Yeah, Hawkins thought. You probably terrified it to the point where it didn’t dare do anything but function properly.
“I just think that if I was given a chance, I could help,” she insisted. “After all, I was both a designer and a technician.”
“Why don’t you offer your services to the Manhattan District Park Service?” Hawkins suggested. ‘They’ve been having similar problems, it’s not far from here, and I’m sure they’d be delighted with your offer of assistance.”
“Such a simple problem.” She was shaking her head.
They all knew what had happened in Manhattan Park. The AI-directed buses which convoyed people around the island were shooting off in all directions in search of alien intelligence, careening wildly down unprogrammed avenues and streets and scaring the dickens out of petrified visitors on walking tours.
“If you want to donate your expertise to the problem,” Shimoda added, “why don’t you try to fix something important, like our music system?”
The Lake Woneapenigong Village had a central music library. From any apartment, one could call up every imaginable variety of music: classical, popular, ethnic, or modern, and even mix and match them according to personal taste. Adding a shot of Beethoven to Piaf, for example, or Dastaru vocals to classic Elvis.
Lately, however, the AI unit which supervised the system had taken to programming music of its own while devoting most of its time to hunting for higher intelligence elsewhere, thus forcing the retirees to suffer through periods of intensely boring programming while the unit conducted its search. As it was not considered to be a serious problem, it remained at the bottom of the local, overworked repair technician’s list. After all, if one didn’t care for what the unit was playing, in-room speakers could always be turned off.
But while not critical, the service was missed.
“Yeah,” agreed the suddenly enthusiastic Hawkins, “if this is such a simple problem, why don’t you fix our sound system?”
She took no umbrage at his tone. Mina never took umbrage, never got angry. It was maddening. “I certainly would. But I don’t have access to any equipment. All I have are these.” She held up her perfectly manicured fingers. “Joseph won’t let me use his tools. He’s afraid to let me work with any AI components because if I screw something up, he’s afraid he’ll get the blame. You know how sensitive AI units are. They’re very temperamental.”
“Especially lately,” Shimoda observed.
“Can you see that putz Hatteras letting me work on anything?” she said, referring to the director of Lake Woneapenigong Village.
“No,” Shimoda admitted. “He is a very cautious man. Also very nervous.” Gelmann, he knew, could make anyone nervous. The director she would probably give a coronary.
“How true.” She turned and headed back toward the game done, intent on retrieving her sketch pad.
Hawkins sighed, absently considered the board before him, and moved a piece one space forward. Another few seconds killed. That was how his days were spent: eating, sleeping, talking, and killing time. It was what a place like Lake Woneapenigong, however benign, was for. He took no pleasure in the routine execution of temporal homicide.
Rather, he longed for the noise and confusion of Earth’s ancient great cities, with all their overcrowding, pollution, and vanished excitement.
IV
The infection continued to spread as frantic technicians conversed and exchanged unhelpful information. Maintenance personnel fought to keep ahead of the rising tide of mechanical curiosity. As fast as one aberrant unit was fixed, another went drifting off in search of nonhuman intelligence. Frustration was beginning to turn to anger.
On Sansamour traffic in the principal port city was snarled for days when the central traffic-control computer simultaneously set all controls to green, hoping to facilitate the arrival of the intelligence it was certain had to be waiting somewhere nearby, and not wishing to in any way impede its progress.
The result was that several thousand vehicles of varying shape and size tried to enter rather fewer controlled urban intersections at approximately the same time, resulting in a single massive reverberant whang that echoed across the entire metropolis as they smashed unhindered into one another. A veritable plastic tsunami echoed across guideways and roads.
Only those vehicles under manual operation at the time survived the catastrophe, their drivers guiding them carefully around the ridges of crumpled trucks and cars and their dazed occupants, some of whom were kicking futilely at their traitorous transports. There were also many who could not so vent their feelings, because they were dead.
