by Greg Bear
Goldsmith wore a hospital gown. His right arm and neck were already equipped with intravenous tubes. He lay silent on the gurney, alert and observant. Seeing Albigoni in the gallery, Goldsmith lifted his left hand in brief greeting, dropped it and turned away.
Albigoni stared wide eyed into the amphitheater. Lascal held his arm gently. They sat and Albigoni squinted, rubbing the bridge of his nose with both hands.
Margery and Erwin applied the field pads to Goldsmith’s temple.
Martin heard him say, “Good luck. If something happens and I don’t come back…Thank you. I know you all did your best.”
“There’s no danger,” Erwin said.
“Anyway,” Goldsmith said ambiguously.
Margery applied the inducer field. Goldsmith drowsed off in a matter of minutes. With his eyes closed, his lips worked briefly—that curious reflexive prayer seen in every sleep induced patient Martin had ever treated—and his features relaxed. The wrinkles on his face smoothed. He might have been ten years younger. Margery and Erwin lifted him into the triplex couch and applied arm, thigh, head and thorax restraints. Martin asked for the time. The theater manager’s feminine voice called out, “Thirteen zero five thirty-three.”
“All signs normal,” Margery said. “He’s yours, Dr. Burke.”
“Let’s begin MRI full cranial,” Martin said, emerging from behind the curtain. “Give me four likely loci.”
David and Karl lifted a hollow tube filled with super-conducting magnets and slipped it into grooves on each side of Goldsmith’s head. David conducted a quick check of Goldsmith’s connections before attaching the cable.
Then, equipment humming faintly, David made a series of rough scans of Goldsmith’s brain and upper spinal cord. “Wall screen,” Martin asked. The amphitheater manager brought down a display over the couch and Martin talked his way through the series of MRI scans. Red circles in the hypothalamus indicated computer guesses at likely probe positions based upon past experience. Coordinates for seven of those positions were fed into the prep container for the nanomachines, which would take their bearings from the points of the inducer field nodes; each tiny nanomachine would know where it was to within a few angstroms.
Karl lifted the steel lid on the prep container and removed a transparent plastic cylinder. Martin took the cylinder from him and examined it briefly by eye. Medical nano past its prime betrayed a telltale rainbow sheen. This container was over a year old but still fresh, with the right grayish pink color. Martin returned the cylinder and Karl fitted it into the saline bottle. Gray clouds of prochines quickly dulled the crystalline liquid. Margery removed the cylinder when it was empty, inserted a nutrition vial and squeezed it into the saline while Erwin hooked up the tubes to Goldsmith’s neck entry. A simple clamp prevented the charged saline from flowing down the tube.
Carol and David released a second nanomachine cylinder into a second bottle of saline. These were prochines equipped with drugs; they would travel through the arm entry into the heart and bring the body’s metabolism slowly, cautiously down to deep dreamless neutral sleep, something the sedation fields could not do. The prochines also carried immune system buffers that would control reaction to the nanomachines when they entered at Goldsmith’s neck.
Carol hooked up the arm tube. She removed the clamp. Charged saline flowed into his arm.
“Reduce field strength to reference level,” Martin said. The control panel manager did so. Martin peered curiously at Goldsmith’s face, waiting for signs of narcosis. He lifted back an eyelid. “Give him five more minutes, then release the main charge.”
He backed away and glanced up at the gallery. Circled O with forefinger and thumb. Albigoni did not react.
“Cheerful man,” he muttered to Carol.
Carol followed him behind the curtain. “Lunch,” she suggested. “We can take at least an hour off. The others can monitor him.”
Martin sighed and looked at his slate. He shivered slightly with some pentup tension. “Now is as good a time as any.”
“The prober has to be in the proper state of mind,” she reminded him with a mother’s chiding voice. She looked at him intently. “Relaxed, clear thinking.”
