Eater

by Gregory Benford

  Neurons held her identity, encoded in myriad connections. It was not enough to know the location and type of neuron, though. They also had to see how each one responded and sent electrical signals, how it was affected by its chemical environment—a swamp of detail. Impossible without the rooms of computers she had glimpsed on the way in.

  All for little ol’ me. Pleasant, to be the center of attention on your deathbed. Research animal plus world-class news object. They informed her early on, days ago, that she thought differently when her adrenal glands had been squirting into her bloodstream. I’ve known that all my life. Goes with being temperamental.

  She lay still as a buzzing bank of magnetic readers sat atop her skull, like a mechanical hairdo. These nests of quantum detectors registered her thoughts while she watched videos of sunsets, tiger attacks, pictures of Benjamin and her mother, a steak, flowers, storms, even porno—-they apologized in advance for that, but it was actually good, the sly devils. Then smells, sounds, touches. She did arithmetic on demand, listened to music, to railroad trains and children laughing. Sheet sensors covering the crown of her brain built a three-dimensional map of each thin layer of her brain cells. Added to a general map of human neural structure, teams of surgeons wrote programs to model the myriad idiosyncratic ways she thought.

  This working model then got sharpened. The surgeons compared its output signals to those she emitted when they showed the same pictures, flashed lights, fed her, played music.

  Like getting a dress tailored, she thought, only this cost millions of bucks per hour. Flash by neuronal flash, the computer model came to echo her. But an echo isn’t the song.

  “It’s not you,” Kingsley agreed when he came to visit. They gave her breaks to keep her neural tone tip-top, and let him in to recalibrate her sense of being human, she supposed. “Just a simulation.”

  “It’s all there’ll be of me, pretty soon.”

  He gazed at her soulfully, wordlessly. “If it’s any consolation, I heard from Arno how they’re doing this trick in the dictatorships.”

  “Pretty rough? Make you watch old black-and-white movies?”

  “I think I’d settle for Citizen Kane happily enough. But no, they haven’t these magnetic sheet recorders. To reach the deeper layers, the surgeon’s easiest path is simply to shave away your brain.”

  “So…their brains, to be fully read, must die?”

  “One ends up with an excavated skull. Luckily, the brain has no pain perceptors down there in its spaghetti snarls of nerves.”

  “Gee, Dr. Science, that’s spiffy.”

  “Not a voyage for the squeamish, no.”

  “And they don’t even want to go, either.” She gazed up into the hard fluorescent glow as if an answer lay there. “Makes this seem easy.”

  He held her hand for a while and they did not speak. She slowly registered that he was crying, and felt bad about that, and then just let it go. That was getting to be automatic: releasing the moment, permitting the passing parade to wash over her like the warm waves of the Pacific. With a sudden pang, she realized that she would probably never feel that salty caress again, and then she was crying, too.

  Kingsley said quietly, “I’ve always loved you.”

  She had dreaded this moment and was tempted to let it drift by. But no, he deserved better than that.

  Before she could bring herself to speak, he added, “I simply did not know until recently just how much.”

  After what seemed like a long time, she mustered some self-respect and made her voice behave. In a faint rasp she said, “I have always loved you. In my way. But this last year has taught me that the man I truly felt the real thing for was Benjamin. Always him.”

  He nodded. A rueful smile played upon his lips. They looked at each other with an emotion she felt powerfully but could not hope to tell him about.

  A long silence tiptoed by. Gratefully, she drifted.

  Kingsley worked the conversation around to ground they could both stand on. He was good at doing that, she realized; she had not even noticed the transition. Small talk, reminiscences…Then: “Obviously,” he said, “the material self will be gone. Your represented self will remain, in silicon.”

  “Yeah, it says so, right here in the contract.”

  “Quite right. This is experimental.”

  “Always happy to be at the cutting edge. When do they do that?”

  “Cut? Not at all, I gather.”

  “I wonder. After I’m dead, wouldn’t they recover more if they could use invasive surgery?”

  “À la the dictators?”

  “I’m willing to give this the best effort.”

  “Heroic, but I think unnecessary.”

  “I just want the best copy, is all.” To her mind, this wasn’t remotely valorous. In her pantheon, science had few heroes. Most good science came from bright minds at play, like Benjamin and Kingsley. Able to turn an elegant insight, to find beguiling tricks in arcane matters—pretty, amusing, a frolic. Play, even intellectual play, was fun, good in its own right.

  “You are going to fly into the mouth of the monster. Classic Beowulf-style hero, by my measure.”

  He was being charming, hardly able to keep his feelings from flooding out, but she disagreed profoundly. Her heroes stuck it out against hard opposition, drove toward daunting goals, accepting pain and failure and keeping on, anyway. All the way through astronaut training, those had been her ideals. This making a Xerox of herself was a last gesture, not bravery. Maybe just foolishness.

  “No, I won’t. My copy will.” He sat gazing down at his hands and she wondered how to get him out of his funk. Be bright, cheery. Men were so grateful for that. “Continuity, that’s really it, right?”

  “How so?” Head up, plainly happier to be off on abstractions.

