The God Machine Page 8

  You must know when to stop.

  The mind, ours or "theirs," must have some criterion for knowing it is moving in the right direction, and when it is time to stop moving.

  When it does this ...

  Then that mind exercises judgment.

  And the gap between man and what he has created is no more.

  11

  YOUNG, BLOND, BEAUTIFUL.

  Add to this stunning legs, the refreshing virtues of inviting lips and golden hair, and you came up with Barbara.

  That wasn't all.

  She was frankly eager to share everything she had with me.

  But there was a complication. . . .

  Kim also was beautiful. Very beautiful.

  She was brunette, her hair long and eye-catching. She was young and breathlessly alive. When she walked into a room, her entrance commanded your attention.

  But Kim Renée Michele had far more than classical beauty.

  She was also the most brilliant woman I had ever known.

  And I was in love with her.

  That was one of the complications. There were more. Kim worked with me, as I'd mentioned, on the bionics applications of Project 79, as the indispensable assistant to crotchety old Dr. Vollmer. Her specialties meant our working together for long hours of the day and often well into the night. The more I was with Kim, the more deeply I fell in love with her.

  I was almost convinced the feelings were mutual. Unhappily for my desires, physical as well as emotional, Kim maintained tight reins on her own feelings. And despite her affection for me, she believed that I was something of a "self-centered, overbearing egotist." Giving me what I wanted desperately with and from her, she believed, would be strictly to her disadvantage. Notwithstanding these problems, I saw much of Kim not only during our working hours together, but also afterward. Except that I had to observe the rules she established for that relationship. If I hadn't loved the girl as much as I did I would have told her to go to hell. That was a nice gesture but I kept it to myself and I knew I couldn't do it.

  Kim drove me out of my mind.

  Barbara took me to bed.

  As part of my contract, Project 79 provided me with an expansive and unique apartment in the modern complex nestled within Bear Creek. Six rooms that would have done credit to the character who designs those luxury pads for Playboy. The first time I saw the apartment, I found myself speechless.

  Nothing had been left out, and even my favorite possessions—which I had marked for shipment before I left the east coast for Colorado—were waiting for me. The effect was much the same as if personal valets and butlers had prepared my new home to be completely ready for my appearance.

  It was all there. Deep-carpeted opulence overstates the decor, but it felt that way to me—and I accepted with open arms the huge couch and easy chairs, the fireplace in both the living room and bedroom, and, wonder of wonders, a bathroom almost as large as the bedroom I'd known as a youngster. Automated devices in the kitchen made me feel almost as if I were an intruder, but it certainly eased a task I'd always detested—preparing my own meals. There's good fortune to be found in so unique an arrangement as I'd been provided with—my dates thought the kitchen was great, and before long an evening at home became an accepted pattern of my social life. With a girl who could cook, of course.

  Invariably there's a specific method to government madness; my apartment, luxurious and comfortable though it was, proved no exception to the rule. I had six rooms in the apartment, but quickly discovered that only four were for living. The remaining two were for homework. One was, I admit, fitted out superbly as an office. The other lacked any real taste; its personal furnishings were Spartan, and instead of the deep wine and ebony hues that characterized the remainder of the apartment one faced a dazzling glow from glass-sheet-paneled fluorescents buried within the ceiling.

  Within that room, always kept locked whenever I was absent from the apartment, was a small but intricate satellite computer—an electronic extension that permitted me direct working contact with almost any element of 79 itself. Closed-circuit television scanners and receivers could link me visually as well as with audio to the key offices of the Project, a feature to which I took at once. Tom Smythe and the Project officials weren't passing up any bets. They didn't want any of the key scientists coming up with a brainstorm and not being able to do something with their sudden thoughts. Satellite computers in the apartments or homes of the top elements of the Project were, of course, expensive—but the results proved worth far more than the dollar costs involved.

  It would be less than the truth to say that I was wholly enchanted with having a computer separated from my bedroom by no more than a thin wall. I was reminded constantly that I was never more than a few moments away from my work.

  There were times when I found it convenient to forget about Project 79. I could always lock the door to the computer room; and I never found it difficult, especially when I was aided by the willing presence of a young and lithe female creature, to ignore the damned thing altogether.

  Except, that is, with Kim.

  I had looked forward to a long weekend with her. We spent a full Saturday, starting out at four in the morning, in the mountains. A stream that filled a wide, deep pool gave me the chance to catch some plump mountain trout. Kim did well by herself, adding two beauties to the catch we brought back to my apartment. What could have been better? A wonderful day off in the hills, back in the late afternoon, a beautiful girl anxious to prove her skill with fresh-caught trout . . . and all the trappings that help to make up what should have been the romantic evening. It certainly started off well enough.

  After dinner, I set up a long-playing stereo tape. Four hours of everything from the 101 Strings to Percy Faith, all smooth and a soothing background. Kim had a preference for brandy Alexanders, and I pride myself on my skill at my bar, with our drinks just strong enough to bring on a pleasant, inhibition-relaxing glow. Soft lights, a deep carpet and pillows before the fireplace.

