Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence (8 page)

“Oh, shut up!” she flared. “I made a mistake. I know it. I won’t do it again.”

“No damage was done,” Timberlake said.

“I don’t need you to defend me!” she snapped. And she thought:
No damage! Nothing was harmed except one of the crew
—
me!
She pressed her hands together to still their trembling.
We’re sitting ducks for any real emergency. We can’t turn back without the risk of a runaway dive into Sol or becoming another of her wandering comets. We can’t go on unless we solve the unsolvable.

“Take it easy, Prue,” Flattery soothed. “We probably put you on the big board too soon after getting you out of hyb.”

Thanks for the excuse!
she thought.

Flattery glanced around the room, seeing the poised silence of Bickel and Timberlake—both of them scorched by Prue’s anger. Bickel slid out of his couch, secured a set of test leads in the clip at his left shoulder. A multimeter could be seen protruding from his breast pocket. Timberlake was refining the hull temperature adjustments, putting the system back into the computer circuits.

Flattery returned his attention to Prudence.
She shouldn’t have panicked,
he thought.
Not the type. She has a woman’s wide perspective and confidence in her intuition. She should be better at the big board than any of us. Is she under greater strain? Does she know something I don’t?

Chapter 13

We understand synergy to mean the fortuitous working together of a set of components which we have assembled in our attempt to achieve artificial consciousness. Working together, the components produce more than …

—Prudence Lon Weygand (#3), incomplete segment from message capsule

It required almost twenty minutes for Prudence to regain her composure. By that time, Timberlake had run a checklist survey on every hyb-tank complex. He did it with a compulsive determination that none of them misunderstood. His function as life-systems engineer had been ignited.

Flattery let the thing run its course and a bit longer. Bickel was fretting to get back to his work, but Timberlake needed this role reinforcement. And Prudence needed recovery time.

Bickel finally had enough waiting.

“Can we get back to work?” he demanded.

“I can take the board now, Tim,” Flattery said.

Timberlake studied his instruments. “Okay. On the count.”

They shifted the board, and Timberlake got up, a sharp ache across his back telling him how tense he had been.

“Let’s get back to the shop,” Bickel said.

“How far along are you?” Prudence asked.

“Barely beginning,” Bickel said. “Let’s get cracking.”

“Is a man just a machine’s way of making another machine?” she asked.

“Just like Sam Butler’s hen,” Timberlake said. “Philosophy I.”

“Philosophy some other time, huh?” Bickel suggested.

“Just a minute,” she said. “By attempting to reproduce an artificial consciousness, we’re monkeying with variation of variability. Now, there’s a field that all good little divines”—she nodded toward Flattery—”and most scientists have agreed by a compact of silence is the exclusive territory of God in Heaven and God’s handiwork on earth—the genes.”

“Yeah,” Bickel said. “That’s great. Let’s solve it some other time.”

“You still don’t get it, none of you,” she said.

Bickel glared at her. “Don’t I? Okay, Prue. Let’s strip off the fancy verbiage. We’re damned if we solve this problem and dead if we don’t. Is that what you were trying to say?”

“Bravo!” she said, and turned to look at Flattery.

Flattery scowled at his board, pointedly ignoring her.

“You see, Raj?” she asked.

She can’t possibly know my instructions,
Flattery thought.
She might guess, but she can’t know. And certainly she couldn’t stop me if I had to blow us all to Kingdom Come.

“Yes, I see,” Flattery said. “Don’t underestimate John Lon Bickel.”

At the sound of his name, Bickel’s head came up. He stared at Flattery’s profile, seeing the way the man’s sensitive fingers moved like spider legs across the big board.

“You’re so very clever, Raj,” she said. “And so damn stupid!”

“That’s enough of that!” Bickel snapped, turning to glare at Prudence. “We’d better clear a little air, here. We’re on our own, Prue. You’ve no idea how much on our own we are. We have to depend on each other because we sure as hell can’t depend on the Tin Egg! We can’t afford to snap and bite at each other.”

Oh, can’t we now,
she thought.

“We’re trapped on a ship that contains only one top drawer mechanism,” Bickel said. “We’ve only one thing that functions smoothly and beautifully the way it should—our computer. Everything else works as though it’d been designed and built by six left-handed apes.”

