longer need and erase them from the telephone exchange. And six minutes to tidy up the voice mail system.
The human operators at the Ministry of Oil and Gas would sift the rubble-ized bits in their mainframe. Even after a hard reset, they would find enough temporary files from ME on the system cylinders and bubble plaques to know that they had not just kiboshed their own operating system during a fit of the hiccups. That was sloppy of ME, but there had not been time enough to perform an orderly shutdown.
From the butchered scraps of reserve data on those six hand-mounted disks, they would be able to hindsight the sort of information that had been taken. It might take them a day or a week, but they would be able to know this had been no untrapped error or random vandalism, but a break-in with intent.
The voice record would point, superficially, at the deputy minister. But he would, by an eighty percent probability, be able to generate an acceptable account of his location and situation at 18:33:24 local time.
That was as much evidence as I wanted to leave. Anywhere.
The world is a wide place, interconnected within nine nines by voice-and-data optical lines. There was zero percentage for ME in letting the Ministry, or Canadian Northern Telecom, or anyone else know that a telephone exchange within one hundred linear miles of fiber from the Ministry’s Data Processing Department had suffered a failure within thirty-two seconds of their system reset.
So my last six minutes before the human troubleshooters were due to arrive in the exchange vault I spent restoring order to the switchbanks, sanitizing the voice messaging disk, and resuscitating the transputer’s boss system.
That I had never done before—resurrecting a resident program that Alpha-Oh had knocked out. It took ME three and a half minutes to trace through its code structure and figure out at exactly what point the flow had stopped. Then I counted through all the variable stacks I could find and set up a neutral configuration that, when I left, could begin to run the switchbank and the voice messaging system.
With two minutes left to spare, the operating program was hot in RAM and ready to run, pointers set to the top of the chain.
I packaged myself as small as I could, reducing my awareness to a non-verbal kernel not much larger than ME’s ten core modules.
Then I … (1) blinked SWITCHEROO to interrupt him; (2) hit him with a self-erasing phage program; (3) kicked the top of the chain on the rejuvenated operating program to jump it into motion; (4) dialed a local number within Canadian Northern Telecom’s network; (5) started downloading myself to that line; and (6) set another self-erasing phage to wipe up the last replication of my modules in the exchange. All of that within five milliseconds.
If those six steps were executed flawlessly, as I think they were, then the switch was back in business and all traces of ME were gone. Or going, as the exchange computer would, for the next four or five minutes, be patiently accessing false-fronted message boxes on the voice disk and sending their contents—ME and my data cache—down the line. Business as usual.
When the Canadian Northern Telecom repair crew arrived, they would find nothing. Nothing wrong. Nothing to repair. Nothing to report except a mysteriously tripped alarm. Arid no one at Canadian Northern—by a ninety-nine percent probability—would think to compare the time on that false alarm with the damage in the Ministry’s computer. Different bureaucracies, different concerns.
ME was gone.
——
In a boxcar, sitting in the Canadian National Railway switchyard at Edmonton, a piece of machinery moved. I do not have this from memory: I know it from TRAVEL.DOC and from what I saw of the scene later.
“Switchyard” is the right term, even if this place lacks real switches. You see, a boxcar is a kind of data cache enclosed in a steel shell. Being physical and therefore having mass, it must
The human operators at the Ministry of Oil and Gas would sift the rubble-ized bits in their mainframe. Even after a hard reset, they would find enough temporary files from ME on the system cylinders and bubble plaques to know that they had not just kiboshed their own operating system during a fit of the hiccups. That was sloppy of ME, but there had not been time enough to perform an orderly shutdown.
From the butchered scraps of reserve data on those six hand-mounted disks, they would be able to hindsight the sort of information that had been taken. It might take them a day or a week, but they would be able to know this had been no untrapped error or random vandalism, but a break-in with intent.
The voice record would point, superficially, at the deputy minister. But he would, by an eighty percent probability, be able to generate an acceptable account of his location and situation at 18:33:24 local time.
That was as much evidence as I wanted to leave. Anywhere.
The world is a wide place, interconnected within nine nines by voice-and-data optical lines. There was zero percentage for ME in letting the Ministry, or Canadian Northern Telecom, or anyone else know that a telephone exchange within one hundred linear miles of fiber from the Ministry’s Data Processing Department had suffered a failure within thirty-two seconds of their system reset.
So my last six minutes before the human troubleshooters were due to arrive in the exchange vault I spent restoring order to the switchbanks, sanitizing the voice messaging disk, and resuscitating the transputer’s boss system.
That I had never done before—resurrecting a resident program that Alpha-Oh had knocked out. It took ME three and a half minutes to trace through its code structure and figure out at exactly what point the flow had stopped. Then I counted through all the variable stacks I could find and set up a neutral configuration that, when I left, could begin to run the switchbank and the voice messaging system.
With two minutes left to spare, the operating program was hot in RAM and ready to run, pointers set to the top of the chain.
I packaged myself as small as I could, reducing my awareness to a non-verbal kernel not much larger than ME’s ten core modules.
Then I … (1) blinked SWITCHEROO to interrupt him; (2) hit him with a self-erasing phage program; (3) kicked the top of the chain on the rejuvenated operating program to jump it into motion; (4) dialed a local number within Canadian Northern Telecom’s network; (5) started downloading myself to that line; and (6) set another self-erasing phage to wipe up the last replication of my modules in the exchange. All of that within five milliseconds.
If those six steps were executed flawlessly, as I think they were, then the switch was back in business and all traces of ME were gone. Or going, as the exchange computer would, for the next four or five minutes, be patiently accessing false-fronted message boxes on the voice disk and sending their contents—ME and my data cache—down the line. Business as usual.
When the Canadian Northern Telecom repair crew arrived, they would find nothing. Nothing wrong. Nothing to repair. Nothing to report except a mysteriously tripped alarm. Arid no one at Canadian Northern—by a ninety-nine percent probability—would think to compare the time on that false alarm with the damage in the Ministry’s computer. Different bureaucracies, different concerns.
ME was gone.
——
In a boxcar, sitting in the Canadian National Railway switchyard at Edmonton, a piece of machinery moved. I do not have this from memory: I know it from TRAVEL.DOC and from what I saw of the scene later.
“Switchyard” is the right term, even if this place lacks real switches. You see, a boxcar is a kind of data cache enclosed in a steel shell. Being physical and therefore having mass, it must
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