The God Machine Read online

  I didn't answer at once. I was tremendously fond of Selig Albracht, and I respected the man as much as I had any other human being in my life. He was drunk. But not so drunk, I was also convinced, that this was simply a matter of alcohol speaking for the man. Selig believed what he was saying; all that had been pushed aside for the moment was the propriety with which we brought some social order to our everyday lives. And the only answer to give him was, of course, the obvious one.

  "No one files like sheep into our program," I said quietly. "You know that as well as I do, Selig.

  They volunteer. No one pushes any one person into—"

  "Bah!" he shouted. "Save that poppycock for the sniveling and eager young things who don't know any better. Volunteers, are they? Don't you try to confuse the issue by avoiding reality, damn your hide.

  Nobody volunteers when he's been drowned beneath a torrent of intellectual abuse we heap upon those blind and unknowing souls out there. What the devil do they know about what's going to happen to them? How could they know anything when you and old flintstone Vollmer don't even know! You're playing with people, Rand, and you damned well know it."

  I tried to break in, but once Selig picked up the scent he was as easy to stop in midstride as an enraged grizzly.

  "It's bad enough you fools are playing with the minds of other people," he said with a voice suddenly lower, sullen in every sound. His eyes were almost to the point of flashing with blazing anger.

  This was no drunken fool and this wasn't alcohol speaking, and Selig Albracht had a damned attentive audience. If I had paid any attention to what was going on around me, I would have seen Tom Smythe trying to signal me to break it off, to get out from under before things got nasty. But Selig was getting under my skin now, and I never liked the idea of walking away from any open challenge of this sort. So I paid attention to what he was saying.

  "Just hold for one moment, Selig," I snapped back as he drew in a long shuddering breath. "Call us fools if you want; you're drunk and I'll attribute that to alcohol. But fools for what? You call it playing around with the minds of people? Then you're acting a bigger fool than those whom you accuse."

  He started to shout an answer, but I wasn't having any of it. "Confound you, man, if you can't believe enough in your own principles to hear someone else out," I said coldly, "then you're just a bag of wind."

  I thought he would choke. His voice rumbled like a locomotive. "Go on, go on," he said, fighting for self-control.

  "If what you say is true, Dr. Albracht, then every psychiatrist and psychologist down through the years is a witch doctor, a hunter of the nightmare of the psyche. You're the people who force the human being to look into the hideous mess of his own subconscious. And that's not an accusation; it's a fact."

  I paused for a moment; something in what I'd said had gotten through to him.

  "And it's necessary, all of it," I went on quickly. "What all of you, what all of us, are doing. We're searching, digging, trying to chase out the nightmares and relieve the horrors. How can you find fault in augmenting our intellectual capabilities? No matter what you may find in searching attics for monsters, 79

  is still just a machine. I won't get into this business of intelligence or life or consciousness, because we've done it a thousand times, and none of us knows enough to make head or tail of what we're talking about.

  You know it and I know it. But what you're saying is that punishing, probing, shoving about, torturing the mind in psychoanalysis is acceptable, but linking man's brain to an artificial intelligence—which may become just as live as is yours and mine—is wrong!

  "I don't know how deep your concern goes for the welfare of the humanity we're supposed to be turning into living mummies, Selig, but I'll tell you one thing. You're a damned hypocrite."

  His beard twitched as his mouth worked, forming the words. "Hypocrite, am I, you young snit?" he roared. "Is that the issue? Let me go back to what I said before and what you never let me finish. Before you polish off those clichés-for-arguments you picked up in your college debating classes, you should try to hear what is being said to you."

  He tilted his head slightly, convinced he'd grabbed hold of something I had let slip by me. "I told you—I started to tell you," he interjected with no small venom, "that it was bad enough you were playing around with the minds of other people. Of course we all do that! Of course there's pain and sorrow in it, and that can't be helped when you reach in up to your armpits where madness and hell are involved."

  He stabbed a thick forefinger at me, leaning forward. "The difference, Rand, and it's a big difference, the biggest damned difference in the world, is that you and your compassionately sterile associates are throwing human minds to the whims of that unpredictable clanking machine of which you're so bloody fond!"

  He drew back, flushed with his own words. "You're creating a monster. Oh, I know all about the old stories and the platitudes and the rest of that rubbish, but this time you're really doing it up brown. It's a machine. A machine, damn you all! Don't you understand that? And you're giving it human minds with which to experiment, and—"

  "Horseshit!" I shouted, "and you damned well know it, Albracht! No one is leading anybody to any sacrificial altars. Where do you get this nonsense, anyway? We're controlling the tests, not the machine!

  Jesus, the way you talk one would think that—"

  "For how long?"

  The words came so quietly and unexpectedly they had a dramatic impact on us all. His interruption stopped me cold.

  "What was that?"

  He smiled without humor. "I asked you a question, Rand. I asked you—'For how long?' "

  I didn't answer immediately, and he drove harder. "How long from now will it be before the computer tells you it can handle the experiments with greater efficiency than can its human programmers?

