by Terry Persun
***
A half hour passed before Fenny read the last message from the computer. Instead of designating the newly accumulated data to a memory block for storage, he kept it in cache so that it was readily available.
Fenny reached over and unplugged himself. Using the dowel, he chose to type using the keyboard. He left a short note for the doctor, thanking him for the new experiences that the hand would eventually offer.
He immediately set to work separating the sensors in an orderly fashion and spreading them along the workbench. He stepped to the end of the bench where rolls of wire were stored, and located a wire-wrap gun with a charged battery. He slid a short stepstool near the bench and stood on it so that his shorter arm could work at the same time his longer arm worked. He allocated his circuitry to work simultaneously, feeding through different segments of data he had uploaded. Completion time, if things went smoothly, would be a few hours.
Fenny also thought while he worked. Running computations or data streams, following work paths; all that could be completed automatically. During which time what he considered his frontal lobe, his neurogrid, could contemplate the more mystical questions he had been discovering while reading; Who am I? What am I? And why do I do the things I do? He had skimmed those key questions from philosophy sites on the internet. There were sites devoted to these questions and how they related to robots, as well, even though he hardly considered himself a robot any longer. Not in the most strict sense of the word.
At completion of the mundane work he was doing, his frontal lobe received a flag. His eyes reconnected with his neurogrid circuits completely. These circuits allowed him to make minor decisions based on averages and probabilities. The circuits had been his fifth revision, Rev 5 and what he thought of as the newest part of his anatomy. Rev 6 had been installed, but only included an adapter of some kind that Dr. Klein said he’d explain later.
Fenny’s technical skills were impeccable, he knew, but fully comprehending the technology wasn’t something he was programmed for. He had watched Dr. Klein pull a scope next to a project and use the probe to touch particular points, but Fenny never truly understood what the doctor was looking for or how he interpreted what he saw there.
Fenny extended his eye fibers and rotated his lenses around to be sure that he was alone. Bringing his attention back to the bench, he did something that created a strange sense in his circuitry, a sense that he at once recognized but could not fully identify. The sense came attached to his decision to wire himself to the new hand.
Quad-5s are working robots, so it took no imagination, only stored knowledge, to know how to proceed. He stepped from the stool and walked to the center of the bench where his tooling was kept. He grabbed the few items he would need for the job, a soldering iron, micro pincers he could use to hold the wires in place, and a solder feeder attachment since he’d be using only one hand to manipulate the iron. He collected a small set of screw drivers as well.
Climbing back into place, Fenny mounted the tools to his side for easy access and set to work soldering the hand circuitry to his long arm. Once the sensors were connected, his data circuits ran through each sensor to be sure that they appeared to be working, but he couldn’t tell for sure. He was receiving sensations he hadn’t possessed. Temperature sensors he understood, but pressure sensors didn’t register in the same way. Combining the two was even further puzzling. His short hand changed tools and used a few small screws to mount the hand.
He lifted it from the bench and flexed the fingers. That was a lot of data, five pincers instead of three. Plus, the fingers had more flexibility. He touched each one to his thumb, as he had read about. The sensation was indescribable. Even the palm and back of his hand produced sensation in the form of data streams.
Fenny attached the other hand to his shorter arm. He walked around the room testing his new limbs by touching different items: boxes, metal chassis, packages filled with biomaterials. He moved slowly, allowing his system to enter data at tremendous volumes. Eventually he would have to switch some of the information to his neurogrid where it could be contemplated on a different level, but first the testing process. He wanted accurate data first.
After a short while inside the work space, Fenny slowly made his way to the front door of the house. He enjoyed walking at night ever since his neurogrid memory had been installed. There was something he associated with meditation that came over him. He could contemplate freely and clearly.
Aerial maps of the area had been downloaded and stored. The cabin was miles from any other resident, so there was little to no chance of being seen. And the evenings always offered additional information such as new sounds, different temperatures and humidity levels, and changes in light and dark that pushed the limits of his circuits. Tonight would be even more filled with experiences.
Once outside, he walked the path through the yard, eager to reach the woods. Along the way his short arm reached out and touched the heads of tall wildflowers that grew near the walkway. His longer arm waved the newly attached hand in the air sensing the temperature and the nuances of air movement. If he stopped and took in only the pressure sensors on his hand, he could tell which way the wind came from. Unbelievable.
Fenny was delighted.
At the woods’ edge, he touched the rough gnarl of tree trunks, the coated exterior of leaves. Different looking plants provided different sensations on his hands: bushes, vines, blossoms. He bent down to touch the ground and to pick up a rock. It was a new world for him, a new experience that he could hardly understand and yet fervently loved.
At one point he stopped and settled in. Each hand touched a different texture. His sensors sampled air quality. Temperatures were logged at every point on each hand. He focused on receiving all the data he could from these two areas of his anatomy. Then he let his neurogrid circuits engage. Sometimes he thought of this joining of different areas of his memory and storage circuits as a mind. There was a free flowing sensation that he found joyous — the only word he could come up with. This multi-connected circuitry, could it truly be called a mind? The doctor called it one.
