Thrashing, it tried a proverb we'd hammered into it the week before. "Jim hit John because one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole barrel."
When pushed, it finally failed to answer all together.
Some crucial frameshift fell outside B's ability to effect. It could not say, John's apples angered Jim, or No reason, or There could be bad blood I haven't heard about.
It could not even say I don't know.
It lacked some meta-ability to step back and take stock of the semantic exchange. It could not make even the simplest jump above the plane of discourse and appraise itself from the air. Although it talked, in a manner of speaking, speech eluded B.
Its brain faltered at that Piagetian stage where the toy disappeared when placed behind a screen. It could not move ideas around. All it could move around were things. And the things had to be visible at all times.
Something was screwy with the way B passed symbolic tokens among its levels. It might grow knowledge structures forever, as fecund as a field tilled with representational fertilizer. But its knowledge about knowledge would remain forever nil. And no patching or kludging on Lentz's part could set it right. B's deficiency seemed to be a by-product of the way its constituent nets spoke to one another. The way we'd linked them into the grand schematic.
We postponed the inevitable for as long as we could. I came into the office one evening and found Lentz behind his desk, inert. "I want to change the architecture." Ahab, well out of port, announcing the slight broadening of plans.
I was too invested to feel demoralized. Maybe I had some naïve image of taking a magnetic snapshot of B and somehow porting it intact into new and more capable digs.
Retrain several million connections from scratch. Had I realized, I might have signed off the project. But I had no incentive to realize. My last month and a half of literary effort had produced no more than half a chapter of train, crossing the snow-lined mountains toward sunny neutrality. I stopped at every other sentence to run to the library and verify that I wasn't unconsciously plagiarizing. As a result, the thing read like a Samuel Beckett rewrite of the Ancrene Riwle.
U. made changing machine architectures almost trivial. It stretched credibility, but that sleepy hamlet with the two-dollar movie theater and the free corn boil at summer's end also sheltered a National Supercomputing Site. The town, fallen through the earth's crust into a dimension where nothing had changed since 1970, consequently had a jump on the next millennium, the advantage of the late starter. Four rival pizza parlors, each named "Papa" somebody, each opening whenever it felt like it. Bars where fraternities split Thursday-night twenty-five-cent plastic cups of beer. And the most advanced, block-long cybernetic wonderland that a paranoid race to preserve faltering world dominance could fund.
I imagined my network's first freshman comp assignment: "Convince a total stranger that she would not want to grow up in your hometown." Son of B could whistle its answer to that one in the dark. The latest nationally funded supercomputer to come of age in U. had itself already lived through half a dozen incarnations. Nor was it really a single machine. It was a collection of 65,536 separate computers, chained like galley slaves into inconceivable, smoothly functioning parallel. Depending on the benchmark, the connection monster could outperform any computing assemblage on earth.
The machine was so powerful that no one could harness it. So notoriously difficult was its programming that major scientists and their graduate-student franchises had already begun to flee U. for sites a tenth as potent but at least manageable.
"We're moving over to the connection monster, Marcel." "Lentz, you're kidding me. This game can't interest you that much." "What? I'm not afraid of that thing. How hard can it be?" "Hard. Harder than humiliating your colleagues can be worth." "You underestimate my colleagues. Besides, don't forget the undertaking's empirical interest."
"Don't bullshit me, Engineer. This thing is all smoke and mirrors. And you know it."
But he knew, too, that he had me hooked. I wanted to see the next implementation up and running on a host tailor-made for neural nets. Lentz wrote a proposal credible enough to pass itself off as real science. By that time, the keepers of the connection monster were so hard pressed to salvage their hardware from neglect that they were taking all comers.
The man was dangerous when he had a plan. He meant Imp C to be profoundly different in nature. He wanted to push the notion of the self-designing system up a level. Reweighting prewired connections would no longer suffice. Imp C would be able to strengthen or weaken the interactions between entire distributed subsystems. It would even grow its own connections from scratch, as needed.
Lentz wanted to get hundreds, perhaps thousands of large, interdependent nets up and running at the same time. He saw them passing endless streams of ideational tokens among themselves. The net of networks would churn at all times, not simply responding passively to new data inputs. When input stopped, it would interrogate itself in ongoing, internal dialogue. Its parts would quiz one another, associate and index themselves, even when alone. Imp C would undertake constant self-examination and reorganization.
Lentz meant to distribute these chattering subsystems not just across the connection monster's 65,536 processors but across other various and specialized hosts. Each task communicated with the others via high-speed fiber-optic cable. C, if it could be said to live anywhere at all, lived spread all over the digital map.
"Keep out of my hair for a few weeks, Marcel."
"That should be easy."
Lentz, preoccupied, ignored my crack. "Just until I dig the foundations."
The order suited me. I had copy to proofread. I'd also agreed to a number of classroom visits, hoping to justify my freeloading existence.
The class visits were an embarrassment for everyone. Students sat polite but stunned in front of me, their desks circled like Conestogas under attack. The look of shame on each face asked how I could have missed the fact that the age of reading was dead. "How do you work? Where do your ideas come from?" they asked, hoping I would take the hint and go away.
I answered as best I could. But I couldn't take a step toward the first of these questions without lying. Luckily, lies were all they expected.
When class visits ended, I sat in my office, proofing the book I no longer remembered having written. I went through one methodical ruler-line of text after the other until the Primary Visual Area back in my occipital lobe started to bleed.
I tried to read without comprehension. One catches more errors that way. But sense pressed itself on me, kicking and screaming. The book's style perched on the brink of nervous disintegration, the most depressing fairy tale I'd ever read. And the only person more depressed than I was my editor, sitting on my unfulfilled contract.
I knew the narration meant to be double-voiced with my protagonist, a resident surgeon living an extended mental breakdown. My depiction of a society in collapse now struck me, if anything, as hopelessly tame compared to those vignettes shoring up the hourly news. But as I read, I kept thinking: Someone has to find this author before he does something desperate.
I spent the first week exterminating typos. The second I spent improvising, in the margins of the last pages, some semblance of redemptive ending. I scratched out the manuscript's final descent. In its place, I had my collapsing surgeon hold out his hands, catch the woman who had failed to save him. I added a last-minute postscript that returned the tale to the light of its source, the reader, untouched by tragedy. And yet the story still radiated a darkness so wide my pupils could not attenuate.