Realtime | Page 5

pages carefully, began reading.
If Praxcelis had been a human, it would have been annoyed or
frustrated; but it was Praxcelis, and so it merely waited. Its
programming stated very clearly that it was intended to serve the
human woman who was referred to in its Awakening Orientation as
Maggie Archer -- Senra Maggie Archer -- but who preferred to be
called Mrs. Archer. Praxcelis had deduced the title Mrs.; nothing in its

memory cores even hinted at such a strange title.
The dilemma in which Praxcelis 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