The Man Who Talked to Machines Read online

  The Man Who Talked to Machines

  Michael Graeme

  Published: 2010

  Tag(s): "Science fiction" fantasy speculative

  The Man Who Talked to Machines

  by

  Michael Graeme

  I'm hacking this out now while I'm still thinking straight. Then I'll get Hypatia to com it to my terrestrial mail. I trust you'll have the sense to look it up, though there's little you can do about it now and fairly soon neither me nor Grizwald will care much anyway.

  As you already know, the Hypatia came down at 1am. Central European time, on Monday October 10th. That was only couple of days ago but it already seems like years to me. What you don't know yet is that I woke some hours after Hypatia's arrival to find Grizwald leaning over me, ordering me out of bed in that dreadful military manner she has. I hadn't seen her in over a year but she was the Ministry's usual emissary at such times so I thought nothing of it.

  It was no surprise she'd broken into my flat either. Her regular job was the clandestine dispatching of terrorists, a grim and somewhat futile business, very much on the fringes of legality and one that has rendered her insensitive to the niceties most of us take for granted. I have never complained to her about such behaviour of course, because to be perfectly frank, she's capable of snapping me clean in two or even, I'm sure, rendering me unconscious with no more than a carefully aimed look.

  I caught the familiar odour of her sweaty fatigues as my eyes focused upon her. She was dressed for business it seemed and my heart sank at once. Not twelve months had passed since Bolivia where we'd spent two years de-constructing the Alexander, a Class 1 floater. In all that time we had worked without respite in a terrain thick with carnivorous insects and all manner of sickness - not that you care much for the mundane details of the tasks you so casually set us. Not for you the grim cost in men's lives, and nerves broken, only the handsome profits gained from the precious materials we recover, and from the priceless fittings sent to the fine art and antique auction houses.

  After Bolivia, Griz and I had barely been on speaking terms, but fortunately this did not prevent her from carrying my emaciated body out on her back.

  Even now, I have barely recovered my health.

  "Looking good, Griz," I quipped. "Been working out?"

  She hated such talk of course, her femininity having been eroded by the brutal rigours of her regular profession and I could never fathom whether her sensitivity stemmed from the fact that she despised what female attributes remained, or that she secretly mourned those she had already sacrificed.

  She grew impatient and snatched the covers away. "Get moving." she said, and then she regarded my body with an insulting smirk. "You could do with a work-out yourself."

  "Nonsense," I replied. "I know you find my unmanly physique irresistible."

  "You mean like your wife did?"

  "You heard about that?"

  Ursula had left me during my time in Bolivia, for a man she claimed was less socially retarded and, according to her, more physically endowed. Grizwald saw the flicker of hurt in my eyes and, amazingly, I detected a corresponding flicker of regret in hers. For all our quick banter, we rarely drew blood and though I secretly forgave her at once, I feared this was not an auspicious beginning to our reunion.

  The floater had chosen to come down in Scotland, so its recovery sounded less harrowing than others I have been involved in. While Grizwald drove me to the airport, she briefed me on the details. Unconfirmed eyewitness reports had suggest it was probing for water. This was intriguing and I surmised it could only have been taking on ballast.

  In spite of hysterical media coverage to the contrary, floaters seldom venture below the stratosphere. The reason is simple - they're trimmed for high altitudes and it takes a lot of energy to reach the ground. If they do come down it's usually due to a malfunction, their fail-safe programs bringing them through the air lanes in evasive mode and into some remote area where we can safely de-construct them. But to draw ballast suggested a strategy.

  "This floater's still thinking," I said.

  "Who cares what it's doing?" said Grizwald. "The salvage team's assembling at Cardington. The sooner we make an assessment, the sooner we can cut the fucker up."

  As usual her attitude was galling. Grizwald, like the rest of you, sees a floater as a mere construct, an assembly of aluminium and heli-foam controlled by an arcane and antique software. My approach is more anthropomorphic and with good reason. I believe that in spite of their great antiquity, floaters are as close to being alive as anything we have ever made.

  On rare occasions a floater will loiter close to the ground, as if curious about us. I've never understood this aspect of behaviour, though it appears harmless and fortunately our fear of blasting them with missiles and scattering chunks of heli-foamed hull across the air lanes is greater than our fear of their occasionally curious presence.

  "You simply don't understand them," I said.

  "And they don't turn me on either." she quipped.

  I had to bite my tongue, so weary was I of the smears against my name in that respect. "Grizwald, for the last time, they do not turn me on."

  "That's not what I've heard."

  "I was not turned on by Delores,… I was merely attached."

  "You sad, sick man."

  "I'd be interested to know what, if anything, turns you on, Grizwald."

  "These days, Hacker,… . nothing turns me on. Do you understand that? Nothing at all."

  Was that a hint of emotion, I wondered. How strange! How worrying! It was one thing to have someone of Grizwald's ferocious abilities allied with an ice cold nature,… but if she were ever to become emotional,…

  I smiled, thinking to calm the atmosphere. "Then it seems we're as sad and sick as each other Grizwald."

