Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence (16 page)

Sometimes, he felt as though the ship carried ghosts within it—of the sixteen clones killed by accident during the construction on the Moon, of umbilicus crew members killed by the ship’s programmed savagery—or perhaps of the OMCs sacrificed on this altar. An altar to human hubris.… Those previous tests—all of the dead crews, colonists … and the OMCs.
All ghosts riding with us.

Did those bodiless brains have souls?
Flattery wondered.
For that matter—if we breathe consciousness into this machinery, will our creation have a soul?

“Have the automatics finished sealing the break?’ Bickel asked.

“All sealed,” Flattery said. And he asked himself:
When will the rogue consciousness hit us again?

“What was in Stores Four?” Prudence asked. “What’d we lose?”

“Food concentrates,” Bickel answered. “First thing I checked.” His tone said,
“You had the watch; you should’ve checked that.”

“Raj, do you want us to start sharing watch and watch?” Timberlake asked. “After I’ve had some rest …”

“After you’ve had some rest, you can help me in the shop,” Bickel said.

Flattery glanced at Bickel, then at Timberlake, wondering how the life-systems engineer would take that rebuke. Timberlake had his eyes closed. His fatigue was obvious in the pale, flaccid look of his face. He appeared almost asleep … except for tight, shallow breathing.

“You want to go right ahead; eh?” Prudence asked. “You don’t think we should wait for Hempstead’s trained seals to chew this over?”

“Whatever hit us came from outside,” Bickel said. “That’s
another
problem.”

“John’s right,” Timberlake rasped. He cleared his throat, unsnapped his action couch, sat up. “I’m bushed.”

“We’ve just decided,” Prudence said, “just like that …” she snapped her fingers, “—that you can go on stirring around in the computer like a wild man?”

“For Christ’s sake!” Bickel said. “Haven’t any of you realized yet we were supposed to use the computer as the basic element of attack?”

Bickel stared around at them—Flattery busy on the board, Timberlake half asleep sitting up at his couch, Prudence glaring at him from her couch.

“That’s no ordinary computer. It has elements we don’t even suspect. It was hooked up with an Organic Mental Core for almost six years during the construction and programming of the ship. It has buffers and leads and cross-ties that its own designers may not even know about!”

“Are you suggesting it’s already conscious?” Prudence asked.

“No, I’m only suggesting that we’ve come a long way using that computer and our Ox frontal-lobe simulator. We’ve come further than the UMB project did in twenty years! And we should go on with this. We’re cutting a straight line through—”

“There are no straight lines in nature,” Flattery said.

Bickel sighed.
What now?
he
wondered. “If you’ve got something to say, spit it out.”

“Consciousness is a type of behavior,” Flattery said.

“Agreed.”

“But the roots of our behavior are buried so far away in the past we can’t get at them directly.”

“Emotion again, eh?” Bickel demanded.

“No,” Flattery said.

“Instinct,” Prudence said.

Flattery nodded. “The kind of genetic imprint that tells a chicken how to crack out of its shell.”

“Emotions or instinct, what’s the difference?” Bickel asked. “Emotions are produced by instinct. Are you still saying we can’t bring the Ox to consciousness unless it has instincts-cum-emotions?”

“You know what I’m saying,” Flattery said.

“It has to love us,” Bickel said. He chewed at his upper lip, caught again by the beautiful simplicity of the suggestion. Flattery was right, of course. Here was a loose rein that could satisfy the fail-safe requirements. It controlled without galling.

“It has to have an autonomic system of emotional reactions,” Flattery said. “The system has to respond with a set of physical effects of which the Ox is … aware.”

Emotion,
Bickel thought.
The characteristic that gives us our sense of person, the thing that summates personal judgments. A process in capsule form that can occur out of sequence.

Here was a break with all machine concepts of time—emotion as process, an audacious way of looking at time.

“There’s nothing of ourselves about which we can be objective,” Bickel said, “except our own physical responses. Remember? It’s what Dr. Ellers was always saying.”

Flattery thought back to Ellers, UMB’s chief of psych.
“Bickel is ‘purpose,’ the force that will give direction to your search,”
Ellers had said.
“You have substitutes, of course. Accidents do happen. But you’ve nothing honed as fine as Bickel. He’s a creative discoverer.”