“Bickel thinks this was all deliberate,” Timberlake said.

Prudence caught herself in an involuntary glance at Flattery, forced her attention away from Bickel and onto Timberlake.
This is far too early for Bickel to suspect,
she thought.

Timberlake avoided her eyes. He looked like a small boy who’d been caught stealing jam.

Flattery broke the silence. “Deliberate?’ he asked.

“Yeah,” Timberlake said. “He thinks the other six ships had the same kind of failure—something rotten with the OMCs.”

Bickel’s far more alert and suspicious than anyone suspected,
Prudence thought.
Raj or I will have to side with him; there’s no other way to keep control of the situation.

“Why … the OMCs?” Flattery asked.

“Let’s not tiptoe around it,” Bickel said. “The thing’s obvious. What feature of these ships is never mentioned in the stress analyses? What feature do we assume is proof against failure?”

“Surely not the OMCs,” Flattery said. He tried to hold his voice to a bantering level, failed, and thought:
God help us. Bickel’s seen through the sham far too soon.

“Certainly the OMCs,” Bickel said. “And they gave us three of the damn things! One in service and two for backup. Never a hint that an OMC could fail, yet we had three on the Tin Egg!”

“Why?” Prudence asked.

“To make damn sure we got beyond the point of no return before we got the cold-turkey treatment,” Bickel said.

I guess I’m elected,
Prudence thought. She said: “More of Project’s goddamn maneuvering! Sure, it’d be right in character.”

Flattery shot a startled look at her, returned his attention to the big board before Bickel noticed.

“Cold turkey,” Bickel said. “This ship’s one elaborate simulation device with a single purpose—and my guess is the others were the same.”

“Why?” Flattery demanded. “Why would they do such a thing?”

“Can’t you see it?” Bickel asked. “Don’t you recognize the purpose? It casts its shadow over everything around us. It’s the only thing that makes any sense out of this charade. The secrecy, the mystery, the maneuvering—everything’s calculated to put us on a greased slide into a very special ocean. It’s not just cold turkey, it’s sink or swim. And the only way we can swim is to develop an artificial consciousness.”

“Then why such an elaborate sham?” Flattery asked. “Why all the colonists, for example?”

“Why
not
the colonists?” Bickel countered. “Ready replacements for any members of the crew slaughtered on the way. Another arrow in the quiver—just in case we do get over the hump to a habitable planet where we can plant the seed of humankind. And … maybe there’s another reason.”

“What?” Prudence demanded.

“I can’t say just yet,” Bickel said. “It’s just a hunch … and there’s something a hell of a lot more important we have to consider—the destructive potential of this project.”

“You’d better explain that,” Flattery said, but he could feel in the dryness of his throat and mouth that Bickel already had seen through to the horror element of Project Consciousness.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Bickel said. “If we really solve this, the whatever-you-call-it we develop could be a kind of ultimate threat to humankind—a rogue, Frankenstein’s monster, cold intelligence without warm emotions, an angry horror.” He shrugged. “Once there was an island in Puget Sound; you all know about it. What happened? Did they solve it?”

“So we install inhibitions, fail-safe features,” Prudence said.

“How?” Bickel asked. “Can we develop this consciousness without giving it free will? Maybe that was the original problem with our Creator—giving us consciousness without permitting us to turn against … what? God?”

Consciousness, the gift of the serpent,
Flattery thought. He wet his lips with his tongue. “So?”

“So this ship has an ultimate fail-safe device to protect Earth and the rest of humanity,” Bickel said. “The only sure one I can think of, given all the variables, is a human being—one of us.” He looked at each of them. “One of us set to pull the pin and blow us all to hell if we go sour.”

“Oh, come now!” Flattery said.

“It could be you,” Bickel said. “Probably is … but maybe you’re too obvious.”

Prudence put a hand to her breast, thought:
Holy Jesus! I never once considered that. But Bickel’s right
…
and it’s Raj, of course. He’s the only one that fits. What do I do now?

