Hunter fiddled with the controls of his go-buggy as he pondered Jacob’s concerns. The GEM rose a few inches from the floor and began to turn slowly clockwise. “How fast can you add the extra processors to the bus and install a VR I/O port?”
“Working three shifts and sleeping on cots in the corner, a week, nine days at the outside.”
“Well then, I guess that in a week, nine days at the outside, you can plug me in and we’ll find out whether it works or not.” Hunter’s artificial hands tightened on the go-buggy’s controls and he moved smoothly out into the hallway for the trip back to his own cubicle and his VR input—where Caroline and Maureena and Charlie-Boy waited for him.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Lattyak demanded almost angrily, an enormous hand twisting fretfully at his mustache. It was as close as Hunter had ever seen him come to nervousness.
“It’s a little late now to change my mind, don’t you think? Go on, Jacob, complete the link.”
With a final scowl, Jacob Lattyak entered the security code that activated the connection between Hunter’s VR socket and the rebuilt Project Saber computer.
As far as Hunter was concerned the result was spectacularly unremarkable. “Is it on?” he snapped. “What’s happening?”
“The OS is up and running. Ask it a question.”
*How much is 500 times 100?* Hunter thought.
The number 50,000 instantly sprang into his head, sounding almost as if someone had whispered it into his ear. But was it the computer? Too easy, he decided, he already knew the answer. Fine, I’ll try something harder.
*How much is 397 divided by 17?*
*23.352941* the almost-voice whispered.
“It works!” Hunter shouted.
“Are you sure?”
“Didn’t you think it would?”
Lattyak ignored the question. “What was it like?”
“Tying it into my auditory system seems to work fine, but it’s hard—no, almost impossible—to describe. It sounds almost like someone is whispering to you, but it’s not quite that either. It’s as if you think someone is whispering to you, but then you’re not really sure if you’re imagining it or not. The essential thing is that I don’t think it will distract me when I’m dealing with the Trajendi.” Hunter pursed his lips. “But I only gave it a simple math problem to solve, duck soup for a computer. Let me try something harder.”
*Who was the most successful pitcher in major league baseball prior to 1970?*
*Ed Walsh had the lowest lifetime earned run average. Dave Foutz had the highest percentage of games won. Cy Young had the most victories. There are many other criteria, such as most strikeouts per nine innings pitched, or lowest on-base percentage. Shall I enumerate them?*
Hunter grimaced. *No. That’s enough.* To Lattyak, he said: “Not so good this time. I asked for a value judgment and got a lot of database statistics.”
“If you don’t like its answers, you have to tell it why. It can parse English. Tell it what you want and let’s see if it can give you a better response.”
“All right, I’ll try again.”
*When I asked for the name of the most successful pitcher, I wanted the name of the pitcher whom baseball historians generally regard as the most successful based on the overall criteria which they use.*
*In all queries using the word “successful” do you then want a response based on reputation and other intangibles rather than on actual data?*
“Jesus, Jacob, it asked me an intelligent question!”
“Of course. If the data is insufficient, any human-interaction program is coded to request addition information. This is nothing new.”
“I guess not. It’s just, well, different, hearing it in my head this way.”
“Well, you had better get used to it, because you’re going to have to train this bucket of bolts night and day in order to build its neural-net patterns into something usable.”
*Computer,* Hunter thought, *the answer to my question is almost certainly Walter Johnson or Lefty Grove. Now I want you to see if you can figure out wh—* He broke off. “Wait a minute, Jacob. I’m never going to be comfortable calling this damn thing ‘Computer.’ It needs a name.”
Lattyak’s massive chest rose and fell and he exhaled noisily. “It’s your alter ego, Royce, not mine. What do you want to call it?”
Hunter paused for a moment, his gaze unfocused. “Atlas,” he said at last.
Lattyak nodded with sour tolerance. “Atlas was the Titan who carried the world on his shoulders, wasn’t he? Well, it seems to fit, I suppose. Be glad I’m just a neurocyberneticist and not your psychiatrist. Now then, we need to start Atlas off with ‘fuzzy’ dimensions such as ‘large issues,’ ‘major points,’ ‘minor problems,’ and the like. Here is a list of concepts and scenarios which the team has developed. You’ll need to run through each of these model problems with Atlas several times.” Jacob handed Hunter a bound report at least a hundred pages long.
“All this?”
“This is only volume one. Volumes two through ten are on my desk. You won’t be getting much sleep for a while.”
Hunter thought of Caroline and of the nightmares in which he relived the explosion and decided that unless he could sleep without dreaming he would just as soon never sleep again.
“It’s just no good, Jacob,” said Hunter bitterly.
“Maybe if we added another channel to the Library of Congress—”
“It’s not that and you know it! You can tap in to as many libraries as you want and all I’m going to get is fancier and fancier databases. I could do as well with a radio receiver in my ear and a roomful of technicians at remote terminals feeding me information. I need an intelligent, creative advisor, Jacob, not reams of statistics from some memory bank! Atlas still only responds to my questions with more and more sharply defined answers from one database or another. I think you’ve lost track of the goal of the entire project!”
“But we’re almost at the limit of the auditory channel as it stands. How—”
“Jacob,” Hunter said wearily, “we both know what has to be done, and we’ve known it right from the start. I need a full virtual-reality input—vision, tactile, odors, sound, everything! And you’ve got to take your restrictions off Atlas.”
“I don’t have any restrictions on Atlas’s computing routines.”
“Call them whatever you like, but you’ve got all kinds of routines built into the operating system to keep Atlas from rewriting any of its own system code. You’ve locked it out from writing any new routines, but that’s just exactly what we need. It’s got to be able to teach itself, on its own, to deduce relevant information from random and unconnected data and then put the results directly into my head using the full virtual-reality system.”
“That’s crazy! We don’t know what the output on the visual channels will be. It might generate nothing but the equivalent of white noise, completely random signals. If your brain received that through a full-bandwidth VR socket, God knows how it would interpret the input. VR signal specifications are rigorously defined for just that reason.”
“Jacob, I’m not going to argue with you, we simply don’t have the time. You either do it my way or I’ll find someone who will. You can put a monitor on the data lines if you want to make sure that the signal strength doesn’t exceed a maximum value, but you can’t filter the data content. Take out the code that makes Atlas’s operating system ‘read only’ too. And one more thing: I want the VR socket connections multiplexed.”