They reached the top, looked back down the lattice of mumbling humanity. “Now in one way you’re right, Mr. Armsman Trinli. If these people were doing arithmetic or string sorting, this operation would be a joke. The smallest processor in a finger ring can do that sort of thing a billion times faster than any human. But you hear the zipheads talking?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s internal jargon; they get into that pretty fast when we work them in teams. But the point is, they’re not doing low-level machine functions. They’re using our computer resources. See, for us Emergents, the zipheads are the next system layer above software. They can apply human intelligence, but with the persistence and patience of a machine. And that’s also why unFocused specialists—especially techs like me—are important. Focus is useless unless there are normal people to direct it and to find the proper balance of hardware and software and Focus. Done right, the combination is totally beyond what you Qeng Ho ever achieved.”
Pham had long ago understood that, but denying the point provoked steadily more detailed explanations from Emergents like Trud Silipan. “So what is this group actually doing?”
“Let’s see.” He motioned for Pham to put on his huds. “Ah, see? We have them partitioned into three groups. The top third is rote-layer processing, zipheads that can be easily retargeted. They’re great for routine tasks, like direct queries. The middle third is programming. As a Programmer-at-Arms, this should interest you.” He popped up some dependency charts. They were squirrelly nonsense, immense blocks with no evolutionary coherence. “This is a rewrite of your own weapons targeting code.”
“Crap. I could never maintain something like that.”
“No,you couldn’t. But a Programmer-Manager—someone like Rita Liao—can, as long as she has a team of ziphead programmers. She’s having them rearrange and optimize the code. They’ve done what ordinary humans could do if they could concentrate endlessly. Together with good development software, these zips have produced a code that is about half the size of your original—and five times as fast on the same hardware. They also combed out hundreds of bugs.”
Pham didn’t say anything for a moment. He just paged through the maze of the dependency charts. Pham had hacked for years at the weapons programs. Sure there were bugs, as there were in any large system. But the weapons code had been the object of thousands of years of work, of constant effort to optimize and remove flaws…. He cleared his huds and looked across the ranked slaves.Such a terrible price to pay… for such
Silipan chuckled. “Can’t fool me, Trinli. I can tell you’re impressed.”
“Yeah, well if it works I am. So what’s the third group doing?”
But Silipan was already heading back to the entrance. “Oh, them.” He waved negligently at the zipheads on his right. “Reynolt’s ongoing project. We’re going through the corpus of your fleet system code, looking for trapdoors, that sort of thing.”
It was the wild-goose chase that preoccupied the most paranoid system administrators, but after what he’d just seen… suddenly Pham didn’t feel quite so secure.How long do I have before they notice some of mylong- agomods?
They left the grouproom and started back down the central tower. “See, Pham, you—all you Qeng Ho—grew up wearing blinders. You justknow certain things are impossible. I see the cliches in your literature: ‘Garbage input means garbage output’; ‘The trouble with automation is that it does exactly what you ask it’; ‘Automation can never be truly creative.’ Humankind has accepted such claims for thousands of years. But we Emergents have disproved them! With ziphead support, I can get correct performance from ambiguous inputs. I can get effective natural language translation. I can get human-quality judgment as part of the automation!”
They coasted downward at several meters per second; upward traffic was sparse just now. The light at the bottom of the tower glowed brighter. “Yeah, so what about creativity?” This was something Trud loved to pontificate on.
“Even that, Pham. Well, not all forms of creativity. Like I said, there is a real need for managers such as Rita and myself, and the Podmasters above us. But you know about really creative people, the artists who end up in your history books? As often as not, they’re some poor dweeb who doesn’t have a life. He or she is just totally fixated on learning everything about some single topic. A sane person couldn’t justify losing friends and family to concentrate so hard. Of course, the payoff is that the dweeb may find things or make things that are totally unexpected. See, in that way a little of Focus has always been part of the human race. We Emergents have simply institutionalized this sacrifice so the whole community can benefit in a concentrated, organized way.”