CHAPTER 4
“IT’S A TIME MACHINE.” Steffenbraun waited for a response. He faced Neil squarely, cocked his head, giving Neil all the time he needed.
But Neil stood fast. He had learned long ago never to laugh at a scientist’s dearly beloved project, whether he thought the man was a complete lunatic or not. He shrugged. “Okay. So, what does it have to do with me? Why am I here? You definitely haven’t lost it.” He indicated how it was there in front of them.
Steffenbraun opened his mouth as though he was about to say something, then closed it again and tightened his lips and lowered his eyes as if in thought. “As unpractical and unscientific as it is, Mr. Altman, this may be the hardest thing you’ll ever have to get over in order to work on a job.”
Insulted, Neil said, “Don’t underestimate my ability.”
“You think this is complete bullshit,” Steffenbraun interrupted. “Can we establish that fact first? Can we?”
“I didn’t come here to be attacked for my personal beliefs, Doctor. I came to help. I suspected something was wrong or missing. If you’ve found it, I can leave,” Neil said.
“You can’t fucking help anyone if we don’t know the truth of where you stand,” Dr. Steffenbraun said.
Neil didn’t expect the anger, but felt equipped to handle it if he had to. Scanning the others who now stared in anticipation at Neil and Steffenbraun, Neil shook his head. “I think time travel is a pipe dream that mystically oriented scientists have been theorizing about for decades. It’s lodged in a need, or desire, to go back and right some sort of assumed wrong, to get the girl you let get away or to change history in some way that suits your own interests. Does that provide you with enough information? Would you like to dismiss me now?”
Dr. Steffenbraun thrust his hand forward. “Now that’s the conversation we needed to have. I’ve got to know what’s going on insi
de your head in order to know what I have to prove and what I don’t. Or should I say, your two heads? How do you think of it?”
The tables turned, Neil stared at Steffenbraun’s outstretched hand for a moment until he caught up to the switch in conversation. He took the doctor’s hand for a brief moment then dropped it. “Prove?”
“Yes, in a moment,” Dr. Steffenbraun said. “First, though, I’m curious to know how you think of yourself,” he stumbled over the right words, “of how your brain operates.”
Neil let the confusion settled for a moment. Steffenbraun had shifted gears too quickly and Neil wasn’t quite sure what just happened in the conversation. “Sure. Glad to.” He shifted so that he partially faced the other scientists, government men, or whoever else sat around. “I’m a bilateral thinker. I can use one side of my brain, if you will, to control everything in my body, while the other side is busy thinking about something completely different, purely focused. I’m not talking about simple multi-tasking. I can do that with either side of my brain. And I can switch back and forth between them.” It was his time to surprise everyone. Neil kept his left eye on Steffenbraun and turned his right eye on the rest of the group. Still staring at Steffenbraun, he scanned the room with his left eye. “While I’m engaged in our little conversation, I can also take in the details of this room, watch the reactions of the others, and calculate how I might find your coffee.” He held up the cup. “Oh, there it is in that far corner against the wall.” He swung his arm out to point at the table holding the coffee maker and stack of Styrofoam cups that sat well beyond his peripheral vision if you only took in the location of his face.
Steffenbraun clapped his hands. “Bravo, Mr. Altman. That was quite a display. I’m impressed. And all this because of an experiment your parents performed on you. An experiment based on a theory that every other scientist in the country negated. And they were eventually imprisoned for it, weren’t they?” His eyebrows raised.
Why the barrage of comments? Neil narrowed his eyes, but let them stay separate. He wanted Steffenbraun to feel as uncomfortable as possible. “They were acquitted,” he said.
“I know.” Steffenbraun produced a smirk.
“You’ve made your point,” Neil said.
“Good. Then you know where I stand as well.” Steffenbraun motioned for Neil to follow him to the workbenches. The others got up and let them approach a monitor they had been watching.
“Are you going to prove something to me now?” Neil pointed to the machine.
“I wish I could, but this machine is only a dummy. The real one was stolen. You’ve no doubt been briefed on that?”
“Not exactly. I wasn’t told anything at all this time.” They stopped at the bench and Neil said, “What about guards?”
Several of the other scientists scoffed as did Steffenbraun. “For a research laboratory the security is lacking. There are a handful of enlisted men who wander the campus and supposedly watch a few monitors.” He pointed to the corner. “Our monitors are recorded separately. This room is top secret and doesn’t show up in the main control room.”
“You have the tapes?”
Steffenbraun just smiled at him. “The guards are supposed to come into this building several times a night, but all they appeared to do was report that several of the cameras heading out of the building had been destroyed. Shot out. They never rewound the tapes. But when we did that, you could see a hand coming around each corner and shooting out the camera.”
He’d heard what he needed to know about that and directed his attention to the machine. “So, this isn’t a time machine? This model doesn’t work,” he said hoping that his sarcasm came through.
Steffenbraun ignored the question. “No faces appeared on those videos.”
