“It’s feverish delirium.”
“We should give it an aspirin,” I joked.
But, thinking about it, we decided to lower the computer’s temperature by pouring quinine into the flasks and bottles that fed the tank. The temperature went down a few degrees, but the delirium continued. The computer was combining images the way they occur in a nightmare — the face of the institute’s first department head, Johann Johannovich Kliapp, smoothly took on the features of Azarov, who then grew Hilobok’s mustache….
When the temperature dropped some more, flat images, like on a screen, of political figures, movie stars, productive workers with miniature Boards of Commendation, Lomonosov, Faraday, and Maria Trapezund, a popular local singer, appeared on the surface of the liquid in the tank. These two — dimensional shadows — some in color, some in black and white — would appear for a second and then melt away. It looked as if my memory was drying out.
On the sixth or seventh day (we had lost track of time) the temperature of the golden liquid dropped to 98.6 .
“It’s normal!” And I went off to get some sleep.
My double stayed on duty.
That night he shook me awake.
“Get up! The computer is making eyes.”
I sent him to hell. He poured a mug of water on my head. I had to go.
At first, I thought that there were bubbles in the liquid. But they were eyes — white spheres with pupils and colorful irises. They floated up from the bottom, bounced against the transparent sides of the tank, watched our movements and the blinking lights on the TsVM — 12’s control panel. They were blue, gray, brown, green, black, huge horse’s eyes with violet irises, cat’s eyes, glowing and with a vertical pupil, and black bird’s eyes. It was a collection of every kind of eye I had ever seen. Since they had no lids or lashes, they seemed surprised.
By morning eyes were appearing near the tank as well: muscular growths stuck out from the hoses, ending in lids and eyelashes. The lids opened. New eyes stared at us intently and expectantly. The infinite silent stares were driving us crazy.
And then. feelers and trunks grew like bamboo runners from the tank, the flasks, and hoses. There was something naive and childlike in their movements. They interwove, touched the apparatus and bottles, the room. One little feeler reached an uninsulated clamp, touched it, and jerked back, drooping.
“Hey, this is getting serious!” my double said.
It was. The computer was moving from a contemplative method of getting information to an active one, and was growing its own sensors and executive mechanisms for it. Whatever you called this development — a striving for informational equilibrium, self — construction, or a biological synthesis of information — you couldn’t help being impressed by the tenacity and power of the process.
But after all we had seen, we were in no mood for awe or academic curiosity. We guessed how it might end.
“Enough!” I picked up Monomakh’s Crown. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to make it do what we want. ”
“It would help if we knew what we wanted,” my double added.
“. but for a start we have to keep it from doing what we don’t want.”
“Get rid of the eyes! Get rid of the feelers! Stop gathering information! Get rid of the eyes. Get rid of the feelers! Stop!” We repeated these thoughts through the crown, spoke them into the microphones.
But the computer went on moving its feelers and following us with its hundreds of eyes. It was beginning to look like a showdown.
“The result of our work,” my double said.
“So!” I said. “If that’s the way.” I punched the tank. All the feelers quivered and stretched out for me. I moved away. “Val, turn off the water! Disconnect the feed hoses!”
“Computer, you’re going to die. Computer, you’ll die of hunger and thirst if you don’t obey.”
Of course, that was crude and obvious, but what else could we do? My double slowly turned the handle on the water supply. The stream of water from the distillers turned into a drip. I clamped the hoses. The feelers shuddered and drooped. They started curling up and going back into the tank. The eyes dimmed, teared, and crinkled.
An hour later everything was gone. The liquid in the tank was once more golden and clear.
“That’s better!” I took off the crown and rolled up the wires.
We turned the water back on, removed the clamps and stayed in the lab until late at night, smoking, talking about nothing, waiting to see what would happen. We didn’t know what we were more afraid of: a new delirium from the computer or that the system, muzzled so harshly, would fall apart and cease existing. On the first day we talked about “covering up the discovery.” But now we couldn’t stand the thought that it might cover itself and disappear.
My double and I took turns approaching the tank, sniffing carefully, afraid to smell decay or degeneration; not trusting the thermometer we kept touching the sides of the tank and the warm living hoses. Were they cooling off? Were they enflamed with fever again?
But the air in the room stayed warm, humid, and fresh, as if there was a large, clean animal in the room. The computer was alive. It simply wasn’t undertaking anything without us. We had tamed it!
After midnight, I looked at my double, like a mirror. He was blinking with tired red eyes and smiled:
“Everything seems okay, Shall we go to bed?”
There was no artificial double for me. A comrade, a colleague, was sitting next to me, just as tired and happy as I was. And — how strange! — I had not felt joy at meeting him in the institute grounds and I hadn’t been soothed by the phantasmagoric memory show in the tank… but now I was at peace and very happy.
It’s really true? the most important thing for a person is to feel in control of a situation.
Chapter 10
Is not the zealous search for causal connections another expression of the property instinct in man? Even here we seek to know what belongs to what.
