They floated diagonally upward between the close-packed rows. Some of the huds flickered transparently and he could see the zipheads' eyes moving. But no one seemed to notice Pham and Trud; their vision was elsewhere.
There was low-pitched mumbling from all directions, the combined voices of all the zipheads in the room. There were a lot of people talking, all in short bursts of words—Nese, but still nonsense. The global effect was an almost hypnotic chant.
The zipheads typed ceaselessly on chording keyboards. Silipan pointed to their hands with special pride. "See, not one in five has any joint damage; we can't afford to lose people. We have so few, and Reynolt can't completely control the mindrot. But it's been most of a year since we had a simple medical fatality—and that was almost unavoidable. Somehow the zip got a punctured colon rightafter a clean checkup. He was an isolated specialty. His performance fell off, but we didn't know there was a problem till the smell got completely rank." So the slave had died from the inside out, too dedicated to cry his pain, too neglected for anyone to notice. Trud Silipan was only caring in the mean.
They reached the top, looked back down the lattice of mumbling humanity. "Now in one way you're right, Mr. Armsman Trinli. If these people were doing arithmetic or string sorting, this operation would be a joke. The smallest processor in a finger ring can do that sort of thing a billion times faster than any human. But you hear the zipheads talking?"
"Yeah, but it doesn't make any sense."
"It's internal jargon; they get into that pretty fast when we work them in teams. But the point is, they're not doing low-level machine functions. They'reusing our computer resources. See, for us Emergents, the zipheads are the next system layer above software. They can apply human intelligence, but with the persistence and patience of a machine. And that's also why unFocused specialists—especially techs like me—are important. Focus is useless unless there are normal people to direct it and to find the proper balance of hardware and software and Focus. Done right, the combination is totally beyond what you Qeng Ho ever achieved."
Pham had long ago understood that, but denying the point provoked steadily more detailed explanations from Emergents like Trud Silipan. "So what is this group actually doing?"
"Let's see." He motioned for Pham to put on his huds. "Ah, see? We have them partitioned into three groups. The top third is rote-layer processing, zipheads that can be easily retargeted. They're great for routine tasks, like direct queries. The middle third is programming. As a Programmer-at-Arms, this should interest you." He popped up some dependency charts. They were squirrelly nonsense, immense blocks with no evolutionary coherence. "This is a rewrite of your own weapons targeting code."
"Crap. I could never maintain something like that."
"No,you couldn't. But a Programmer-Manager—someone like Rita Liao—can, as long as she has a team of ziphead programmers. She's having them rearrange and optimize the code. They've done what ordinary humans could do if they could concentrate endlessly. Together with good development software, these zips have produced a code that is about half the size of your original—and five times as fast on the same hardware. They also combed out hundreds of bugs."
Pham didn't say anything for a moment. He just paged through the maze of the dependency charts. Pham had hacked for years at the weapons programs. Sure there were bugs, as there were in any large system. But the weapons code had been the object of thousands of years of work, of constant effort to optimize and remove flaws....He cleared his huds and looked across the ranked slaves.Such a terrible price to pay...for such wonderfulresults.
Silipan chuckled. "Can't fool me, Trinli. I can tell you're impressed."
"Yeah, well if it works I am. So what's the third group doing?"
But Silipan was already heading back to the entrance. "Oh, them." He waved negligently at the zipheads on his right. "Reynolt's ongoing project. We're going through the corpus of your fleet system code, looking for trapdoors, that sort of thing."
It was the wild-goose chase that preoccupied the most paranoid system administrators, but after what he'd just seen...suddenly Pham didn't feel quite so secure.How long do I have before they notice some of mylong-agomods?