  “That’s the essence of it, of the identity problem. We do it all the time, really. When we sleep, the unconscious remains active, so we get continuity at a broad level.”

  “Ah. Your point is that no one wakes up and thinks they are a new person.”

  “Yeah, only lately, I feel a thousand years old.”

  “Patients brain-cooled until their brain waves lapse can later revive with their sense of self intact.” His brow furrowed, then relaxed. “I see—how will we know it’s truly ‘you,’ eh?”

  “I suppose you could just log on to the computer aboard the Searcher, my ship, and read me out.”

  “But I don’t know you like that. I know you—love you—this ordinary old, human way.”

  “Inside I’m a mess, lemme tell you.”

  “You look orderly and understandable from a distance.”

  “And only that way. Close up, inside, I’m ugly.”

  “All of us live inside, always close up. Other people look methodical and tidy only because they’re at long range.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  He pressed her hand into his. “I’ll know you.”

  “How?”

  “You’ll think of something, m’love.” He grinned, but there was no elation behind it. “I know you.”

  8

  A few more days had crept by, and now that they were at the nexus of it all, he felt only a yawning vacancy.

  “This must be the strangest thing anyone has ever done,” Benjamin said to her. The specialists’ army had withdrawn, leaving them in an enclosed space, almost comforting in its intimacy. They were surrounded by advanced magnetic reading gear and diagnostics.

  She smiled. “Yeah, and out of love, at that.”

  “To…leave me something?”

  “That’s part of it, for me. But love is a big, cheesy word, able to cover a lot of things.”

  Channing was fully uploaded now. The last few hours had been pretty painful for her and she had stood up well, sweat popping out on her brow. He had wiped it away carefully. She had kept waving away even the light painkillers they had offered. “Don’t wanna cloud the picture,” she had kept repeating earlier. As though she were an artist a
t work on her last oil painting.

  The offhand weirdness of the scene kept throwing him. They had come to him with a proposal about the use of her brain afterward. He had listened and gone through confusion to anger to swirling doubt and then he had made them go away. Their idea was to slice her dead brain layer by layer, so that scanning machines could read the deep detail digitally, getting better resolution to sharpen the simulation.

  This had sent a cold horror running through him. They had put it as nicely as they could, but still it meant slowly planing away her brain. In the end, her entire cranium would be excavated, leaving half a skull. He could not bear the picture.

  She struggled up out of her fog and managed a wrecked smile. “You have to die to be resurrected.”

  “I’ll…” The words stuck in his throat.

  “You’ll see me again.” She gave him a blissful look. “Goodbye, lover.”

  It was the last thing she said.

  After a night of no sleep and a lot of sour drinking with Kingsley, he met with the specialists again. They showed him the long black box housing Channing’s uploaded mind. “Reduced to a featureless…” he began, but could not finish the sentence.

  “We’ll be processing, compiling, and organizing,” a woman in a smart executive suit said.

  “Fine.”

  “In a few days—”

  “Fine. Just shut up.”

  He understood all the parts of the arguments. Magnetic induction loops, tiny and superconducting, could map individual neurons. Laying bare the intricacies of the visual cortex, or evolution’s kludgy tangle in the limbic system, had already unleashed new definitions of Genus Homo. Still, nobody considered Homo Digital to be an equal manifestation. Parts were not the whole.

  They played a voicebox rendering, a voice repeating, sounding exactly like her. He saw them looking hopefully at him and he didn’t give a damn about their marvelous trick. Numbly he pulled from his coat pocket the hourglass she had given him. He set it atop the box—her, now—and watched until its sand had run down.

  He wondered what it might mean to upend it, to start the cycle again. He struggled with the thought.

  No.

  The decision came as a release.

  It was a slow day for the Neptune Society, so theirs was the sole party when he went out with a few friends from the Center. The captain wondered if he wanted the champagne before or after. After, he said. There were little printed cards set out next to the champagne with some doggerel titled LET ME GO inside and the data: ENTERED INTO LIFE OCTOBER 15, 1978, and ENTERED INTO REST, but he could not read the date through some blurring that had gotten into his eyes.

  He gazed up into a sullen cloud cover, a pearly gray plane halfway up Mauna Kea. This pathetic fallacy still quite accurately mirrored his curiously displaced mood. The sea was flat and glassy and he said little on the way out. They gathered at the bow and the captain gave him the urn, blue with odd markings. Not his to keep, as if he would want to. Off came the lid and inside were gritty gray ashes, the color of the sky. He poured the powdery stream and bits of bone into dark blue water. Some of it spread on the surface, some blowing away on a mild wind, but most of it plunged deeply, an inverse plume that seemed like transposed smoke rising to the depths. He had not expected that. His intellect, spinning endlessly in its own high vacuum, told him immediately that it must be the heavier parts sinking, but that did not explain why a bubble burst in his chest and his throat closed and the world seemed to whirl away for a long moment, suspending him over an aching void.

  Someone murmured something of farewell and he could not echo it, getting only partway through some words before his voice became a whistle through a crack in the world. He had wanted to say simply goodbye, but it came out why? and he did not know why at all. Then the captain pressed a bunch of flowers into his hand and he tossed them after the ashes. The boat slowly circled the floating flowers and he could not take his eyes off them and that was all there was.

