The God Machine Page 15

  "What else?" he asked.

  I leaned forward—grunting a bit with the effort—and punched the start button of a concealed tape recorder. We settled back for a replay of my conversation with Ed Taylor. When it ended, the major stubbed out the remains of the cigar, arched his brows, and smiled when I handed him a new one.

  "Very interesting," he mused, removing the cellophane. He gestured at the report. "The case of your Mr. Taylor, I mean," he added. "Interesting, but not really unusual."

  "Oh?" That was all I ventured for the moment.

  He tossed his match into the wastebasket, peering after it to see if he'd started a fire. Satisfied, he turned back to me. "No, not unusual, Mr. Rand," he said. "Miss Michele here," he nodded toward Kim,

  "pointed it out in her report. Mr. Taylor was a victim of photic stimulation. Sometimes, especially among pilots, it's referred to as flicker vertigo or flicker unconsciousness. And anyone working with alpha-wave patterns of the brain has some familiarity with its cause and effect."

  Sure, I knew something of flicker vertigo. Under certain conditions a flickering light can match the alpha-wave pattern of a human brain. Susceptibility is a happenstance thing; it occurs in one individual and doesn't in another, and except in those cases where there's extreme susceptibility it isn't possible to tell just who will or won't be a victim. There's a relationship, sometimes distant and sometimes meaningful, between the effects of flicker vertigo and an epileptic. But it's unpredictable. And although the effects of a flickering light have been known for a long time—the ancient slave traders would make slaves stare at a rapidly spinning potter's wheel to search out possible epileptics —it hasn't been until recent years that we began a really scientific study of the phenomenon. And suddenly I was very interested, because flicker vertigo is associated with the alpha-wave pattern of the human brain.

  And alpha-wave patterns were critical to everything I was doing with Project 79. Also, I had come to suspect that my electronic playmate—the computer—was acting in a manner wholly unprecedented and that it all involved photic stimulation. I was badly in need of information and I didn't want to miss any bets. Which meant not acting like a smartass. And turning to a source to which photic stimulation—flicker vertigo—was not at all strange. Like Major Harold Konigsberg, MD, USAF—a flight surgeon who was considered an expert in the subject. "Can you give me a thumbnail rundown, Major?" He shifted to a more comfortable position. "As long as these cigars of yours hold out, Mr. Rand, I am very willing to run down along all of my nails." I waved him on.

  "But first I want to ask you a question." I looked carefully at him. I nodded. "Shoot." "Why the big scene with getting me down here, Rand? Your watchdog—Smythe, I think is his name—was practically foaming at the mouth about my learning something about your precious computer." He waved his hand to dismiss my surprise. "Oh, for Christ's sake, Rand, it's no secret among a group of us. We've known about the program; we don't know exactly what you're doing, but we can guess pretty well." He took another long drag on the cigar and then waved it at me. "But I'm wandering. Forgive me. I started to ask you why you wanted me here to play footsie with the photic stimulation." He nodded at Kim. "Miss Michele is knowledgeable on the subject. Dr. Vollmer—we know he's tied in with your program—is an expert on alpha-wave patterns. So why the big fuss to get some obscure flight surgeon in a blue suit into the middle of your zealously guarded electronic harem?"

  I couldn't help the laughter that met his remark. "Major, you're priceless," I gasped, "even if all these chuckles have me wincing inside me. The leg doesn't laugh as well as the rest of me."

  He threw me a glance of professional sympathy; I think the bastard really meant it, and that made me feel good. If we had some empathy between us, he'd be free with his words. I urged him to go on.

  "Well, the fact is, Mr. Rand," he said, "that even Dr. Vollmer—and I credit him with being a genius—has a restrictive outlook. He has what you could describe as a clinical relationship with photic stimulation. It's cut and dried and laid out neatly in the laboratory. My attitude is different. As a flight surgeon I've lived with photic stimulation—with flicker vertigo—as an active thing. The first thing I'll tell you is that it's lethal." He looked at us over his cloud of cigar smoke.

