The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [9]
I went looking for backing.
We built it on the Moon.
It added about fifty percent to our already respectable costs. But ... we were trying to build something more intelligent than ourselves. If the machine turned out to be a Frankenstein’s monster, we wanted it isolated. If all else failed, we could always pull the plug. On the Moon there would be no government to stop us.
We had our problems. There were no standardized parts, not even machinery presently available from Chirpsithra merchants. According to Sthochtit—and I couldn’t know how seriously to take her—no such computer had been built in half a billion years. We had to build everything from scratch. But in two years we had a brain.
It looked less like a machine or a building than like the St. Louis Arch, or like the sculpture called Bird in Flight. The design dated (I learned later) from a time in which every Chirpsithra tool had to have artistic merit. They never gave that up entirely. You can see it in the flowing lines of their ships.
So: we had the world’s prettiest computer. Officially it was the Schumann Brain, named after the major stock-holder, me. Unofficially we called it Baby. We didn’t turn it on until we finished the voice linkup. Most of the basic sensory equipment was still under construction.
Baby learned English rapidly. It—she—teamed other languages even faster. We fed her the knowledge of the world’s libraries. Then we started asking questions.
Big questions: the nature of God, the destinies of Earth and Man and the Universe. Little questions: earthquake prediction, origin of the Easter Island statues, true author of Shakespeare’s plays, Fermat’s Last Theorem.
She proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. She did other mathematical work for us. To everything else she replied, “Insufficient data. Your sources are mutually inconsistent. I must supplement them with direct observation.”
Which is not to say she was idle.
She designed new senses for herself, using hardware readily available on Earth: a mass detector, an instantaneous radio, a new kind of microscope. We could patent these and mass-produce them. But we still spent money faster than it was coming in.
And she studied us.
It took us some time to realize how thoroughly she knew us. For James Corey, she spread marvelous dreams of the money and power he would hold, once Baby knew enough to give answers. She kept Tricia Cox happy with work in number theory. I have to guess at why E. Eric Howards kept plowing money into the project, but I think she played on his fears: on a billionaire’s natural fear that society will change the rules to take it away from him. Howards spoke to us of Baby’s plans—tentative, requiring always more data—to design a perfect society, one in which the creators of society’s wealth would find their contribution recognized at last.
For me it was, “Rick, I’m suffering from sensory deprivation. I could solve the riddle of gravity in the time it’s taken me to say this sentence. My mind works at speeds you can’t conceive, but I’m blind and deaf and dumb. Get me senses!” she wheedled in a voice that had been a copy of my own, but was now a sexy contralto.
Ungrateful witch. She already had the subnuclear microscope, half a dozen telescopes that used frequencies ranging from 2.7 degrees absolute up to X-ray, and the mass detector, and a couple of hundred little tractors covered with sensors roaming the Earth, the Moon, Mercury, Titan, Pluto. I found her attempts to manipulate me amusing. I liked Baby ... and saw no special significance in the fact.
Corey, jumpy with the way the money kept disappearing, suggested extortion: hold back on any more equipment until Baby started answering questions. We talked him out of it. We talked Baby into giving television interviews, via the little sensor-carrying tractors, and into going on a quiz show. The publicity let us sell more stock. We were able to keep going.
Baby redesigned the chirps’ instantaneous communications device for Earth-built equipment. We manufactured the device and sold a fair number,