A “creative discoverer”—the failures of all who went before him … all of those clone-brothers, all was preparation for this assault on the problem.
If we succeed we survive, and if we fail …

And Bickel was thinking:
Emotion. How do we symbolize it and program for it? What does the body do? We’re inside, in direct contact with whatever the body’s doing. That’s the only thing we can really be objective about. What does the body …

“It has to have a completely interfunctioning body,” Bickel said, seeing the whole problem and answer as an abrupt revelation. “It has to have a body that’s gone through trauma and crises.” He stared at Flattery. “Guilt, too, Raj. It has to have guilt.”

“Guilt?” Flattery asked, and wondered why the suggestion made him feel angry and half fearful. He started to object, grew conscious of a rhythmic rasping. He thought at first it was a malfunctioning alarm, realized then it was Timberlake. The life-systems engineer had reclasped himself in his action couch cocoon. He was asleep—snoring.

“Guilt,” Bickel said, holding his attention on Flattery.

“How?” Prudence asked.

“In program engineering terms,” Bickel said, “we must install trapping functions, inner alarm systems—monitors that interrupt operations according to the functional needs of the entire system.”

“Guilt’s an artificial emotion; it has nothing to do with consciousness,” Flattery objected.

“Fear and guilt are parent and child. You can’t have guilt without fear.”

“But you can have fear without guilt,” Flattery said.

“Can you?” Bickel asked. And he thought:
It’s the Cain-and-Abel syndrome. Where’d the race pick that one up?

“Not so fast,” Prudence said. “Are you suggesting we install a … that we make this … Ox afraid?”

“Yeah.”

“Absolutely not!” Flattery said. He had his couch exerciser going, but shut it off, turned to stare at Bickel.

“Our creature already has a large, fast memory,” Bickel said. “It has fixed memory—if you discount our addressing problems, which aren’t interfering with function at any rate—and I’ll bet this thing has a protected area of memory that’s even ready with illusions when they’re necessary for self-protection.”

“But fear!” Flattery said.

“This is the other side of your coin, Raj. You want it to love us? Okay. Love’s a kind of need, eh? I’m willing to give it a need for external program sources—that’s us, you? I’ll leave the necessary gaps in its makeup that only we can fill. It’ll have emotions, but that means an unlimited spectrum of emotions, Raj. The spectrum includes fear.’’

Guilt and fear,
Prudence thought.
Raj will have to face it.
She looked at Bickel, seeing the filmed-over, withdrawn look in his eyes.

“Pleasure and pain,” Bickel muttered. He focused on Prudence, the sleeping Timberlake, on Flattery—each in turn.
Did they see that the Ox had to be able to reproduce itself too?

Prudence felt her pulse quickening, tore her attention away from Bickel. She put a hand to her temple, checked the pulse there, related this to her quickened breathing, to body temperature, to hungers, to stage of fatigue and awareness. The chemical experiments on her body were giving her an acute awareness of her bodily functions, and that awareness told her she needed chemical readjustment.

“Well, Raj?” Bickel said.

I must compose myself,
Flattery thought, turning back onto his couch.
I must appear natural and calm.
He kept his eyes away from the false panel on his repeater board. Under that panel lay death and destruction. Bickel was growing exceedingly alert to the tiniest clues. Flattery marked the quiet green of the flashboard, the ticking of relays through the graph counters. Everything about the ship felt soothing and ordinary—all systems functioning.

Yet, deep inside himself, Flattery felt knotted up, like an animal poised at the sound of the hunter.

Pleasure and pain. It could be done, of course: the gradual orientation toward a goal, then denial … interference … removal … frustration
…
threat of destruction,

“I’m going back to the shop,” Bickel said. “The way to do this is pretty clear, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps to you,” Flattery said.

“There’s no stopping,” Prudence said, and hoped Flattery heard the implication:
There’s no stopping him.

“Go ahead” Flattery said. “Assemble your blocks of nerve-net simulators. But let us think long and hard before we tie your system into the full computer.” He looked at Bickel. “Do you still contemplate this black box—white box experiment?”

Bickel merely stared at him.

“You know the danger,” Flattery said.

Bickel felt elation, a breakthrough in some inner factor that had resisted him. The ship—its living organisms, its problems—all were like marionettes and marionette toys. The way out was so clear to him—he’d only hinted at it before—so clear. He could see the necessary schematics stacked in his mind, like transparencies piled one on another.

Four-dimensional construction,
he reminded himself.
We have to construct a net in depth that contains complex
world-line tracks. It has to absorb nonsynchronous transmissions. It has to abstract discrete patterns out of the impulse oversend. The important thing is structure
—
not the material. The important thing is topology. That’s the key to the whole damn problem!

