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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 R4DBd 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.”
r /> 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.
Chapter 23
I feel the duties of a creator toward this Artificial Consciousness. It seems to me that my primary goal must be to render this creature happy, to provide it whatever joy I can. Else this entire project seems pointless. There already are enough unhappy creatures in this universe.
—Raja Lon Flattery, Private Communion with the Ox
It took several minutes for the incoming message to search its way through the AAT and the Ox-accretions which Bickel had added to the system. They were tense minutes in Com-central. Flattery’s gaze swept back and forth across the telltales of his board. There were big unknowns about the system now and any input might elicit strange behavior from dangerous quarters.
