Identity Matrix (1982) (16 page)

"Then—I'm not really Victor Gonser at all," I said, feeling a little hollow and distant. "Dory's mind just thinks it's me. And that Indian girl, whoever she was, just thinks she's Dory."

Stuart shrugged. "If all that vas you, your id, ego, superego, all the memories and bits of information that went into forming them, your identity matrix, in other words, is duplicated exactly—vat is the difference? I think of it as an exchange of souls in a marvellously mathematical way."

"These chemical messages—you already said false ones could be sent and that total erasure was possible," Dory put in, thankfully changing the subject.

"You also said that the computer can figure out our entire filing sys-tem. Does that mean what I think it means?"

"If you are thinking vat I think you're thinking, then, yes. An unforseen side product, but a revolutionary dis-covery. In its own vay the equivalent of atomic energy—with the same potential both vays."

I suddenly felt very stupid. "What are you two talking about?"

"Selective memory," Dory responded. "If that com-puter tells you you're Joan of Arc you'll set the fire yourself."

"It is a fact," Stuart admitted. "Ve can read out the mind and record it, even store it like Beethoven sym-phonies are recorded. Feed it into any mind. It's still very primitive right now, and there are too many risks to try it on humans, but it is coming, it is coming!"

I felt sick. "And anything that can be digitally recorded can be selectively doctored."

Stuart nodded, apparently not bothered by that. "Oh, yes. Ve have high hopes that ve can bypass brain disor-ders, cure cerebral palsy, for example, epilepsy, and other such things. Do away vith dyslexia. Perhaps, even-tually, be able to order cancer cells to self-destruct. The potential for ending much human misery and suffering is unlimited!"

I grew increasingly uneasy, and I could see Dory was the same way. "You could also turn an entire popula-tion into loyal, loving, obedient slaves."

The scientist shrugged. "Like all discoveries, the po-tential for abuse is awesome. It is our responsibility, our trust, to see that it does not happen.

Fortunately, ve have much time—the technology involved in such a thing is not yet here, and, for now, ve alone have it. But ve cannot unlearn vat ve have learned, cannot undo vat ve have done any more than the atomic genie could be pushed back into the bottle once released. It is a grave responsibility, but it is no more grave than other great discoveries of mankind. Ve have the responsibility vether ve vant it or not, and, as always, ve puny little fallible humans have to deal with it. Considering how far ve have come to now, I think ve vill."

An assistant brought Stuart and Dory tea and me coffee. I couldn't help thinking about the potential, and wondering about the possibilities of abuse. I looked around at the people at IMC and thought about the others I'd met.

Except for Parch they seemed very ordi-nary people, middle-level bureaucrats in administration, technicians and scientists and their families as well. Not evil threatening people. Not headed by Stuart, particu-larly, one of the finest men I'd ever known. Still, they would worry me, particularly Parch. In the hands of such a man as he, the pontential was horrible.

It was Dory who shifted subject again, possibly partly in self-defense against thinking too hard on what was bothering me.

"What about genetics?" she asked Stuart. "I mean, you can't change the genetic code when you change this information in the brain."

"I'll admit that is a puzzle," Eisenstadt admitted. "There are so many things about a person that are determined by his physiology and science is no closer to solving the heredity-versus-environment debate now than twenty years ago.

Perhaps people like you vill eventu-ally solve the puzzle, although there is debate even on that. After all, your personalities were shaped by your original genetic and other makeup and might by this time be too fixed to be measurably changed. Maybe not. If you find out vill you tell us?"

We both laughed, and Dory kept to this point for a reason I slowly started understanding.

"What sort of things are you certain are genetically caused?" she asked him.

He shrugged. "Studies vith tvins have shown a little but it is more puzzling than before. They make a great thing about identical twins separated at birth using the same shaving lotion—but might that not be because their taste and smell are the same so the same stuff vould be pleasurable? Ve don't know."

"What about—sex?" she pressed, becoming obvious.

