No. I did not want to work for him again. I would find another way. But first…
I lost control for a moment. My mind was filled with weather maps … I was lying in a field being rained upon, watching the advance of a high pressure front. It looked like a huge H in the sky… Miles away, I realized that my real body was yawning … I… I was falling asleep… My mind was drifting … I had done what I had set out to do… and now it was time to go back… but it was so pleasant just to drift into and out of the data-bases, floating on the systems streams, stroked by the pulses… washed by the baseball scores … I was…
I slept. Never before had I dreamed in the coils of the data-net, never before had I surrendered my consciousness in such a state. But the fatigue had caught up with me—and I was gone—before I knew it…
Asleep in the arms of the data-sea, asleep in the coils of the deep…
I dreamed. I dreamed as I had never dreamt before, and only fragments protruded above the skyline of wakefulness, later…
I dreamed that I was a computer—a vast, unsophisticated one—existing in a kind of Limbo. A shadowy figure came and stood before me. While I did not exactly know this individual, it was not unfamiliar.
It moved to a keyboard and punched out a query—I do not remember what—requiring that I search my data-banks.
Whatever it was that it wanted involved an extraordinary amount of information. My printer hummed and the copy began to emerge.
The dark figure took the printout pages into its hands without tearing them loose and began to scan them at a rate which equalled my rate of output. They passed in a steady, shuffling cataract into accordian-pleated heaps upon the floor. Gradually the figure, still reading, was immersed within them.
When I ended my response the papers were swept away as by a sudden gust of wind, and the figure keyed another question. Again I responded. And again. And again.
Finally, it was typing upon my keyboard—something long and involved which did not really require a response on my part. It was trying to program in—well, tell me something. This input went on and on and on, and I was not really understanding all of it. Frustrated, the figure tried several more times…
All that I remembered, from the crazy games the waking consciousness plays with dream materials, was, NET LOT TO THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS, IMPEDIMENTS REMIT…
Amazing, the order in which a recovering memory recovers, the images in which we clothe things, the commonplaces within the mysterious, and vice versa.
I awoke back inside my own skull and feeling somewhat rested. There was a moment of disorientation, and then the entire previous day’s doings returned to me. I sat up and looked out of the window. Countryside, with a pre-dawn paling of the sky off to my left…
I took a drink of the flat-tasting water, my throat feeling rather dry, then used the sanitary facility. I washed and combed and sponged a few spots from my clothing. Then I opened some nourishing but otherwise undistinguished rations and broke my fast while staring ahead and trying to remember something that seemed very important
Something had happened. What, I was not certain. I did not doubt that I had actually altered the truck’s signal and its reception. But there was something more. While not on a level with Hans Castorp’s, perhaps, I felt that my dream did hold some significance. Maybe I was really a computer dreaming I was a man.
The truck gave a sudden lurch, and I looked up in time to see a girl in bluejeans, a heavy sweater and tennis shoes pass out of sight to the left. What the devil was she doing in the middle of the highway? Then, up ahead, the figure of a young man crossed before me—not too quickly, and not at all like a person running for his life. His movements were studied—with almost a dance-like quality to them. The radar, of course, picked him up immediately and my truck slowed. Then he was left behind, in the interlane area on my left, passing as the similarly garbed girl had passed.
Shortly, we braked again. There was no one before me, but naturally my truck would brake if the one before it braked, and it of course would brake if the one before it braked, and so on down the line.
Another jerk, and we were going more slowly. Another—
We passed two more of the youths, who had obviously repeated their predecessors’ performances here farther along the line.
And then I recalled having seen or read something concerning the practice. They were referred to variously as truck-bashers, truck-dancers and truck-dumpers. They got their kicks—usually in the early morning or late at night, when there were few witnesses passing in the “live” lanes—by dancing into and out of the automated lanes on the big highways. Knowing that the vehicles’ radars would detect them and that their computers were programmed to keep them from striking foreign objects, they were aware of their own relative safety. Some merely enjoyed causing alterations in the speed and flow of the long lines of automated vehicles. Others had somewhat more catastrophic aims, in that their objective was to so alter the trucks’ speed in a short period of time as to overload the control systems and cause a long chain of accidents to occur. Of course, there was some danger to this—outside of one’s possibly passing into the “live” lane while it was active—for they were gambling on the skill of the very same robot drivers whose systems they were attempting to overload.
Was it just kids indulging in the newest way of getting lacks? I wondered. Or was it yet another incarnation of Luddism—that old imperative to smash the evil machines which are wrecking life as we know it—now transferred from sinister engines to the computerized, the automated?
Or might it be neither of these, but something running deeper still and possibly a thing slightly more encouraging? I was reminded of something one of my professors had once said about ritual games and festal contests as being a general part of the human condition. Could the behavior I had witnessed represent a sort of modern rite of passage into the age of automation, an affirmation on the part of youth that man is still superior to his creations?
We lurched again. Damn lads! Irresponsible foolery is what it was. Too much time on their hands. They ought to…
… be out stealing industrial secrets?
Well, maybe I’d done a few socially unacceptable things myself when I was a bit younger. Of course, there had been reasons—if I could only recall them.
The ride smoothed out and we picked up speed again. Ritual ended, whatever. And the thing I had been trying to remember danced tantalizingly nearer.
The day continued to brighten. Haystacks and farmhouses emerged from the night’s retreating tide.
And then the image of the dancer recurred within my mind, flagrant passer in the dawnlight, arms waving through radar pulses, feet measuring some secret beat. To prove one’s self superior to the juggernaut by passing the body before it? To redirect the motions of the monster? To—
Redirect?
Change?
Alter?
Control?
The new, improved version of the power… I wondered. It should be possible for me to work my way back from here—terminal by terminal, connection by connection, through the data-net—coming at last to Big Mac, the computer banks at Angra Energy. The installation was hedged about with every conceivable security defense, to protect Angra from others doing what we had done unto them. There were codes and scramblers, a security kernel… Phrases such as “hierarchical design”, “stepwise refinement” and “Parnas modularity” passed through my mind, recalled from the days when I had worked to set up some of Big Mac’s protections. Of course, everything must have been overhauled, revised, refined, pushed to much higher levels of sophistication in the intervening years. But, on the other hand, it seemed that something similar might have happened to me. If I could penetrate Big Mac and reach the Double Z sector, I was certain that information concerning Cora would lie within. My rite of passage, perhaps, to the new state toward which I had been growing—if I could manage it…