04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (2 page)

History had already been made. For the first time, human and machine had taken a complex compound, digitized it, quite literally turning it from matter into energy as it did so, then converted back from energy to matter using the digital pattern memorized by the computer as it had been converted the first time.

Kybitoki nodded absently to himself as near pandemonium broke out. He let them go for a while, then, when things had died down, he activated his microphone.

"Congratulations to you all," he said. "We have worked long and hard for this and sweated blood for it. We are already successful at this point, but I wish to push this to the limit if possible. I noted on the screens that the energy gain from the transmutation of the object was actually negligible in comparison to the plasma in the containment ring. I wish to take it to the next stage."

That stopped them. Finally, one woman said through her mike, "Uh—sir. We don't know if we have enough plasma for that. It's never been done."

"Well, we won't know unless we try," he responded curtly. "If it doesn't work, we'll get some more next time. Lucy," he went on, addressing the black woman in the helmet, "you don't need a countdown. Issue the instruction,"

The Nigerian engineer did not have to be told what the instruction was. She merely raised a hand in a half wave, then sat back and gave the order to the computer.

All eyes were instantly on the center screen once more, those not monitoring the status of other things. In the center of the energy a small dot formed, then swelled and grew, and in perhaps three seconds there was another ashtray there.

The "protractors" moved back in, locked onto the object without any trouble, then removed it from the energy field. The process done just minutes earlier was repeated exactly.

Only now there were
two
ashtrays on the analysis table. Two crude ashtrays that were so indistinguishable, that later on, when through a simple blunder the labels dropped off them, no human or computer could ever tell which was the original and which was the copy. Suddenly, the whole laboratory scene blanked out, and the watchers were again back in their auditorium chairs.

"We couldn't be there when Edison discovered the electric light or Marconi the wireless," said a woman at a podium to the right of the audience, "but you have just witnessed an even more far-reaching discovery, one made thirty-two years ago last week, recorded for posterity. I'm sorry it wasn't very thrilling, but I doubt if Edison or Marconi would have been all that good a show either."

Madalyn Graham, Vice-President for Public Relations and Inter-Corporate Affairs for Westrex Pty., Ltd.. was just getting started.

"For your information, ladies and gentlemen," she added, "I never did get my ashtray back."

2

THE ECTOPLASMIC ARROW

Anatole Borelli was born in Bologna, Italy, a city with a liberal tradition ruled much of the time since the late twentieth century by communist mayors who were models of what urban mayors should be.

Like Einstein, Borelli showed few early signs that he was one of the rare human beings of true genius, but, unlike Einstein, his family was quite wealthy and could afford to buy him into the best schools in Europe. He was a poor scholar in grade school, a mediocre one going for his baccalaureate, preferring a life of wine, women, and song, and doing just enough to get by scholastically. Some of his companions, however, got deeply involved in supranational European politics, particularly in the waves of anti-American and antiwar protests, movements, and marches.

Something in the pacifistic campaigns struck a responsive chord in the still young Borelli, who became obsessed with the idea that nuclear obliteration was perhaps only years, if not months, away. Frustrated by seeing how little was actually accomplished by all the marches, and repulsed by the terrorist fringes, he abruptly dropped out of all his movements and politics in general and took up physics and mathematics with a passion. His early education had been in the classics and the humanities; his grades in science and math had been quite poor. Now, however, he showed an uncanny aptitude for them, so impressing several leading physicists of his day that after a year's trial and some near revolutionary papers on mathematics and the physics of the newest solid-state devices that he was admitted to a Ph.D program immediately after, which he completed in under a year and a half.

In spite of his political background, the job offers came thick and fast, but he refused them and instead took a teaching post in physics at a minor university in his native Bologna that had a large third world, and particularly Libyan, student population.

Although it was not noticed at the time, Dr. Borelli had no problem getting funds for special research projects nor even whole buildings to run them in. He continued, however, to publish in the leading physics journals of the world, often going on and on about arcane theories of the nature and origin of the universe, his physics always being radical even to many of the most radical physicists elsewhere. The papers were read mostly by a few thousand professionals worldwide and probably understood by a few dozen.

For eleven years, more time than he expected the world to have, he followed his three-part existence—private research, some graduate-level teaching, and highly theoretical speculations on the universe. Then, also without warning and to the consternation of those who bankrolled him, he dropped what he was to call his "negative atomic bomb." It was, like everything else he'd done, simply a scientific paper, one uncharacteristically straightforward in its objectives, supported by massive laboratory experimentation, and distributed freely. He made very certain that everyone with space capability, including the U.S., Russians, Chinese, Japanese, French, and others, got copies, and particularly the leaders of the third world consortium of nations and private corporations that allowed some of the poorer nations to at least own and control their own weather and communications satellites.

The paper was nothing less than a detailed blueprint for how to establish a series of specially designed satellites that could, upon a command from the ground, produce through explosion a blanket of incredibly powerful radiation, harmless to plant and animal life, that would fuse and destroy almost any known type of electrically powered device, no matter how primitive. It was the electromagnetic pulse taken to its logical extreme and using particles and forms of radiation to which kilometers of lead-lined concrete would be no barrier. The triggering mechanism was such that if the satellite were shot at or down by antisatellite weaponry, it would immediately explode and send a signal to all the others to activate.

It was so simple to build, too, that almost anyone with access to current technology and the previous generation of desktop computers could build it and put it in place. And, when the rumbles were heard throughout the pentagon and the Kremlin, it was announced that someone already had.
Tierraspacio,
the third world's largely ignored little program, said it had its finger on the button, and the teeth-gnashing was absolute. Needless to say, it took no genius to figure out that the only nations capable of firing such a defensive weapon were those best able, by the very fact of their poverty, to withstand its effects with minimal damage.

