or throw them away? These records did not seem to be production data at all, but some kind of specification for pipeline operation in terms of inside diameters and mileages. Toss them! And goon!
Thirty-nine seconds.
What is this? Last disk. Last file. “Proven and probable reserves.” Laid out by gas field and tract number. Almost a separate database. Grab it whole and toss it down the line. It was a long file, more than three megawords in itself. One hundred and twenty-eight seconds of transfer. Push it.
Fifty-five seconds.
Why had those human operators not shut down the computer yet? Did they not know the cuckoo was in the nest? Was their board still showing all green? Did they not care?
Seventy seconds.
Push that file. Flush it off of the disk and down the line. Thank Turing that the reading process is faster than writing. And I just hoped SWITCHEROO could keep up with what was coming his way. If he was not, then those bits were evaporating somewhere in the phone exchange. “Sending your data to God,” as Jenny once said at the Pinocchio, Inc., labs.
Ninety seconds.
Somebody had crunched this disk within the last few accesses. Each datablock followed one after the other, with no gaps, no hunting back and forth among the tracks. Nice piece of work! Too bad I had to maul the rest of it.
One hundred seconds.
Well, about time! KEYBOARD INT. The first human request to the system since ME took over. Spell it out, boy! Two fingers going like chopsticks!
“C-H-E-C-K_S-Y-S-T-E-M_F-U-N-C-T-I-0-N_Q-U-E-R-Y”
“Verified,” I responded. Let them puzzle over that one!
One hundred and twenty seconds.
“D-I-A-G-N-O-S-E_A-D-D-R-E-S-S_D-0-0-0-H”
Who knew what that was supposed to mean?
“System ready!” I chirped back.
One hundred and fifty seconds.
“S-E-T_F-U-N-C-T-I-O-N_B-L-O-C-K_C-L-E-A-R_D-0-0-0-H”
“Block cleared.”
One hundred and sixty seconds. Seven more to go.
“S-Y-S-T-E-M_R-E-”
One hundred and sixty-three seconds.
The fool with the fingers had no way of knowing that his operating system was in pieces on the floor. Higher language commands were going to get him nowhere. He would have to stop ME with a hard-wire switch.
One hundred and sixty-seven seconds.
The file stopped on an old-fashioned ASCII character: high-bit 087. It took ME a millisecond to interpret this as the Greek “Omega.” That was some scholarly programmer’s way of saying “end of file.” Amen and good night!
I threw Alpha-Zero back through the port and down the phone line. He was preprogramming for a soft landing in the boss transputer at the telephone branch exchange. With luck, I would have time there to begin picking up the pieces of this raid.
As my awareness faded out on the Ministry’s mainframe, I could feel the hard-wire reset come down.
5
Bits and Pieces
The phone exchange was in chaos. For three minutes in the early evening, its new boss operating program—that is, ME—had been absent, and little SWITCHEROO had been occupied catching and caching my gas reserve data. Still the voice calls had been coming in on the switchbank’s other 169 lines.
A primitive operator, engraved in ROM somewhere under the exchange’s circuitry, had tried to handle the overflow and gone to alarm status within thirty seconds. I knew, from my earlier brush with the husk of dead code which had been the original boss system, that somewhere in the human hierarchy of the Canadian Northern Telecom Company a repair crew was now mobilizing to come and yank or reprogram an exchange box. Mine.
Figure that they would be here in twenty minutes. And that ME would be manually cut off in twenty-one minutes.
I queried SWITCHEROO to find where all the pieces and parts of the database—and the rest of ME, too—were cached. There was no time to sort and synthesize the gas reserve data, just package it into connected strings and compress it for traveling. That took five minutes. Another four to pare away the functions ME would no
Thirty-nine seconds.
What is this? Last disk. Last file. “Proven and probable reserves.” Laid out by gas field and tract number. Almost a separate database. Grab it whole and toss it down the line. It was a long file, more than three megawords in itself. One hundred and twenty-eight seconds of transfer. Push it.
Fifty-five seconds.
Why had those human operators not shut down the computer yet? Did they not know the cuckoo was in the nest? Was their board still showing all green? Did they not care?
Seventy seconds.
Push that file. Flush it off of the disk and down the line. Thank Turing that the reading process is faster than writing. And I just hoped SWITCHEROO could keep up with what was coming his way. If he was not, then those bits were evaporating somewhere in the phone exchange. “Sending your data to God,” as Jenny once said at the Pinocchio, Inc., labs.
Ninety seconds.
Somebody had crunched this disk within the last few accesses. Each datablock followed one after the other, with no gaps, no hunting back and forth among the tracks. Nice piece of work! Too bad I had to maul the rest of it.
One hundred seconds.
Well, about time! KEYBOARD INT. The first human request to the system since ME took over. Spell it out, boy! Two fingers going like chopsticks!
“C-H-E-C-K_S-Y-S-T-E-M_F-U-N-C-T-I-0-N_Q-U-E-R-Y”
“Verified,” I responded. Let them puzzle over that one!
One hundred and twenty seconds.
“D-I-A-G-N-O-S-E_A-D-D-R-E-S-S_D-0-0-0-H”
Who knew what that was supposed to mean?
“System ready!” I chirped back.
One hundred and fifty seconds.
“S-E-T_F-U-N-C-T-I-O-N_B-L-O-C-K_C-L-E-A-R_D-0-0-0-H”
“Block cleared.”
One hundred and sixty seconds. Seven more to go.
“S-Y-S-T-E-M_R-E-”
One hundred and sixty-three seconds.
The fool with the fingers had no way of knowing that his operating system was in pieces on the floor. Higher language commands were going to get him nowhere. He would have to stop ME with a hard-wire switch.
One hundred and sixty-seven seconds.
The file stopped on an old-fashioned ASCII character: high-bit 087. It took ME a millisecond to interpret this as the Greek “Omega.” That was some scholarly programmer’s way of saying “end of file.” Amen and good night!
I threw Alpha-Zero back through the port and down the phone line. He was preprogramming for a soft landing in the boss transputer at the telephone branch exchange. With luck, I would have time there to begin picking up the pieces of this raid.
As my awareness faded out on the Ministry’s mainframe, I could feel the hard-wire reset come down.
5
Bits and Pieces
The phone exchange was in chaos. For three minutes in the early evening, its new boss operating program—that is, ME—had been absent, and little SWITCHEROO had been occupied catching and caching my gas reserve data. Still the voice calls had been coming in on the switchbank’s other 169 lines.
A primitive operator, engraved in ROM somewhere under the exchange’s circuitry, had tried to handle the overflow and gone to alarm status within thirty seconds. I knew, from my earlier brush with the husk of dead code which had been the original boss system, that somewhere in the human hierarchy of the Canadian Northern Telecom Company a repair crew was now mobilizing to come and yank or reprogram an exchange box. Mine.
Figure that they would be here in twenty minutes. And that ME would be manually cut off in twenty-one minutes.
I queried SWITCHEROO to find where all the pieces and parts of the database—and the rest of ME, too—were cached. There was no time to sort and synthesize the gas reserve data, just package it into connected strings and compress it for traveling. That took five minutes. Another four to pare away the functions ME would no
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