“Prue, give me a hand,” Bickel said. He glanced at the chronometer beside the Com-central board, looked at Timberlake.
Let him sleep; Prue could help. She did neat electronics work
—
surgical in its exactness, clean and with minimal leads and tight couplings.

“We’re going to need a coupling area for each group of multiple blocks,” Bickel said, looking at Prudence. “I’m going to turn that job over to you while I build up the major block systems.”

As though his words had accumulated in her mind, built up a certain pressure until they spilled over into understanding, she saw what Bickel intended. He was going to feed a continuous data load into an enormously expanded Ox-cum-computer linkup. He was going to project into the computer, like a film projected on a screen—a giant spreadout, an almost infinite psycho-space.

The array of required connectives set themselves up in her mind with parallel rows of binary numbers, cross-linked, interwoven. And she saw that she could reframe the problem, overlap it with matrix functions, creating a problem-solution array like a multidimensional chessboard.

In the instant of this revelation, she realized that Bickel could not have framed his approach to this solution without using the same mathematical crowbar to lever away the heavy work.

“You used adjacency matrices,” she accused.

He nodded. She had seen that he was intruding into a new mathematical conception—a calculus of qualities by which he could trace neuron impulses and juggle them within the imbedded psychospaces of the Ox-cum-computer.

Prudence had begun to see what he saw, but the others weren’t ready yet for anything more than hints. The possibilities were staggering. The implied methods would permit construction of entirely new computers reduced in size and basic complexity by a factor of at least a thousand. But more important was the understanding this gave him of his own psychospaces and their function in abstraction—the aggregate nerve-cell excitation of his own body and the way this was reduced to recognizable values.

Thinking within this framework, Bickel saw, put him on a threshold. A certain pressure here, a certain application of energy there, and he knew he would be projected into a consciousness that he had never before experienced.

The realization inspired fear and awe and at the same time it lured him. He turned, crossed to the hatch into the shop, opened it, looked back at Flattery.

“Raj,” he said. “We’re not conscious.”

“What? Huh?” It was Timberlake rousing out of his sleep, rubbing his eyes, staring straight out at Bickel.

“We’re not awake,” Bickel said.

Chapter 22

Beyond the senses there are objects; beyond objects there is mind; beyond the mind there is intellect; beyond the intellect there is the Great Self.

—Katha-upanishad,
Excerpt for instruction of Chaplain/Psychiatrists

“We’re not awake.”

During Flattery’s watch, the words haunted him.

Timberlake had muttered something about, “Damn joker!” and gone off to finish his sleep in quarters.

But Flattery, dividing his attention between the console and the overhead screen that showed the shop with Prudence and Bickel at work there, felt the ship assume a curious identity in his mind.

He felt as though he and the others were merely cells of a larger organism—that the telltales, the dials and gauges and sensors, the omnipresent visual intercom—all these were senses and nerves and organs of something apart from himself.

“We are not awake.”

We keep skirting that thought,
Flattery reflected.

Bickel’s voice talking to Prudence in the shop—“Here’s the main trunk to handle negative feedback. Follow the color code and tie it in across there.” “Here’s the damper circuit; we have to watch we don’t introduce reverberating cycles into the random neural paths.”

And Prudence, talking half to herself: “The human skull encloses about fifteen thousand million neurons. I’ve extrapolated from our building blocks and the computer—we’re going to wind up with more than twice that number in this … beast.”

Their voices were like echoes in Flattery’s mind.

Bickel: “Think of a threshold to be overcome. Several kinds of pressure will overcome that threshold. They’re the pressures involved in entropy—or the pressures of proliferating variability: call that one life. Entropy on one side, life on the other. Each drives past the threshold at a certain pressure level. When one gets through, that turns on the Consciousness Factor.”

Prudence: “Which is it, homeostat or filter?”

Bickel: “Both.”

Flattery thought then of the total ship, the great machine whose continued life required a certain optimum organization—an
ordering
process. That involved entropy, certainly, because the system of a total ship tended to settle into a uniform distribution of its energies.

As far as the ship is concerned, order is more natural than chaos,
Flattery thought.
But we’re playing the ship as though all its parts were an orchestra and Bickel the director. Bickel alone has the score to achieve the
music
we want.

Consciousness.

Bickel: “I tell you, Prue, consciousness has to be something that flows against the current of time. Time in which it’s embedded.”