  "It kills."

  Suddenly we were paying very close attention.

  "Like I said, it can kill. I prefer to think of it in the pilot's terms. Maybe that's because I'm as much an airplane driver as I am a flight surgeon. Gives me a closer and more intimate look at things. Flicker vertigo comes without warning; it can come at the damnedest times, and it can be very terrifying—even when you live through it. It's always associated with a light, of course, as you know so well yourself. But it's one thing to look at a pretty light in a laboratory and something else to get the works when you're upstairs and everything comes unglued all around you.

  "There are sensitives and there are sensitives." He shrugged. "We haven't any real way of knowing.

  Not even lab tests work all the time, because the individual reacts differently at different times. Alcohol, drugs, exhaustion, state of mind, surroundings and environment—they're all involved. In some individuals, although they are the rarer cases, even a single flash of light will match the alpha-wave pattern, at just that moment, and zing!" — he snapped his fingers—"the individual is unconscious. Just like that," he said to answer the expression on my face.

  "In most cases, however, to get an honest case of flicker vertigo—and we're referring to complete spatial disorientation as resulting from optical exposure to the flickering light—there must be a steady interruption of the light source. Many factors intervene—point or broad source of light, intensity, color, and so forth. Neon signs, television screens, motion-picture screens, moving past a row of trees with the sun directly in view, car headlights moving past a fence, light reflections from snowdrifts, on tracks . . .

  almost anything can trigger it. Now, let me emphasize that not everyone is susceptible. But once you get caught, the odds are that you're dead game for a repeat session."

  I chewed that one over. "That means we're taking a chance if we use Ed Taylor for alpha-wave tests, doesn't it?"

  He nodded agreement. "I can guarantee he'll go under again the moment he gets an optical alpha-wave pattern."

  "Go on, please."

  "Well, assume the conditions are right—the light source is just so, and the effects of the flickering light are right on target." Konigsberg was almost cheerful with his narrative; I had the strange thought that he wouldn't be any different if he were picking up the pieces of a friend from some cruelly smashed airplane. But it takes all kinds of professionals. Almost as if reading my thoughts he concentrated on a case in point—flicker vertigo from flight. "Take a pilot landing a single-engine plane— one with a fan instead of a torch, and—"

  "I'm sorry, Doctor," Kim broke in suddenly, smiling. "But I'm afraid you lost me there. 'Fan'?

  'Torch'?"

  Konigsberg laughed. "Forgive me, Miss Michele. I was referring to someone flying an airplane with a propeller instead of a jet engine."

  "Oh. Please continue."

  He waved the cigar freely. "All right, then. Our boy is flying an iron bird with a fan in front. The conditions are perfect, too. For trouble, I mean. Let's say he's coming in for a landing at sunset and he's landing to the west. Do you know what that means?" His expression was a challenge.

  "Of course," I said slowly. "He would be landing into the sun, looking at the sun through the propeller."

  "Right as rain, Mr. Rand. Only—and it's a very big only— when you're on final approach you cut back on the power. The propeller turns a great deal more slowly than when you're cruising. In fact, you can get about five hundred rpm with the propeller. That means about sixteen to twenty blinks per second.

  And that's what happened to Ed Taylor in your Frankenstein hutch, or whatever it is you call your laboratory.

  "You see, the brain doesn't register t
he individual flashes of light. As you know, this is too fast for the optical system of the human being. The brain fuses the incoming flickers into a single light—a steady source point. When Taylor was—well, whatever it was he was doing, when he was able to distinguish the light as a separate source"—he looked at us suspiciously—"I'd still like to know how you managed that. Care to let me in on your trade secrets?"

  I smiled, and shook my head.

  "I thought not," he grunted. "Anyway, when that moment came that he was distracted, or chose to let his mind wander, the light separation vanished. His brain fused the signals into a single light source. But he was susceptible; damn, but he was! From what I gathered—the tape recording and the report—he wasn't looking at a single small light point, but something with some meaningful diameter or dimension to it. Darkened room, wide source of light, the right frequency, and, umm, yes, he mentioned the light as orange-red—that's the most dangerous; did you know that?—well, that's all. I'll bet that if you run a check through his close relatives, perhaps even several generations back, you'll discover some form of epileptic evidence."

