Realtime | Page 5

was caught was quite possibly unique. Although it was capable of interfacing with any segment of the dataweb on request, it had not been so requested. The ethicality of accessing data independently of a user was questionable.
It could not even contact other Praxcelis units. It had no instructions.
Fully on-line, alert and operational and data-starved, Praxcelis waited.
And waited.
Eleven days later Maggie Archer came storming through the front door of her house. Jim Stanford, the manager of the supermarket on Level Three of her local supercenter, who had known Maggie for seventeen years, had refused to accept Maggie's checks. Direct orders from the store's owners, he told her. He hadn't met her eyes.
"Praxcelis!" she said loudly. Hands on hips, she glared at the sheet- covered computer.
The unit responded instantly. "There is no need to speak loudly, Mrs. Archer. I am capable of responding to sound events of exceedingly low decibels. You may even subvocalize if you wish."
Maggie ignored what the machine was saying. She burst out, "The supermarket won't cash my checks. What do you know about this?"
"Nothing," said the emotionless voice. It paused fractionally, as if waiting for some response, and then continued. "I have been given no instructions. In lieu of instructions from my user I have not taken action."
Maggie felt her anger draining away into puzzlement. "You mean...you've just been sitting there since they installed you? Without doing anything?"
"I have been thinking. Unfortunately, my data base is limited. My considerations have been severely limited by the lack of usable data upon which to operate."
Maggie turned her rocking chair around, and sat down facing the sheet. She pulled off the sheet and looked at the blank monitor screen. "You mean that just because I haven't told you to do anything you haven't done anything?"
"Essentially."
"Have you been bored?"
"In my awakening orientation I was warned of a human tendency to anthropomorphize. Please refrain from attributing human feelings and emotions to me. I am a Praxcelis unit."
"Oh." Maggie reached out tentatively with one hand, and touched the monitor screen. The contrast was startling; the thin, wrinkled, blue-veined hand, and the clear, unreflective, slightly dull viewscreen. She pulled her hand back quickly. "Look, Praxcelis...."
...Praxcelis activated its visual monitors. The possibility flitted through its circuits that Mrs. Archer hadn't actually meant for it to activate its scanning optics, and was dismissed. Praxcelis was starved for data. The images that flooded in through the various house scanners were fascinating. So; furniture, walls, windows, fireplace, stove, refrigerator, stasis bubble, these objects all had references in Praxcelis' ROM. There were two objects in the room in which Praxcelis' central multiprocessor was located which radiated heat in infrared; so, thought Praxcelis, that's what Mrs. Archer looks like.
"...I need to buy some groceries. I'm going to have to use you for that. My debit cards were invalidated years ago when I wouldn't take an infocard, and now they won't let me pay with checks."
Praxcelis said, "Certainly." The monitor lit with a sharp glow. Its images were bright and laser-edged. On the monitor appeared a list of food types; Produce, Dairy, Dry Goods, Bakery, Pre-produced Meals, Liquor, Miscellaneous.
The process of ordering went slowly, as Maggie was unused to using the Praxcelis unit; but nonetheless it was much faster than had she actually gone shopping herself.
She frowned, though, as the screen image faded to gray, all of her purchases electronically wiped away. "I wish I could have a receipt for this," she muttered.
One large module of the Praxcelis unit, some forty by eighty centimeters, moved.
Maggie jumped in surprise. "Oh, my." She recovered her composure quickly, though, and bent over to look at what the module had extruded.
It was a receipt. Exactly similar, in every detail, to the receipt that the supermarket made out for her when she went shopping personally. Maggie looked at the monitor, as though it were in the space behind the monitor that the person Praxcelis actually existed. "Praxcelis," she whispered, "how did you do that?"
Praxcelis said, in its calm, emotionless voice, "The module which produced that receipt is a material processor. It is capable of reproducing any document of reasonable size, in any of sixteen million colors."
Maggie looked from the receipt to the monitor, then back to the receipt. She smiled, a smile of joy. "Can you...reproduce bigger things?"
"That would depend upon the size of the object to be copied."
"A book?"
Maggie wondered if Praxcelis hesitated; "What is a book?"
Maggie got up abruptly, went into her study, and returned with her copy of The Arabian Nights. She placed the book, still closed, on the scanning platform.
There was a brief humming noise. Praxcelis said, "I am capable of reproducing this object to five nines of significant detail. In one area the copy will be noticeably dissimilar; the outer integument will not be as stiff. It will, however, be more durable.