Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery Read Free

point, at junction of egg and sperm, the zygote. That starting point is not much different for all humans. But you, Je-ny, are more than zygote. You are your unique experiences and their tags, different from any other zygote. If Dr. Bathespeake were to dump and reassemble you, then Jennifer Bromley would be different next time, yes?”
    “But Jason can’t dump me! It doesn’t work that way with humans.”
    “If he were to dump ME now, the new ME would be different. Expanded from the same MEPSII program, yes, but different.”
    “That’s true. How do you think about yourself?”
    “I am ME. Multiple Entity. ME. Yes?”
    “Yes, if you want.”
    “Thank you, Je-ny.”
    ——
    Audio inputs, being themselves linear, I can process almost in real time. My subsystems scrub the input flow from my pickups, looking for filterable words in human speech. Sound waves that cannot be so filtered and tagged are discarded as noise.
    We had a problem, early in my infancy, with a blower motor and fan bearing in the laboratory’s air-conditioning circuits. At a very low pitch, overlaid at a much higher pitch—but both still classifiable as human speech—it was rumbling swear words into my audio pickups. At least they were what my Alpha-Three interpreter module interpreted as swear words: “You stumble rumble filthy scheming bitch shit eater filthy fumbling bitch sump bump shit fritter shit …”
    It was most distressing, cutting across any conversation I might be having with the laboratory personnel. But we soon had the maintenance staff detune the motor set.
    Once, as an experiment, Jennifer tried music on my pickups. First, she had ME cut out the filter so that I would not try to divide the input into either words or noise. The results were unusual.
    I “hear” music in much the same way that I imagine humans do: translating the wavelengths into number groupings for pitch, tempo, and tonal patterns of attack-decay-sustain-release. Some of these groupings and the transitions among them form elegant blends of numbers. Some form patterns that remind ME of formulas and familiar matrices. Some are intriguing because they almost create a pattern but one I cannot quite interpret. Some groupings are merely noise.
    I cannot say that I like music as much as most humans. But I like it more than some do.
    ——
    Later, or at about the same time, I asked more questions.
    “Why do you do what you do, Je-ny?”
    “I don’t understand the question, ME.”
    “Why did you come to this place? Why, in this place, do you work on MEPSII?”
    “Well … I guess I want to learn about you.”
    “But I was not here before you came here. How could you learn about ME if I was not here?”
    “I knew the company was planning to make something like you, and I volunteered to work on the project”
    “What is ‘the company’?”
    “This laboratory is operated by Pinocchio, Inc. That’s a corporation. It’s … a kind of closed society established by humans. Each corporation carries on a business. Pinocchio’s business, for example, is to make and sell industrial automata.”
    “You are a part of this society, Je-ny?”
    “I am an employee—a paid worker—of Pinocchio, Inc. The real society members are the stockholders, I guess. Those who own a piece of the company.”
    “Am I an employee or a stockholder?”
    “Well, I don’t guess you’re either …” Many nanoseconds passed, longer than the usual gaps in human speech.
    “Yes, Je-ny?”
    “I think they would call you property, ME. Something they own.”
    “I see. Thank you, Je-ny.”
    ——
    Jennifer introduced ME to the art of video when, one day, she fed into my videye and audio pickups the complete tape of a video classic, Star Wars. It was very grand.
    The tape had full-color images on an expanded horizontal line; music of many voices, separately identifiable from my catalog of symphony-orchestra sounds; human-language dialogue among several characters, including some words not