K. Prutkov — engineer, Thought 10
We went out into the institute grounds. The night was warm. Our exhaustion made us forget that we should not appear in public together, and we remembered only in the entry. Old man Vakhterych stared at us with his inebriated eyes. We froze.
“Ah. Valentin Vasilyevich!” the old man exclaimed happily. “Done for the day?”
“Yes…” we replied in unison.
“Good.” Vakhterych rose heavily and unlocked the front door. “And nothing will happen to the institute, and no one will steal it, and have a good evening, and I still have to sit here. People go off to enjoy themselves, and I have to sit here….”
We ran out into the street and hurried off.
“That’s something!” I noticed that the facade of the new institute building was decorated with multicolored lights. “What’s the date?”
My double counted on his fingers:
“The first… no, the second of May. Happy holiday, Val!”
“Belatedly… oh, boy!”
I remembered that I had a date with Lena for May I to go out with some of her co — workers and to go for a motorcycle excursion on the second. I had blown it. She would never forgive me.
“And Lena is out dancing right now. somewhere with somebody,” my double muttered.
“What do you care?”
We fell silent. Buses, decorated with branches, raced up and down the street. Neon rocket boosters were set up on rooftops. We could see people dancing, singing, drinking, through open windows.
I lit a cigarette and started rethinking my observations of the computer — womb (as we finally decided to call the complex). “First of all, it’s not a computer — oracle or a computer — thinker, because there is no winnowing of information in it, only combinations — sometimes meaningful, sometimes not. Secondly, it can be controlled not only by energy (clamping the hoses, turning off water and power — in other words, grabbing it by the throat), but also by information. Of course, for now it responds only to the
command ‘No! — but it’s a beginning. I think the most convenient way to command it is through Monomakh’s Crown with brain waves. Third, the computer — womb, while very complex, is still only a machine, an artificial creation without a goal. The striving for stability, informational equilibrium, is not a goal but a characteristic, just like that of an analytic scale. But it is expressed in a more complex way: through synthesis in the form of living matter via external information. A goal always lies in solving a problem. There was no problem — and so it fooled around from an excess of possibilities. But…”
“… man must set its goals,” my double picked up; I was no longer amazed by his ability to think with me. “As for all other machines. Therefore, as the bureaucrats say, all responsibility lies with us.”
I didn’t feel like thinking about responsibility. You work and work unstintingly — and then you get stuck with responsibility, too. And people go off to enjoy themselves. We missed the holiday. What dopes! And my whole life will go by in a smelly lab.
We turned down a chestnut — lined avenue which led to Academic Town. A couple strolled ahead of us. My double and I felt a pang — we poor, sober, hungry, and lonely men. That couple fit in so beautifully in the gaslit avenue. Tall and elegant, he held her by the waist. She bent her full mane of hair toward him. We unthinkingly sped up, in order to pass them and be spared the lyrical sight.
“We’ll play some music, now, Tanechka! I have records that’ll make you salivate!” Hilobok’s buzzing voice reached us, and we were knocked for a loop. The charm of the lovely picture faded. “Harry has another new one,” my double announced. As we got closer we recognized the girl, too. Just recently she had come to the institute in school uniform to do her probation work; now, I think, she worked as a lab assistant in the digital computer lab. I liked her looks: full lips, a soft nose, and big brown eyes that were dreamy and trusting.
“And when Arkady Arkadievich is on vacation or on a business trip abroad, I have to make many of his decisions,” Harry said, spreading his peacock tail. “And even when he’s here… what? Of course, it’s interesting, why not?”
There goes little Tanechka, her head bent forward towards Hilobok’s shoulder, and assistant professor Harry seems like a shining knight of Soviet science to her. Maybe he even has radiation sickness like the hero of the movie Nine Days in One Year? Or maybe his health is completely undermined by his scientific work, like the hero of the movie Everything Will Remain for the People? And so she melts, imagining herself as his heroine, the little fool…. Your scientific boyfriend is in fine shape, don’t you worry, Tanechka. He hasn’t worn himself out with science. And he’s leading you directly to your first major disillusionment in life. He’s a pro in that department….
My double slowed down and said under his breath:
“Should we beat him up? It would be very easy; you go off to visit some friends and establish an alibi, and I’ll….”
He beat me to it by a split second. He spoke hurriedly in general, to prove his individuality. He understood that we thought the same way. But since he spoke up so soon, I immediately developed the second mechanism of proving my individuality: opposition to someone else’s idea.
“Over the girl, you mean? The hell with her; if not her, then he’ll get someone else.”
“Over her, and everything in general. For the good of my soul. Remember the stink he made over our work?” His eyes narrowed. “Remember?”
I remembered. I was working in Valery Ivanov’s lab then. We were developing storage blocks for defense computers. Serious things were going on in the world, and we were working hard, not observing days off or holidays, and turned in the work six months before the government’s deadline. And soon the institute well — wishers related Hilobok’s pronouncement on us: “In science people who turn in research before it’s due are either careerists or brown — noses, or both!” His pronouncement became popular. We have quite a few who are in no danger of being called careerists or brown — noses from working the way we did. Sensitive and hotheaded, Valery kept wanting to have a heart — to — heart with Hilobok, then had a fight with Azarov and left the institute.