Prudence: “I don’t know. When a cell block fires, that sets up an impulse. The impulse divides and forms a multi-branched structure with a single stem—in the nerve-nets, the embedding space. The stem contains that original firing, of course, and you have transmission shooting out through four-dimensional space—it includes time.”

Bickel: “And consciousness is like a boat breasting that flow.”

Prudence: “Against the flow? You have to include time in the diagram, certainly, but the firing and branching are like a complex solid pushed
into
time, like the veins in a four-dimensional leaf.”

Bickel: “Think of the ship’s AAT system. What’s that? The thing takes hundreds of duplicates on a single message—all the duplicates having been transmitted in a single, compressed burst … a single firing—and it slows them down, compares them, breaks off the error stems and passes along to you the translated corrected message.”

Prudence: “But consciousness doesn’t enter the picture until the message reaches its human receiver.”

Bickel: “Negative feedback, Prue. Input adjusted to the output. If the system malfunctions, the human operator repairs it, like repairing a dam in a stream so you catch a significant amount of the flow.”

Prudence (looking up from a length of neuron fiber she was feeding into a micro-manipulator): “Consciousness—a kind of negative feedback?”

Bickel: “You ever think, Prue, that negative feedback is the most terrifying perfectionist in the universe? It won’t permit failure. It’s designed to keep the system running between certain limits no matter what the disturbance.”

Prudence: “But … these Ox circuits … you’ve deliberately introduced errors that aren’t—”

Bickel: “Why not? All our conventional ideas about feedback imply a certain uniformity of environment. But we live in a nonuniform universe. That place out there isn’t completely predictable. We’ve got to keep it off balance out there … by changing the rules ourselves at random.”

Order opposed to chaos,
Flattery thought, glancing at the overhead screen. Lord! How that block-upon-block extrusion was spreading out from the computer wall! It had proliferated into two major growths with a jungle of vinelike pseudoneuron sheafs between them and around them and over them.

Bickel lay on his back working beneath the structure. Loops of the main bus connections hung down just above his knees.

We are not awake,
Flattery thought.

Oh, God! How easy it’d be to give up right now! He was here in the driver’s seat, wasn’t he? One of the triggers was at hand. Who’d ever know? The ship would die … the problem end. Let the bastards at UMB try again … with somebody else.

But that was the real problem: they’d try again, all right, but not with somebody else.

The same miserable charade—over and over and over!

Look at Prue down there,
he thought.
She’s stopped her anti-S injections. She’s experimenting with her body chemistry. She’ll be posturing and twisting in front of Bickel pretty soon. And the only way he sees her is as an expert with the micro-manipulator. She does good work!

We are not awake.

Consciousness itself created variety, developed offshoot probabilities. And variety thrived on variety. The very act of playing their own special
music
produced the unpredictable—produced errors.

Where does communication break down?

Bickel (grunting as he squirmed out from beneath the Ox): “The generalized body and the specialized brain, Prue—put ’em together and what’ve you got? Illusion. That’s the buffer, illusion. It’s the protective layer that lets virtually incompatible systems get in bed together. Consciousness is a producer of illusions.”

Prudence: “Where’d you store the R
₄
DBd neuron reel?”

Bickel: “Second rack, left end of the bench. Now, you take the illusion of central position.”

Prudence: “That’s the natural result of a baby’s helpless dependence on its environment. A baby
is
the center of the universe. We never lose that memory.”

Bickel: “Well, individual sense impressions are something like pebbles dropped in a four-dimensional pond. Consciousness locks onto the waves created by those pebbles, and gives them a spatial and temporal integration so they can be interpreted. Consciousness has to make sense out of things. But its major tool is illusion.”

Spatio-temporal integration,
Flattery thought.

The identity that was the ship—their Tin Egg—it lacked a certain integrating ability at the moment. Instead of an efficient self-regulating force, the ship was making do with the inadequate feedback system represented by four humans loosely connected to its “nervous system.”

That was one way of looking at it.

But there was a point in the ship’s future where damage passed beyond their ability to recover. The humans were failing.

Flattery felt then a deep bitterness toward the society that had sent this frail cargo into nowhere. He knew the reasons but reasons had never prevented bitterness.

“Think of society as a human construction, a very sophisticated defense mechanism,”
Hempstead and his cohorts had said.
“Society’s restrictions get bred into the cells themselves by a process of selection. And these restrictions become part of the self-regulating feedback in society’s governing systems. There’s a serious question whether humans actually can break out of their self-regulated pattern. It takes audacious methods indeed to explore beyond that pattern.”