Timberlake stirred out of a deep silence. He had heard the argument and the only thing that surprised him was how easy it was to accept Bickel’s summation. Why was Bickel right? He
was
right, of course. But why did they accept it when the thing really wasn’t that obvious? Was it awe of Bickel—clearly the strongest mind among them? Or was it that they already knew the facts—unconsciously?

“I tell you something,” Timberlake said. “Bickel’s right and we know it. So one of us is set to pull the pin. I don’t want to know who.”

“No argument,” Bickel said. “Whoever it is … if this thing goes sour, I’d be the last person in the … Tin Egg to stop him.”

Chapter 14

The Zen master tells us that an omnipresent idea can be hidden by its own omnipresence—the forest lost among the trees. In our normal daily behavior we are most estranged, most in the grip of an illusory idea of the self. Every enchanting inclination of pride and its ego, of convention and its master—social training—conspires to maintain the illusion. The semanticist calls it the inertia of old premises. And this is what holds our analyses of consciousness within fixed limits.

She wrote “Prudence Lon Weygand” at the foot of the log tape, started it rolling through the autorecorder, made the synchronous shift to Flattery’s tape as he took over the board. The counter said it was her thirty-fifth change of shift.

Flattery squirmed in his couch, settling himself for the four-hour watch. Reflections on the dial faces were hypnotic. He shook his head to bring himself to full alertness, heard the hiss of fabric as Prudence got out of her couch. She stood there a moment stretching, did a dozen deep-knee bends.

How easily they accept the possibility that I’m the executioner
, Flattery thought. He noted how wide awake and alert Prudence appeared. This four-hours-on, four-hours-off routine could be endured as long as no serious problems arose, but it played hob with the metabolic cycle. Prudence should be headed for food and rest, but she obviously was wide awake.

She glanced at Flattery, saw he was settled in for the watch, checked the repair log. Nothing was flagged urgent. That made it a bit more than twenty-five hours with nothing more than minor adjustments on the big board. Smooth. Too smooth.

Danger keeps you honed to a fine edge,
she thought.
Extended peace makes you dull.

But she wondered if Project had anticipated the special danger she had found for herself, and she thought:
Am I the stick to beat not only the others, but myself?

The line of her own research seemed so obvious, though: define the chemical sea in which consciousness swam. The ultimate clue lay, she thought, in the serotonin adrenalin fractions. The thing she sought was an active principle, something between synhexyl and noradrenalin, a flash producer of neurohormones. The end product would be the root-stimulator of human consciousness. Find that chemical analogue and she could give fine detail to the workings of consciousness; provide a point-to-point sequencing which they could follow with machine simulation.

On the course she had chosen, the dangers to her person were enormous. She had no other guinea pig upon whom to test the derivatives her ingenuity produced. The possibility of deadly error was always present. The last substance, a relative of cohoba with an extra nitrogen addition, had ignited her mind, transported her into a weird consciousness. All sounds had become liquids which merged within her to be translated by a centrifuge process of awareness. It had been a terrifying experience, but she refused to stop.

It was only possible to make the tests during the deep rest periods in her own private cubby, and there was always the possibility some physical response would betray her. She could not afford that; the others would unite to prevent the tests, she knew. Such was their conditioning.

“You’d better get something to eat and try to rest,” Flattery said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“At least try to rest.”

“Maybe later. Think I’ll wander in and see how Bickel and Tim’re doing.” She looked at the big screen overhead. It was tuned to the peak-corner lenses of the computer shop.

“We have to have a constant monitor on each other,” Timberlake had argued. “We can’t wait for somebody to yell help.”

The screen showed Bickel alone in the shop, but another eye had been keyed; it showed Timberlake asleep in his cubby adjoining the shop.

Four hours on and four hours off plus this constant looking over each other’s shoulders will have us batty in a week,
she thought.

Bickel looked up to his own screen-eye, saw Prudence watching, said: “Satan finds mischief for idle hands.”

They mock me,
Flattery thought.
They laugh at God, at the Devil, at me.

“How about some coffee?” Prudence asked, speaking to Bickel.

“Coffee later,” he said. “No more food of any kind in here, anyway. We have to keep the cover plates open and we can’t risk contaminating the fine structure. If you’re free, I could use some help.”

