The God Machine Page 9

My mouth opened and I started to say something. But when in doubt—don't speak. There's the old saw that it is wise to engage brain before putting mouth in motion. I didn't need to speak; he knew what I was thinking, and he wasn't pressing it any further.

  He rose to his feet. "C'mon, you need a break," he said. "Let's take a stroll and get some scenery and air in one big dose."

  That was a good idea. The smell of trees and grass and unfiltered air was like a tonic for me.

  And I could appreciate what Tom was trying to evoke from me, because I'd been living with it for more than a year now.

  My God! I'd never kept track of the time. Self-reflection can be upsetting when you discover suddenly that so much time has gone by. More than a year of studies and preparations and coordinating programs, of initial tests and experiments, of probing with infinite caution into the miracle of thought we ourselves were trying to create.

  And how would it all turn out?

  "We can't do this on the needle approach," I said slowly to Tom, breathing deeply of the pines about us. "It's got to be a matter of establishing, and then working with, the gestalt of 79."

  He stared at me for a moment. "Run that by me slowly, if you would." He hated my being obscure.

  But it was so damned difficult to detail a feeling, to categorize an emotion. With all the specifics with which we worked, we found ourselves foundering helplessly. Finally we reached a point where you simply had to know, even without an unemotional justification for it, that you were doing the right thing.

  That alone had shaken me up more than I'd cared to admit. My skills—the music of math, I mean—had encountered new horizons where they availed me not at all. I was over my head. We were all over our heads, individually and collectively. None of us could produce the mathematical equation for consciousness, let alone satisfy anyone else with rigid lines of explanation.

  Were we more capable, our sciences might have carried us across the troubled waters of lack of comprehension. Well, maybe. We didn't know. It hurt to admit the truth—we foundered when we demanded hard-line reasoning and explanation —but in a sense the truth freed us. We found ourselves utilizing to the nth degree what science could do for us, and then we turned to what was, in our work, the most elusive of all.

  Intuition.

  Faith.

  A ... a feeling. That this was the right way to proceed.

  Washington—the National Security Agency—would have suffered the burbling fits had they ever known of this self-admission within the confines of our cliques. Tom Smythe knew, but he wouldn't rock the NSA boat. Tom wasn't a hardware scientist, so to speak. No matter how clinical his own work, Tom as a psychologist found more science in intuition and feeling than he did in classroom theory. So we could talk freely with him.

  "Well, in the clinical sense—what you'd call the psychological sense, Tom—I think that gestalt is the best description of what I'm trying to establish with 79. Not just the sense of rapport between the teacher and the student. First of all, I don't even know if that applies in this sense. I mean that . . . put it this way," I said, seeking the words that would express without verbal stumbling what I felt clearly within me. "To the gestalt school of psychology the very act of perception is a process worthy of the title

  'miracle,' and—"

  I stopped short both in my words and our walk together. "Wait a moment, Tom," I said, feeling piqued at having been led down a primrose path. "What am I explaining psychology to you for! You're the expert in this field, and I—"

  "No, no," he broke in quickly. "You misunderstand me, Steve. Of course I'm well versed in this business. But I'm not testing your understanding or verbalization of my field. You've wandered off on a tangent wholly different from mine. What I want to find out from you—and this is really the only way to do it—is your attitude and your approach to what you're doing. I'm not looking for proof or anything else, Steve," he said smiling. "I'm asking you to open the door a bit so I can get a good look at what's going on inside. Okay on that basis?"

  I was forced to return his smile. "Well, being cautious about it, Tom, I mean, explaining the gestalt approach— perception must be not a collection of one separate element of one sensation after the other, but actually an intellectual ability to establish, or to create, a relationship. It isn't enough for 79 to have vast stores of knowledge or be able to sort out bits and pieces of that knowledge." I scratched my chin; things always became a bit rough when I got into this.

