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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 d
am 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.
