Science Fiction Discoveries

by Carol

  Carefully, I strove for stability, realizing that even I could be destroyed if I did not achieve it. How clumsy I had been! It should not be that difficult to ride the current all the way down to the abyssal plains. I continued to test my awareness as I went, clucking over each new discovery.

  “Ease up, Dan! It’s running the show now. Let it!”

  “I guess you’re right, Tom.”

  He leaned back, removing the stereovisual helmet, detaching himself from the telefactor harness. Out of the gauntlets, where microminiaturized air-jet transducers had conveyed the tactile information; strap after sensitive strap undone, force and motion feedback disconnected. Tom moved to assist him.

  When they had finished, the teleoperator exoskel hung like a gutted crustacean within the U-shaped recess of the console. Dan dragged the back of his hand over his forehead, ran his fingers through his hair. Tom steered him across the cabin toward a chair facing the viewscreen.

  “You’re sweating like a pig. Sit down. Can I get you something?”

  “Any coffee left?”

  “Yeah. Just a minute.”

  Tom filled a mug and passed it to him. He seated himself in a nearby chair. Both men regarded the screen. It showed the same turbulence, the mud and rock passage Dan had regarded through the helmet’s eyepiece. But now these things were only objects. Away from the remote manipulator system, he was no longer a part of them. He sipped his coffee and studied the flow.

  “. . . Really lucky,” he said, “to run into something like this first time out.”

  Tom nodded. The boat rocked gently. The console hummed.

  “Yes,” Tom said, glancing at the indicators, “it’s a bonus, all right. Look at that slop flow, will you! If the unit holds up through this, we’ve scored all the way around.”

  “I think it will. It seems to have stabilized itself. That brain is actually functioning. I could almost feel those little tunnel junction neuristors working, forming their own interconnections as I operated it. Apparently, I fed it sufficient activity, it took in sufficient data . . . It formed its own paths. It did—learn. When the quake started, it took independent action. It almost doesn’t really need me now.”

  “Except to teach it something new, for whatever we want it to do next.”

  Dan nodded, slowly.

  “Yes . . . Still, you wonder what it’s teaching itself, now that it’s in control for a time. That was a peculiar feeling—when I realized it had finally come into its equivalent of awareness. When it made its own decision to adjust to that first tiny shock. Now, watching it control its own situation ... It knows what it’s doing.” "Look! You can actually see those damn eddies! It's doing around fifty-five miles an hour, and that slop is still going faster. —Yeah, that must really have been something, feeling it take over that way.”

  "It was quite strange. Just when it happened, I felt as if I were—touching another awareness, I guess that’s the best way to put it. It was as if a genuine consciousness had suddenly flickered into being beside my own, down there, and as if it were aware of me, just for a second. Then we went our own ways. I think the neuropsych boys and the cyberneticists were right. I think we’ve really produced an artificial intelligence.”

  "That’s really frosting on my turbidity cake,” Tom said, taking notes. "It was actually a Swiss guy, back in the nineteenth century, who first guessed at turbidity currents, to explain how mud from the Rhone got way out in Lake Geneva— Did you see that! Tore a hunk right off the side! Yeah, that’s a great little gimmick you’ve got. If it makes it down to the plains, I want some cores right away. We’ve got plenty of recent samples, so it ought to be able to give us the depth of sediment deposit from this slide. Then maybe you could send it back up to where it was, for some comparison cores with the ones it was just taking. I-”

  "I wonder what it thinks about itself—and us?”

  "How could it know about us? It only knows what you taught it, and whatever it’s learning now.”

  "It felt me there, right at the end. I’m sure of it.”

  Tom chuckled.

  "Call that part of its religious upbringing, then. If it ever gets balky, you can thunder and lightning at it. —Must be doing close to sixty now!”

  Dan finished his coffee.

  “I just had a bizarre thought,” he said, moments later. “What if something were doing the same thing to us—controlling us, watching the world through our senses—without our being aware of it?”

  Tom shrugged.

  “Why should they?”

  “Why are we doing it with the unit? Maybe they’d be interested in turbidity currents on this sort of a planet—or of our experiments with devices of this sort. That’s the point. It could be anything. How could we tell?”

  “Let me get you another cup of coffee, Dan.”

  “All right, all right! Forgive the metaphysics. I was just so close to that feeling with the unit ... I started picturing myself on the teleslave end of things. The feeling’s gone now, anyhow.”

  “Voic, what is it?”

  Voic released the querocube and lufted toward Doman.

  “That one I was just fiding—it came closer than any of them ever did before to recognizing my presence!” “Doubtless because of the analogous experience with its own fide. Interesting, though. Let it alone for awhile.”

  “Yes. A most peculiar cause-field, though. It gives me pause to wonder, could something be fiding us?” Doman perigrated.

  “Why would anything want to fide us?”

  “I do not know. How could I?”

  “Let me get you a B-charge.”

  “All right.”

  Voic took up the querocube once again.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just a small adjustment I neglected. There. —Let’s have that B-charge.”

  They settled back and began to feculate.

  128

  ‘What are you doing, Dan?”

