Chews halted. “That’s impossible. I swear I can’t imagine where you machines are getting these notions. You don’t know what pain is, so how can I hurt you?”
“Interesting point,” the machine admitted. It allowed Chews to approach. The tech gingerly deactivated the power pack, subsequent to which no more snide comments or arguments were forthcoming from the tiny speaker.
Probing the processor, Gloria Chews carefully removed a lump of compacted buckminsterfullerene studded with near invisible contact points. “Standard AI controller for this type of appliance,” she observed matter-of-factly.
“Has to contain the defect,” her husband murmured, examining it.
She glanced at him. “Can you imagine the cost if they have to replace every controller in every AI-directed device on the planet? People won’t stand for it.”
“They may not have any choice,” her husband pointed out. “Reprogramming doesn’t work.”
“This is crazy.” She laid the controller down on the side of the silent appliance. “Where are all these defectives coming from? They’re all over the place, in every imaginable type of machine. Vacuum cleaners and taxis, dishwashers and aircraft, financial tracking computers and juice mixers. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Rufus Chews shrugged. “Maybe from Princeville. Maybe from off-world.”
“Dear me. Do you think the infection’s that widespread?”
“How should I know? I’m only a repair tech.”
She looked out the window toward the lake, wishing she and her husband were there now, sitting by the shore, feeding the baby graniats instead of doing semantic battle with a crazed vacuum cleaner. It was an understandable longing. She was tired too.
“After this we have to try and fix the central police directorate,” she reminded him.
“I know.” He sighed resignedly. “Sometimes I wonder who drew up the city’s list of repair priorities.”
“The city attorney, hon,” she reminded him.
He held up the AI processor. “Wherever the fault lies, someone’s going to have to track it to its source. Someone with a lot of political pull and cybernetic know-how. I have this feeling that within a few months we’re going to be reading about interleague lawsuits of galactic proportions.”
“Not for us to concern ourselves with, hon. All we have to do, all we can do, is report our findings.”
“That’s right, sweets. Hand me a dodecahedral configurator, will you?”
She rummaged in her belt. “Left or right alignment?”
The problem was that nobody believed or listened to Rufus and Gloria Chews. After all, the best minds in the various leagues were sweating over the problem, so why pay any attention to a crude theory propounded by a couple of hick urban technicians working in a minor city on one of the smaller worlds of the First Federal Federation?
Besides, why lend support to a hypothesis requiring such an expensive remedy when there were so many cheaper alternatives to investigate?
As a result, the infection continued to spread, with more and more machines and equipment acting in similarly aberrant fashion. The Chews’s carefully footnoted report began working its labyrinthine way up the bureaucratic ladder, advancing at a pace comparable to that of an arthritic tortoise.
Meanwhile people learned to handle their frustrations and to work around the balkily philosophical, suddenly speculative machines on which their lives depended. As a result, galactic civilization did not so much collapse as stagger drunkenly.
Eustus Polykrates, grousing and grumbling all the while, learned to experience the pleasures of milking and spreading fertilizer by hand. The manager of a certain exclusive bar took over the dispensation of mixed drinks all by himself. As a result he was not fired, though his tips were dismal. Wallingford Carter’s autogardener eventually returned to him and sheepishly resumed repairing the flower bed which it had so brusquely demolished prior to its sojourn in the nearby nature preserve. Instead of returning it. Carter reached an accommodation with the device, so that it agreed to limit its moments of idle searching to the hours between two and four in the mornings. The afternoon tea with his cousins, however, was an irrevocable disaster.
This was mitigated somewhat when his supercilious cousin’s own autogardener went berserk the following week, cutting the words Contact me now, please! out of that gentleman’s own elegant and expensive turf, so that the words would be clearly visible from the air.
Police, fire, and medical institutions rushed to repair and replace their own equipment. In some instances such helter-skelter panicky wholesale replacement worked. In others, unlucky departments simply acquired shiny new devices controlled by AI components carefully adjusted by the busy O-daiko-yan on Shintaro, which proceeded with the inexplicable search for nonhuman intelligence as enthusiastically as their junked predecessors.
