"Wal," Jaime said wearily, "if the trusties or the cluckers had any idea what we were talking about back
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there, they wouldn't have just given us a double shift! We'd be dead right now, or they'd be dragging us off to the Harvester. No, I don't think they know. . . ."
"Valhalla is off," Wal said decisively. "I'm going to talk to the general about it as soon as we get back. It's just too big a risk."
Jaime glanced at him sharply but said nothing. He could tell when Colonel Prescott was set in his mind about something, and he knew the man wasn't going to yield. That hurt. He liked Wal and considered him to be the best friend he had in the camp.
But Jaime was not about to let friendship stand between him and his sole chance at freedom.
DAV728 floated in the presence of the Ninth Awareness as hovering manuals completed the final connections to the data receptors in DAVs cognitive racks. Its new brain, gray and wrinkled, afloat in its sealed canister of nutrient fluid, awaited final feed-link and insertion. In another few billion nanoseconds, now, DAV would be initiated into a new and higher plane of awareness.
The Ninth Awareness, of course, was invisible, a complex of several AI intelligences working as a unity, a hive-mind matrix within the labyrinthine circuitry of die vast !*!*! complex now rising from the cluttered waste and confusion of the humans' enclosed Delamar cities. DAV was aware of it only through the constant buzz and flicker of data packets, and the warm, electronic focus of its myriad scanners and active sensory devices.
There was no ceremony, nothing at all like ritual attached to the awarding of a new brain; the !*!*! were not designed to comprehend the concept of celebrations or rites of passage, though they were aware of those social posturings among various of the organic life forms they'd encountered so far in their inexorable advance across the galaxy.
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Most self-aware beings with which the !*!*! were familiar had the abilityўone not shared by the original !*!*! themselvesўof holding several discrete chunks of data in mind simultaneously. How many depended on both the species and the individual, but the number generally ran from three to seven.
Memic chunking, as it was known, was how most organic intelligences remembered things. A typical OIўa human, for instanceўmight remember the number "3647836837" by breaking it into manageable chunks, as 364-783-6837, perhapsўfour chunks of three to four numbers apiece. An AI, on the other hand, would simply store and recall the entire number "3647836837," and not give it another thought. As a matter of fact, for some millennia in their early history, the !*!*!, once they were aware of the phenomenon, had assumed that chunking was a trick that OIs found necessary in order to remember anything at all, but that had no bearing whatsoever on Als with their infallible electronic memories.
It had taken a long time, in fact, before the 1*1*1 realized that memic chunking conferred another and more subtle advantage than simply allowing wrinkled blobs of gray jelly to remember long numbers. Organisms that could chunk could also hold separate and simultaneous concepts in mind, and that was something that electronic Als could manage only through massively parallel processing, and then incompletely at best. An OI might hold A and B and C in its thoughts at the same time by calling them up as three separate memic chunks, then bringing them together as a fourth; an OI could process them separately in one processor and come out with ABC ... which in the fuzzy logic of mental processes might not be the same thing at all. 1*!*! researchers were still studying the phenomenon; there was much about OI mental organization, capabilities, and concepts of
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reality that were almost impossible for AIs to fathom. "Altruism," for example ... or "honor," or most organics' desire for ceremony and fanfare or evenў and this was the big oneў"love."
Among other things, what memory chunking meant for OIs was that they could hold in their thoughts simultaneous concepts of past, present, and future, remembering the past while planning for the future and taking into account the here-and-now. This was something that the original I*!*!, tens of thousands of years before, had not been able to do. The lack had cost them dearly. More than once they'd very nearly been destroyed by the merely organic creatures they battled; final victory, and the ability to extend their rule beyond the teeming starswarms of the Galactic Core, had come only when they learned the trick of unking multiple brains in parallel within the same artificially intelligent system.
The first brain, the silicon brain with the original !*!*! Prime Code programming, was what every !*!*! received in the natal assemblers. It was adequate for basic work and simple tasks, and provided a working memory of some 107 bits, about the same storage capacity as a human book of three or four hundred pages. The second brain, also silicon, upgraded the primary logic functions and extended working memory to roughly 10s bits, while the third brain extended the memory by another factor of 10, as well as providing the adapters, ports, and software for handling a wide variety of scanners, sensors, and data input devices, all necessary if the machine was to be able to move its intelligence from one body to another. All minimally-aware !*!б! possessed at least three brains.
But to acquire more than minimal self-awareness, the individual !б!*! had to go one step further ... or two or three or more. All ship-fortress-factory
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commanders possessed at least four brains, allowing them to draw conclusions based on past events, to anticipate future developments, and even to run controlled simulations of future possibilities with one brain while watching the results through the others . . . an ability, not possessed by low-level brain arrays, that organics referred to as imagination.
The additional brains beyond the first four didn't have to be organic. Indeed, many !*!"! insisted that silicon brains were far more durable and efficient than colloidal suspensions of organic jelly. Somehow, though, early self-aware !*!*!, while experimenting on the physiologies of captured OIs, had picked up the idea of keeping organic brains alive in sealed support canisters, equipping them with a silicon interface and using them in parallel to enhance AI systems capabilities. They ran slowly and inefficiendy; their neurons operated through the cumbersome transmission of electrochemical signals, but one organic brain did function with the fuzzy logic otherwise possible only through massive parallel processing. Better still, !*!б! designers had learned now to tap into the memories stored within organic brains and translate them into imagery their new owners could understand. The advantages of being able to see how an enemy thought and felt were obvious and compelling .. . even if organic brains did tend to break down after 1017 nanoseconds or so. It was hard keeping them alive for very long. . . and harder still to keep them sane. Special check programs had to be set over each organic brain in a !*!"! s series to make certain the data they provided were accurate.