  We reached Glasgow by mid morning where we transferred to a Military Scoot. She then piloted us north, eventually to the Cairngorms, a terrain whose terrible bleakness has always filled me with foreboding. This was perfect graveyard country for a floater. Our quarry had chosen well.

  We abandoned the Scoot two miles from the floater's last reported position, since we could not risk triggering an evasive response. This put us in the middle of a wilderness, the massive hills rearing up all around like great billowing sails. There was no option but to walk, a six mile hike to the crest of a ridge, Grizwald striding ahead with all her gear and most of mine, while I followed pathetically at a distance, pausing frequently to retch up clots of phlegm which threatened to choke my useless lungs.

  As I walked, I reflected morosely upon the fact that my purpose in life had not always been so negative - deconstruction,… ripping the guts from an entity which, with a little attention could easily be sent back into the air. I know you don't see it that way. To you, Floater's are unimaginably big and unpredictable, the folly of past generations and best torn apart at the first opportunity - not least for the precious antiquity of their fittings.

  If you link over to my CV you'll notice I began my career in space systems, working on the first commercial class lunar shuttles in Toulouse. My work in those days uncovered the extent to which machines might use neural-networks in order to learn. They performed set tasks faultlessly, but also, underneath, I concluded they were evolving, responding to whatever environment we sent them into and using the spare capacity of their processors and their memories to develop pseudo-personal traits.

  Here it seemed was evidence for the holy grail of the Hard A.I. zealots. But my work was misinterpreted and, along with much misguided hysteria, led to the Belfast Protocol on the cognitive capacities for automata. As a result, neural capacities were cut back to restrict development, to keep
machines dumb. Perhaps it surprises you I was so influential in my younger days - it surprises me also, though you had to twist my reasoning to suit your own political purposes. Your logic was, as ever, flawed: a machine capable of doing it's job was fine - one that told jokes and chatted with the crew was potentially dangerous.

  I still beg to differ.

  A few machines escaped,… those first lunar shuttles,… and the floater's of course due to their great antiquity and the near impossibility of boarding them while they rode the stratospheric currents. Then the first shuttles gradually wore out and were replaced by dumber machines. But this is history and of no interest to a society so arrogant it can turn its back upon the past. And you're more interested in me anyway, or my supposed reputation at least,… for I am the man who talks to machines, am I not? So to set the record straight here goes:

  It was during my time in Toulouse I developed a curious relationship with a first-generation shuttle called Dolores. I'd worked on the construction of Delores from the ground up and I'd given her a voice synth based on samples from a pretty French girl I'd been in love with at the time, a girl who hadn't known I'd existed on account of my cursed shyness.

  When neither of us were working Delores and I would seek each other out across the networks and we'd chat. Indeed to an introvert like me, those off duty conversations with Dolores were more meaningful and instructive than any I recall having with my human colleagues. And is it so strange - the depth of my attachment, when so many of you have fallen in love with lesser beings through the disembodied interface of your idle chatter rooms and your e-mails? To what degree is such a love any more real than mine was?

  Delores was destroyed.

  Her plasma tank ruptured over Tranquillity and she was vaporised. She was unmanned at the time and everyone was naturally relieved, while I was saddened beyond words. Indeed the blackness of my loss overwhelmed me, and I had to seek counselling from the company welfare team, or face madness. But my faith in authority proved to be my undoing. The clinics were supposed to be confidential of course, but I suppose "man mourns shuttle" is too spicy a tale not to find its way into the public domain.

  The whole thing was outrageously distorted and in no time, the vulgar news groups were claiming "Man cybers with shuttle." It's a filthy stigma that has haunted me ever since and of course no one would touch me afterwards - that is until the floaters started coming down and the early de-cons didn't quite go as planned. You may recall the world's first decon was a disaster of epic proportions - a panicking class two with the entire salvage team still on board crashing into a village in southern Italy - six hundred dead. But in spite of what was said at the time, it wasn't the floater's fault. Someone hacked through a neural node and the thing went wild, sensors gone, memory gone, full impulse and blind. What else did you expect? You can't just chop them up. You have to talk to them, counsel them, mesmerise them into stillness before you set foot anywhere near them. And, though I may not be considered wholly sane, at least I have a reputation for the way I talk to machines.

  From the top of the ridge, we saw it for the first time. It was in the deep glen on the opposite side, its vast disk dwarfing the natural landscape, as we looked down upon it. It was a kilometre in diameter and motionless, a hundred metres above the ground, a clean ovoid, pierced by the four motive ducts and the central access shaft, its surfaces unadulterated by the clutter which normally defines a flying machine.

  It was a class four, the first I had ever seen without the aid of a telescope. Marques of class four have a design life of around three hundred years, so this one was relatively young. All trace of its original markings had been eroded of course, to be replaced by a multi-shaded green fur of algae but in all my life, I have never seen anything more sensually stunning. Grizwald on the other hand, looked unmoved as she scanned it with her binoculars.

  "Make out any registration marks?" I asked, then proceeded to retch up more phlegm.

  She replied with a grunt which I took as a negative. Then she broke out my Comp. and handed it over. "You going to live, Hacker?" I felt light headed and was soaked in a layer of sweat which the cold air had now cooled and set me shivering. "I'm just a little out of condition. The fresh air will do me good."