  How long before this happens? And what will you do then? What? What? Will you refuse the answers from the machine you're giving such omnipotence? Will you accept its logic as superior in all other things but not in this area when it demands more and more living brains with which to experiment? What will you do then? What's going to be your answer when it wants to extend its probing of the gamut of human emotions and it asks for children and then for newborn infants, and when it asks to be hooked up with those who are dying because it's curious about the cessation of neural activity? Or whatever it is, that thing we call the death of a human being?"

  I gestured involuntarily. "I—"

  "Will you refuse it its three pounds of flesh?"

  And right then, right there, I couldn't answer him. Because I'd never thought of it. Never for a moment had it occurred to me to record the moment of death of a human being ... to attempt to understand, to comprehend intellectually, the passing of the soul or whatever it was that separated the body from life and death. At once I saw where Albracht would go, what he would say.

  We wouldn't stop with just those experiments, of course. He was right. God, how he was right!

  The ultimate in experiments.

  Death . . . and . . . and life. Birth; the moments of awareness of being born. And what of the life before birth? Medically it would not be difficult to implant electrodes within the brain of the unborn child.

  . . . What incredible things might we learn? If we— But then there wasn't time to think of this because Selig Albracht was still there, his anger naked and exposed, his contempt coming into being like a physical force in the room with us. I had never yet been less than honest; I would not stop now.

  "No, Dr. Albracht, we would not refuse. You knew that answer before you so dramatically presented the question."

  He stroked his beard, now more in control of himself. "To be sure, to be sure," he said. "Naturally you would not refuse. You would offer up death and life and in-between and even the beyond if that were possible, wouldn't you?"

  I didn't have the opportunity to answer. Dr. Vollmer was on his feet, shuffling closer to the circle of antagonists.
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br />   "One moment, one moment," he said quietly, his voice unexpected, a distraction in our exchange.

  He walked up to his old friend and faced him squarely.

  "Selig, I wish to ask you a question. Just one," Dr. Vollmer said in his cracked voice.

  You could see the strain of old friendship against what had been exposed through Albracht's anger.

  The bearded giant nodded, for the moment humbled. "Of course, Howard."

  The old scientist drew up his shoulders to stand straight. "Just the one question, Selig.

  "Would you have it any other way?"

  There was no other question to ask, for in that one question there were a thousand others.

  Would you close the door on learning?

  Where would you draw the line on bringing light into the darkness we have always faced, must face for another thousand years or more?

  Who is to decide, Selig?

  Who?

  What if in what we are doing lies the secret of another hundred years of life for every human being? What if we can learn enough of that instant of the miracle when the brain still growing within the womb accepts its first electrical energy? What if we can learn enough to cure madness before it is born with the child naked and wet from its birth? What if we were meant to do this, Selig, what if this were the path that God had always meant, when we have the opportunity to change the brain that has not changed for a hundred thousand years?

  How do you know this is not really nature's way, that this is how we will bring to life the creature to follow Homo sapiens?

  Which window of the universe of knowledge would you close next, Selig Albracht?

  When will you make that final move, that turning of man's back on knowledge?

  When will you condemn man to fear the future so much that he will take root where he stands and become less than man?

  The room was deathly still.

  For several minutes they stood facing each other, until Dr. Vollmer, shaking his head slightly, returned to his chair. "I am old and I am tired," he said to Albracht.

  "Forgive me," Albracht said, "I did not mean to—"

  "I am old and tired," Vollmer repeated, his voice leathery and instantly alive. "But I am not yet blind."

  He sat down, leaving Albracht standing alone.

  But Selig Albracht was made of sterner stuff than most men. And he did not retreat. He looked for a long moment at Dr. Vollmer, and then he turned back to me.

  "I will tell you something," he said in a quiet voice. "I will tell you something, and in the telling I will ask you some questions. I do not care if you answer me. Not now, not later. It would be enough for me if you were to think of what I say."

  He looked at me strangely, some inner torment now revealed in his eyes, his gestures.

  "I will suppose that the cybernetics organism progresses as you all wish, that it becomes all for which you hope, that it is indeed the miracle you seek to create with your minds and your hands and your dreams. I will suppose that it all takes place and that you are wildly successful, far beyond your most fervent hopes and dreams.

  "And when that happens, and we are at the wire, when man himself may be threatened—I am talking about the existence in the future of the race itself—when that happens, I wish you to ask yourself a question."

  He paused, but I did not interrupt. I felt Kim's hand on my arm, her touch, so warm and meaningful to me, seemed a thousand miles away. I did not interrupt; I waited.

  "Ask yourself this: Would this thing be willing to die for you and me? Ahh, would it make this sacrifice? Would it, could it, comprehend what you and I, this instant, know to such depth and with such meaning?"

  His eyes bored into mine. "Because that, Steven Rand, is the crux of it. It really is, you know."

  He laughed harshly. "Would this mass of neural relays and hovering electrons really do such a thing? If it were for the best, if it were needed? Would it be willing, would it be capable, ever, intellectually, of sacrificing its own physical being even when it proved to itself that its own existence comprised the single greatest threat in existence to all mankind, to what we so easily call humanity?

  "Would it?" He hammered one word after the other, driving them with force, pounding, pounding.

