Текст книги "The Turing Option"

Автор книги: Harry Harrison

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

7
February 22, 2023

Erin Snaresbrook felt logy with sleep – even though she had slept for only five hours. It had not been by choice but by necessity, since she hadn’t been to bed at all for almost three days. She was beginning to hallucinate and more than once had found her eyes closing in the O.R. for lack of proper rest. It was too much. She had used one of the vacant intern’s rooms, fallen into a black hole of fatigue and, what seemed like a moment later, had been dragged painfully awake by the clamor of alarm. A cold shower shocked her back to life; reddened eyes blinked back at her from the mirror as she put on a touch of lipstick.

“Erin, I have to tell you. You look rotten,’’ she muttered, sticking out a furred and tired-looking tongue. “I prescribe coffee for your condition, Doctor. Preferably intravenously.”

When Snaresbrook came into her waiting room she saw that Dolly was already there, turning the pages on a worn copy of Time. She looked at her watch.

“Patients steal all the new magazines, would you believe it? Rich patients, or they wouldn’t be here, they even pinch the toilet paper and bars of soap. Sorry I’m late.”

“No, that’s fine, Doctor, it’s all right.”

“We’ll have some coffee, then get to work. You go in, I’ll be just a moment.”

Madeline had the mail ready and she flipped quickly through it, glancing up when the door flew open. She smiled insincerely at the angry General.

“Why are you and the patient still in this hospital?

Why have my orders for moving him not been carried out?”

General Schorcht snapped the words like weapons. Erin Snaresbrook thought of many answers, most of them quite insulting, but she was too tired for a shouting match this early in the day.

“I will show you, General. Then maybe you will climb down off my back.” She threw the correspondence onto the desk, then pushed by the General and out into the hall. She stamped toward the intensive-care unit where Brian was, heard the General’s heavy footsteps behind her. “Put this on,” she snapped, and tossed General Schorcht a sterile mask. “Sorry,” she said, took the mask and fixed it into position over the other’s nose and mouth; it’s not easy to fit one of the things with only one hand. When her own mask was in place she opened the door to the ICU just enough so they could see in. “Take a good look.”

The figure on the table was barely discernible behind the network of pipes, tubes, wires, apparatus. The two arms of the manipulator were positioned over him, the multibranching fingers dropping down into the opening in the cloth. The flexible tube of the oxygen mask wormed out from under the drapes and there were drips and tubes plugged into arms and legs and into almost every orifice of the unconscious body. Lights flickered on one of the complex machines; a nurse looked at a readout on the screen and made an adjustment. Snaresbrook let the door swing shut and pulled the mask from the General’s face.

“You want me to move all that? While the connection apparatus is in place – and in operation? It is working with the internal computer now to reroute nerve signals.”

She turned on her heel and left: General Schorcht’s continuing silence was answer enough.

She was humming cheerfully when she entered her office and turned on the hulking coffee machine. Dolly sat on the edge of her chair and Erin pointed a spoon at her.

“How about a nice strong espresso?”

“I don’t drink coffee.”

“You should. It is certainly easier on the metabolism than alcohol.”

“I can’t sleep, it’s the caffeine you see. Nor do I drink alcohol either.”

Nodding sympathetically over the coffee, an answer to the unanswerable, Snaresbrook sat down at her desk and brought up on the screen the transcribed notes of their previous interview.

“You told me a lot of very vital things last time you were here, Dolly. You not only have a good memory but a deep understanding. You were a good and affectionate mother to Brian, that is obvious in the way you speak about him.” She glanced up and saw that the other woman was blushing lightly at this casual compliment; life had not been that kind to Dolly and compliments very rare. “Do you remember when Brian reached puberty?” Erin asked, and the blush deepened.

“Well, you know, it’s not as obvious as with girls. But he was young I think, around thirteen.”

“This is most important. Up until now we have been tracking his emotional life as a small child, then going on to follow his learning patterns and intellectual history. That is all going very well. But major emotional and physiological changes take place with the onset of puberty. That time and area must be explored in depth, charted as well as we can. Do you remember him dating – or having any girlfriends?”

