Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence (13 page)

“Listen to Raj.” Bickel slipped another neuron block into place against the wall, made new connections.

“Rhythm,” he said. “I went to sleep on it … and it woke me up—that and your yakking. Rhythm.”

Another substitute neuron block went into place beneath the first two.

“Describe what you’re doing,” Flattery said, and he motioned for Timberlake to come to his side.

“Brain-vision anatomy can be reduced to the mathematical description of a scanning process,” Bickel answered. “It follows that any other brain-function anatomy—including consciousness—should submit to the same approach. I can duplicate the alpha-rhythm cycle for a brain-scanning sweep by setting it up in the time-cycle of these neuron blocks. If I trace each rhythm from a human model and duplicate—”

“What’s the function of each of these human rhythms?” Flattery demanded.

As he spoke, Flattery scribbled a note on a pad of ship flimsy, pressed it into Timberlake’s hand.

Timberlake looked up to the screen, but Bickel still had his back to the video eyes that matched the screen-view.

“We don’t know that function for certain, do we?” Flattery asked, and he motioned frantically for Timberlake to read the note.

Timberlake turned his attention onto the paper, read:

“Back way, around the hyb tanks. Bickel hasn’t jammed the hatch from quarters. Take the other tube and surprise him.”

Again, Timberlake looked up to the screen.

The Ox was taking on new shape under Bickel’s hands—reaching out to the angle of the shop against the computer wall. It began to assume a feeling of topological improbability in Timberlake’s eyes—with jutting triangles of plastic, oblongs of neuron couplers, strips of Eng multipliers … and the color-coded leads interweaving like a crazy spider web.

Timberlake felt a hand grab his arm, shake him. He looked at the hand, followed its arm to Flattery’s glaring face.

Flattery gestured to the note in Timberlake’s other hand.

Again, Timberlake looked at the note, recognizing why he remained rooted to this spot.
Around the hyb tanks?

No.

It would have to be through the hyb tanks.

Flattery must know that.

Timberlake turned his tortured gaze on Flattery, bringing the terror up to full awareness.
Bickel has infected me with his cynical skepticism. I’m afraid of what I’ll find in the hyb tanks if I look too close. I’ll find the tanks empty, and nothing but leads back into the computer from the tanks. And the computer will be programmed to simulate the presence of hybernating life in those tanks. The whole thing will turn out to be a monstrous hoax.

I’ll discover I’ve been life-systems engineer to … nothing
.…

Why do I fear that?
he
wondered. Even this thought set him shivering.

Again, Flattery shook his arm.

Why doesn’t
he
go? Timberlake wondered.
He’s so anxious!

The answer was obvious: Flattery wasn’t as knowledgeable about computers. He couldn’t analyze what Bickel was doing and repair—if that was possible—the damage.

I’m panic-stricken,
Timberlake thought.

But he knew he couldn’t stay rooted here. He had to take that other passage. And when he got into the hyb tanks, he wouldn’t be able to resist the close inspection. He’d look beyond the dials and gauges and repeaters. He’d look into the tanks.

Despite his unexplainable terror, the other possibility remained—that the tanks contained life, and this life shared their danger.

Chapter 19

The cell has energies that oscillate and pulse with the tumult of living. We see reflections of this root-activity in that coordinated cell structure which we commonly refer to as a human being. Have you ever watched a man tapping his finger nervously on a desktop? Have you ever timed the periodicity of the human eyeblink? Breathing has characteristic rhythms for different conditions of the total cell structure. You must keep this in mind when you design devices to be used and occupied by this human bundle of cells. You must always remember the pulse and the needs of the component cells.

—Vincent Frame, Biochemist/Designer

I’ll use the shot-effect generator again,
Bickel thought.

He leaned into the organized clutter of the Ox, clipped a lead onto the temporary input, threaded the lead out, and draped it to one side.

The effect and the way to achieve it were still clear in his mind. He had awakened suddenly, not knowing how long he had slept, but feeling refreshed and with this
answer
filling his mind.

He turned to the computer leads, linked the Ox through a buffer that would feed its impulses into a test-memory bank, connected this to the new bank of neuron blocks, and put the system on full interlock.

“Will you at least explain what you’re doing, John?” Flattery’s voice flowed out of the screen.”

Bickel glanced back, saw Prudence at the controls, Flattery sitting on the edge of an action couch—no sign of Timberlake. But this screen’s eyes didn’t expose all of Comcentral. It was probable that Timberlake was trying the hatch.
Well let him.

“We have only ourselves to use as models for producing this Consciousness Function,” Bickel said. “And everybody keeps saying we can’t get
into
ourselves the way an engineer should to duplicate the mechanism. But, friend, there’s another approach—thoroughly tested and effective.”

Prudence said: “Raj?”

Flattery looked at her.

“I’m getting current drift on the auxiliary power supply.”

“It’s the shop,” Flattery stated flatly. “John’s taken a direct line to prevent us from shutting him off.” He looked back at Bickel. “Right?”

“Right. It shouldn’t cause you any trouble. I’ve isolated the line. Your main board is still functioning.” Bickel turned back to the Ox, began tying in a series of timed neurofibers.

