The Mind Like A Strange Balloon | Page 2

the trickiest cost-and-time decisions. Should it drop the millions of balls it was juggling, SenTrax would fall along with them. ICOG's vendor contract with SenTrax undoubtedly called for heavy penalties, up to and including default, so ICOG's lawyers would nail SenTrax to the courthouse wall.
For the next two weeks my home was the Ops Room. Workstations were scattered around the forty-meter hemisphere, paths between them marked by glowing red beads. Around the room's circumference were racks of metal globes that bounced soft white light off the walls.
The sound most usually heard was a soft murmur of voices from Alice Vance's group of knowledge engineers.
The KEs are acolytes of the system. They occasionally receive an epiphany in the form of a bright hologram, which springs into being over the consoles they manipulate. To them the current systems problems were something on the order of original sin, so they approached me diffidently with suggestions, hypotheses, or just good wishes. They were looking to me to explain the ways of Aleph to man.
I thought they were mentally ill, but didn't have time for them any way. I was too busy learning , Aleph's characteristic patterns, those complex internal rhythms that, like a foreign language, you begin to forget when you're away from them. I was listening for dissonances or sprung rhythms--anything to indicate what might be wrong, but all I got was the usual dense flow of information.
From the vast number crunching any computer can handle to the decision processes that only an IA can touch, Aleph appeared to be functioning normally.
But several times--and often for an hour or more, which, to a machine whose unit of time is the nanosecond, is an infinity--the system slowed. It was as if stunned, confused. Calculations queues formed, vital decisions processes virtually halted. Suddenly, normal flow would resume. Aleph would have to play catch-up for a while, but it was built for that game, so routine functioning of Athena Station wasn't seriously impaired.
In short, the situation was somewhat troublesome. What was causing the anomalies? What would happen when the system was under full load at all times?
I could understand why Alice's KEs twittered during these slowdowns like priests who had just heard about the archbishop's illegitimate child.
Like them, like the diagnostics programs, I had no answers. I did, however, have a guess. Such all-purpose IAs as Aleph do a lot of their own programming--it's part of what makes them easy to work with--and in the process they sometimes tie themselves up in strange ways to their subsystems, with unfortunate results. So I was rifling the black boxes that on my data windows represented subsystems, hoping to find inside one of them a little, squatting, fork-tongued demon--an ugly little thing with a long tongue, nasty breath, and a repellent sense of humor. Turing's Demon I called it--a being conjured out of the unfathomable complexity and speed of IA systems.
Given this idea, nothing more than an intuition, I was ready to go out and watch Aleph at work. I intended to observe groups that asked the system for a lot of processing power and whose software was home cooked--the weird spots, places out on the edge of R&D.;I had run a quick sorting program to find them.
Biops/I-Sight was on the station's outer rim. It featured blank white walls, cluttered workbenches, and a row of data consoles Twenty-first century still life as opposed to the new millennium Gothic of the Ops Room.
A young woman in blue jeans and a T-shirt, fairly obvious postdoc material, got up from the station where she and an even younger Japanese man were working, and said hello.
I told her I wanted to see the boss. She went through one of two unmarked doors and came back in a few minutes to tell me Doctor Heywood could see me now.
Diana Heywood was small, slender, in her early thirties. She had close-cut, dark hair streaked with gray, and when she turned to face me, her eyes were hidden behind large, gold-rimmed glasses with a burst of dark smoke at the center of each lens, like the expanding cloud from an explosion. Her features were sculpted in fine bone, her neck was long and slender, carved from ivory. She was wearing a silky blouse the color of a ripe peach, and black jeans.
"What can I do for you?" she said. She moved slowly from behind the desk, her fingers barely touching the surface.
Her image seemed still and sharp before me, and I got a sudden, involuntary spasm of desire.
"I need to observe your employment of the Aleph-Nought system."
"One of Alice's wizards, are you?"
"Hardly. Just a freelance troubleshooter. Could you tell me in general what you are doing?"
She explained they were growing biocomputers, which were ultimately intended to be implants--replacements for destroyed retinal tissue or optic nerves. Athena