Seven Come Infinity

by Groff Conklin

  “You’re leaving us behind,” said John. “We don’t know much about those particular things.”

  “The Mantell Synthesis,” said David, “consists of replacing the library of the brain, but of equal importance are the two halves of the process. Information is restored in punched card form, which in this case consists of punched molecules.

  “Duplication of the basic cell structure, the complex cortical processes, and establishing metabolistic reactions—these things have been done by biochemists for half a century in an effort to create an artificial thinking brain. But none of their efforts succeeded because they had no data mechanism and stubbornly refused to recognize it in spite of the antiquity of Von Foerster’s work on punched molecules.

  “Synthesis builds up these molecular files in previously prepared basic cell structures. Blank molecules are first created chemically. Then they are ‘punched’ with data from giant pattern molecules which have been prepared from a number of sources. That is old, too. At least as early as the twentieth century the principle of molecular molding was suspected.

  “The chief data source is the brains of associates of the patient. Electroencephalographic data was taken first from my wife’s brain, then from about thirty others. This covered a vast sector of my life. Then data was poured in from all the trivia and impedimenta that could be discovered to have ever been in my possession. All these carried connotations and implications far beyond the bare artifact.

  “Lastly, book data were poured in. Thousands of tomes that I had read and thousands more that I hadn’t. All of this added up to a pretty complete mass of information that came very close to duplicating what had been in my brain before the accident.

  “That was the first half of the process, but in that state a brain is like a great library that has just been moved to new quarters, in which the truckers have dumped the books and file cards in a hopeless jumble in the middle of the floor. A brain that regained consciousness in such a condition would be in a state of lethal insanity. The body would die within minutes from the confusion of impulses.”

  “I begin to see where the semantic selector comes in,” said Martin. “That’s the librarian.”

  “Right. The earliest work in direct line with selector development was the mathematical theory of communication developed by Shannon in the twentieth century. It flowered in the discovery of the Law of Random by Jamieson and his subsequent invention of the semantic selector. Marianne can tell you what the selector does. She’s spent five years as nursemaid to them.”

  The girl smiled. “No Jamieson selector ever did what the Mantell Synthesis demands. The old ones were mere toys that could take random combinations of a few items, several hundred thousand up to a couple of million, and arrange them in order, rejecting all semantic noise and nonsense. But Synthesis demands that this be done for a set of items numbering around 1021.”

  “Surely a man in a whole lifetime doesn’t accumulate that many items of data,” exclaimed John.

  “No—but he could. The wastage of the human brain has been deplored for centuries, and I wonder if we haven’t stumbled onto the answer to it right here.

  “The learning process we all go through is a clumsy mess at best. Unable to cope with the world in childhood, we acquire tens of thousands of erroneous learning sets, which are seldom corrected in later life. They remain all our lives cross-indexed with masses of reasonably correct data. When the brain is asked for a certain response it fumbles around through these incorrect sets and brings them up about as often as the correct ones to which they are cross-indexed.”

  “That explains it!” Marianne cried in sudden excitement. “That’s what’s happened! The selector has sorted out and done away with every one of those semantically erroneous learning sets. We’ve got the same data with a modern filing system.”

  David smiled at her almost childish excitement, but he felt the same superb confidence that bubbled out in her.

  “I think you’re quite right,” he said. “I was working up to it by a slower approach. The learning of a child is a hodgepodge of accumulating experiences—like the delivery of books dumped on a library floor. These are carelessly filed and cross-indexed by emotion, a poor, inefficient librarian who hates her job but bitterly resents the rightful attempts of reason to take it over and put emotion in her own place as head, say, of the art department. Emotion is a selfish old spinster who wants the whole job and glory and makes a mess of all of it.”

  “Are we then cold and rational beings wholly without feeling?” said Martin in dismay. “Surely that is as bad as what we once were!”

  “Is that the way you feel?”

  “No—I think I feel an emotional sensitivity as great as I ever did.”

  “Probably greater. With emotion in her own place she is much more effective than when she was in charge of the files, which she messed up so badly.

  “The semantic selector, in arranging the pre-punched molecules in precise order with semantically correct cross-indexing, has swept clean the crazy, nonsensical filing system accumulated over the years. Learning has been speeded up because there are prepared vast numbers of blank molecules that can efficiently receive new data now. The ties that required us to evaluate present data on the basis of early experiences are gone.

  “The greatest evolutionary deficiency of the human brain is lack of a built-in semantic selector system. Some selection must go on it is true, but from an evolutionary standpoint the selector must be as primitive as the brain of a worm.

  “The Law of Random is a perplexing thing that men have never fathomed,” he went on quietly. “We know it exists and we have fashioned semantic selectors to abide by it, but we have never seen the heights or the depths of it.

  “Evolution appears to follow the Law, but in a smooth and flowing curve along which mutations themselves are part of a continuous process.