  "In other words, we're hoping that 79 will come to understand that it has its vast stores of information. Just knowing that it—the computer—is real, and that it's serving a purpose, would be a tremendous step forward."

  Tom nodded, relighting his pipe. "Yes," he agreed, "it would be that, certainly."

  I waited for him to finish. "All right, then. It's not enough for the mind to have knowledge. It must know that it has it. It must perceive of itself. Okay so far?"

  He motioned with his pipe for me to continue.

  "So the mind, as best we understand it, perceives a gestalt by perceiving the whole of a situation, or the whole of an impression. Someone who knows nothing about music perceives a tune, so to speak, because of the melody he hears. And even the musician, learning that melody, the tune, must learn the whole of the tune. He doesn't merely go through a mechanical recitation, a robot thumping of one note in succession after another. He can do this, of course, but if his perception is of the one note at a time, he doesn't have the melody. He has nothing but one unattached tone after the other. He's got to blend it all.

  "Now ... the perception of the whole—well, carry it one step further. I mean, with the music.

  Before long it becomes clear that not only the notes, or their succession, but also combinations of notes are vital to perceiving the tune or the song. Maybe I'm clumsy with all this, Tom. I'm not a musician and I may be using symbols that don't pertain."

  "You're doing fine."

  I nodded slowly. "Well, these combinations of notes, blending finally into the musical creation as intended by the artist, make up what we perceive.

  "In fact, that's this very ability to receive vast stimuli for all of our senses that makes of man such a unique creature. The mind—accepting brain-mind as a single entity, of course—is still uncontested, and likely will remain so far into the future as I can see, as the single most versatile receptor of a simultaneous scattering of phenomena one could imagine. This is so because, well, nothing else of which we might imagine could perceive across so vast and simultaneous a range of stimuli. It involves everything at once: incoming, cross-checking, switchback, memory feed even while the input is at its maximum, and it can go on even while the individual carries on physical functions. I mean motor functions of volition, not the automatic. The miracle is that the brain of one man perceives the whole, and then, at his leisure, he can separate individual facets and aspects or groupings from the whole, the gestalt. . . ."

  Clumsy as I was with these thoughts voiced to Tom Smythe, I knew I was on the right track.

  The mind of man is a blotter. It is blindly absorbent of all that happens around it or, somewhat more strictly, of what happens within the range of perception of man's senses. Within that range it cannot prevent the input of stimuli. Its very capability ties together its mental shoelaces. Unique as it is, the mind does not have the speed of operation of the cybernetics system, and so it cannot separate incoming data at that moment when they are being received. Thus the miracle of the brain becomes cluttered with junk.

  There is so much cross-hatching of undesirable material that if we could bring selective perception into the gestalt ability, we would have in our grasp a vast step forward in what our admirers like to call brainpower.

  This is one of the major hopes we had for Project 79. The creation of an artificial cognition, an artificial brain (I must remember to call it rearranged, I suppose, when in earshot of Dr. Vollmer!) that had selective input. It could be subjected to a battering assault of stimuli—
data—and as swiftly as they were received would break down the input and, at the same time, perform the act of man's brain.

  Perceive the whole, and separate meaningfully the individual elements of the whole.

  And then go man one better. Categorize and remember everything with instant recall of any or all of what had been received. And, hopefully, utilize with reason what was remembered. . . .

  A long time ago, Sir Charles Sherrington, a famed neural scientist, provided a clue to what we would one day create in our cybernetics organism.

  Sir Charles commented that the brain ". . . is an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one."

  Well, 79 was all that, and more.

  Because it was an "abiding one."

  13

  "But, damn it, Kim, why the sudden change in, I mean—oh, hell," I grated, "you know damned well what I mean."

  I knew I showed my irritation. I was also wearing my feelings on my sleeve, but I couldn't help it.

  This was one of those moments when Kim was doing her best to drive me to distraction. Until now we had had a marvelous evening, a desperately needed "get away from it all" escape just for the two of us.