My fists grew heavy with the memory. Maybe my double could provide the alibi, and I’d…? And then I pictured it: a sober intelligent man beating another intelligent man to a pulp in front of a girl. What was that! I shook my head to chase out the image.
“No, that’s not it. We can’t succumb to such base feelings.”
“Then what is if?”
“Then we must at least protect those dreamy eyes from Harry’s sweaty embrace.” My double bit his lip thoughtfully and pushed me under a tree (taking the initiative again). “Harry Haritonovich, could I see you privately for a moment?”
Hilobok and the girl turned around.
“Ah, Valentin Vasilyevich! Of course… Tanechka, I’ll catch up with you.” The assistant professor turned toward my double.
“Aha!” I got his plan and raced through the trees’ shadows. Everything worked perfectly. Tanechka got as far as the fork in the road, stopped, looked around and saw the same man who had called her boyfriend away just a few minutes before.
“Tanechka,” I said. “Harry Haritonovich asked me to convey his apologies. He won’t be returning. You see, his wife is back and…. Where are you going? I’ll walk you!”
But Tanechka was running away, hands over her face, straight for the bus stop. I headed home.
A few minutes later my double came in.
“Wait,” I said before he could open his mouth. “You told Harry that Tanechka is the fiancee of your friend, who’s a boxing champion?”
“And a judo black belt. And you told her about his wife?”
“Right. Well, at least we’ve found one positive application of our study.”
We got undressed, washed, and got ready for bed. I took the bed and he took the folding bed.
“By the way, speaking of Hilobok,” my double said, sitting down on his bed. “We didn’t mention that our retrieval topic will be discussed at the next scientific council? If Harry hadn’t reminded me so nicely, I would never have known. ‘It’s time, Valentin Vasilyevich. After all you’ve been working six months now, and it hasn’t been discussed yet. Of course, random retrieval is a good thing, but you’ve been requisitioning equipment and materiel, and I keep getting calls from accounting, wanting to know what to call the account. And there’s talk in the institute that Krivoshein can do what he wants while everyone else has to fill out forms in triplicate. I, of course, understand that you must do all this for your dissertation, but you must give your topic form and bring it into the overall plan…. The creep brought up work as soon as I told him about the boxing and judo.”
“If Hilobok is to be believed, all science is done to keep accounting happy.”
I explained the situation to my double. When the computer was spewing out those crazy numbers, I had called Azarov in total despair and asked to see him for advice. As usual, he was too busy and suggested that it would be better to have a scientific council; he would ask Hilobok to arrange it.
“And by then, the little red egg had hatched,” my double finished. “So shall we report it? With the intention of writing a master’s dissertation. Even Hilobok understands that it’s important.”
“And I’ll bring you in as a demonstration at my defense?”
“We’ll see who demonstrates whom,” he replied. “But basically… it’s impossible. We can’t.”
“Of course we can’t,” I agreed glumly. “And we can’t apply for a patent either. It looks as if I have only expenses so far on this deal, no profits.”
“I’ll give you the money, you cheapskate! Listen, what do you need with the Nobel Prize?” My double narrowed his eyes. “If the computer — womb can easily make people, then money…”
“… is easier than anything! With the right paper and all the water marks… well, why not?”
“We’ll each buy a three — bedroom co — op,” my do
uble said, leaning back against the wall dreamily.
“And a Volga car…”
“And two dachas each: one in the Crimea for rest and one on the Riga seacoast for respectability.”
“And we’ll make a few more of us. One will work so that public outcry will be stifled…”
“… and the others will be parasites to their heart’s content…”
“… with a guaranteed alibi. Why not?”
We stopped and looked at each other in disgust.
“God, what depressing small — timers we are!” I grabbed my head. “We take a major discovery and try it on for size on stupid stuff: a dissertation, a prize, a dacha, beating people up with alibis… This is a Method of Synthesizing Man! And we’re….”
“It’s all right, it happens. Every person has petty thoughts once in a while. The important thing is to keep them from turning into petty acts.”
“Actually, so far I see only one positive application of the discovery: you can see your faults much better when they’re in someone else.”
“Yes, but is that any reason for doubling the earth’s population?”
We were sitting opposite each other in our underwear. I was reflected in him, a mirror image.
“All right, let’s get serious. What do we want?”
“And what can we do?”
“And what do we understand about this business?”
“Let’s begin with what’s what. The ideas of Sechyonov, Pavlov, Weiner, and Ashby agreed on one point: that the brain is a machine. Petruccio’s experiments on controlling the development of a human fetus is another move in this direction. The striving for greater complexity and universality in technological systems — just take the desire of microelectricians to create machines that are as complex as the human brain!”
“In other words — our discovery is no accident. The way was prepared for it by the development of ideas and technology. If not this way, then another; if not now, then in a few years or decades; if not us, then someone else would discover it. Therefore, the question comes down to…”
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