  “We have jumped the curve entirely. We are a discontinuity. If we understood more than a fragment of the Law of Random, we could determine if we are an error that is to be erased or if we are the beginnings of a new and higher curve. Perhaps in a sufficiently large scale of time the whole curve is naturally discontinuous. We’ll never live long enough—the race may not—to know the answer empirically. Some day we might solve it epistemologically.

  “Without any way of knowing we may as well assume that we won’t have to wait for the mutations of evolution. We have within our hands the means to make a new kind of man, one which can displace the old and bring reason into the world.

  “Neurosis and psychosis have been driven beyond the reach of us forever. I am very certain we are the most completely sane people the world has ever known!”

  IV

  The two men blinked sharply as if stung by a quick shock. Marianne gasped a little at the appalling nakedness of his claim. But none of them spoke to deny it.

  As if it were the suddenly perceived answer to a long and intricate problem upon which he had spent his whole life, David felt the delicate pleasure of discovery. It was the logical goal achieved after a lifetime of wandering amid faint clues and whispered rumors. He felt as if he were standing upon a high peak beholding a vast and beautiful sea which he had always known would be there.

  But his companions were not with him in spirit. They were not ready to behold such vastness without terror.

  “How can we ever be sure of what we have lost?” said Marianne. She was sitting in a contracted position, hugging her arms close to her as if sudden cold had pervaded the room.

  “We are not what we once were. You say we have emotion, but is it anything more than the recorded emotion of a symphony which can be stamped out by the thousands? Are we anything more than the products of a machine and, therefore, machines ourselves? Where is individuality, personality if the soul of man is no more than a collection of figurate molecules?”

  “You have answered your own question,” he said kindly. “You are afraid and I am not. If a single molecule among all the billions that have
been recreated in your brain is different from those in mine then we are not identical.

  “There is individuality enough for the most rugged of rebels against the herd. As for personality, that has certainly been changed, but little of value has been lost. Fear-born hate is certainly gone. In its place there is understanding of the motives of men. Greed is no longer in you because you can evaluate your own worth.

  “Yet the intensity of your laughter, your capacity for sorrow, and your intellectual interests are specifically your own and different from any other man’s. Every brain upon the whole Earth could pass beneath the selector, but no man would emerge the duplicate of any one of us.”

  “I cannot comprehend it,” said John. “I have spent my life building symbols of my own emotional responses in order to convey those responses to others. But I—”

  He stopped short. David smiled. “Keep going. You can’t deny the logic of your own train of thought. Perhaps this is the key you need: No one else in the whole world could have painted the same pictures you have made.”

  A great peace seemed to flow over the artist. He settled back in the chair, his face calm as if a great turbulence within him had suddenly calmed.

  “That’s what you did,” he said, “you took my pictures and out of them you obtained data to punch the molecules that now make up the only brain in the world that could direct the painting of those pictures—mine.”

  “That is it. And still you might fear that much is lost, but it is not. A single hour’s contact with another brain leaves enough imprint of our personality that it would suffice for fifty percent reproduction. No Synthesis has been performed with the assistance of less than twenty such persons who have known the patient for long periods.

  “True, Synthesis could not exist without these recordings we have made upon other brains. Though it has not yet been done I believe that a one hundred percent restoration could be made with adequate assistance and no one could tell the difference in the Synthesized individual except for the increased efficiency of mind. Nothing essential would be lost.”

  “But the language—” said Martin. “You have not explained yet the advantages or even the full reason for this substitution of a wholly artificial language for the one we knew.”

  “I can name one advantage very quickly,” said David. “How long do you suppose our conversation has taken so far?”

  “About fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “I’ve been noting Marianne’s watch since I sat down. That was just thirty-eight seconds ago.”

  Marianne jerked her arm up as if she could confirm the statement with a glance. Then slowly, disbelief faded and they realized how incredibly short a time their discussion had taken.

  “Shannon introduced the factor of entropy into his formulations,” said David. “His work has scarcely been improved upon since his day.

  “As the organization of a communication system increases so that there is minimum freedom of choice, increased certainty, and minimum noise of both semantic and engineering kinds—as these things approach the ideal the entropy of the system approaches zero. I suggest that the communication systems of our brains have been reduced to virtually zero entropy by the selector.

  “As a result, there is zero redundancy also—there is absolutely no part of a message between us which could be omitted and leave possible a correct translation. Likewise, any possible sound that we can make has a single, definite, and completely understandable semantic significance. Ideas that once would have required minutes of speaking can be conveyed with a single sound of almost infinitely precise intonation. There is no possible misunderstanding on the part of the hearer whose communication faculties likewise have been ordered by the semantic selector.

  “For this reason we have found it impossible to understand those about us in any form of communication—speech, reading, sign language. All are beyond our comprehension because, as Shannon demonstrated so long ago, a channel cannot pass a message of greater entropy than the channel capacity without equivocation. Since we demand zero entropy and ordinary communication employs so much higher values, we understand nothing.”