  If I had written the script for getting closer to my girl, I couldn't have done any better. With my arm around Kim and her head nestled against my shoulder, I was content with the world. Tomorrow was Sunday; the hours belonged to us. It was perfect.

  Kim wanted to talk.

  I tried to stop the exchange before it could get really started. Kim, I swore, never left her work. I knew how she felt, but, damn it, there are times—! The third time I tried to kiss her, she slipped away from me and demanded that I refill her drink. I could recognize the mood in her. And when she demanded from me full attention, it was difficult to refuse her. Tonight, I learned quickly, was simply the culmination of something that had been disturbing her for a long time. I recognized the inevitable, turned on a few lamps, and in my mind kissed good-by to the romantic evening I had anticipated.

  It was something that Dr. Howard Vollmer had said. During our first meeting the elderly scientist plainly had given me a message. His words were, essentially, a reaffirmation of the fact that all of us in Project 79 were pursued always by an invisible presence. It was this unsettling and persistent gnawing at the mind that so obviously disturbed Kim. But we all lived with it; we all bore the cross of the "new"

  sciences. For a long time men of science had known there were questions that no longer could be avoided. Questions that evaluated the consequences of what we were all doing. Questions demanding that one heed the tiny voice that shrilled from the back of the mind. Scientists were aware of this collective conscience, I suppose, but not until the first mushroom cloud rose did they say what they thought.

  What is it that we create?

  The scientists who formed a body of protest before the atomic dawn seared Hiroshima gave birth to a vocal element of their sacred assembly. Call it conscience, insight, or plain everyday concern for what their work would do to others. No matter what you called it, it was there.

  It came to roost in the hollow chambers deep within the mountain where we tinkered with some
unimaginable Tomorrow. It disturbed us; it followed us home; it crawled into sleep with us. It was here, this same night, standing between myself and Kim.

  She sipped from her glass, looking carefully at me. "Do you remember, Steve," she asked, "what Dr. Vollmer said to you that first time you and he talked together?"

  I nodded. "I remember. His exact words were, 'We have an intelligence.' Why?"

  "What else did he say, Steve?"

  I put down my drink and glared at her. "I really wasn't looking forward to this kind of evening, Kim," I said testily.

  "Please, Steve." That did it; I knew I was hooked. I took a long pull from my glass and reached for a cigarette.

  "Well, the old man said that he didn't consider 79 to be an artificial intelligence," I began. "Right so far?"

  She nodded, and I went on. "He claims there is really nothing artificial in nature. Only rearrangement. All man can do," I said, "is to rearrange what we find lying about us. On that basis, Vollmer claims, in 79 we have, not an artificial entity, an electronic mimic, but an intelligence."

  "How did all that strike you?" She reached out for the cigarette I'd just lit.

  I shrugged. "He hit home, I suppose," I said. I looked up at her. "What's this all about, Kim? You act as if you're trying to lead me to a conclusion you've already drawn. Is that it?"

  She put her glass down slowly and turned to look into the fireplace. "Do you remember when he said—I think I'm quoting him properly—that, 'It is time for a change; it is long overdue for a change'?"

  "Sure, I remember. So what?"

  Kim seemed to shudder as she turned back to me. "That's what disturbs me so much, Steve.

  That's what makes me question what we're doing, why I'm so—so, well, upset. Does Dr. Vollmer really mean change?

  "Or does he really mean replacement?"

  Often we sat alone and brooded over the thoughts. And then, disturbed by the shadows, we sought out the common meeting ground of verbal contest, where we might toss out our individual concepts to be collectively examined. When we did this, at least we shared the conscience that seemed to affect us all.

  There were many aspects of our work where we lacked definitions acceptable even to small groups working on the same research problem. Strictly on the basis of the functioning of the electronic brain, for example—and this is a point Kim and I argued violently—there was no separation of 79 into periods of consciousness or unconsciousness.

  And when Kim threw herself into her beliefs, you quickly discovered that beneath the surface of that beautiful girl was a mind that both commanded and demanded full attention. Kim insisted that any intelligence, no matter what its stage of development or the nature of its being, biological or cybernetic, must have some split in its personality.

  "There must be moments of activity and of dormancy, just as in the human brain," she snapped.

  "The brain doesn't turn itself off during sleep or unconsciousness, Steve; you of all people know that!

  There's always some level of electrical activity within the brain, always a flow of oxygen and blood and regeneration. Or else the brain couldn't survive; there would be no way to prevent destruction of the biological organisms. There's nothing to justify the blind belief that's persisted all this time about the brain turning itself off. Either the brain lives or it doesn't. And there's no difference to these basic rules where 79 is concerned, either."

  Kim wasn't debating; damn it, she was spoiling for a fight, seeking some way to relieve her own building frustrations. Because I couldn't agree with her.

  If, in 79, we did shut down all systems, if we ceased our demands upon the electronic neurons that made up the brain, if we ceased to make demands on the force fields, what then? Did your electronic gumbo and the packaged energy still remain, as she insisted, conscious? I threw the argument back at her.