  Within a week or ten days, working together, we would be ready to attempt the first brain-to-brain contact between a human programmer and 79. For the past month Kim and I had worked at least eighteen hours every damned day of the week to prepare for the epochal test. We were worn out, our minds sodden with the exhaustion of our intensive final preparatory efforts. One morning it just became too much. I couldn't think, couldn't see straight, didn't care any more. I grabbed Kim, shouted something at my secretary, and we took off for a long drive. We had lunch at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs and made idle plans to drive to Denver for dinner and a show. Then Kim got the wonderful idea that we could just ensconce ourselves for the day in her apartment. She said she wanted to prepare dinner.

  Great! We made a mock celebration about our breaking way from the grind. The works: a fabulous meal to candlelight and music, and pleasant music afterward.

  We sprawled on pillows thrown onto the floor. We kissed, long and tenderly, and pressed our bodies together, and I moved to make love to her.

  Then suddenly she pulled away and murmured a sleepy invitation for me to go home and sleep in my own bed.

  I glared at her. "What the devil has gotten into you, Kim?"

  Her face a deliberate blank, she looked directly into my eyes. Her voice was silk, purring.

  "How do you mean that, Steve?"

  I gestured helplessly. "What do I have to do, make an official pronouncement of 'I love you'?"

  She shook her head slightly; the firelight glistened off her hair as it followed the motion.

  "I love you, damn it," I forced out.

  "You make that sound as if it hurt to say it, Steve."

  I groaned.

  "It's all right, Steve, honey," she said quickly. "I know you believe you mean it." She was moving away, starting to her feet. But what was it she said?

  "What do you mean, I believe I mean it?"

  "That's right. You believe you love me. I know that."

  "Well, then—"

  She broke in. "That's not the same thing, darling."

  I wanted to gnash my teeth in frustration. I stared at the girl I loved, and I was going around in circles.

  "Kim, you're a wonder," I sighed. "Not even the computer could figure out a woman." I raised my arms and rolled my eyes. "We might as well pack up shop and let everyone go home. That is, if you're the test we put to 79."

  She stopped in her flowing movement and fixed her gaze with mine. Even in the flickering light of the burning logs I could see the change in her expression, the instant expression of doggedness. Lovely, beautiful, soft, wonderful, stubborn-as-a-mule Kim.

  "That's just the problem, Steve," she said. "You put your own finger squarely on it. You believe you love me. I—I'm —well, that's important to me. Very important. But you don't know. You simply aren't sure. You said that not even the computer could figure out a woman, didn't you?"

  I nodded, helpless before her swift right-angle turns of conversation.

  "There you are, darling."

  I groped. "Where the hell is that?"

  "What you said, Steve." She stretched, and I felt that urge to whomp my head a few good ones against the floor.

  "You equate women—how shall I say it? You equate women cybernetically. It's all got to be balanced and equaled out. No loose ends, no untidy strings, no emotions unaccounted for."

  Now she was on her feet. "I think—I don't know—I think I love you, Steve." She pressed her lips together . . . those lips. I wanted to ...

  I did gnash my teeth.

  Her silken caress against my cheek reduced some of the anger.

  "Steve, Steve, my darling, you're trying to program me, and I won't have it."

  I sulked at her. Her hand held me back as I started to my feet.

  "You haven't beaten that thing yet, Steve," she said with a half-whisper. "It seems to hurt you to understand that between your ears you're as much flesh and blood as anyone else and . . ." Her voice faded as she looked intently at me, acting as if she had found something there that before remained unseen to her. "Wouldn't it be fascinating if you found you couldn't have your own way all the time and you decided to join the human race? Every now and then it's nice down here, Steve. It's nice to see you boyishly passionate and silly and romantic and—"

  But I was standing now, and I grabbed my jacket and I didn't even bother to say good night or anything else. Games! Jesus, what the hell did a woman want from a man? I loved that blasted girl, but it didn't mean I had to mope about in some straitjacketed funk because of her silly rules. Where the hell was Barbara's telephone number? . . .

