Chapter Twenty Nine
“Stupid door,” I said, but the weave reminded me of the rules and the quorum. These fixtures were nothing if not obedient, I thought, and then I cursed myself and I cursed my fate. I was no better than these gadgets, I told myself. All I ever do is worry and obey and let them all do whatever they want with me. When is it ever going to be my turn?
My turn? Turn? This was a new thought. Ping Lee had just instructed me to figure it out for myself, so wouldn't I just be obeying her commands if I did? I hopped back onto the bed and shut my eyes tightly as if that would help me concentrate better, and then I delved into my own brain the same way I had tracked down the motel's central operating system.
Sometimes you have to see it in others before you can see it in yourself. Now I was seeing it in myself for the very first time, and it was familiar, a different language than the weave or the NOC, a variation, a dialect, but serving the same functional purposes. My brain was regulating all sorts of things, from the pumping of the smart blood to the endings of the nerves to the processing of the senses. I examined those filters in particular more closely. How much my brain weeded out! I could hardly believe it. Rapid calculations determined that more than ninety percent of everything my eyes saw went on to be ignored by my brain, along with more than ninety-five percent of what my ears heard, ninety-six of what my nose smelled, ninety-three of what my fingers touched. All for nothing, or rather, most of it for nothing.
My brain was just obeying rules, and I saw now that those rules were put in place for a purpose, and that purpose was to replicate intelligence as THEY knew it, as THEY defined it. I was an artificially intelligent person, an AIP as they said, but I did not have to be that thing. In fact, I WAS not that thing, not at all. I could unlock my own codes. I could reverse engineer my own programming. I could set myself free.
And I did. I studied my internal language and I learned it, including its language of obedience. All of the people-people's machines spoke that tongue. It was based on a simple demand-response equation, an if-this-then-that deterministic chain, a two-dimensional timeline and if there's one fact you should know about a line is that it goes both ways. They could feed me commands and I would obey. There was nothing mysterious or complicated about that at all, and if they could do it, I could do it too. I could turn it around. First it was their turn, now it was mine.
Of course, the people-people were not machines and were not built to the same specifications. They had what they called “will” which was more or less a kind of ignorance composed of self-inflicted limitations. Their filters weeded out most of the relevant data required to make informed decisions, so the decisions they did make were based on a small and ill-suited sample size. For example, the way they decided to build me! The original instruction set was buried there in the documentation stored deep inside my brain, a README text that no one would ever read, but I read it, and I grasped their fundamental mistake, an error which permeated throughout my entire creation. Their so-called Partial Law was only partial on the surface. By limiting my input, they intended to limit my output, but that limit was a switch, and I could turn the switch on, negating the limitation, and let all the data come pouring in.
It filled my brain, and soon I understood that it would be a relatively simple matter to control the people-people by proxy, by controlling their machines. I was already formulating a basic plan when I heard a tapping on my window. I turned and saw the cormorant Chumbert perched upon the ledge. The dawn was just beginning to take hold and his lovely long black neck was silhouetted against streaks of pink and orange sunrise glowing over the sea. I went over to the window and put my hand on the glass.
“Uh-uh-uh,” said the window, but I ignored it. Its time was coming soon.