  Kim fixed me with a glare that almost frosted the edge of the fireplace. She had lived her entire adult life with biological systems, and she believed absolutely that life forms, no matter what their origin or their makeup, always possessed consciousness, or else they were passing into some phase of their own destruction.

  "Of course it remains conscious," she retorted, almost openly contemptuous of my words. "At least this, this thing" — she gestured in her reference to 79—"will retain some measure of consciousness. It's the first brain ever created by man in this manner that meets his criteria of intelligence. A living intelligence. If you had bothered to really listen when Dr. Vollmer took the time to explain to you—"

  "Back off, sweetheart," I snapped, the anger in my own voice undisguised. "And never mind the lectures. Vollmer has many points worthy of consideration, but his words are a hell of a long way from the panacea acceptable to everybody else in this project. The brain we're building isn't made up of the biological stew from which we make rabbits and beautiful, even if mule-headed, females. This thing, no matter how sharp it is, can be turned on and off. Like a machine. Like any machine, and . . ."

  My voice trailed off before a suddenly sweet smile that warned me I'd fallen into a trap. I spotted it at the same moment that she impaled me with a pitying look a teacher usually reserves for a backward student.

  "Oh? Are you certain of that? Really, Steve. Of all the people on this project, certainly you should remember the difference, shouldn't you?"

  I almost lost my temper. But, damn her, she was right. Once 79 became a system that was fully operational, it would sustain itself from a nuclear reactor that would remain sealed and that could operate, theoretically, for hundreds of years. The great brain didn't have an outside power source.

  For the first time, we couldn't pull the plug.

  12

  if you place an electrode on the scalp of an average adult male, your instruments will indicate an electrical output that extends anywhere from five to fifty millionths of a volt. Electrical current. No question of it. Current that exists and that may be detected and measured. The electrical current of synapses, of message leaping from neuron to neuron within the nerve networks and the neural centers of the brain. Electrical current signifying—what? A man's thoughts instantly take him a billion years back in time or into the infinite possibilities of a future that doesn't yet exist. Is the man in his mind recalling the barking of a friendly puppy or does he contemplate some physics problem? The point is, this is the electrical current that moves worlds and that one day will carry its cranial originators throughout the universe.

  How much current is this? If we could place electrodes at one time to the scalps of sixty thousand men we could barely produce a weak beam from a small flashlight. That's the total electrical output at any one time.

  It could be, as one of our staff remarked wryly, that we were just lousy electricians and that the brain functioned with forms of energy we simply didn't understand or might not even know existed. And yet we also knew so much. . . . Electrical activity represented but one element of brain activity, of course.

  Brainwaves, electrical current of the mind . . . rhythmic currents with measurable cycles spanning a broad spectrum of mental activity, were critical to our work. Especially in the work that I performed as baby-sitter to 79, and in which I was aided and guided by the Bionics Division under Dr. Howard Vollmer.

  It was through these rhythmic wave patterns of the brain that we hoped initially to establish communications directly between a human programmer and what might be termed the Soul of 79.

  . . .

  So we had to know everything possibly within understanding. There are intricacies piled upon intricacies; the brain seems to achieve its splendid level of operation from an ordered and ceaseless catastrophe. As might be expected, there are within the brain neural systems each quite separate and distinct from other neural systems. These are comparable to packages of circuits, all linked together, to perform their kaleidoscopic variety of mental functions.

  Their interrelationship is as great a mystery to us as the creation of the universe.

  A
nd the beauty of compactness! Even those scientists among us who felt they were on the edge of juggling not only individual atoms but also the particles from which the atoms were formed . . . remained openly in awe of the wonder that makes up the human brain.

  We pursued the miracle we called the human brain, and while we chased mental rainbows, we were much more self-rewarding in our primary goal—to create our own made-to-order miracle with the unpretentious name of 79. ...

  Tom Smythe sprawled in the lounge chair in my office—a madhouse of charts, instruments, dismantled equipment, and sometimes the unnerving presence of Kim—and blew thick clouds of pipe smoke at me.

  "Have you been able to come up with your own acceptable comprehension of how this will work out?" He waved the pipe with good-humored patience as I glared at him.

  "What the hell do you want?" I shot back, testy in my manners and even, at this moment on this day, irritated with his barging in. I'd been hacking away at some technical problems of training special subjects to control their alpha-wave brain patterns, and I wasn't in the mood for philosophical banter.

  Maybe Tom knew that. He always seemed to show up at those moments when I wanted to throw up my hands and go fishing for six months.

  "I'm not asking you for a bloody report," he retorted, as quick with a mood as the one he sensed in me. "I was asking you for your own feelings on this thing. The only way I can know—and not for the official reports, mind you; this is for my own understanding—what's really going on is to wrap it up with you in a conversation exactly like this one."

  I turned in my seat. A small knot of pain had embedded itself between my eyes, and I kneaded the bridge of my nose, trying to work it away.

  Tom looked carefully at me. "That happen very often?"

  I nodded glumly. "Too often. It's a simple matter of ache and strain between the ears."

  He grinned. "You should have Kim rub your neck and back on a more frequent schedule."