“But,” said Danielle, “eventually the mouse will ‘recruit’ the remaining portions of its brain to other functions. There’s a certain plasticity to the thing. Learning actually changes brain shape. Specific regions grow or shrink in response to changing environmental demands.”
Kyle grinned at me. “What do you make of that, Jared?”
Jared smiled. “It demonstrates that learning is something that the mouse does to its brain, not something the brain does to the mouse.”
“He’s loaded,” announced a young man at the computer console. Kyle nodded to the screen.
“Watch this.”
The image showed a wire-frame mouse, which I assumed was the “somatic simulation” mentioned earlier. The operator spread his finger and thumb and the viewpoint panned back, so that the mouse appeared placed at the entrance to a maze. I glanced aside at the plastic and wood box on the table. The simulated maze replicated the physical one that Jared had assembled. I thought I knew what was coming.
“That’s why you had us arrange the pattern in the maze,” I said to Kyle, “so we wouldn’t suspect you had preprogrammed anything.”
He answered only with a smile, but Jared murmured, “Now where would we have gotten the idea that Kyle would stack the deck?”
“Cyber-Algernon is all set,” the operator told us. “And…go.”
The simulation scurried through the maze, making all the correct turns. When it came to a certain point on the straight-away, it leaped.
I sucked in my breath and jerked my head to look at Kyle.
“That’s why you had me set that hurdle. So we’d know. No other mouse in the universe would have been trained to hop at that precise point in that particular maze.”
Kyle had slouched in his chair, long legs protruding, hands balled together and tucked under his chin. He nodded toward the computer. “That’s Algernon in there. That is freaking Algernon.”
Afterward, we went to an upscale restaurant in River Rouge, just the three of us; not to celebrate the success of the experiment—Kyle had run the test many times before he dared invite us to witness it—but just because the three of us had not dined together for some time. On the way over in the limo, Kyle ran on about the experiment and the possibilities it opened up. I asked enthusiastic questions; but Jared remained monosyllabic, which I did not take for a good sign.
At Courier du Bois, we were shown to Kyle’s “usual table” and left to study the menu, which was burned into elk hide, in keeping with the theme.
“The central human ability,” Jared said finally, “is our ability to ‘see what matters when.’ And data, no matter how much there is, never adds up to context.”
“Don’t get all metaphysical on my ass,” Kyle said. “You beat that drum too often. Theoretical objections don’t matter now that we have empirical success.” The sommelier brought a wine list to us and Kyle pointed. “Two bottles of the ’12. Those should be old enough to drink, d’you think?” He handed the wine list back and picked up the menu. “Let’s see here…Hmm. I don’t see crow on the menu. Do you, Mac?”
I preferred to stay out of it, but saw no way to duck a direct question. There was something going on between my two friends that ran deeper than philosophy and computers. I turned to Jared. “He couldn’t have preprogrammed that demo. I don’t think it’s a trick this time.” It wouldn’t hurt to remind Kyle that he had tried to trick us before, and we had empirical reasons to be skeptical.
“No, it wasn’t a trick,” Jared admitted. “But it might not mean what you think it means. Facts never explain themselves. We—you, me, people—we have to apply meaning to them. Everything we saw cyber-Algernon do was physical, it can be accounted for by sensation and imagination, and those are purely material powers. You can’t extrapolate that to immaterial powers like conception and volition.”
“Mice don’t have such powers,” Kyle objected.
Jared gave him a level stare. “No, mice don’t.”
“Look, guys,” I pleaded with them. “Can’t we just have a pleasant dinner together? Forget cyber-mice, forget metaphysics; but never forget friendship.”
Jared and Kyle both looked away at the same time. Kyle muttered something under his breath. Jared said, “Just for you, Mac.”
