Диана Дуэйн - High Wizardry

She hadn't squirreled anything away in her claudication: she was going to have to find water. More to the point, there were no bathrooms here. Dairine wished heartily that she had taken time in the Crossings, or even back at Natural History, to use the facilities for something other than programming interstellar jumps. The memory of what sometimes seemed to be her mother's favorite line, "You should have gone before we left!" made her grin ruefully.

She got up to improvise what she could. Her turtle started to go with her. "No," she said, as she might have to Ponch. "Stay!" The turtle's response to this was the same as Ponch's would have been: It went after her anyway.

Dairine sighed and headed off to a little outcropping of rock about half a mile away. When she had finished, and started back to where the computer lay, she could already see small shapes moving on the horizon. She sat down with her bread and bologna, started making a sandwich, and waited for them.

Pretty soon she was knee-deep in turtles, or would have been had she been standing up. After the first few walked into her as her lapturtle had, she asked the computer to get them to hold still when they reached her. Something like two hundred of them were shortly gathered around her. They were all exact copies of her friend, even to the striations and banding inside them. She sighed a little as she looked at them.

"This isn't gonna work, you guys," she said. "There's more to life than walking around, and none of you have anything like hands…"

"Hi!" said all the turtles, simultaneously. She couldn't hear the ones that were outside her bubble of air, but the ones that were inside made racket enough.

She had to laugh at that. "Look," she said to the computer, pushing her first turtle out of her lap and putting the computer there instead, "where did the mind behind these critters get the design for them?"

"Probably from one of the design templates in the "Make" utility," said the computer.

"Okay, let's get into that. If these guys are going to be the arms and legs for the mind that's running them, they need arms!"

The computer's screen flicked obediently to the opening screen for the "Make" utility. Dairine frowned at the menu for a while. The computer had a machine-assisted drafting utility: she chose that, while her turtle tried to climb back into her lap.

"No," she said. "No, honey!" ' It was no use. "With!" said the turtle. "With, with, with, with-"

She laughed helplessly. "Boy, are you ever GIGO," she said.

"Yes," the turtle said, and sat down next to her abruptly, folding all its legs under it like a contented mechanical cat.

Dairine put her eyebrows up at that. Was that all it wanted? A name? "Gigo," she said, experimentally.

"Yes!"

It sounds happy, she thought. Can it have emotions?

"Good baby," she said, and patted it. "Good Gigo."

"Yes!" said Gigo, and "Yes!" said several of the other turtles around, and it began to spread through the crowd to the limits of her air: "Yes, yes, yes-"

"Okay," she said, "he's good, you're all good, now put a cork in it!"

They fell silent. But there had been no mistaking the sound of joy.

"I can see I'm gonna have to find names for all of you," she said. "Can't have the whole bunch of you answering to that."

She turned her attention to the blank graphics screen. "Bring up the design that. ." She paused. "I can't just keep banging on the ground. Does what you were talking to have a name for itself?"

"No."

Dairine sighed. "Okay, just let's call it a motherboard for the moment. Bring up the design it was using for Gigo and his buddies."

The screen flickered, showing Dairine a three-dimensional diagram, which the computer then rotated to show all the turtle's surfaces. "Good," she said. "How do I make changes?"

"The screen is touch-sensitive. Touch a line and state what you want done with it."

Dairine spent a cheerful hour or so there, pausing for bites of sandwich, as she started to redesign the turtles. She wasn't shy about it. The original design had its points, but as the mobile units of an intelligence, the turtles were sadly lacking in necessary equipment. She built several of the legs into arms, with six claws apiece at the end of them, four "fingers" and two opposable "thumbs"; this hand she attached to the arm by a ball-and-socket joint so that it could rotate completely around without having to stop. As an afterthought, she put another pair of arms on the turtle's back end, so that it wouldn't have to turn around to pick something up if it didn't want to.

She took the turtle's rather simplistic visual sensor, barely more than a photosensitive spot, and turned it into something of a cross between the human retina and a bee's faceted eye-a multiple-lensed business equally good for close work and distant vision. She placed several of these around the turtle's perimeter, and a couple on top, and then for good measure added a special-purpose lens that was actually something like a small Cassegrain telescope, focusing on a mirror-polished bit of silicon buried a ways into the turtle's "brain." She added infrared and ultraviolet sensing. Ears for sound they already had; she considered that it might be wise to give them something to hear radio with, too, but couldn't decide on which frequency to work with, and let the idea go for the moment. They could work it out themselves.

Dairine sat staring at the screen, musing. The newly awakened intelligence had made all its mobiles alike: probably because it didn't understand the concept of otherness yet. She would make them different from one another. But they were going to have to be different on the inside, too, to do any good. If some danger comes along that they have to cope with, it's no use their information processors being all the same: whatever it is could wipe them all out at once. If they're as different as they can be, they'll have a better chance of surviving.

She paused in her design to look closely at the structure of the chip layering in the turtles-not so much at what the layers were made of, but what their arrangement meant. At the molecular level she found the basic building-block of the chips, as basic as DNA in humans: not a chain molecule, but a sort of tridimensional snowflake of silicon atoms and atoms of other elements. DNA was simple beside these.

Any given silicon molecule hooked with up to fourteen others, using any one of fifty different chemical compounds to do it; and every different arrangement of hookups between molecules or layers had a specific meaning, as each arrangement has in DNA. With the help of the computer she began to sort out the code buried in the interconnected snowflakes. Hours, it took her, and she was perfectly aware that even with the computer's help she couldn't hope to deal with more than the tip of this iceberg of information. Some parts of the chip structure she did manage to identify as pure data storage, others as sensor array, associative network, life support, energy management.

Dairine began devising layering arrangements different from those in the turtles. She designed creatures that would have more associative network and so could specialize in problem solving: others with more data stacks, turtles that would be good at remembering; mobiles more richly endowed with sensors, and senses, than some of the others, that would see and hear and feel most acutely. One arrangement of layers, the one that the computer identified for her as the seat of the turtles' emotions, seemed an awfully tiny thing to Dairine. She expanded it to about three times its original size, and allowed it to interconnect at will with the other associative areas, with data memory and with the senses. Finally, to every model she designed, Dairine added a great deal of latent memory area, so that each mobile would have plenty of room to store what it experienced and to process the data it accumulated.