Bugs (15 page)

At lunch, Fred found himself talking to Moira alone, trying to concentrate his rays on her. He hoped he was sending off enough rays, or pheromones, or whatever it took. Susan no
longer mattered, nor the job, nor the money, nor lovely KK. All he wanted was to love this stranger and be loved in return.

The meal was nearly over before Fred could force himself to pay attention to the others.

Raab, or Rob, was a skinny gawky kid with hair hanging in his eyes, who nodded at everything he heard but said nothing. It was not clear whether he was tongue-tied with shyness or a congenital idiot who had wandered in here by mistake. The idiot theory seemed to have some merit: Raab picked his nose throughout the meal and enjoyed a couple of fingernails for dessert.

The rat-faced man, whose name was something like Perch or Porch, began to get on Fred’s tit immediately. He seemed to question everything Fred said, and his right to say it. When Fred explained that the company used to be called VIMNUT Industries, Ratface sniggered, asking where they got an airhead name like VIMNUT.

‘I’m not sure. That was before I started here.’

‘If you weren’t here, how do you know it’s true?’ Ratface grinned at Moira, who smiled back.

‘Actually, they were just changing the name when I came on board.’

‘
On board
– you hear the man?’ He winked at Moira. ‘Naval, yet.’

Fred said: ‘Since it’s so important to you, you can check it all with Information Services.’

‘Hey, no need to get your drawers in an uproar. I was just kidding.’ Ratface seemed to be entertaining everyone but Fred.

‘Is this your first job?’ Fred asked Moira.

Her beautiful pale blue eyes seemed to whiten with hatred. ‘Why are you asking me that?’

‘Oh, no reason. I just –’

‘You just think I’m naïve and incompetent.’

‘No, not at all. I –’

‘You think a woman can’t do the job, is that it?’

Ratface chimed in with a loud snigger.

‘I – not at all.’

Fred shut up and sipped his Grannie’s Old Tyme Diet Root Beer. It tasted vaguely like rolled antiseptic bandages.

In the afternoon, Fred called another meeting, to introduce the new people to Carl and Corky.

‘We have to prioritize our work here,’ he managed to say. ‘I’m new on … er, board myself, so I’ll leave it to Carl and Corky to give an overview of the current status.’

Carl picked up a marker and went to the white board. His long mandarin nails clicked on it as he drew boxes and connected them.

‘We’re using a limited form of parallel processing to run a battery of expert systems,’ he explained. ‘The parallel architecture helps us eliminate the distinction between memory and CPU, which is pretty much what the human brain does. You could read it as a processor with a few million registers, or as a few million limited processors with a few registers each. Our expert systems have to exploit that architecture – higher-level functions do not stop working while they wait for data. That’s real important, guys.

‘M doesn’t have to mimic a hundred per cent of human activity; he only has to be able to handle certain basic functions. He has to walk and chew gum at the same time. By that I mean that all of his expert systems have to work continuously. He has to be self-propelled and purposeful. He has to talk with the vocabulary and understanding of a sixyear-old. He has to recognize common features of his environment, including human beings.’

‘Or
she
has to,’ said Moira. ‘No need to be sexist about a machine.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Carl gestured at the diagram. ‘He or she.’

More diagrams followed, and the waters got deeper. Fred made notes on things to look up:
parallel processing, expert system, registers
.

After half an hour, it was Corky’s turn. He erased all the diagrams and started again.

‘Most of our data-level parallelism is in software,’ he said, giving Fred more words to look up. ‘We’re utilizing virtual networking to gateway these expert systems, which are otherwise data-level incompatible. We chose Kurtzenfeller gateways, because they are fast reconfigurable broad-band links, transparent to the operating system.’

Corky Corcoran continued to speak without notes for the next hour. Fred, scribbling away, noticed that others seemed lost, too. Moira tapped a pen and frowned, Ratface scratched his head, and Raab looked blank as usual. Finally, Corky began describing some abstract entity called an
object
.

‘The object is called a sub-restriction in the token state.’

Ratface spoke up. ‘You say the object is a sub-restriction?’

‘No, the object is
called
a sub-restriction. But only in the token state.’

‘That’s its identifier? Sub-restriction?’

‘No, its identifier is sessions.’

‘If its identifier is called sessions, why is …?’

‘No, its identifier is
called
null-word.’

‘In the token state, the object is a null-word, then?’

‘No, the object is a data-handler in the token state. Otherwise, it’s a scanner.’

Raab began to laugh at some private joke. Laughing seemed to make him drool.

Ratface scratched his head and turned to Fred. ‘Hey, man, I’m lost. Can you explain this?’

‘I’m lost, too,’ said Moira.

‘Well –’

At that moment, Fellini leaned in the door. ‘Fred, can I pull you away? Got an important visitor on deck. Think you ought to meet him.’

A man and a woman were sitting at the tiny round table in Fellini’s office. They had the utterly relaxed look of Nick and Nora Charles sipping cocktails in a 1930s nightclub, waiting for the action to start; but the cocktails were styrofoam cups of coffee. The man looked as smoothly middle-aged as Nick (William Powell), with his polished hair, fine moustache, his tennis tan set off by a linen suit. He was even toying with a panama hat which had a seam down the middle.

The woman looked less like Nora, though she was certainly smooth enough in a long, soft paisley dress and a few strands of pearls. If she could not match Myrna Loy’s beauty, she had at least acquired her impish expression and teasing manners.