  Next morning we met, as usual, in the cafeteria for breakfast and coffee. I felt vaguely uncomfortable. Kim stirred her coffee, and for several minutes maintained the silence between us. It wasn't a barrier, just a silence I was grateful to have. But it couldn't last forever, and I knew Kim had a final word to say about what had happened. But she caught me off balance with what I had never expected to hear.

  "Did you get it out of your system?"

  She flashed a smile at me, and her laughter had a musical, delighted sound to it.

  "No thanks to you," I said coolly.

  She nodded, never taking her eyes from mine. Christ but she could raise dust all over a room with those eyes!

  "It's obvious you don't mind," I said with as much venom as I could put into the words.

  They had as much as effect as a snowflake in the middle of a blizzard.

  "I wondered about that," she said, too damned casual about it all. "I thought I wouldn't mind. But, honestly, I don't know. I had some mixed emotions about it."

  "You don't act it," I said with a sudden spark of hope.

  "Why should I?" came the unexpected reply. "I don't own you, Steve. I have no call upon you, and I ... I ... can't say anything if you want to sleep with Barbara."

  "How—how in the name of hell did you—"

  She leaned across the table and kissed me lightly on the lips. "You know, I think I really do love you," she whispered. She walked away suddenly, leaving me speechless and with my mouth open like an idiot.

  That's how Selig Albracht found me a few moments later. He alighted at the table like a bearded warrior of Norse mythology, heaved his bulk into a chair with his customary crash, and peered beneath shaggy brows at me.

  "Do you know that you look like an idiot?" he challenged.

  I looked at him stupidly, still with Kim in my mind.

  "W—What?" I stumbled.

  "You are an idiot, I do believe," he said grandly. He turned to follow my gaze, and caught a glimpse of Kim as she left the cafeteria.

  "Oho!" he boomed, drawing everyone's attention. "So that's it!"

  I got back to the ground in a hu
rry. "So that's what, you bearded ape?" I snarled at him.

  "You're a lovesick pup, that's what!" he bellowed.

  It was a hell of a way to start off the new program. But at least with the computer I'd be dealing with logic instead of a beautiful but frustrating woman. And without hairy geniuses who shouted opinions in crowded restaurants.

  Talking with 79 would be a pleasure. I couldn't wait to get started.

  14

  the deeper we explored the growing possibilities of our cybernetics brain, the more excited we became about its true potential. It seemed as if the computer could handle just about any realistic task we put to its vast memory and computing systems. It functioned with a logic that proved relentless, and when weak spots appeared we were chagrined, although not surprised, to note that the fault lay with the programmers. Ourselves.

  The task of feeding and nurturing the memory capacity of 79 was one in which every one of us held the greatest interest. In effect, such programming contained the key to the possibilities of greater and greater success with the relationship between man and his cybernetics servants. Unfortunately, few people in Washington, or anywhere else, for that matter, realized the problems involved in amassing the tremendous stores of knowledge that are the tools with which the computer functions.

  79 differed from other digital-base cybernetics systems in that it enjoyed full feedback and switching theory—a process used by the human brain. If, using all available data, a solution cannot be found, or if the solution found is not acceptable, the brain returns to the problem and seeks different approaches in finding its solution. Oftentimes the result is a solution that is a compromise, but that's a reality of life. 79 could come up with the best possible solution—the least of the many evils involved. If offered, essentially, a multiplicity of choice.

  Now, it's obvious that the more information a man has at his mental fingertips to solve a given problem, the greater are the chances he'll come up with the answer he's seeking. Impede that man with insufficient data, or data that's not quite accurate or is misleading, and your solution may contain explosive ingredients. The computer isn't any different—until it knows better. If you tell the memory banks that the chemical formula for kerosene equals water, than you can get a solution to putting out a fire that calls for spraying kerosene on the flames. It's a drastic example, but no less applicable than one of greater subtlety.