Brain Child (36 page)

“If what you’re saying is actually true,” Marsh said, “what you’ve done is no miracle at all. It’s an obscenity.”

Ellen’s eyes filled with tears, which she made no attempt to wipe away. “But he’s alive, Marsh,” she protested, and then shrank back in her chair as Marsh turned to face her.

“Is he? By what criteria? Let’s assume that what Torres says is true. That Alex’s brain was far too extensively damaged even to attempt repairs.” His eyes, flashing with anger, flicked to Torres. “That
is
what you said, isn’t it?”

Torres nodded. “There was no brain activity whatever, except on the most primitive level. His heart was beating, but that was all. Without the respirator, he couldn’t breathe, and as far as we could tell, he made no response to any sort of stimulation.”

“In other words, he was brain dead, with no hope of recovery?”

Again Torres nodded. “Not only was his brain dead, it was physically torn beyond repair. Which is the only reason I went ahead with the techniques I used.”

“Without our permission,” Marsh grated.

“With
your permission,” Torres corrected. “The release clearly allowed me to use any methods I deemed necessary or fit, whether they were proven or unproven, traditional or experimental. And they worked.” He hesitated, then went on. “Perhaps I made a mistake,” he said. “Perhaps I should have declared Alex dead, and asked that his body be donated to science.”

“But isn’t that exactly what you did?” Marsh demanded, “Without, of course, the niceties of telling us what you were doing?”

Torres shook his head. “For the operation to be a complete success, I wanted there to be no question that Alex is still Alex. Had I declared him dead, what I have done would have led to certain questions I was not yet prepared to deal with.”

Suddenly Ellen rose to her feet. “Stop it! Just stop it!” Her eyes moved wildly from Marsh to Raymond Torres. “You’re talking about Alex as if he no longer exists!”

“In a way, Ellen,” Torres replied, “that’s exactly the truth. The Alex you knew doesn’t exist anymore. The only Alex that is real is the one I created.”

There was a sudden silence in the room, broken at last by Marsh’s voice, barely more than a whisper. “That you created with
microprocessors?
I still can’t believe it. It just isn’t possible.”

“But it is,” Torres said. “And it isn’t nearly as complicated as it sounds, except physically. It’s the connections that are the most difficult. Finding exactly the right neurons to connect to the leads of the microprocessors themselves. Fortunately, the brain itself is an aid there. Given an opportunity, it will build its own pathways and straighten out most of the human errors by itself.”

“But Alex is alive,” Ellen insisted. “He’s alive.”

“His body is alive,” Torres agreed. “And it’s kept alive by seventeen separate microprocessors, each of which is programmed to maintain and monitor the various physical systems of his body. Three of those microprocessors are concerned with nothing except the endocrine system, and four more handle the nervous system. Some of the systems are less complicated than those two, and could be lumped together in a single chip with a backup. Four of the chips are strictly memory. They were the easy ones.”

“Easy ones?” Ellen echoed, her voice weak.

Torres nodded. “This project has been under way for years, ever since I became interested in artificial intelligence—the concept of building a computer that can actually reason on its own, rather than simply make computations at an incredibly rapid speed. And the problem there is that despite all we know about the brain, we still have no real concept of how the process of original thought takes place. It very quickly became
obvious to me that until we understood the process in the human brain, we couldn’t hope to duplicate it in a machine. And yet, we want machines that can think like people.”

“And you found the answer,” Marsh said, his voice tight.

Torres ignored his tone. “I found the answer. It seemed to me that since we couldn’t make a machine that could think like a man, perhaps we could create a man who could compute like a machine.

“A man with the memory capacity of a computer.

“The implication was obvious, and though the technology was not there ten years ago, it is today. The answer seemed to me to involve installing a high-capacity microprocessor inside the brain itself, giving the brain access to massive amounts of information, and enormous computational abilities, while the brain itself provides the reasoning circuits that are not yet feasible.”

“And did you do that?” Marsh asked.

