Annie.
HARLIE.
The two people who meant the most to him.
He thought about it.
He’d learned something in the past three days. He’d learned he was in love. And he’d learned what love meant. And in both cases, he’d realized it by himself. Nobody had had to point it out to him.
He felt a little pleased with himself at that. He’d finally been able to experience and cope with something that HARLIE couldn’t surpass him at. It was a nice feeling.
Not that he was jealous of the machine — but it was reassuring to know that there was still something that human beings could do that machines could not master.
Love.
It was a good feeling. He turned the word over in his mind, comparing it with the strange sparkly glow that surged through him. The word couldn’t begin to encompass the tingling warmth that he felt. When he’d come in to work this morning, he’d literally bounced. He hadn’t been conscious of his feet even touching the ground. He had this feeling of wanting to tell everyone he met how good it was to be in love — only common sense kept him from doing that. Even so, he was abnormally cheerful and could not keep from dropping oblique remarks about his weekend and the reason for his fantastic good mood.
The feeling had lasted all day, been reinforced by a wistful call early in the morning from Annie. There was little either had to say to the other, but they each wanted to hear the other’s voice one more time, and they whispered “I love you” back and forth at each other, and “Hi,” and “It’s good to know that you’re there,” and not much more than that. So they just listened to the sound of each other and shared a smile together.
Then he’d spoken to HARLIE. At last. And he’d answered his own question. HARLIE had helped him clarify his thinking, but it was he and not the machine who had realized what love was and why it was so confusing.
And finally, today a problem that had seemed so big on Friday had been reduced to nothing more than a routine adjustment of procedure and programming.
He felt fine. Auberson felt just fine.
And then his intercom buzzed.
It was Carl Elzer.
The little man wanted to meet HARLIE.
In the flesh, so to speak.
So they took the long elevator ride down to the bottom level and Auberson introduced him.
Elzer stood before a console-sized mass that barely reached to his chest and said, “This? This is HARLIE? I’d expected something bigger.”
“This is the thinking part of HARLIE,” Auberson said calmly. “The human part.”
Elzer eyed it warily.
It was a series of racks, perhaps twenty of them, each two inches above the next. The framework holding them had wires leading off at all angles. Elzer squatted down and peered into it. “What’re those things on the shelves?”
Auberson raised the plastic dust cover off the front and slid it back across the top. He counted down to the fifth rack and unsnapped the hooks on the frame. He slid it out for fiber’s inspection.
“Is he turned off?” Elzer asked.
“Not hardly.” He indicated the mass of wires at the back of the rack still connecting it to the rest of the framework. “This board that the units are mounted on is a hyper –state piece itself. It saves a lot of connecting wire. A lot of connecting wire.” The rack was about two and a half feet long and a foot wide. It was less than a quarter inch thick. Spaced across it, seemingly in no particular pattern, were more than fifty carefully labeled “black-box” units. They were featureless little nodes, rectangular and dark. Most were less than an inch in length. Others were as long as six. None were thicker than one inch. They were the equivalent of human brain lobes, but they looked like miniature black slabs, casually arranged on a small bookshelf in a random geometric pattern.
“Actually,” explained Auberson, “we could fit these pieces into a space not too much larger than the human brain — well, not these pieces here, but the actual circuitry of HARLIE. It could easily be compressed into a unit the size of a football, but we’ve laid the lobes out like this for easy repair or replacement. The football-sized unit would be more efficient, because general circuit length would be reduced, cutting our overall operation time. But HARLIE’s still considered a prototype unit, so we want the ability to open him up and see what makes him work or not work.”
“Especially ‘not work,’ ” said Elzer.
Auberson ignored it. “Anyway, that’s why we sacrificed some of the compactness of the operation for the ease of a ‘breadboard’ set-up.” He slid the rack back into the frame, snapped the hooks into place, and lowered the dust cover over it.
Elzer touched the plastic cover. His tiny eyes were veiled. “That’s all there is to him, huh?”
Auberson nodded. “Hyper-state circuitry enables us to compress a lot of things into a very small area. Large-scale integration, the process that preceded hyper-state, allowed enough circuitry per inch to reproduce the actions of the human brain in a volume only four times the size of the human head. Hyper-state allows us to duplicate not only cell function, but cell size as well.”
Elzer looked skeptical. Auberson knew what he was thinking and added, “Of course, it’s not much to look at, but it’s the results that count. Each unit you see there — each node — is worth at least ten thousand dollars. The whole case here is more than eleven million dollars. Give or take a few hundred thou.”
Elzer pursed his lips thoughtfully. “It’s the research,” said Auberson. “That’s what costs so much. Also, the planning, the diagramming, the implementation. Also, the careful precision required in construction — those things have to be layered, molecule by molecule. We had to work out new techniques to make some of the larger ones; but then, those units are practically indestructible.”
“An awful lot of money,” Elzer murmured. “Future units will be cheaper,” Auberson replied. “If there are any future units.” Elzer looked around. “If this is all there is to him, why do you need the whole bottom level of the plant?”
Auberson led him through the doors into the large, brightly lit work room. “This is where we monitor the actions of that.” He gestured behind him at the room they had just left. “Each one of those big consoles you see is monitoring the actions of one or more of those slabs.”
Elzer looked about him at several million dollars’ worth of data processors and analyzers. For the most part, they were tall rectangular shapes, or squat rectangular shapes, or long rectangular shapes. Some had windows in which spinning reels of tape were visible. Others had panels of buttons, keys, or bunking lights. Many had TV screens on them, but the diagrams they flashed were meaningless to Elzer’s untrained eyes. “All this for analysis?”
“Mostly. Also for conversations.” Auberson pointed to a cluster of consoles and typers. “HARLIE has twenty or so channels for talking to people, but each of those twenty channels has several consoles to it. HARLIE doesn’t just carry on a conversation with you, he annotates it as he goes along. A separate console keeps a record of all reference texts, equations, and source material that has a bearing on the conversation. That requires a highspeed printer. Also, there’re auxiliary consoles to each channel, so other people can monitor the conversation, or participate in it.”
Elzer nodded. “I understand.”
“We’ve begun to move out of the prototype stage,” Auberson said. “We’re starting to use him for non-essential tasks, the working out of auxiliary programs, et cetera. We’re going slow, taking it one step at a time, making sure we’ve mastered each phase before going on to the next. We’re at the point now where it’s easier to set him an actual problem than to try and devise a suitable test. So far, he’s done all right. A few of his solutions have been rather unorthodox, but not unworkable.”
“Like for instance?” the bookkeeper prompted.
“Well, the Timeton plant contract, for example. We used HARLIE as a disinterested third party to monitor both sides’ demands and proposals, and offer, if possible, a solution of his own. The union’s requests were routine: higher pay, increased benefits. But the plant was in a money squeeze because of a recent expansion and failure to match expected earnings. Timeton was considering a cutback at the time.”