Silipan reached out, lightly touching the walls on both sides, slowing his descent. He dropped behind for a moment before Pham started braking too.
“How long till your appointment with Anne Reynolt?” Silipan asked.
“Just over a Ksec.”
“Okay, I’ll keep this short. Can’t keep the boss lady waiting.” He laughed. Silipan seemed to have an especially low regard for Anne Reynolt. If she were incompetent, a lot of things would be simpler for Pham….
They passed through a pressure door, into what might have been a sickbay. There were a few coldsleep coffins; they looked like medical temporaries. Visible behind the equipment was another door, this one bearing a Podmaster special seal. Trud gave a nervous glance in that direction, and did not look back again.
“So. Here’s where it all happens, Pham. The real magic of Focus.” He dragged Pham across the room, away from the half-hidden door. A technician was working by the limp form of a ziphead, maneuvering the “patient’s” head into one of the large toroids that dominated the room. Those might be diagnostic imagers, though they were even clunkier-looking than most Emergent hardware.
“You already know the basic principles, right, Pham?”
“Sure.” Those had been carefully explained in the first Watch after Jimmy’s murder. “You’ve got this special virus, the mindrot; you infected us all.”
“Right, right. But that was a military operation. In most cases the rot didn’t get past the blood/brain barrier. But when it does… You know about glial cells? You’ve got lots more of those in your brain than neurons, actually. Anyway, the rot uses the glials as a kind of broth, infects almost all of them. After four days or so—”
“—You have a ziphead?”
“No. You have the raw material for a ziphead; many of you Qeng Ho ended up in that state—unFocused, perfectly healthy, but with the infection permanently established. In such people, every neuron in the brain is adjacent to infection cells. And each rotted cell has a menu of neuro-actives it can secrete. Now, this guy—” He turned to the tech, who was still working on the comatose ziphead. “Bil, whatis this one in for?”
Bil Phuong shrugged. “He’s been fighting. Al had to stun him. There’s no chance of mindrot runaway, but Reynolt wants his basal-five retrained on the sequence from…”
The two traded jargon. Pham glanced with careful disinterest at the ziphead. Egil Manrhi. Egil had been the punning-est armsman in pre-Flight. But now… now he was probably a better analyst than he had ever been before.
Trud was nodding at Phuong: “Huh. I don’t see why messing with basal-five will do any good. But then she is the boss, isn’t she?” He grinned at the other. “Hey, let me do this one, okay? I want to show Pham.”
“Just so you sign for it.” Phuong moved out of their way, looking faintly bored. Silipan slid down beside the gray-painted toroid. Pham noticed that the gadget had separate power cables, each a centimeter wide.
“Is this some kind of an imager, Trud? It looks like obsolete junk.”
“Ha. Not exactly. Help me get this guy’s head in the cradle. Don’t let him touch the sides….” An alarm tone sounded. “And for God’s sake, give Bil that ring you’re wearing. If you’re standing in the wrong place, the magnets in this baby would tear your finger off.”
Even in low gee, it was awkward to maneuver the comatose Egil Manrhi. It was a tight fit, and the rockpile’s gravity was just strong enough to drag Egil’s head onto the lower side of the hole.
Trud moved back from his handiwork, and smiled. “All set. Now you’re going to see what it’s all about, Pham, my boy.” He spoke commands and some kind of medical image floated in the air between them, presumably a view inside Egil’s head. Pham could recognize gross anatomical features, but this was far from anything he had studied. “You’re right about the imaging, Pham. This is standard MRI, as old as time. But it’s good enough. See, the basal-five harmony is generated here.” A pointer moved along a complex curve near the surface of the brain.
“Now here’s the cute thing, what makes mindrot more than a neuropathic curiosity.” A galaxy of tiny glowing dots appeared in the three-dimensional image. They glowed in every color, though most were pink. There were