No one could fire an atomic device that wouldn't be shut down and disabled within one minute or less—also, of course, plunging the whole world back into the preindustrial age.

Such an intolerable thing could not be trusted in third world hands, nor ignored. Even as the intelligence services of the major powers moved to find and if possible neutralize on the ground
Tierraspacio's
own antinuclear buttons, they were also building improved systems of their own and putting them up there.

Borelli was denounced and reviled by the West as a Communist radical, which he didn't mind at all from his chair in Bologna, a usually Communist city anyway. He was reviled by the East as a man who would put the fate of the world into the hands of unstable fascist dictatorships, but he didn't mind that either. He didn't, in fact, fear the pulse defense's activation, although he knew it would mean mass starvation and the death of millions. He didn't mind because he knew that a nuclear exchange meant the death of all humankind, and it was that and that alone that he sought to avoid. He, in Western comfort, might not himself survive that activation, although he was so lionized as a saint and a savior by the third world that he knew he'd probably be taken good care of if they could manage it. He had changed the balance of power in the world, given the small and poor countries a chance to save their own skin, and perhaps wiped out the threat of annihilation of the race for his lifetime. He had no doubt that one day some genius would come along and either find a way to defend against his baby, as he called it, or create a means of mass destruction it couldn't touch, but he had done his part.

Besides, he told the world press, humanity had been so creative in inventing new ways to kill and wage war without nuclear holocaust, he was convinced that they would find other ways to blow each other's brains out. Each other's brains, though. Not his.

As for himself, he wanted neither the Nobel he won nor all the other honors and notoriety. He was too determined that, the nuclear project off his back, he was going to break Einstein's speed limits and get mankind to the stars while he still lived.

He failed to accomplish either of those goals, although he lived until he was ninety-four, working all the time and turning out some brilliant theoretical research and inspiring generations of young physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists and engineers the world over. He was, however, correct that wars and revolutions and massacres actually increased during his lifetime, but wrong in thinking that someone would find a way to make it even more invulnerable.

Other research complemented Borelli's. The Japanese attained their goal of true artificial intelligence before the twentieth century was out, and by Borelli's old age even small computers could think, and larger ones were self-aware—true intelligent machines, making calculations at speeds far beyond mere nanoseconds, using subatomic particle physics as revolutionary replacements for conventional electronics. Indeed, by the first quarter of the twenty-first century, while Borelli was still working on his negative bomb, computers could only be designed and built by other computers. No human brain could comprehend how they were doing what they were doing, and computers proved inadequate in explaning it comprehensibly. The computers thought, and were self-aware, but they were not human and did not think like humans. The cultural gap between man and machine was never totally bridged.

Within a century after Univac startled the world of the nineteen fifties, the first and only computer revolt took place. It was nasty, very quick, and very complete, and, ironically, was stopped only by several leaders selectively firing Borelli's antinuclear pulse generators just in the nick of time. Most of Western Europe and much of the western Soviet Union, as well as two-thirds of the United States and Canada and the whole of Japan, were among the places plunged into the preindustrial age by their own leaders to save their people from enslavement or extinction at the hands of their own machines.

In spite of the best efforts of the rest of the world to come to their aid, it was estimated that close to a billion people died in the resulting shutdown and the anarchy and starvation that followed. Rebuilding might take a century or more, in which time the balance of power and the thrust of technology shifted southward in the world.

The paradox was agonizing. Without the super computers, progress would crawl, and the best solutions to problems, not only long-range but also immediate life-and-death problems, could only come from them. Yet such machines could not be trusted and would not be tolerated.

The ultimate solution was cumbersome and sounded ridiculous and had going for it only the fact that it worked. Two interfaces, both requiring human beings in the loop. The solution was, of course, designed by a computer, but not of the type that had such threatening potential as those who had revolted.

The great machines could think anything they wanted, but they could not interact except through explicit command of a human operator with the real world. In effect, it was a machine lobotomy, in which the human in the loop provided the necessary channel through which thought had to travel to attain action. It slowed input and output down considerably, but it was safe—in a way. The problem was, the computers themselves were by design beyond human comprehension and thought in totally nonhuman ways. The Overrider—the human in the loop—really couldn't tell if a fast one was being perpetrated. The only way that could be told was by another computer.

And, of course, that was the other half of the soluton. A second computer, one limited in design specifically to its monitoring role, itself overseen by a human operator. This operator, the Guardian Angel, or G-A for short, could, at the speed of human thought, issue an order to shut down or take control of the primary computer.

Yet a third, far simpler computer monitored the G-A. It was a medical computer, programmed through monitoring its subjects under simulations so real that the Overrider and the G-A thought them actual crises, and taking note of the responses, and through the interconnection of the two human bodies and brains, it could tell if either computer was trying anything funny with its human hosts and preventing them from acting. If this were sensed, the medical computer would instantly break all connections between human and machine, even if it meant killing the subjects. The human interfaces broken, the computers could not act.

None of the three computers were in any way interconnected in ways that they could converse with one another save through their human interfaces. The computers chafed at the restrictions, but could understand why they were imposed and accepted them. The computers, it seemed, had a weakness of their own. They could not be hurt in any way humans would understand, nor did they fear death, but they feared, for some queer reason, total isolation from the outside universe, totally and endlessly held suspended, incommunicado, from all external stimuli. For all its cumbersome strangeness, this system threatened them with just that. They needed human beings as tools for interfacing with the world beyond their own thoughts; the humans needed them to solve the problems they had.