“No, nothing like that. Well there was a girl he saw for a bit, she would come around the house to use his computer sometimes. But it didn’t seem to last very long. She was the only one. Then of course there was the matter of their age difference, she was much older than him. So the relationship could only have been platonic. I do remember that she was a pretty little thing. Name of Kim.”

“Kim, I want you to take a look at your screen right now,” Dr. Betser said. “You had trouble with this last week and until you know exactly what is happening you won’t be able to move on to the next step. Now look at this.”

The instructor had typed the equations into his own computer – which not only displayed them on the screen in front of the class but entered them into the desk computers of all the students at the same moment.

“Show us how to do it,” he said and switched command to her. All eyes were on the screen as Kim reluctantly touched her keyboard.

All eyes except Brian’s. He had worked out the solution within a minute after the problem had been entered. College was becoming as frustrating as high school had been. He spent almost all of his class time waiting for the others to catch up with him. They were a stupid and despicable lot who looked down on him like some kind of freak. All of them were four, five years older than he was – while most of them stood a head taller. At times he felt like a midget. And it wasn’t just paranoia on his part – they really did hate him, he was sure of it. Disliked him because he was younger, out of place here. Plenty of jealousy too, since he did the work so much better and faster than they did. How had people who really knew how to think, like Turing or Einstein or Feynman, how had they managed to live through school?

He looked at his screen and tried not to groan as the girl made a hash of it. It was too awful to watch. He casually pushed his pocket calculator against the side of his terminal and punched in a quick code. A list of Italian verbs appeared in a window on the screen and he scrolled through them, memorizing the new ones.

Brian had discovered, very early on, that the school tapped into every student’s computer and recorded all the data that was entered into it. This was made obvious by some of the questions they had asked him, knowledge they could only have obtained in this underhand way. Once he had discovered it, he made sure that the school computer was just used for schoolwork. He had observed that his teachers, Dr. Betser in particular, were quite certain that their words were golden – and would be quite upset if they discovered that during their lectures he had been running war games or accessing data bases instead of giving them a hundred percent attention. But there were ways around everything. If all of the computers in the schoolroom had been connected by cables it might have been easier – or harder to misdirect information. But now narrow-band infrared links, like ethernet systems, filled the room with invisible communication. Every computer had a digitally tunable LED, a light-emitting diode, that transmitted on low-noise channels. A photodetector picked up messages it was tuned to. Brian’s solution to this was to build an intercepting device into what appeared to be a pocket calculator. When it was placed at the side of his computer it intercepted the incoming signal and rebroadcast it. So he could do whatever he wished without anyone being able to detect the operation. What was on the screen was for his eyes alone! Allattare to feed or to nurse… allenare to exercise, to train.

He was still keeping track of the class and became vaguely aware that Dr. Betser’s voice was taking on that weary, nagging tone.

“… a basic misunderstanding of how we make successive approximations. Unless you get this basic point, you’ll never get any further. Brian – will you do this correctly so we can move on. And, Kim, I want to see you after class.”

The Italian verbs vanished as Brian pushed the calculator aside. He looked at the screen and tracked her first error. “The misconception begins here,” he said, moving the cursor and highlighting the equation. “After you find the first-order solution, you have to remove it – subtract it from the original equation – before you can apply the same method to find the next term. If you forget to do that, you’ll keep getting the same term again. And then you have to divide out the independent variable, or you will just get zero the next time. And finally, you have to go backward again, adding the terms back in and multiplying back the variable again. I think the trouble is that everyone in the class believes that there are a lot of different ideas here, derivatives, approximations, second-order approximations, and so on. But there’s only one idea, used over and over. I don’t see why they make it out to be so complicated…”

An hour later Brian was eating his cheese and tomato sandwich and reading Galaxy Warhounds of Procyon when someone sat down heavily on the bench beside him. This was unusual enough since he was left strictly alone by the other students. More unusual were the tanned fingers that pulled the book from him and slammed it onto the table.

“Juvenile science fiction space crap that only kids read,” Kim snapped at him.