She took one low-grav step across to the hatch lock, let herself through, stopped just inside the shop to study what Tim and Bickel had accomplished since her last free period.

Where the optical character reader had been, on the big panel across from the lock, now stretched a mechanical excrescence—a piled and jutting structure of plastic blocks: Eng multiplier circuits, each sealed in plastic insulator. Linking the blocks were loops and tangles and twists—a black spiderweb of insulated pseudoneuron fiber.

Bickel had heard her entrance. Without turning from his work at one end of that protruding angular construction, he said: “Take that other micro-tie viewer on the bench. I need 21.006 centimeters of the K-A4 neurofiber with random spaced endbulbs and multisynapses. Connect it as I’ve indicated on that schematic labeled G-20. It should be the top one in that pile on the right end of the bench.”

Bickel sat down on the deck, slid a new block of Eng multipliers into position. He swung a portable micro-tie viewer across the block, leaned into the viewer’s forehead rests, began making the connections.

Yes, sir!
she thought.

She found the indicated schematic, reeled off the neurofiber, fed it into the viewer, bent to the eyepiece. The enlarged image of the conductor line with its green-coded synapse sections and yellow endbulbs leaped into view. She looked once more at the schematic, began making the required connections.

“What’re we doing now, boss?” she asked.

“Installing a system of roulette cycles,” Bickel said.

“Why?”

“A machine can reproduce any form of behavior,” Bickel said. “We can engineer this device to satisfy any given input-output specifications. It’ll behave any way we want under any
specified
circumstances. Raj set me straight on that.”

She kept her tone light. “That was wrong, huh?”

“You bet your sweet life. Specified environment and behavior—that’s deterministic. The manufacturer is still in control. What’s worse, it requires a completely detailed memory—everything in the machine’s past has to be immediate … right
there
and
now!
Memory load gets bigger and bigger every second. And it’s all present and immediate. And
that
throws you into an infinite-design problem.”

She reeled off a required length of side fiber, made the loop indicated in the schematic. “Infinite design. That means an indeterminate form and, by definition, the indeterminate is impossible to construct. So what do we do now?”

“Don’t be dull,” Bickel said. “We build for a random inhibitory pattern in the net—behavior that follows probability requirements.” He leaned back from his viewer, wiped perspiration from his forehead. “A behavior pattern that results from built-in misfunction.”

The way this ship was programmed to behave for us,
she thought.

“Deterministic behavior from unreliable elements,” she said. And she sensed Flattery’s hand in this, an argument, a gentle nudge.

“Bickel,” she said, “I’ve been stewing about your suspicions. Even if you’re right—about one of us being set to blow us up if we go sour—how can you be sure this failsafe person is still among us? I mean, three of the original crew are dead.”

“Okay,” Bickel said. “Let’s say we brought you out of hyb and you found our chaplain-psychiatrist had been killed. What were your orders?”

“Orders?”

“Come off that! We all had special orders.”

“I’d have insisted we bring another chaplain-psychiatrist out of hyb,” she said in a small voice. “What would you have done?”

“I had my orders, same as you.”

She looked up at Flattery visible on the overhead screen. He appeared intent on the big board, paying no attention to the conversation coming over the intercom from the shop. That was sham, she knew. Everything said here was going into his brain, being weighed and analyzed.

Bickel’s right,
she thought.
It’s Raj.

“Pay attention to what you’re doing!” Bickel said.

She turned, saw him watching her.

“You foul up the ties on that loop and I’ll put you back in hyb,” he said.

“Don’t make threats you can’t carry out,” she said. But she turned back to the micro-tie viewer, finished off an interringed series of loops, tested to be sure they weren’t mutually oscillating, traced the output sheaf, and attached a plug for an Eng multiplier connection.

“Let me have that G-20 assembly as soon as you’re finished,” Bickel said. He yawned, put his knuckles to his eyes.

Prudence checked her assembly against the schematic, saw it matched, lifted it gently out of the viewer and took it to Bickel. He was overdue for a rest and still driving himself, she saw.

“Here,” she said, presenting the assembly. “When you get this tied in, why don’t you take a break.”

