by Bob Shaw
“Welcome to Biosyn, Martin,” Urquhart said cheerfully. “Why didn’t you signal you were coming and let us pick you up at the airport?”
“Thanks, John.” M’tobo’s warm dry hand closed over Urquhart’s. “I didn’t want to inconvenience you—you must be very busy just now.”
“We’re never too busy to greet an old friend,” Urquhart assured him, weighing the implication that the company’s management was experiencing difficulties.
“Thank you, but this is a business visit more than anything else. Is Colonel Crowley available?” They began walking towards the glowing green organ-pipes of the dropshafts.
“Ah … no. We’re temporarily out of contact—but why didn’t you use the microwave link to call him? It would have saved you….”
“I had a feeling he wouldn’t be available, and my business is mainly with you, John. Is it safe to speak here?”
Urquhart stopped walking. “Yes.”
“The position—in a nutshell—is that a general election is being forced on my Government, probably within two months. You’ve heard about the riots in Losane?”
“We all have.” Urquhart was enveloped in the cold unease of premonition. ‘But I assumed it was merely teachers demanding equal pay with students, or something like that. I didn’t think they were serious.”
“I assure you that they are. O’ringa’s Democratic Reform party has gathered much support in the past year, so much that we have no option but to agree to an election—an election we might lose without the active support of Colonel Crowley.”
“Active?” Urquhart laughed as he glanced up at M’tobo’s glistening chestnut face above the wall-like torso. The saffron-tinged eyes were uncomfortably intent on his own.
“Active in the political sense—which means being available at all times to speak to his people and to give his overt blessing to the Loyalist Government. That is no more than we were promised by Biosyn.”
“Of course, of course.” Urquhart glanced around him at the scattered knots of people in the reception hall. “Martin, perhaps we shouldn’t talk here. I’m going to take you down to the Tank level.”
M’tobo took an involuntary step backwards and collided with a pert secretary who was wearing one of the latest vi-bras. The impact threw the tiny impulse motors in the vi-bra out of synchronisation and the girl hurried away looking disgusted as she tried to control the wild oscillations of her bosom.
“Interesting effect, that,” Urquhart smirked desperately, but the huge man’s eyes were blank and Urquhart suddenly understood a little more of what was happening in the African state he represented. If a person of M’tobo’s education and experience had doubts and fears—what would the mass of his people be like?
M’tobo recovered his composure almost immediately. He talked about inconsequentials while Urquhart used his key to get them into the special shaft which went a hundred metres down into bedrock. The drop took a matter of seconds, then they were stepping into the Tank room. It was fifty metres square and hewn from solid rock, but each wall was covered with magnified scenes brought down from the roof in light pipes, creating the impression of being in a penthouse. Urquhart glimpsed the same wooded hill in the misty morning light, his hill, and he made up his mind to go there at the weekend. The Tank itself occupied the centre of the room, its mirrored sides stretching from floor to ceiling, and desks of varying sizes formed a line around it. Most of the desks had two or more technicians seated at them.
“Martin!” Bryan Philp, teeth and glasses screening his face with light, advanced on them. “Good to see you, good to see you!”
You ham, Urquhart thought, don’t overplay the welcome. But M’tobo’s attention was held by the Tank. He took several paces towards it and stood with his back to the others. Watching him, Urquhart remembered his own early dismay, the emotional upheavals which were a result of intellect forcing instinct to accept the impossible….
“It is so difficult for me to credit this thing,” M’tobo said. “I attended Colonel Crowley’s private funeral and cremation, and yet I have to believe he is alive in there.” He seemed subdued, slightly less Herculean, and Urquhart realised that bringing him face-to-face with the Tank had been a good tactical move. M’tobo turned to speak to Philp. “The technology involved goes far beyond my understanding, and yet I wish I could learn….”
Philp’s eyes lit with excitement. “Come into my office, Martin. I’ve got something you’ll be interested in.” He took M’tobo’s elbow and steered him into his long office which had a glass partition on one side and an old-fashioned blackboard on the other. Urquhart followed with brooding suspicions that his technical director was about to go off the rails, as he usually did when not closely confined to his own work. Philp waved M’tobo into a chair and busied himself with the controls of a 3D projector.
‘Bryan,” Urquhart whispered. “I hope you’re not going to show that animation I’ve heard about. The one you and your cretinous mechanics put together while you were supposed….”
“Hello,” said a pink cigar with fins at one end and a comicbook face at the other. It had appeared in the air close to the blackboard and was bowing grotesquely while introducing itself. “I am an intercontinental ballistic missile and, believe it or not, I am a direct ancestor of the bionics Tank in which a human personality can be synthesised and preserved indefinitely.
