Transhuman (40 page)

"So what does that have to do with how my brain works?" Naylor asked.

"Holograms don't store information in the same way as a photograph. I said a moment ago that a photographic record is point-to-point—every point on the film corresponds uniquely to one part of the object. If you snipped the crown of this king out of the image, for example, it would be lost." Naylor knew all this from material he had been studying online. His object was to lead the conversation into more practical matters. He nodded and looked intrigued. "Okay. So how else can you do it?"

"The way a hologram does. In the interference pattern, the information from every part of the object is spread all over the image. And conversely, every point on the image contains some information from all parts of the object. So even if you cut a part of the pattern out, what's left still enables a complete image to be constructed. It will be degraded to some degree, depending how much was removed, but all of the object will still be there."

"That's amazing."

"And in many ways it feels more like the way minds work. Memory seems to be distributed around the brain, not localized in one place." Katokawa replaced the king and picked up a printed sheet that was lying to one side on the bench. "Holograms have another very interesting property too. Suppose you made a hologram of this page of text, and then made a separate hologram of, say, the letter A."

"All right."

"Now, if you superpose the light shone through both holograms, what you'll get is a black representation of the page, but with a spot of light at every position in which an A appears."

"You're kidding."

"And what's more, the brightness of the light will vary depending on how similar in size, form, and orientation the As on the page are to the original. So again, it has the same 'mindlike' property about it of instantly recognizing likenesses and being able to judge the degree. Not like the precise symbol-processing of a conventional computer at all."

"And you're saying that's how this brain of mine works?"

"Yours is even better. It has some of both."

Naylor studied the board for a while, made the move he had selected before they digressed, and looked up. "They use lasers, don't they? Holograms."

"Yes. You need coherent light—all in phase. Ordinary light from the Sun or a filament lamp wouldn't work."

"I'd like to find out more about this for myself. In a lab like this it shouldn't be a problem." Naylor waved a hand at the pieces of electronics that he had been experimenting with. "Do you think I could have something more than the kind of stuff I've been playing with there? I'm thinking of optical devices and a couple of small lasers. And maybe some things like oscillator chips and amplifiers. I'd like to try making some holograms myself and see what you can do with them. Do you think that would be okay?"

"I don't see why not."

"I guess Howell would have to okay it, wouldn't he?"

"Oh, I don't think that would be too much of a problem." Katokawa moved a rook onto the opened file.

"He's pretty impressed with what you've been doing, and curious to see where it might go. Leave it with me. I'll have a word with him."

* * *

As was true of most computing and office equipment, the surveillance system used wireless communication for control and exchange of data. From maintenance manuals accessed via the Quantec web site, Naylor learned that the monitors were capable of operating in what was called "retention mode." This was an option typically employed in situations where image transmission was subject to interruption or noise interference, such as from space platforms. To avoid the disconcerting effects of having a screen intermittently blanking out, the current image would be held until a signal was generated confirming that a new image had been successfully received. The manuals also gave full information on operating frequencies, signal protocols, and control codes.

Amid the clutter of art projects, electronic and optical experiments, hydrocarbon "cookery" creations, and other activities that Naylor had going around his quarters and spilling out into the lab, nobody attached much significance to the phone that he had taken apart and fiddled with from time to time. When Lisa Ledgrave asked him casually what he was doing with it, he replied that he wanted to see if he could modify the transmitter to write into a hologram by modulating the reference laser. Howell seemed delighted and happy to await further developments. By this time Naylor had succeeded in hacking into Howell's personal files in the Institute's administrative system, and knew that Howell had persuaded the governors to agree to a three-month extension to the period allowed for the preliminary phase of the Adonis project.

In fact, what Naylor had produced was a remote controller that would enable him to switch the surveillance system to retention mode and suppress the internal code announcing a new image. This meant that he would be able to freeze the images on all the screens of the guard's monitor panel across the hall outside. If that was done in the early hours of a morning when nothing was changing anyway, there would be no reason for the guard on duty there to suspect anything amiss inside. Naylor tried it out in the middle of a typical working afternoon, when the regular mix of personnel were present in the lab. The modified phone was inside a cardboard box that he had placed among others on a shelf used for storage, activated by a timing circuit that would turn it off again after thirty seconds. Naylor himself arranged to be visibly occupied on the far side of the room at the time, pondering some three-dimensional maze problems that Howell had set him.

The first sign came when George, another guard who rarely spoke, fished his phone from his pocket where he was stationed inside the door and took a call. "Yeah? . . .What?" He listened for a few seconds, then began peering around and up in turn at the lab's three openly displayed cameras. "No, nothing here. Same as usual. Why, what's up?" He listened some more and frowned. "Just a second. I'll come out." He turned, pocketing the phone, keyed in the door lock code, and left, closing the door again behind himself. He reappeared several minutes later, looking puzzled.

"What's happening," Howell asked, coming across from where he had been observing.

"I'm not sure. There seemed to be some kind of glitch with the monitors, but it's cleared now. We've reported it to the office. Someone will be coming to check it out." Naylor never found out exactly what transpired after that. But it didn't really matter. He knew all he needed to.

He spoke to Howell later, when Howell came out to discuss the results of the maze tests.

"Katokawa tells me that you're pretty happy with the way things have been going."

"Very," Howell agreed. "What we're seeing exceeds all my expectations."

"It must be quite a tribute to your work . . . I mean, I assume you keep the people who run this place up to date—and others in the business who are into this kind of thing." The eyes behind the heavy gold frames took on a gratified gleam. "We are arousing considerable interest. I think you can rest assured of an interesting future."