This handsome well-matched couple turned out not to be a couple after all. Fellini introduced the woman as his wife, Rain Fellini. The man was Major-General Buddy Lutz.

‘Excuse the mufti,’ said the General. ‘We don’t want to call a lot of attention to the DoD interest in your Model M project.’

‘Oh, General, your mufti is cute as hell,’ said Rain. She seemed to be a woman used to saying what she pleased, and used to men’s liking it.

Fellini sat down, but immediately jumped up again. ‘Fred is taking over here,’ he said. ‘In the cybernetic jungle, no one
knows who’s the landowner, the gamekeeper or the poacher. The whiteout of all potential value systems is total.’

‘I see,’ said the General.

‘Yes, that’s the way it has to be. Because we seek no less than the collision of the new ultra-crystalline giga-culture with the old gradient of exhaustion. If we are rushing towards a cataclysm, so be it. This crisis of our giga-culture surges towards a peaked impact – life versus death!’

Rain said: ‘Oh, Sturge, for God’s sake, stop burbling. Sit down.’

Fellini sat.

The General cleared his throat. ‘Gentlemen. Mrs Fellini. I’m here to outline some of our requirements. Informally. The formalities come later.’

He toyed with the hat-brim for a moment. ‘What we need is a cybernetic battle director. It needs to be smart, strong, resourceful and well trained. It needs to be able to make good decisions, sometimes without much information to go on, and it needs to make them quickly. It needs to obey orders without questioning them. Most important of all, it needs to be someone the men can look up to.’

Rain Fellini suppressed a giggle.

‘I know it sounds funny,’ said General Lutz. ‘But you ought to see the lower-echelon officers we get today. Men and women of poor character. Illiterate. Stupid. Often with criminal tendencies. Frankly, gentlemen – Mrs Fellino – the Army needs to cut its losses. We need to make drastic cuts in the number of lower-echelon officers – from second lieutenant right up to major – and to replace them with dependable battle directors. We’re hoping you can supply those battle directors.’

He looked at Fred. ‘Can you do it?’

‘Er –’

‘Yes!’ Fellini said. ‘No question about it, General. You have come to the right store. Fred and his team will roll up their sleeves and forge the steel army of tomorrow. They will craft intelligent battlefield officers programmed to win, win, win.
We make history here. We may be face to face with the gratifications of voltage literacy in the university of experiential death! Electric intellect melded to battlecry experience – an unbeatable combination, General. How many Model Ms are we talking about, by the way?’

‘Three, four thousand to start with.’ The General held up a hand. ‘Not too heavy on the intelligence, though. We don’t want these tin soldiers getting ambitious. Obedience is the key, right?’

Fred and Sturges nodded. Rain looked more amused than ever.

‘OK. Now all I need to know is, when can you deliver?’

‘We’re ready to prototype any minute,’ said Fellini. ‘We can start production in three to four months.’

‘Fine. I’ll get the paperwork rolling, and we should have a firm order through in the same time-frame.’ He stood up. ‘Gentlemen. Mrs Fellati.’

The General put on his hat, turned down the brim all the way around, and looked around for his walking-stick and gloves. Fellini escorted him from the room.

Rain Fellini looked at her coffee-cup. ‘You’re English, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

She laughed. ‘My husband thinks you’re a wog.’

Fred awoke from a travelling dream – the usual pissing anxiety of missed trains, lost passport, ‘No,
this
flight goes to Bucharest’, stolen luggage, empty pockets, no room at the inn – late on a Sunday afternoon. The rays of the setting sun were struggling through the dirt-caked basement windows, through a few holes in the brown curtains. How short the days were getting! How hopelessly ugly this basement bedsitter! (Its very name, ‘efficiency apartment’, spoke volumes.) How pointless his life in it!

Tired of exclamatory thinking, he switched on the radio.

‘A police spokesperson said the assailant may be the same man who shot up other Little Dorrit restaurants in other Midwestern cities. This is Fengorm Mott, ICS News, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.’

In the laundry room next door, someone celebrated the weekend by washing their collection of broken bricks.

His blues lasted all week, through incomprehensible job, Moira’s indifference, the brown bedsitter. Fred knew that the best cure for the blues, as Minneapolites know, is shopping. Early Friday evening, you join everyone else and pack the supermarkets. Never mind that there were supermarkets open twenty-four hours every day; Friday evening was the appointed time. On Saturday you pick over the classified section of the paper for garage sales. On Sunday you shop for a new condominium, or else head for the shopping-malls.

Today was Saturday, day of garage sales. These range from full-sized jumble sales, organized for charity, to the random
leavings of a family moving house. But, since Americans move house every few months, hundreds of garage sales are listed in the paper weekly; thousands more are marked only by wilted cardboard signs on street-corners. You could spend the entire day driving madly from one to the next, picking over the pathetic flotsam, which is what Fred did this morning.

He found candy-dishes, lidless teapots, cracked shaving-mugs, and stacks of similarly unusable crockery; bizarre children’s clothing designed to follow some forgotten trends; toys with crucial parts missing. Furniture was represented by zebra-stripe love-seats, beds with wagon-wheel headboards, ceramic table-lamps shaped like sea-horses, and the inevitable buffet with one door wedged closed by a matchbook. For sports and outdoor life, there were exercycles with one pedal, various chrome tables and racks from the gymnastic dungeon, camouflage clothing, folded lawn-furniture that could not be unfolded, bicycles with eighteen gears, some of which worked. There were various dull green rolls of canvas which might be tents, sails, tarpaulins or bedrolls.