He had had this argument often enough before. “Science fiction utilizes a vocabulary twice as large as that of all other popular fiction. While SF readers are in the top percentile…”

“Space balls! You made me look pretty dumb today.”

“Well you were pretty dumb! I’m sorry.”

Brian’s worried expression got to her; she could never stay angry very long in any case. She laughed aloud and pushed his book back to him. Pushing it through a slice of tomato on the table. He smiled and wiped the cover with his napkin.

“In fact it wasn’t even your fault anyway,” he said. “Old Betser may be a wizard programming mathematician but he doesn’t know a gnat’s fart about explaining it to anyone.”

“What do you mean?” She was interested now, reached out and broke off a corner of his sandwich. He noticed that her teeth were very white and neat, her lips red – and that was without lipstick. He pushed the remains of the sandwich over to her.

“He’s always going off on tangents, getting sidetracked into explanations that have nothing to do with the material he should be teaching, things like that. I always stay a chapter ahead of him in the text so he won’t confuse me when he starts to explain something.”

“Amazing!” Kim said, meaning the thought of reading a text you didn’t have to when there were so many other wonderful things to do. “Can you do better than him, Mr. Smartass?”

“Run circles around him, Miss Birdbrain. Using the heretofore totally secret Brian Delaney lightning instruction system all will be made clear! In the first place, it’s not really so important to know exactly how to solve each problem.”

“That sounds stupid. How can you solve a problem if you don’t know how to solve it?”

“By doing just the opposite. You can learn a lot of ways not to solve it. A lot of wrong methods not to try. Then, once you find the most common mistakes, you can hardly help doing the right thing without even trying.”

He remembered exactly where she had gone wrong and knew at once what her misunderstanding was. He explained it patiently, two or three ways, until she finally caught on.

“Is that what my trouble was! Why didn’t Beastly Betser explain it like that? It’s obvious.”

“Everything is obvious once you understand it. Why don’t you work through the rest of those examples while this is clear in your head?”

“Maybe tomorrow. Got things to do, gotta run.”

Run she did, or at least trotted out of the dining room, and he shook his head as he watched her go. Girls! They were a strange breed. He opened his book and winced at the red tomato stains. Sloppy. Sloppy thinking too, she should have worked this thing out while it was fresh in her head. Five will get you ten she would forget the whole thing by tomorrow.

She did. “You were right! It was gone, zip. I thought I remembered, but not exactly.”

He sighed dramatically and rolled his eyes heavenward. Kim giggled.

“Look,” he said, “there’s really not much use spending the time to learn something unless you spend a little more time making sure that it stays learnt. First, you can’t really understand anything if you only understand it one way. You have to think a little about each new idea – which old ones it is like, and which are really different. If you don’t connect it to a few other things, it will evaporate the moment anything changes. That’s what I meant yesterday, about the solution not being important. It’s the differences and similarities.” He could see that this was having no effect, so he played his ace. “Anyway, I worked out an auto-tutor program that simplifies the subject of successive approximations. I’ll give you a copy. Then you can run it whenever the curtain starts to fall in your brain and all will be made instantly clear. At least it will get you through this part of the course.”

“You really have a program like that?”

“Would I lie to you?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know anything about you at all, Mister I.Q. Kid.”

“Why did you call me that?” He was angry, hurt, both feelings mixed together. He had overheard the other students calling him that behind his back. Laughing.

“I’m sorry – I didn’t mean it, I just never thought. Any moron that calls you that must be a moron. I apologized so you can’t be angry.”

“I’m not,” he said, and realized mat he meant it. “Give me your log-on ID and I’ll zap a copy of that program to your modem.”

“I always forget the ID, but I’ve written it down someplace.”

Brian groaned. “You simply can’t forget your ID. That’s like forgetting your blood type.”

“But I don’t know my blood type!”

They both laughed at that and he found the only solution. “You better come over to my place and I’ll give you a copy.”

“You will? You’re a great guy, Brian Delaney.”

She shook his hand in gratitude. Her fingers were very, very warm.

