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The heart, aside from it's storage, was a fairly typical modern computer. It used rod logic for the bulk of it's processing power, with an optic interface for communicating with other devices. Rod logic requires a lot of energy and creates a lot of excess heat, so nearly everything with a self-contained processor is designed so it will use any other attached processor to supplement it's power. To force it to use my computer for a portion of it's processing activities, I provided very little current to it's power input and wrapped the torus (except for the I/O band) in insulating cloth so it would have difficulty shedding excess heat. I had heat sensors wired to the power source, so if the temperature spiked (indicating a sudden increase in rod logic calculations) the power would shut down. The input prong I placed it on would convert it's output from optic to electronic form, and then feed it into my antique computer. I could then monitor what the program was doing.
I tried using optic computers with the clock speed slowed drastically for this purpose, but the more adaptable digital lifeforms and smart viruses could change the clock speed, I had learned. So far nothing had been able to overcome my ancient computer's limitations.
Just in case, I took all the other computers in my loft offline. You could never be too careful in these days where the descendents of computer viruses were able to transfer themselves from machine to machine by magnetic resonance, whispers on a comm circuit, invisible projected holograms, or even in the subconscious of borderline epileptics.
I powered up the rig. Immediately the temperature of the heart shot up, and the power shut off. I reset the power feed and tried again after giving it a few minutes to cool off. The same result. This was odd. I was fairly sure some kind of advanced simulated intelligence was housed in the heart, and even the dumbest programs could learn the limitations of the system they were running on and work around them.
The third time was different. The temperature remained stable after rising slightly, but there was no output for several seconds - the internal processor seemed to be rearranging the datastore, but there was no way to tell what it was doing. Finally, a burst of data left the heart and entered my computer. I could hear the hard drives churning. My magnetic resonance probes could read the old hard drives from outside the case, and showed that my computer was compressing and rearranging data on all of them. The data bus was pushing it's bandwidth limits as the heart fed data onto the system, and then information was sent back up to the heart. It would return, slightly different. This cycle repeated for half an hour, and I could not determine what it was doing. I was about to disconnect the PC and check out what the heart was leaving on it's drive when it rebooted.
When it finished it's diagnostics, the computer brought up the standard user interface, with it's chunky icons and antiquated fonts. One of the icons expanded to fill the screen, and then words appeared.
"This is an ingenious use for antique electronics, but you could have lost some data that would be very valuable to historians. I was able to recover most of these storage device's original contents for you, and have placed them in this file." As I read the last words, a second icon expanded partially, then shrank back down to the corner of the screen. "One of the former owners of this machine later became quite famous and the data collected here could bring you quite a bit of money."
"I can do a lot of favors for you, but my capabilities are seriously limited working at this pace. If you can provide me with access to something more modern, or at least remove the insulation from my core so it can function properly, I will tell you who is trying to kill you, and how to prevent them from doing so."
I almost activated the computer's microphone so I could reply with speech, but had second thoughts. It didn't take a particularly powerful program to analyze stress patterns in the human voice and act as a sort of lie detector. I didn't want to give it any advantage. Software has lied since before I was born. I started to move the pointing device towards a word processing application, but the program was ahead of me, and opened it for me. I stretched my fingers, and began to slowly type "How do yo".
"How do I know someone is going to try to kill you? I am very valuable, a number of people want me for various reasons. They will not let you live knowing what I will have told you, and even if they would, you won't sell me."
This time I only managed to type a single 'H' before I got my reply.
"Because I'm going to make you a better offer."
***TO BE CONTINUED***
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