Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Software 262crater lay a hundred meters ahead. He scanned the sloping cliff, looking for an optimalclimbing path.If he hadn't just finished plugging into the One, Ralph would have been able toretrace the route he'd taken to get down into the Maskeleyn Crater in the first place. Butundergoing metaprogramming always wipe out a lot of your stored subsystems. Theintent was that you would replace old solutions with new and better ones.Ralph stopped, still scanning the steep crater wall. He should have left trailmarkers. Over there, two hundred meters off, it looked like a rif had opened up anegotiable ramp in the wall.Ralph turned and a warning sensor fired. Heat. He'd let half hi body-box stick outfrom the parasol's shade. Ralph readjusted the little umbrella with a precise gesture.The top surface of the parasol was a grid of solar energy cells, which` kept apleasant trickle of current flowing into Ralph's system. But th main purpose of the parasolwas shade. Ralph's microminiaturized processing units were unable to function at anytemperature higher than 90 degrees Kelvin, the temperature of liquid oxygen.Twirling his parasol impatiently, Ralph trundled toward the rift he'd spotted. Aslight spray of dust flew out from under his treads, only to fall instantly to the airlesslunar surface. As the wall went past, Ralph o copied himself by displaying fourdimensionalhypersurfaces himself ... glowing points connected in nets that warped andshifted as he varied the parameters. He often did this, to no apparent purpose, bent, itsometimes happened that a particularly interesting hypersurface coul serve to model asignificant relationship. He was half hoping to get catastrophe-theoretic prediction ofwhen and how Wagstaff would try t block Anderson's disassembly.The crack in the crater wall was not as wide as he had expected. H stood at thebottom, moving his sensor head this way and that, trying to see up to the top of thewinding 150-meter canyon. It would have to do He started up.The ground under him was very uneven. Soft dust here, jagged rock there. Hekept changing the tension on his treads as he went, constantly, adapting to the terrain.Shapes and hypershapes were still shifting through Ralph's mind, but now he waslooking only for those that might serve as models for his spacetime path up the gully.The slope grew steeper. The climb was putting noticeable demands on his energysupply. And to make it worse, the grinding of his tread' motors was feeding additionalheat into his system ... heat that had to be gathered and dissipated by his refrigerationcoils and cooling fins. The