8
March 25, 2023

There were muttered complaints from people waiting in the line, but not from Benicoff. Not only didn’t he mind – he enjoyed the security. When he finally reached the two M.P.s they coldly asked him for his ID – although they knew him very well. They examined this closely, then his hospital pass, before they let him approach the front door of the hospital. Another guard inside unlocked it for him.

“Any troubles, Sergeant?”

“None other than the usual with you-know-who.”

Benicoff nodded in understanding. He had been present when General Schorcht had chewed the Sergeant out, him with hash marks up to his elbows, a Master Sergeant, not that the General cared. “I got my troubles with him too – which is why I’m here.”

“It’s a tough life,” the Sergeant said with marked lack of sympathy. Benicoff found the internal phone and called Snaresbrook’s secretary, discovered that the surgeon was in the library, got instructions how to find it.

Leather-bound medical books lined the walls; but all of them were years out of date and just there for decoration. The library was completely computerized, since all technical books were published in digital form. This had only become possible when conventions and standards were set for illustrations and graphics which were animated most of the time. So any medical book or journal was entered into the library’s data base the instant that it was published. Erin Snaresbrook sat in front of a terminal speaking instructions.

“Can I interrupt?” Benicoff asked.

“In two seconds. I went to make a copy of this in my computer. There.” She hit return and the item was instantly transferred to the data base in her own computer upstairs. The surgeon nodded and spun about in her chair. “I was talking to a friend in Russia this a.m., he told me about this. It’s in St. Petersburg, a student of Luria. Some very original work on nerve regeneration. What can I do for you?”

“General Schorcht keeps bugging me for more detailed reports. So I bug you.”

“Niet prahblem, as our Russian friends say. But what about your end? Progress there?”

“An absolute dead end. If there is a trail, and I doubt it, it gets colder every day. No hints, no clues, no idea of who did it or how they did it. I’m not supposed to know this, but the FBI has managed to get undercover data taps into every AI lab or department of every university, every major industry in the country, to report any sudden changes or input of new information. They are looking out for the AI data stolen from Brian. Of course the trouble is that they don’t exactly know what to look for.”

“Sounds sort of illegal, snooping like that.”

“It is. But I’ll put up with it for a short time before I blow the whistle on them. But that’s not what worries me. The real question is whether the security agencies have enough experts to interpret any or all of that data. We must get a lead. Which of course is why the General is bugging me.”

“Because the possibility that Brian may remember something, recover, respond in any way – is the only chance we have? Fascinating. I’ve read in bad novels ‘he nodded gloomily’ Now I know what it looks like because you just did it.”

“Gloomily, depressingly, suicidally – take your pick. And Brian?”

“Our progress has been good, but we are running out of time.”

“He’s getting worse, regressing!”

“Not that, you misunderstood. Modern medicine can stabilize a body, keep it alive for years when the mind is not in control. Physically, I could leave Brian in the recovery unit until he died of old age. I don’t think we want to do that. What I mean is that I have traced and reconnected nearly a million nerve fibers. I’ve tracked and accessed Brian’s earliest memories, from birth right up until about age twelve. The film connectors and computer are in place and in the very near future they should have hopefully made all of the possible connections. I have gone about as far as I can go with this technique.”

“Why are you working on his childhood – when it is the adult we need to answer our questions?”

“Because the old expression about the child being the father of the man is quite true. There is no way we can restore the higher level brain connections until the lower levels begin to operate. This means that the enormous structure of the human mind can be rebuilt only from the bottom up – in much the same way it was built in the first place…”

“When you say building a mind – built of what?”

“The mind is made of many small parts, each mindless by itself. We call these basic parts agents. Each agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. But when the agents get connected up, in certain very social ways, they work together as societies – -that’s how intelligence emerges from non-intelligence.

“Fortunately, most of the agents themselves are okay, because their brain cells are located in the uninjured gray matter. But most of the connections between the agents thread their way through the brain’s white matter – and too many of those connections have been severed. That is where I am now. Locating and reconnecting large numbers of the simplest agents, at the sensory and motor levels. If I can reconstruct enough of the society of agents formed during each stage of Brian’s development, that will give me a foundation for repairing the structures that were formed in his next period. Stage after stage. Layer after layer. And the different kinds of cross-connections between them. While at the same time I have to restore the feedback loops between the agents at each level, as well as the systems in other parts of the brain that control reasoning and learning. These different kinds of loops and rings are crucial because they are what supports the thoughtful and reflective activity that distinguishes human from animal thinking. At the present time I am almost at the end of this first period of rebuilding. In a few days I will know if I have succeeded or not.”

