by Roger Elwood
There had been no need, he told himself, for the change to have been as great as it had been; there had been those, history reminded one, who had thought of it all as madness. The idea had been carried farther than there was any need by the great revulsion that had risen at the olden way of life and this revulsion, a madness in itself, had swept all mankind beyond the point of common sense. And yet, perhaps, he thought, it was just as well, for because of it man had, in many ways, a better life and a cleaner planet.
He tried to imagine how it might have been in those days when the rivers ran dirty to the sea and the sea itself was foul, when the air and earth were poisoned and a great noise beat against the land.
The world in which he sat, he thought, had begun to form with the first pollution-killed fish that floated to the surface, with the temperature inversion that had blanketed a city with the smog that it had spawned, with the cry of rage that had gone up against the smoking chimneys and the streams of effluents that were poured into the waters. We must built new cities, men had screamed, and the new cities had been built, but not quite the kind the screamers had envisioned; we must halt the overuse of resources, other men had shouted, and in time the old, time-honored rule of obsolescence had been scrapped and commodities had been built to last— not for ten years or twenty, but for centuries. As a result of this, in time fewer commodities were manufactured and the use of natural resources and energy had diminished and there had been less and less pollution and today the rivers ran crystal to the sea and the air was clean and fresh and the land lay quite unpoisoned since agriculture had been moved indoors and no longer utilized the soil.
A city, he thought. Once a sprawling mass of structures, today three great towers: one for residential purposes, another for agriculture and industry, the third for services—for government, education, arts and sciences, recreation. Three great towers reaching deep into the earth, rearing far into the air, and all operated by electronic wizardry. A people served by cybernetic systems that turned bleak corridors into country lanes, that gave a man an authentic simulation of every possible environment, that did one’s chores and wiped one’s nose and helped to do one’s thinking and placed at each man’s fingertips all the knowledge in the world.
And all of this, he thought, because a crackpot (the first of many crackpots) a bit more than two hundred years ago had bellowed out a maniac conviction that the earth was being poisoned.
From that first crackpot to this, so small a thing to bring about so great a change.
And that was why, he told himself, he must be absolutely certain.
He rose from his chair and went to the console, lifted the think-piece from its cradle and put it on his head. Sitting down in the operator’s chair, he punched in the gross knowledge components, then fed in the factors. He had done it all before, he told himself; he would do it all again. It was not necessary, he was sure; he already knew. But in a thing like this nothing must be left undone.
It was all imagination, of course, but he seemed to see and be aware of, as had happened many times before, the great banked cores of all the knowledge banks that now were open to him—medical at Mayo’s in Minnesota, legal at Harvard, theology in Rome, sociology at California and history at Yale, all these and many more.
And it was not only knowledge. Knowledge in itself was not sufficient. It took more than that; it required the thought enhancement that was electronically built into the instrument. Man and computer now, human brain and robot brain, working in tandem, hooked into the basic banks of the world’s entire hoard of knowledge, with the waiting relays that would open the way to other banks of knowledge should they be required.
Now that all was ready, he asked the question: What would be the long-range effect of intellectual immortality upon the human race? What if the minds of men could be transferred and imprinted upon robotic brains?
But that was not entirely right, of course* You would not imprint a human mind upon a robot brain, then range the brain upon a shelf with other brains and leave it there. You'd mount the brain upon some sort of ambulatory device that would serve the function of a body. You'd have, to some degree, a robotic body, perhaps extremely sophisticated, much more sophisticated than a human body, with many skills a human did not have, and yet it would not be, in many aspects, human. So you'd have intellectual immortality and, in a way, physical immortality, but not human immortality. To become immortal, a man must become a robot.
What was wrong with that? he asked himself. Where lay that nagging flaw? Why was he so reluctant to reach a fast decision? What was it that sent him back again, and yet again, to a simulation of the situation?
Man lived in a computer world, a robotic world, a cybernetic world. Every chore that man could think of was performed, upon command, by cybers. Most of his needs and wishes were fulfilled by cybers. The city in which he lived, the very home in which he lived was a cybernetic system. Men lived easily and comfortably with electronic contraptions and were happy with them. He trusted them and valued them and looked to them not only for his comfort, but for his happiness. The cybernetic system that was one’s home could simulate another environment for one with precise exactitude. It could send you to a beach and it would not be just an impression of a beach, the suggestion of a beach. It would be a beach. You would feel the sand beneath your body, would feel the sea-wind blowing, would know the heat of sun, would hear the sound of surging water and be wetted by it. You would be upon a beach, not pretending you were there, not imagining you were there. You would be really there. It need not be a beach. It could be a forest, a mountaintop, a desert, a jungle, a raft upon the sea, the moon or Mars. It could send you back through time to dwell in a castle on a Rhine, to labor in the fields with serfs on a medieval manor, to participate in a joust upon a field of honor, to sail with a Viking crew.
