Terminal Man (12 page)

He drew the dash and waited. It was going to take a long time to go through all forty electrodes, but it was fascinating to watch. They produced such strikingly different effects, yet each electrode was very close to the next. It was the ultimate proof of the density of the brain, which had once been described as the most complex structure in the known universe. And it was certainly
true: there were three times as many cells packed into a single human brain as there were human beings on the face of the earth. That density was hard to comprehend, sometimes. Early in his NPS career, Gerhard had requested a human brain to dissect. He had done it over a period of several days, with a dozen neuroanatomy texts opened up before him. He used the traditional tool for brain dissection, a blunt wooden stick, to scrape away the cheesy gray material. He had patiently, carefully scraped away—and in the end, he had nothing. The brain was not like the liver or the lungs. To the naked eye, it was uniform and boring, giving no indication of its true function. The brain was too subtle, too complex. Too dense.

“Electrode four,” Richards said into the recorder. “Five millivolts, five seconds.” The shock was delivered.

And Benson, in an oddly childlike voice, said, “Could I have some milk and cookies, please?”

“That’s interesting,” Gerhard said, watching the reaction.

Richards nodded. “How old would you say?”

“About five or six, at most.”

Benson was talking about cookies, talking about his tricycle, to Ross. Slowly, over the next few minutes, he seemed to emerge like a time-traveler advancing through the years. Finally he became fully adult again, thinking back to his youth, instead of actually being there. “I always wanted the cookies, and she would never give them to me. She said they were bad for me and would give me cavities.”

“We can go on,” Gerhard said.

Richards said, “Electrode five, five millivolts, five seconds.”

In the next room, Benson shifted uncomfortably in his wheelchair. Ross asked him if something was wrong. Benson said, “It feels funny.”

“How do you mean?”

“I can’t describe it. It’s like sandpaper. Irritating.”

Gerhard nodded, and wrote in his notes, “#5—potential attack electrode.” This happened sometimes. Occasionally an electrode would be found to stimulate a seizure. Nobody knew why—and Gerhard personally thought that nobody ever would. The brain was, he believed, beyond comprehension.

His work with programs like George and Martha had led him to understand that relatively simple computer instructions could produce complex and unpredictable machine behavior. It was also true that the programmed machine could exceed the capabilities of the programmer; that was clearly demonstrated in 1963 when Arthur Samuel at IBM programmed a machine to play checkers—and the machine eventually became so good that it beat Samuel himself.

Yet all this was done with computers which had no more circuits than the brain of an ant. The human brain far exceeded that complexity, and the programming of the human brain extended over many decades. How could anyone seriously expect to understand it?

There was also a philosophical problem. Goedel’s Theorem: that no system could explain itself, and no machine could understand its own workings. At most, Gerhard believed that a human brain might, after years of work, decipher a frog brain. But a human brain could
never decipher itself in the same detail. For that you would need a superhuman brain.

Gerhard thought that someday a computer would be developed that could untangle the billions of cells and hundreds of billions of interconnections in the human brain. Then, at last, man would have the information that he wanted. But man wouldn’t have done the work—another order of intelligence would have done it. And man would not know, of course, how the computer worked.

Morris entered the room with a cup of coffee. He sipped it, and glanced at Benson through the glass. “How’s he holding up?”

“Okay,” Gerhard said.

“Electrode six, five and five,” Richards intoned.

In the next room, Benson failed to react. He sat talking with Ross about the operation, and his lingering headache. He was quite calm and apparently unaffected. They repeated the stimulation, still without change in Benson’s behavior. Then they went on.

“Electrode seven, five and five,” Richards said. He delivered the shock.

Benson sat up abruptly. “Oh,” he said, “that was nice.”

“What was?” Ross said.

“You can do that again if you want to.”

“How does it feel?”

“Nice,” Benson said. His whole appearance seemed to change subtly. “You know,” he said after a moment, “you’re really a wonderful person, Dr. Ross.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Very attractive, too. I don’t know if I ever told you before.”

“How do you feel now?”

“I’m really very fond of you,” Benson said. “I don’t know if I told you that before.”

“Nice,” Gerhard said, watching through the glass. “Very nice.”

Morris nodded. “A strong P-terminal. He’s clearly turned on.”

Gerhard made a note of it. Morris sipped his coffee. They waited until Benson settled down. Then, blandly, Richards said, “Electrode eight, five millivolts, five seconds.”

The stimulation series continued.

A
T NOON
, M
C
P
HERSON SHOWED UP TO SUPERVISE
interfacing. No one was surprised to see him. In a sense, this was the irrevocable step; everything preceding it was unimportant. They had implanted electrodes and a computer and a power pack, and they had hooked everything up. But nothing functioned until the interfacing switches were thrown. It was a little like building an automobile and then finally turning the ignition.

Gerhard showed him notes from the stimulation series. “At five millivolts on a pulse-form stimulus, we have three positive terminals and two negatives. The
positives are seven, nine, and thirty-one. The negatives are five and thirty-two.”

McPherson glanced at the notes, then looked through the one-way glass at Benson. “Are any of the positives true P’s?”

“Seven seems to be.”

“Strong?”

“Pretty strong. When we stimulated him, he said he liked it, and he began to act sexually aroused toward Jan.”

“Is it too strong? Will it tip him over?”

Gerhard shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not unless he were to receive multiple stimulations over a short time course. There was that Norwegian …”

“I don’t think we have to worry about that,” McPherson said. “We’ve got Benson in the hospital for the next few days. If anything seems to be going wrong, we can switch to other electrodes. We’ll just keep track of him for a while. What about nine?”

“Very weak. Equivocal, really.”

“How did he respond?”

“There was a subtle increase in spontaneity, more tendency to smile, to tell happy and positive anecdotes.”