And it was a fine meal, a companionable refection full of humor and bonhomie. There was wine and talk and laughter, and by mutual and unspoken assent we avoided any mention of the AI project, or indeed of philosophy or computers of any sort. Sporting teams were mentioned and their prospects assessed. A new threedy, Beggars in Spain, was quietly building an audience by word of mouth. Chef Brian was called forth from his culinary domain to receive our approbation. There was a book that the critics all agreed simply must be read which we decided by a vote of two to one ought not. There was an election coming up and we agreed there was an outside chance one of the parties would nominate a candidate of substance. We had not shared such a meal since Vienna, now many years distant, and while we talked of many things, very few of them, thank God, were of any grave importance.
But toward the end, as we prepared to leave the restaurant, Jared said something odd to Kyle. Kyle had said he was sorry that Gladdys couldn’t make it and Jared said, oddly, “Remember Gödel’s theorem. There are things that are true that can’t be proven.”
Kyle’s face closed up after that and the handshakes that followed were perfunctory. After Kyle was gone, I asked Jared what he had meant, but he would not say.
Kyle took the red-eye flight to Budapest that night; and when I awoke in the morning at the hotel, Jared was already on the New Twenty-first Century Limited sliding toward the City to connect with the Metrocela. Not too long afterward I was heading back to Chicago on the 80-90 Bullet.
It was the last time all three of us would be together in the flesh.
A FLASH IN THE BRAINPAN
Some wag in NM called the neural transcription process a “flashbulb in the brain.” They soon discovered from their experiments on mice that they could not proceed piecemeal. Each transcription fried the neuron it copied; and when a sufficient number of nodes had been broken the neurological network fell into disjoint segments. Neurologists grew excited because the surviving mice would behave in various peculiar ways. There was some evidence of multiple personality disorder, although it was difficult enough to tell if a mouse had a personality, let alone more than one. Other mice became obsessive-compulsive or developed even shorter attention spans than usual. It all depended on which parts of the brain’s neural net were disconnected from which other parts. As usual, in his pursuit of eternal downloaded life, Kyle’s researchers had stumbled on half a dozen useful spin-offs.
So there was no help for it but to record the entire neural net at once. This, of course, fried all the neurons, so there were not even disjoint segments left. Kyle proffered me a contract to analyze the topological connectivity of the brain’s neural structure. It was a handsome fee, but I hesitated too long and shortly received a message from the Dean informing me that if I did not accept the contract the University would lose a substantial bequest. Nothing more needed saying. It was long, difficult research and while useful, the results were hardly spectacular.
A few years after we had watched Algernon do his thing, Kyle spun off Com-Pet-itive Solutions to market a line of virtual pets. These were simulated dogs and cats imprinted with the neural patterns of actual pets flashed in the process of euthanasia. Anyone who has owned one knows that dogs and cats have distinct personalities, and those who opted to flash their dying pets rather than put them down in the usual way swore up and down that their virtual reconstructions had all the quirks of their corporeal predecessors. Either it was wishful thinking on the part of grieving pet owners or Kyle had actually captured their pets’ essences by copying their brain patterns.
Jared pointed out that since modern science did not believe in “essences,” this raised grave philosophical problems about what Com-Pet-itive Solutions thought they were actually copy
ing. You would think the Old Jogger would be grateful, Kyle texted me shortly after Jared had raised that point. Haven’t I proved the existence of souls? Me, I took Kyle at his word. He cared less about the logical coherence of his basic assumptions than he did about the results.
Naturally, parents began to request the same for their dying children, but the FDA withheld approval. There was also a degree of pushback from the general public, those who objected to human euthanasia. It was a tragedy for a child to die; it was murder to kill him.
“That someone faces inevitable death,” Jared told me on a pix-call, “does not justify pushing him into the abyss.”
“Why not?” I had asked him.
“Because all of us face inevitable death, Mac. So that puts all of us at risk. Remember what I told you once about the danger of one day treating real people as if they were sims? The real danger of gadget worship is what it does to our conception of ourselves.”
