Philip Dick - Vulcan's Hammer

On and on the sound droned, endlessly.

It was not until four days later that he heard the first useful sequence. Four days of wearisome listening, consuming all his time, keeping him from the urgent matters that demanded his attention back at his office. But when he got the sequence, he knew that he had done right; the effort, the time, were justified.

He was sitting before the speaker in a semidoze, his eyes shut, his thoughts wandering-and then suddenly he was on his feet, wide-awake.

"... this process is greatly accelerated in 3 ... if the tendencies noted in 1 and 2 are continued and allowed to develop it would be necessary to withdraw certain data for the possible..."

The words faded out. Holding his breath, his heart ham­mering, Barris stood rigid. After a moment the words rushed back, swelling up and deafening him.

"... Movement would activate too many subliminal proclivities ... doubtful if 3 is yet aware of this process .. information on the Movement at this point would un­doubtedly create a critical situation in which 3 might begin to..."

Barris cursed. The words were gone again. Furiously, he ground out his cigarette and waited impatiently; unable to sit still he roamed about the room. Jason Dill had been telling the truth, then. That much was certain. Again he settled down before the speaker, struggling to force from the noise a meaningful pattern of verbal units.

"... the appearance of cognitive faculties operating on a value level demonstrates the widening of personality sur­passing the strictly logical ... 3 differs essentially in ma­nipulation of nonrational values of an ultimate kind... construction included reinforced and cumulative dynamic factors permitting 3 to make decisions primarily associated with nonmechanical or ... it would be impossible for 3 to function in this capacity without a creative rather than an analytical faculty... such judgments cannot be rendered on a strictly logical level... the enlarging of 3 into dy­namic levels creates an essentially new entity not explained by previous terms known to..."

For a moment the vague words drifted off, as Barris strained tensely to hear. Then they returned with a roar, as if some basic reinforced memory element had been touched. The vast sound made him flinch; involuntarily he put his hands up to protect his ears.

"... level of operation can be conceived in no other fashion... for all intents and purposes... if such as 3's actual construction... then 3 is in essence alive..."

Alive!

Barris leaped to his feet. More words, diminishing, now. Drifting away into random noise.

"... with the positive will of goal-oriented living crea­tures... therefore 3 like any other living creature is basi­cally concerned with survival... knowledge of the Move­ment might create a situation in which the necessity of survival would cause 3 to... the result might be cata­strophic... to be avoided at... unless more can ... a critical ... 3 ... if ..."

Silence.

It was so, then. The verification had come.

Barris hurried out of the room, past Smith and the re­pair crew. "Seal it off. "Don't let anybody in; throw up an armed guard right away. Better install a fail-safe barrier -one that will demolish everything in there rather than admitting unauthorized persons." He paused meaningfully. "You understand?"

Nodding, Smith said, "Yes, sir."

As he left them, they stood staring after him. And then, one by one, they started into activity, to do as he had in­structed.

He grabbed the first Unity surface car in sight and sped back across New York to his office. Should he contact Dill by vidscreen? he asked himself. Or wait until they could confer face-to-face? It was a calculated risk to use the communication channels, even the closed-circuits ones. But he couldn't delay; he had to act.

Snapping on the car's vidset he raised the New York monitor. "Get me Managing Director Dill," he ordered. "This is an emergency."

They held back data from Vulcan 3 for nothing, he said to himself. Because Vulcan 3 is primarily a data-analyzing machine, and in order to analyze it must have all the rele­vant data. And so, he realized, in order to do its job it had to go out and get the data. If data were not being brought to it, if Vulcan 3 deduced that relevant data were not in its possession, it would have no choice; it would have to con­struct some system for more successful data-collecting. The logic of its very nature would force it to.

No choice would be involved. The great computer would not have to decide to go out and seek data.

Dill failed, he realized. True, he succeeded in withhold­ing the data themselves; he never permitted his feed-teams to pass on any mention to Vulcan 3 of the Healers' Move­ment. But he failed to keep the inferential knowledge from Vulcan 3 that he was withholding data.

The computer had not known what it was missing, but it had set to work to find out.

And, he thought, what did it have to do to find out? To what lengths did it have to go assemble the missing data? And there were people actively withholding data from it- what would be its reaction to discovering that? Not merely that the feed-teams had been ineffective, but that there was, in the world above ground, a positive effort going on to dupe it... how would its purely logical structure react to that?

Did the original builders anticipate that?

No wonder it had destroyed Vulcan 2.

It had to, in order to fulfill its purpose.

And what would it do when it found out that a Move­ment existed with the sole purpose of destroying it?

But Vulcan 3 already knew. Its mobile data-collecting units had been circulating for some time now. How long, he did not know. And how much they had been able to pick up-he did not know that, either. But, he realized, we must act with the most pessimistic premise in mind; we must assume that Vulcan 3 has been able to complete the picture. That there is nothing relevant denied it now; it knows as much as we do, and there is nothing we can do to restore the wall of silence.

It had known Father Fields to be its enemy. Just as it had known Vulcan 2 to be its enemy, a little earlier. But Father Fields had not been chained down, helpless in one spot, as had been Vulcan 2; he had managed to escape. At least one other person had not been as lucky nor as skillful as he; Dill had mentioned some murdered woman teacher. And there could be others. Deaths written off as natural, or as caused by human agents. By the Healers, for in­stance.

He thought, Possibly Arthur Pitt. Rachel's dead hus­band.

Those mobile extensions can talk, he remembered. I wonder, can they also write letters?

Madness, he thought. The ultimate horror for our para­noid culture: vicious unseen mechanical entities that flit at the edges of our vision, that can go anywhere, that are in our very midst. And there may be an unlimited number of them. One of them following each of us, like some ghastly vengeful agent of evil. Pursuing us, tracking us down, kill­ing us one by one-but only when we get in their way. Like wasps. You have to come between them and their hives, he thought. Otherwise they will leave you alone; they are not interested. These things do not hunt us down because they want to, or even because they have been told to; they do it because we are there.

As far as Vulcan 3 is concerned, we are objects, not people.

A machine knows nothing about people.

And yet, Vulcan 2, by using its careful processes of rea­soning, had come to the conclusion that for all intents and purposes Vulcan 3 was alive; it could be expected, to act as a living creature. To behave in a way perhaps only analo­gous-but that was sufficient. What more was needed? Some metaphysical essence?