“What’s the tested, effective method?” Flattery looked up at the telltales on the Com-central board, following Timberlake’s progress by the heat sensors. Timberlake was out in the second zone now, turning in toward the opposite side of the shielding and the hyb tanks.

Why was Tim so reluctant to go?
Flattery wondered.

Bickel finished a triple connection along the timed fibers, straightened. “The system you can’t tear apart and examine is called a black box. If we can make a
white
box sufficiently similar and general in
potential
to the black box—that is, make it sufficiently complex—then we can force the black box, by its own operation, to transfer its pattern of action to the white box. We cross-link them and subject each to identical shot-effect bursts.”

“What’s your white box?” Flattery asked, his interest and attention caught in spite of his fears. “That thing?” He nodded toward the crazy-block construction of the Ox.

“Hell, no, this is nowhere near complex enough. But our entire computer system is.”

He’s gone crazy!
Flattery thought.
He can’t be suggesting seriously that he’d throw a scrambling shot- effect burst into the computer!

Again, Flattery glanced up at the telltales. Timberlake was at the edge of the hyb tanks, moving at a maddeningly slow pace.

“Then … how does the Ox function in this?” Flattery asked, returning his attention to the screen.

“This is our sorter,” Bickel said. “It sorts the rhythms of the system and acts as a crude set of frontal lobes.” He linked two parts of his construction by cross-jacks in a patchboard. “There. Now to run a few tests.”

“Shouldn’t you wait?” Flattery demanded. “Shouldn’t we discuss this a bit more? What if you’ve made a mistake and—”

“No mistake,” Bickel said.

Flattery looked to the telltales. Timberlake was in the hyb tanks now, but he wasn’t moving—just stopped there.

We set Bickel, our “organ of analysis,” at too high a pitch,
Flattery thought.
We should’ve known it could run wild.

What was keeping Timberlake?

“Straight-line test, first,” Bickel said, and closed a key on the computer wall. He stared at the diagnostic-circuit dials above him.

Flattery held his breath, turned slowly to look at the big board in front of Prudence. If Bickel’s test loused up the central computer system, it’d show up first on the big board.

The flashboard retained its quiet green. The steady ticking of relays through the graph counters and monitors held at an even pace. Everything appeared soothingly ordinary.

“I’m getting individual nerve-net responses on the separate blocks,” Bickel said.

Flattery kept his attention on the flashboard. If Bickel ruined the computer, the ship was dead. Most of the Tin Egg’s automatic systems depended on the computer’s inner lines of communication and supervisory control programs.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Bickel demanded. “I’m getting nerve-net response! This thing’ll behave like a human nervous system!”

“Raj, he is!”

It was Prudence. Flattery dropped his gaze to where she was pointing. She had shifted a small corner of her own auxiliary board into a repeater system tied to Bickel’s diagnostic circuits.

“Beta rhythm,” she said, pointing to the scope in the center of the board.

Flattery watched the sine play of the green line on the scope, digesting what Bickel had said, what that scope implied.

Black box
—
white box.

Perhaps it was possible, theoretically, to use the entire computer as a white box to take the transfer pattern called consciousness. But there remained many unanswered questions—and one was more vital than all the others.

“What do you intend using as a black box?” Flattery asked. “Where’ll you get your original pattern?”

“From a conscious human brain. I’m going to take one of our spare hyb tanks and adapt the electroencephalographic feedback system as a man-amplifier.”

He’s utterly mad,
Flattery thought.
The shot-effect shock would kill the human subject.

Bickel looked out of the screen, stared at Flattery—realizing that the psychiatrist-chaplain had seen the possible deadliness of this proposal.

Who will bell the cat?
Bickel thought. He swallowed.
Well, if necessary, I will.

“How would you protect the subject from the shot-effect bursts?” Prudence asked. “Curare?”

Even as she asked, she wondered how she was protecting herself from her own experiments. The answer was daunting: No better than Bickel would! What had made this crew so prone to all-or-nothing efforts?

“I believe the subject will have to be fully conscious,” Bickel said. “Without any medication … or narcoinhibitions.”

He waited for the explosion from Timberlake. This idea was sure to outrage the conditioning of the life-systems engineer. Where
was
Timberlake?

“Absolutely not!” Flattery exploded. “It’d be murder!”

“Or maybe … suicide,” Bickel said.

Prudence looked away from the console, met Bickel’s eyes. “Be reasonable, John,” she pleaded. “You’re already endangering the computer with that …”

“The ship’s still functioning, isn’t it?” Bickel countered.

“But if you throw a shot-effect burst through that—” she nodded toward the stacked blocks and interwoven leads of the Ox beside Bickel “—how’ll you avoid damage to the computer’s core memory?”

“Core memory’s a fixed system and buffered. I’ll keep the Ox potential below the buffer threshold. Besides …” he shrugged, “we’ve already put shot-effect bursts through the computer without—”

“And scattered information from hell to breakfast!” she snapped.

“We can still find that information if we use the Ox to sort the addresses for us,” Bickel said.

