The God Machine Page 17

  I had been wrenched violently from hypnosis, and I was paying the penalty for brain cells scrambled wildly. It was the most blessed and wonderful pain I had ever known in my life, and I embraced it hysterically. It saved me.

  I lay there on the floor, chest heaving, and I clung to the pain as a drowning man clings to a log in the water. Through the red mist that fogged my eyes, I listened. I listened to what I had heard before.

  The voice.

  The voice of 79, that deep, timbrous sound from the superbly, ingeniously crafted artificial larynx I had developed to carry out direct communications experiments with the great cybernetics brain. Talking.

  Giving instruction, repetitiously, while the swirling light held captive, like a bug in a steel mental trap, a human being.

  Charles Kane. Professional associate and personal friend, one of the best technicians and programmers on the staff. A man who worked with the electronic intellect from the day of its inception. A man who felt completely ... at home with the cybernetics brain.

  A man absolutely in the complete control of 79. A man who had been receiving instructions while he was under hypnotic control and would be placed under posthypnotic control when 79 completed its instructions.

  A man, a friend of mine, who was being ordered by the cybernetics brain to bring another person, at the earliest possible opportunity, into this test cubicle. To bring him here as quickly as this could be done, to place him in this same seat, to expose him also to that terrible pattern of light.

  A man.

  Steve Rand.

  Me.

  The words coming through the slightly opened door welled up in my mind and snagged on nightmarish disbelief, made all the more grotesque because it was real. A hysterical giggle seemed to accompany my thoughts.

  The phrase welled up in my mind amidst the nightmare. The first free thought, evaluating what I had seen, what I had heard, what was happening to me.

  I thought, My God! I thought, It is really happening.

  The machine is taking over!

  And at the same time the giggle wrapped itself in a thin shining cocoon of madness.

  Because . . . because I knew that Selig Albracht was right.

  25

  Just don't lie there and moan, you idiot. Think!

  That's a help. An insufferable ego, I mean. Thank the Lord for mine. Still clutched in pain from my leg, my reflexes began to take over. One of them was the ability to start using the gray matter between my ears. I confess I didn't know what to do at the moment. The voice of 79 faded in the pain to a background hum drifting through the door. Yet it carried with it a compulsion to get the hell out from under. At the moment I didn't dare try to make it all the way down the corridor. Using the cane for support and leaning against the wall, I managed to regain my feet. Wincing, I edged along the wall to the next cubicle, fumbled for the master key in my pocket, and pushed open the door. I slid the door back into place and leaned against the cool, hard surface, forcing myself to breathe regularly, to regain control of my thoughts. I felt as if a herd of mental elephants were stampeding through my brain.

  I don't know how long I stood there, the pain easing from my leg. Damn me for a fool for having overdone it on the premise of "I'm a big boy now and can take care of myself"! Yet I knew I'd had a tremendous stroke of good fortune. If things hadn't happened the way they did while I was gawking stupidly through the observation window, I might still be there, snared in a hypnotic trance just as was Charlie Kane.

  And that was something else again. From what little I'd seen, I knew Charlie was deep, way down deep, under posthypnotic command. There wasn't a shadow of a doubt about that. Everything had been going along with such tremendous impact in that test cubicle. ... I shuddered at the manner in which I remembered myself being drawn into that light. Christ! The sensation of disembodiment had been fantastic. There had been no sense of losing control or anything like that. It was simply a matter of letting go to that bottomless, infinite beckoning. That should answer any questions about a cybernetics brain being able to adapt to purely biological-intellectual activities! If it were a matter of intent, then 79 was now able to rewrite the book on hypnotism.

  None of this was getting me anywhere. I don't know how long I stood there before I got up enough sense to climb into the control chair, stretch out my leg, and massage some decent feeling back into the muscles. That's where I'd run into trouble, of course. I hadn't really used or placed strain on the leg muscles for so long that my abuse of my own body had brought about the shrieking collapse. The pain I'd felt had been from muscles twisting and knotting. I felt improved already, and at the same time I congratulated myself on my own well-being I knew it was simply a dodge. I was avoiding the issue of what was going on in that test cubicle next to me.

  Well, maybe that was the right thing to do. Avoid it for the moment. I needed time. Time in which I could think, could add things up, and go over them slowly. This wasn't any time for action. Jesus, what was I going to do? Stump my way into the cubicle and flail away mightily with the cane? Bash Charlie across the side of the head? Kick the computer? Maybe James Bond would have dashed into the room to flick ashes into the glass eye of 79, but outside of messing up the floor I don't know what good that would have done. Heroics was for the birds, and I wasn't inclined to be a screaming eagle.

  Of course I went through my instinctive reaction. It's a malady of the generation which I shared through youth and into manhood. If the computer gets frisky, quoth the pundits, you could always pull the plug and leave the damned thing sulking like a cinder that's been pulled out of the fire.

  Like hell you could. Not with this one. Not with twin breeder reactors sealed off within defensive systems that made Fort

  Knox look like sand castles built by a six-year-old on the beach. That's the first thing that cemented itself clearly in my mind. No one was going to pull any plugs around here. In the game of one-upmanship between man and cybernetics brain, man had neatly cut off one of his own fingers.