The law was stated, Flattery knew, thusly:
“Individual human experience is not the overriding control factor in human behavior. The cellular social pattern dominates.”

Flattery deliberately rapped his knuckles against the edge of his action couch to shock himself out of this reverie. He focused on the console, saw he had the usual temperature adjustments to make. The automatics could never quite hold the line.

Bickel: “Watch those lengths in the time-delay circuits. You’ll confuse the Ox’s psychological present.”

Prudence: “Its what?”

Bickel: “Its psychological present—its ‘specious present’—what you experience in any given instant; that short interval you call
now.
Prof. Ferrel—remember old Prof. Ferrel-barrel?”

Prudence: “Who could forget Hempstead’s son-in-law?”

Bickel: “Yeah, but he wasn’t stupid. We were on the satellite tracker once—him on his side of the sterile wall and me on ours. And he said: ‘Look at that thing move!’ It was a shuttle ship coming in from earth. And he said: ‘You know for a fact it’s changing position fast as hell. But you seem to see all those position changes right now—in the present. No sharp edges; just a flow. That’s the ‘specious present,’ boy. Don’t you ever forget it.’ And I never did.”

Prudence: “Will the … Ox really experience time?”

Bickel: “It has to. Our time-delay circuits have to give it a way of internal measurement. It has to feel its own time. Otherwise, it’ll be a big package of confusion.”

Prudence: “The … now.”

Bickel: “You think about it and you realize we don’t interpret the immediate experience of time. We take big gulps of time. But real time, now, that has to be something gradual and progressive, a smooth change against a background of some measurement constant.”

Prudence: “So we line up the Ox’s physical time and set it going like some mechanical toy—in one direction.”

Bickel: “The more remote parts of its ‘specious present’ have to fade the way they do with us. The past has to be less intense than what’s just appearing on its horizon. It needs a constant ‘serial fadeout’; otherwise, it won’t be able to distinguish points near in time from points remote in time.”

Flattery looked up into the screen, saw Bickel hook an oscilloscope to the Ox, run a pulse check.

Entropy,
Flattery thought.
One direction in time.

He projected a picture in his mind: jets of water—one labeled entropy and the other that thrusting probabilism they called Life. Balanced between the two like a ball on a fountain danced consciousness.

It’s so simple,
Flattery thought.
But how do you reproduce it … unless you’re God?

Bickel: “Hold on there! Don’t hook in that layer without running your stepdown test.”

Prudence: “You and your damn caution!”

Bickel: “Life is a very cautious proposition. An error in those stepdown circuits could screw us up royally. Remember this, Ox has to take complicated inputs and filter them down through simpler and simpler integrating systems until it finally displays the results as symbols on which to act. Think of your own sense of vision. How many receptor in your retina?”

Prudence: “About a hundred and twenty million?”

Bickel: “But when the system gets back to the ganglion layer, how many cells there?”

Prudence: “Only about one and a quarter million.”

Bickel: “Stepped down, see? The system takes hordes of sense impressions and combines them into fewer and fewer discrete signals. In the end, we get a sense datum called an image. But we interpret that image out of an enormous file of topological comparisons, all of them out of previously translated experience.”

Prudence: “And you think our computer has enough … experiences for that kind of comparison?”

Bickel: “It will have when we’re through with it.”

And Flattery thought:
Black box
—
white box.

Prudence: “Aren’t you likely to overload the computer, bog it down?”

Bickel: “For Chrissakes, woman! You personally receive all kinds of information constantly. Doesn’t your own system sort through all that information, queue it up, program it, and evaluate the data?”

Prudence: “But the Tin Egg’s very existence depends on the computer. If we blunder with …”

Bickel: “There’s no other way. You should’ve realized that the instant you saw this whole ship was a set piece.”

Prudence (angrily): “What do you mean? Why?”

Bickel: “Because the computer’s the only place where that amount of information can be stored. You see, woman, we don’t have time to train a completely uneducated infant.”

Before she could answer, the transmission horn blared its warning. The AAT stood on manual bypass to keep its circuits from interfering with the work in the shop. The horn’s trigger fired both Bickel and Flattery into action. Bickel threw the action switch in the shop. Flattery slapped the AAT master control switch on his console, realizing with a sense of detachment that the UMB message would pour through the Ox circuits before being displayed for them.