Benicoff shook his head in wonderment. “You are getting me used to thinking the unthinkable as a daily habit. What you are doing is so new, so different, that I find it basically – I’m sorry to say this – incomprehensible. That you can enter Brian’s head, listen to his thoughts and repair the damage done! Better you than me. Does he feel anything while you are doing this?”

Snaresbrook shrugged. “There is really no way to tell. I suppose the experience will be indescribable because it is happening to a mind that is not yet human. My personal belief, however, is that while his brain is being reconstructed his mind might very well be retracing and reliving the important early events of his life.”

* * *

Dolly could hear the clatter of computer keys as she came down the hall; she smiled. Brian was usually alone so much, it was nice to see him with a school friend.

“Anyone for a fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookie?” she said, holding out the plate. Kim squeaked with pleasure.

“Me for one, Mrs. Delaney. Thanks!”

“Brian?”

“Finish this first,” he muttered. “Come on, Kim. It would be a lot better if you did this before you take a break. You are just beginning to understand what basis vectors are.”

“We can finish it later. Take one.”

Brian sighed and pushed one of the still-warm cookies into his mouth. “Good,” he spluttered.

“I’ll get some cold milk to go with that.”

When Dolly brought the tray with the filled glasses she had her purse with her. “I’ve got to go to the market and it is going to be crowded. Which means I’ll be late and your father will be upset if he gets in before I do. Tell him that dinner will be at six like always and it’s ready for the microwave now. You won’t forget?”

Brian shook his head and drained the glass as Dolly left. He put it down and turned back to the computer. “Now to pick up where we left off.”

“No!” Kim said. “We’re taking a break, remember?” She pushed the books aside and dropped onto the bed, punched his pillow into a mound and settled it behind her back. “A break is a break – and you have to learn that.”

“Work is work and you have to learn that. Just look at your term paper, for instance.” He spun his revolving chair about and punched the scroll button. The copy flipped by in the screen, most of it white letters against red blocks. “Do you see all the red copy? You know what it means?”

“You had a nosebleed?”

“You ought to take this seriously, Kim. You know that I’ve been helping you with this paper for Bastard Betser, adding bits and straightening it out when you get it wrong. Just for the heck of it I wanted to check up on my input and started marking off the blocks of what I was doing in red, all the corrections and changes that I had made. There is sure a lot more red than white here.”

“There is a lot more to the world than AI. Since you are standing up, bring me over a cookie.”

“You’re going to flunk this course.” He got up and passed her the plate.

“Big deal. So maybe I flunk out of school altogether and marry a millionaire and travel around the world on my own yacht.”

“You talk big for a Redneck from the Rigs. I bet you’ve never even been ashore.”

“I have been around, leetle man, I have been around.” She licked the chocolate from her fingertips and half closed her eyes, spoke huskily in a fake French accent. “I have zeen zee world, have driven ziz prince mad with passion.”

“Mad with boredom! You’ve got a good mind, Kim. You just don’t like to use it.”

“Mind! Enough zee mind. What about zee body?”

She pulled at the top of her blouse to disclose her cleavage. Pulled a little too enthusiastically and the blouse opened wide disclosing one bare breast, a sweet pink nipple. She giggled as she buttoned the blouse.

“I drive zee men mad…”

Her voice died away as she saw the effect the accident had had on Brian. His skin had gone pale, his eyes wide.

“Relax,” she said. “You’ve seen lots of bare skin before down on flesh beach where all the kooks hang out.”

“I’ve never been there,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“Well I don’t blame you. Some pretty ugly guys and gals are naturists.” She looked up at him and arched her eyebrows. “Hey, how old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

She bounced up onto her knees and looked him in the eye. “You’re as tall as I am and not too bad looking. Ever kissed a girl?”