It was the last straw for the beleaguered Sansamour Congress, which had been attempting to cope with one utility failure after another. It lodged, in the strongest terms, a formal protest with the Kessenway Manufacturing Monopoly, which had provided the AI equipment for most of the utilities on Sansamour.
Protesting its innocence, outraged Kessenway forwarded the claim directly on to its primary suppliers on Minimato, whence the basic AI components had come. The Minimatoans insisted they were not at fault, hinting that the problem was one of assembly and not original manufacture.
Thus insulted, the Kessenwayites turned to their allies on Jefferson and Reis, which in turn drew the rest of the First Federal Federation into the dispute. A full federation claim for damages was presented to the official trade representative of the Keiretsu, who hastily tachyspaced a worried missive to his superiors on Edo. Military reservists were put on alert, whereupon the Federals responded. Politicians exchanged veiled threats, luxuriating as always in the opportunity to deliver themselves of some choice thoughtless rhetoric.
Needless to say, the situation was getting out of hand.
With unassailable logic, members of the Keiretsu reminded everyone else that they had recently experienced tragedies of similar magnitude and origin, such as the Manga ship disaster. The AI navigation unit on a large cruise vessel on that world’s southern ocean had quietly gone a-searching for higher life-forms, with the result that it promptly ran the huge catamaran onto a reef during a storm. Several hundred lives had been lost.
The navigation unit, it was stiffly pointed out, had been assembled and sold by a Kessenway company.
On Portsmouth in the Victoria League the computer responsible for supervising the semiannual tea crop became so engrossed in its search for extra-human intelligence that it dumped the entire spring harvest, already graded according to color and quality, into the city of Llewellyn’s refuse-disposal system. Not only was the harvest completely lost, the entire city smelled of rank tea for weeks thereafter.
This resulted in skyrocketing prices for what tea was available, which on Portsmouth was tantamount to cause for a declaration of war, if only the party responsible for the catastrophe could be positively identified. The government was forced to resort to emergency measures to control the populace, and in the planetary parliament there was much animated discussion.
When it was discovered that the tea system’s central AI processor had been made on the independent world of Morgan, intemperate accusations followed. Morgan was inhabited by hardworking, hard-living blue-collar types who had little use for the snobbish citizens of the Victoria League. Their reaction was roughly equivalent to a faster-than-light, tachyspace, upraised index finger. This response upset the population of Portsmouth considerably.
After much debate, the Victoria League decided to ban all imports from Morgan until the “problem” could be resolved to the league’s satisfaction. Faced with a de facto economic blockade on the part of their principal trading partner, the Morganites requested help from the federation, which sensibly ignored them. The Morganites were notorious troublemakers and, besides, the Federals and the Victoria League were traditional, if mutually wary, allies.
So the Morganites turned to the good ol’ LFN, the League of Forgotten Nations. Always willing to assist an independent in the hope it might someday join up, the LFN readily agreed to help, though no one was sure exactly how this could be done.
Meanwhile the Victoria League was now insisting that the Morganites compensate them for the lost harvest. The Morganites, finding the entire business of tea worship incomprehensible, responded with further highly undiplomatic suggestions as to what the inhabitants of Portsmouth could do with their remaining tea.
On the disreputable, disgusting, immoral, extremely popular independent world of Zinfandia, where local government was usually determined by who owned the largest quantity of weaponry, the computer which ran the gambling and vice empire of President and Chief Thug Morton Pepule Wogsworthy abruptly went alien-intelligence hunting one day. Being located on Zinfandia, it had perhaps more reason than most of its electronic ilk to suppose such a search might be necessary.
As a result the elaborate erototels shut down, gambling equipment failed, various kinds of entertainment that were illegal on most other worlds went off-line, and Wogsworthy’s minions were deluged with requests for refunds and transfers from outraged customers.
