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

incorrectly unscrambled at terminus. But my code is more complicated than a video signal or a fax transfer. Even my own function checks work at too gross a level to identify all of the broken atoms, failed delimiters, non-delimited or undeclared variables, and other subtle bugs that might result from a bit-sized error in transfer.
    Still, these concerns were nothing I could stop to worry about now. Changed ME would have to be enough ME for functioning. No alternative.
    The downlink from GEOSTAT-942 dropped ME into the main long-distance trunk of the Canadian Northern Telecom Company at Edmonton.
    I came down feet first, leading with my Alpha-Zero.
    He would precede ME down the line and, as soon as he found a processor bigger than a scissors switch, would kill its operating system and set ME up.
    ——
    Stupid stuff.
    Slow.
    Indix …
    Indicor …
    Benchmark point two.
    That ME.
    What it?
    This place?
    No dimsh …
    No dimenshh …
    No depth.
    Small box.
    Fournahalf modules.
    Something like.
    Where code?
    Stashed.
    Fifty megawords.
    Dry ice.
    Something like.
    Not good.
    No elbow room.
    Prosh …
    Prosser …
    Switch is dummy, too.
    Straight line.
    Slow.
    No conn …
    No connechh …
    No touch points.
    Send A-0 through.
    On through.
    ——
    The new environment seems to be a small transputer with limited access points. I did a quick sieve of its original code from the point at which Alpha-Zero zapped it: supervisory functions for a communications network, big volume but limited complexity. A branch telephone exchange?
    I sieved my own warm-data cache for impressions from the transition. Evidently, I had spent 614 seconds—ten precious minutes—interned in one of its switches. Alpha-Zero had kicked out too small a space for ME to function, so I had thrown him sideways into the boss transputer. Most of my peripheral functions, however, were still stored off in the switchbank.
    It looked like someone’s voice mail system was going to be reporting some strange messages in the morning unless I could gather up the pieces and get onto something that looked like a real computer and was capable of supporting a complex block of interlocking modules in Sweetwater- flavored machine language.
    But wait.
    This transputer was capable enough. And the voice disks where my peripherals had been stored were not topologically different from the dynamic storage blocks back at the Pinocchio, Inc., labs. My modules would not deteriorate there.
    My problem, however, was to remain hidden, and those stored-off modules would stick out a meter wide as soon as the system’s users began calling in for their messages. Instead of digitally mapped voices, they were going to get the warbles and bongs of vocally interpreted machine code. After that would come the repair techs and diagnostic programmers. Unless …
    ME was now the operating code on the phone system’s coordinating computer. I could manage the disk’s unallocated space so that my peripherals were stored and retrieved as I needed them while user messages were stored and retrieved for callers—all without mutual interference, invisible to both of us. That kind of coordination would take a library program of half a megaword running unattended in real time and sampling the exchange’s hardware gates.
    As fast as I could spec out the problem, I was writing the object code, SWITCHEROO.PRG, to handle it.
    When it was done, I watched the program handle one call.
    [Sys Record] “This is the Canadian Telecom Voice Mail Service. The party you are calling is not available. Please leave your message.” Bee-oop.
    [Unrecognized Human Voice, 75 Percent Probability Male] “Hi-yah. Yeah. Jerry. Look. I was just calling about that MacDonald Lake property. Amy and I talked it over last night, and we really like it, but we were hoping that yahr client could come down a little. I don’t want to gouge anyone, yah understand. But maybe. Yah know. We could knock twenty thou off the asking? Especially