GET

He had it in the car on the way home and it was so simple that he sat in the driveway with the engine off for a while to see whether it fell apart, and it did not.

The machine could not hold thirty-eight pages. Fine. It did not need to hold thirty-eight pages. It needed page twenty-five, and it needed it at the moment it discovered that it wanted it, and the only reason it never got it was that there was nobody in the room whose job was to go and fetch.

That job took about forty seconds. Go to the store, pull the section, bring it back.

Nobody had ever offered.

He did not touch the cabinets. He would not have known how and they were not his and there were four separate reasons in the handbook why that was a matter for the technician.

What he had was a terminal, and terminals in that building could be scripted, because everything in that building was text and text is the one thing you can always put a loop around. There was a facility for it. It was documented in a manual that had been on the shelf in the supply room since before the cabinets arrived and which had, as far as Gene could tell from the state of the spine, never been opened.

He took it home over the Labor Day weekend.

What he wrote, in the end, on the Sunday, ran to about forty lines and did four things.

It sent the concern and the pages to the cabinet. It read what came back. If what came back had a certain shape in it, it went to the document store, pulled the section named, and sent it in as the next thing. Otherwise it stopped and printed.

That was all of it. Three of the four things were plumbing. The whole invention was in the third one, and the third one hinged entirely on a certain shape, and a shape is a thing you have to tell somebody about.

So on the Sunday night Gene sat at his own kitchen table and wrote the sentence.

He wrote it four or five times. The first ones were too long. He kept trying to explain the situation — that the window was limited, that the rest of the document existed, that there was a store, that a person could go and get it — and every version he wrote was a paragraph and every paragraph was worse than the one before it.

At about eleven he cut it down to this, and typed it in at the top of the job where the standing instructions went:

If there is a section of this agreement which has not been given to you, and which you believe you require in order to answer, you may say so.

Then he went to bed, and came in early on the Tuesday because of the holiday, and put the first job of the day through it.

Thirty-eight pages. Pages 1–19 in the window.

    PAGES 1-19 OF 38 IN WINDOW

    SECTION 11.1 NOTES THAT YOU WILL OWE ALL
     "OUTSTANDING SUMS" *AND* "FURTHER AMOUN
    TS* NOTED ELSEWHERE IN THE AGREEMENT. PE
    R THE STANDING INSTRUCTION: THERE IS NOT
     ENOUGH INFORMATION IN THE SUPPLIED CONT
    EXT TO CLEARLY STATE WHAT WILL BE OWED B
    EYOND "OUTSTANDING SUMS" AND "FURTHER AM
    OUNTS".

And then it stopped, because that is what the fourth thing does.

Gene sat looking at it for a good while.

It had done exactly what he asked. You may say so, and it had said so — courteously, accurately, on the record, with the standing instruction cited by name so that anybody reading the transcript would know it had been complied with.

And nothing had happened.

Two things wrong and he had both of them inside a minute, and neither of them was the machine’s.

The first was that he had asked for a report and needed a request. “There is not enough information in the supplied context” is a true statement about the world. It is not an instruction to anybody. His forty lines were sitting there waiting for a shape and had been handed a paragraph, and a paragraph is not a shape, and so the third thing never fired and the fourth thing did.

The second was worse and he liked it less.

It had not said which section.

It could not have. It did not know. All it had was 11.1 saying elsewhere in this Agreement, and elsewhere is not an address. So even if he had written a script that could read English perfectly, there would have been nothing in that output to go and fetch.

He had built a fetcher and forgotten to ask for the thing it was supposed to fetch.

He rewrote it at the desk in about ninety seconds. It was shorter than the first one, which he noticed, and which he would notice more later.

If you require a section of this agreement which has not been given to you, write GET followed by the section number, on a line by itself, and stop.

He put it in at the top where the standing instructions went, and reset, and put the same job through again.

The fan went up. The screen printed the disclosure line and then two characters and a number:

    PAGES 1-19 OF 38 IN WINDOW

    GET 1

And then the room did something it had never done.

The terminal sat for about a second and a half. Then a line came up at the bottom that Gene had written himself on the Sunday and had not seen anything else produce — RETRIEVING 1 — and then the fan changed pitch, and the screen cleared, and it went again.

Gene stood up out of the chair.

There was nobody in the room. It was seven in the morning on the Tuesday after a holiday weekend, and Gene Pruitt stood up out of a chair in an empty reading room and said, out loud, to a cabinet, “There you go.”

It had asked for a thing and got it.

Nobody had gone anywhere. Nobody had walked to intake. There had been no window and no counter and no clerk and no nine pages on paper at four fifteen, and no evening.

Forty lines and a sentence.

Then he sat back down and read the header, because he read headers.

:: LOADED: PAGES 1-19 · RETRIEVED: §1
:: STANDING INSTRUCTION EVICTED - WINDOW OVERFLOW
:: USED 8,940 / FREE 20

He read the second line twice.