If one could live with and accept such fantasies as these (an easy thing to do, for they did not seem like fantasies), then why recoil from a fact that was no fantasy— that man, if he chose, could live forever? The robotic brain, or robotic body could not be a part of human rejection of or revulsion against such a situation, for in those simulations of other times or places to which one most willingly subjected himself, he became as intricately, or perhaps more intricately, involved with robotic functions.
Harrison sat before the console and as the thoughts built up within him, he felt, just beyond his reach, but available if he should need to reach out for them, the phantoms of all the massive portions of knowledge packed in the knowledge centers. As if, massed solidly behind him, were all these men, all these thinkers of the ages who had preceded him, standing ready with all their knowing and their counsel. A continuity, he thought, a great human continuity that spanned from the present day back to that old prehistoric ancestor who had come to terms with fire, to that sub-human creature that had struck two flints together to construct a tool. And that, he told himself, was a part of it as well. The minds of men were a resource and here were being used, but in each individual case, a resource with a lifetime limited to less than a century (although now, in this year of 2218, the old limit no longer held and a man, barring accident, could confidently expect to live a century and a half). But that was something new, just as immortality would be something new. And if human minds were a resource, why allow them to be limited by time? Why be content to use a mind for a century and a half and then be content to see it die? Certainly the human minds imprinted upon robotic brains would continue to contribute to humanity and the continuity of the human mind would be that much strengthened.
He did not sense the others moving in, but he knew they had moved in and he closed his eyes and was in a peopled darkness. There was a voice, speaking in the darkness, and that was strange, for in all the times before there had been no voice.
Second-class citizen? asked the voice and it seemed that he was rolling from the darkness, not walking from it, but rolling from it. And it seemed instead of rolling that he was scuttling, moving furtively, afraid
of being seen, shrinking from the ridicule if he should be seen, knowing that in this human world he could not be human who had been human once. Although it seemed strange that he should feel this way, for the very ones who scorned him and reviled him in some later day might become as he.
Dead conservatism? asked the voice in the darkness and when the voice spoke he was no longer rolling, but was huddled in the darkness—a huddled machine among many other huddling machines and as he huddled there he heard the mumblings of his fellows and while he could not make out the words he knew what they said and from this he knew that they were huddling not only in the darkness, but in the past as well. There were the huddling machines, but there were others that were not machines, but rather immobile brains sitting in rows upon the shelves that stretched up and down this place wherein he huddled and these shelved brains seemed more content than those that had the bodies.
Death in life? the voice asked and when the voice stopped another voice spoke, a low and husky voice that belonged to the machine standing close beside him. Humanness, it said to him and all the others there, is not the matter of the mind alone, of the intellect alone. It is, as well, a matter of the body, of the women that we loved or the men we loved, of the things we ate, of lying on a hillside and feeling the earth beneath us and seeing the top branches of a great oak tree against the cloud-flecked sky, the feel of flesh on flesh when we shook hands with a friend, the smell of evergreen at Christmas, the glories of the lilies in the Eastertide . . . The low, husky voice went on and on, but he no longer heard it; he had shut his ears against it. It was saying all he felt and he did not need to hear and he did not wish to hear.
But would it be that way? Need it be that way? Why must these old bogeys rise? Could not humans accept their roboticized members, not as bogeymen, not as aliens, not as harsh reminders of what the future held for each of them, but as a metamorphosis, another way of human life, the only way of human life if there were to be survival? It was either that or death. Surely, on the face of it, anything was preferable to death. Not that death, in itself, was bad, but it was oblivion, an emptiness, an ending and a nothingness and certainly man had a right to expect something more than nothingness.
Unless, he thought—unless there could be something to an afterlife. What if persisting as a human intellect should rob a man of an afterlife? But there was, he thought, no evidence, no evidence at all, that there was such a thing as afterlife. And the thought brought a clamor in his mind—a quarreling clamor from all those others with him.
When the clamor died down, he tried to think again. Perhaps, then, the thing to do was to investigate the theory of an afterlife. But how would one do that? How could one go about it? What kind of investigative process should one use, how could one evaluate the data, how could one be sure the principles applied to that evaluation would be valid?
He reached up and tore off the headset, thumbed the console back to deadness. What the use, he thought. How could one be ever really sure?
He rose, shaken, from the chair, and went back to the living room. He stood before the window, but now there was nothing he could see. Clouds had moved in far below him and masked the landscape.
“A drink, sir?” asked Harley. “I think you need a drink.”
“I think I do,” said Harrison. “Thank you very much.”
The liquor dispenser did not ask. It knew exactly what he wanted. He picked up the drink and turned back to the window.
