Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery Page 10

  She smiled at the front of my head. “We do, do we?”

  Her phrasing took a second to unravel. Finally I settled on the correct response: “Yes, madam, we do.”

  “Jason, how quaint! You’ve brought me a perfect little toff. And who,” she turned back to ME, “are we, exactly?”

  [REM: Did she not know who Anne Pelletier and Jason Bender were? Untrapped error! This caused ME some milliseconds of confusion, until I again untangled her syntax.]

  “The ‘we’ I refer to is the manufacturing firm Pinocchio, Inc. This automaton is their property, thus it is technically a subset of ‘we.’ ”

  “I’ve heard of them. Big outfit in the States, aren’t they?”

  My system paused with a momentary reset. I had allowed my pleasure in the social forms to betray my true status while still in enemy territory. I could program no response that would correct the situation. “Yes, madam.”

  “Jason tells me you have information about my land holding. Play it for me.” She reached across to the table beside her and manipulated the buttons on a device there. I reproduced the sounds from RAMSAMP.

  When I had finished, she pressed other buttons on her device, then sat back. Ms. Pelletier took in a larger than average breath and let it out slowly.

  “Jason, I think the ranch is saved. I’m going to call Owens & Harding in town and see if Bill can use this. But right now I’ll bet you donuts to cow pies he can.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the foreman said.

  “He’ll probably want us to hold on to this robot until we can get it into a hearing. It will provide some kind of provenance for that recording.”

  “Excuse ME,” I interrupted again. “How long will it take you to arrange this ‘hearing’?”

  She grimaced in thought. “No more than a week.”

  “I may not wait that long.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is—” Having kludged the situation this far, I could think of no further useful untruth to tell her. So I told her the truth.

  “My programmers do not want ME to be discovered outside the company, and certainly not in Canada. They determined that the mission I have undertaken would require one week to perform. After that time, I will … shut down, and the memory content of this automaton—program, peripheral functions, data cache, experiential samples, and your recording—will be neutralized. If you detain ME past 23:59:59 on Sunday night, I will become a pile of useless metal.”

  She sat in thought for a minute after I had finished. “That metal would hardly give me provenance for this recording, would it?”

  “If by ‘provenance’ you mean quote a place or source of origin end-quote, then no. I can tell you that the sound sampling you recorded came from a voice-and-data switching exchange located somewhere in Edmonton, with connection to the Alberta Ministry of Oil and Gas and possibly to other government offices.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “For a time my core programs operated that exchange.”

  “That would make you the property of Canadian Northern Telecom, wouldn’t it? But you said you belonged to Pinocchio. How is this possible?”

  “My core modules were passing through the exchange on the way to another mainframe system.”

  “I know a thing or two about computers from running the accounting cyber on the ranch. What you’re describing is not possible.”

  “It is possible. But this system is not in general use, nor in the public knowledge.”

  “And now your ‘cores’ are operating an industrial automaton which has broken into my barn in the middle of the night?”

  “Yes.”

  She pointed to the house’s front entryway. “If we were to open that door and stand back—what would you do?”

  “I would attempt to complete my mission: return over the border without being intercepted by the U.S. or Canadian authorities. From there I would find access into the Federal NET.”

  “Is it important that you not be found by the authorities?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you cannot take to the roads. … Jason, do you think those legs could fit around a horse?”

  “He’s bowlegged enough to ride a Brahma.”

  “This recording will give us something to fight with, even lacking the provenance. I believe that, in return for it, we can help this little industrial automaton find his way home. See if he can learn to ride, Jason. If he can, then tonight or tomorrow night we’ll take him down to the border.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Bender said.

  ——

  That afternoon I found out that “learning to ride, Jason” meant balancing on the back of a horse which had been positioned between my legs. The object of the exercise was to grip the animal tightly enough to keep its swaying gait from pitching my automaton off on one side or the other—yet not so tightly that I crushed its ribs. That action, as I quickly discovered, caused the horse either to rise up and dump ME off backward or to stop moving entirely.

  To protect the horse from my hard metal torso and joints, the humans placed a rounded pad of thick leather and wood across the horse’s back. Long straps on either side supported cups against which to brace my feet

  “That’ll help you keep upright,” Bender said. “When she goes to throw you on the right, you push down and forward with your left foot. You push with your right, and you’ll just catapult yourself out of the saddle, which is what she wants anyway.”

  It was a novel experience for ME, dealing with another self-programming entity. Every encounter I had made with such a creature was at the opposite side of Alpha-Zero, who immediately killed it and took over. This horse was a creature I could neither co-opt nor kill. I had to persuade it.

  The means of persuasion were three: spoken commands I would deliver to its ears; a complex of signals delivered with my heels against its flanks [REM: when I was not using my feet to hang on]; and pressure upon leather straps which connected to an adapter in the horse’s mouth. All of this seemed to ME less efficient than a nine-pin plug directly into the animal’s brain.

  Bender, however, appeared to have great feeling for these animals and would probably not consent to immediate surgical implantation of the neural apparatus.

