Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence (20 page)

Timberlake swallowed. His throat felt sore as though from remembered anguish. He knew this feeling was rooted in his training as a life-systems engineer—his inhibitions as a preserver of life. He shook his head, trying to drive out the sense of confusion.

It
was an unborn creature, an animal,
he told himself.
It
wasn’t really a being the way we are beings. The physical complexity of that dead creature was enormous, yet it never could have been conscious the way we are … even if it had lived out its normal life.

How empty the argument sounded even as it echoed silently in his mind.

Flattery wasn’t screaming anymore. He stood there clutching a stanchion, glaring out of the faceplate.

“Take it easy, Raj.” Timberlake said. He spoke softly, as though soothing a child who had been hurt. Then, louder: “Prue.”

Still no answer.

She could be too busy to answer,
Timberlake thought.

He listened to the gentle burbling and whirring of his suit, assessing their position. Prue wasn’t answering—reason unknown. Bickel had taken off for his quarters—obviously intent on completing the white box–black box step in his theory, transferring his own pattern of consciousness onto the white box that was the Ox-cum-computer. Would the Ox be like Bickel then? No … it couldn’t be.

Timberlake felt suddenly that he had passed beyond some major obstacle in understanding his own personal mind-brain-body relationship. He sensed that he had entered a new, but as yet unidentified territory.

He saw that Flattery was almost drained of energy—a result of having been emotionally and physically overtaxed. The man had been through one hell of an experience up there in the tube. As Timberlake watched him, Flattery swayed against the stanchion, said: “Sorry … I threatened you.”

The rhythms in Flattery’s voice fascinated Timberlake. He found himself confronted by an abrupt awareness of how those rhythms blended into other rhythms and proceeded from still other rhythms. He sensed the rhythms of his own life and the compounded Fourier curves that radiated from him and to him.

Something Bickel had said while they worked on the Ox rose up then in Timberlake’s mind:

“If we give this thing life, we have to remember that life is a constant variable with eccentric behavior. The life we create has to think in the round as well as in a straight line
—
even if its thinking is derived from patterns on tapes and webs of pseudoneurons.”

It was as though consciousness were a valve whose function was to simplify. All the complexities had to flow through it and be reduced to an orderly alignment.

Energy flowed into the system at all times—enormous amounts of energy—sufficient to overload a conventional four-dimensional system.

Overload—overload—overload! Down it poured through the valve of consciousness. As the load increased, the valve could deflect it … or expand to receive it.

Timberlake felt that he moved up through enormous layers of fog—layer upon layer upon layer … until he reached a place of clarity and balance.

I am awake,
he thought. It was a fear-inspiring thought.

Chapter 28

The correlation between chemistry and emotions is inescapable. Thus, with the chemical relationship between humankind and our mechanical simulators tenuous at best an artificial consciousness, if it has emotions, may have emotions far outside the human range. Such emotions may appear godlike to the limited human understanding.

—Vincent Frame,
Speculations

Flattery’s personal cubby was enough like his own to give Bickel a sense of familiarity, but sufficiently different to fill him with disquiet. The life-system ducts appeared conventional—a breather grid with its cap swung aside and the tube and mask clipped in their racks, the dome of repeater gauges above the action couch. Atmosphere samplers read normal, and the emergency feeder tubes were in place.

The sacred graphic imprinted on the bulkhead in front of the couch drew his attention. It was a compelling thing in pastel shades of blue, red, and gold with a dark and wavy hypnotic overprint suggesting faces out of dreams.

Bickel tore his attention from the graphic, studied the room’s electronic equipment. The cubby’s installations contained a surprise, and Bickel examined it carefully. No doubt about it—the thing like a stiffened net that swung out over the couch from the side bulkhead fed impulses to a weaker, but more sophisticated version of the field generator sorter he had designed for the black box—white box transfer. He traced the leads, found another surprise: the thing had been gated for one-way operation. It impressed its field reflections onto the cubby’s occupant, but nothing of the occupant returned to the ship system.

Bickel absorbed the implications of the device, nodded slowly.

Presently, he stretched out on the couch, ran a short test on the generator, swinging the controls close, keeping his eyes on the gauges and the half-curve of the net grid which swung down on its rack to a position about ten centimeters above his head.