  The next day on the big screen he watched the black box being inserted into a Searcher craft.

  Some commentator spoke with grave excitement. Arno made a little speech. It launched and he felt a pang at the brave plume of rocket exhaust. Cheering. At least nobody pounded him on the back.

  What had she said in that last hour? First, a pained I can’t go on like this.

  Before he could speak, she had provided her own jibe.

  That’s what you think.

  PART SIX

  ULTIMATA

  JULY

  1

  Like bad breath, Kingsley had often noted, ideology was something noticed only in others.

  Even at this supreme crisis, nattering concerns of infinitesimal weight furrowed the brows of supposedly wise leaders. Here at power’s proud pinnacle, the politician’s aversion to risk reared above all else.

  “Dr. Dart,” the President said, “how can we be sure this will work? I have a grave responsibility here, ordering the use of nuclear warheads.”

  “I should think, sir, that nothing is certain here.”

  “But using these weapons so near Earth, I…well…” The President let his voice trail off into the air-conditioned, enameled silence, as if to do so allowed someone to come in with a quick solution to his grave dilemma.

  Sorry, not getting off so easily this go. Kingsley smiled slightly as the occasion seemed to demand. “We hope to short out some of the flowing currents in the vicinity of the black hole. The thing’s a giant circuit, really—a ‘homopolar generator,’ in the physics jargon.”

  A German general from European Unified Command said sternly, “These are the very best warheads, Mr. President.”

  “Ah, I’m sure,” the worried politician said, his eyes moving from side to side as if seeking a way out. The idea of having all allies present—to spread the responsibility and thus risk, Kingsley supposed—gummed up matters nicely.

  “Surely, the quality of arms is not the issue,” Kingsley said.

  The general said smoothly, absolutely right on cue, “We have every assurance of success.”

  “The Eater comprises an immensely complex balance of forces, utilizing gravitational, magnetic, and kinetic energy stores. It vaguely resembles the region near a pulsar—a rotating, highly magnetized neutron star, that is.”

  “It’s like a star?” the President asked, as if this would simplify his problem. He had seen stars, after all.

  “The region around it is. The Russian term for a black hole once was”—a nod at the New Russian Premier—“‘frozen star,’ because seen from outside, a collapsing mass appears to stop imploding at a certain point. It hangs up, its infall seeming to halt. The star fades from our view like a reddening Cheshire cat, leaving only its grin—that is, its gravitational attraction.”

  “No light, just gravity?” the President asked. He was a bright man, but he had lived in a world in which only what other people thought mattered. The physical world was just a bare stage. Techno-goodies and assorted abstract wonders came occasionally in from stage left, altering the action mostly by adding prizes to the unending human competition that was really the point of it all.

  “In France, the equivalent phrase trou noir has obscene connotations, so ‘frozen star’ would be better,” a woman from the State Department added unhelpfully.

  The President was a practiced ignorer; while nodding, he did not take his eyes from Kingsley. “These maps of it, it looks like a kind of interstellar octopus with magnetic arms.”

  “Not a bad description,” Kingsley allowed.

  “I can’t see how we can kill an octopus without having to chop off its legs,” the President said.

  “Kill the head,” Kingsley said. “The legs are secured by the accretion disk, plus those anchored directly in the black hole itself.”

  “I see,” the President said. “We try to get at this little disk it carries around.”

  “More that the disk carries the hole, sir. The hole is just a singularity, a gravitational s
ink, nothing more. The essence of the Eater lies in the magnetic structures erected using the accretion disk as a foundation. If we can shake that foundation, we can damage the great house the Eater has built upon it.”

  “I understand,” the President said in a tone conveying admirably that he did not.

  “More precisely, my point is that we cannot solve the pulsar problem, even after half a century of trying. On the face of it, a reliable model of the black hole’s inner regions—and their functions—is impossible.”

  “Then I don’t think I can authorize—”

  “But you must!” the Secretary of State broke in. “The consequences of not following through—”

  “These are our weapons and delivery systems,” the President shot back, showing why he was President.

  “But the world alliance agreed—”

  “To leave final judgment, moment by moment, to the nation actually doing the job,” the President finished. “I am keeping my options open.”

  “Not attacking this thing—”

  “May yet prove to be the best course,” Kingsley felt himself forced to say, before this deteriorated further. The Secretary of State had been rumored to be a highly political appointment from a wheat state, he remembered hearing. Something about shoring up support with a domestic ethnic constituency, which unfortunately appeared to be a major theme of this administration, rather than competence. “Only its response to our counteroffers will tell the tale.”

  “But it doesn’t answer,” the Secretary of State said moodily.

  “Silences are the most artful phase of diplomacy,” Kingsley said, and instantly saw that this was the wrong tack. The Secretary of State’s eyes widened a millimeter. Plainly he did not like being reminded, however indirectly, of his lack of background in diplomacy. “A strategy you have employed well in the past, as I recall.” There. That might put a Band-Aid on the wound.