  "Is it necessary that they be epileptics?" Kim didn't take notes, but the recorder was on, had been on from the beginning of our meeting.

  Konigsberg shook his head. "Not at all," he replied. "That's what fouls up this whole thing.

  Normally—at least the odds favor it—there's some form of susceptibility strongly related to epilepsy. But it's not necessary at all."

  "What about the reaction?" I asked. "Taylor had some severe convulsions."

  Kim shuddered. "They really were . . . quite awful, Doctor," she added, "I'd never seen anything like it before."

  Konigsberg shrugged off her painful memories. "It happens," he replied. "Then again, the reactions vary. Sometimes the man doesn't even fall unconscious. He becomes wildly unstable, irritable. Sometimes he's seized as if in a coma; fully conscious but unable to speak or to control his body. He may act as if paralyzed or he may suffer irregular muscular twisting and jerking. The head snaps from side to side with force enough to do damage to the neck. I want to emphasize that there's no guaranteed pattern. He may be dazed. In fact, he may even realize what's happening to him and he will take steps to stop what's happening. Usually that will kill him. As far as pilots are concerned, I mean."

  "But why would that happen?" His remark puzzled me; it was hard to believe.

  "I explained—or maybe I didn't," Konigsberg said, "that with pilots flicker vertigo can be lethal.

  And it is. Imagine a man on his final approach, still several hundred feet up, and he finally goes blank. Just like that. He's going to continue straight into the ground, and that sort of thing can ruin your whole day.

  Of if he has convulsions he hurls the plane out of control in just an instant, and a crash is inevitable. Say that a pilot is on instruments, within the clouds. If his rotating beacons inter-mesh—their reflections off the clouds, off his wings—he can get flicker vertigo. And having that happening to you while you're IFR—flying on instruments—is a death sentence. It can happen to a helicopter pilot who looks at a light source—the sun, the moon, lights on the ground—through his rotor blades. Now, going back to what I said before: suppose the pilot feels the effects coming on. What's the first reaction?"

  "Close your eyes, of course," I said quickly.

  "Uh-huh," he came back just as fast. "Why?"

  "To shut out the source of light."

  "And that, my friend, will kill you. Abrupt closure of the eyes can set off the seizure. We don't know why. Not really, and I won't give you any theories in the way of explanation. The best bet is that the eyelids permit only red light to enter. The brain cells are peculiar creatures"—I smiled inwardly at his remark; how well Kim and I knew that!—"and they're irritable. They react to red light in a case like this.

  They react to it much more strongly than they do to white light, which, in its effect, is considered neutral."

  Major Konigsberg shrugged. "I don't have to know the why of it, only that it happens, and it's happened enough to kill some very good people."

  He seemed to slump in his chair. "Some very good people, indeed," he mused, drowned suddenly in a rush of memories I was sure he had held at bay—until our questions brought him face to face with the past again.

  I had some of the answers I wanted. Not enough of them yet, but at least it was a good start. Ed Taylor was sensitive to photic stimulation; that much was an established fact. There might be more photic sensitives among the alpha programmers and test subjects; we would have to be extremely careful about any blink-light tests. As to why Taylor was suddenly seized— well, anything could have started it. The blink lights, the lighting conditions of the cubicle, the red-orange color of the light, his closing his eyes ...

  he could have had excess caffeine in his system, too many aspirins, or being overtired. Any one of these items or a combination of things could have set off his attack of flicker vertigo and the terrifying convulsions that followed.