  The silence reached me and—Silence? The voice, that deep and commanding voice of 79, had stopped. I moved as quickly as I could to the front wall of the cubicle so that I could remain in shadow and still look into the corridor, toward the other cubicle where Charlie Kane was being made into a willing slave. I noticed the flickering glow of light was no more. The brain-squeezing session was over.

  Charlie Kane was himself again— he thought—and now under posthypnotic control. But in his conscious thinking he didn't even know what had happened to him! He would remember—I could anticipate the routine; it had to be this way—only that he had some late adjustments to make to equipment in the test cubicle. That's all. He would know absolutely nothing of anything else that went on. Glued to the wall, I watched him emerge from the cubicle, close and lock the door, and walk off down the corridor. I waited fifteen minutes until, as I was ready to leave, weariness suddenly assailed me. To hell with it. No one would question my being anywhere in the complex at any time of the day or night. I punched the desk phone and called the security guard and told him to bring the wheelchair to me.

  I wasn't even about to try that long haul back to my office. It was bad enough limping in my mind.

  I didn't go to work for the next two days. Aside from my feeling miserable physically, the doctor chewed up one side of my butt and then down the other, double-damning me for being the worst kind of fool for overdoing the Look-Ma-no-hands bit with my leg. Nothing could have pleased me better than the doctor's orders to remain in my apartment and to exercise the leg with care. Fortunately no real damage had been done, and there was more wincing than injury. Besides, it gave me the opportunity to think. When I returned to the apartment on that same night when I nearly got taken down the drain by that infernal light of the cybernetics brain, my first impulse was to drag Tom Smythe out of bed and tell him the story from beginning to end. But even as I picked up the telephone, I changed my mind. Tell him what? That 79 was now collecting a private gang of hypno
tized subjects to do its bidding? What bidding? What gang? The only person of whom I knew was Charlie Kane, and there wasn't the ghost of a chance of getting through the posthypnotic block induced by the computer.

  That was the real stub of it. What the devil would I do? Because there were questions upon questions that required answers before I could go running off to anyone. 79 had proved itself capable of the impossible, and that was the concealment of its actions. That it could function in a sense where it initiated its own programming was not unusual; we had created that. But to go off on its own and then take every attempt to conceal what it was doing, and deliberately to take over control of human beings, was something vastly different.

  No; if I were to do anything at the moment it was to think, to come up with rational answers to the questions that bedeviled me. I had to find out what else was going on, had been happening during my absence. I was off to a running start, and that helped tremendously. They say that being forewarned is being forearmed. That advantage I clutched fervently to my feverish scientific brow. I knew about Charles Kane and what had happened with and to him. I knew the tremendous impact of the light patterns generated on the glass panel by 79. I knew that Charles Kane, outwardly perfectly normal, was operating under posthypnotic suggestion, under orders. I knew I could expect Charlie either to call me or to visit me at home, and even while I stared at nothing and thought furiously, I had a visitor.

  Charles Kane.

  Of course; who else would it be? The meeting proved ineffectual for Charlie and rewarding for me.

  I managed to act perfectly normal—insufferable, I suppose, but Charlie was accustomed to that aspect of my social behavior and didn't mind it at all. But I was nervous and edgy, and Charlie spotted it. I attributed the feelings to a combination of pain from my leg and the drugs the doctors still ordered me to take. Charlie shrugged and made sympathetic sounds and thought nothing of it.

  Except for his insistence, worded carefully, that it was important for me to get back into harness as soon as I could.

  "I've got something real interesting to show you, Steve," he said, showing genuine excitement about the matter.

  "Oh? What's up?"

  "Damnedest thing you ever saw. As you know, while you were trussed up in the hospital we continued the communications experiments. The regular bit, Steve. We picked up where you had left off on the voice communications, and we're still running the alpha and blink patterns, and—"

  "Any difficulty with the photic stimulation?" I asked the question in purest innocence.

  "No, nothing like that any more. Except, of course," he added hastily, "where the doctors have induced flicker vertigo deliberately. They're trying to get some correlations and guidelines of effects and lack of effects between normals and adepts at alpha control."

  I nodded.

  "But that's not what I was talking about, Steve. 79 has come up on its own with its own experiments."

  I started suddenly. "What?" The look on my face wasn't sham. I was taken unaware by his words.

  "I know how you feel." He laughed, the perfect picture of a friend and associate sharing a professional secret. "It's just how I reacted when I first discovered what was happening. We were going through a results study and were querying 79 on different aspects of man-machine communications. We reviewed the whole package. You know it, of course." He smiled with just the proper amount of self-deprecation. "Tape, punch card, alpha pattern, acoustic, energized neural blocks—the works.

  Then—and it caught us all off balance—79 ran through a query to us on light communications."

  "Light?" I know my voice sounded hollow.

  "Uh-huh." He nodded. "Not the light signals per se, Steve, such as blinker light for Morse code and things like that. Direct light—colors, patterns, intensities, forms, all worked out in a system of communications."