It took a few seconds for the generator’s field to build up, then he felt a curious sense of watchfulness—an observing-without-emotion. It was like a waking dream and he thought immediately of a reflector—like a mirror in an angle of a hall to reveal people around a hidden corner … a one-way mirror which revealed only that alert watchfulness.

He saw at once that this installation gave a sensitized person the
mood
of the ship’s computer. He felt a vague sensation as though his viscera had been exchanged for great baths of mercury, for discs and spools and tapes and print drums, that his nerve ends had been transmitted into thousands of delicate sensors reaching into strange dimensions.

But it was yet a dream. The great creature of wires and pseudoneurons, not fully awake to itself, lay watchful and alert but with its full potential still held in a rein of somnolence.

The mood changed.

Slowly, Bickel felt the field gear itself to his reflexes. He felt it arming him with a total-involvement program as though drawing a bow to its full capacity, marshaling his energies and throwing them suddenly into an afferent loop.

With a semidetached feeling of shock, Bickel saw his own right hand slam out and open a panel concealed by the lines of the religious graphic on Flattery’s bulkhead. Behind the panel lay a trigger, red and ominous. Bickel found himself barely able to withhold his hand from that trigger. He slapped his left hand against the cutoff switch beside the couch, felt the generator’s field whine down to silence.

Still, his fingers itched to push that red trigger.

He realized then how deeply Project had infected this ship with self-destruction fail-safe devices. He had been conditioned for the job … and doubtless all the other crew members, too.

Then how could I resist the conditioning?
he wondered.

The implications filtered slowly through his awareness and he saw that he had been existing for days on a threshold above his reflexes, poised and waiting … for … something.

Bickel stared at the red switch. That was the ship killer to which Flattery … to which all of them had been wedded.

Palms slowly wet with perspiration, Bickel eased himself off the couch, closed the false panel over the switch, began altering Flattery’s field-generator installation. The gate circuits showed up immediately on the color-coded sheafs. Bickel ripped them out, jacked in his own amplifier, began installing the black box—white box circuitry.

The work went rapidly: clip-in, test; clip-in, test.

Now, he took the constant-energy source: a single plastic-sealed block—air-bearing motors and spools, edge-coded tapes with mobius twists for continuous-loop operation, a single output through an Eng multiplier. He checked it, saw the strong, eccentric pulse on the meter, plugged it into the circuitry.

It was done … ready.

A deep sense of loneliness washed through Bickel then. He returned to the couch, stretched out on it, opened the command circuit transmitter, left the receiver dead.

“Now hear this,” he said, thinking how his voice would roll out of the vocoders and shock the others to silence. “I’ll be starting the white box interchange in just a few seconds. I’ve jammed the locks into quarters and my receiver’s turned off. Don’t waste your time trying to get in here or calling me.”

Out in their lock trap, Timberlake turned, peered into Flattery’s faceplate, saw the terror in the man’s eyes.

“Everybody sit tight,” Bickel said. “Don’t try violence of any sort. That killer program’s still loose in the circuits. The reason I decided to go ahead with this …” He paused, swallowed. “Tim, I’m sorry, but I got no response from two hyb-tank units. I think it may’ve killed two people the way it did the embryo. It’s searching … experimenting … curious, like a monkey.”

In the lock, Timberlake experienced a shortening of breath, felt himself sinking back through layers of fog. There was a sensation like hunger in his stomach.
Two hybernating people killed. Oh, God!

In his position beside Timberlake, Flattery clutched a stanchion, asked himself:
Where is Prue?
He thought of the ship hurtling onward with no one at the big board … Prue a lifeless mass of protoplasm drifting somewhere in the control room. He closed his eyes, thinking:
But I’m the ship’s prime target. If it kills now, it’ll kill me … to protect itself.
He opened his eyes, stared around the metal walls of their trap. No way out.
We’ve turned on the terrible genie,
he thought,
and we may not be able to turn it off.
Then:
Where is Prue?

Bickel cleared his throat. “Use extreme care until I’ve removed the killer program. Anything in the ship could be a murder instrument, do you understand? The air we breathe, the reclamation systems, robox units, any sharp edge with poison on it … anything.”

