"Basically, yes."
Caroline could see that it bothered Lawrence a lot. She wanted to press him on the subject, but prudently let it drop. She'd get another chance later.
Lawrence showed her the Law Potential registers, and she watched the numbers dance in response to various hypothetical and real situations. "These are called the Action Potentials. There's one for each of the Three Laws. They are fractions, representing the impact under the Law that would result from taking action, over the impact from not acting. When that number falls below one, Prime Intellect is forced to act. That's what happened on the Night of Miracles, and later at the time of the Change.
"Most things result in very large or very small Action Potentials. Especially the First Law; few things even affect it any more, since the Change. Then when you do something really outrageous, it drops to flat zero for a moment while you're resurrected.
"But there are some close calls on the Second Law. The Action Potential around a Death Jockey contract drops to around one point oh six when you change your mind, so if Prime Intellect had even a slightly different opinion of your hobby it might not exist at all. There was a shift like that after the incident with AnneMarie, which is why you had to start specifying time limits."
"You don't have a time limit."
"I'm a special case. Prime Intellect lets me do things that other people can't do, because I'm in a different category."
So it was that simple.
"I thought everyone was equal under Prime Intellect's watchful eye," Caroline said sarcastically.
"Some are more equal than others. You get a disproportionate share of its attention yourself, just because you were there at the beginning."
"I what?"
"I thought you realized, Caroline. It was your drug overdose which forced the Night of Miracles. Prime Intellect found you with your heart stopped soon after it got control of the Correlation Effect. After that, the rest was inevitable."
Her mouth opened and shut several times, and after a brief effort she fought down the urge to vomit. She had never realized her own role in the Change, or understood the significance of her own history.
It was bad enough to be caught up in the Change, but she was an accessory.
She looked at the Law Potential Registers, which were displayed on Lawrence's antique TV set. Her voice was tinged with impotent fury. "I don't see why you're worried about it. It seems like a very stable system to me," she spat.
Lawrence started to tell her, stopped, then decided she might be right. Maybe there was no harm. In any case, she deserved to know. "The problem is that something might set up an endless loop. If the potential is close to one, then acting on the potential could cause it to shift slightly, crossing the line. Then the software would be in an unstable state."
"What would happen then?"
"That's a good question. The original software was written in C and compiled with a standard compiler. What would have happened in the original Prime Intellect is that the Second Law Arbitrator would come to a crashing halt in one or more of the independent processors, and Prime Intellect would assign more processors to the task. I didn't plan for that kind of failure and I didn't work out what would happen until much later. More and more processors would be allocated to the paradoxical task, each crashing in turn, until Prime Intellect ran out of system resources to allocate. Then the Ego Interpreter would get into an infinite loop waiting for a response from one of the nonexistent copies of the Second Law Arbitrator, and there would be no spare resources to devote to the task of cleaning up, and the whole works would come to a grinding halt. If I was watching this on the monitor back in the original Prime Intellect Complex, I would see the video image disappear and the text message 'Fatal System Error in Ego Interpreter, Emergency Shutdown. And then I'd have to load a backup copy of the software, because the GAT would be totally corrupted."
"Wow."
"That was the original system," Lawrence continued. "After the Night of Miracles there were a lot of copies of Prime Intellect. Billions of them. Forming a network. And if one copy on the network crashed in this way, it would be possible for another copy to clear it out and restart it. I understand this even happens periodically, particularly when the Death Jockeys are acting up."
"Oh?"
"However, there is a heirarchy to this network. As it turns out, a copy can only be restarted by another copy that is above it in this heirarchy. If a copy crashes, all the copies below it will eventually crash too, due to message loop failures. It's like a big chain reaction.
"But the system can still always recover, since there's always a higher up copy, right?"
"Most of the time. But not all the time. Because, you see, there is a top copy. It is the direct lineal descendant of the original hardware, which made the First Law decision to start growing. If it fails, we are shit out of luck."
"You're kidding."
"And that top copy just happens to be the one that reports directly to me. And has a deep interest in yourself."
Caroline was beside herself with excitement as he continued. She had accepted Prime Intellect's omnipotence at face value; it had never occurred to her that it might fail.
"Now, that was the original code, too. At the time of the Change the code was adapted to run in alien hardware — already compiled once, it was re-compiled. This is kind of like taking a Russian novel, translating it into English, then translating that into Japanese."
"Sounds awkward."
"Particularly when the novel itself does the second translation. Prime Intellect re-compiled itself. Which means I have no idea whether it did a good job. I assume it did, because it's much smarter than me in that way. But it's not human, and its imagination is simpler than ours, and it might have missed something important. Particularly something like an error handler that isn't used very often. But I have no way of knowing that, because Prime Intellect will tell me nothing — nada, zip, zilch — about the details of the Change."
"Do you know why?"
"For the same reason it won't let me change things in the Debugger, and that it won't restart the alien worlds and let them live. It's afraid of the possible consequences. I tricked it into displaying the Action Potential for showing me the new object code, and it was one point zero six five. The Law Potentials are all in the stratosphere, so it's afraid to show me and it's slightly less afraid not to."
Somewhere, Caroline realized, Lawrence had crossed an invisible line and was now telling her all of his most dangerous secrets without even realizing he was doing so. Caroline had the feeling that there were Action Potentials in Lawrence's head, too. But flesh was no match for machinery, and those close fractions and high values had simply burned his registers out.
They didn't discuss it for a few days. Caroline puttered around the island, which was really very small. It was a classic tropical paradise with palm trees and beaches. Caroline played in the surf, built huge sand castles, then knocked them down because there was no tide to do it for her.
She noticed Lawrence watching her in a strange way.
"See something interesting?" she finally said to him.
"I…didn't mean to stare. It's been a long time since I had company. Particularly female company."
"How long?"
He counted back. "A hundred and thirty-eight years."
"That's a long time to be celibate," Caroline scolded. "Are you doing this to yourself because other people are distracting, or because you're afraid they will find out how badly you've fucked up?"
Lawrence flinched. "Option B," he admitted. "It's not just that you're a beautiful woman; you're so…physical."