Identity Matrix (1982) (15 page)

He was the kind of person who was charismatic in an odd way, exuding a grandfatherly warmth you could feel. He had always been among the most highly re-garded men I could remember by, those who knew him, always doing favors, always willing to listen, sympa-thize, give advice. His father, a Lutheran minister, had died in a concentration camp during World War II and he remained a deeply, if inwardly, religious man, seeing no conflict between his science and his faith. He never pushed it on you; he just lived it and that was far more impressive.

I went up to him and offered my hand. To my surprise he didn't shake it but took it gently and kissed it. "Dear lady," he said softly, and suddenly I was yanked back to the present and my own new form. This wasn't Hopkins, and he was seeing a far different person he'd never known.

"Stuart, it may be hard to believe, but inside this body is Vic Gonser, an old colleague of yours."

He grinned broadly, and there was added twinkle in his eyes. "My! Victor!

How you have changed!" He turned to Dory. "And you must be Miss Dorian Tomlinson." He bent down slightly and repeated the hand-kissing routine.

I cursed myself for underestimating the wily old bas-tard and not remembering that "Project Director" title on his door. His often comic personality masked a bril-liant mind fully as devious as anyone's. Of course, he'd known all about us, who we were, how and why we were here, all the facts well ahead of time.

He gestured to chairs and we all took seats except Parch, who excused himself and left with a few whis-pered words to the professor we couldn't hear. I couldn't help noticing that the others in and around the office kept glancing nervously at Parch, while the security chief was anything but deferential to Stuart. When Harry Parch left, he seemed to take a black cloud with him.

Eisenstadt sighed. "Vell, Victor! So—it is a great im-provement, this change in you. I find you positively radiant to look at." He turned to Dory and said with mock seriousness, "He was a bald little schmoo of a man ven he vas a he." She giggled, and I could see she was falling under his spell.

"Stuart, I may look different and you the same, but I have to say I'm surprised to see you here—surprised and pleased," I told him. "Project Director, huh?"

He nodded. "This is vere it's all done. Parch, he chases the aliens and keeps us a secret, but here ve find out how they do it, what they do, and open up the frontiers of knowledge. I tell you, Vict—Vicki—that here ve have already taken quantum leaps—quantum leaps!—in man's knowledge of himself, the most important frontier you can imagine."

I was interested. "You've made real progress, then?"

"Wery much so. I'll be glad to explain it to you, but first ve begin at the beginning, yes? Some old college biology. Ve have not vun brain in our head, you know, but three. Vun, the medulla oblongata, is the first, the basic, the primal brain from our reptilian ancestors. It controls much of our automatic functions. Then there's the cerebellum, our mammalian brain. Body tempera-ture, blood pressure, voluntary muscles, that sort of thing. If you have both these you are perfectly equipped to be an ape, yes? A primitive ape, anyway. Memory data, too, is mostly stored here. But to use it for anything but the most basic stuff you need the cerebrum, yes? In computer terms, the cerebrum is the program-mer, the cerebellum is data storage, and the medulla is the electric company, you see?"

I had to laugh at the analogy, which was simple but apt. I would like to admit that such basic stuff was unnecessary, and it was to me, but I could see that Dory was getting her memory jogged.

"Now, that's a simplified model—extremely so." Stuart continued, "but it's vat ve need for our purposes. Ve will keep to the computer analogy for all this, but it is important you not think of the brain as an integrated whole but a series of assembled components. All right?"

We both nodded.

"All right, then. Ve have known for a long time that the memory process is basically, holographic—you see complete, integrated ideas or images in your cerebrum, not individual data bits. Ve had some success back at Johns Hopkins vith feeding additional information into the brain in such a manner, but it vas child's stuff. But this holographic idea vas a wrong direction, even though it was right. No, don't look at me like that. I mean it. It meant ve didn't ask the right question next."

"And that was?" I prompted.

"How that information is stored rather than how it is processed," he replied.