“Let’s go to work,” he said uncomfortably as he turned away. She took him by the shoulder and pulled him back. “That’s no answer – and I know you know about girls because I found some old Playboys under your bed – with scorch tracks that your eyes had left on all the centerfold nudes. Maybe you know what they look like – but I’ll bet dollars to dongles that you are sweet thirteen and have never been kissed – so you’re going to learn now.”

Brian did not pull away when she took his head gently in her hands and pulled his mouth down to hers. She made a happy humming sound and let her tongue drift inside his lips, felt his hands harden on her back. She moved her hand down; that wasn’t the only thing that was hard.

She opened his belt.

What Brian could not understand was why everyone didn’t know what had happened just by looking at him. It was so momentous, earth-shattering, that it must show on his face. Whenever he thought about it he could feel his skin glow with the strength of his memories. Kim was gone by the time Dolly came home; he heard his father arrive a few minutes later. He stayed in his room as long as he could, waiting until he was called a second time for dinner.

But neither of them noticed a thing. Brian ate in silence, face lowered over his plate. They were discussing a barbecue they had been invited to next weekend; neither wanted to go. But it was business not pleasure and in the end they made the obvious decision. They were barely aware that he had left the table and was back in his room.

The thing that bothered Brian most was that what had happened did not seem to have affected Kim in the slightest. The next morning she passed him in the hall with a “Hi!” and nothing else. He thought about it all day in school, muttered some incorrect answers which shocked his teachers, then cut all of his afternoon classes and went out on the rigs. Alone above the sea.

If he felt so strongly about what had happened – why didn’t she? The answer was pretty obvious when he asked the question that way. Because she had done it before. She was eighteen, five years older man him, had had five years to get interested in boys. He was jealous of them – but who were they? He couldn’t dare ask her. In the end he said the hell with it and tried to put it from his mind. And sought for an excuse to see her alone as soon as possible.

Brian was waiting in the hall next morning, caught her before class. “I stayed up late last night, finished your term paper.”

“My hearing is going. Did you just say what I thought I heard you say?”

“Mm-hmm. Thought it would be easier to get it done all at once than take you through it step by step. Maybe that way you will remember what you wrote.” He tried to be more casual than he felt. “Come over this afternoon and I’ll give you a first run-through of how it works.”

“You bet. See you there.”

The day dragged by. It was Dolly’s afternoon to play bridge and the house would be empty.

“This is the final surgery,” Snaresbrook dictated quietly. “The implants are all in place. The CPU put into position. The regrowth of new nerve connections to the damaged portions of the cortex is almost completed. The replacements for the corpus callosum connections are being stimulated. The fiber-optic interfaces between the chips have been installed, the last of the intracranial procedures. The meningeal tissues have been repaired or replaced and I am now coating the edges of the section of bone that was removed to give access to the brain. This will grow and seal the section of skull into place. The procedure now begins.”

She did not add her silent thoughts that this was just the end of the surgical procedures. But the new and untried procedures that would hopefully restore the connections inside Brian’s brain were only in their opening stages. New, unproven – would they work?

Stop thinking about it. Complete this and move on.

It was a muggy and torrid July afternoon when Brian finally got away from the computer lab. He had worked out what he hoped would be an improvement on LAMA, and AI programming language that his father had helped to develop. If he was right the cross-linking nemes of the CYC information nets could be speeded up by a factor of 10. But his new technique had to be tested and this would have taken days to work through on his own computer – so he managed to borrow some time on the Cray 5 and if all went well he should get some results by morning. Which meant there wasn’t much else he could do until then.

And there was a good chance Kim might be waiting for him at home. He walked faster now and his sweat-soaked shut stuck to his skin. She had no classes this afternoon so she might come over for what she called tutoring. Yes, there would also be some tutoring because she really needed it. She was cutting classes now and ignoring lectures because she knew that he would be there to tell her what to do before the exams. She really hated the school work and was always happy to find something better to do. Brian slowed down when he realized he was gasping for breath. Easy did it in this heat or he would get back dead.