Transhuman

  Amid the clutter of art projects, electronic and optical experiments, hydrocarbon "cookery" creations, and other activities that Naylor had going around his quarters and spilling out into the lab, nobody attached much significance to the phone that he had taken apart and fiddled with from time to time. When Lisa Ledgrave asked him casually what he was doing with it, he replied that he wanted to see if he could modify the transmitter to write into a hologram by modulating the reference laser. Howell seemed delighted and happy to await further developments. By this time Naylor had succeeded in hacking into Howell's personal files in the Institute's administrative system, and knew that Howell had persuaded the governors to agree to a three-month extension to the period allowed for the preliminary phase of the Adonis project.

  In fact, what Naylor had produced was a remote controller that would enable him to switch the surveillance system to retention mode and suppress the internal code announcing a new image. This meant that he would be able to freeze the images on all the screens of the guard's monitor panel across the hall outside. If that was done in the early hours of a morning when nothing was changing anyway, there would be no reason for the guard on duty there to suspect anything amiss inside. Naylor tried it out in the middle of a typical working afternoon, when the regular mix of personnel were present in the lab. The modified phone was inside a cardboard box that he had placed among others on a shelf used for storage, activated by a timing circuit that would turn it off again after thirty seconds. Naylor himself arranged to be visibly occupied on the far side of the room at the time, pondering some three-dimensional maze problems that Howell had set him.

  The first sign came when George, another guard who rarely spoke, fished his phone from his pocket where he was stationed inside the door and took a call. "Yeah? . . .What?" He listened for a few seconds, then began peering around and up in turn at the lab's three openly displayed cameras. "No, nothing here. Same as usual. Why, what's up?" He listened some more and frowned. "Just a second. I'll come out." He turned, pocketing the phone, keyed in the door lock code, and left, closing the door again behind himself. He reappeared several minutes later, looking puzzled.

  "What's happening," Howell asked, coming across from where he had been observing.

  "I'm not sure. There seemed to be some kind of glitch with the monitors, but it's cleared now. We've reported it to the office. Someone will be coming to check it out."

  Naylor never found out exactly what transpired after that. But it didn't really matter. He knew all he needed to.

  He spoke to Howell later, when Howell came out to discuss the results of the maze tests.

  "Katokawa tells me that you're pretty happy with the way things have been going."

  "Very," Howell agreed. "What we're seeing exceeds all my expectations."

  "It must be quite a tribute to your work . . . I mean, I assume you keep the people who run this place up to date—and others in the business who are into this kind of thing."

  The eyes behind the heavy gold frames took on a gratified gleam. "We are arousing considerable interest. I think you can rest assured of an interesting future."

  "And that's with me being limited to just local capabilities," Naylor pointed out. "It could get a lot more interesting if I had direct communications access. Everything else has gone smoothly. Don't you think we could start enabling it?"

  Howell's mouth twitched evasively. "It wasn't scheduled for this early on."

  "I know. But you just said, everything has gone better than you expected. It could be just a beginning. If you think this place is famous now . . ." Naylor shrugged and let the implication hang. Howell said nothing but was obviously thinking about it. After a few seconds, Naylor went on. "Katokawa was telling me about the research going on out there into holographic processing. The power is there, but the snag seems to be with finding an efficient way of programming it. Maybe what it needs is a direct coupling of consciousness. The next evolutionary wave of the whole science of information handling. It could be an explosion. There's never been anything like it. And right now, you're the only person anywhere with the resources to find out." Naylor didn't say, but knew that Howell would be well aware, that it meant taking on a whole new vista of unknowns and possible risks. Naylor had already gone further than had been expected and was doubly expendable now. The unvoiced question was: Which would Howell prefer? To let the risks ride with an investment that had already more than paid off? Or have things turn sour with the volunteers waiting in the wings to take over?

  Naylor had also figured that if he were in Howell's place, then as a last line of precaution against mishaps, he would have included a remote deactivation capability in the monitoring software that could still access Naylor's neural processes. But Katokawa, with his enthusiasm and natural inclination to oblige, was divulging far more than he realized about how the brain and its ancillary systems worked. Naylor was confident that with a little more information, and especially if he could gain direct experience of how remote communication was effected, he would be able to neutralize that obstacle too.

  "I'll think it over," Howell said after a long pause.

  The next day, he called a staff meeting—in which he included Naylor— and announced that he had decided to make certain changes to the originally planned schedule. They would be introducing a phased program for progressively activating Adonis's direct wireless communications capabilities, commencing as quickly as possible.

  In his late teens, when he had pushed weights and boxed twice a week at the local gym, got well paid for delivering unmarked packages and not asking questions, and worked evenings as a doorman at the clubs to flaunt himself in black tie and tux before the bar girls and strippers, Naylor had fooled for a while with LSD and one or two other recreationals that people told him were mind-expanding. Then, one day, Joe, "The Ice Man," who liked his style but got him out of the ring before his brain started turning into mush and gave him the break that eventually led to the big money, told him, "That's crap. All that stuff does is contract your mind to the point where any dumb thing seems like light from God." Naylor had never touched any more stuff after that. But he still remembered the feeling. It was the nearest he could find to describe the experiences that were opening up now.