  But that was the least of it. Really. I wasn't concerned about Ed Taylor, for he would be fine. And we could even induce flicker vertigo if this were desired for test purposes. The attacks by themselves were harmless in the laboratory under controlled conditions. Many victims of flicker vertigo never even remembered what happened to them; they were wholly unaware of blacking out or going through muscular disorientation. Flicker vertigo kills when you're flying. I wondered how many automobile accidents—Konigsberg brought up this point—we could attribute to flicker vertigo. Good Lord, all the conditions that existed on the highway—headlights passing behind rows of trees or fences or telephone poles or cables or rows of passing cars . . . Konigsberg estimated that flicker vertigo killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of people every year. Even white-painted lines, spaced at specific distances, became a killer to some drivers who lost control of their cars "for no reason." And I'd never see a word about photic stimulation in any safety studies of the highways!

  But all that was getting me nowhere. My concern wasn't flight or driving. It was for that cybernetics organism for which I was, to a great extent, responsible. At least with the bio-cybernetics test program.

  And that's what worried me. Worried, hell! I was starting to run scared.

  And with good reason.

  Several weeks had gone by since Ed Taylor went into convulsions.

  During that time I was flat on my back in a hospital bed, and I was out of touch with what had been happening with the bio-cybernetics program.

  79 had taken over its own research.

  And that scared the hell out of me.

  Not because of the self-programming, so to speak. That capability we had built into the cybernetics organism. When it lacked data, it attempted to seek it out. It requested additional information; it queried its programmers; it kept searching for missing pieces in its memory neural blocks.

  The human programmers had long been accustomed to this capability of 79. Their responsibility was to add to the memory capacity of what was already the single greatest storehouse of knowledge in existence. They found nothing unusual in their meeting the requests of the computer or, if they did, they shrugged it off. Security has its drawbacks; the honored stone wall of "need to know" effectively blocks questions. After a while a technician or an engineer or a whole army of them learn it's wisest not to ask questions. Leave the questions to the big-domes. What the hell, they're the ones who are in charge.

  Intellectual brilliance has been channeled effectively, and horribly, into tight and restrictive specializations.

  So you do what you're paid to do and you become very skilled at minding your own damned business.

  Thus you fail to recognize when the cybernetics organism with which you're working as a test programmer begins to act entirely out of the ordinary. And even if you do recognize the unusual, you remember the Code— Don't rock the boat! You remember the cold stares, the security indoctrinations, the warnings and the penalties for no
t staying in your own technical bailiwick.

  In effect, the whole damned staff turned their backs on what was happening. By the time I stumbled on the truth, it was too late.

  79 had broken loose.

  23

  catalyst, thy name is Ed Taylor.

  Because when this man succumbed in the control cubicle to photic stimulation, and went through psychological extremes of panic and then, unknown to him, violent physical seizure and convulsion, his human brain was still linked to the cybernetics system.

  The contact with its intensive peaks both psychological and physiological triggered a sudden demand for data on the part of 79. This wasn't unusual. In fact, the computer was operating as its designers had intended. It was employing its built-in feedback mechanism that prompted it to pursue data in any area where it determined there existed a deficiency in data.

  Only now this self-motivating principle was being exercised with a level of capability somewhat unanticipated and, what turned out to have serious implications, I wasn't around to spot what was happening. I was flat on my scientific butt with a busted leg that kept me away from direct observations of 79.

  Simply enough, the cybernetics brain had come to recognize when it could not receive the data it sought through standard programming. That's the difference between a single grain of sand and an entire mountain. Feedback, switching theory, open-end data input ... it all now came to fruition. In electronic-hungry fashion, its appetite whetted by the extraordinary session with Ed Taylor, 79 sought to fill the gaps it sensed within glowing neural memories. With single-minded purpose it demanded data—and received what it demanded.

  The technicians servicing 79 found nothing untoward in the sudden machine-prompted insistence on more information.

  Their job, in fact, was to respond to such demands. What they didn't realize was that the alpha-wave pattern tests were wholly new to the short life of the computer. The technicians themselves didn't even know such tests had been initiated. They existed in a world of their own, and there was no need for them to be privy to secret experiments. They didn't know of the alpha tests, and they were unaware that for the first time, rather than juggling its already vast stores of data, 79 had been monitoring an experiment in which it was an active and essential participant.