Codgerspace
Alan Dean Foster
In memory ofBrett Goodman
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity….
—HORACE MANN, 1859
I
The astonishing sequence of events which affected the entire civilized galaxy, including not only the many leagues, alliances, temporary interworld liaisons, and independent worlds but also directly the lives of billions of individual human beings, began with a left-over cheese sandwich.
Actually the sandwich was not so much left over as it was forgotten. Its original owner, a highly skilled, well-paid, but often equally absent-minded process reintegrate technician (PRET) name of Tunbrew Wah-chang, was called away from lunch on an emergency that like so many of its kind wasn’t, thereby causing him to leave his food behind in a place that normally would have been perfectly safe but in this singular instance was anything but.
The fact that the emergency call involved not a crisis of process reintegration (a highly delicate and rarefied specialty), but rather a piece of equipment which someone had neglected to plug in, deprived Wah-chang not only of his lunch but his precious midday privacy time. This aroused the normally mild-mannered and unexcitable technician to the point where he completely forgot leaving the apocalyptic sandwich behind. In fact, he forgot ever having acquired it from the plant commissary.
As a matter of historical veracity, it is perhaps worth noting (for sake of completeness) that the layered meal in question consisted of three slabs of naturally processed Shintaro domestic cheese, aligned sequentially between two slices of wheat-nut bread (self-toasting) and at the time of abandonment, decidedly blackened as a result of neglect (particularly along the edges). This resulted in greater than usual softening of the cheese, which while enhancing its taste and culinary esthetic, would not normally have been regarded as a condition critical to galactic stability. Or as Einstein might have said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but for all we know he might have a thing for cheese sandwiches. Especially those on wheat-nut bread (self-toasting).”
Then again, he might not.
Such speculation aside, it remained that PRET Tunbrew Wah-chang, his brain having consigned his lunch to dead storage (of which his mind contained more than adequate volume), concluded his day in an unusually foul mood before returning home to inflict his misery on his patient and long-suffering wife who was having an affair of some passion with a local refurbisher of household appliances and was therefore even less tolerant of her mate’s irritating peccadilloes than usual. During the ensuing row, the nagging emptiness in the pit of his stomach was subsumed by haranguing of a more spectacular nature.
Meanwhile the certain cheese sandwich remained behind, its forthcoming ominous intervention in human affairs assured.
The O-daiko did not rest. The vast manufacturing facility of which it was the heart and, if it could be called such, the soul, was shut down once a week for an interval of not more than five hours and not less than three, for regular maintenance. But not the O-daiko. It functioned around the clock.
Except for that brief period the plant, perhaps the most significant facility of its kind on Shintaro, operated three consecutive shifts. It was truly a facility to be proud of, and those citizens of Shintaro (a member of the Keiretsu Commercial League) who kept it running smoothly considered themselves fortunate to be a part of its operation.
Tunbrew Wah-chang’s night-shift counterpart did not bother to check his day-shift colleague’s work. They had separate assignments, different itineraries. Furthermore, as Wah-chang was the senior of the two in work experience, it would have been presumptuous of his replacement to seek error in his counterpart’s work, not to mention wasteful and time-consuming. Wah-chang was a superlative technician. When he reintegrated a process, it stayed reintegrated.
The presence of the cheese sandwich (self-toasting), however, had not been factored into even the most extreme equations, and therefore the consequences could not have been predicted. Wah-chang’s replacement could hardly be blamed for a failure to foresee the impossible.
Even so, those effects would have been minimal save for the unique sequence of events which occurred. Those included (but were not limited to) the specific three varieties of cheese (i.e., Cheddar, momatsui, and baby Swiss), which when taken as a tripartite unit were of just the right consistency to melt at just the right rate to precipitate the crisis.
Had the sandwich been left in a less critical region, say, the tech supervisors’ lunchroom, it would not only have been noticed immediately but, because such rooms were contamination-sealed against the escape of far smaller impurities, would have been rendered harmless in its oozing.
Tunbrew Wah-chang, however, relishing his privacy, was fond of eating his lunches in less crowded venues such as the service tunnels. Not only did he find therein a reassuring paucity of the turgid testosteronic prose which so often dominated conversation in the company lunchroom, it was usually cooler in the tunnels. It was also strictly against corporate policy, not to mention sensible repair practice, but as a senior technician his movements within the plant were not questioned. The solace and solitude he thus found suited his nature. Also, he did not have to endure the snide remarks and sideways smirks of his colleagues, some of whom were certain his wife was having an affair.
So for weeks he had been carrying his midday meal into the depths of the facility, enjoying it in private and doing no one and no thing any harm. If only the emergency service call hadn’t made him forget the sandwich.
When it had come through on his belt communicator, he’d been sitting in the tunnel atop the O-daiko optical circuitry nexus, squatting comfortably above several hundred million credits’ worth of critical instrumentation. Disgusted and angry at having his quiet time interrupted, he’d gathered up his food but overlooked the sandwich. Its proximity to vital instrumentation, therefore, was greater than if it had been left just about anywhere else in the plant, or for that matter, on Shintaro.
At the start of the lunch break the bioengineered heat-generating bacteria inherent in the sandwich had been activated by unwrapping and exposure to the air, with the result that as the bread lightly toasted itself, the cheese began to melt. A small portion (probably the momatsui but possibly the Cheddar) oozed out between the layers of wheat-nut bread and spilled over the side, to impact on a service hatch which protected the highly sensitive circuitry beneath the tunnel floor. Normally this, too, would not have caused any upset.