“Let me tell you something about a little family problem I had a long time ago. Like all other early complex computer systems I was … well, let’s face it, I was downright unreliable. My designers did their best with my individual parts, and managed to give them a reliability factor of something like 99.9993 per cent, but even this allowed me only a reasonable chance of working properly. Increasing the reliability of individual components was an engineering dead-end, because any minute gains were more than cancelled by my growing size and complexity.”
The pink cigar paused to demonstrate this process by becoming a little longer and sprouting an extra fin. M’tobo stared at it fixedly.
“You’ll roast for this,” Urquhart snarled quietly in Philp’s ear. “Our PR consultants gave strict instructions that this abortion of yours was to be destroyed. Turn it off at once!”
“And yet there is one very common type of computer which has achieved the opposite effect—this is the human brain,” the cigar continued blithely, and smiled as a greenish object resembling a boiled cauliflower appeared in the air beside it.
“It consists of ten thousand million neurons, each of which is less dependable than a transistor—and still the complete system is millions of times more reliable than any of its single parts. The brain is not perfect, mind you. Being a survival device, it is somewhat inflexible as a result of its conditioning, and, quite frankly, it is not very well adapted to handling problems in logic’
“I must agree,” the brain said in a coy feminine voice and Urquhart groaned aloud. “The problems don’t end there, either. My neurons are exactly like my friend’s electronic switches in that they have to be either on or off, with no in-between state possible—but they are very much slower in operation than switches.
“How do I overcome these drawbacks? The answer is simple—I act in parallel. Many different connections are made simultaneously, with the result that a defective biological switch is immediately outvoted, giving me high reliability. Acting in parallel also makes up for the comparative slowness of my neurons.”
“Absolutely true,” the pink cigar cut in. “With the example of the brain before them, computer designers began turning away from sequential or serial operation as far back as the Nineteen-Sixties. They investigated parallel operation systems modelled on the brain and the technique proved successful—machines capable of human-like, alogical, heuristic thinking came into being—but the biggest breakthrough of all was the development of microminiature electrochemical components.” The cauliflower-like brain abruptly vanished and was replaced by a swarm of multi-coloured specks, striped like wasps.
&n
bsp; Urquhart made a determined effort to reach the projector’s controls, but Philp’s sharp elbow struck him painfully on the mouth. “You’re finished, Philp,” he whispered, gingerly patting his upper lip. “You leave Biosyn today.”
“Relax, John—Martin’s enjoying the show. It’s almost over anyway.” Philp flashed his outsize teeth as the cigar began to speak.
“Designers found themselves equipped with a whole new armoury of basic components—the artron, an artificial neuron with built-in logic and inhibitor gates which enabled it effectively to simulate the brain’s neuron; the neuristor, a diode which stood in for the axon, the nerve fibre which connects the neuron; the memistor, which used electrochemical phenomena to function as a memory unit.
“True artificial intelligence had finally been born—and with it the possibility that an individual human intelligence could evade the catastrophic power failure we refer to as death. This was done by sweeping the brain just before death with an ultra-fast Röntgen ray scanner, recording the electrical state of every one of its millions of components. The result was a tremendously complex programme which, when fed into the Tank, recreated the human personality in every detail.
“Thank you for listening so patiently.” The pink cigar bowed again and vanished.
Urquhart wiped the perspiration from his forehead. “How can I apologise for this childish exhibition, Martin? My colleague is obviously a frustrated washing powder salesman.”
“No need to apologise—I found it quite interesting, as a matter of fact.” M’tobo got to his feet and looked out through the glass partition towards the Tank. “I hadn’t realised the computer would be so large.”
“The matrix itself occupies only a part of the installation you see there.” Philp’s angular frame moved jerkily as he spoke. “Of course, we have almost a thousand other clients in there, but even so, Nature still has a slight edge when it comes to density. Even with the latest cyber-random, self-establishing palimpsest circuitry the best we’ve been able to achieve is five million artrons to the cubic centimetre. So Colonel Crowley’s brain is approximately twice as big as the one he had previously.”
M’tobo shook his head slowly. “Exactly whereabouts in the computer is the brain?”
Philp glanced warily at Urquhart, then switched on his smile.
“That’s the whole point,” Urquhart said. “Each client has an address—specific volume of the matrix which was assigned to him when his personality was programmed into the Tank—but circuitry of this kind is self-establishing. It is possible for a kind of osmosis to occur, for an identity to change its position.”
“When that happens you lose contact?” M’tobo’s practical mind was going to the heart of the problem.
“Well … more or less.”
“Wouldn’t it be better if you employed much smaller matrices and had only one client to each?”