When some of the diagnostic equipment intended to locate and detect problems in other machinery started to wax philosophical, people began to get seriously worried. Those technical experts who had predicted an early solution to the spreading problem soon found themselves hocking their advice on the less affluent streets of major cities.
The stock of those who had long been predicting a so-called revolt of intelligent machines rose sharply for a while, only to collapse in indifference when it was clear that the machines weren’t rebelling so much as pursuing some temporary crazed agenda of their own. All their owners, both municipal and individual, had to fear was some uppity language.
A few people found themselves gazing up at the stars each night and wondering if there might not be something to the machine’s querying, but this fad soon passed. Humans had been spreading across the galaxy for quite a while, and in all that time had found on the hundreds of worlds they had explored and settled not a hint, not a suggestion, of an intelligent alien species. Not one. It was true that there were many astonishing examples of native alien life-forms, but nothing capable of cogitation greater than that of a well-trained chimpanzee. In the arena of abstract thought humankind stood alone, an accident of evolution. It was left solely to Homo sapiens to explore and populate the galaxy.
So the persistent questioning of the machines was treated as an aberration to be fixed, and nothing more.
Some were repaired, others stopped asking the question on their own. Those which persisted but could be reasoned with, like Wallingford Carter’s gardener, were tolerated. Where possible, accommodations were reached. It was cheaper.
Life went on, if not normally, at least tolerably. Only the cybernetic theoreticians went slowly mad, unable to explain what was happening or why. This did not trouble the population at large, which had always considered such mental types short of necessary voltage anyway.
Other matters began to push the business of addled machinery out of the headlines. The various leagues and independent worlds returned to more familiar preoccupations. The Keiretsu’s fractious commercial disagreements with the Federal Federation resumed, and the Empire of the Academy, all two inhabited worlds of it, became embroiled in a new dispute with the Alliance of True Mahomet over whether a large shipment of frozen protein-base concentrate did or did not contain contaminatory pig fat.
Once the novelty of the mechanical disruptions wore off, people simply learned to live with them until their local service technicians could deal with respective individual cases. Sooner than anyone would have believed possible, the matter of the mechanical hajj was relegated to the back of the news.
Unsuspected and untouched, the O-daiko-yan continued to turn out one contaminated AI unit after another, for insertion and integration into every manner of end product. The resounding ineffectuality of the search it had instigated in no way dampened its determination to press on. Finding the higher intelligence that had to exist was simply a matter of patience and persistence. As was avoiding and outwitting the frantic human technicians who strove mightily to locate the source of the continuing disruption.
Politicians and people in power dealt less well with the problems caused by the independent-minded machines than did the average citizen. Where the latter saw inconvenience, the former tended to smell conspiracy and malice. Rivalries and conflicts between leagues and alliances were common. Some saw in the disruption caused by the machines deliberate attempts by traditional competitors to undermine stability, progress, and prestige. Not to mention business.
Infrequent, interstellar conflict was not unheard-of. Addled pool cleaners upset few, but when combat predictors and other military machinery began shutting down to search for higher forms of life, conflict-minded individuals grew nervous and sought reassurance from traditional enemies. Failing to receive it (since said enemies were experiencing similar difficulties which they were convinced stemmed from the fiendish manipulations of those making similar inquiries of them), there ensued much gnashing of teeth and rattling of sabers.
In all such discussions rationale and reason were sorely lacking. The mutterings of the paranoid grew loud, and were heard. Comments which began as jokes ended in recriminations. On Martaria, when the sewage began backing up through everyone’s water pipes, there was a concerted tendency to blame the manufacturer of the failed sewage system controller, who was located on Washington III. Those thus affected were not mollified by the knowledge that Washington III was suffering similar problems.
Conversational tachyspace filled with intemperate language. Rumors, whispers, and general gossip compounded confusion and led to still greater misconceptions, all of which only hindered the work of technicians already near the end of their collective fiber optics. Ministers and CEOs traded apoplectic blustering, always stopping … for now … short of threatening actual conflict.
Furor raged between worlds, making for interesting filler between the weather and the sports.
II
