Oh, she thought. Poor Gigory. He totally thought I was waving at him, so he came over, and then he got to be the hero saving me from everybody thinking I'm a fern-toppler, and now he's realized I'm here with another guy.
"Um," she said, trying to figure out how to answer the question Cord had asked and Gigory had half-asked without seeming to favor Gigory because she didn't want to give Cord the wrong impression, but also without seeming to brush Gigory off after he gave up his place in line because she waved and then came and pulled her cache out of the fire with the plant. "So ... yes!" She settled on splitting the difference by looking back and forth between them as rapidly and repeatedly as she could. "Yes, everything's fine. That was almost a disaster with that plant, so thank you for helping, Gigory. And Cord, this is Gigory, from my work. Cord, Gigory ... Gigory, Cord." And by the way, Gigory, Cord is Real. Oh gosh, that didn't come out of my mouth, did it? No, no of course not.
"Well." Cord held out one hand in a bit of a formal offer of hand-shaking, and Gigory took it with his face turning red. "Nice to meet you, Gigory."
"Sure, right, you too," Gigory said, backing away a step as their hands unclasped and hooking a thumb back toward the line -- which Bitsy could see had stacked up significantly as the station grew more and more crowded with the morning rush. "I guess I'll just ... get back to ... oh."
He'd glanced over his shoulder and seen the line, then let his shoulders slump. "Aw, LAN. I really wanted to get to work early and catch up on those 6-O-2 reports. I guess I'll just skip waiting and get some break-room coffee when I get there."
The 6-O-2 reports that I was so laggy about getting to him yesterday, she thought, feeling terrible about it. And that he'd already have done if I'd put even half my bandwidth to actually doing my job instead of daydreaming.
"Here, look," she said suddenly inspired to kill two birds with one stone. I really don't want to drink this coffee anyway, right? "Why don't you take mine, since it's my fault you have extra reports to do and you saved me from a plant disaster?"
A confused look scrolled onto Gigory's face. "Well, that's really nice of you, but isn't it like, tea or cocoa or something? You hate coffee, right? I really need some nano-caffeine to get my reportware going this early ..."
From the corner of her eye, she could see Cord switch his gaze from Gigory to her, but she didn't dare glance over to see what kind of expression he had on.
"I mean, I don't hate it," she said weakly, still holding the cup out toward him. "Not if you put enough cream and sugar in, which I think I did. Or maybe over-did. I mean, you're right that it's not my favorite or anything, but 'hate' is a bit of a strong word."
Seriously, Gigory! Just take it!
He glanced over at the line again. It was so backed up now that if it had been a drive, it would be saying, Backup drive full. Gigory's eyes returned to her proffered cup. She could practically see him fretting between whether it would be worse to take her coffee and leave her with nothing, or to turn down her kind offer when he knew she really detested coffee anyway.
Bitsy lifted the cup a little higher, and he sighed and took it.
"Okay, thanks," he said. "I guess ... uh, I'll see you at work later."
"Sure," she said with a tight smile. "See you there."
As he made his way off into the crowd, Bitsy turned back to the table to find Cord sitting down with his phone half out of his pocket again and another frown on his face.
"Sorry about that," she said. "Gigory's very sweet, but I think he saw me waving at you and thought I was waving at him, and so he came over, and ..."
Cord let the phone slip fully into his pocket, took a sip of his coffee, and leaned casually back in his chair. "You know, Bitsy, when you very first tried to claim responsibility for me spilling my coffee on you, I wrote it off to some overactive ettiqcoding. Then when you invited me to coffee, I figured it was just a palgorithm reacting to something cute or likable you saw in me. But I'm starting to think maybe I somehow triggered a full-blown crushroutine."
Oh no. He thinks I'm overreacting. Which, of course he does, because he doesn't know I know he's Real.
"Well, I mean ... don't you think the dream feed would have archived a crushroutine and compressed the initiating impulse enough that I wouldn't ..." be making such an idiot of myself?
Cord shrugged and took another sip. "The dream feed's not perfect."
She blinked at that. "It's not seamless. It deliberately allows some randomization so we don't all end up exact boring duplicates of each other. But it is supposed to be 100% reliable, right? At least if you round up from the thousandth or two-thousandth digit after the decimal place."
"Well, reliable and perfect aren't necessarily the same thing, are they?
"I guess not ..." As she said the words, her processor somehow flashed with, Gigory's reliable, you're perfect. But of course she didn't say that out loud.
"Look," he said, leaning forward, "if you can keep a secret, one of the reasons my job is so annoying is that I'm in dream feed management."
She blinked again. "I ..." Why would there even be such a thing? "... isn't the system supposed to be fully autonomous?"
"Heisenborg certainly intended it to be," he said. "But in practice, well, if it lets a random crushroutine go on for a week with one android and allows an overactive palgorithm in another, and those two randomizations cause a convergent interaction, you can end up with a sort of positive interference between signals. An amplification of behavioral quirks that nudges just outside the specifications boundaries. The system detects those and works to smooth them out, of course. But if you take the number of decision points the dream feed has to make about every second of every day's experience of every android and then multiply it by the number of androids, well, you start to get very large numbers. And when you have very large numbers of anything, preposterously unlikely things are actually guaranteed to happen. So a thousand quirk amplifications might occur in a day that are over spec limits and get fixed automatically ... but ten thousand more occur that are just barely under spec limits. That's ten thousand amplifications left in circulation the next day that could potentially have their own interactions and create amplifications twice as large as the system would normally clamp down on. On top of that, if a half-dozen of those double-amplifications occur in the same morning, that's six opportunities for further amplification lurking around for the rest of the day."
Bitsy just stared at him, rapt. So. This is what Reals have to deal with every day!
"Now," he went on, "let's talk about millions of androids living their lives for hundreds of years since the whole system initially booted up. I'm going to stop blathering about the math of it, because you kind of look like your junk filters are trying to decide whether this is all gibberish. But the long and the short of it is, without external management, the dream feed is likely to allow a magnitude six amplification every decade or so, and a magnitude eight every century. Magnitude six would be a personality divergence sixty-four times greater than the system considers safe. Magnitude eight would be two hundred fifty-six times greater."
"You stopped the math too late, I guess," she told him honestly. "Because I don't really know what those numbers mean."
"In terms of old-style human behaviors, we're talking about sociopathic or even psychotic behaviors."
Bitsy felt a jolt in her chest, like a backup processor coming online to deal with data beyond her processing core's normal capacity.
"That's ... that's really scary."
"Yes," he said. "And ordinarily I wouldn't give this kind of information out freely. But I like you, Bitsy --"
Yes! Oh, Loj, what a relief!
"-- so I wanted you to understand that when I say I just got a text that means I need to leave on a train that's coming in two minutes, I'm not blowing you off in any way. I simply don't have any choice about it."
"Oh."
"I know. I'm really sorry, but it's important."
"Of course!" Her eyes felt so wide, she worried the servomotors in her lids might seize up. "Gosh, please don't stay and finish coffee with me if it means some android might end up with psychosis!"
"Thanks for understanding." He stood up and smiled at her. "And look, we have each other's numbers now, so you can call me or I'll call you sometime and set something up that hopefully won't be interrupted."
She tried to smile back, he nodded once more, and then he was gone.
(Chapter Ten is here!)
No comments:
Post a Comment