Pandora's Brain (18 page)

*

It took several long minutes to get through security at the entrance to the Nine Elms complex. It was obvious that without Vic it would have taken a great deal longer.

Everything around them was new, but temporary -looking. Some of the facility comprised joined-up portable cabins, and some of the other structures were flimsy-looking affairs made of pre-fabricated panels. Vic explained that the redevelopment of Nine Elms was one of the largest urban construction sites in Europe,
and that the buildings here would be changing, mor
phing and moving about a lot in the coming months.

They headed towards the scanning room. The gurney carrying Matt had been taken by a couple of Vic’s people to what Vic described as ‘the preparation room’. Sophie, David and Leo had reluctantly gone along with Vic’s strong advice not to accompany it.

At their destination, Vic held the door open and they entered, one by one. The room was the size of a large classroom: it felt spacious because everything inside was white and bright. Light flooded down from powerfully illuminated white ceiling panels, and white was the predominant colour of the large machines and cabinets that lined the walls and filled much of the rest of the room to waist height. To one side of the room, a couple of sofas and accompanying armchairs in off-white fabric and a large oval glass coffee table provided some relief from the hard edges elsewhere. Vic gestured towards them.

‘Welcome to the scanning room.’ Addressing David in particular, he added, ‘You and I will be spending a good deal of time here in the next few weeks. The fridge is kept well stocked, and a phone call to reception can get you hot food any time of the day or night.’

He didn’t ask whether anyone was hungry at the moment.

‘Now, I suggest that we call it a night. We have a couple of company flats nearby; you’re welcome to stay there tonight, and I’ll arrange for you to have the use of one of them for as long as you want it. Leo and Sophie: I don’t imagine that you will want to be here every day, but you will have site passes anyway, and you’ll be welcome any time.

‘I’m going to brief my four most senior scientists tomorrow. They’re a great team, and I’ll introduce them to you when you’re ready. We could make a start the day after tomorrow, but I realise that may be too soon. Just let me know when you feel up to it.’

*

Having said goodnight to David, Sophie and Leo, Vic had one last job before he too headed to bed: he called Dr Paul Humbert, his chief medical officer.
Dr Humbert was in the room which Vic had previously
referred to as the preparation room, although in reality it was a state-of-the-art operating theatre, equipped with brand new machines whose clean, minimalist lines whispered money.

At 56 years old, Dr Humbert was a highly skilled senior consultant, at the top of his profession. He was head of the neuroscience department at St Thomas’ Hospital, but maintained a lucrative private practice, including a part-time role as Chief Medical Officer for Von Neumann Industries. A tall man in good physical shape, he had a handsome but severe face, with thinning grey hair and clear blue eyes.

Matt’s body lay on a gurney next to an operating bed which was ready to be illuminated by banks of lights like the compound eyes of insects, each sending out a sensitive finger of light, probing and querying.

Dr Humbert answered his phone.

‘OK, Paul, you can get started,’ Vic said. ‘We have the green light.’

‘Thanks Vic. Are you coming over now?’

‘No, I’m exhausted. I’ll come to the prep room first thing tomorrow. Will you be there – say, 7.30?’

‘I doubt it,’ Dr Humbert replied. ‘We’ll be at this most of the night, so by 7.30 I’ll be catching up on some sleep myself, if it’s alright by you. But I’ll make sure one of the team is here to debrief you.’

‘Fair enough. Has the license to carry out the autopsy arrived yet?’

‘Yes. A police officer brought it over a short while ago.’

‘Excellent,’ said Vic, relieved. ‘What do they want us to do with the body afterwards? Will the coroner commision another post-mortem examination?

‘Yes,’ Dr Humbert replied. ‘That is pretty much inevitable following a murder.’

‘And when should we tell him that we have removed the brain?’ Vic asked.

‘No need to do that before we return the body, I think. There may be a fuss about it, but given the cause of death and the political support you have mustered, we should be able to contain it.’

‘Good,’ Vic said with evident relief. ‘Did you manage to get hold of the voice expert we talked about?’

‘Yes, he’s been on standby with the others with a couple of his assistants.’

‘Great. Well, good luck. Wake me up if there are any complications.’

‘Shouldn’t need to, but understood. Good night.’

As he put his phone back in his pocket, Dr Humbert looked down at Matt’s body, lying on the gurney. He looked across at the immaculate array of cutting equipment lying waiting for the job, and then he looked up at his team. Thanks to his own seniority and also the resources at Vic’s disposal, Dr Humbert
had managed to assemble a first-rate group of sur
geons, nurses and pathologists at very short notice.

‘Right, let’s get this young man on the operating table and get ourselves washed up. We’ve got a long night ahead of us, and the sooner we get started, the sooner we can all go home.’

