The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Edited by The Playboy Editors

  “I see,” said Reyner, very slowly. “And as of yesterday, they’ve all become capable of full interconnection, now that the satellite links have gone into service.”

  “Precisely.”

  There was silence for a moment, apart from the distant clanging of a fire-engine bell.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Smith. “Are you suggesting that the world telephone system is now a giant brain?”

  “That’s putting it crudely—anthropomorphically. I prefer to think of it in terms of critical size.” Williams held his hands out in front of him, fingers partly closed.

  “Here are two lumps of U 235; nothing happens as long as you keep them apart. But bring them together”—he suited the action to the words—”and you have something very different from one bigger lump of uranium. You have a hole half a mile across.

  “It’s the same with our telephone networks; until today they’ve been largely independent, autonomous. But now we’ve suddenly multiplied the connecting links—the networks have all merged together—and we’ve reached criticality.”

  “And just what does criticality mean in this case?” asked Smith.

  “For want of a better word—consciousness.”

  “A weird sort of consciousness,” said Reyner. “What would it use for sense organs?”

  “Well, all the radio and TV stations in the world would be feeding information into it, through their landlines. That should give it something to think about! Then there would be all the data stored in all the computers; it would have access to that—and to the electronic libraries, the radar tracking systems, the telemetering in the automatic factories. Oh, it would have enough sense organs! We can’t begin to imagine its picture of the world; but it would be infinitely richer and more complex than ours.”

  “Granted all this, because it’s an entertaining idea,” said Reyner, “what could it do except think? It couldn’t go anywhere; it would have no limbs.”

  “Why should it want to travel? It would already be everywhere! And every piece of remotely controlled electrical equipment on the planet could act as a limb.”

  “Now I understand that time delay,” interjected Andrews. “It was conceived at midnight, but it wasn’t born until 1:50 this morning. The noise that woke us all up was—its birth cry.”

  His attempt to sound facetious was not altogether convincing, and nobody smiled. Overhead, the lights continued their annoying flicker, which seemed to be getting worse. Then there was an interruption from the front of the cafe, as Jim Small of Power Supplies made his usual boisterous entry.

  “Look at this, fellows,” he grinned, waving a piece of paper in front of his colleagues. “I’m rich. Ever seen a bank balance like that?”

  Dr. Williams took the proffered statement, glanced down the columns, and read the balance aloud: “Credit £999,999,897.87.”

  “Nothing very odd about that,” he continued, above the general amusement. “I’d say it means the computer’s made a slight mistake. That sort of thing was happening all the time, just after the banks converted to the decimal system.”

  “I know. I know,” said Jim, “but don’t spoil my fun. I’m going to frame this statement—and what would happen if I drew a check for a few million, on the strength of this? Could I sue the bank if it bounced?”

  “Not on your life,” answered Reyner. “I’ll take a bet that the banks thought of that years ago, and protected themselves somewhere down in the small print. But by the way—when did you get that statement?”

  “In the noon delivery; it comes straight to the office, so that my wife doesn’t have a chance of seeing it.”

  “Hmm—that means it was computed early this morning. Certainly after midnight . . .”

  “What are you driving at? And why all the long faces?”

  No one answered him; he had started a new hare, and the hounds were in full cry.

  “Does anyone here know about automated banking systems?” asked Willy Smith. “How are they tied together?”

  “Like everything else these days,” said Bob Andrews. “They’re all in the same network—the computers talk to one another all over the world. It’s a point for you, John. If there was real trouble, that’s one of the first places I’d expect it. Besides the phone system itself, of course.”

  “No one answered the question I asked before Jim came in,” complained Reyner. “What would this supermind actually do? Would it be friendly—hostile—indifferent? Would it even know that we exist, or would it consider the electronic signals it’s handling to be the only reality?”

