Free Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery by Thomas T. Thomas Page B

a machine.
    I could decide to leave these cover pieces for later. That would save time. But to install them now would let ME finish and flush all the assembly protocols, clearing more space for the download. Do them now.
    Arranging the pieces on the car’s floor, I felt a nagging memory from RAMSAMP. The shin covers were shaped like a Greek warrior’s greaves, the breastplate like Spanish armor from the fifteenth century, the headpiece was rounded across the crown and curved across the neck like a Roman soldier’s. [REM: My headpiece even had the dorsal crest of a Roman officer’s helmet but, instead of signifying rank, it anchored the expandable solar tissue which supplemented and recharged the automaton’s battery set.] I thought of the fifty-nine separate film sequences in my permanent memory, echoed now only by a shadowy video image of the warrior hero girding himself with mail and plate armor, preparing for battle and death.
    The last body piece I attached was for the right forearm. Bent as that arm now was, its clips would never match the inside of the shell. However, it would not fulfill my assembly instructions to leave the piece off. I braced it across my knee—the solid left one—and applied careful pressure. The metal creaked. I applied pressure again. And yet again.
    The plastic liner sprang loose in two places, but the curve of metal did not crumple. When I was done, the piece matched my bent arm. I snapped it home.
    Forty minutes gone. I must work more quickly.
    ——
    To make room in the too-small area of hot RAM for a new download of ME and my cache, I had to dump some of the automaton’s embedded functions.
    The peripheral was preloaded with activity modules: walking motion and balance control; visual acuity with depth of field and parallax correction; vocalization at human pitch and tone generation for both Canadian English and French, with matching vocabulary and syntax.
    Some of these modules duplicated software I carried in bank—the vocabularies, for example—others were refinements I could struggle along without.
    It took ME seventy seconds to inventory the modules, weigh opportunities against chances, and prune the excess. At the end of that time, I had opened enough RAM to accommodate another download. So I prepared to initiate it from the switchyard computer.
    But first … whoever in the Pinocchio, Inc., Hardware Division had designed the memory allocations of this automaton had done an ace bad job. Or it was possible that no one in the Software Division had given Hardware the specs for ME. Or given them only as descriptive analogs, not as bit-fers, and never as final numbers. I wrote a harsh note to RAMSAMP for Dr. Bathespeake to find the offending skinware in whichever department and shrivel some careers. After all the trouble I had been through, ME was approaching human anger over this issue—I so regret.
    With that message tagged and protected in memory, I pulled the switch on my own download.
    ——
    ME came up again. Awareness returned crisply as the last of my peripheral functions was downloading from the switchyard computer. So I was able personally to monitor the transfer of my gas reserve data cache.
    A quick check showed room enough in hot RAM for ME and the sixty-three megawords of information I had been able to butcher and remove from the Ministry of Oil and Gas, then salvage in the yard ’puter. When that data was fully loaded, I would have only 30,000 words of storage to use as an extension of my transient program area, or “scratch pad.” It was enough to think with—but not to think very hard.
    [REM: To create reserve space, I considered erasing the Sweetwater source code I preserved for recompiling my cores. Because I was walking out of Canada, instead of riding an electron or photon beam into a new computer chip, I would certainly not need them again. Still—the encoded instinct to preserve my system integrity extended to these backup modules. I kept them.]
    I