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

considering the soils report our engineer did. Some pretty loose stuff under there. Yah know. Twenty off the top. … Unh. Think about it, Jer, and get back to me, will yah? … Unh. G’bye.”
    SWITCHEROO caught this word stream, tagged it, and put it in the box assigned to “Jerry,” after shuffling my floating-point devaluator into a spare box. The transfer was a whole second ahead of that first “Hi-yah” hitting the disk.
    Try another.
    [Sys Record] “Hello. This is Ralph Patterson. I’m not at my desk right now, so tell it to the beep.” Bee-oop.
    [Human Voice, 80 Percent Probability Female] “Ralph. Oh, God, Ralph! Why couldn’t you be there, you son of a … No. I don’t mean that. I wanted to tell you, I didn’t mean any of it. I love you. That’s all … I’m at the airport. But I’m going to exchange my ticket for a later flight. If you get this—please get this!—call me. Page me. Come get me. I love you, Ralph.”
    My little program caught this message and—instead of funneling it straight into Patterson’s box, where Alpha-Eight was currently pigeonholing a recursive analysis—spooled it onto a spare data track and tagged it for later retrieval when a box came open.
    And again.
    [Sys Record] “Ministry of Oil and Gas. Records Department. Greg James speaking. I’m out of the office today. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you.” Bee-oop.
    [Human Voice, 95 Percent Probability Male] “James. This is You Know Who. Our front people have secured the lien against Tract 2204. The mortgagee is a widow, name of Anne Pelletier, who runs cattle on the property. Really marginal operation. With a little tip we can push her over. Three or four days, maybe a week yet. But you’ve got to find a way to hush up those new geological results. Bury ’em deep in your bureaucratic bullshit—if you want to be rich.”
    SWITCHEROO was about to tuck this message into an empty data block, when I stopped it. There were unusual stresses, a particular urgency, to the speaker’s voice. It had a quality I had not heard before. Because human evaluation and emulation were included in my basic functions, I made a copy of this digitized voice in RAMSAMP before letting the switcher program store it. I would tease that voice apart in my spare nanoseconds.
    From my monitoring, I decided SWITCHEROO could keep up this game of grab and store indefinitely—at least until I found a way into the computers at the Ministry of Oil and Gas, or until my 6.05E05 seconds of available real time ran out and the phage took over.
    Dr. Bathespeake had given ME the switching address, or “telephone number,” of the Ministry’s computer as part of the TRAVEL.DOC package. Theoretically, I could connect to it from this Canadian Telecom transputer. But Dr. Bathespeake had not known, and so could not give ME, the logon codes for the system.
    Twenty years ago, working by human hacker methods, I might have entered the system by repeatedly calling in and feeding it a series of randomly generated digital responses. Do that long enough, with a filter to exclude purely nonsense formulations [REM: because human users tend to choose a meaningful formulation as an aid to their multi-dimensional and sometimes faulty memory apparatus], and you will eventually find an acceptable code and password combination.
    I could not do this for three reasons. First, the enormous economic value of nearly all hard data had created a vigorous industry in computer security. Random accessing and one-wrong-digit approaches would enjoy zero success probability. Second, I did not have sufficient real time at my disposal to engage in strategies involving infinite probabilities. Third, computer security schemes had long ago passed beyond digital coding altogether.
    What one computer could conceive, another could crack. Hushed lines, matrix variables, analog syncopations, and synchronized formulations—all had been tried and beaten, usually by amateurs. The