McPherson seemed unimpressed. “And thirty-one?”

“Clear tranquilizing effect. Calmness, relaxation, happiness.”

McPherson rubbed his hands together. “I guess we can get on with it,” he said. He looked once through the glass at Benson, and said, “Interface the patient with seven and thirty-one.”

McPherson was clearly feeling a sense of high drama and medical history. Gerhard got off his stool and
walked to a corner of the room where there was a computer console mounted beneath a TV screen. He began to touch the buttons. The TV screen glowed to life. After a moment, letters appeared on it.

Gerhard pressed a button and the screen went blank. Then a series of questions appeared, to which Gerhard typed out the answers on the console.

There was a pause, and the questions continued for electrode 31. Gerhard typed in the answers. Watching him, McPherson said to Morris, “This is amusing, in
a way. We’re telling the tiny computer how to work. The little computer gets its instructions from the big computer, which gets its instructions from Gerhard, who has a bigger computer than any of them.”

“Maybe,” Gerhard said, and laughed.

The screen glowed:

Morris sighed. He hoped that he would never reach the point in his life when he was referred to by a computer as an “auxiliary unit.” Gerhard typed quietly, a soft clicking sound. On the other TV screens, they could see the inner circuitry of the small computer. It glowed intermittently as the wiring locked in.

That was all there was to it. Somehow Morris was disappointed; he knew it would be this way, but he had expected—or needed—something more dramatic. Gerhard ran a systems check which came back negative. The screen went blank and then came through with a final message:

Gerhard smiled. In the next room, Benson was still talking quietly with Ross. Neither of them seemed to have noticed anything different at all.

J
ANET
R
OSS FINISHED THE STIMULATION SERIES
profoundly depressed. She stood in the corridor watching as Benson was wheeled away. She had a last glimpse of the white bandages around his neck as the nurse turned the corner; then he was gone.

She walked down the hallway in the other direction, through the multicolored NPS doors. For some reason, she found herself thinking about Arthur’s yellow Ferrari. It was so marvelous and elegant and irrelevant to anything. The perfect toy. She wished she were in Monte Carlo, stepping out of Arthur’s Ferrari wearing her Balenciaga gown, going up the stairs to the casino to gamble with nothing more important than money.

She looked at her watch. Christ, it was only 12:15. She had half the day ahead of her. What was it like to be a pediatrician? Probably fun. Tickling babies and giving shots and advising mothers on toilet training. Not a bad way to live.

She thought again of the bandages on Benson’s shoulder, and went into Telecomp. She had hoped to speak
to Gerhard alone, but instead everyone was in the room—McPherson, Morris, Ellis, everyone. They were all jubilant, toasting each other with coffee in Styrofoam cups.

Someone thrust a cup into her hands, and McPherson put his arm around her in a fatherly way. “I gather we turned Benson on to you today.”

“Yes, you did,” she said, managing to smile.

“Well, I guess you’re used to that.”

“Not exactly,” she said.

The room got quieter, the festive feeling slid away. She felt bad about that, but not really. There was nothing amusing about shocking a person into sexual arousal. It was physiologically interesting, was frightening and pathetic, but not funny. Why did they all find it so goddamned funny?

Ellis produced a hip flask and poured clear liquid into her coffee. “Makes it Irish,” he said, with a wink. “Much better.”

She nodded, and glanced across the room at Gerhard.

“Drink up, drink up,” Ellis said.

Gerhard was talking to Morris about something. It seemed a very intent conversation; then she heard Morris say, “… you please pass the pussy?” Gerhard laughed; Morris laughed. It was some kind of joke.

“Not bad, considering,” Ellis said. “What do you think?”

“Very good,” she said, taking a small sip. She managed to get away from Ellis and McPherson and went over to Gerhard. He was momentarily alone; Morris had gone off to refill his cup.

“Listen,” she said, “can I talk to you for a second?”

“Sure,” Gerhard said. He bent his head closer to hers. “What is it?”

“I want to know something. Is it possible for you to monitor Benson here, on the main computer?”

“You mean monitor the implanted unit?”

“Yes.”

Gerhard shrugged. “I guess so, but why bother? We know the implanted unit is working—”

“I know,” she said. “I know. But will you do it anyway, as a precaution?”

Gerhard said nothing. His eyes said: Precaution against what?

“Please?”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll punch in a monitoring subroutine as soon as they leave.” He nodded to the group. “I’ll have the computer check on him twice an hour.”

She frowned.

“Four times an hour?”

“How about every ten minutes?” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “Every ten minutes.”

“Thanks,” she said. Then she drained her coffee, and left the room.

E
LLIS SAT IN A CORNER OF
R
OOM
710
AND
watched the half-dozen technicians maneuvering around the bed. There were two people from the rad lab doing
a radiation check; there was one girl drawing blood for the chem lab, to check steroid levels; there was an EEG technician resetting the monitors; and there were Gerhard and Richards, taking a final look at the interface wiring.

Throughout it all, Benson lay motionless, breathing easily, staring up at the ceiling. He did not seem to notice the people touching him, moving an arm here, shifting a sheet there. He stared straight up at the ceiling.

One of the rad-lab men had hairy hands protruding from the cuffs of his white lab coat. For a moment, the man rested his hairy dark hand on Benson’s bandages. Ellis thought about the monkeys he had operated on. There was nothing to that except technical expertise, because you always knew—no matter how hard you pretended—that it was a monkey and not a human being, and if you slipped and cut the monkey from ear to ear, it didn’t matter at all. There would be no questions, no relatives, no lawyers, no press, no nothing—not even a nasty note from Requisitions asking what was happening to all those eighty-dollar monkeys. Nobody gave a damn. And neither did he. He wasn’t interested in helping monkeys. He was interested in helping human beings.