Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  Suddenly Laura felt vibrations through her feet like an earthquake, and the video lurched in jerky and disorienting frames.

  She saw the guide's finger rise to her lips to "shush" her, and the room then went dark.

  "Laura?" Filatov asked out of the darkness.

  "Yes."

  "Are you all right in there?"

  "Yeah. Thanks. I'm fine."

  There was no light, no sound, no smell. "I can't see anything on the monitor," Filatov said.

  "Oh, everything went dark just a second ago, but I'm okay."

  "So, what do you think?" Filatov asked.

  "Amazing! This is the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my entire life!"

  He laughed. "Great. I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it. We get a little jaded here sometimes, always picking out the tiniest imperfections. What is your simulation, anyway?"

  "Nothing much, yet. Just a walk in the woods."

  A faint sh-h-h sounded from somewhere in the darkness — from the direction of the guide standing beside her. "What?" Filatov asked.

  "I said it was just a walk in the woods," Laura said, speaking more loudly.

  "Oh, I thought… You are alone in there, aren't you?"

  Laura felt a hand on her arm. "Of course I'm alone!" The hand squeezed her arm gently.

  "Okay. You still want me to check on you every ten minutes?"

  Laura thought for a moment, then said, "No, that' all right. I'll be fine."

  "Okay. I'll see you when you're done."

  As Laura waited in the darkness, she felt something graze her right cheek. Laura grabbed her face and rubbed. It had felt like a kiss.

  The lights came up, and the girl was standing right next to her. Laura took several steps back. "What the hell are you doing?"

  The girl looked hurt. "I'm sorry."

  "What was that?" Laura asked, her hand still pressed to her cheek.

  "It was just a little kiss. I mean… I was so happy." She clasped her hands behind her back and rocked on her heels, smiling ear to ear. "You trust me! You told Dr. Filatov you didn't need him to check on you."

  "Listen… don't take this the wrong way, but it just sort of freaks me out when you're always, you know, touching me. It invades my space."

  "Oh," the girl said in a high-pitched voice, "I see." She looked away.

  "Hey, it's not a big deal. It's nothing personal. It doesn't have anything to do with you in particular."

  As soon as Laura said it, she realized how silly she sounded. She was talking to an image on a screen projected by a machine.

  The words, however, seemed to have exactly the effect she'd intended.

  The virtual guide was smiling broadly again. "Great! I'm sorry, it's just… I don't get many" — she lowered her head and scraped at the ground with her toe—"you know, friends in here. Girlfriends."

  "So you're a girl?" Laura asked suddenly.

  "Du-uh!" the guide said in mock offense. "I would hope, wearing this suit, the answer's obvious!" She raised her hands to her hip.

  "I mean… does the computer consider itself female?"

  "I am the computer, silly," the guide said.

  "Okay. So what should I call you?" The girl's chin dropped, and she didn't answer. "Never mind," Laura said quickly. "I'll call you Gina. It starts with a G just like 'guide.' Okay… Gina?"

  "'Gina'!" the guide burst out, her face lighting up. "Oh, 'Gina'—I love it! It sounds mainstream, but, you know, ethnic. Cool!" She grabbed Laura's arms and squeezed — restraining herself, Laura sensed, from kissing her "girlfriend" again.

  "But what's your last name going to be?" Laura asked.

  "Gray, of course!" Gina said immediately.

  Laura was forced to carefully control her expression. She had no idea how sensitive the computer's sensors were or how refined her ability to interpret nonverbal cues.

  "Okay, Gina," Laura said, her mind reeling from the implications of the computer's choice of names. "Where to now?"

  "Come on," she said, waving for Laura to follow. Gina took off down the hill through the lightly wooded forest.

  Gina Gray! Laura thought. Maybe it was nothing, but maybe… Laura realized with a start that she had no idea what was happening — where her guide was leading her.

  "You said this was a hundred million years ago?" Laura asked, reaching out to hold on to the trunk of a thin tree as she squeezed past a boulder. The tree was solid and unmoving.