“I get it. So, who broke in?” Neil asked.
“No one.” Steffenbraun leaned over the monitor in front of them. “Our guess is that robots did the job…from the inside.”
“What model?”
“No model. These robots look human, Dr. Altman.” Steffenbraun opened a file on the computer.
“But that’s illegal. Are you positive? If they’re from inside, are you building them? Couldn’t they just dress up like…”
“Like what? Robots dressing like humans? Or humans dressed like robotic humans?” Steffenbraun straightened up. “No. They are robots. No one broke into the lab. These are intelligent, human-type monsters from the future.”
Neil consciously held himself back from swinging around and walking out of the lab. How absurd. It had to be a hoax to maintain government money while having nothing to show for it. That was his first thought. But if that were the case, they called in the wrong man. He’d expose them for what they really were. And it wouldn’t take long in his estimation.
Mavra had suggested danger associated with this job. Perhaps this was what she saw, that they were trying to claim the thieves had come from the future, but that Steffenbraun and his partners were the dangerous ones. Neil was out numbered. If they didn’t want to lose funding, who knew what they’d pull to keep working on their project, no matter how ridiculous it was.
“Watch,” Steffenbraun said.
Neil pulled two notepads from his pocket and placed them on the bench. He poised over them with a pen in each hand. “You don’t mind if I take notes, do you?”
“Be my guest.”
Neil bent closer to the flat screen.
“This first video section is of the time machine during a few experiments. This is to give you some background. These were early trials, but should prove out my theories. No doubt you’ll notice the details aren’t perfect in our mock-up here. A few pieces of equipment are missing.”
Neil locked his eyes to operate together, and took in as much information as he could from the video, even with the intense skepticism he held to.
Segments of the film showed sterilized objects sitting on a small bench inside the hull. In a moment the objects disappeared. Now you see ‘em, now you don’t.
Steffenbraun reached over and turned up the volume. “Time to test your abilities,” he said. “If I understand this correctly, you can watch the video and listen to the narration while carrying on a conversation with me.”
“I can do that and take notes,” Neil said.
The narrator of the video explained the disappearance of the items using parapsychological philosophies. Mavra should have been there, he thought. The gist of the explanation had to do with the thread of life not being a part of the sterile object. Neil passed by these explanations as so much hubbub, while taking care to register other, more physical details like comparing the images on the video with those of the mock-up in the lab. His left hand scratched brief notes from the narration and observations of the machine and its contents. As he watched the screen, a wrench that was placed on the bench disappeared. A small cardboard box disappeared.
The video flashed in places where it had been spliced, most likely eliminating dead time. Yet, it just as easily could have been doctored by a teenager, let alone Steffenbraun or one of his minions. The next experiments were of lab mice that remained inside the old hull without so much as a scratch, the narrator pointed out. With these experiments, the cages disappeared but the mice didn’t. Apparently this was the case whenever a living object was used. The life thread held things firmly in a timeline. It could only occupy one time sequence. In the philosophy of the moment, the lab mice were essentially motionless, in the sense that they couldn’t move through time.
Additional narration discussed the inability for a biological subject to go into the past, since that part of the thread had already been used. If Neil understood the theory correctly, it was clear how going into the past might be impossible – he was good with that, considering the explanation – but, according to the narrator, this same philosophy would allow for a subject to travel into the future. Unless, that is, that all of one’s life is predetermined, connected to the thread, which he didn’t believe. Further, the way Neil u
nderstood the hypothesis, these guys believed that they could send someone into the future and then that same person could go into the past as long as he or she hadn’t already lived at that time. They could bend the thread, but not overlap it.
While he took notes and watched the video, Dr. Steffenbraun carried on a completely other conversation with Neil. He went over complicated formulas, explaining advanced stages of his time theories. It wasn’t the age-old folded space thing, or the black hole drawing us into a bowl. None of the old theories came up at all. He took notes, but would have to review them later to fully understand what the doctor was trying to get across.
Neil copied down formulas while tenaciously listening to Steffenbraun and the film narrator simultaneously. His eyes were the most obvious indication of his bilateral mind. His hearing wasn’t so easily noticed. Listening to two conversations was a bit more difficult because of the overlap of sound, which he had to learn to get over. The real problem – not in this case – was using one mouth to communicate with two people.
From what he garnered from the formulas, he had little doubt that the doctor’s theories were plausible on the surface. But then, math could be manipulated, especially when you base it on theory rather than reality. He allowed his right eye to look at Dr. Steffenbraun. “According to this video, life is predetermined?”
Steffenbraun gave a little nod, apparently acknowledging a good question. “It might sound that way, but that’s not quite how I see it. Just because we can’t go into the future doesn’t mean that this particular life is predetermined. It may be that we haven’t found the way through yet. I have other experiments to try. There’s another thing, too. I’m sure you are aware of the parallel universe theories. The future could take on any one of a million paths. But the thread, now a spider web, would still be connected. We still can’t go where we already are, but we can go any number of other places.”