Four hours later, a layer of artificial skin had been applied in a circle around Matt’s shaved skull, hiding the join where the crown had been removed and then re-attached. His brain was sitting in a refrigerated box, ready for delivery to the scanning room. The theatre was spotless, showing no traces of the operation to separate brain from body: circular saws, clippers, forceps and various other devices of healing violence had been scrupulously cleansed and returned to their state of pristine innocence.

As soon as the brain had been safely removed, Dr Humbert’s medical forensic colleagues had busied themselves further down Matt’s body, tracing and documenting the exact point of entry and progress through the body of the bullet which had killed him. They continued their work until they had built up a comprehensive picture of the journey and the impact of the tiny lump of metal which ended Matt’s life.

When that was done, the final post-mortem task began: a minute examination of the structure and composition of the body’s vocal cords, the way they were supplied with air by the lungs, and the precise arrangement of the articulators – the tongue, palate and lips.

As Dr Humbert and two of his colleagues continued to type up their findings, Matt’s body was placed back on the gurney by two other members of the team, and wheeled into a specially prepared storage cabinet in the adjoining room. Matt had taken the first steps of his journey toward an afterlife.

David and Sophie spent the whole of the next two days in the flat. Leo called round late in the morning each day, bringing some sandwiches for lunch which they hardly touched. He left them again in mid afternoon. The days passed in a trance. They were speechless, numb.

The following morning, after a night of little sleep, David called Vic and told him that he and Sophie were ready to discuss the project. They met a couple of hours later in the scanning room, along with Leo.

David opened the conversation by asking Vic about the probability of success.

‘Obviously we’re hoping that we will revive Matt’s mind, whole and complete,’ Vic began. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. Our simulations suggest that we have a better than 75% chance of success, although I confess I would be hard put to justify that with empirical evidence.’

‘And if it’s not successful?’

‘If it’s not successful . . .’ Vic paused, his features betraying his discomfort about some of the possible outcomes. ‘Well, the short answer is that we don’t know what kind of mentality we might create. It’s possible that we will fail to capture any kind of consciousness, or indeed any kind of intelligence. But frankly I’ll be astonished if that happens: the process should re-create at least some of Matt’s mental faculties, even if we fall short of reproducing his full consciousness.’

Vic paused again, glancing in turn at David and Sophie in search of reassurance that they were comfortable with him talking about Matt in this analytical way. Sophie was silent, still heavily absorbed in her grief. David replied for both of them, his voice shaky but resolved.

‘It’s OK, Vic: We’re signed up to this. I realise that pretty soon Matt . . . that Matt’s brain won’t exist in any recognisable form. But we also realise it’s our only chance of getting him back.’

Vic nodded grimly, and continued cautiously.

‘Actually, Matt’s brain is going to be preserved in a more profound way than anybody else’s has ever been. Many people’s brains have been preserved, but obviously none of them have retained their functionality. We are not only going to re-create the functionality of Matt’s brain – we hope – but we will preserve its structure in a physical sense too. True, it won’t look much like a brain, but topographically, the slices will preserve the physical layout of Matt’s brain in a way that has never even been attempted before.’

‘So you’ll be keeping the physical slices?’ Leo asked. ‘They aren’t destroyed by the scanning process?’

‘No,’ Vic replied. ‘They comprise a reference library that we can refer to if we need to iron out . . . um . . .’

‘. . . glitches,’ David finished his unpalatable sentence for him. ‘I hadn’t thought of this before, Vic, and maybe this isn’t the right time to discuss it, but are there any questions about the ownership of Matt’s physical brain, once it has been processed? Somebody will have to make decisions about how to treat it, whether and how long to store it, who gets access to it and so on. I suppose that person will have to be whoever ‘owns’ it. As Matt’s parents, I would hope that we have a strong claim, mainly because we will be more likely to act in Matt’s best interests than anyone else.’

‘It’s a good question, David,’ Vic agreed, ‘and it’s not straightforward, because there are at least three different manifestations of the brain. There is the physical material, there is the information that will reside in the computers, and there is the consciousness – assuming that one does emerge. Will the same person or people own all of these? Will anyone else have any legitimate interest in them? There’s no legal precedent for a lot of this, so to some extent we’re going to be making it up as we go along. For my part I can tell you what I think, but I want to be honest with you: I can’t be sure that my view will always bind the joint-venture organisation that I run. My colleagues from DARPA will no doubt also want to have a say.

‘Speaking for myself, though, I’m inclined to think that if we succeed in bringing back his consciousness, then Matt himself should have as much control over all three aspects of his brain as possible, although that may have to be subject to reasonable considerations of safety and cost. If we don’t, then on the whole I agree with you that as his parents, you should have the biggest say in what happens to the material brain.