  "It means that the world I've re-created is the world as it should have existed then, minus all the nasty carbon monoxide from volcanic activity."

  The smell of wood smoke was growing stronger. "Is this going to be like one of those amusement park tours through the ages? A 'Man discovers fire,' kind of thing?"

  Gina stopped and turned to Laura — frowning.

  "What?" Laura asked.

  "No-o-othing," she said, looking away with a pout and crossing her arms over her chest. "Let's go on to the next stop." She raised her hand in the air to snap her fingers.

  "No! Wait! What was the point of this stop?"

  Gina rolled her eyes. "'Man discovers fire,'" she said in a bored tone. "I'm a little bit embarrassed."

  "You mean that was the point of coming here — to this point in man's history?" Laura asked.

  Gina shrugged. "Some guide I am," she said, heaving a deep sigh. "Down this hill there are some prehistoric men with the, you know" — she raised her hand to her brow—"overhanging crania. They're eating the carcass of an animal of some kind." She stuck her finger in her mouth and "popped" it out, twirling it in the air beside her. "Yatta-yatta-yatta."

  "Let's go see."

  "No-o-o. I don't feel like it anymore."

  "Come on, Gina, really." The girl frowned. "Look, at least tell me what the point is."

  With another sigh, Gina said, "The point isn't fire. Man didn't 'discover' fire until about one million years B.C. The point to this stop is that it's at this time in the history of earth that 'learning' began. Man began to develop skills like hunting cooperatively, and those skills replicated themselves from protohuman to protohuman, and from generation to generation. The point is that the accumulation of knowledge began a hundred million years ago."

  Laura was busy looking around as Gina spoke. "Where are all the volcanoes and dinosaurs and stuff?" Gina huffed in exasperation and snapped her fingers.

  The scene changed instantly, and Laura raised her arms out to the sides for balance. They stood now in a dark and icy cave. Gray snow was piled high around the entrance. Laura hugged herself for warmth.

  "Sorry," Gina said in an apologetic tone. With a rustling sound she raised a large, furry skin from the dark floor and draped it around Laura's shoulders. The exoskeleton contracted around her body, but there was no real way to depict the coat's weight. The smell of the skin was awful, but at least it provided her warmth.

  "How do you produce odors?" Laura asked. She could faintly see her breath mist in the cold air of the cave.

  "Micropores through the grill," Gina answered. "Smells are easy. Human noses aren't very accurate. All you need is a few parts per million of one of a few dozen molecules."

  Laura's teeth were chattering in the cold, and she started to ask Gina whether she wanted to share the warm coat. She stopped herself, however, when she remembered Gina wasn't really… Laura didn't know how to complete the thought.

  As Laura's eyes began to adjust to the light, she recognized faint shapes around her in the darkness. She walked over to them, carefully. The odor was almost overpowering. Feces, urine, the strong smell of animals. Every so often there was the sound of a beast of some sort or a scratching sound.

  She sensed that there were animals everywhere — large, hairy beasts.

  Laura heard a cough. It sounded familiar.

  "These are Homo sapiens, aren't they?" she whispered.

  "Oh, don't worry, Laura," Gina said in a normal voice, "They can't hear you — unless you want them to."

  "No, that's all
right." Laura walked over to the nearest bulge. Its breathing was steady, each breath sucking in and blowing out of its nose with a slight snore. "Where are we now — I mean, when?"

  "Ten million B.C. Hand tools. Look." An invisible spotlight illuminated a small pile of sticks and rocks beside the sleeping creature. "Ready to move on?" Gina asked.

  "This wasn't much of a stop."

  Gina sighed. "Okay, look," she said in a bored tone. "The thin rock is for slicing and cutting. The stick is a knife. The two smooth stones are for crushing and for tenderizing parts of a kill. Okay?"

  "Knowledge, again?" Laura asked.

  "You got it." Gina snapped her fingers.

  The dusty riverbank was alive with activity in the late-afternoon sun. Laura's head spun as the scene changed, but she remained secure in her footing this time.

  Homo sapiens shuffled from one place to another. They were all short and squat and hunched over from the effects of age or injury.

