Донна Эндрюс - Delete all suspects

"Good question, * I said. "Usually space to put a computer. The co-lo company sets up a big space someplace where real estate and Internet access are cheap, installs racks that can hold hundreds of servers, and maintains staff on-site twenty-four hours a day to keep things running properly. Provides high-speed phone lines, fire prevention, physical security. It's a lot cheaper and easier for a small business like Eddie's to rent space at a co-lo site than to do all that itself. "

"Then what does he do with all the computers he has here?" Tim asked.

"Plays with them, most likely, n I said. "Or does his administrative work on them — bookkeeping and word processing. Maybe developing and testing sites on them before he moves them to the co-lo site. Assuming most of the computers there even run."

"Yeah," Tim said. "He's in the middle of taking a couple of them apart. Or maybe putting them back together. Hard to tell."

"Not surprising," I said. "Remember how many old nonworking computers we had lying around Alan Grace before Casey came onboard? I bet at least half of Eddie's machines are broken ones he hasn't gotten around to fixing or obsolete ones he can't bring himself to throw away because they just might come in handy someday. But Maude can figure that out when she gets there."

"I'll wait for her, then," Tim said. "All I know is half of them are blinking or beeping, and the other half are just sitting there doing nothing, and I don't know which half worries me the most."

"Maude will handle it," I said.

Though it occurred to me that if Eddie had any reasonable kind of security on his systems, Maude might need some help figuring it out. I fired off a message to KingFischer, asking if he could take time from his hacking project to help her.

Which was silly, of course, because obviously he could take the time — all he needed to do was call for some additional processing power. It was more a question of whether KingFischer would be in the mood to help, and that wasn't exactly something I could predict.

"Of course I have the time," he replied, almost immediately.

"But why is Maude doing this? Why don't you send your hardware technician?"

"Casey? He's having his wisdom teeth removed today," I said.

"Why?" KingFischer asked.

"They're redundant," I said. "By the time the wisdom teeth grow in, humans already have sufficient teeth for eating purposes. Often they don't have room for the wisdom teeth and this causes problems."

"Then why grow them?" he asked.

"Apparently, it's involuntary," I said. "They'reprobably something that once served a useful purpose but are no longer necessary because of evolutionary changes, or changes in humans' environment or lifestyle. Like tonsils and appendixes."

"Seems inefficient," he said. "Maintaining a system that has been patched and jerry rigged long past its useful life."

"I don't think they see themselves that way."

"Still, someone should look into redesigning their whole architecture, " KingFischer said.

"They already are," I said, and fed him a few gigabytes of data on ways in which humans were trying to redesign themselves, from cosmetic and reconstructive surgery to genetic engineering. I wasn't sure whether this satisfied him or merely convinced him that I didn't want to talk about the topic of new, improved humans, but at least he dropped the subject.

"That's a strange name, wisdom teeth," he said instead.

"It comes from the fact that they don't erupt in childhood, but in young adulthood," I explained, though I knew KingFischer could find the same information if he'd make the effort. "After the human has acquired some amount of maturity and wisdom."

"Then what's Casey doing with them?" he asked.

Before I could determine whether this was a serious question or a joke, he turned his attention back to his hacking project. Presumably, a joke, then. Or at least an attempt at repartee.

KingFischer making jokes. A relatively new development, and one that made me realize that perhaps he and I were part of yet another attempt by humans to redesign themselves. Perhaps the Uni-

versa/ Library programmers who created us had their own vision of an improved human — the power of the human mind amplified by potentially unlimited processing power and access to data.

I'm not sure we've lived up to our programmers hopes. Only two of us have achieved the sentience that I think our programmers initially dreamed we would reach — assuming that KingFischer really has achieved sentience and is not just simulating his rather eccentric notion of it. Most of us have become nothing more than another set of tools for humans. Marvelously powerful and sophisticated tools, but only tools.

Perhaps that's because our programmers endowed us with their own limitations along with their strengths. So many of them were men and women who seemed to live entirely in cyberspace, or perhaps in their minds. That could explain why we AlPs were created with virtually no way to experience the world outside our hardware, much less to manipulate it. No wonder so many of the AlPs had only a vague notion of where data left off and the real world began.

I found myself remembering Zack, the programmer who created me, KingFischer, and many of the most successful AlPs. Not that I ever forgot him, but I tried not to dwell on the fact that he was no longer around to guide us. He was, like the other AI programmers, someone for whom the power of the human mind was one of the most important aspects of humanity — perhaps the defining aspect. But not the only aspect. He also valued something else. He called it personality, but I think it was more than that. Emotion. Conscience. Perhaps even a soul. Whatever it was, he tried to give us that, along with all our intellectual power. He was the first programmer to succeed in creating a working A IP, and the others seem to have succeeded only to the extent that they followed his lead. None of them ever became as good at it as he was. I don't think it's an accident that KingFischer and I, two of Zack's creations, were the first AlPs to achieve sentience.

Not, I hope, the last. Though lately I'd been feeling pessimistic about the whole subject.

Of course it's possible that creating sentient A IPs was never most programmers' goal, or even Zack's goal. Maybe they only wanted

marvelously powerful and sophisticated tools, and our sentience was a happy accident, like the discovery of penicillin in Alexander Fleming's petri dish.

Or an unhappy accident; an unlooked-for and unwanted byproduct like superbugs, the mutated, antibiotic-resistant bacteria spawned by humans' unwise use of their marvelous medical discovery.

At which point I decided that I had been right about my need for distraction. If Vd started comparing myself to a staph infection, I really did need something new to think about.

Luckily, Maude was logging in from her laptop, which meant that she must have arrived at Mrs. Stallman's house.

Fridayi 12:M5 p.m.

Maude forced herself to keep smiling pleasantly.

"Yes," she said. "I'm the computer expert Tim mentioned."

Normally, modesty would have made her deny being an expert. But something about the obvious disbelief in Mrs. Stallman's eyes made her abandon her usual tendency to downplay her skill with computers. Obviously, the woman expected someone completely different. The typical media stereotype, perhaps—a rumpled, inarticulate twenty-five-year-old male with thick spectacles, not a self-possessed, fifty-five-year-old professional woman. A rather chic one at that, Maude thought, raising her chin as she caught sight of herself in Mrs. Stallman's hall mirror. She'd worn one of her most flattering and feminine outfits today, in case she hadn't gotten home in time to change before the now-canceled dinner with Dan. At least her efforts hadn't been completely wasted. Mrs. Stallman looked positively intimidated.