tmp0 (6 page)

“Just another
series of antibiotics,” Dr. Fielding said. “You’ll
need about an hour before we can ensure they are effective. With all
of the expensive biological substrates down here ...” He spread
his hands in a gesture of helplessness, and Chal realized why she
found him so creepy. His pupils were so large that you couldn’t
see even the faintest ring of his irises, and it gave him a reptilian
look. Like a snake waiting to strike its prey.

As she watched him,
his tongue darted out to the corner of his lip, then back in,
completing the image. She hid her shudder and placed the pill on her
tongue, tasting its bitterness before washing it back with the water.

Dr. Fielding turned
and left through the glass door, a soft hiss of air blowing around
the doorframe as it closed. Johnner went to the wall screen and
turned up the brightness. Onscreen was a frozen image of a man lying
naked in a hospital bed, an assortment of medical recording devices
displayed behind him. Chal recognized the wired board over his head
as an EEG reader. At the bottom right of the screen the timer was
marked at 00:00.

“Since we
don’t have much time, I thought I’d take the opportunity
to show you the recordings now while we’re waiting,”
Johnner said.

“What is
this?” Chal asked, but her pulse was beating faster.
Could
it be?

Lieutenant Johnner
nodded, as if reading her mind. “This is the initial
questioning of the first full human-substrate biological organism
developed here. What you’re about to see is highly classified.
Most members of Congress don’t have access to the results of
these experiments.”

“Yes, of
course,” Chal said, impatient.

Johnner hesitated,
as if he wanted to say something else, but decided against it. He
pressed the play button and sat back down next to Chal. The timer
began to run.

The voice that they
heard first on the recording was Dr. Fielding’s.

“Prototype One
consciousness trial. Aluminium core and memory stats all checked and
normal. Vital signs within expected parameters.”

The camera blurred
and refocused as Dr. Fielding came into view. He was sitting next to
the man who was asleep, it seemed. IV drips ran into both of the
man’s arms. His chest rose and fell regularly, the silence
broken only by the soft beeping of the monitoring equipment. He had
dark hair, almost black. Then Dr. Fielding spoke.

“We will now
awaken the prototype.”

***

CHAPTER FIVE

“And the LORD
God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
-Genesis 2:7

***

Chal had seen this
done before with rats grown in her lab. The consciousness and
intelligence experiments that she had attempted had all tried to
achieve the same results. They had all been rated miserable failures
in the end.

She had grown rats
from single cells, adjusting the development of their brains with
chemical and electrical alterations as they grew into maturity. At
first they stayed comatose in the grow tanks designed specifically
for this purpose, never interacting with the world until their brains
were already developed in a specific way.

The rats, when
awakened with anti-anesthetics, seemed normal enough at first. They
ran around, sniffed at things, ate without overfeeding. The
interesting part came when they were placed into maze tests.

At first Chal’s
lab believed that they had somehow messed up the memory centers of
the brains. For when the rats were placed into mazes they had run
before, they sometimes did well but sometimes sat motionless at the
entrance of the mazes or at the first turns, seeming to indicate that
they had no recollection of the paths they had run. Further tests of
intelligence also pointed to the same memory impairments.

It was an
almost-serendipitous moment when one of Chal’s interns decided
to run EEG trials with the rats, doing test after test with
single-digit numbers of electrodes wired into different parts of
their brains. He was looking for confirmation of memory impairment to
see if the kinds of brain malfunctions matched with human Alzheimer
patient malfunctions.

To his surprise, the
rats all had fully functional memory centers, at least according to
the EEG readouts. The problem lay with the consciousness development
process. There were new efforts made to study the rats, but the
results were inconclusive. As their development continued, many of
the rats began to perform erratically, running the mazes into dead
ends again and again, almost as if they were intentionally avoiding
the correct path. Some of the rats self-mutilated, chewing at their
limbs. Others starved themselves to death despite available food.

