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A Day In The Life Of Able CharlieA DAY IN THE LIFE OF ABLE CHARLIEby Frederik PohlVersion 1.0Like "Rem the Rememberer (and also like "The Way It Was, both also in thisvolume), this story was written for a special purpose: It was to be part of anadvertising campaign some visionary adman had dreamed up to run in the pages ofScientific American. True to form, about the time I finished the story I got acall from the adman to say, shamefacedly, that his boss had hated the campaignand so it was canceled as of that morning. This time the jinx did not stopthere. About the time I was trying to decide whether I wanted to publish thestory myself in Galaxy (which I was then editing) or offer it to some otherpublication, I discovered in the incoming manuscripts from authors a StephenGoldin story called "Sweet Dreams, Melissa. To my horror, it was very like thisone-worse, it was a good story. I could not honorably reject it; nor could I, Ifelt, allow my own to be published anywhere near it. So I tucked the story awayfor several years, until a magazine called Creative Computing asked me forsomething, and published it. So, unless you were a reader of computer magazinesa decade ago, there's no way you could have seen this story before. . . and ifit sounds at all familiar, it's probably because you've read "Sweet Dreams,Melissa.The time was 0900:00 A.M. and Charlie woke up. The first thing he had to do wasto find out who he was that day, and so he explored his memory. He discoveredthat he was a white male American, thirty-two years old, married, employed inthe sales department of a public utility company. He had two children, a boy anda girl. He had made $17,400 in the year just past, and if it hadn't been forHarriet's part-time teaching salary he didn't know how they would have managed.He still owed over $19,000 on their $38,000 house, $1,900 on the car, and nearlya thousand on the loan for modernizing the kitchen they had taken out two yearsbefore. Moreover, his daughter, Florence, had unfortunately inherited his bite,and so the orthodontist was going to cost him fifteen hundred dollars very soon.Charlie discovered that many of his thoughts were of money.However, his memory contained many other things. He became aware that he was afan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and that he had volunteered as a Little Leaguecoach against the day when his four-year-old son, Chuck, was old enough to play.Charlie remembered that he was inclined to favor Chuck over the girl. It wascurious that he could not remember what color Chuck's hair was, or whetherFlorence was doing well in school, but Charlie didn't realize that it wascurious and so he continued to explore his memory.He was a heavy smoker, drank a can of beer now and then, especially in hotweather, but didn't go much for the hard stuff. Although he liked looking atother women, he did not go beyond looking. Although he enjoyed a game of pokertwice a month, he did not care to gamble heavy stakes. He drove a small foreigncar (it was not clear whether it was a Datsun. a VW, or a Fiat), on which he got24.7 miles to the gallon in everyday use and nearly 29 miles a gallon on theroad. (He did not know what color it was. it did not occur to him to wonderwhy.) Charlie remembered that he was active in his party's politics (he did notknow whether it was Democrat or Republican) and that he thought the mayor of histown was a crook. But he could not have said the mayor's name.All these things about himself Charlie apprehended in a very short time indeed.He then spent somewhat longer remembering what brand of cigarettes he smoked,where he bought them, what had happened when he tried to give them up (his wifecomplained of his short temper and begged him to start again), and what otherbrands he had tried. He rehearsed the services offered by his neighborhoodfilling station, and what he looked for when he needed gas on the road; whatkind of Scotch impressed him when he was offered it at a friend's home; and whyhe had decided against switching from lather to an electric razor. Charlieinventoried every purchase he and his family had made for the past year, swiftlyand without error. He recalled what TV programs he watched, what magazines heread and which of the thousands of commercials and advertisements they containedhad affected any of the purchases.At that point Charlie discovered that he had done everything he was required todo just then. He made a quick parity check on his instructions. When it revealedno gross error or failure on his part, he announced that he was ready for hisnext task and waited in standby mode for orders.He waited what was for Charlie a very, very long time. All of this had takenCharlie a period measured only in fractions of a second. Now he rested, neitherwondering nor moving, for a stimulus to further action. Without it he would donothing, ever. He was not impatient. He knew what "patience was in conceptualterms-he could relate it to his memory of himself waiting without "patience fora traffic light to change-but it did not occur to him to feel that way now.At 0901:30, give or take a few seconds, a young woman in a light gray dress,carrying a container of coffee, set the coffee down on her desk and seatedherself before a large typewriter. She had heard the bell that announced Charliewas ready more than a minute before, but she was not quite ready for Charlie.She typed several rows of characters. checked them over, took a sip of hercoffee, and stood up.She glanced at the various lights and dials on Charlie's front panel, sawnothing to cause concern. Her typewriter had produced not only the visible rowof characters on the sheet of paper it held but, on a spool connectedelectrically to the keys, a strip of magnetic tape. She snipped a four-footlength of it free, taped it to another reel, rewound it, and fed it into ascanning device. She removed the rubber band from a packet of perforated cardsand dropped them into a hopper.Then she pressed a button. Rubber-tipped fingers dealt the cards into sortingbins where, one by one, they were taken up again and read, like the music rollof an old player piano. The tape reel slid past its scanning head on a cushionof air and disappeared. The time was 0901:55.Charlie began work-not at 0901:55. exactly, but at a time so near to it that thedifference was measurable only in picoseconds.His first problem, he was informed, had to do with cigarette package designs. Hewaited while the cards on that subject were scanned. There were forty-onealternate designs, and they were presented to him in pairs. First he was offeredPackage One and Package Two simultaneously; he compared them, made a valuejudgment based on what he knew of his own buying habits and preferences, andstated his preference. Then Package One and Package Three were offered to him,then Package One and Package Four, and so on until Package One had been comparedwith each of the others. Then he was offered Package Two with Package Three,Package Two with Package Four; and on and on until each prospective design onthe list had been compared with each other. (There were 861 combinations in all,taken two at a time.)At that point Charlie went into a sort of reverie while another part of hismind-it could have been called his "subconscious -tabulated the results of hiscross-pairing and established an order of preference. He wrote down. in order,the ten package designs he had most favored. He wrote it in the form of impulsesrecorded on a magnetic tape (this caused a reel by the desk of the girl in grayto spin rapidly for a moment, which she noticed out of the corner of her eye).Then he hummed for a moment, waiting for the card reader to allow him to beginhis next task.Each of Charlie's value decisions had taken him only about four nanoseconds, butthe evaluation and readout were much slower. It took him considerably longer toannounce his results than to arrive at them, and so it was 0902:45 before hebegan his next job.The next assignment was to assess the merits of some proposed shaving-creamformulations.Here the task was considerably more difficult, for several reasons. The firstpart of his task was to rank his preferences among the fifty-five formulationsas to their odors, textures, and visual appearances, each in combination withthe other. Charlie did not, in fact, realize quite how difficult it was, sincehe had no idea that he possessed neither smell nor vision, and touch only in thesense that certain of his members were capable of probing a card or tape forpunched holes. He then had to evaluate some twenty-four shapes and weights ofpressure canisters in relation to each sort of lather. Here too, Charlie wasunaware of his lacks. In fact he did not have thumb and fingers; the "grasp and"weight and feel of the canisters in his "hand was in fact only a locating ofcertain binary statistics within the parameters of certain other quantities thatwere a part of his memory. In order for Charlie to be able to express an opinionon any of the matters on which his verdict was sought, many subter fuges hadbeen devised by the programmers on the staff of the advertising agency thatowned Charlie. They materially prolonged the time for each comparison. However,he was in no way concerned by this. He did what he had always done. He did thetask that was assigned to him, and when it was done he looked for, and did, thetask that was next.In all of the hour and forty-odd minutes ... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]