scuppernong - 3

25 November 2410 15:22 GMT, Stockholm at Earth

Aubrey Owsley, my systweak, had her nook across the square from the university. She worked from the first floor of a three-story brick building. Her immediate neighbors were a pamper-flesh called Svetti's and a preschool called The Ghost. There were three pizza shops and four coffee shops in the block. I pinged her.

"Heysan, Django, it's a long time since," she shouted when I opened the door. "Come on in."

"Hey, Ouch, nice paws," I said. She'd grown foot fingers.

"Yeah, now I can do four things at once."

Owsley half-lay on an ancient tobacco-brown cracked leather sofa, with her new heels resting on an Empire ottoman. She wore a black watchman's cap, a long, faded, brown corduroy skirt over yellowed once-white wool longjohns, and rough wool footgloves. She had a leather belt with a turquoise buckle. She had on a brown and cream Norwegian wool seaman's sweater which rode above her waist, revealing an unbuttoned longjohn hole. Let me take you a button-hole lower, I thought. All twenty fingers twitched randomly and Oswley's half-closed eyes shifted independently of one another as she worked. She drooled just a bit.

Owsley was a very busy, very wealthy, very good sysman. I'd met her when some sork kidnapped her twin long-haired Dachshunds, Myrtle and Methyl. I got them back unharmed, and the ransom too. Owsley still felt grateful.

"Ouch," I said, "I need some face. I'm going dustup on New Berkeley and I want your check-out. And I'm still having that problem with ping recall."

Owsley sat up slowly, focused, and wiped her mouth. "Glad to help, Go. Tell me about it."

"You remember how I feel I have ping, but when I recall it, nothing's there, no source, no subject, no nothing?" Owsley nodded.

"That's slowly getting worse. And I have kind of a general fuzziness, nothing specific, just kind of a lost feeling I guess, and - well, it's embarrassing, Ouch. I, uh, I guess I dropped a fold on my foot."

"You dropped a pseudo-object on your foot?"

Good old Ouch. I can always count on her for sympathy. She slapped both hands over her mouth, squinched up her eyes, and slowly slid off the couch to lie on the floor, trying to stifle her laughter. Tears ran on her face before the mirth eased up a little.

"Go," she said, gasping, "did you - did you - hurt yourself?" She gulped, and chortled.

With what dignity I could muster, I said "Yes, Ouch, I hurt my big toe."

That set her off again.

"Go, let me take look around in there," Owsley said finally, wiping her eyes and getting up. "I'll see what I can do. I'm sure I can" - snort! - "fix the toe."

I unlocked my sys and watched Ouch work. It was all Geek to me. I saw flashing graphs and snaky interlocking balls of neon strings and incomprehensible fractal displays
and other artifacts of Ouch's trade come and go in our shared visual field.
Test patterns ran shapes repeatedly through my eyes - star, cube, pyramid, sphere, mobius, torus, saddle - or sounded chords to my ears, or tingled my fingers painfully at each tip in rapid succession, or made goosebumps rise in waves running down my arms. Each one a pattern, diagnostic and prognostic. Seventeen interminable minutes later, Owsley spoke.

"First, the ping problem. You understand that once it's in your extended memory, incoming information makes itself known to you via attention attraction focii?"

I nodded, trying to look as if I knew that. Well, I did know it, sort of.

"OK, in your case, the focus for ping got linked to your habitual learning system. I
bet you poll it pretty frequently, right? You know you don't have to do that? It will announce itself? That's what it's for?"

Ouch tends to preach. "Yeah, OK, so I used to check it from time to time. So?"

"Well, the repeated active attention you gave to it when it hadn't changed state made your sys think you wanted that to happen automatically - habitually, if you will. So now the focus tries to get your attention even when no ping has arrived. There's two ways to fix that, the slow way and the fast way.

"The slow way is to ignore it. Just check for ping now and then, not too often, to see if you actually do have any. After a few days, your system will naturally dissolve the habitual binding to the focus, and the problem will reverse itself.

"The fast way, I reach in and break the habit from outside. What'll it be?"

If I had to fight, I didn't want distraction. And I didn't have time to waste looking to see if I had ping or not. I had a business to run. "Fast."

Owsley grinned. Suddenly, simultaneously, I felt a painfully intense taste of cilantro, a piercing light behind my right eye, and a drastic phantom limb manicure. I said "Ouch!"

"You called? OK, habit's broken. As for the fuzziness, that could be several things. I adjusted your sonic quantifier - that's the organoid that puts hard numbers to your sound data, like when you want to know exactly what frequency a sound is, you know? - it was a little non-logarithmic, and I bumped your subitizer back up to 10. There's still that damned tendency down to the natural level - how could they function back then when they couldn't grok more than four things at a time?"

"Speaking of the past, did you notice my latest antique?" Her hand fingers pointed to her left.

Owsley collected and restored ancient electro-mechanical devices. Her new project was a group of large ugly black plastic boxes connected by stiff colored tubes or cables. There was an array of worn buttons, with letters still visible on most of them. There was a square-bottomed glass bottle lying on its side, with glowing colored figures and a moving cartoon dog on the bottom surface. The whole contraption squealed like a mutant mosquito and reeked of ozone.

"Is that a television? Or a typewriter?" Ouch had me puzzled, and she liked that.

"No, Django, that clumsy contraption was called a "personal computer". It's a distant ancestor of your own sys, and big sys too. Do you know that there was no direct connection between that thing and the cognitive perceptions of its operator?"

"But how the hell did they work it? Knobs and levers?"

"Very close to right. Almost the only input came from pushing on those lettered buttons with your fingers - that was still called type-writing. The operator had to see output in letters on the bottom of that bottle, and then read it back to himself!"

"But how did it ping? How could it load or show folds?"

"This device is more than four hundred years old, Go. It couldn't show folds because back then they couldn't share perceptual spaces. There wasn't any ping, just telephone and electrified mail. They couldn't load because they could only use one or two of the old senses for access to electrical memory. All right, now watch this."

Owsley reached out her left foot fore-finger and carefully pressed a button on the array of lettered keys. The images on the bottle's surface disappeared, replaced by an even glowing blue.

Owsley frowned. "It keeps doing that," she said. "I don't think it's supposed to."

"Anyway, Django, let's get back to you. One reason you feel lost is that they're chasing a dead cat in the quantcomps up on Orwell, so the big sys satpix updates are intermittent. Just ignore it until they get that fixed. There're no isats around New Berkeley so you'll have to work from static images there, but at least you won't notice any geographic agnosia.

"I corrected some other minor problems - I tuned your ultraviolet spectrum equalizer, I got rid of some hum in those hot Japanese transponders you wear, I reversed a tendency to Spoonerism in your French-English translator -"

"Berci meaucoup," I interrupted.

Owsley looked at me sharply and chuckled. "Can't tweak a tweaker, Go."

"I also found the problem with your hold on that fold. There was some unscheduled cell necrosis in your left haptic-tactile organoid. It made your in virtu touch experience tend toward the slippery. I fixed that, so you should be able to feel shared pseudo-objects just fine from now on. In short, you're in top combat form."

Owsley looked at me expectantly. She knew I had to ask. I tried to fight it. I clenched my jaw. I gritted my teeth.

I said, "What about my big toe?"

"Well, Go," Owsley said, already giggling again, "not to worry, that pain in your toe is all in your head. Now go break a leg at New Berkeley."