  “I forgot to turn it loose.”

  “To what?”

  “Give it total autonomy, to let it go. I had to overload the slave-circuits to burn them out.”

  “You— You— Yes. Of course. Here’s your coffee. —Look at that mud slide, will you!”

  “That’s really something, Tom.”

  Clucking, I toss another chunk of anything handy into my chopper.

  Deathrights Deferred

  by Doris Piserchia

  Doris Piserchia raised five children before finding time to do any writing. She has published two successful and critically applauded science-fiction novels, Mr. Justice and Star Rider. Her third novel, A Billion Days of Earth, will appear shortly.

  A veterinarian and an owner discussed Spot, newly from surgery.

  “I fixed it so the leg will lift automatically.”

  “How is that going to help his weak kidneys?”

  “They have to be kept open and clean. Every time his leg goes up, he’ll feel the urge.”

  “Why?”

  “He just will. I’ve been a vet for forty years and I know what I’m talking about. The little motor I put in his thigh will pop that leg up and he’ll sprinkle like a pup. That’ll be fifty dollars.”

  Eastcoast suburb—two women chatted over the back fence; the conversation eventually led to their dead husbands.

  “By the way, the children said they saw Billy the other day.”

  “Where?”

  “Down by the bam.”

  “They told me they shut off all those motors inside him. If he's walking around, I’m going to sue somebody.”

  Atomic motors required a long passage of time to wear out and it seemed that the least little disruption inside the corpse could set the machines in motion— an earth tremor, too much worm activity, gas, etcetera. It was an unpleasant experience to visit the family plot and hear noises coming from beneath grave markers, stones or monuments, or from within tombs or from inside caskets that lay in tombs. Steps had to be taken to alleviate the situation.

&nbs
p; At first, the dead were cremated. Religious groups objected. Then the dead were pulverized. Everyone objected to that. Transparent tombs were built aboveground, and relatives were supposed to report undue activity to the authorities. This step didn’t work because people didn’t want to see the dearly departed turn to dust. Then the dead were laid to rest on top of the ground in caskets made with special lids. Any substantial pressure on the undersides of the lids made them open.

  The dead started walking around. Since they had been buried nude, they were easily identifiable, and special squads cruised the streets and picked them up.

  The company that manufactured the body motors was sued a thousand times over until the government declared it impervious to lawsuits. The motors were a necessary part of life and if the company went bankrupt there would be no more motors. In the meantime, the government ordered the company to do some research and find out how to turn its products off,

  * * *

  The most remarkable thing about Huston Adler was that he was neurotic.

  “Welcome to the company,” said his superior. “Right up into the third floor lab with you and don't come out until you turn off all the dead meat in there”

  Huston didn’t completely accomplish what he set out to do, which was to turn off the corpses in die third-floor laboratory of the company building. He failed not because he wasn’t proficient at electronics but because of his neurosis and because of a natural disaster in the form of a fire that burned down the building. But the fire came later. At the moment, Huston wandered through his third-floor domain and felt important. This was a lot of expensive property for him to oversee.

  His living quarters adjoined the worklab and were ample for his comfort. The kitchen was stocked with food, the stereo came complete with a batch of records, there was a color TV, everything he could possibly want was available. The company wished him to be content when he wasn’t working on dead bodies.

  The worklab—eighty by sixty feet, unusually low ceiling, fluorescent lights, some of which were brightly lit and some dimly lit, walls pale green, lots of tables and benches, a couple of railed racks on which things could be suspended, a big desk with Huston s electronic equipment on it, the experimental bodies that sprawled about in various states of disarray—except for Billy.

  A big meat hook between Billy’s shoulder blades kept him in a vertical position on one of the railed racks. His thyroid had never functioned properly, which made his blue eyes large and bulging. Once upon a time, when he was alive, Billy developed serious bone abscesses. He lost his arms and legs to amputation and had to live in a basket for a while and then medics implanted a small antigravity unit in his pelvis. Wires ran from the unit to his thigh joints and all he had to do in order to rise in the air was tense his lower stomach muscles. By keeping the tension equal, Billy could float in a vertical position about three and a half feet aboveground. This odd power of mobility kept him sane and relatively happy until his surgical wounds healed completely. Then he received four fine prosthetic limbs that enabled him to walk and reach, pick up and grip almost normally. The antigravity unit was left in place because his body tissue had grown around it. Now the unit was out of kilter, so Billy was impaled on the meathook, to keep him down to earth. His artificial arms occasionally raised, his legs sometimes swung or made walking motions. When the corpsecatchers originally picked him up, down by the bam, they found him with a terrible bloody wound in his back. He was interesting to the company because of his many motors, so he wasn’t returned to his relatives. His circulation was stopped by severing the heart arteries. Little motors were implanted to keep the heart and lungs pumping. The operating technician didn’t have a good reason for doing this other than that he needed the practice. Elements were introduced into Billy’s veins and arteries to enhance the non-decomposing process. He would rot, but not before some technician worked on him for a while. In this case, Huston Adler.