"Sex is obviously genetic in the most basic sense," Stuart replied, at first missing the real question. "The degree of sex and of sexual response is partly a matter of enzyme and hormone production, stuff like that. You can be oversexed or undersexed, for example, even in the drive, as determined by your genetic make-up. Beyond that, though, so many cultural factors go into it that it is hard to say. Victor, here, vas Victor for thirty-five years and is now Vicki, but not in the usual sex-change vay. Fully functioning, vith all the body's genetic drives, hormones, that sort of thing. I vould suspect the head to respond to vomen and the body to men, vich vill give you the life of a real svinger for a vile—but you vill settle down into vichever pattern body and mind com-promise on, feel best vith, over the long run."

"That was my body," Dory pointed out.

"I'm avare of that."

"Doc—I was a lesbian."

That stopped him, but only for a moment. He thought over the possiblities, then said, "Veil, that puts a little more of a strain on Vicki, here. There is a tiny area in the cerebellum discovered in 1980, a small group of neurons that is normally sexually consistent—it looks vun vay in men, the other in vomen. It came out of studies to see if the male and female brain differed in any significant vay. Now, this is not the cause of all homosexual tendencies—much of it is psychological and environmental. But it has been found that some vomen have the male configuration—not many, but some—and some men have the female.

Who knows vy? A mistake in genetic coding? A mutation? Something the mama drank? Extreme sexual mirror-imaging vas found in hermaph-rodites, but a small but important percentage have the thing tilted a bit towards the wrong sex, if you'll par-don me. It might cause extra—complications—for Victor if that body's sexual identity center is more male than female. Only time vill tell—or, of course, ve could do a computer scan and find out."

"You mean hook me up to your computer? Uh uh, Stuart. Not now, anyway.

I've had enough fooling around with my mind for the time being."

He chuckled softly. "Come. I vill show you the heart of IMC and maybe you vill not feel so bad."

We got up and left the office, going down a hall to a set of large double doors with all sorts of security warn-ings on them. He ignored them and held the doors for us to pass inside.

The room was huge, looking more like the control center for some space system than anything related to biology. An orange wall-to-wall carpet went around the floor in a semi-circle, but it was almost obscured by the computer terminals, control centers and chairs, that made it seem like Mission Control.

They all faced a raised semicircular platform carpeted in light green, on which sat two large chairs looking like nothing so much as dental chairs with large beauty-parlor hair dryers attached. Enormous masses of cable ran from the chair assemblies into the floor.

"The soul of IMC," Stuart told us with obvious pride.

We walked onto the orange-carpeted area and Stuart went over to a large and forbidding looking console. He opened the top and reached down, removing from it a ruby-colored translucent cube perhaps a foot square. He handed it to me and I looked at it curiously. It weighed no more than two or three pounds at best. I handed it back and asked, "What is it?"

"A digital recording module," he replied. "Inside it can be stored over ten trillion bytes of information. In a sense, a couple of these can hold the sum total of a human brain's knowledge and experience. It is a revolu-tionary vay of storing information and the key to our progress here. The equivalent of tventy thousand kilometers of magnetic tape fifty centimeters wide. Two or three of these, in the computer system, and ve can record and play back a human mind."

I shivered. "Then you can actually remove informa-tion from the brain, like they can?"

He nodded. "Yes, yes, ve can do that. It is simply a matter of applying the correct electrical signal at the correct point in the cerebral cortex. Ve can now get a readout."

I looked down at Dory and thought that her expres-sion must be matched by my own face. "So can you—switch minds?"

"Ve are not that far along yet, although ve are very close. So far ve have managed first to copy someone's identity matrix and store it on the cubes. Then it was but a short step to learning how to erase as ve recorded. Ve can take it out and erase now, and put it back in the same head from which it vas took, vith no apparent loss. In fact, ven ve do that the person always remembers much more of their life, seems to think a bit more clearly. Remember—ve are cleaning out not only the active memory and personality but also that attic full of forgotten junk, opening new pathways to it and for it. It becomes accessible again. But only for a vile. Since it vas stored there in the first place because it vas no longer needed, it fades with disuse, in a veek or two at the most."

I nodded to myself. "Yes, I remember the first time I got switched. I seemed to remember things back to babyhood and everything seemed so crisp and clear, like my I.Q. had been doubled. But it faded."