  Martin spoke up. “How well we know! In the hospital John and I beat our brains trying to work up a code system with the attendants and doctors. They did nothing but stare and grin as if we were cute monkeys cutting capers.”

  “Consider what it would mean as a universal language,” said David. “Never has it been possible for one man to know another’s thoughts with hundred percent certainty. Now it can be done. The new language makes possible unity of thought and action that has scarcely been dreamed of. What it would do to the advertisers, the politicians, and all those who thrive by breeding misunderstanding between men!”

  “How can we remain in our present isolation?” exclaimed John. “What can we do? There are only the hundred of us. Is there no possibility of our ever breaking through?”

  David looked carefully at each of them. The sharpness of his perceptions made the very presence of the others a thing of exquisite pleasure. But this was only an oasis where the drink of companionship with his own kind could be tasted for a short time. Dawn was coming with its necessities that would break the perfection of this hour.

  They could not exist in this isolated world within a world.

  “Suppose it were possible,” said David thoughtfully, “to increase the entropy of our brains somewhat, deliberately introducing the necessary disorganization that would permit communication with the world, retaining if possible the present speech channels so that we could translate from one to the other.”

  “From what you said previously such a thing sounded impossible,” said Martin.

  “It may be. As long as the present semantic entropy approaches zero without actually achieving it, however, the selector might be able to fix it for us. It’s a gamble, but I’m willing to try. Yet I couldn’t be the first.”

  He saw the change come upon their faces now. They, who a moment ago were terrified at the vastness of the world which they had entered with him, now shrank before the implications of his words.

  “We can’t go back!” cried Marianne. “Not after this—have dim memories of a period of terrible confusion and uncertainty, pain and misunderstanding, a period worse than the first days after the Synthesis.”

  “Such residual impressions are possible,” said David. “I am appalled by the ugliness of what I see in the city about us, and the stupidity it signifies. Those I saw on the streets seemed to have shrunk to moronic stature. Have any of you checked your I.Q.?”

  “How could we without standards?” said Martin.

  “That’s why it did not seem very astounding that you could penetrate the barrier field around the hospital with a baling wire gadget made in the therapy shop—when it has been mathematically proven the field cannot be penetrated.”

  “Why…we’d never thought of it. It seemed a simple problem.”

  “I’d say your I.Q.—and that of all of us—has gone up by one to two hundred points at least.”

  “Supermen, huh?” John smiled.

  “No!” Marianne exclaimed seriously. “That’s an ugly word that puts us above and beyond humanity. We are not that. We are part of it. We are the first normal men. We are the first of what all men could and should be. Anything less is illness of the normal man. We have been healed of that universal illness.”

  “That’s a better definition,” said David. “Every man who is born with adequate biochemical proportions is potentially a noble creature. We are the first of our kind to be put in the way to achieve our potentialities.

  “Yet—we must give it up. To a degree, at least—if we are to re-enter the world we have left. Of that I am certain.”

  “Suppose we do? What then?”

  “There is a far broader field for Synthesis than gross physical injuries. Reorientation by the selector should be made available to every man. It could banish neurosis and psychosis from the Earth—if it were permitted.”

  �
��There would hardly be opposition to that,” said John.

  “Perhaps. But Synthesis is now illegal because of the failures it has produced so far. I have long worked on borrowed time.”

  “But we’ve got to restore contact! How can it be done?”

  “I’ll take one of you with me for increase of entropy. That one can be an interpreter so that Dr. Vixen can take care of me. Then we will see what happens to the opposition.”

  “Who do you want?”

  Each of them was looking at him now with eyes of dread. Though it possessed its own private hell of isolation from humanity, this was a paradise they regretted leaving.

  “Let’s draw names,” said David.

  It was Marianne.

  V

  It was the night following when they drove into the darkened grounds of the Institute. A few random lights showed in laboratories in some of the buildings, but the Synthesis building was dark.

  As the car drew to a halt the four of them left it and fanned out like silent, skillful thieves. David applied the combination to gain entrance through the main door, but they had to slug a watchman who surprised them. He greeted David with recognition and a friendly smile. They couldn’t take the risk.

  Inside, David hurried Marianne through the dark hallways and past the great banks of the selector equipment that was silent now like a herd of sleeping giants. John and Martin followed at a short distance.

  David turned on the lights as they entered the operating chamber. Marianne shrank in momentary hesitation as she saw the operating table before her.

  David tried to smile reassuringly, but he understood her fear. “You don’t have to go through with it,” he said.

  “Yes…I do. But you don’t know what I’ll be like when I get up from there, do you?”

  “No. I don’t know for sure.”

  While she changed to the operating robe he set the matrix of the semantic selector to widen the communication channels of her mind. Then he helped her to the table so that she lay with her face in a cradle that permitted access to anaesthetic and oxygen. Seconds later she was unconscious.