‘But . . .’ he hesitated, looking slightly nervous, ‘I would be failing in my duty towards my organisation if I didn’t also point out that we are going to be spending an enormous amount of time and money on this process, and I hope you would agree that should confer some rights as well.’

‘It’s all rather complex and murky, isn’t it?’ David mused. ‘But the process is going to take . . . what . . . several weeks? I guess that should give us time to get some basic principles straightened out?’

‘That’s exactly what I was going to say,’ Vic agreed, with evident relief. ‘The thing to do now is to get started and complete the scanning process. Once we’ve done that the timing gets less critical. We’ll have a lot of work to do throughout the next few days and weeks, but we’ll have time to discuss these issues too.’

Leo brought the conversation back to David’s earlier question. ‘So you’re confident that you will re-create something of Matt’s mind, but maybe not the whole thing. What could that mean?’

Vic helped himself to a Coke, largely to give himself time to gather his thoughts. He didn’t want to make this sensitive conversation any harder than it already was.

‘There has been some speculation about this, but we are in unknown territory,’ he began. ‘The first thing to say is that there may be disagreement about whether the mentality we . . . restore . . . is Matt or not. Dr Christensen expressed this well in the studio yesterday when he said it could be sideloading instead of unploading. That is a philosophical question which I doubt we will resolve to universal satisfaction, at least in the short term. I have my own view, you will have yours. I can only assume that you are satisfied that there is a possibility of bringing Matt back or you wouldn’t be here.’

Leo looked towards David and Sophie for confirmation. Sophie remained silent, but David nodded.

‘Good, so we can leave to one side the question of personal identity. Now one potential failure mode, I think, is that we only succeed in restoring part or parts of Matt’s mind. I mentioned before that Ivan had made some breakthroughs which will enable us to distinguish between sub-minds; sub-routines within Matt’s overall suite of mental programmes, if you like.’

‘Assuming you can replicate Ivan’s results,’ Leo interrupted.

‘We’re confident that Ivan’s work was robust on this point,’ Vic reassured him. ‘We’ve seen a lot of repeated outcomes in his work, with a high degree of confidence.’

‘That’s assuming he wasn’t just making stuff up,’ persisted Leo. ‘We know he wasn’t exactly a slave to scruples.’

‘Yes, we are assuming that. For all his many faults we do think Ivan was a capable and sincere researcher, and the way he and his people have recorded their findings looks entirely professional.’

‘So what do you think will happen if Matt is only partly restored?’ David asked.

Vic took a deep breath before replying. ‘Well, it might be like meeting a child, or a heavily autistic person, or someone trapped inside a dream. Or it might be unlike any human encounter we’ve known before. Or we might know nothing about it: we might create a mind that is unable to operate any of the communication peripherals we’ll provide.’

‘You mean Matt might be like someone with locked-in syndrome?’ Leo asked, shocked.

‘My god, that could be awful for him! We can’t let that happen.’ said David, firmly. Sophie also looked at Vic in alarm, but couldn’t bring herself to speak.

‘I agree with you, David,’ Vic nodded grimly,
silently praying that Matt’s parents understood that he shared their concerns for Matt as a person. ‘Over the coming weeks we need to draw up a set of protocols covering what action we take given a range of different outcomes. We can shut the mentality down any time we like, if we think it is suffering pain or any kind of mental anguish. But of course it’s possible that we might shut down a mentality that had the potential to stabilise and become a wholly satisfactory recovery of Matt’s mind.’

A small nervous laugh escaped from Leo. ‘You’re not exactly selling this, Vic!’

‘I’m trying very hard
not
to sell it, Leo,’ Vic replied with feeling. ‘That’s the whole point. This is a big step for all of us, but especially for you three. The last thing in the world I want is to be the cause of any regrets or recriminations down the line. I’m not going to tell you that I care for Matt in the same way that you do, but I do care about him nonetheless. I won’t deny I have a professional and personal interest in this process going ahead. But I want to be absolutely certain that my enthusiasm for this project doesn’t cause me to mislead you in any way.’

‘We understand, Vic,’ David said. ‘Don’t worry. You’ve bent over backwards to be open and fair with us. And please don’t think that we’ve forgotten how much else you and your colleagues have done for this family. I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for you.’

‘We’ve all helped each other immeasurably, David,’ Vic agreed, gratefully. ‘I just wish Matt was here to share this opportunity – here on this side of the scanning table, I mean.

David could tell that Sophie needed to escape the conversation. He stood, and took her hand, suggesting that he and Vic meet for breakfast the following morning.