"Look, basically we vould have claimed that what we can now do vas, if not totally impossible, then unlikely in our lifetime. What shocked us all was the self evident fact that complete memory and personalities could be changed with no apparent physical harm. Incredible! Impossible! But a fact. The process itself is so complex that it defies rational expla-nation among my colleagues. The fact is, like gravity and magnetism, ve're not quite sure how it works but ve know it does."

"You can do it, then?"

He shrugged. "Not vat these aliens do, no. They do in moments vat it takes this entire complex of the most sophisticated computers to do. No machines, no vorry, just touch and pfft! It is something inside them, something to do with the nature of what they really are. I think they are some sort of energy creatures, bound together in a complex pattern, that needs a body to vork. They are born in bodies, yes, same as ve, but they are not that body. They are symbiotic organisms inside animal bodies, although they can not exist outside bod-ies at all. So, vat they do naturally ve are not physically equipped to do. But if they can do it to us, there is a vay, vith technology, for us to do it to us."

"I'm sitting here listening to all this," I said, "in a body so different from my own it's incredible, yet it's still hard to believe."

He nodded. "I know, I know. I don't believe it myself sometime. But, let's make a try at it, yes? Let's start by saying that the brain is everything. The most incredible, complex, and vonderful computer ever designed. It is made up of cells called neurons that are so densely packed that there are one hundred thousand of them in a square inch! And interconnected by ten thousand miles or more of nerves. The whole brain contains over ten trillion neurons—a staggering number, bigger than ve can really conceive. So much ve don't live long enough to fill it all up.

"But the brain is a prisoner, you see, an isolated thing with no sensations, not even pain. It is totally input-dependent for its information, and this input comes from everyvere else in our bodies—eyes, ears, nose, throat, and the nerve cells that cover our bodies inside and out. It can be fooled—that is the basis of hypnosis. If it can be convinced by its receptors, its input, that something false is true, it accepts it. It has no independent vay of checking out that information."

I glanced over at Dory and saw her rapt attention. Stuart was a good teacher, and he was obviously relish-ing the role once more.

"Now, input—sensory data, whether it be light, shape, color, anything—is sent to the brain and routed to the proper place for it," he continued. "It indexes by area. There's really no difference in the neurons, but our genes set up a pattern, a matrix if you will, that the brain follows as its own unique coding and indexing system. Evolution, in other vords, produced an incredibly effi-cient indexing system. Each individual matrix is unique, like fingerprints, and so our first problem is how to discover how the brain indexes for each personality—their identity matrix, you might call it. Ve do this by a sophisticated probe—actually millions of tiny energy probes—that finally find the right place and are able to plug in, as it were, to the individual's brain. The process is new—invented here—and quite complex."

"You don't have to shave the head and drill, then?" Dory put in.

He chuckled. "Oh, no. At the start, yes, but no more. It is necessary only to establish a direct, electrical connec-tion to the brain. The Urulu, they do it at almost any set of nerve ends in the body, but ve believe there is actual entry by the Urulu organism along the nervous system and into the brain. Ve based our own work on that hypothesis and it vorked. Our computer system and probes is the mechanical replacement for the organic, as it were, Urulu."

"But you said each matrix was unique," I pointed out. "So how can you replace one pattern for another?"

"Veil, ve start by shooting tremendous amounts of stimuli into the cerebrum directly. You say 'name' and your name is brought forth into the cerebrum. The com-puter seizes on that and follows it back, and so on. But after a vile it can ask questions far faster than ve, and it asks millions of them per second.

Ultimately it learns the code, the matrix, for the information center and can track down miscellaneous material until it has complete access to memory storage. It generally needs an external stimuli—like us asking questions—to start, then it takes over, and, at computer speed, it still takes twenty or more minutes, sometimes longer, to completely map a matrix. At the end it is just recognizing the existence of data, of course, not caring vat that data is."

I was starting to feel a little uneasy about what he was saying. The idea of mapping the memory, the very core of being, of an individual like Rand McNally did roads was unsettling.