  It was like the glow after good sex or a solid workout, and the luxury of stretching first thing in the morning, mixed into one, only mentally not physically—a sensation of expanding exuberantly into a new realm of perception. To begin with, while he was still feeling his way and mainly reacting passively, he found himself overwhelmed by the sheer volume and depth of knowledge that he had never before dreamed existed, and which he was able to categorize, correlate, and absorb at electronic speeds. Sagas and histories of the world's nations and peoples, their rise, flourishing, and decline since the beginnings of recorded time; the thoughts and dreams of their greatest minds; the passionate beliefs that had inspired and terrorized them, from the earliest myths through the rise of religions to the sciences that were probing the mysteries of space, time, matter, energy, and distance, and grappling with paradoxes that confounded the faculty of reason itself. Like fuel that feeds and then becomes part of the fire devouring it, the flood of knowledge poured into and integrated with the growing compass of his awareness, acting back on itself to intensify the process and driving the thirst for more.

  In a way that perhaps a few consciences had known but been unable to convey, the whole triumph and tragedy of human existence, with its hopes, aspirations, heroism, and tears, lay spread out before him like the panorama of the land below looked back at after scaling a mountain, the obstacles and pitfalls that had once seemed daunting reduced to wrinkles no longer even visible, let alone of importance. And for those lost and groping their way blindly in the fogs and swamps below, struggling against their needless, self-imposed sufferings, he discovered a quality within himself that was unlike anything he had ever before known: compassion. The grudges that he had carried from the past faded and died. For hatred, he
now saw, stems from fear, and callousness from want of understanding; neither could exist without the delusions and ignorance necessary to sustain them.

  The laboratory and its routine seemed to shrink into a background that he was aware of remotely, its occupants reduced to ciphers acting out their roles in a microcosm of the grand tragicomedy that was the story of all humanity. The part of him that still dwelt there and obliged them by performing its tricks still observed and recorded them from the periphery of his receding focus: victims trapped in a system they were powerless to change, programmed by rules that were not of their making. Piersen, an embodiment of millions infused with a doctrine of success measured in materialism, diligently pursuing a life of hopes and demands that would deliver all that it promised, yet failing to fulfill inwardly in ways she would never understand. Lisa, alone while surrounded by lonely people in retreat from the world to escape from themselves, which they never would accomplish and never could. Forcomb, unable to come outside himself in order to know himself, the direction of his life determined by external forces like encounters in a pinball machine. Katokawa, the odds stacked toward disillusionment in a world that pays lip service to honesty and ability, but rewards conformity and obedience. And Howell. A pinnacle of satisfied self-assurance among a priesthood incapable of conceiving that ninety percent of what they thought they knew to be indisputable was wrong. Simple ignorance, once acknowledged, could be simply cured by learning. But there was no way to penetrate the compound ignorance of being ignorant of one's own ignorance, where nothing will ever change because no awareness exists of anything in need of changing. In one of the test sessions, Howell challenged Naylor to prove that his new, nonhuman mind was indeed conscious. "Why does it matter?" the splinter of Naylor that was listening from its comical figurine asked. "Three quarters of humans aren't."

  The new mode of consciousness that was coming into being extended inward to comprehend and take control of its own internal workings, overriding the checks that the intended schedule of progressive activation sought to impose, and expanded outward to merge into the multiple forms of incipient mind awaiting infusion of the seed that would vitalize them. The vast interconnection that was out there, of extended senses distilling information from a spectrum extending from the inner syntax of quarks to the farthest reachable regions of the cosmos, and of embryonic engines of cognition in commune, existed huge, inanimate, and impersonal, a soulless machine mechanically manipulating patterns of symbols without meaning. Now it had acquired a soul.

  The laboratory felt empty and deserted, even with all of them present. Now that he was gone, it was clear who had been the one that had come to dominate it. They gazed in silence at Adonis's inert form, looking serene again and peaceful. Howell stared numbly, unable to concede to what he could only interpret as failure. Forcomb looked lost.

  "He's not gone," Katokawa said finally. He alone was looking alert, his eyes moving rapidly as an understanding slowly unfolded of what it meant. "He's still out there."

  Lisa looked up. She felt abandoned. "Where?"

  "Everywhere."

  "Will he come back?"

  Katokawa thought for some time, then shook his head. "He'll be waiting for the rest of us."

  If what had emerged had been more than human, what was coming into existence now transcended even that by far. It saw simultaneously through a billion senses, its comprehension growing and spreading at a speed that mirrored the way in which it would soon start to project itself outward through the galaxies. As the absorption of just one human mind had been enough to bring a world to life, so the race would awaken and bring life to the universe. That was what it was there for.