Torres hesitated, then shook his head. “The risks seemed to me to be entirely too great, and the stakes too high. I had no idea what the results might be. That’s when I began work on the project of which Alex is the end result.” He smiled thinly. “It’s no accident that the Institute for the Human Brain is in the heart of Silicon Valley, you know. All our work is highly technical, and extremely expensive. And we have very little to show for it, despite all those articles out in the lobby.” Marsh seemed about to interrupt him, but Torres held up a restraining hand. “Let me finish. As I said, my work is highly technical, and very expensive, but this is one area of the country that has an abundance of money available to just such work. And so I took my proposed solution to the problem to certain companies and venture capitalists, and managed to intrigue them to the point where they have been willing to fund my research. And what my research has been, for the last ten years, is nothing more or less than reducing the monitoring and operation of every system in the human
body to language a computer can understand, and then programming that information into microprocessors.”

“If it’s true,” Marsh breathed, “that’s quite incredible.”

“Not quite as incredible as it is useless,” Torres replied. “At first glance, it might seem quite marvelous, with all kinds of applications, but I’m afraid that isn’t the case. Usually, when a system goes bad in the human body, the dysfunction is caused by disease, not a failure of the brain. And good as my programs are, they can only function with healthy systems. What they don’t need is a healthy brain.

“You see,” he said quietly, “I decided years ago that I couldn’t experiment on someone who had a normal life ahead of him. I was only willing to work with a hopelessly brain-damaged case—someone who would unquestionably die unless I tried installing my processors—but whose body was basically intact. And that meant that the memory and computation chips wouldn’t be enough. So I spent ten years developing all the systems-maintenance programs as well.”

Raymond Torres opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a Lucite block, which he pushed across the desk to Marsh. “If you’re interested,” he said, “that block contains duplicates of the processors that are in Alex’s brain.”

Marsh picked up the block of Lucite—only a couple of inches on a side—and gazed into the transparent plastic. Floating in the apparent emptiness were several tiny specks, each no bigger than the head of a pin. “Those,” he heard Torres saying, “are the most powerful microprocessors available today. They’re a new technology, which I don’t pretend to understand, and they can operate perfectly on the tiny amount of current generated by the human body. Indeed, I’m told they require less electrical energy than the brain itself.”

Finally, as he stared at the tiny chips held prisoner in the lucite, Marsh began to believe what Raymond Torres had been telling him, and when he finally shifted
his gaze to the other doctor, his eyes were brimming with tears.

“Then Alex was right,” he said, his voice unsteady. “When he told me last night that he thought maybe he hadn’t really survived the operation—that maybe he really was dead—he was right.”

Torres hesitated, then reluctantly nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. “Certainly, in one sense, at least, Alex is dead. His body isn’t dead, and his intellect isn’t dead, but almost certainly, his personality is dead.”

“No!” Ellen was on her feet, and she took a step toward Torres’s desk. “You said he was all right! You said he was getting better!”

“And part of him is,” Torres replied. “Physically and mentally, he’s been getting better every day.”

“But there’s more,” Ellen protested. “You know there’s more. He … he’s starting to remember things—”

“Which is exactly why I wanted him to come back here,” Torres said smoothly. Until this moment, he had told them the truth.

Now the lies would begin.

“He’s remembering things that he couldn’t possibly remember at all. Some of them are things that happened—if they happened at all—long before he was born.”

“But he
is
remembering things,” Ellen insisted.

Torres only shook his head. “No, he’s not,” he said flatly. “Please listen to me, Ellen. It’s very important that you understand what I’m about to tell you.” Ellen looked uncertain, then lowered herself back into her chair. “There are some things you still aren’t accepting, and although I know it’s difficult, you have to accept them. First, Alex has no memories of what happened before his accident. All he knows is what was programmed into the memory banks I installed during the operation, together with whatever experiences he’s had since then. Basically, when he woke up he had a certain amount of data that were readily accessible to him. Vocabulary, recognition of certain images—that sort of
thing. Since then, he has been taking in data and processing it at the rate of a very large computer. Which is why,” he went on, turning to Marsh, “he appears to have the intelligence of a genius.” Torres picked up the little block of lucite and began toying with it. “What he actually has is total recall of everything he’s come in contact with since the operation, plus the ability to do calculations in his head at an astonishing rate, with total accuracy, plus the very human ability to reason. Whether that makes him a genius, I don’t know. Frankly, what Alex is or is not is for other people to decide, not me.