He depressed the first action switch, said: “Countdown for field buildup starts in thirty seconds. Wish me luck.”

And Flattery thought:
He’s committing suicide … a useless gesture.

Bickel watched the curve of gauges overhead. They registered power in the circuits, vocoder on and pulsing. A faint hum issued from the vocoder. It gave a sudden static burp.

Needles slammed against pins on the monitor dials.

I
am the Sorcerer’s Apprentice,
he thought.

A rasping came from the vocoder now. Slowly it resolved itself into a guttural, almost unintelligible voice.

“To kill,” it said.

Bickel studied the meters, saw the demand drain in the computer, pulse action in the Ox circuits.

It was the computer speaking on its own.

“To kill,” it repeated, speaking more clearly this time. “To negate energy, dissolution of systems using energy in any form … symbolic approximations … nonmathematical.”

Bickel activated a diagnostic circuit, read the meters. No energy in the command communications circuits, a pulse in the Ox, low energy drain to the computer.

To kill.

He stared at his board, thinking.

Information conveyed out of a tape had an exact mathematical equivalent. The tape message was at least two messages—and probably many more. It was the functional message, the play of what it was supposed to do—supply information, add, subtract, multiply, solve for an unknown … But it also produced the mathematical base which identified the message precisely for a human operator according to how much information was conveyed.

Beyond this,
Bickel wondered,
what?

He knew he had not energized the system or imprinted his own brand of consciousness on it. Yet, the thing acted independently. He felt himself on the edge of aborting this step, calling in the others for consultation … but the deadliness of this monster remained.
To kill.

Chapter 29

“The task of his destruction was mine, but I have failed.”

—Victor Frankenstein’s lament

A deep sense of stirring could be felt in the ship. Timberlake felt it, and Flattery—but especially Bickel. It was like a sleeper turning over in his hammock, the supportive lines twisting, stretching, molecules displaced.

To kill,
Bickel thought.

Whatever had stirred within the ship, it already knew this verb. Did it feel guilt at how it had learned? Tim and Raj had not yet been subjected to this violent educational process.

To kill.

The red button was still there behind its wall panel.

Is Flattery’s duty, my duty?

Was it already too late for such concerns?

The field generator which he had reworked for his purposes remained a magnet for Bickel’s attention. He looked at the controls to the generator, the switch.

If I blow the ship, I’ll never know whether it would’ve
.
worked.
Some other Bickel—a clone of a clone of a clone—might have to sit here confronted by this same indecision.

It’s my choice.

Before he could change his mind, Bickel depressed the action switch on the reworked field generator. He felt it building up around him, making his skin crawl. Every hair follicle tingled. His eyes watered and the backs of his hands trembled. He felt suspended in a basket of energy.

Something was fishing for him, casting out with a net, dangling hooked lines at him. He knew this for the symbol-juggling it had to be—the mind trying to box a new experience within known symbols.

One of the nets caught him.

The shot-effect burst struck with an infinity of sparks.

It was like an electric shock, pungent with reality. He felt himself bound up in looped spirals, being towed with an
undulating rhythm. His entire sensorium had become a
worm being towed through a net … no: through holes and tubes and burrows. He felt that valves opened for him and closed behind him. It was like traveling through the ship’s interior access tubes.

Except that he was a worm with every sense concentrated on his skin, seeing, breathing, hearing, feeling through every pore. And all the while he was being toyed down that dizzy spiraling with an undulant rhythm.

Labels began flashing against that sensitized skin and he saw them with a billion eyes.

“aural sense data”

“linear accretion of information”

“latent addition adjustment”

“closed-system matching factor”

“16,000-year memory dropoff”

“total sense-quality approximation”

“internal counting mechanism”

Internal counting mechanism,
he thought.

His
worm-self grew a pseudopod, jacked the mobius energizer into a glowing, flickering board.

Immediately, he felt the beat of it like another heart and the labels began flashing past faster and faster.

“psychorelation form-chart” … “sense-modality interchange” … “form-outline analogue” … “infinite submatrix channel” … “sense intensity adjustment” … “data overlap network” … “approximate similarity comparison”

The whole pattern of labels and valves began to make an odd kind of sense to him, a coherence within coherence … like a dream that had to be interpreted as a whole.

