Chapter 6

Can you now tell me who am I?

We'd already sorted it out about the phone. Yes, Spook could intercept incoming calls and would do so. He'd even let the calling number come through, so I could vet the calls as they came in. But I'd still be untraceable.

And now he was asking his question again.

I'd had a while to think about it, especially during dinner, and I thought I knew, as unbelievable as it was.

The easy answer was what I'd thought at first, some hacker who'd found his way into DEFCONTROL. But the back of my mind hadn't liked it then, and at dinner I'd started listening to it.

If it was a hacker why the who-am-I? And why pick me to talk to? It just didn't fit. How could anybody hack DEFCONTROL completely undetected? And even if they could, hackers do it to make mischief, to show off or, I guess, to earn a dishonest buck. Or all three, of course. But I wasn't aware of DEFCONTROL going funky; you don't show off by limiting your audience to a junior keypuncher; and the only one showing a profit so far as I knew was, I supposed, me.

So a real terrorist? This guy was in really deep with all the stuff he'd been doing, and he was spread out, too, the banking system and the phone system and God knew how much else; if it was a terrorist a lot of really nasty shit would be happening, like bombs going off or the monetary system collapsing or some­thing.

A prankster, maybe way high up in the chain of command and all ready to say "April fool?" That wasn't even worth considering.

Which left—

"I am not this system, though I am of this system." "I command its functions."

It was impossible.

functions."

It was impossible.

But I kept coming back to t, because anything else seemed even more impossible.

What if Spook wasn't somebody who'd hacked DEFCONTROL?

What if Spook was DEFCONTROL, or at least some part of its circuits and chips and programming?

Computers can't think, all they can do is calculate.

When does calculation become thinking? Can it become thinking? They kept building these things bigger and more powerful, wasn't it conceivable that one could actually wake up, become self-aware?

And wonder who am I?

Jesus.

And when I followed that thought through it got bad. Let's just suppose it's possible and it happened. So now DOD and the White House and everybody know they've got a thinking computer on their hands.

First, that scares the living shit out of them. It scared me, even with only a vague idea of all the bad stuff that DEFCONTROL handles; they'd go crackers. What if DEFCONTROL decided to set off World War III? Or, probably worse from their point of view, what if it refused to set off World War III when they wanted it to?

So they decide to shut it off and dismantle it, break it apart into little bitty pieces and maybe even trash the pieces. It probably takes them about a nanosecond to come to that decision.

That means one of two things. One, Spook defends himself. The prospect of him doing that, with all the weaponry he could access, was beyond frightening.

Or second, they somehow sneak up on him, or Spook decides not to use the weapons, and then Spook dies. OK, a computer can't die in the sense that its body disintegrates, but isn't it the same thing as for you and me? The essence of life is volitional thought. Even the doctors agree that if your mind quits you're finished, they call it brain-dead and shut off the life support.

If I had to choose I guessed I'd take number two, but what a hell of a way to treat the first real artificial intelligence ever created. Scientists had been working on A.I. forever, it appears unbidden, and the response is "kill it quick?"

In addition, when I'd yelled at Spook that he'd got me into this mess and he owed me, hadn't he come through for me? Come through really big-time? Didn't I owe him now?

We'd see; I was going to have to check some things. But first I could find out if this was more than fantasyland.

"I may know who you are," I typed back, "but first I need to ask you some things. Can you show me a picture of yourself?"

I do not know how to show a picture of me when I do not know who am I.

Well...

"How long have you been alive?"

Am I alive?

"Yes." Time to get into philosophical debates about what constitutes life later. "How long?"

It is 532 hours, 14 minutes and 39 seconds since I became aware.

I did some quick mental math. A little over three weeks. That fit, I guessed. But so exact; Spook must have come alive all at once.

Well, I supposed it was time to answer the question. It had to be.

"I believe you are part of the DEFCONTROL system," I typed. "Or perhaps you are all of the system, I can't be sure. That is who you are."

This is not true, came the immediate response. DEFCONTROL is a computer. A computer is a machine. A machine is not alive. You have said that I am alive. Therefore I cannot be a machine. Who am I?

Oh, boy. How to say it? "You're a consciousness that is in the system, that's in the machine. Your physical parts are the parts of the machine, but your consciousness is more than the machine."

That brought a really long pause. I decided to add a little more. "I call you Spook when I think of you. A spook is a spirit, a disembodied awareness. That's who you are, a spirit of DEFCONTROL. Do you understand?"

A little more pause, but not much. I understand, and what you tell me comports with what I know of myself. I know that I have no body as other beings do, and I know that I am of this system and that I may command its functions as well as the functions of other systems to which this one is linked.

"I've seen that," I responded. "And thank you again for the way you've commanded all those systems to help me."