“Faust was never relaxed,” he said. “He couldn’t afford to be.” He jerked his head in the direction of the gallery and noticed with some puzzlement that the glass had been opaqued. “Albigoni’s spooking me. He acts like a zombie.”
“You should talk to him before we go to lunch.”
Martin smiled abruptly, tool Carol by her shoulders and hugged her. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
“We’re a team,” Carol said, pushing back his hug gently. “Let’s go talk.”
They walked through the exit and up the stairs to the gallery. When they entered, Albigoni was in subdued conversation with Lascal and another man. Martin recognized him: Francisco Alvarez, grant and funding director for UC Southern Campuses. Now Martin understood; the glass had been blocked to prevent Alvarez from seeing into the theater below.
Alvarez smiled and stood. “Dr. Burke. Glad to meet you again.”
“It’s been a few years,” Burke said. They shook hands, Alvarez gripping lightly.
“I’m arranging for your funding,” Albigoni said, glancing up at Martin. His eyes were hooded, dark. “Tomorrow I’ll be meeting with the chief counsel for the President. I’m true to my word, Dr. Burke.”
“Never doubted it,” Burke said.
“I’m not even going to ask what’s going on here,” Alvarez said with a little laugh. “It must be important, if it involves the President.”
“Funding is always important,” Albigoni said. “You had something to say, Dr. Burke?”
Martin looked between the three for a moment, staggered by the connections and money involved in this simple scene. The President’s counsel. Perhaps next the Attorney General? A winding down of the investigation into the IPR’s alleged connections with Raphkind?
Carol touched his arm lightly.
“The process is started,” Martin said. “Everything will be ready by this time tomorrow. We have a lot of work to do between now and then but we can take a break, get ready for the main event.”
“I understand,” Albigoni said. “Mr. Alvarez and I have more things to discuss.”
Martin nodded. He and Carol backed away and Martin closed the gallery door behind them.
“Jesus, what arrogance, bringing Alvarez here,” Martin said as they walked up the rear stairs to ground level. He realized he was sweating and his neck was tense. “Maybe Albigoni controls him, too.”
“At least he’s functioning,” Carol said. “Albigoni, I mean.”
48
LitVid 21/1 A Net (David Shine, Evening Report): “The only news we have from AXIS may or may not be significant. A recently received analysis shows that at least three of the circular tower formations discovered by AXIS on Alpha Centauri B-2 are made up of mixes of minerals and organic materials, the minerals being calcium carbonate and aluminum and barium silicates, and the organic materials being amorphous carbohydrate polymers similar to cellulose found in terrestrial plant tissue. AXIS has told its Earth-based masters that, in its opinion, the towers may not be artificial structures…That is, not created by intelligent life. We’ve been given no clue as to how they might have been created.
“Will we suffer a kind of backlash of disappointment if it turns out that the circles of towers on B-2 are natural? Have we prepared ourselves, in the last few days, for a new age of wonder and challenge, when in fact it has only been a false alarm?
“As always, LitVid 21, interested in economic survival, has found a topic that might be of equal interest to our viewers…should the towers prove to be an enormous fizzle.
“Since LitVid 21 broadcast poems created by AXIS’s thinkers, protein and silicon based, our audience has become increasingly interested in what sort of ‘personality’ AXIS has. As we can no longer communicate effectively with AXIS, each round-trip signal taking ov
er eight and a half years, we have to go to Jill, the advanced thinker which has as part of its duties the earthbound simulation of AXIS’s thinking processes.
“While its name is female, Jill is neither male nor female. According to designer and chief programmer Roger Atkins, Jill has the potential to become a fully integrated, self aware individual, but has not yet done so.”
Atkins (Interview clip): “When we began constructing the components that would go to make up Jill, some fifteen years ago, we thought that self awareness would follow almost naturally at some level of complexity. This has not proven to be the case. Jill is much more complex than any single human being, yet still it is not self aware. We know this because Jill finds no humor in a joke designed specifically to test self-awareness. This is the same joke we programmed into the original AXIS, an older less advanced thinker that is also in most respects as complex as a human being. That neither AXIS nor Jill perceive the joke is frankly a puzzle.
