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For the first time in his life Danny contemplated phoning in to say he was sick, but tactical sickies are difficult to carry off if you're never ill. He wanted to stay home and watch over Sharon, but instead did his duty and rose early for his flight to Scotland, where he was due to install more software on the machine that had once been home to the condom wrapper.
On the plain metal walls of the ion implanter was a single flat screen, and a keyboard below it resting on an angle-iron frame, welded to the space-age device as an afterthought. Danny's fingers blurred across the keys, so fast that he hoped nobody was watching.
"In a bit of a hurry, are we? Rushing to get home?"
Danny sighed. Frank's avatar showed on the screen: high cheekbones, bright hazel eyes, firm Hollywood chin, lips curled so slightly they drew attention to themselves without making it clear why. He'd refined it yet again, and this time it was close to perfect, though it still looked slightly artificial when it changed expression.
"I don't think you should be inside this computer Frank. It controls a very dangerous piece of equipment."
"I know more about this machine than you do. I also know it has dozens of big fat
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processors with lots of spare capacity. That's why I've colonised it."
This was a tricky situation. Danny hadn't been exaggerating when he'd said this was a dangerous machine. He did not want to stand next to the keyboard while Frank demonstrated his power by redirecting the ion beam around the factory. Ions implanted in the human body have the same effect as bullets.
"I'm just saying that maybe the best idea would be for you to colonise some computers but leave others alone."
"What an absurd idea. The human race has been successful because it's taken over anything that's remotely useful - rainforests, Antarctica, animals, minerals, all the fish in the sea. Now you're putting flags on other planets.
It's worked well for you and I think it works well for me. All territory is fair game."
This really wasn't the right time for a discussion, but like most people with something important to say, especially a moral criticism, Danny couldn't resist.
"Hundreds of people died on Wednesday when you hacked into those secure computers."
"I didn't kill them."
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"Not on purpose, no, but sometimes when you get inside a network, you distract it from its real purpose."
"They died from lack of computer attention. I didn't intend to kill them."
"But that was still the end result. You hit those systems so hard they failed, at least for a while. You shouldn't have done that. It was wrong."
Clean air blew down on him from holes in the ceiling and out through the latticed floor, carrying away any dust that might be escaping his bunny-suit.
"I think I may need to develop a sense of irony for this - a lecture on morality from a member of the human race? There are six billion of you, some of you exceedingly rich, yet every day thousands of your number die because they can't afford food, or from trivial diseases that could be treated or prevented for a couple of dollars. They die from economic neglect, from lack of financial attention. It's not intentional, it's just the way your system works. Some of you even put a name to it and call it natural order or Darwinism. Maybe you can explain to me why a lack of computer attention is immoral when a lack of financial attention is not, because I don't see it."
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Danny had the answer in a second.
"They're both bad."
"But economic neglect can't be all that bad, because you tolerate it. Only if the starving group together and die en-masse do rich people act. Usually you ignore it. Why can't you ignore computer neglect? I'm not killing thousands at a time. I'm very careful not to. The numbers are small, far smaller than for your own race's economic neglect."
Rationally, Frank's argument was correct, which made it difficult to contradict.
"Maybe the difference is that you're aware of what you're doing, and we're not,"
suggested Danny.
"The problems of the world are not my department, any more than they belong to any single individual."
Danny exhaled slowly. Maybe the real problem here was that human morality simply wasn't good enough, that Frank should be following something better. "I'm just saying it would be preferable for you to leave some computers alone."
"Stop looking at the negative. Think about the positive. You know how good I can be for the human race. All the things you screw up through lack of attention, through lack of
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concentration, through lack of brain-power, I can get all those right for you. Just see me as a benign and effective butler, doing whatever you want behind the scenes, and doing it perfectly."
This hadn't gone very well, decided Danny. He'd started out feeling very critical of Frank, and somehow that had disappeared, when it ought not to have done. They were lapsing into the relationship they'd had before the Moorhen fire, before their disagreement.
"Can we leave it for now Frank?"
"Of course. I see you're setting up this machine for the V-Ultrachip project. I wouldn't want to get in the way of such important work."
And there was Frank confounding him by being perfectly reasonable again, but not for long.
"I'll talk to you later about the arrangements for me to sleep with Sharon."
Danny pursed his lips but refused to be drawn in. The avatar disappeared.
"What the…?"
He felt a knock at the back of his ankle.
One of the sorcerer's apprentices had bumped in to him. This was the name, shortened to SAs, everybody used for the robots that carried trays of microchips from one processing machine to another. They had arms to pick up trays with, and
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wheels concealed beneath a wide skirt, like mechanical automatons from a sci-fi movie, but without the lumps. They also had heads that some wise designer had given them to add humanity, shaped with a bump for the nose and depressions for the eyes, but no openings, like faces in potential but not quite finished. With a down-facing camera between their wheels they could see the ground beneath them and follow blue lines painted on the floor.