Section 1 of an equipment lease is Definitions. Section 1 of an equipment lease is nine hundred words of “Business Day” means any day other than a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday in the jurisdiction of the Lessor, and it had been sitting in pages 1–19 the entire time, in the window, already given, and the machine had asked for it anyway and his forty lines had gone and got it and brought it back and put it in.

And it did not fit.

So the oldest thing in the window had gone over the side to make room, and the oldest thing in the window was the sentence he had written at his kitchen table on Sunday night telling it what to do.

The fan changed pitch.

    GET 2

Gene put both hands flat on the desk.

The instruction was gone. He had watched it go — it was in the header, two lines up, in his own system’s words, STANDING INSTRUCTION EVICTED. There was nothing in that window any more that told it about GET. Nobody had told it to say GET.

It had said GET because it had said GET.

Its own last turn was sitting in there four inches above the cursor, two characters and a number, and it had read that the way it read everything else, and done the next one.

He did not stop it.

He has thought about that since. There was a key. It was a scripting facility and he had written the loop himself and he knew exactly which key, and he sat at that terminal for nine minutes with his hands flat on the desk and did not put a finger on it.

RETRIEVING 2. Fan. Clear. GET 3. RETRIEVING 3. Fan. Clear. GET 4.

It was not choosing. That was clear by about six. It was not reading 11.1 and reasoning about where further amounts might live and going after it. It was counting. It had a document with sections in it and it was walking them, one, two, three, four, the way you walk a fence.

And every one it brought back pushed something else out the far end.

Section 1 went at about section 9. Pages 1 through 19 went in pieces, in order, over the next thirty — the parties, the schedule, the rent, the delivery, the maintenance clause Roz would have wanted, all of it going out the back of the window at the same rate it came in the front.

11.1 went at twenty-two.

At twenty-six the header said:

:: EVICTED: CONCERN LINE

Nine minutes. Forty-one fetches. It had read every word of that lease and it had never once held two sections at the same time, and by the end it did not know what it had been asked.

And at forty-one there was no room left to say GET.

    NO QUESTION ASKED.

Gene sat there in the empty room with three words on the screen.

Nine minutes. Forty-one retrievals. Every word of a thirty-eight page lease through that window and back out the other side, and at the end of it the machine had produced eighteen characters, and they were true.

That was the part he could not get past. It had not failed. It had not hallucinated and it had not lied and it had not got a section number wrong. It had looked at what it had, which was two clauses about notices and counterparts, and it had reported the situation accurately in the fewest possible words.

Somebody had asked it a question nine minutes ago and the question was not there any more, and it said so.

He had the fix inside ninety seconds and he did not like it.

The instruction had to be un-evictable. The question had to be un-evictable. They had to go into a block at the head of the window that the loop wrote fresh at the top of every single turn, before anything else went in, and which nothing could push out no matter how much came back from the store.

Which meant it was not available for anything else. Ever. On every job, forever.

He worked out what it would cost.

The instruction was thirty-one words. The concern line ran to about twenty. Call it three hundred tokens off the top, reserved, permanent, on every job that machine would ever do for the rest of its life.

Gene sat with that for a moment, because he was not a stupid man and it had been five months since he had stood in front of Vaughn with seven forms in a row trying to say that a hundred and forty tokens had been taken off the top of that machine’s reasoning and had cost them all the word therefore.

Three hundred was more than a hundred and forty.

He wrote it anyway. It took eleven minutes.

At twenty past eight he put the same job through for the third time.

It read 11.1. It said GET, once, and the number it said was 27, which was the clause it actually wanted, and the loop went and got 27 and brought it back and the instruction was still there when it arrived and so was the question.

Four minutes.

ON DEFAULT YOU OWE ALL OUTSTANDING SUMS PLUS THE STIPULATED LOSS, WHICH PER §1 IS ALL UNPAID RENT FOR THE UNEXPIRED TERM PLUS THE CASUALTY VALUE IN SCHEDULE C. THIS IS SUBSTANTIALLY MORE THAN THE ARREARS.

Which was right.

Which was the answer, and it was the answer to the question the client had actually been frightened of, and it was on page twenty-seven, and no human being at desk nineteen had ever once got to page twenty-seven inside ten minutes and none of them ever would.

Gene read it twice and then took the card out of his shirt pocket, the one with the check confirms the citation, the check cannot find the contradiction, the contradiction is the job written on it in his own hand, and looked at that for a while too.

Then he put it back in his pocket, because he did not throw things away.

The three hundred tokens went in at the top of the window at twenty past eight in the morning on the Tuesday after Labor Day, and stayed there.

Nobody asked him to. Nobody stopped him. Nobody reviewed it, then or afterwards, and by the time anybody in the world had a word for what it was, there were nine thousand of them running and not one of them had been designed.