The Mind Like A Strange Balloon | Page 2

was the station itself; the chaos around it,
the staging area for the orbital energy grid. The Aleph system managed

everything, from the routine flow of supplies to 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