Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [106]
“I am an outcast, a renegade,” Yagharek continued. “It is . . . no surprise . . . if I turn my back on my traditions, perhaps . . . But I must learn when to turn to face them again. Lajhni is ‘to trust,’ and ‘to bind firm.’ The Torque cannot be trusted, and nor can it be bound. It is uncontainable. I have known that since I first knew the stories. But in my . . . I . . . I am eager, Grimnebulin. Perhaps I turn too quickly to things from which I would once have recoiled. It is . . . hard . . . being between worlds . . . being of no world. But you have made me remember what I have always known. As if you were an elder of my band.” There was one last, long pause. “Thank you.”
Isaac nodded slowly.
“Not at all . . . I’m . . . mighty relieved to hear all that, Yag. More than I can say. Let’s . . . say no more about it.” He cleared his throat and prodded the diagram. “I’ve some fascinating stuff to show you, old son.”
In the dusty light under Isaac’s walkway, the repairman from Orriaben’s constructs teased the innards of the broken cleaning machine with screwdriver and solder. He kept up a mindless jaunty whistling, a trick that took no thought at all.
The sound of the consultation above reached him as the faintest bass murmur, interspersed with an occasional cracked utterance. He looked up in surprise, briefly, at this latter voice, but quickly returned to the matter in hand.
A brief examination of the mechanisms of the construct’s internal analytical engine confirmed the basic diagnosis. Apart from the usual age-related problems of cracked joints, rust and worn bristles—all of which the repairman quickly patched up—the construct had contracted some kind of virus. A programme card incorrectly punched or a slipped gear deep within the steam-driven intelligence engine had led to a set of instructions feeding back into themselves in an infinite loop. Activities the construct should have been able to carry out as a reflex, it had started to pore over, to attempt to extract more information or more complete orders. Seized by paradoxical instructions or a surfeit of data, the cleaning construct was paralysed.
The engineer glanced up at the wooden floor above him. He was ignored.
He felt his heart judder with excitement. Viruses came in a variety of forms. Some simply closed down the workings of the machine. Others led the mechanisms to perform bizarre and pointless tasks, the result of a newly programmed outlook on everyday information. And others, of which this was a perfect, a beautiful specimen, paralysed constructs by making them recursively examine their basic behavioural programmes.
They were bedeviled by reflection. The seeds of self-consciousness.
The repairman reached into his case and brought out a set of programme cards, fanned them expertly. He whispered a prayer.
His fingers working at astonishing speed, the man loosened various valves and dials in the construct’s core. He levered open the protective covering on the programme input slot. He checked that there was enough pressure in the generator to power the receiving mechanism of the metal brain. The programmes would load into the memory, to be actualized throughout the construct’s processors when it was switched on. Quickly, he slid first one card, then another and another into the opening. He felt the ratcheting spring-loaded teeth rotate their way along the stiff board, slotting into the little holes that translated into instructions or information. He paused between each card to make sure that the data loaded correctly.
He shuffled his little deck like a cardsharp. He sensed the minuscule jerks of the analytical engine through the fingertips of his left hand. He felt for faulty input, for broken teeth or stiff, unoiled moving parts that would corrupt or block his programmes. There were none. The man could not forebear from hissing triumphantly. The construct’s virus was entirely the result of information-feedback, and not any kind of hardware failure.