The public debate boiled over when the right-to-die people joined in. They issued a press release stating that while they opposed flashing children because children could not give consent, the same objection did not apply to terminally ill adults.
The FDA still balked and even NM weighed in saying that the necessary primate studies had not been performed to ensure the process would even work at the human level. A dog or cat was one thing; apes, dolphins, or humans were orders of magnitude more complex. A chimpanzee has twice the encephalization of a dog or cat, a dolphin twice that of a chimp, and a human twice that of a dolphin.
It’s not simply a matter of scaling up, Kyle said in a podcast during the height of the controversy. Vertebrate brains are the most complex structures known to science. Do you want to know what a billion synapses looks like? It looks like one cubic millimeter of human cerebral cortex. The human cortex contains something on the order of twenty billion neurons, each with 10,000 synaptic connections. That makes two hundred trillion synapses. Friends, that’s bigger than the national debt. Now…We can cut this down by eliminating most of the purely somatic circuits, but there’s still a lot more complexity remaining than you’d find in a dog or cat. So before we can flash a human mind, we must cut down the number of synapses we need to record, and increase the capacity of our qubes. Only after we achieve a meeting between the size of the mind and the capacity of the q-bit computer, will human virtual immortality be within our reach.
“No, it won’t,” Jared texted me afterward. “A man might achieve immortality in an analogous sense by writing his autobiography; but that biography, no matter how detailed and extensive, will not be him. Neither would a biography written in an alphabet of synapses, let alone a photocopy of it.”
I asked him if he had told that to Kyle and he answered, “Why bother?”
And so NM itself took the matter off the public table and a shroud of silence descended on their public relations releases. We heard no more on human flashing. As far as the newsfeeds were concerned, all work on it seemed to cease. There were two possible reasons that I could see. Either Kyle had run into an insuperable obstacle, or he was continuing the work in secrecy.
“Do you really think Kyle would ever give up?” Jared texted me when I broached the possibility. “He probably finds the work goes a lot faster without a lot of noise.” And then he added something that puzzled me at the time. “I never thought it would go this far.” It was only later that I realized that it was not an admission of defeat, but a fear of success.
THE GUEST IN THE MACHINATIONS
Among the three of us, communications slowed. Kyle threw himself into his work; Jared, into classes and closely-written papers that no one read. Living on the far side of the moon in Chicago, I found myself more and more out of the loop. Besides, I had my own interests.
One of those interests was Beth Phillips. I had been a bachelor for so long that I barely recognized what had come upon me when it did. After that winter when we had dined with Jared, she and I began to find excuses to text, to meet, attend shows and showings, and generally provide pretenses to be in one another’s company. I am glad to say that we were friends before we were anything else. Jared evinced no surprise at the news. I knew it at that first dinner, he texted me when I announced our engagement. Kyle responded by assuring me that I would thoroughly enjoy living with Beth. I’m not sure which response irritated me more.
In any event, our association proved fruitful for both her archeology and my mathematics, as we found a confluence of interests in building upon old work by Rashevsky, Renfrew and others on mathematical history. So I was able to make certain probabilistic statements regarding the size and distribution of Elamite pueblos along the Iranian coast and Beth was able to discover the sites of six of them and establish the connection between Elam and Harappa beyond reasonable doubt.
This might not excite anyone who has never heard of Harappa or Elam, which on the evidence would constitute the vast majority of the population, but the tablets she unearthed established sufficient overlap in inscriptions to permit Khan and Gazdar a few years later to finally crack the Harappan cuneiform. Best of all, none of it had any connection to Kyle’s AI project.
It did, however, result in my invitation to the AMS convention when it was held in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to sit on a panel on the mathematical study of history. Daniel Hotchkiss, the pure historian on the panel, declared that history could not be captured by numbers, and I surprised him by agreeing. The world had metrical properties and non-metrical properties, and only the former could be netted by mathematics. The remainder required a different kind of understanding. Maybe that concession was due to Jared’s influence.