  "Would it order its own destruction? Could that beautiful, intricate, wonderful mixture of energy and matter, which is what we are—plus what God has given us—willingly ordain its own end to consciousness?

  "Tell me that, Mr. Rand. Tell me! Then, then," his voice caressed every word, "I will trust that nightmare you are all trying so desperately to bring to full life, to which you offer human minds and life and death and the substance of the soul. Tell me what I wish to hear, and I will abide by our search for truth.

  "But this is not truth! Until that thing is ready to die for you or me, for an ideal or a principle, for generations yet unborn, for what mankind is destined to become . . . until then, it is as dangerous as a viper.

  "And I am opposed!" he shouted. "Do you hear me? I am opposed, violently and unalterably opposed to what you are trying to do.

  "Because . . . because then it is the ego supreme. If it cannot sanction its own passing from unconsciousness, forever, do you know what you are creating?

  "A God Machine."

  "Go to hell," I said.

  18

  the breach was deep and wide, a mortal cleavage between two men who had been close friends and between whom there had been an abiding mutual respect. Now it was gone, vanished like a wisp of smoke from the heat of anger and our confrontation face to face among our colleagues. Had we endured this contest of wills among ourselves, alone and unheard by others, the strength of what was good between us would have sustained the friendship. But not now.

  I do not know what Selig Albracht thought from that day forward, or what he felt. For myself, I suffered a sense of great loss. Selig was that kind of man; a great man, I thought, but blinded and with a sense of his intellectual vision turned in upon itself. But I would have nothing to do with remorse or with self-searching nonsense. Our exchange was bitter only because it had never been intended by Selig to be an exchange; his stupor had led him headlong into a proclamation. Nevertheless it was what the man thought, and what brought a bitter taste to me was that he had never taken the pains nor had he showed the backbone—a lack that was all the rarer because it was Selig who was involved—to express himself until that sad and angry moment.

  To the devil with him, I thought. Michelangelo, Newton, Tsiolkovsky, Fulton, the Wright brothers, Goddard, Edison, and so many, many others who march down the ranks of history—they had all carried the stigma of witch for their society. There were those who castigated and would like to have burned alive Norbert Wiener who had, despite all reservations of undue credit, founded the science of cybernetics. It was simply the price you paid.

  But there was another price. Selig Albracht was a man and a scientist of immense personal and professional standing in our closed community, and an open breach with the man courted both personal and professional disaster for the dissenter. Which I was, and in spades. Albracht had nothing to do with this; I believed firmly he regretted it deeply. But it was there nonetheless, and overnight I found myself the pariah of Project 79. Former friends and associates shunned me socially; in our work they were cooperative but cool and distant. Those who were not directly involved usually took the safer route. Why be exposed to the leper when the doorway to the king's chambers is open?

  From Dr. Vollmer, who flew into a rage with the memory of that evening, I earned a new respect, and in him found a powerful ally. Strong as was the reputation of Albracht, that of Vollmer was even greater. He was one of the grand old scientists recognized as a leader in half a dozen sciences, and respect for him knew no bounds. Where others branded me leper, Vollmer threw the aura of his personal and his professional cloak about me.

  I confess my reaction, indifferent at first, hardened swiftly. I had never sought out any man's friendship or his resp
ect; I expressed my own as I saw it, and let things go at that. The frigid air that often surrounded me did not affect me except to harden my own resolve; namely, "to hell with all of them." I had come here to work and, by God, work I would. I had a cybernetics organism to develop in the way of new and fresh capabilities, and that is precisely to what I would attend, if I had to do the damned job on my own. I didn't, of course; not with Vollmer and his staff, as well as some scattered friends and, of course, Tom Smythe, solidly behind me.

  But withdrawal came; an inner self sighed unhappily with the realization. I turned my back on all except a select few, and I didn't care; let the chips fall where they might. I became brusque, rejecting timid offers of friendship, and concentrated on those whom I felt I could trust without first studying the situation.

  Strange, but Kim and I were never closer. Not because she agreed with me in respect to the episode with Albracht; I think she was disappointed in my angry retort and my refusal to have anything more to do with the man. Kim believed a man of science had to have above all else a complete detachment; I couldn't see it that way. Just as we programmed the computer brain to know when to stop solving a problem, so every man must know, within himself, when it is time to cry Enough! And I'd had it right up to the eyeballs.

  Above all else I hurled myself into my work. Except for the times I spent with Kim—for a long time I never even called Barbara—I worked. I worked throughout the day and long into the night and I spent many weekends and holidays with 79, programming new experiments, testing the bio-cybernetics subjects, watching Maurice Levy achieve a speed of two-way communication that was almost unbelievable. I gave him freedom for random contact with 79; instead of reading programmed questions he would query the computer on his own, asking questions as they came to him. The results were so spectacularly successful—the cybernetics brain literally had to learn to communicate in this unorthodox fashion—that I released a dozen more alpha-wave-pattern adepts to do the same. Always the purpose was to require the "think" portion of 79 to cope with the unskilled programmers, for anyone who communicated in one fashion or another was exactly that—a programmer.