  I didn't answer. I didn't dare to. I began to have a suspicion that . . .

  "Well, we rigged up one of the test cubicles for the tests. It's Number 17. Sort of an intricate pattern-potential of lights, with thousand of small bulbs, multicolor principle, and that sort of thing. We hooked it up directly to the energizer circuits of 79 so that it could manipulate the system directly, and—"

  "I'll bet," I said acidly.

  "What was that, Steve?"

  I cursed myself for a fool. "Nothing, nothing," I said, waving my hand for him to continue.

  "Well, we also rigged a duplicate of the voice-comm system that you've been using, and—"

  "Whose idea was that?" I broke in.

  "Oh. 79. It gave us a set of working rules. Voice communications would allow us to get things moving faster with the light communications tests." He showed his pride in the systems he and his staff had built, and there was also pride in his ability to work along such a tremendously advanced level with the cybernetics brain. Pride—and not so much as the slightest suspicion that he had unwittingly carried out the instructions on the part of 79 to create the equipment with which the giant brain could carry out its hypnotic tests.

  "Did you have any difficulties?"

  "Oh, some," he said, "but not that much to slow us down. Some of the light patterns—they register not single words, of course, but what I'd call intent-messages for communications —were pretty disturbing at first. A few of the people found themselves with screaming headaches. The light, well, it sort of felt as if it reached inside your skull, and twisted." He shook his head in wonder or admiration, or a combination of both. "We informed 79 that the patterns were optically disturbing to the programmers.

  That thing is fast, Steve," he emphasized. "It still amazes me how 79 could digest the words, convert them into its own data system, and come back with the solution."

  "How?"

  Charlie shrugged. "Difficult to say, except that after we had our first problems the light didn't bother us any more."

  Of course not, I thought. The son of a bitch didn't want to overplay its new capabilities that quickly. I marveled at myself. How easily I'd slipped into the frame of mind where 79 had become an ominous personality, a thinking creature of deceit. I'd never before thought of a computer as a son of a bitch. But I did now.

  I also flared up in my mind, at Charlie Kane. But that was stupid, I reminded myself immediately.

  Charlie didn't have the slightest suspicion of what had happened to him. Not even torture could have made him confess about a hypnotic control of which his conscious mind was entirely unaware. I had to remember that. The man was not functioning—where the intent of 79 was involved—either of his own knowledge or his own volition. I had to remember that this was so, even though at times I found it difficult to remain objective.

  "When can you come in for some demonstrations of the new system, Steve?"

  "What?" I hadn't been paying attention to Charlie Kane for several moments, and his words caught me by surprise. "Oh, hell, sorry," I said easily, "I was just chewing over what you've been telling me."

  He smiled in return. "No sweat. I wanted to know when you might be able to come in for a demonstration of the new light-communications system."

  I looked at him carefully. "What would you suggest?"

  "I dunno." He shrugged. "From the looks of things, with your leg, I mean, you might be a couple of days yet before you can make it."

  "Uh-huh." I tapped my leg. "Sort of scrunged up a bit yet, but it won't be much longer. Umm, by the way, Charlie, how's your work schedule, lately?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, I was looking at the sign-out sheets the other day—or night, I suppose—and I noticed you'd been signing out pretty late. You getting to be an overtime hog?"

  He laughed, flashing white teeth. "No, no, nothing like that. I just seem to be getting absent-minded as of late. It's a funny thing," he said, scratching his chin. "I mean, I wrap up things for the day and I go home for dinner. Then later, usually it's about ten o'clock or so, I always remember something I forgot to do, and I end up back in the office again,"
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  "Couldn't it wait until the next morning?"

  "Well, that's what had me wondering," he said, clearly puzzled by his own actions. "Because every time it happens I remember that it's important that I have to do this thing— whatever it happens to be at the moment—to get ready for the staff the next morning. So," he shrugged, "back to the office I go."

  Neat, very neat. A posthypnotic command, shrouded in the sudden "memory" of work that must be completed that evening, and Charlie Kane is in Cubicle 17, and he seats himself in that chair and he looks at the glass panel, and he's under, and getting instructions as 79's errand boy.

  But why? What was the purpose of all this? Why did the computer deliberately operate in the manner I had discovered? Why—except as an experiment—did it want to place anyone under posthypnotic control? Why the deliberate attempt to conceal what had happened? And again and again, and a hundred times again, the same question came back to me—Why was all this going on? What purpose could there be in these manipulations?

  Wait . . . wait just a moment, now. 79 had directed Charlie Kane to get me into that cubicle. For what? Obviously, for what. To get me under as well. But why me? And when had the computer begun to make distinctions between one human being and another when we were faceless data sources to an electronic entity? How could it have made such distinctions? I made a mental note to check on that, and even as I scribbled the words in my mind I had the answer. At least I bet I had it. I knew, I just knew, that in the programming requested by 79 was a list of every high-level cybernetics scientist in the country.

  But there was more to it than that. There had to be. ...

  "Have there been any other demonstrations—I mean, outside of the immediate staff of technicians—with the new light-communications system?"