“They have a good time.” Hawkins wondered why he felt a sudden urge to defend the spiritual precepts of distant Candomble.
“Hedonists, the lot of them. An irresponsible bunch. Anyway, it seems that one of their innumerable holidays was about to conclude on Amado III when the climate controller monitoring equipment took itself off-line to go hunting for this mythical suprahuman intelligence. The most noticeable consequence was that heavy unprogrammed cloud-seeding resulted in six centimeters of snow. Can you imagine? Have you ever seen pictures of the Candomblean worlds? All tropical, or at least warm.
“So everyone was running around freezing in their silly little costumes and clothes, all strings and diaphanous material and that nonsensical peek-a-boo stuff the women there seem so fond of.”
A faint gleam came into Hawkins’s eye. He’d seen pictures of the famous Candomblean festivals. The participants wore very little indeed. Hawkins was old, but he wasn’t dead, and there was nothing wrong with his memory.
Gelmann was going on about failed robotics and how they didn’t build optical circuits the way they used to, but Hawkins’s mind was filled with images of scantily clad young women. The sheer bulk of her spiel, however, eventually drove them away.
“You would think that in this day and age someone could fix these things, find the source of this problem, but oh no, they don’t know where to start, the schmucks.”
“We all know that robotics were your specialty, Mina.” Shimoda’s tone was tolerant. “If only they would ask for your help.”
“I would know what to do,” she insisted. “At least how to begin.”
“Has it occurred to you,” said Hawkins solemnly, “that if the cream of the cybernetics staff of the federation and the Keiretsu and the Eeck and the Victoria League can’t figure out what the problem is, it might be even beyond your grasp?”
“No,” she replied blithely. “My perspective is different, I’m sure. I have more experience. I always had a special relationship with the machinery I worked on, you should excuse my saying so.”
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.