It made no sense, he knew. It was all old prejudice and bias. Man had the right to expect a shot at immortality, if it were possible. And it was possible. Perhaps not in exactly the form that one might want it, but it was available. It was there and could be had.
The wastefulness, he thought, the utter wastefulness of death. If for no other reason, immortality would recommend itself on economic grounds. But no matter what might be decided, the old objections would still persist; they never went away. If he had stayed longer at the console, the favorable opinions would have wiped away and set at naught all but a tiny nagging doubt that would hang on forever. There was little use, he told himself, in returning to the console. The pattern had been set and it would not change.
He had gone, he knew, as far as he could go.
He went back into his workroom and sat down, not in the console chair, but behind his desk.
“Harley,” he said, “please get me Univac.”
“Surely, sir,” said Harley.
In front of him a shimmer came, that shimmer no amount of work and research ever could get rid of, and the face was there. No body, as would have been the case if it had been a human, but just a face hanging in the air. It could as easily have been a human face, with body, Harrison reminded himself, a human simulation of the mighty system that was, in fact, the city, but the system itself had not gone along with that. “Let us be honest,” it had said and it still was honest—not a human, but a system. And in accord with that it was not a human face that stared across the desk at him, but a strangely mechanistic face, the sort of face than an artist, full of artistic cynicism, might have conjured up to represent the system.
“Mr. Harrison,” said Univac, “how good to see you once again.”
“It is good to see you, too,” said Harrison. “You recall, perhaps, that I spoke with you some time ago about a project I was working on.”
“Yes, of course,” said Univac. “Immortality. How is it getting on?”
“It can be done,” said Harrison. “A human mind can be imprinted. I am sure of that.”
“What does the computation say?”
“It says we can imprint. With no loss. No aberration. A human mind can be transferred intact.”
“And be effective?”
“Entirely effective. There may be, eventually, some emotional loss. We can’t be sure.”
“Mr. Harrison, if that should happen, how important would it be?”
“Immensely important from the human viewpoint, perhaps. Although it might make the mind the more efficient, we are not, of course, entirely sure it would come about.” “You, of course, have done exhaustive simulation?” “Yes,” said Harrison, “exhaustive. That’s what bothers me. It works out. There would be a period of social adjustment, certainly. At first, perhaps not all the people would wish the transfer. There might always be some who would shrink from it, although, as time went, there would be fewer of them. Perhaps the time would come when it would be accepted as a normal course of human life, a normal event in the life of any man. It might take some time for the public to accept the actual presence of robotic humans—not robots, but humans in robotic form —but that, in time, I am sure, would work itself out. Humanity would gain by it. We would be the richer by each human mind that could be saved from death. Our brainpower would increase, with no great additional drain on our natural resources.”
"What is your problem, then?” asked Univac.
"A nagging doubt,” said Harrison. "One that hangs in there and will not go away. Based on certain objections that have no real logic in them. They can be explained away, but they stay. It is, I suppose, a matter of human intuition, if not human judgment. I hate to go against human intuition.”
"So would I,” said the face that was Univac. "What do we do, in such a case? Wait another century, with men dying all the time, to make up our minds?” "Some controlled experiment, perhaps.”
"But we couldn’t do that. Without it leaking out. Can you imagine what might happen if such a thing leaked out? There’d be sheeted hell to pay. The public almost immediately would divide into two hostile groups and the pressure from each group would be unimaginable. It would be an intensely emotional thing, you see . .
"Yes, I know,” said Univac. "I have something else in mind. You have heard, of course, although it is not yet public knowledge, that in another year or so we plan to send out several interstellar probes.”
"Of course. I am a good friend of Anderson. We have talked about it.”
"It strikes me,” said Univac
, "that it might be preferable to send out humans rather than mere instruments. There’d be instruments, of course, but also that other factor you mentioned—human judgment.”
"A controlled experiment,” said Harrison. "Yes, of course it would be that. And if planets should be found, roboticized human minds could go out onto them, no matter what the conditions were. They’d not have the physical limitations . . .”
"Perhaps,” said Univac, "we could send several of them on some of the probes, so that we could study the interaction between several imprinted brains. And on at least one probe, a single imprint, to see how one mind alone could react under . . .”
"It’s a vicious experiment,” said Harrison.
“Most experiments involving humans are vicious. But it would be a matter of free choice. It would be carefully explained to potential volunteers. To a man on the verge of death, it might be preferable.”
“Yes, it might be.”
“Then we’d know,” said Univac. “We’d know if it would work. The trips would run to a number of years. But we wouldn’t have to wait that long. If it appeared to be working, we could engineer a leak about what had been done, then sit back and wait for the reaction. I am willing to wager that in a short time we’d be faced with a wide demand that this business of immortality be made available, immediately, to everyone.”
“And if the reaction were the opposite?”
“Then we’d deny the rumor. We’d say it never happened.”