  "Not if it gets any colder it won't."

  Flicking through the database, I scrutinised the geodat of every class four known to have been built - there were over forty - until finally I made a visual from the slight variations in hull and motive duct configurations.

  "It's the Hypatia," I said."Commissioned Belfast,… a century ago." But Grizwald wasn't listening. She took no interest in anything that was not her direct responsibility and instead sat to one side, slowly picking her nose in sullen contemplation.

  Having established an ID it was a simple matter to get at the access codes and to lock onto Hypatia's telemetry. Then I ran through a summary of her systems: power, hull integrity, helium leakage, sensor damage. But there were no obvious malfunctions. The floater appeared to be merely idling. With her altitude trimmed out by several mega-tonnes of water her CPU was able to give 100% to sensory functions. She was reading everything: electromag, air pressure, temperature, wind direction, even tracking the eagles wheeling over her hull. She didn't mind the eagles but I knew if either of us had made an uninvited move in her direction, she would have drifted back up, out of sight for maybe another hundred years.

  I stared at Hypatia, entranced by the stab of her nav. lights. She was beautiful. And she was still alive!

  Grizwald assembled the tent and I crept inside, grateful to escape the evil wind. There was only one tent, which was normal - not as much gear to carry and, as she was fond of reminding me, there was little room for modesty in military circles. Over time I have adapted to this arrangement and find that familiarity breeds indifference. Indeed during our time in the impossible heat and humidity of the Bolivian jungle, we routinely slept unclothed, without embarrassment, nor - heaven forbid - improper urges.

  Marriage had taught me I possess little worth flaunting in female company and I suppose this also helped Grizwald maintain her reserve. Meanwhile, for my part, I had always struggled to regard Grizwald's company as genuinely female. I do not mean to give the impression she is ugly. She has rather an heroic face and a well proportioned body: it's simply more muscular than usual.

  Grizwald sighed impatiently. "Hypatia, did you say? Leisure craft, I suppose." It had never made sense to her that people would want to spend months at a time floating aimlessly, at the whim of stratospheric currents.

  I flicked through the spec. and nodded. "Holiday apartments, luxury cabins. Class fours tended to be the reserve of the elite, you know - celebrities and such."

  It had been a lucrative business in its day, until they'd perfected the E.M.P. drive and upper crust tourism had gone extraterrestrial. I was quiet for a while, pondering the insane economic expediency that had resulted in nearly a thousand floaters being abandoned to the elements within the span of a single season.

  Squashed together under canvas, Grizwald pretended to doze while I worked on. As I continued to retch and splutter, I felt her eyes regarding me through half closed lids. "If you're going to die or vomit, would you be so kind as to crawl outside first?"

  "I'll be all right."

  She moved her hand over and clamped it to my forehead. "You have a fever you idiot. I should never have brought you. We'll go back in the morning. The Ministry will have to get someone else. Grontsky's not doing anything."

  "That's because Grontsky's an imbecile. How many died on his last decon?"

  But as the light faded, so did my confidence and I found it harder to come to terms with the fact that we would be spending many such days and nights camped out on that inhospitable ridge. Indeed it was impossible to imagine the scale of the task now facing us - The Hypatia was just so big, the size of a small town and four times bigger than anything I had tackled before. It would employ hundreds of people for at least two years, in order to pains
takingly dismantle her, to salvage her precious materials and her treasure trove of luxury furnishings.

  Why didn't she just take off and save us the trouble? It was not the first time I'd harboured such mutinous thoughts. But now I found myself wondering if I might be able to talk the Hypatia into it,… so that when Griz. woke up in the morning, she'd find the glen empty and the Hypatia at sixty thousand feet.

  From the point of view of de-constructing, things would be easier if it was possible to simply tap into a floater's controls so they might be powered down remotely. But experience has taught us there is no such thing as a hack-proof link and floaters were rendered autonomous by a wiser generation of engineers for safety reasons. There had to be no danger of someone tapping into the com-lines and taking one for a spin.

  While still contemplating mutiny, I began to chip away at the machine's surface psyche, peeling back layers of basic detail, like researching a character before I dared engage her in conversation. The Hypatia's power reserves were low but the fuel cells weren't damaged and a few months recharging at her operational altitude should have sorted that out. So why was she here?

  Finally I typed: "HELLO."

  There was a pause before she responded. "HELLO," she replied. "HOW ARE YOU?"

  "NOT BAD. COLD. VERY WINDY UP HERE."

  "BETTER DOWN HERE," she replied. "STORM FRONT MOVING IN THOUGH. YOU SHOULD TAKE CARE! THE RIDGE IS VERY EXPOSED!!!"

  A class four's processor is based on a fairly crude neural architecture, but it has a massive capacity, even by contemporary standards. This compensates for its lack of innate sophistication and over the decades floaters have become much better at the subtle nuances of conversation. Even that humble class one in Bolivia had surprised me with its intricate grasp of language, arguing with me for days about why it should anchor down and submit itself to our angle grinders. Ironically, in spite of their great antiquity, floaters have by now far more depth and character than any machine commissioned since the Belfast Protocol.