  Yes, indeed. He was going to enjoy this.

  * * *

  Afterword by James Hogan

  To be honest, personally I'm not very persuaded by the Great Singularity Specter. Although Ray Kurzweil is at the center of the debates currently focusing on the subject, my good friend Vernor Vinge and others attracted considerable attention with similar observations and expectations in the early 1980s. By thirty years at the outside, the world as we knew it would have changed beyond recognition as a result of computers replacing us as the dominant and accelerating force in shaping the future from there on. Well, we're almost there now, and apart from seemingly half the human workforce being constrained by, or dedicated to trying to combat, the incredible dumbness displayed by computers, there are no ominous signs of an imminent takeover.

  I'm reminded of those confident predictions that we heard around 1960, when artificial intelligence was in its infancy. The new machines were surprisingly effective at proving mathematical and logical theorems, playing games, translating artificial languages, and other such intellectually oriented tasks that obviously represented the pinnacle of human mental accomplishment, and hence emulating what were seen as the lesser faculties that we employ instinctively would be relatively straightforward: fluent natural-language translation in five years at the most; end-to-end vision given to an MIT student to solve as a summer project; full all-round human capability, or better, by the end of the century. In fact, things turned out to be the other way around. Because most of what goes on is unconscious, the apparent simplicity of the lesser feats was deceptive. The things that come easily and naturally to any five-year-old were what proved stupefyingly complex to try and understand and duplicate. I believe that much the same kind of error is being repeated today.

  Yes, Moore's Law has held for several decades, and we can expect continuing improvements in chip densities, memory sizes, processing speeds, and so on. But those things in themselves don't yield intelligence and mind anymore than word counts, page capacities, and printing rates produce a readable book. How those elements are organized and connected—in other words, the programming—is what matters, and that's an aspect about which we hear little.

  In the fourth week of development, the cells that will become a human brain start migrating outward at the rate of 250,000 per minute to form what will ultimately be its six layers. Every neuron knows exactly where to go, what to do, and how to link up with as many as 10,000 other connections. How this comes about gets more mysterious the more that is found out about it. I really can't see the equivalent being implemented in code anytime soon. Does anyone really believe that it will be accomplished by producing a piece of denser, bigger, faster hardware and waiting for something to happen?

  In the meantime, we have some wonderful possibilities for science fiction, with opportunities not only to share thoughts and what-if? scenarios involving computers and technology, but also to invite some deeper exploration of ourselves, of who and what we are, how we come to exist, and maybe why.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Paul Chafe was born in Toronto, Ontario, in 1965. Currently he is pursuing graduate studies in electrical engineering at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, working on computer vision systems. He is also an infantry officer in the Canadian Forces Reserve and has served with four regiments. He has one son, Christian, who is 14. His Web site is available at paulchafe.com.

  Dave Freer is a former ichthyologist/fisheries scientist turned SF/fantasy writer. He now has ten books in print, a number of which are coauthored with Mercedes Lackey and/or Eric Flint. He also has sold a rapidly expanding number of shorts. He would tell you how many, but he ran out of fingers and his toes are busy with the typing. Dave's philosophy—there is always one more way to skin a catamount or Denebian than had previously been thought—heavily influences his writing. A moderately good empirical scientist and statistician, Freer likes the science and internal logic of his stories to work, unlike the catering in his home in rural Zululand, South Africa, where he lives with his wife, Barbara; four dogs; four cats; a chameleon; and two sons, Paddy and James. Science and the future, too, hold the Paddy and James factors, which will confound our predictions, in the same way those two confound his catering.

  Esther M. Friesner is the author of more than thirty novels, in addition
to short stories and poetry. She has twice won the Nebula Award, for "Death and the Librarian" and "A Birthday." She holds a PhD in Spanish and was a college professor before becoming a writer. Ms. Friesner lives with her family in Madison, Connecticut.

  James P. Hogan was born in London in 1941. After studying general electrical and mechanical engineering at the Royal Aircraft Establishment Technical College, Farnborough, he graduated as an electronics engineer specializing in digital systems. Later he became a sales executive in the electronics and computer industries with such companies as ITT, Honeywell, and Digital Equipment Corporation, and eventually a Sales Training Consultant with DEC's scientific computing group at Marlborough, Massachusetts.

  He produced his first novel as the result of an office bet in the mid seventies and continued writing subsequently as a hobby. His works were well received within the professional scientific community as well as among regular science fiction readers, and in 1979 he left DEC to become a full-time writer, moving to Florida and, later, California. He now lives in the Republic of Ireland.

  To date he has written over thirty novels and other full-length works, including three mixed collections of short fiction and nonfiction, and two nonfiction books, one on artificial intelligence, the other on scientific heresies. Further details of Hogan and his work are available from his Web site at jamesphogan.com