  Buck was burned to death. He used to be a fire-, man. When he was alive, varicose veins had made his legs weak. A little motor helped him walk. After he died, he wandered about, whenever the motor in his spine became confused by the signals coming from his heart prodder. In his blood was a special enzyme that thickened the fluid in his superficial veins and capillaries. His wounds didn’t bleed. They simply oozed.

  Miss Sonia was bom an imbecile. Her lover shot her through the liver. She looked like a doll. Many of her organs had been defective and so in addition to the brain and spinal motors, there were others in various places. She even had one that stimulated her genitals. It hadn’t been an entirely good idea, overstimulated her so that she spent much of her life in amorous pastimes. She made an attractive corpse, small and fragile-looking, tiny facial features, large brown eyes, a dimpled chin that trembled when the motor in her brain created miniscule vibrations.

  Tamara had been a compulsive tourist. She drowned in the Grand Canal when her gondola tipped over. Before she took up traveling, she played football. A severe injury destroyed part of her brain. Later, cancer canceled out her throat. She had been a great talker because of the machine in her neck. The cancer had left nothing at all and so an amplifier would have done no good. Her brain impulses had activated the recorder and since she traveled to foreign countries the recordings were multilingual. Now, her inner motors disturbed, Tamara still talked and she sometimes said things in French or German or Swahili when English would have been appropriate. Most of the things she said were defensive. She had always regretted her appearance.

  Spot—little dappled canine; his eyes stayed alive after the rest of him died; so big, those eyes, so glistening, and then there were the alert ears that were too large. Each time his leg lifted, he barked. There was a little motor in his throat that connected with the one in his thigh. His owner had been concerned about the weak kidneys; wanted to keep a close watch on what happened. Toward the end, Spot had needed a motor to help him walk.

  Huston Adler—alive, neurotic, young, a hard worker; he soon began to sleep badly, suffered from indigestion, had facial tics, wet palms, heart palpitations, red eyes, listened too much for sounds that never occurred. His was such a complete laboratory that there was even a closet full of clothing. Naked Miss Sonia embarrassed him so he made her dress in a red dinner gown. Tamara also caused him to grow hot under the collar and he urged her to choose jeans and sweatshirt. As for Buck, he got tie and tails and Billy decked himself out in a business suit. But that was after Huston succeeded in turning his clients on.

  Huston’s experience with atomic motors had been confined to plain machines that had been implanted in living persons. He had^found a chair that first day, had sat in it and looked, really looked, at the five people he was going to work with. (He already classified Spot as a person.) He hadn’t seen many dead people. There had been a few tranquil corpses, in coffins, not up and sitting or standing with their eyes open.

  He was supposed to turn off everything in the five. The world wanted the dead to be dead—stiff and silent, with no phony symptoms of life remaining. Well, what would he do first? Turn them all on, of course, otherwise he wouldn’t know where to start the job.

  The most important of his machines was the integrator. It told him what kind of motors were contained in the bodies. A touch of a wire on Spot’s chest and a number of lights on the reading board lit up. He touched the other four with the wire and watched the lights flicker. Green, blue, red, yellow, Huston knew what they meant.

  What was death? No heartbeat? Every human being had a heart prodder placed in his chest at birth. Odd that Spot had one of these. His owner must have had money to play with. So the five in Huston’s lab had pulses.

  What about brain waves? Huston had no EEKG machine, but if he had, at least half his clients would have showed a reading. Two and a half people: Miss Sonia, Tamara and Spot.

  Poor Buck and poor Billy; Buck far poorer because his looks were ruined. This w7as one of Huston’s thoughts, and he owned up to the fact that it was weird. He was to have
more.

  Respiration? The lungs of the five functioned. As they had been in life, so they were active in death. Circulation? At death, a body received an intravenous injection that inhibited decomposition. Everything flowed because of the operative heart.

  Huston set to work turning on his clients.

  Buck paced back and forth, slowly, almost haltingly. His expression was startled, as if he were seeing the flames for the first time and hadn’t yet arrived at a state of fear. He had been a conscientious fireman. Now he bumped into the laboratory wall, turned and went the other way, bumped into another wall, turned ...

  Billy hung on the meathook and yelled without making a sound. His face was frightened. The hook was heavy and short and prevented him from rising more than a few inches. Each time he went up, he hit his head on the rail with a gentle thud.

  Miss Sonia was staring at Buck who was plowing his way between a row of benches near her. "You’re like all the rest,” she said. "You’re not really interested in me as a person.”

  "Please, which way to the restroom? Damen? Her-ren? Toilet? Oui. Ach, so.” Tamara said it, scowled at nothing, turned her head and glared down at Spot who raised his leg as if to urinate on her shin. He barked as he did it.

  Miss Sonia got in Buck’s way and he walked into her and knocked her down. "It isn’t my fault,” she said, picking herself up. "You don’t know what it’s like not being able to control it. It stands to reason that some men would be just plain unattractive. I mean, they can’t all be desirable. It isn’t my fault at all. I can’t be arrested or anything. I’m a ward of the government. Innocent. Besides, it isn’t serious. Men are certainly able to take care of themselves where I’m concerned.”