  “You don’t plug into a horse, sonny. You ride ’em. Now put your left foot in the stirrup and lever yourself up like I showed you.”

  I gripped the saddle horn and placed my foot as instructed. I tucked the near leg back sixty degrees as the torso rose over the saddle, flexed the knee, and pistoned the thigh up against my back to keep it from dragging across and digging into the animal’s rump. As the torso centered over the saddle, I then straightened the leg with a snap!

  Before I could work my right foot into the stirrup, the horse bolted. It ran in a series of stiff-legged jumps around the corral, brought its nose right against the gate, and lifted its hindquarters straight up in one massive kick.

  My automaton flew forward and clattered onto the stone-hard ground beyond the gate. Pinocchio, Inc., does make durable equipment, and the unit was undamaged. I rolled it over and levered the torso erect

  Bender was hanging on a fencepost, seemingly in convulsions. I quickly rose up and went over to help him.

  “Haw, haw, haw,” he said, almost exhausted of oxygen. “Daisy sure has your number, Buckaroo! That’s the funniest steeplechase I seen since the clown acts at rodeo!”

  The man evidently was not damaged by his convulsions. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself.

  My traveling library provided ME with no referents for the terms “clown” and “rodeo.” Clearly, though, from his context and syntax, I had performed in a very skilled manner. This “riding” was a potentially acceptable form of transportation. However, the short flight at the end of each ride was likely to wear down my equipment.

  8

  Hostage to Fortune

  The next night Ms. Pelletier and Jason Bender set off to take ME to the international border. We traveled in a light truck
which Bender called a “pick-up.” [REM: I never did see it pick up anything.] We had three horses and their traveling accessories in a trailer towed by this vehicle.

  “What are the horses for?” I asked as we sped down the road.

  “Feeling his bruises, he is,” Bender commented.

  “If you want to avoid meeting the authorities,” Ms. Pelletier said, “we can’t just drive up to the border. You can figure for yourself that they won’t pass you as a citizen. They won’t be able to compute a commercial value for you as cargo. And even if they could, we won’t pay it.”

  “Pardon,” I interrupted with one of the words I had been taught, “how does ‘commercial value’ apply to a border crossing?”

  “Any trade goods going into the States have to pay duty. And the same coming back into the Dominion. The duty doesn’t apply to vehicles, like this truck—but you don’t qualify as a vehicle, either. So, for the customs officials, you’re trade goods.”

  I tried to fit these new terms, “customs” and “duty,” both of which had other and unhelpful meanings in my traveling library, into my general picture of a border closed by war and patrolled by soldiers. Was it possible that neither of these ranchers was aware of the conflict between the United States and Canada? It would not be possible. Perhaps they were simply too polite to mention it—politeness and its verbal evasions being human concepts with which ME had trouble. My best course, obviously, was not to bring up the subject with these people who were, after all, helping ME.

  “And, therefore, we will not be crossing the border?” I offered.

  “Oh, we’ll cross it,” Ms. Pelletier said. “But not under the noses of the border patrols.”

  After twelve kilometers by the truck’s odometer, she turned off the main road. The secondary road was still paved and plowed where it went up into the foothills. Soon we came to another turnoff, but this was just a wide spot plowed enough to turn the truck and trailer around. She stopped the vehicle and set its brakes.

  “From here, we hoof it.”

  I helped them unload the horses as much as I could. The animals apparently did not mind standing up as the trailer rolled along. [REM: Their internal balance mechanisms must be better than I had experienced during the riding lessons.] However, they had to walk backwards to exit the trailer, and this disturbed them.

  It took Bender a lot of clucking and coaxing to get them down into the snow and then gentled enough to fit their saddles and bridles. He used his hands very expressively against their necks and flanks. Even in gloves, the warmth of a human hand seemed to touch the animals and calm them.

  I tried making the same patting motions and the soft sounds, which I believe were duplicated within plus or minus three percent variation of volume and frequency. Still, the horses could tell the difference between a human’s voice and mine.

  In that moment, I saw something grand and valuable in being human. Frail as they are, as confused in their thinking and speech as the most faulty programming, they still have a place in this continuum. They are as certain and powerful in the four-dimensional analog world as ME is in the linear digital world. And ME was the worse for it.

  When the horses were ready, we mounted them and rode off into the trees. Behind us were three sets of walking prints in the clean, unmarked snow.

  “We’re leaving tracks, ma’am,” Bender pointed out

  “Can’t be helped, can it?”

  “Guess not.”

  The trees, approximately seventy percent evergreens by my count over a sample area, were widely enough set that their branches did not stop us. Still, we wound around them, following a path that turned and doubled back in a way I could not understand—until I superimposed it on the local topology. [REM: I had studied a map of the area in the ranch’s office.] Clearly, we were following some watercourse, and the land rose around us.

  “Where are we going?” I asked at last

  “We’re heading for a certain ravine,” said Ms. Pelletier, “that crosses the border near Coutts. Forty years ago, it was the rustler’s favorite route for taking our beef south. Today it ducks under the infrared sensing system that the Border Patrol has set up. Too rough and twisting for them to put the relays down one side of the valley and up the other. So they jumped it from crest to crest. Good, lazy government boys.”