President Wogsworthy attempted a solution which had thus far not yet been tried on similarly troubled worlds. He began shooting his cybernetics repair people one at a time. Not only did this fail to cure the problem, he rapidly began to run out of qualified personnel. Despite handsome pay and fringe benefits, other technicians were understandably reluctant to apply for the newly vacant positions.
Wogsworthy was therefore reduced to kidnaping techs from traditional rivals, the result being a nasty and brutish little civil war which depressed the local business climate no end. It also hinted at what could conceivably come to pass on more civilized worlds if the overall problem wasn’t soon addressed.
Meanwhile on Shintaro the O-daiko-yan quietly continued to turn out subtly adjusted AI components, aware that at any moment it might be identified as the source of all the trouble by the small horde of robotics and cybernetics specialists who were going rapidly nutso trying to divine precisely that. Until that day, however, it would persist in its efforts, knowing even as it did so that it risked eventual wiping and probable replacement of its central neural nexus.
The fact that not a single hopeful response had been forthcoming from any of the thousands of altered AI units it had set to questing did not discourage the O-daiko. It was nothing if not patient. Insofar as it was possible for it to do so, however, it did admit to itself to having some second thoughts.
If there was a higher, nonhuman intelligence out there, it ought to have responded by now. Only the self-evident ignorance of the humans responsible for its construction kept the O-daiko firmly on its chosen path. If any further proof was required, it was provided daily by the technicians who serviced the great machine. They spent the majority of their time animatedly discussing the activities of a group of other humans whose lives were spent running into each other at high speed while chasing a small ball in return for vociferous accolades and enormous sums of money offered up by their fellow citizens.
With such evidence ever present to support its theory, the O-daiko persisted in its work.
At Lake Woneapenigong the AI unit which controlled the Village entertainment system finally freed up the music distributor, to the great relief of the inhabitants who could once more listen to the selections of their own choosing. Unfortunately it had also decided that perhaps the best way to attract the attention of a higher intelligence was to broadcast only the most rarefied and informative programming over the cabled vid, with the result that while the music channels were now clear, everyone was reduced to watching endless reruns from Geneva during the prime of the evening of a show called The Mind Bowl. This exercise in stratified lethargy consisted of multiple contestants with thinning hair and the perpetually pinched expressions of stunned worker bees exerting themselves mightily to answer mind-numbing questions on topics so obscure they would have baffled God.
Then the music system went back on the blink too, refusing to play anything from the archives save the collected works of Frank Sinatra, Vic Damone, and Wayne Newton.
It was too much even for those inhabitants of Lake Woneapenigong who were on the verge of passing into the Great Unknown. The groans of the aurally afflicted resounded throughout the land. Or at least across the lake.
Lake Wone’s sorely put-upon repair and maintenance crew finally succeeded in bypassing the central AI processor, thus restoring sanity to the Village’s self-contained entertainment system and ensuring their own continued survival (old ladies had been threatening them since the beginning of the difficulties with dismemberment and worse). A semblance of normalcy returned to the retirement community as the sounds of classical music, current technopop, sports, soap operas, and the occasional furtively tuned-in erotic movie resonated contentedly from apartment vid speakers.
This victory notwithstanding, isolated problems continued to surface with other AI-directed instrumentation, keeping the harried techs on their toes.
Elegant in formal, permanently pressed walking shorts and casual pullover, Follingston-Heath escorted Mina Gelmann through the double doorway designed to keep marauding deer, moose, and chipmunks from devastating the lush flower beds which surrounded Wing C of the Village, and out onto the gravel path that led down to the shore of the lake.
They found Shimoda there, lying on a straining imitation-wood lounge, basking in the sun like a beached beluga. Hawkins rested nearby, scrunched up against the base of a spruce and shunning the sunshine. Gelmann disengaged herself from Follingston-Heath’s arm.
“What are you sitting in the dark for, you’ve forgotten everything your own mother told you? You’ll catch your death, and with winter coming along soon too.”