"Now, let's go back to the brain itself," Eisenstadt went on. "Although retrieval is holographic, storage is not really so. The hologram is constructed in the cere-brum from retrieved data. How is that data stored? Vell, all the input, all the information from your senses, goes to the cerebrum—but not as you perceive them. All external stimuli are instantly converted into brain language—and that brain language is chemical in na-ture. But there are two languages. One, the holographic one, is transmitted to the brain. There it is broken down into bytes of information and recoded. Each byte becomes a synapse, a chemical messenger that is hustled along and routed by a tiny electrical impulse. Each little messenger gets to the brain where neurons route it, according to the matrix, to its proper place. When it gets to that proper place the individual neuron in charge, as it vere, make a tiny copy in its own individual language. All this at incredible speed, you understand. Like trillions of tiny chemical tape recorders, infinitely specialized, who record the message ven the chemical messenger runs past its little recording head.

"Ven you remember something, or use something, or need to retrieve something, then the command is sent out from the real 'you'—your cerebral cortex, or com-mand center—and, instantly, the little bits of informa-tion that apply rush back with copies of the information needed—copies, note, the original stays there—where the cerebrum reintegrates this information into a holographic picture. An idea. A memory. You name it. Natu-rally, the information that is most frequently used is easiest to get at. The less it is used the more difficult it is to get at that information—you 'try to remember' but can't, quite, because you have had no need for it for so long the track is overgrown with veeds. It has to be this way. Most information you get from cradle to grave simply isn't needed or relevant, no matter how big it vas at the time, and it is stored avay in the cranial closet, so to speak, to make room in the more efficient areas for more pressing stuff. Once out of the main matrix and off in that closet, it becomes hard to find, like any attic overfilled with unused and unvanted stuff, becoming even harder as you grow older as those closets fill with all the junk.

That's why much of the brain appears to be doing nothing and ve don't even miss some of that stuff if it has to be removed, say, in an operation."

"Does the brain ever—erase?" Dory asked hesitantly. I got the impression she was a bit unsettled by all this, too.

"Oh, yes," he replied. "Sometimes it's accidental. Sometimes it's the result of an injury—repairs inside the brain may require it. Self-repairs, I mean. In fact, some of it is automatically erased very qvickly. Vy should it bother to keep instructions it gave to the gastrointestinal tract for digesting a specific meal when you vere three? So, after a decent interval, it erases and generally keeps this sort of expendable information in one area for con-stant reuse. So, to sum, the neurons store the informa-tion, the synapses feed the input to the brain, copy and transmit stored input, and erase. They also do much more, of course—they create enzymes that do different things in and to the brain and the like in response to stimuli."

"That explains the brain in layman's terms," I agreed, "but not how the Urulu swap minds."

"Ah, the Urulu. Vell, vat they do seems to go something like this. By simple touch they are able to plug into anyone's nervous system the same as our computer. Automatically, in no more than a few seconds, they are able to do vat ve vith our huge computer take half an hour or so to do—get a complete picture of your matrix, and, as such, know exactly vere and how your informa-tion is stored and processed. And they know instinct-ively what to ignore—the automatic functions, for example. Then they are able to order the neurons to disgorge this information and it flows in an electro-chemical rush to the point of contact and from there to the Urulu brain. The same thing happens to the other matrix, which flows, simultaneously, in the opposite direction. The amazing thing is not only is the exchange complete in both directions, without disrupting the body functions, but it is accompanied by a 'carrier' signal, as it were, which is the exact opposite of the information being extracted. In other words, the neurons receive a signal that is absolutely complimentary to the chemical code they already are storing—in effect canceling it out. The effect is that each brain rearranges itself into an exact chemical copy of the other. Not a hundred percent, mind you—memories, personality, yes, but not vat is necessary to keep the body going, to manage the unique physical body into which it is now placed.

Vether this is an actual transfer of information or vether this is simply a rearrangement is something ve don't really understand yet, although ve tend to think it is a rear-rangement rather than an actual exchange considering the speed at vich it is done. If memory, personality, whatever is chemically stored, then prior information is duplicated by the other brain and then totally erased in the original by giving such commands to the cerebral cortexes of each brain and a channel through which the information needed may be exchanged."