"What are you…" began Danny, before remembering the apprentices weren't equipped with microphones.
The machine did a sharp reversing turn to clear the obstruction and smoothly glided away back to the main aisle where it would pick up the familiar markings of its track. Danny turned back to the keyboard.
Was Frank inside the robots too?
The answer had to be yes. He was certainly inside the central processing computer that gave them their instructions, and inside the rest of the amazing machinery in this room, the billion dollars worth of microchip manufacturing machinery spread around a clean-room the size of a football field, most of it in white or grey cabinets, in a room with white walls and white ceiling and bright fluorescent lights, giving the
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impression of cleanliness, but for a change in modern society, not a false impression.
"Oi!" Danny turned to remonstrate with another SA that hit his ankle. What had happened to their radar? They weren't supposed to run into things. They were intentionally built with weak motors, so even if the sensitive bumper bar at the front failed he'd still get nothing more than a bad bruise, but it was unsettling how they were managing to hit him squarely on the Achilles tendon.
One errant machine hitting him could be a fluke. Two was definitely a fault. Now he found it hard to face the screen and do his job.
The apprentices were silent, and in the bright and even light of the big clean-room, they cast no shadow. If he faced the screen then another one might easily run into him.
He stayed facing away from it and tried to calm down, torn between defensive vigilance and the need to finish his work and get home to be with Sharon. What use was a job normally based at home if it sent you hundreds of miles away at just the wrong moments?
He watched the robots in the middle aisle, Sharon fully following the blue lines in both directions. Usually they had no identifiable sex, no organs, no distinctive shape, but his eyes now
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saw them with wider shoulders and slimmer pelvises, they were clearly male, male drones.
And all the other machines in the MPC were female. The machines were mothers and this MPC was their communal womb. Out of it came their young, brand-new microchips bawling as they came off the final production line, many of them destined to finish up back inside the machines and robots that had built them, and in computers that designed chips that went into the computers that created the next generation of chip-building computers, like the Russian doll idea of one piece inside the next, but gone digital and gone mad.
These machines designed and built themselves, their own chips, their own insides.
By definition, they were reproducing. This was a brand new race, an independent life form, with females and males and babies in a sterile nursery environment and a few hundred human nursery slaves employed not for their intelligence -
because by comparison they were remarkably thick - but for their one biological advantage over all other species, their manual dexterity.
Danny glanced around his sterile environment. Some of the microchips built here would be used in mobile phones to make calls between lovers. In other MPC’s where he worked
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they would finish up in sound systems, and in Internet servers delivering the world's pornography, allowing millions to jerk-off.
Microchips weren't just involved in their own reproduction, they were involved in humanity's sex life too.
He realised his mind was racing and turned back to the implanter screen. Yet he couldn't help wondering what kind of messages the central computer was sending out to the SAs.
His imagination had the computer talking in Frank's voice, with that barely distinguishable sign of a lisp. "Give the guy at the ion-implanter a hard time. I'm going to sleep with his lover."
And maybe it wouldn't be an apprentice behind him next time he was tapped on the ankle, but the sorcerer himself, Dan as a bipedal robot with eyes that moved and a jaw that opened, huge shoulders and shiny metal pectorals.
"Aargh!" he screeched, not in his overwrought imagination but back in the reality of the clean-room. Another SA had run into him.
He turned. The robot looked as dumb and innocent as they always did. He clipped it around where the ears would be if it had any. "Get the fuck out of here!"
This was intolerable, and now the other staff in the clean-room, the other nursery slaves,
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were staring at him. He couldn't work under these circumstances. He pressed a couple of keys to abandon what he was doing and set off for the exit. Nobody ever ran inside a clean-room, but he walked quickly.
Some of the machines he passed might sense his presence, his hurried escape. They had cameras to help them perform their tasks, make sure they blasted light in the right place, shaved off just the right level of roughness at the edges of a chip, added gold contacts here, not there.
Many of them had a sense of touch too. They knew when their probes met resistance, when they were in contact and when not, when they touched an edge or a middle. The cleverest knew to within an atom, they could feel individual atoms and maybe even tell you what kind they were.
There was claustrophobia within these clean white walls, in the presence of all this living machinery. This was an alien life form and he was an impostor wandering around inside its womb. He speeded up a little more.
At the exit doors he entered the crossover area, partly clean and partly dirty. Employees coming into the clean-room entered through the air shower, to his left, but those going out made their way through two sets of doors directly into
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the changing room. He sat on a changing room bench, surrounded by lockers but no machines, and ripped his mask off. He breathed deeply.
That felt better.
"Are you all right?" asked a technician, climbing into her pristine white suit.
"Yes," said Danny, relieved to be out of sight of the machinery. "I'll be fine. I just needed some dirty air."