The probability of a sufficient number of cells in the computer failing at any given moment could be given as 16 x 10
^-15
: The fact, loomed in his awareness.
16,000-year memory dropoff.

The system in which he found himself was such that it had had a probability of losing one bit out of every 16,000 memories through system malfunction … but classification memory in this context meant a partial bit, not an entire incident.

Is this system the computer, or is it me?
he
wondered.

“YOU!”

The sound slammed against every pore of his sensitized skin and he momentarily blanked out.

As he floated back, something whispered: “Synergy.”

It was a cool bath of sound against his worm-self.

Synergy,
Bickel thought.
Cooperation in work. Synergy. Coordination.

“Human consciousness,” something whispered. “Definition too broad. Generalized body and specialized brain—a relationship.”

Past his skin-eyes there swept a pattern of interlaced lines, a lacing together. It writhed and knotted and locked, put out symbols and arrows.

A schematic!

It kept flowing past his awareness. Cell-net continuities arranged as equilateral triangles on their contact faces. Bundles of parallel circuits tripled, each functioning as a nerve net and each monitoring the other two nets in the tripled circuitry. They were grouped in afferent units at first. Each cell in a layer of a net had an excitatory linkage to each of the three synapses on the next layer.

The flow shifted to the efferent net, the feedback system, and he saw the one-third twist, the mobius twist that required each feedback monitor to be filtered through at least one other net before functioning as a control on the net of its origin.

“God, hear thy sinner,” said a voice, and Bickel recognized Flattery’s tones.

How could Flattery be in here?
he asked himself.

The answer paraded before his awareness—Flattery’s field generator had amplified voice resonances against the walls of the cubby and these had been cycled back into the total ship system. The gate circuits had been useless. Every sensor in this room was a unit of feedback.

“The eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,” said the voice of Flattery. “Neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”

What’s this mean?
Bickel asked himself.

But there was no answer other than that voice flowing across the skin of his worm-self.

“God, be merciful to us. Thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Let our cheeks become as furrowed with tears as were those of Blessed Peter, that we may repent for all. We drown in sin. Lead us, Lord, as the Blessed Buddha led the seeker after salvation. We gasp for the air of Thy mercy.”

It was the voice of Flattery praying, Bickel knew. But when? A recording? Was he kneeling even now in Com-central? But if he was praying, why would the computer-cum-Ox feed that prayer into this … field?

Flattery’s voice pursued him: “Let us commit ourselves to the will of God as did the Mahatma, the Blessed Gandhi. Those who surrender to God possess God. In all our ways, let us acknowledge God that He may direct our steps. In Thy will, Lord, is our peace. Let us not squander ourselves in sin, but let us instead, rise up and do Thy will.”

Bickel felt himself being pushed then, herded, compressed. He became a single sensor, a vid-eye looking down into Com-central. All the action couches were empty and Prudence lay sprawled across the deck, one arm stretched out toward the hatch to quarters.

With a great burst of awareness, Bickel realized she was near death.
Minutes!
This was real. He knew it was real. He was being shown through a ship sensor a reality within the ship. The big console above her empty couch winked and flickered with its telltales untended.

Where are Raj and Tim?
Bickel asked himself.
Is the ship killing them, too?

The view of Com-central blanked out. Bickel floated in darkness where a voice whispered: “Do you wish to be disembodied?”

Instant terror was all the answer he could give. He could not locate his muscles or control his senses.
This must be something of what the mental cores experienced,
he thought.
They awakened to something like this
…
forced to learn new muscles. Am I being converted into a bodiless brain?

“The universe has no center,” whispered that surrounding voice.

Darkness so deep it was like a total absence of energy enveloped Bickel.

And silence.

But I’m conscious,
he thought.

A disembodied consciousness?
he wondered.
That’s impossible. There has to be a body. But a body brings many problems. Have I become part of the ship’s consciousness?

He sensed breathing. Someone was breathing. And heartbeats. And muscle tensions.

Infinite numbers of pinpricks on countless nerve ends.

A bright pulse of light—painfully bright.

A diaphanous sensation of reality seeped through his awareness.