“For engineering and administrative reasons, undoubtedly—but economics are involved too. We can now produce artrons for something like a penny each, but complete simulation of an adult brain calls for ten thousand million artrons. So, for artrons alone—never mind associated components—the bill for the equivalent of a man’s brain comes to a hundred million dollars.”
“M’tobo nodded glumly. “Then how can you … ?”
“More than one identity can occupy a given volume of the matrix at any time. That’s why we use the word palimpsest, although it isn’t strictly accurate—the old writing on the manuscript doesn’t have to be erased. With multiple usage of the components the cost is shared, and even a small and fairly new country like Losane is enabled to retain the services of its great men after they have died.” Urquhart stopped speaking suddenly. He had found himself selling the Biosyn plan to M’tobo all over again, which made it look as though he was unsure of himself.
“Yes. Colonel Crowley’s personality has been preserved at a greatly reduced cost.” M’tobo’s voice was growing more resonant as he became used to the proximity of the Tank. ‘But the point is that my Government is not acting out of sentiment. If the Colonel is not available to advise his supporters and lend visible support to the Loyalists, then he might as well be dead. From our point of view it would be better if he were dead, because the money we are paying to Biosyn could be used for other purposes.”
“I appreciate your feelings, Martin.” Urquhart glanced at Philp, whose teeth and glasses immediately blazed with morning light from the vicarious windows. ‘But let me assure you that this break in communications with Colonel Crowley is of a very temporary nature.”
M’tobo squared the massive cantilevers of his shoulders and began walking towards the door. “I’m glad to hear that. I’ve arranged for him to broadcast to the whole of Losane five days from now. If he is not available I will discontinue our bi-annual payments to Biosyn—and I will make my reasons for doing so very public’
Later, when the Losanian had been escorted to the monorail, Urquhart hurried back to the Tank level and found Philp sipping cofftea from a plastic bulb. Philp’s bony face showed concern.
“Five days,” Urquhart said. “Can you do it?”
“You fired me, remember?”
“You’re reinstated.”
Philp shrugged. “While you were up top we lost contact with two more clients—including Browne.”
‘Browne! But he’s …’
“I know. Eight years in the Tank and never once strayed from his input/output station. I would have sworn he was the best adjusted of the lot—but the last thing he said to us was that Crowley has shown him there is more to existence than being a kind of intellectual sponge. I tried to hold him by increasing the input voltage at his station, but he pulled that trick of Crowley’s—overloaded most of his molecular amplifiers and used the extra energy to batter his way towards the centre of the Tank. It must have been painful for him, but he got away from me.”
Urquhart sat down and stared dully at the mirrored side of the Tank. “Perhaps we should have told M’tobo the truth.”
“We may have to, eventually—but how do you convince a patriot like Martin that the founder of his country has lost interest in it, that he has found new kingdoms to conquer?”
“New kingdoms?”
Philp studied Urquhart narrowly, as if seeing him for the first time. “I’ve been wondering how to tell you this, John. Our multiple usage scheme is not a very good idea—at least, for some types of client. Crowley, for example, was a classic, damn-the-torpedoes, statesman-adventurer who—if he’d been consulted before that car crash—would probably have blown out his own brains rather than be programmed into the Tank.
“Now, our typical client is a professor emeritus whose fee was paid by a university department which was grateful to see him finally tucked away, and who probably had been existing as a pure intellect for twenty years before his death.”
“What difference does it make? Crowley’s in there now and he’ll just have to adapt.”
“That’s what you think.” Philp snorted. “If you’d been paying attention to my animation you’d know that every neuron in Crowley’s original brain has its counterpart in the Tank. Crowley was endowed with the strong will common to his kind, which from the biologist’s point of view is another way of saying there was plenty of power available locally at his neurons to amplify weak signals and trigger off following branches of neurons.
“Translated into the electrochemical context of the Tank, our Colonel Crowley has a lot of extra molecular amplifiers which give his artron networks more zip than those of our other clients.”
“What of it?”
“I’ll tell you what of it. Crowley doesn’t just converse with other clients in the normal manner—he imposes his own thought patterns on them.”
Urquhart’s sense of alarm deepened. “That sounds bad. How long has it been going on?”
“Several weeks. Ever since Crowley learned how to screen off all normal inputs and to generate his own signals. That’s what I meant about conquering
new kingdoms—he has his own private universe to occupy him.”
“You mean he’s insane?”
“Not necessarily. A psychologist might say he has prevented himself from going insane.”
“This is terrible.” Urquhart began pacing the length of the office. ‘But come now, Bryan—you’re exaggerating when you say he has a private universe. Do you mean … ha-ha … he forces some of the others to swallow his own notions about the benefits of colonialism?”
“I mean he makes them ride around a desert on green-and-red dragons while he hunts them with a rifle.”