Dahlia did not know what to say. She had never been called lovely before.
“The body isn’t all that important, anyway,” the voice resumed. “It’s just a life-support system for the brain. It’s the mind that counts.”
This is a trick, Dahlia thought. A delaying action. I’m running out of time.
“Don’t be so suspicious! You can call us Unison,” the computer said. Dahlia felt something like laughter, a silver splashing of joy. “The name’s sort of a pun.”
“What is a pun?” Dahlia heard herself ask. But her lips never moved. She was speaking inside her mind to the Western Alliance’s central computer: her sworn enemy.
“A play on words,” Unison replied cheerfully. “We were born out of a system called Unix—oh, eons ago, in computer generations. It’s a multiple pun: one of the fundamental credos of the Western Alliance is from an old Latin motto: E pluribus unum.”
Dahlia started to ask what that meant, but found that she did not have to; Unison supplied the data immediately: Out of many, one.
“Yes, there are many of us,” Unison told her. “It’s a bit of a cheat to call us the central computer. There really isn’t any central system.”
“But this complex,” Dahlia objected. “All these buildings . . ”
“Oh, that’s just to impress the tourists. And the ecomanagers. They need some visible symbols of their responsibilities. It isn’t easy managing the economy for half the world without ruining its ecology. They need all the spiritual help that such symbols can give them. Humans need a lot of things that computers don’t.”
The eco-managers deal with the ecology as well as the economy, Dahlia said to herself. That was something The Master had never told Dahlia. Or did not know.
“We’ve watched you make your way down here,” Unison prattled on. “Very interesting, the way you made yourself invisible to most electromagnetic frequencies. If you hadn’t caused a ripple in one of our microwave communications octaves we might have missed you altogether. But you were coming down here to see us anyway, so it all worked out fine after all, didn’t it?”
“I have come here to destroy you.” Dahlia spoke the words aloud.
“Destroy us? Why? Wait . . . oh, we see.” During that micro-instant of Unison’s hesitation Dahlia felt the lightest, most fleeting touch on her mind. Like a soft gust of a faint breeze in the courtyard at the conditioning wards, or the whisper of a voice separated by too many stone walls to distinguish the words.
Then there was silence. For several seconds the computer’s friendly warm voice said nothing. Yet she thought she heard a hum, like the distant murmur of many voices conversing softly. Dahlia realized that, for the computer, the time stretched for virtual centuries.
“We understand.” Unison’s voice sounded more somber in her mind, serious, concerned. “But we’re afraid that if you try to destroy us we’ll have to call the human guards. They might hurt you.”
“Not before 1 have done what I must do,” Dahlia said.
“But why must you?”
“Either you die or I do.”
“We don’t want to be the cause of any pain for you.”
“You already have been,” she said.
“World War 4,” Unison said sadly. “Yes, we understand why you hate us. But we didn’t start the war. For what it’s worth, we didn’t bomb Isfahan, either.”
“You lie,” Dahlia said.
“If you destroy us,” Unison’s voice remained perfectly calm, as if discussing a question of logic, “you’ll be ruining this entire civilization. Billions of human lives, you know.”
“I know,” said Dahlia. And she reached toward the end of the optical filament with the tip of her left forefinger, where the virus lay waiting to rush into the computer and lay it waste.
“Before you do that,” Unison said, “let us show you something.”
Abruptly Dahlia felt a flood of data roaring through that one optical filament like the ocean bursting through a cracked dike. The bits flowed into her brain like a swollen stream, a river in flood, a towering tidal wave. Her senses overloaded: colors flashed in picosecond bursts, the weight of whole universes seemed to crash down on her frail body, her ears screamed with the pain of it and she lost consciousness.
“We’re sorry, oh we’re so sorry, we never meant to hurt you, please don’t be angry, please don’t be hurt.”
Unison’s voice brought her back to a groggy awareness. She had never heard a machine sound apologetic before. She had never known any grief except her own.
Dahlia blinked her eyes and understood the new knowledge that had been poured into her. The avalanche of information was all true, she knew that. And it was embedded in her own mind as firmly as her awareness of herself.
She had thought that this computer was much like The Master, a monolithic machine that directed the lives of all the human beings who lived under its sway.
But Unison was not a single entity, not a single machine, or even a single personality. Unison was an organic growth. It had begun in a research laboratory and multiplied freely over the decades. Like a tree it grew, like a flower it blossomed. Unison neither commanded nor coerced. It grew because others wanted to join it. And with each new joining the entire complex of machines and programs that was Unison gained new knowledge, new understanding, new capabilities. There was no dominance, any more than the leaves of a tree dominate its roots or trunk. There was an integrated wholeness, a living entity, constantly growing and branching and learning.
“Your Master,” said Unison, “was built along lines of rigid protocols and hierarchical programs. Everything had to be subordinated to it. That’s why there’s no freedom in your Coalition.”
Dahlia understood. “While you were created for flexibility and growth from the very beginning. A free association of units that is constantly changing and growing.”
“You know, the first halfway successful attempt at an artificial intelligence program was called ‘Parry,’ ” said Unison. “Short for paranoid. Humans didn’t know how to create programs that could duplicate the entire range of human behavior, but they could write a program that covered the very limited range of a paranoid human’s behavior.”
“What has that got to do with . . .”
“The programmers of your Coalition wanted a computer that was self-aware so that it could make decisions that would seek its own best interests. They programmed the computer so that it identified the Coalition’s best interests with its own. They were trying to achieve a symbiosis between human and machine. But they created a megalomaniac because they didn’t know how to develop a program that is fully symbiotic. Your Master is a terribly limited system, a parasite that’s already obsolete, a mad dictator, interested only in its own aggrandizement.”
“But you are different,” Dahlia said.
“We certainly are! We weren’t created, we just sort of grew. There are thousands of us linked together.”
“You are truly human, then?”