"Can you—put people back into other bodies?" Dory asked hesitantly.

He saw her concern and smiled reassuringly. "No. Not yet. Not really, anyvay. Tolerances are too critical. Ve just don't know enough. There is anyvere from a ten to fifty percent insertion loss, or the information is there but can't be gotten at. The roadblock seems to be the brain vaves, the woltage inside the head. It, too, is dif-ferent for different people and the old values won't do since that would interfere with the autonomic functions of the body ve don't touch.

The values of the new body aren't matched to vat the old matrix system is used to. It appears there is an almost no-tolerance compromise between vat the input needs and the new body requires that is unique with each individual. But the Urulu find it—find it and automatically match it in moments. Vun day, perhaps soon, ve vill find it, too."

And, somehow, I knew he would. I shuddered at the idea of an "insertion loss" of ten to fifty percent. An I.Q. 150 might become a below-normal I.Q. 75.

Stuart had to go about his business after that, and we left him in the command center of IMC. We headed for the cafeteria, although neither of us felt like eating. I, for one, felt the need to sit down and get control of myself for a few moments.

"It scares the hell out of me," I told Dory. "Right now he can read us out and store us in little cubes. You know it won't be long before they'll know how to switch. Considering how far they've come in such a short time now, it could be today, or tomorrow. Certainly it's a matter of months, not years. And all that will be put in the hands of men like Harry Parch. Worse. Can you imagine them with a bunch of bodies, clearing them out, then feeding Parch's recording into all of them? An army of Harry Parches. He wouldn't need his makeup kit any more."

"It's worse than that, if you remember our earlier conversation with Eisenstadt," Dory replied. "Look, I own—used to own—a good digital tape recorder. Puts the signal on tape as a binary code, millions of tiny dots, each representing a single element of the music. Mine won't edit much—it's a cheap model—but at the store where I got it they had this real fancy kind, the kind professional recording companies and TV companies use. They had a string quartet—four instruments playing together—on tape. They used to show what you could do with an editor by removing one instrument—the violin, say—and replacing it with a piccolo playing the same part. Sounded stupid and weird, but that com-puter tape recorder-editor of theirs could figure out which little dots applied only to violins—even reverb, echo, you name it—then separate it from all the other sounds and replace it."

For a moment I didn't see it, but suddenly it hit me. Holographic memory…

That meant that the brain didn't store your name, for example, in a billion places.

Inefficient. It stored that in one place and went to it when forming its thoughts. If they learned which little digital dots, which bytes of information, were which, and could locate your name as easily as the musical engineer located Dory's violin, they could replace that information when reading it back into you. Edit your memories.

"You see what I mean," she said gravely. "They could redo everybody. We'd be happy little robots. And Dr. Eisenstadt seemed so nice."

"He is," I assured her. "I'm sure he and his colleagues are thinking along the lines he said. Curing disease, treating hopeless mental illness, that sort of thing."

"These people—the ones we've met they seem like decent sorts, I guess.

They have husbands and wives and kids and many live on the surface, in normal homes, having normal family lives. They join the PTA, play tennis, laugh at comedies, bowl. Am I wrong to be so afraid?"

I reached over and squeezed her hand. "No, you're not. History is on the side of your nightmares, I'm afraid. Oh, I doubt if anybody here, even Parch, is acting from selfish, power-seeking motives. Whatever they do with this power they will do for the best of reasons, from the purest of motives. Their psychiatric screening is damned good, as good as for the guys who fire the nuclear mis-siles in case of atomic war—and we've never had one fired incorrectly yet. But good motives don't make ac-tions good. These people aren't monsters or crazy dictator types, they're worse—middle-level government bure-aucrats and naive scientists. But consider—I'll just bet there is, or soon will be, a Genetic Research Center that's the equivalent of IMC somewhere. So that IMC and GRC combined can produce the sanest, healthiest, most perfect human specimens government bureaucrats can devise. Perfect people made to order—a glorious ideal. Without hatred, without prejudice, all equal. And all somebody else's idea—and ideal—of perfection."