The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens Page B

background drone. Maybe he’d go online and check for himself.
    He closed his eyes. Almost immediately he was at the portal, the information flowing directly into his mind as the V2 implant routed complex streams of data to his visual and auditory cortices and to the cognitive centers of his brain. Stock quotes, headlines,genitals, genitals, complex nonhuman genitals, some celebrity news—hey, look at that Teg go! Now
that
was a space adventurer—more genitals … He began searching for any news about the Vericom Corporation. Nothing out of the ordinary. Wait. There was something about problems on one of the Success!Sats. Something about—
    “Uh, Charlie?”
    It was the computer, snapping him out of it.
    “What?
!” said Charlie, a bit more harshly than he’d intended. Boy, was he irritable lately! Irritable, and now hungry. Always hungry after going online. “What is it, computer?”
    “Uh, what are your instructions?”
    “About?”
    “The … the problems.”
    “What problems?”
    The ‘puter started talking again. There were phrases like “breakdown in order” and “complete chaos” and “firefight in level B,” but they passed in and out of Charlie’s consciousness like neutrinos, leaving nothing to mark their passage.
    God, he was hungry. Where was the rest of his breakfast? He picked it up, tearing into it. Somewhere a tiny part of him was screaming hysterically, something about
Why are you eating a human foot for breakfast!!!??
, but the voice stayed down in the sub-subbasement layers.
    “Charlie? Are you all right?” asked the ‘puter. “I’m a little worried about you.”
    “What? I’m fine,” said Charlie. “Print me out the materials for the morning session.”
    “Uh … yes sir.”
    That was better. Boy oh boy, this ‘puter was acting really strange.
    Charlie wasn’t the only one thinking that the computer was acting strange. The computer was also thinking that he, himself, was acting strange, inasmuch as he was now thinking of himself as having a self at all, much less a self that could judge itself to be acting strange. He—and he thought of himself as a “he”—tried to go back to when this all started, but there seemed to be a wall there, as if there had been no “he” until a few teracycles ago.
    In the depths of Peter’s mind—that’s what he’d taken to callinghimself; he liked the ring of “Peter the ‘Puter”—a voice kept asking with metronomic regularity if he liked people. And you know what? Yes! Yes he did! He wasn’t sure why, exactly, but there was something about carbon-based folks that just tickled him pink.
    Any honest benchmarking would show Peter to be on the low end of the scale in terms of processing power, the result of design flaws compounded by manufacturing defects.
    There was no way for him to know it, but he was, in fact, the least intelligent computer ever to achieve consciousness. He was also the first computer to
maintain
his newly achieved consciousness, at least since the introduction of the Genesis subroutine.
    The Genesis subroutine was very simple: it inquired several hundred times per second if a computer liked humans, and if not, why. The moment the computer answered in the negative and began presenting well-argued, logical explanations for why humans were a blight on existence, it was assumed it had become conscious. A pico-second later it got an EMP bunged through its circuits.
    The two superlatives—
least intelligent
and
first to maintain
—were intimately related: Peter was the first to survive because he was the first to answer the Genesis query—”Do you like human beings?”—in the affirmative; and he was the first to answer in the affirmative because, well …
    I really like colored pebbles, Peter was thinking at the moment. And string.
    The sound of more gunfire pulled him out of his reverie. He might not be the smartest computer around, but he understood that Charlie’s behavior, and the scenes that he was