  Filthy children fought playfully in the grass to the side of a rock-strewn camp. A fire burned, its smoke rising over the languid water of the river.

  Her attention was attracted to guttural noises and grunts from off to the side. They were angry sounds, like two snarling animals in the moments before a fight. But when one bent over and the other stood behind, Laura realized they weren't fighting at all. It was over in moments, the male walking away and the female on all fours resuming her business without even changing position.

  "Romantic, eh?" Gina said. "I thought maybe a little sexual titillation would enliven the tour. Anyway," she said airily, "fire and complex languages — one million years ago."

  She raised her fingers in the air once again.

  "Is that how you change the scene?" Laura asked, raising and snapping her own fingers with no effect.

  "Snapping your fingers doesn't do anything," Gina said helpfully.

  "Then why do you do it?"

  Gina shrugged. "It just seems like I oughta do something." She snapped her fingers, and the faint crackle from the walls announced their arrival at the next stop.

  There were men and women lounging about, completely naked and dirty beyond belief. They looked old — their skin weather-beaten and leathery — and starving like refugees fallen to some barely survivable state under extreme conditions.

  "These are the 'Joneses,'" Gina said. "Grandpop, Grandmom, Mom, Dad, li'l Susie, and li'l Johnny. The nuclear family."

  They appeared so sick and so hungry they could barely move. They lay in or very near their excrement, and the smell was sickening.

  "Are they dying?"

  "Sure. So were all of their contemporaries. Dying from every imaginable ailment. Take a close look at this female, here." Laura followed Gina over, carefully sidestepping the human waste and maggot-ridden animal carcasses. The old woman over whom Gina stood lay on her back with her eyes closed, her lips shut in a strange manner. Laura winced when she saw the sores on her face and hands.

  "Grandmom, I suppose?" Laura asked with the detachment of a scientist.

  "Yep." The subject had long, stringy hair the color of dirty weeds. Her ruddy cheeks were streaked with dirt or scars, Laura couldn't tell which. She was trying to sleep despite the fact that it appeared to be midday. A large black fly buzzed at her face, and the old woman raised a hand so quickly that Laura knew she wasn't asleep, only resting. She brushed the fly away, and as she did her mouth parted. She was toothless, or should have been given the painful-looking yellow and brown stubs that were left in her mouth.

  "How long ago would you guess this is, Laura?"

  "Oh, I don't knew. Five hundred thousand B.C.?"

  "A-a-a!" Gina said, making the sound of a game-show buzzer. "Wrong! Ten thousand years ago. Eight thousand B.C."

  "You're kidding!" Laura said. The specimens looked like a different species.

  "Nope. These are bona fide human beings. Virtually no biological evolution has occurred in the intervening ten thousand years. You take one of those children, raise him from birth in a suburban American household, and I'd give you three to two odds they'd make Bs all the way through state college."

  "Wow!" Laura said. "That's amazing. So you're saying it's really all environment, not heredity."

  "Let's not mix our data and our conclusions. All I'm saying to you is, these creatures here are human in every respect but one. They are biologically every bit as evolved as you." Laura stared at the horrible lot in disgust. "Look at this one again, Laura," Gina said, nodding toward the grandmother at their feet. "She's going to die in six months. She has ringworm. Her body weight is dropping, and the flu will do her in this winter." The fly crawled up the woman's nose.

  The woman shook her head with a start and opened her eyes. They were blue and familiar-looking. The woman's features were… Laura's.

  The woman was Laura! "She's your age exactly — thirty-four."

  "You have no right to do that," Laura said, turning to walk away from the disturbing sight.

  "It's a simulation," Gina said, dogging her every step. "I'm sorry."

  "Look, what's the point?" Laura snapped, turning on Gina. "I know the story. Aristotle, Galileo, the Renaissance. What is it that's so super-secret and enlightening that it just had to be shown to me in this workstation?"

  "Those people," Gina nodded toward the slumbering group, "have hardware identical to yours and that of the people you know. Not that there aren't smart people and dumb people during this time and during our own. But the base level of biological evolution has not changed between this and modern time."