Funding for the
project ran out, and since there were no practical applications to be
seen, Chal’s lab accepted the failure and moved on.

It was perhaps
Chal’s biggest mistake as a scientist, for if she had spent
more time studying the rats she might have realized that her attempts
to induce conscious development had been successful. Indeed, the
experiment had been too successful in that regard. The rats were not
just conscious, they were conscious to a very high degree.

Moreover, they were
emotionally conscious.

The connection
between over-developed consciousness and depression would not be made
until much later, at a neuropsychology lab in Singapore. But by then
Chal had already forgotten about the rats.

***

The timer was at
01:13 when Dr. Fielding reached over and adjusted the IV drip into
the prototype’s arm. The liquid dripped green through the clear
plastic tubing. Chal leaned forward, her eyes glued to the screen.

The man's eyelids
fluttered open. The recording was high-definition but Chal wanted to
get closer, to see the expression in his eyes. Dr. Fielding reached
over to turn the dial on one of the EEG readers, blocking the view of
the screen, and Chal felt like reaching through the screen and
swatting his arm away.

"Hello,"
Dr. Fielding said softly, sitting back into his chair.

"Hello,"
the prototype said, almost automatically. Chal inhaled sharply at the
voice. She knew that language memory chips were good, especially at
installing preferred adjacency pairs such as responding to phrases
like "Hello" or "How are you?" Still, this was
not a human with an already-functioning language network in his
brain. This was a new person entirely, or a new brain, at the very
least.

She wanted to ask
Johnner to stop the tape so that she could ask him whether it was a
memory implant or an actual language network they had developed, but
she was too excited to see what came next.

"I am Dr.
Fielding." The doctor looked over to a clipboard on the table
next to him, and Chal realized that he was reading off of a script.

"You are Dr.
Fielding."

"That is
correct." Dr. Fielding shifted nervously in his chair, and Chal
watched as the man's eyes tracked his movement. It was awe-inspiring.

“Who are you?”
Dr. Fielding continued.

“I–”
the man in the bed began to say, but then stopped. He looked down at
the IV going into his left arm, reached down, and pulled it out.
Blood began to flow from the opening and Dr. Fielding stood up
immediately, reaching over to stanch the flow of blood. He had just
put his hand on the prototype’s arm when all hell broke loose.

The prototype
screamed and began to kick his legs in violent circles, moaning
loudly. Thrashing in his bed, he ripped out three other IV tubes and
knocked over the monitor, which crashed to the floor and began to
emit a high-pitched squeal.

“I am
malfunctioning!” the prototype yelled, the words echoing off of
the laboratory walls. He kicked out and knocked Dr. Fielding to the
ground beside him.

“I am
malfunctioning!”

Immediately Dr.
Fielding looked to the wall behind him and gestured frantically.
Watching the video, Chal was confused until she realized it must have
been one-way glass, with the spectators just behind the wall. Indeed,
after just a few seconds, two assistants rushed in and restrained the
prototype, while another doctor came in front of the camera,
obscuring the view again. Chal could see that the doctor was holding
a syringe. The prototype’s shouting degenerated into incoherent
screams, staccato yells that punctuated the bedlam.

“AH! AH! AH!
AH!–”

The noise died down
almost instantly as the doctor injected the prototype with the
syringe. The doctor moved out of view and the camera took a
half-second to refocus. When it did, Chal could clearly see the man
lying in the hospital bed. His eyes were glazed over, but his face
was twisted with emotion. Blood trickled down his arm and dripped off
of his elbow, splashing on the white vinyl flooring of the lab.

Johnner reached over
and stopped the recording.

“What
happened?” Chal asked.

“There’s
nothing more than this,” Johnner said. “Later attempts to
reawaken the prototype were unsuccessful.”

“I mean,”
Chal said, “what happened to him? Why did he malfunction?”

“That,”
Lieutenant Johnner said, “is what we were hoping you could tell
us.”

