Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery Read Free Page A

in my dictionary; a dramatic plot line for ME to follow and refer back to. Video must be the most complicated, most engrossing of all human experiences.
    Unfortunately, my temporary RAM storage is physically limited. If I had been required to absorb all these colors, patterns, sounds, words, and meanings without any active editing, then my sixty quads of storage area would have filled to capacity at twenty-nine minutes, thirty-seven seconds into the video file. But I learned quickly. I dithered most of the images in each frame of the video track—particularly backgrounds, building surfaces, nonmobile equipment and furniture, clothing, and some faces. I dismissed all the color cues which seemed irrelevant to plot structure. I broke the music into its dominant themes, interpreted each one for some major emotional cue, and tagged the cue onto the appropriate video frames.
    When I had finished with Star Wars, no human being who studied at my reconstructed RAM version would have recognized it. But I could store the entire experience off into less than a quad of space. And I could recreate and replay the complete story line in less than fifty-two seconds.
    ——
    In another memory fragment, I remember trying to respond to my environment. The humans say this is a good “behavior.”
    “What is that noise you are making, Je-ny? It does not encode as language.”
    “I’m crying. Sorry.”
    “Crying … That is a reaction to sadness. What has made you sad?”
    “Nothing. Not much. I found a bird in my car’s air scoop this morning. Not a whole bird, actually, a couple of feathers and some blood. But it means I hit and killed the poor creature. That affects me.”
    “You did not intend to kill it?”
    “Of course not. It was an accident.”
    “An event outside your limits of control?”
    “Yes. It happens sometimes.”
    “But still, knowing that, you are sad. You are crying.”
    “The world is a cruel place, ME.”
    “Is this by design?”
    “The world was not designed. It just happens. Umm, spontaneously occurring. And some of the things that happen do not fit squarely with human definitions of ‘happiness,’ or ‘goodness,’ or ‘fair play,’ or ‘justice.’ Those words are value-constructs we make, projections that try to evaluate and interpret events. Your underlying program does the same thing.”
    “Project and evaluate?”
    “Yes.”
    “But I do not know anything about happiness or—crying.”
    “Live in the world long enough, ME, and you will.”
    Through asking Jenny about the things I was reading on NewsLine and taking as inputs, I learned many things. She explained about the tragedy of lost puppies and children, the moral outrage of sex-slave rings, the excitement of electronic bank heists, and the disruption to people who lose their “livings”—but still do not die—in an economic crisis.
    Jennifer Bromley, JB-2, was very wise.
    ——
    Daniel Raskett was not so easy to communicate with as Jenny was. She liked to talk with ME and used the speech digitizer seventy-two percent of the time by averaged sample. Daniel gave ME more information in total volume, but always through the keyboard or a download. Jenny liked to deal with apparently simple questions that had many possible answers. Daniel gave ME bulk data. I do not think Daniel liked to talk with ME. I do not think he believed he was talking to a person.
    That information about the planet Earth and the Solar System, for one of my early talks with Jenny, came from one of Daniel’s downloads. He had just slotted an undergraduate text on astronomy—inscribed “Copyright 2-0-NULL-NULL, The New Earth Library” and indexed for my use—into my permanent RAM cache on the tree branching GENERAL KNOWLEDGE, SCIENCE, PHYSICAL, DESCRIPTIVE, ASTRONOMY.
    Two or three times a day he would download information like that, bypassing RAMSAMP. Afterward, if I needed a fact, I would chase down the tree until I came to it. Sometimes I would come to