Pa'an

With the CEO in transit, there was no one to stop him. So McHugh, a balding man with a fringe of white hair and an Irish temper, was standing in the lab area, red in the face, and lecturing Sara and Deepak.

“I don’t know what you eggheads do in here all day, and, frankly, I don’t care. What I see is more of these defective Exaplex modules coming back in than we have going out. And you say you don’t even know what the problem is? Didn’t you invent the damned things? How is it you don’t know how they work?”

Deepak bobbed his head, “Aura was the inventor. All we did was follow her patent and her instructions. But Aura…Aura is gone.”

“So put her back together. Isn’t that supposed to be what you’re good for? I’ve got a half billion dollar order to fill, and you had better do whatever it is you do, but get those defective units fixed and out of here. If it was up to me I’d fire the lot of you and bring in someone who can make things work.”

Sara was ready to go into combat with McHugh. “You half-cocked Irish peddler, do you even know how big an exabyte is? These modules,” she hefted a tray filled with rejects, “have a hundred times more memory capacity than all the other memory chips in the world today. Do you have any idea how long it takes to even scan one exabyte?”

“Don’t try to flim flam me with technical talk. We put out a spec, they get rejected. It could be a toaster for all I care. Fix them, or I’ll forget I’m an Irish gentleman and take after you with a shillelagh. Get it?” McHugh glared at Sara and at Deepak and stomped out.

“What’s a shillelagh?” Deepak asked.

“A substitute for an Irishman’s penis,” answered Sara.

“Sara, McHugh may need a substitute penis, but he is right about one thing. We have to get these modules working, even if we have to stop work on the AI. I now have an idea. So please calm down and listen for a few minutes.”

Deepak pulled over a white board and drew a very bushy tree, upside down. The branches had branches which grew branches until the bottom branches ended in the letter C. “Do you recognize that structure?” he asked.

“Isn’t that a monotonic semantic net with codelets in the Sharpie configuration?” Sara replied.

“Exactly. And what is the fastest machine ever made for this kind of structure?”

“Well, that one,” she swept her arms toward the Sharpie computer cabinet.

“Exactly. Now what if we have only one kind of simple codelet that tries to execute in every memory space it can. And what if we put all those,” he waved both hands at the tray of Exaplex modules, “into the Sharpie and start her, I mean it, up?”

“Umm. Deepak, that is brilliant.” Sara curtsied and swept her hand in a grandiose gesture toward Deepak, “Dr. Advani, I bow to your intellect. Lets get this show on the road.”

“OK, wire up ten more memory carriers and a couple of spares, just in case. Make it an even dozen. We’ll plug the modules into those and replace all the Level 4 and level 5 carriers with the new memory. Let’s see, that will be ten to the 20th power… Blessed Brahma himself that’s a lot of memory! While you do that I’ll write the new codelet and figure out some way to keep them from covering the same sectors more than once.”

“If we have the parts, and I think we do, I’ve got at least one day over a hot soldering iron.”

“I should be ready about then,” Deepak already had his head into the code.

It actually took them only five hours.