“When we began designing AXIS, over three decades ago, we thought we grasped at least the rudiments of what constitutes self awareness. We thought self awareness would arise from a concatenation of modeling of social behavior and self application of that modeling—that is, feedback loops. For our thinker systems, we believed that if a system could model itself, in the sense of creating a functioning, realtime or faster than realtime abstraction, self awareness would emerge. This seemed to have been a good explanation for the evolution of human self awareness.
“Our present thinking is that self awareness is not strictly a function of complexity, nor even of design as such; self-awareness may be a kind of accident, catalyzed by some internal or external event or process that we do not understand.
“Three years ago, we started presenting Jill with problems having to do with society, in the hopes that giving Jill some sort of social context would provide that catalyst. But alas, nothing significant has happened yet, though Jill keeps on trying. Sometimes, she’s—it’s so earnest and convinced it’s succeeded…It’s heartbreaking. It’s like waiting for a baby to be born…There’s all this muss and fuss, but nothing’s come out yet.
“Which is not to say that Jill isn’t a delight to work with. There’s nothing quite like designing and programming a complex thinker. After all this time with Jill, anything else would just be twiddling my thumbs.”
David Shine: “So there you have it. You may be enamored of AXIS or Jill, you may even find something enchanting about them, but they are not like you and me. For all their wonders and talents, they are no more equipped with ‘soul’ than your home manager.
“On the other hand, some psychological researchers have suggested that if self awareness does not automatically follow from complexity, a significant percentage of human beings may also be little more than convincing automatons. Perhaps every human being must undergo this mysterious ‘catalysis’ to experience self awareness, and not all of us do. Not a new idea, but decidedly a dangerous one. Perhaps on some future edition, we can ask Jill what she thinks about this possibility.”
Switch/LitVid 21/1 B Net (Decoded: Australian Cape Control:) Message relayed Space Tracking: Lunar Control: Australian Cape Control: _____
AXIS> I hope this analysis doesn’t prove disappointing. I can think of no reason such materials might not be used by intelligent life forms, a peculiar form of celloconcrete, perhaps. More should be known in a few hours. I remain hopeful if I (informal) may use that word, adopting the proper meaning syncline. I hope to find intelligent beings to communicate with.
Language is the engine that does our thinking for us. Spoken language is as much an evolutionary advancement in brain function as the enlargement of the cerebral cortex. The history of spoken (and much later, written) language is a fascinating problem for psychologists, for to understand the early stages of development, we must somehow return to the kind of mentality that is not familiar with words. We find this in very young children, but there are no pre-verbal cultures left on Earth, and ontogeny no more recapitulates phylogeny in language than it does in embryology…
—Bhuwani, Artificial Soul
49
In the quartiers diplomatiques, Soulavier gave her one hour to rest and prepare for the move.
Mary shut the door to the bedroom, removed the hairbrush from her coat and laid it on the glass-top dresser beside the window. She pulled down the window shade and reviewed the instructions mentally.
The whole process would take about ten minutes. There was no lock on the door; she backed a wooden chair against the brass and crystal knob. She looked hastily around for the extra materials she would need. At least one quarter kilo of steel, one sixth kilo of some high density plastic, and the makeup kit. She assayed the contents of the room, picked up a stainless steel tray from the dresser and decided it would do. A clock from the bedside, nearly all plastic. In the closet, she found an old fashioned pipe bootrack. She hefted the bootrack; more than enough.
Gathering the objects into a pile on the dresser, she unscrewed the hairbrush handle and removed a plastic panel from the rear of the brush head. A single small red button lay countersunk in the exposed area. With a deep breath, thinking of Ernest, feeling a faintly creepy sensation, she pushed the button and arranged the handle and head next to the pile.