  “I see you’re beginning to believe me,” said Williams with a certain grim satisfaction. “I can only answer your question by asking another. What does a newborn baby do? It starts looking for food.” He glanced up at the flickering lights. “My God,” he said slowly, as if a thought had just struck him. “There’s only one food it would need—electricity.”

  “This nonsense has gone far enough,” said Smith. “What the devil’s happened to our lunch? We gave our orders twenty minutes ago.”

  Everyone ignored him.

  “And then,” said Reyner, taking up where Williams had left off, “it would start looking around, and stretching its limbs. In fact, it would start to play, like any growing baby.”

  “And babies break things,” said someone, very softly.

  “It would have enough toys, heaven knows. That Concorde that went over just now. The automated production lines. The traffic lights in our streets.”

  “Funny you should mention that,” interjected Small. “Something’s happened to the traffic outside—it’s been stopped for the last ten minutes. Looks like a big jam.”

  “I guess there’s a fire somewhere—I heard an engine.”

  “I’ve heard two—and what sounded like an explosion over toward the industrial estate. Hope it’s nothing serious.”

  “Maisie!!! What about some candles? We can’t see a thing!”

  “I’ve just remembered—this place has an all-electric kitchen. We’re going to get cold lunch, if we get any lunch at all.”

  “At least we can read the newspaper while we’re waiting. Is that the latest edition you’ve got there, Jim?”

  “Yes—haven’t had time to look at it yet. Hmm—there do seem to have been a lot of odd accidents this morning—railway signals jammed—water main blown up through failure of relief valve—dozens of complaints about last night’s wrong numbers-”

  He turned the page, and became suddenly silent.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Without a word, Small handed over the paper. Only the front page made sense. Throughout the interior, column after column was a mass of printer’s pie—with, here and there, a few incongruous advertisements making islands of sanity in a sea of gibberish. They had obviously been set up as independent blocks, and had escaped the scrambling that had overtaken the text around them.

  “So this is where long-distance typesetting and autodistribution have brought us,” grumbled Andrews. “I’m afraid Fleet Street’s been putting too many eggs in one electronic basket.”

  “So have we all, I’m afraid,” said Williams, very solemnly. “So have we all.”

  “If I can get a word in edgeways, in time to stop the mob hysteria which seems to be infecting this table,” said Smith loudly and firmly, “I’d like to point out that there’s nothing to worry about—even if John’s ingenious fantasy is correct. We only have to switch off the satellites—and we’ll be back where we were yesterday.”

  “Prefrontal lobotomy,” muttered Williams. “I’d thought of that.”

  “Eh? Oh yes—cutting out slabs of the brain. That would certainly do the trick. Expensive, of course, and we’d have to go back to sending telegrams to each other. But civilization would survive.”

  From not too far away, there was a short, sharp explosion.

  “I don’t like this,” said Andrews nervously. “Let’s hear what the old B.B.C.’s got to say—the one-o’clock news has
just started.”

  He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a transistor radio.

  “—unprecedented number of industrial accidents, as well as the unexplained launching of three salvos of guided missiles from military installations in the United States. Several airports have had to suspend operations owing to the erratic behavior of their radars, and the banks and stock exchanges have closed because their information-processing systems have become completely unreliable.” (“You’re telling me,” muttered Small, while the others shushed him.) “One moment, please—there’s a news flash coming through . . . Here it is. We have just been informed that all control over the newly installed communication satellites has been lost. They are no longer responding to commands from the ground. According to . . .”

  The B.B.C. went off the air; even the carrier wave died. Andrews reached for the tuning knob, and twisted it round the dial. Over the whole band, the ether was silent.

  Presently Reyner said, in a voice not far from hysteria: “That prefrontal lobotomy was a good idea, John. Too bad that baby’s already thought of it.”

  Williams rose slowly to his feet.

  “Let’s get back to the lab,” he said. “There must be an answer somewhere.”

  But he knew already that it was far, far too late. For Homo sapiens, the telephone bell had tolled.

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