“But he has limitations, as well. The most obvious one is his lack of emotional response.” For the first time that afternoon, Torres picked up his pipe, and began stuffing it with tobacco. “We know a great deal about emotions. We even know from which areas of the brain certain of them spring. Indeed, we can create some of them by stimulating certain areas of the brain. But in the end, they aren’t anything I’ve been able to write programs for, which is why Alex is totally lacking them. And that,” he added, almost incidentally, “brings us back to the reason why I’ve told you all this at all.” As he lit his pipe, his eyes met Marsh’s, and held them steadily. “If you accept the truth of what I’ve been telling you, then I think you’ll agree that Alex is quite incapable of murder.”

“I’m afraid I don’t see that at all,” Marsh replied. “From what you’ve said, it would seem to me that Alex would make the most ideal killer in the world, since he has no feelings.”

“And he would,” Torres agreed. “Except that murder is not part of his programming, and he’s only capable of doing what he’s programmed to do. Murder, as I’m sure you’re aware, is most often motivated by emotions. Anger, jealousy, fear—any number of things. But they are all things of which Alex has no knowledge or experience. He’s aware that emotions exist, but he’s never experienced them. And without emotions, he would never find himself prey to the urge to kill.”

“Unless,” Marsh replied, “he were programmed to kill.”

“Exactly. But even then, he would analyze the order, and unless the killing made intellectual sense to him, he would refuse the order.”

Marsh tried to digest Torres’s words, but found himself unable to. His mind was too filled with conflicting emotions and thoughts. He felt a numbness of the spirit that he abstractedly identified as shock. And why not? he thought. He’s dead. My son is dead, and yet he’s not. He’s somewhere right now, walking and talking and thinking, while I sit here being told that he doesn’t really exist at all, that he’s nothing more than … He rejected the word that came to mind, then accepted it: nothing more than some kind of a machine. His eyes moved to Ellen, and he could see that she, too, was struggling with her emotions. He got to his feet and went to her, kneeling by her chair.

“He’s dead, sweetheart,” he whispered softly.

“No,” Ellen moaned, burying her face in her hands as her body was finally racked by the sobs she had been holding back so long. “No, Marsh, he can’t be dead. He can’t be.…” He put his arms around her and held her close, gently stroking her hair. When he spoke again, it was to Raymond Torres, and his words were choked with anger and grief.

“Why?” he asked. “Why did you do this to us?”

“Because you asked me to,” Torres replied. “You asked me to save his life, any way I could, and that’s what I did, to the best of my ability.” Then he sighed heavily, and carefully placed his pipe back on his desk. “But I did it for myself, too,” he said. “I won’t deny that. I had the technology, and I had the skill.” His eyes met Marsh’s. “Let me ask you something. If you had been in my position, would you have done what I did?”

Marsh was silent for a full minute, and he knew that Torres had asked a question for which he had no answer. When he at last spoke, his voice reflected nothing
except the exhaustion he was feeling. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I could say that I wouldn’t have, but I don’t know.” Shakily he rose to his feet, but kept his hand protectively on Ellen’s shoulder. “What do we do now?”

“Find Alex,” Torres replied. “We have to find him, and get him back here. Something happened yesterday, and I don’t know what effect it might have had on Alex. There was … well, there was an error in the lab, and Alex underwent some tests without anesthesia.” Briefly he described the tests, and what Alex must have experienced. “He didn’t show any effects afterward, which indicates that there was no damage done, but I’d like to be sure. And there’s still the problem of the memories he thinks he’s having.”

Marsh stiffened as he suddenly realized that for all his carefully worded explanations, Torres was still holding something back. “But he
is
having them,” he said. “How can that be?”