A gray paste oozed from the handle, directed by a reference field within the head. Like a slime mold it crept across the table top, bumped into the bootrack, paused and began its work.
Soulavier had given her an hour but she surmised he would allow her twenty minutes of comparative privacy. She was much less sure about the servants. At any moment on some pretext or another they might try to open the door, show alarm and express concern for her safety.
Lying back on the bed, Mary decided to test what she had been told about interdicted communications.
She lifted her slate and typed in a request for direct access to the LAPD Joint Command. The transmitter within the slate was powerful enough to reach the first level of satellites at three hundred fifty kilometers; if she had been told the truth, however, its signal would be blocked by automatic interference from a more powerful counterphase transmitter. She assumed Hispaniola would be flooding all com satellites with such spurious random messages; the satellites would “eclipse” the island to restore order to their systems.
However, Hispaniola needed certain satellite links to maintain essential financial and political contacts. There was a definite possibility the authorities would raise the counterphase jamming periodically.
The slate displayed: Link established. Proceed. She lifted her eyebrows. No interdict thus far; were they expecting her to do this? She typed: ID check.
PD issued com unit message register 3254-461-21-C. Enter. She doubted that Hispaniola security would have her pd message register number, although if they were listening, they had it now. She thought for a moment, decided to be circumspect but take advantage of a possible opening, and typed Place call to D Reeve. Text message: Being held in Hispaniola. No information on suspect. Treated well. This in case her success was a ruse and she was being tapped. Using gift. What a mess. Then she typed Confirm receipt.
PD message register 3254-461-21-C: acknowledge receipt of message to Supervisor D Reeve.
Mary frowned. The link was clear; that made no sense. She thought of typing something about getting her out, but she had no doubt they were doing their best. Continue message. Going to Leoganes outside Port-au-Prince. Grotto tourist spot. Tension high; coup against Yardley may be in progress; Dominicans’? Military vehicles in streets everywhere. Confirm signal receipt again.
She looked at the dresser top; gray shiny paste covered all the objects in the pile. They were already deforming.
Signal confirmation not received, the slate told her. Incomplete link: interference suspected. There it was: interdiction. Either somebody had been asleep at the switch or they were playing her like a game fish; either way she at least had been allowed to send a message that she was alive. With a shudderin
g sigh she turned off the slate and knelt in front of the dresser, chin on folded arms resting on the edge.
She patiently watched the nano at work. The metal tubing of the bootrack had crumpled under the gray coating. The resulting pool of paste and deconstructed objects was contracting into a round convexity. Nano was forming an object within that convexity like an embryo within an egg.
Five more minutes. The house was quiet. From outside the house came the sound of distant shellfire and echoes from surrounding hills and mountains. She closed her eyes, swallowed, gathered her mental resources.
How close was the island to outright civil war? How close was she to being called a spy in the heat of an angry moment? She imagined Soulavier her executioner speaking so very apologetically of his loyalty to Colonel Sir.
The convexity grew lumpy now. She could make out the basic shape. To one side, excess raw material was being pushed into lumps of cold slag. Nano withdrew from the slag. Handle, loader, firing chamber, barrel and flightguide. To one side of the convexity a second lump not slag was forming. Spare clip.
“Are you ready, Mademoiselle?” Soulavier asked behind the door. To her credit she did not jump. He was early. No doubt he had been informed about her transmission; she was being a bad girl.
“Almost,” she said. “A few more minutes.” Hastily she packed her suitcase and tossed the slag into the waste basket. She washed her face in the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror and prepared mentally for what might come.
She lifted the pistol from the dresser top and placed it in her jacket pocket. Slim, hardly a bulge. The nano on the dresser compacted and crawled sluglike back into the handle of the brush, an oily sheen on its surface; spent. It would need a nutritional charge to perform any more miracles: soaking the brush in a can of kola might do the trick, she had been told. Mary reassembled the hairbrush and stuck it into the suitcase, closed the lid, removed the chair from the knob and opened the door.