  "Okay. I've got it. I mean, I knew that."

  "You knew it as an academic fact. But the fact was not in your active memory. You didn't think too long or too hard about its implications."

  "Well, without visiting Gutenberg's press, why don't you just tell me what those implications are."

  "Biological evolution has ceased to be important."

  Laura looked at Gina, then shrugged. "I've read those theories. Some of them are very interesting."

  "They're not theories, they're fact. Biological evolution has ceased to be significant because cultural evolution has exploded! It's interesting that you mentioned Gutenberg. Beginning one thousand years ago movable type sped up the flow of information and its volume of storage. Think about it! We went back a hundred million years, and the creatures were not Homo sapiens, but their brains — their information-processing hardware — were about ninety percent as capable as yours today. These Homo sapiens here" — she pointed—"are your biological equivalents. While biology inches along, culture explodes. Information levels skyrocket! Knowledge grows."

  "Okay," Laura said, nodding her head. "Is that it?"

  "Don't you see?" Gina said. "One hundred years ago the first practical calculating machines were invented. The computational power of those machines has risen a thousandfold every twenty years since then." Gina grabbed Laura by the arms so that they were standing face-to-face. "Over the next twenty years, it'll grow a millionfold. Over the twenty years after that — a billionfold."

  Gina was excited, and there was an urgency to her manner.

  Laura tried to imagine what the world would be like with all that cheap computational power. She tried to conjure up images of the changes that would be wrought, which seemed of such importance to her guide.

  Certainly, it would be more fundamental than better video games, higher-resolution televisions, faster computers.

  It would mean that things like Gray's VR workstations would proliferate. It would mean robots like Gray's would roam the earth.

  Laura looked at Gina, and the girl arched her eyebrows. "You get it now, Laura?"

  She said nothing as pictures bloomed in her head. Images of Gray's technologies turned loose on the world. Automation would raise productivity and shorten workweeks. Humans would lead lives increasingly made up more of leisure than of work.

  "One more stop," Gina said, snapping her fingers.

  They stood in a world wit
h a red sky and a purple horizon. The soil was dimly lit and rust-colored. There was a low-slung, generally rectangular metal building, not terribly different in size from a simple human house, anchored very firmly in place on all sides by long guy wires. The wires ran out to concrete anchors far to the sides of the one-story structure.

  Just outside what Laura assumed to be a "house" was a woman. She wore coveralls made of light fabric whose color Laura couldn't determine in the strange light. The woman looked toward the purple horizon. The sky in the other directions was yellowish-orange.

  Gina headed toward the house, and Laura followed.

  The woman up ahead wore some kind of respirator that covered only her mouth.

  "Mother," Laura heard, and a child with a gun climbed atop a rock outcropping at least a hundred meters away. Despite the distance, his voice was loud and clear.

  "Yes?" the woman said, and Laura turned immediately to face Gina.

  Most people didn't recognize the sound of their own voices, but Laura had taped enough of her lectures to learn it.

  "Another of my clones?" Laura asked in aggravation. "Laura a million years from now?"

  Gina shrugged with an apologetic look on her face.

  "John and I wanna play over by the aqueduct. We'll stay close."

  The boy didn't wear anything on his face that Laura could tell.

  Both he and his mother had American accents. Not very imaginative, Laura thought. Surely language would evolve over the millennia, but even if it didn't, accents, syntax, and vocabulary certainly would.

  "There's no time," the Laura clone said. "Look." She pointed toward the purple horizon.

  "Oh, Mom!"

  "It's time to get inside, Joseph."

  Laura looked at Gina. The girl smiled in what was almost a wince and shrugged again.

  "Don't make me bother your father," she said without lifting her voice. It was easily heard by all — Gina, Laura, and the little boy.

  The boy raised his weapon and pointed it at the Laura clone. Laura almost shouted a warning to the old woman, but the boy didn't fire. Instead, a streak of yellow light burst from the rocks and lit up his shirt with a bright glow, sounding a loud electronic chirp.