It was funny that I thought of Jared, for that very evening in the Blue Grotto, after my dining companions had gone, Gladdys Kenrick-Holtzmann slipped into the chair across the table from me.
“Mac!” she said. “How delightful to see you! It’s been years, hasn’t it?”
My gap-mouthed silence expressed my surprise. “Gladdys,” I said when I had found my voice. I started to rise; but as she was already seated, aborted the motion. “What are you doing in Valley Forge?”
“Major shopping expedition,” she confided. “King of Prussia Mall.”
By that I knew Jared was not with her. Princeton was only forty or fifty miles up the highway, but still it seemed a ways to travel just for shopping. She said it was a coincidence running into me, but I could run the probabilities. I very much doubted that a department store clerk had mentioned the mathematics conference to her, as she claimed. It wasn’t the sort of chatter that department store clerks passed on to their customers.
“Is Beth with you? I’m so sorry we weren’t able to come to the wedding.”
“No. I’m traveling back home tomorrow.” The wedding had been a small family affair. Invitations had been sent, but I hadn’t really expected Kyle to interrupt his Chinese negotiations or Jared to leave the symposium in Oxford. I waited for Gladdys to get to her point, which she did with commendable dispatch after a few perfunctory questions about my own well-being.
“Have you heard from Kyle lately?”
“Not really,” I said. “We exchange emails now and then, especially after NM came up with that neural prosthetic. I expect he and Jared communicate far more often than he and I.”
Gladdys unfolded one of the napkins on the table, refolded it, smoothed it out. “He and Jared aren’t as close as they once were.”
“Oh. Did they quarrel?” And I could not help but recall their quarrel in college.
“No. No, it’s not like that. They just…grew distant.”
The opposite of love, Jared had once told me, was not hate, but indifference. And of the two, indifference might be the worse. Hate has a sort of vitality; but indifference was like one of Beth’s Elamite pueblos, forgotten and enveloped by drifting time.
“He’s only twenty miles away,” Gladdys said with a strangle-grip on the poor napkin. “And he never comes by or even calls.”
Yet I was certain that
Kyle had moved to New Jersey to be closer to Jared. Did she want me to make excuses for him? Did she think I could make him call?
“I remember how you used to referee their debates, back in the day. Maybe you could…”
“I hardly ever hear from him, myself,” I reminded her.
“But…He’s so much fun to be around. I…Jared needs that in his life. He needs someone carefree and frivolous. He needs…”
“A sprinter?”
“What? Oh. Yes, I suppose so. Jared is so…steady, dependable…”
“That’s pretty terrible,” I agreed. “Dull?”
“Oh, he doesn’t think so; and I guess among his like-minded friends he can be a real live wire. But he’s like a monotone—la, la, la—and that’s fine. That’s a ground, a tenor; but there ought to be a bit of, of duplum, don’t you think? There ought to be improvisation, jazz. Kyle is attentive. He knows how to turn a, a compliment. Jared…gathers dust.”
“He doesn’t attend your concerts?”
“Oh, of course he does. But it’s like it’s his duty, and…” She suddenly fell silent and looked away from the table. “I suppose I ought to be heading home.”
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose you ought.”
She looked at me with a curious glance, as if I had said more than I had. Then she reached across the table to take my wrist. “Poor Mac! Always caught in the middle. I’m sorry I unloaded on you. But tell me this. Your sister. Why her?”
The question brought sudden fear. Maddy doesn’t tell me everything. “Jared hasn’t been…”
“What? Jared? No, but Kyle has!”
“Ah.” I pondered that for a moment. “Maybe because she’s like his AI: forever just out of reach. She told him not to call anymore, you know. She has her own world, and Kyle doesn’t fit. Gladdys, Kyle has trouble sometimes remembering the name of the woman he’s with. Maddy doesn’t want to be just another notch on his gun. She’s the only woman he ever set his sights on and never bagged.”
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