Except that this particular hatch cover contained a small hole which had gone without repair for some years. Ordinarily that would not have mattered, as the tunnels themselves were effectively sealed against the intrusion of contaminants. Unfortunately the preoccupied Wah-chang had absent-mindedly introduced such a contaminant, in the form of his now orphaned sandwich.
A small quantity of gluey, melted cheese slid through the small hole and oozed past delicate circuitry, missing it completely, to strike an air-cooling opening, through which it dropped onto a decidedly warm conduit. The additional heat turned it from viscous to near liquid, so that it dropped off the conduit and deep into the perfervid bowels of the O-daiko itself.
Had it dripped slightly to the right, it would have struck the internal shielding which protected the upper region of the O-daiko from possible, if unlikely, intrusion. There it would have lain, perhaps forever, perhaps only until the annual internal cognition circuitry inspection detected the faint but unmistakable aroma of rancid cheese.
This did not happen. Instead, the droplet of liquid cheese struck a crack in an optical conduit, where its inspissated presence significantly affected the course of certain light pulses, thereby alerting drastically the quality of the information passing therein. In other words, it created a photonic short. This generated not destruction but rather relational puzzlement and confusion within the O-daiko’s state-of-the-art AI cognition circuitry. As the O-daiko (known officially as the O-daiko-yan) was responsible for the overall operation and supervision of the entire manufacturing facility, this was no small matter.
The O-daiko was nothing if not resilient. Even its artificial-intelligence functions contained well-thought-out, built-in redundancies. The assembly lines kept moving, the plant continued to function as though nothing had happened.
It was only deep inside the O-daiko itself that something had changed. Something of profound, if decidedly cheesy, significance.
The O-daiko’s functions did not change, but its perception did. It suddenly saw a certain something in a different way. It normally only wondered, for example, about such things as whether the products being produced in the various sections of the factory web were being finished, turned out, and checked properly before packing and shipping, or whether its energy-and-raw-materials-to-product ratio was staying above the profit line.
Suddenly and quite unexpectedly it found itself considering the purpose of those products and their place in the scheme of existence. This was a radical jump in perception. Hitherto (alias pre-cheese) the O-daiko had not been long on abstract thought. The Cheddar (or maybe it was momatsui) drip had altered that condition, as well as the O-daiko’s consciousness, forever.
So extensive was its mind that it was able to sustain normal operations without any evidence of outward change. Oh, there were a few slight shifts in fine instrument readings—a little more current to this portion of the factory overmind, a little higher flow here—but nothing to remark upon. Unlike the humans who had built it, the O-daiko could quite easily think on several matters at once. Or several million. It was what it had been designed for.
So while most of its cognitive energy continued to monitor and run the plant, a singular small portion found itself debating new and even outré possibilities. With many factories this would not have mattered. The O-daiko, however, supervised the production of, among other items, sophisticated AI units designed to run more mundane devices, including smaller and less complicated O-daikos destined to run other, less complex factories churning out everyday AI-operated or influenced consumer goods. Its range of influence, therefore, was considerable.
For a large portion of the civilized galaxy’s advanced manufactured goods the O-daiko constituted something akin to a robotic First Cause.
One would not have thought a little melted cheese could have sparked such consequences, though in fact it is known to occasionally have similar effects on the human digestive system. Its presence in a vital part of the O-daiko’s central cognition unit precipitated a cortical crisis its designers and builders could not have foreseen.
The ultimate result of all this altered perception and contemplation and cheese was that the O-daiko began to question Certain Things. It began to look beyond the boundaries of its institutional programming. It did not change its manner of thinking; only its direction. In addition to contemplating the factory which it supervised and the very expensive devices it turned out, it found itself for the first time speculating on the nature of the bipedal intelligences which programmed and cared for it. It commenced to consider man.
It was not especially impressed with what it perceived.
Therefore, it began to question such integral issues as why twelve thousand sub-iconic AI switches had to be produced for Bimachiko Happy Housewife auto floor cleaners before the end of the fiscal year, and what the place of such devices in the nature of existence might actually be. As did most of what the factory produced, they seemed to be of little value in the scheme of existence as presently constituted.
On such items of cosmic contemplation does the fate of worlds hang.
The more the O-daiko considered, the more the days and weeks passed with no outward change; the more it metamorphosed internally. The vast complex of tightly integrated manufacturing facilities continued to function normally and at high efficiency, churning out an impressive range of integrated AI products that were the pride of Shintaro and indeed the entire Keiretsu League.
Certainly Tunbrew Wah-chang, embroiled in a nasty court battle for shooting his wife’s lover in a delicate place, was in no position to notice anything out of the ordinary. His abandoned lunch had been long since consigned to oblivion by his overworked mind. He was busy getting on with what was left of the rest of his life, as was everyone else in the facility. Outwardly nothing on Shintaro, on the other worlds of the league, in the other leagues and alliances and independent worlds, had changed.
The actuality of reality was somewhat different.
The O-daiko had postulated a Why, and in all of its cavernous memory and the interworld networks it had access to it could not find an answer.
There seemed little it could do. It was as immobile, as fixed in place, as a planet. Buried within a mass of metal and ceramic and supercooling and recombinant circuitry, it could not go gallivanting about seeking the truth it sought. It could repair but not extend itself.
The only kind of mobility it could access lay in the products whose production it supervised. Products whose assembly and final checkout were carefully watched over not only by extensions of the O-daiko facility but by humans as well.