Dr. Fielding knocked
at the glass door, and Lieutenant Johnner went to open it for him. As
he walked in and sat down in one of the chairs, Chal noticed that he
averted his gaze from hers. She was about to ask him something about
the first prototype interview when she felt the floor move under her
feet. The metal bench rattled against the wall.

Chal stood up in
fright, certain that the lab station was under attack, that the
entire building was about to crumble, that she would die– that
they would
all
die here, hundreds of feet under the ground.
Somewhat amusingly, she thought about the book signing in Boston she
had missed because of this.
She would never get to do another book
signing
.

And then, just like
that, it was over. Dr. Fielding and Lieutenant Johnner were still
sitting in their seats, as calm as anything.

“What the
hell
was that?” Chal said, still standing.

“Earthquake,”
Dr. Fielding said, and now he met her eyes with his, dark empty
pools. His cool tone annoyed her, as though she should have been
expecting such an occurrence.

“We get them
here all the time,” Johnner said. “I’m sorry, I
should have warned you. This part of Arizona is very close to the Big
Chino fault line.”

“Great idea to
build an underground facility here, wasn’t it?” Chal
said.

“It’s
only small quakes,” Dr. Fielding said, and again Chal was
irritated by the condescending quality of his voice.

“This building
is built to withstand earthquakes up to 6-7 on the Richter scale,”
Johnner continued. “And there have never been any quakes around
here that are more than a 3. It’s safe.”

Chal didn’t
think that any kind of earthquake was safe, but she was clearly
outnumbered. Turning back to the matter at hand, she tried to
remember her question for Dr. Fielding. It wasn’t coming to
her.

“The prototype
said it was malfunctioning,” Chal said.

“Yes,”
Dr. Fielding said. “This is a standard error message that was,
for lack of a better word,
programmed
into the organisms’
mental structure. When their mental structure is in peril, this is
the phrase that indicates that they need help.”

“Programmed?”

“Language
turns out to be a fairly simple structure to grow in neuronal
substrates,” Dr. Fielding said, with not a small hint of pride
in his voice. “Of course, they have the grammar/content
structures, but there is also a set of built-in responses.”

“Using
language memory chips?” Chal asked.

“Yes,”
Dr. Fielding confirmed. “But we’ve also been able to
graft in language structures that function much as a baby’s do.
They are pre-equipped with certain syntactical structures. In other
words, they are able to expand vocabulary, make connections, and
learn how to speak almost instantly upon awakening.”

“If they don’t
die immediately,” Chal said.

Dr. Fielding
flushed. “Of course we are working out the issues with the
awakening process, but I see no reason to think that the language
structure is part of the problem.”

“No,”
Chal said, her mind wandering elsewhere. She didn’t think that
language was the issue, either. Something else, something more
fundamental.

Lieutenant Johnner
coughed slightly, and Chal realized she had been staring at the blank
wall.

“You said
there were two other prototypes,” Chal said, gesturing toward
the screen.

“The next one
was similar,” said Dr. Fielding. “We tried all we could,
but it didn’t work. After only a half a minute of questioning
and it ran into the same kind of malfunction. Now we have a limited
amount of time before we awaken the third prototype–”

“Why?”
Chal interrupted.

Johnner and Fielding
looked at each other, and Chal got the idea that Fielding was
embarrassed by the question. He frowned, coughed, and frowned again
before speaking.

“For the past
few months, we’ve been pressed by the government for results,”
Fielding said.

“You’ve
been promising results since before then,” Johnner interrupted.
Fielding shook his head, visibly annoyed, and went on.

“The third
prototype has reached the stage where it is ready to be awakened,”
he said. “We know we can’t keep a nascent brain in
stasis forever, and every minute that passes sees the mental
structure grow further in directions we can’t predict. We need
to awaken the prototype as soon as possible in order to ease it into
the world while its brain is still malleable.”