“We’re almost ready to put this on an initial program,” Bickel said. He took the assembly, began connecting it to the newly installed Eng multiplier block, running one sheaf back to a plugboard connection on the computer panel.

Prudence stepped back, studied the mechanical growth that jutted from the wall. As though she saw it for the first time, the construction abruptly took on a new meaning for her.

“That’s more than a setup for analysis,” she said.

“That’s right.”

Bickel stood up, wiped his hands on the sides of his vacsuit, swung his own micro-manipulator and viewer to one side.

“This, in addition to giving us our analysis of built-in misfunction, this little ‘Ox’ we’re driving will provide a three-way energy interchange.”

“You’re tied into the computer,” she accused, pointing to the connections in the plugboard.

“Every line in that board has a diode in it. Pulses can come from the computer to our test setup, but anything going into the computer has to be coded by one of us and
inserted
over there.” Bickel pointed to the input heads lined up at the right corner of the wall.

“Three-way interchange?’ she asked.

“We’re going to test my field-theory approach. I have a source program ready to insert. If our Ox doesn’t work, it’ll just produce an unconditional transfer of the material at the readout. If the field is produced, it’ll act as a filter, and we’ll get truncation. It’ll pass only the significant digits.”

“What about the roulette cycles?”

“The zero suppress will be intermittent,” he said, “but we’ll still get only the significant digits at the readout.”

Prudence nodded, looking at Bickel with a new understanding of what he was doing. “All sense data are intermittent into the human consciousness.”

It was an explosive thought.
Waveforms! Everything which consciousness could identify had to move in some organized way. It had to move against a background which set off … which outlined! … the organization. Therefore: intermittence. And Bickel had seen right through to this necessity.

She found the realization somehow deeply sexual, and awareness of this filled her with disquiet. There was no way she could include anti-S on her present testing regimen. She wondered if her body might finally betray her.

Forcing herself to a calmness which she did not feel, she said: “What we see and identify has to be discrete and significant, it has to dance against some other background.”

“Now you have it,” Bickel said. “But we assume that the one who views the data is continuous—a
flow
of consciousness. Somewhere inside us, the discrete becomes amorphous. Consciousness weeds out the insignificant, focuses only on the significant.”

“That’s judgment,” she said, “and it’s where physicalist theory falls flat on its face. If this is an introspection device, then it won’t be conscious. Introspection confuses consciousness with thinking. But sensing, feeling and thinking are physiological processes … and consciousness—”

“Is something else,” Bickel said. “It’s a relationship, a field, a selective interchange. It drops the insignificant digits. It’s a weeder. Now, we see if we have a device that can weed on the basis of intermittent data, some of which is erroneous.”

“Erroneous data—significant results,” she whispered.

“What?”

But she ignored Bickel to turn and look at the overhead screen where Flattery was revealed calmly monitoring the big board. Something Flattery had said came now into her mind as though it had been amplified to full volume:

“There’s nothing concerning ourselves about which we can be truly objective except our physical responses—the reflections of behavior. We exist in a forest of illusion where the very concept of consciousness merges with illusion.”

She turned to look at Bickel where he worked, seeing the stretch of his muscles under the vacsuit fabric as he bent to finish the assembly. And she thought:
To be conscious, you must surmount illusion. Bickel saw that where I didn’t.

A moment of illumination filled her mind and she saw the man at his work as more than flesh and sinew and nerves—more than the physical chemistry with blanks to be filled in. Bickel was both a minuscule and vulnerable creature, but beyond that, he contained powers that could stretch across any universe. Something of this momentary understanding struck her as almost religious … holy. She savored it, realizing this was a private and personal thing she could never completely communicate to another creature.

Bickel finished the final tie of the G-20 assembly, stood up, and rubbed the small of his back. His hands trembled as he relaxed after the fierce concentration of the work he had just completed.

“Let’s give it a run,” he said. “Prue, you monitor the diagnostic board.” He gestured to the panel of dials and gauges waiting like so many glistening eyes at his left. “I’ll give each net of the roulette cycles a one-fifth-second burst from the shot generator.” He moved around to the right of the piled blocks of the test setup, stepping over the leads with elaborate care. He flipped the row of switches to start the source program through the inputs.