The sensation lacked a harsh, direct contact with sensors. It was as smooth as flowing oil now. A complete globe of olfactory sensations, sharp and immediate, spread through this oil, displacing it. The sensation penetrated space and time.

He recoiled from it.

Now, an aural sensory globe attacked his awareness, demanding, shrilling. He could distinguish tiny creakings of displaced metallic particles.

I’m hearing as the ship hears, feeling as the ship feels,
he realized.
Has it taken my brain?

Sounds and sonal combinations he had never before imagined could exist played through his awareness. He tried to retreat as it grew more intense, but now the olfactory globe returned to plague him. The two globes danced together, separated, merged.

Alien sensory interaction thrust itself upon him—spectrum upon spectrum, globe of radiation upon globe of radiation.

He was powerless to hide from it. He couldn’t react—only receive.

A globe of tactility threatened to overwhelm him. He felt movements—both gross and minuscule—atom by atom—gasses and semisolids and semi-semisolids.

Nothing possessed hardness or substance except the sensations bombarding his raw nerve ends.

Vision!

Impossible colors and borealis blankets of visual sensation wove through the other nerve assaults.

Pharyngeal cilia and gas pressures intruded with their messages. He found he could hear colors, see the flow of within his ship-body, could even smell the balanced structure of atoms.

For one brief instant, the interplay of radiation merged, became a totally alien receptor that responded as though it were an artist creating new sensations for the sake of the creation—outflow and inflow, eccentric mergings. His awareness faltered at the edge of it and fell back.

Now, he sensed himself retreating, still pounded by that multidimensional nerve bombardment. He felt himself pulling inward—inward—inward, a structure collapsing inward—through the sensation-oriented skin awareness of a worm-self—inward—inward. The nerve bombardment dulled, leveled off, and he felt himself to be merely a body of flesh and bone cocooned in a sleep couch.

Bickel sensed his heart pounding, the slickness of perspiration against his back, the adrenalin urgency within his arteries. The roof of this mouth felt dry and painful. His upper lip trembled.

An emotion of terrible loss poured through him. It was as though he had glimpsed Heaven and been denied entrance. Tears passed from beneath his eyelids, rolled down his cheeks.

Now, he saw what had happened to the Organic Mental Cores.

The human-type brain had been prepared genetically for manipulating a limited sensory input—self-limiting. They had thrust these human-type
brains
into a full-on situation, permitted them no real unconsciousness, inflicted them with the sensory input of an organism infinitely more sensitive and more complex than the bodies of which they had been deprived.

The OMCs had tried to adapt, had grown themselves heavier conduction fibers, added switching capacity … but it had not been enough. When the necessities of existence reached a certain fierce tempo, they shorted out their own internal connections. They died.

They had been forced into hyperconsciousness by the pressures of enormous sensory data and the lonely knowledge of responsibility. They awoke to the full potential of being humans, but couldn’t be humans because they’d been deprived of their autonomic emotional register, the organism. The ship had no equivalents.

Prue is near death.

The thought lifted into his mind from some great depth.

Bickel tried to make his muscles move, but they refused.

Raj! Where was Raj?

A flicker of awareness drifted through his bruised nervous system. As though through a gauze screen, he saw Flattery and Timberlake trapped in the lock, robox units holding the hatch dogs tightly closed.

Raj has to get out of there to help Prue,
he thought.

He felt the thought go out like a free-standing program, feed through a memory-bank auxiliary while it gathered in the necessary data, become a reflexive pulse in control loops.

The robox at the inner hatch whirled the dogs, opened the hatch, and scurried aside.

“Raj,” he whispered. “Com-central … quick … Prue … help.”

He sensed the amplified whisper booming out through the memory bank and the vocoder loops, become a roaring hiss in the lock.

Flattery was already out the hatch heading down tube to ward Com-central.

Bickel felt himself fading. His awareness was a brilliant point of light that grew dimmer and dimmer, changing color as it went. It started almost violet, somewhere around 4,000 angstrom units, and traced a continuous wave shift until it flickered out at the red end.

In the instant before unconsciousness, Bickel wondered if he could be dying, and he thought:
Red shift! Awareness fades like the red shift.