Flattery glanced at the sensors in front of Prudence. What was wrong with Timberlake? Was he injured? Unconscious? But the sensors revealed a narrow path of movement from the life-systems engineer … all of it within the hyb tank complex.

“If I understand you correctly,” Prudence said, “you’ll have to add nerve-net simulation channels to the Ox
until
it and the computer are as complex as a human nervous system. As you build it and test it, we become more and more dependent on that jury-rigged Ox monstrosity for our very lives.”

“It has to have a full range of sensory apparatus,” Bickel said. “There’s no other way.”

“There must be!” she said. “Where’d you get such a mad idea?”

“From you.”

Shock momentarily stilled her tongue. “That’s impossible!”

“You’re a female,” Bickel pointed out, “capable of biological reproduction of conscious life. In that method, you have a substrate of molecules that are capable of assuming a large number of forms … different forms. Those molecules assume a
particular
form in the presence of a molecule that already has that form.” He shrugged. “Black box—white box.”

“I thought you meant from me personally,” she said, looking up at the telltale sensors and seeing the apparently irrational movements of Timberlake.

“Look,” Bickel said, unaware of their preoccupation, “the basic behavior of the computer will remain intact. We won’t interfere with supervisory programs or command constants. We want to set up a system dealing with probabilities, with mobility constant for the—”

“Games theory!” Flattery sneered. “You can’t predict all the behavior of your machine.” He looked back at the telltales.

What was Tim doing?

“That’s just it!” Bickel said. “If the machine’s going to be conscious, we can’t predict all of its behavior … by the very nature of consciousness, by definition. Consciousness is a game where the permissible moves aren’t arbitrarily established in advance. The sole object’s to win.”

Anything goes?
Flattery wondered. He focused suddenly on Bickel, recognizing the essentially blasphemous nature of such a concept. There
had
to be rules!

“The machine gets part of its personality from its creator, part from its opponents,” Bickel said.

Something from God, something from the Devil,
Flattery thought.
There had to be essential error in this path … somewhere. Bickel was behaving far outside the predictions. Their “organ of analysis” was acting magically. He was not making the best possible move each time.

“You’ll introduce error factors and loss increment into the entire computer,” Prudence cautioned. “That’s not only illogical, it’s—” She broke off, studied her board, made a pressure-balance correction in the atmospheric recirculation system, and waited to see if the automatics could hold the new setting.

“You have to make the best possible move at all times,” Flattery said. “Your suggestion does not appear to—”

“There you’ve hit it,” Bickel agreed. “Best possible move. Sometimes your best possible move is to make a dangerously
poor
move that changes the entire theoretical structure of the game. You change the game.”

“What about all those lives down in the hyb tanks?” Prudence asked. “Do they have any choice in this … game?”

“They already made their choice.”

“And while they’re helpless, you change the rules,” Flattery said.

“That was one of the chances they accepted when they accepted hybernation,” Bickel said. “That was their choice.”

Flattery abandoned the argument, pushed himself off his action couch.

“What’re you going to to do?” Prudence asked.

“Check on Tim.”

“Where
is
Tim?” Bickel asked.

“Down in the hyb tanks,” Flattery said, knowing Bickel could get the answer himself—once he consulted the shop’s repeaters.

“Deep in the hyb tanks?” Bickel asked.

“Of course!”

“Prue!” Bickel snapped. “Try to raise him on the command circuit.”

She heard the urgency in Bickel’s voice, whirled to obey.

There was no response from Timberlake.

“You fools!” Bickel said.

Flattery stopped at the tube hatch, glared up at the screen.

“Who let him go down into the deep tanks?” Bickel demanded. “You blind idiots! Don’t you know what he’s likely to find down there?”

“What do you mean?”

“This whole damn ship’s nothing but a simulation device,” Bickel said. “There’ll be nothing down there except a few crew replacements. Those tanks have to be empty!”

He’s wrong!
Flattery thought.
Or is he?

The thought staggered Flattery. He saw immediately how that might pull the props out from under Timberlake—a man tuned as fine as the rest of them for a specific function.

“He’d still have the crew systems,” Prudence said. She stared across the room at Flattery, feeling the loneliness. The Tin Egg with its programmed peril might contain only a few isolated humans launched into nowhere.

They wouldn’t,
Flattery thought.
But if they’d prepare me to cheat the rest of the crew …
His feet felt rooted to the deck. He swallowed in a dry throat.
But it’s impossible! They promised me when I discovered the actual Tau Ceti records
—
if we succeeded we could just send back the message capsule and continue as …

“Raj, are you sick?” Prudence asked. She studied him, seeing the lost, sunken look in his eyes.

“The Tau Ceti planets are uninhabitable, yes,”
Hempstead had admitted when confronted with the evidence.
“No Eden, But the universe is known to contain billions of inhabitable planets. You realize you can’t come back here, of course. The danger to your hosts.”

“The biopsy donors were all criminals,”
Flattery had said, springing his other suspicion.

“Brilliant people, but misdirected,”
Hempstead had protested.
“That is one of the reasons you can’t come
back, but nothing’s to stop you from going on to explore and find your own Eden.”