"And that's with me being limited to just local capabilities," Naylor pointed out. "It could get a lot more interesting if I had direct communications access. Everything else has gone smoothly. Don't you think we could start enabling it?"

Howell's mouth twitched evasively. "It wasn't scheduled for this early on."

"I know. But you just said, everything has gone better than you expected. It could be just a beginning. If you think this place is famous now . . ." Naylor shrugged and let the implication hang. Howell said nothing but was obviously thinking about it. After a few seconds, Naylor went on. "Katokawa was telling me about the research going on out there into holographic processing. The power is there, but the snag seems to be with finding an efficient way of programming it. Maybe what it needs is a direct coupling of consciousness. The next evolutionary wave of the whole science of information handling. It could be an explosion. There's never been anything like it. And right now, you're the only person anywhere with the resources to find out." Naylor didn't say, but knew that Howell would be well aware, that it meant taking on a whole new vista of unknowns and possible risks. Naylor had already gone further than had been expected and was doubly expendable now. The unvoiced question was: Which would Howell prefer? To let the risks ride with an investment that had already more than paid off? Or have things turn sour with the volunteers waiting in the wings to take over?

Naylor had also figured that if he were in Howell's place, then as a last line of precaution against mishaps, he would have included a remote deactivation capability in the monitoring software that could still access Naylor's neural processes. But Katokawa, with his enthusiasm and natural inclination to oblige, was divulging far more than he realized about how the brain and its ancillary systems worked. Naylor was confident that with a little more information, and especially if he could gain direct experience of how remote communication was effected, he would be able to neutralize that obstacle too.

"I'll think it over," Howell said after a long pause.

The next day, he called a staff meeting—in which he included Naylor— and announced that he had decided to make certain changes to the originally planned schedule. They would be introducing a phased program for progressively activating Adonis's direct wireless communications capabilities, commencing as quickly as possible.

In his late teens, when he had pushed weights and boxed twice a week at the local gym, got well paid for delivering unmarked packages and not asking questions, and worked evenings as a doorman at the clubs to flaunt himself in black tie and tux before the bar girls and strippers, Naylor had fooled for a while with LSD and one or two other recreationals that people told him were mind-expanding. Then, one day, Joe, "The Ice Man," who liked his style but got him out of the ring before his brain started turning into mush and gave him the break that eventually led to the big money, told him, "That's crap. All that stuff does is contract your mind to the point where any dumb thing seems like light from God." Naylor had never touched any more stuff after that. But he still remembered the feeling. It was the nearest he could find to describe the experiences that were opening up now.

It was like the glow after good sex or a solid workout, and the luxury of stretching first thing in the morning, mixed into one, only mentally not physically—a sensation of expanding exuberantly into a new realm of perception. To begin with, while he was still feeling his way and mainly reacting passively, he found himself overwhelmed by the sheer volume and depth of knowledge that he had never before dreamed existed, and which he was able to categorize, correlate, and absorb at electronic speeds. Sagas and histories of the world's nations and peoples, their rise, flourishing, and decline since the beginnings of recorded time; the thoughts and dreams of their greatest minds; the passionate beliefs that had inspired and terrorized them, from the earliest myths through the rise of religions to the sciences that were probing the mysteries of space, time, matter, energy, and distance, and grappling with paradoxes that confounded the faculty of reason itself. Like fuel that feeds and then becomes part of the fire devouring it, the flood of knowledge poured into and integrated with the growing compass of his awareness, acting back on itself to intensify the process and driving the thirst for more.

In a way that perhaps a few consciences had known but been unable to convey, the whole triumph and tragedy of human existence, with its hopes, aspirations, heroism, and tears, lay spread out before him like the panorama of the land below looked back at after scaling a mountain, the obstacles and pitfalls that had once seemed daunting reduced to wrinkles no longer even visible, let alone of importance. And for those lost and groping their way blindly in the fogs and swamps below, struggling against their needless, self-imposed sufferings, he discovered a quality within himself that was unlike anything he had ever before known: compassion. The grudges that he had carried from the past faded and died. For hatred, he now saw, stems from fear, and callousness from want of understanding; neither could exist without the delusions and ignorance necessary to sustain them.

The laboratory and its routine seemed to shrink into a background that he was aware of remotely, its occupants reduced to ciphers acting out their roles in a microcosm of the grand tragicomedy that was the story of all humanity. The part of him that still dwelt there and obliged them by performing its tricks still observed and recorded them from the periphery of his receding focus: victims trapped in a system they were powerless to change, programmed by rules that were not of their making. Piersen, an embodiment of millions infused with a doctrine of success measured in materialism, diligently pursuing a life of hopes and demands that would deliver all that it promised, yet failing to fulfill inwardly in ways she would never understand. Lisa, alone while surrounded by lonely people in retreat from the world to escape from themselves, which they never would accomplish and never could. Forcomb, unable to come outside himself in order to know himself, the direction of his life determined by external forces like encounters in a pinball machine. Katokawa, the odds stacked toward disillusionment in a world that pays lip service to honesty and ability, but rewards conformity and obedience. And Howell. A pinnacle of satisfied self-assurance among a priesthood incapable of conceiving that ninety percent of what they thought they knew to be indisputable was wrong. Simple ignorance, once acknowledged, could be simply cured by learning. But there was no way to penetrate the compound ignorance of being ignorant of one's own ignorance, where nothing will ever change because no awareness exists of anything in need of changing. In one of the test sessions, Howell challenged Naylor to prove that his new, nonhuman mind was indeed conscious. "Why does it matter?" the splinter of Naylor that was listening from its comical figurine asked.

"Three quarters of humans aren't."