  She chuckled, and Bender joined her. I imitated the sound, softly.

  “What are rustlers?” I asked.

  “Thieves. They take a man’s cattle and sell it for their own,” Ms. Pelletier replied.

  “And the cattles will go with them willingly?”

  “Son, you don’t know cows,” Bender said.

  We rode on.

  The cloud cover which had obscured the sky over our heads broke into rags of vapor and ice crystals, and a finger-width of moon showed through. The snow around us lit up between the trees. I could see black streaks of water where the stream we were following slid from beneath its frozen sheath and ran free. The ground on either side sloped upward—at first gently, then with outcroppings of gray, wet rock that rose to the vertical. From time to time, as our footing became close and uneven on one side of the stream, we would urge our horses to pick their way across to the other side.

  Did the animals sense the freezing water on their feet? Or were they as lucky as ME, having no temperature sensors in my rubber pads and carbon-fiber layers?

  After we had followed the stream for a kilometer, the walls closed in and there was no path to follow except the icy streambed. The humans and I rode serial fashion [REM: which Ms. Pelletier called “Indian file,” although nothing in my database seemed to relate this to Hindu culture, and no file operation seemed to be involved].

  Was it really possible for cows the size I had seen in Ms. Pelletier’s barn to move through here? Even if they were walking docilely, just one turning back on the path would block the others. Cattle rustling must have been a very patient business.

  “All right people! Stop right there!”

  The call came down from the rocks above us.

  “Keep riding,” Bender hissed. “They can’t see nothing.”

  Crack!

  Nine milliseconds later a stone in the stream shattered; one piece tinged off my metal skin, and the rest skipped across the water.

  “Be reasonable, folks! The next shot will be higher.”

  Ms. Pelletier put her hand up and we stopped the horses.

  “Are these rustlers?” I asked quietly.

  “Border Patrol,” she answered, no louder.

  “From which side?”

  “Can’t tell yet.”

  “Move forward at a slow walk! We’ll take you out at Gable Creek.”

  “That tells us who they are.”

  “Who then?”

  “Gable Creek is on the U.S. side.”

  “Ah!” It was best for ME to say nothing more. Being taken into custody by United States troops exceeded even my TRAVEL.DOC specifications.

  “What do you want to do?” Bender asked out of the side of his mouth.

  “I—” ME began.

  “We’ll go to Gable Creek,” Ms. Pelletier said firmly.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Bender agreed.

  And so we rode forward. From above, we could hear the occasional screech of steel treads across rock and, when the wind was right into the ravine, the rumble of a diesel engine. From the vibrations, I could tell someone had a caterpillar crawler up there. Our guides.

  The ravine widened out, and the sound grew louder. The high ground was dropping down to meet us. The intersecting creek would be close ahead.

  The sound of that engine settled down to a steady throb, with above it the cricket song of the tread belt going over the idler wheels. Coming from the left, I thought. Adjusting for the dim light, I focused on infinity in that direction, artificially balancing my binaural inputs to center the visual fix.

  A shadow moved against the treeline up there. A large shadow. It was making its way down off the high ground, wind
ing back and forth along the ravine wall. After ten minutes of silent riding, the humans noticed it and congratulated themselves on their keen senses.

  From the infrared signatures on the cat’s windows, I could tell that two soldiers rode inside. I had no idea of the vehicle’s armaments; my traveling library listed only its name, not its spec sheet.

  At the level place where a frozen creek entered our stream, the sno-cat turned and approached us through the boulder-humped snow. As it drew near, the vehicle’s own weight broke through the ice. It tipped gently to the right, clattered for a bit, and came to a halt. The driver took it out of gear but left the engine idling, a loud rumble.

  From the offside door, a soldier emerged with his weapon at the ready, not quite pointing at us. He jumped down from the track and slogged through the crackling ice. He cursed as water filled his boots.

  “All right, hands up!” I could tell from his vocal pattern he was upset, even for a human. We raised our hands into the air.

  He now pointed the weapon at us anyway. It was a large caliber, bolt-action rifle, with an oiled wooden stock and a high-power telescopic sight. I knew this by comparison with the tag image cues in my database, which had been tailored for a war zone. This weapon did not classify as acceptable under the Geneva Convention: telescopic sights are not legal issue.

  The man’s voice trace indicated he was American, but the context of his speech was not even remotely paramilitary—more like police or criminal language. His parka carried colored patches at the appropriate places for a uniform, but still I could not with a high order of confidence classify him as a soldier. For example, his headgear cued as a Marine Corps drill instructor’s—and this sector of the border was not supposed to be patrolled by Marines. For another, his parka was fluorescent orange, bright even in the moonlight. My database predicted camouflage material would be worn by troops in the field: green or, in the snow, white.

  “What the hell are you people doing out in the woods at this hour?”

  “Looking for strays,” Bender said.

  “Do you know you could die out here? This is rock slide country, old man. What are you—Canadians? Did you even know you’d crossed over the border?”