks. They would alarm in a millisecond if the transmission were truncated, or if the scramble at origin were