Pandora's Brain (19 page)

*

David didn’t want any breakfast. Over a cup of coffee, Vic described the team of scientists that he wanted to bring onto the project.

‘All of them have been with VNI since its foundation, and three of them – Gus, Julia and Junchao – worked with me at Northrop Grumman before that, which means they are used to working on top secret military projects, and have been positively vetted for years. They enjoy each other’s company, and they socialise quite often outside work. I know them all well, and I trust them all implicitly.’

When Vic took David into the scanning room, the scientists were waiting for them. Vic introduced David, and reiterated once again the need for absolute secrecy during the coming days and weeks. David shook their hands and thanked them for agreeing to join the team.

At 44, Gus Donaldson was the senior scientist in the team. He was tall and lanky, with auburn hair that was going grey at the temples. He had regular features and blue eyes, and an over-serious, earnest demeanour, which made him seem nervous even when he wasn’t. He wore black trousers with a white shirt and a blue tie, and a thin blue jumper carrying a VNI logo over the left breast.

Julia Traynor was an attractive woman in her late thirties, with a great figure and shoulder-length, expensively dyed blonde hair. She wore designer glasses with thick lenses, and unusually for a Brit, she had perfect white teeth. She dressed imaginatively, taking considerable care each day to select an outfit which was colour co-ordinated, and set off her natural colouring. Her pride in her appearance was not due to vanity, and she did not use her looks to get her own way in social or work situations. It was simply a manifestation of the professionalism and care that she took in every aspect of her life that she regarded as important.

Junchao Kim came from China to study at Imperial College before joining Northrop Grumman. Now in his mid-thirties, he was 5’7”, and wore thick black-rimmed glasses. He was extremely capable, but shy. He lived in Ealing with his Chinese wife and son, but was extremely reluctant to talk about his family, or any other aspect of his private life. Seeing his discomfort, the others had stopped asking him personal questions. Every year he took a one-month holiday and visited his parents in China. He had a dry sense of humour, and a ready smile. He was hard-working, generous and kind.

Rodrigo Oliveira was the only member of the group who did not work at Northrop Grumman prior to the foundation of VNI. A tall, dark, handsome Brazilian in his early thirties, he was the most flamboyant and gregarious of the four. He organised most of the team’s social events, and led an active social life with his stunning French-Argentine girlfriend. He considered himself fortunate to be living in London. He dressed in jeans, trainers, and brightly-coloured shirts.

After the introductions were complete, Vic sat David down again and told him about another workstream which was going on elsewhere.

‘We have hired the world’s leading voice reconstruction expert to help us with this project. He and his team have taken precise measurements of Matt’s vocal cords and related musculature, and they are going to programme a synthesiser to ensure that whatever sounds your revived son makes emerge as close as possible to the way Matt used to sound. We think this will be important to you and Sophie,
but it will also be important to Matt. We have
provided them with recordings of Matt’s voice taken from the Ross programme, but if you have any other good-quality recordings of his voice, it would be immensely helpful . . .’

Matt’s funeral was held two days later, at a discreet hotel in Matt’s home town in Sussex. Only family and close friends were invited, and Vic stayed away to avoid raising unhelpful questions. Security was sufficient to keep the media away from the funeral itself, but quite a few inhabitants of the town were approached by journalists and cameramen while the ceremony was under way behind closed doors. Most of them refused to talk to the media at all, reasoning that David and Sophie would tell the journalists anything they wanted them to know, and that they would not be glad to see comments by neighbours in the papers when they themselves were saying nothing.

A few inhabitants did talk to journalists, though, feeling that Matt’s passing should be marked, and his life celebrated. But no-one wanted to cause offence, so their comments were fairly bland and anodyne. Of course, by the time their comments became printed quotes they bore little resemblance to what had originally been said, but were puffed up into exaggerated claims about Matt’s intelligence, courage and ingenuity, feeding the narrative of Matt the hero that editors were keen to run with – for the moment at least.

All in all it was a frustrating day for the ladies and gentlemen of the media, and the announcement that a memorial service would be held in the area two months later was scant consolation.

David, Sophie and Leo were aloof at the funeral. Their friends respected their guardedness as the natural consequence of their grief, and conversations were brief and superficial.

Carl, Alice and Jemma were also there. Sophie thanked them for their messages of condolence. She said they would be in touch before long, when they were feeling less raw, and when they had made all the necessary arrangements. No-one had the least idea that Sophie and David were using their grief to cloak a secret hope of returning their son to life.

*

David and Vic quickly settled into an intensive routine, spending twelve or more hours in the scanning lab, six days a week. The evening of the sixth day, Sophie drove David home to Sussex, to keep him at least tenuously connected to normal life. But they saw little of their local friends on these rest days: they stayed indoors most of the time, and kept conversations with neighbours to a minimum. They cooked dinner together, watched an old movie or two, and tried not to think too much about their hopes and fears. The following morning they got up early and Sophie drove David back to London and the scanning room in Nine Elms. She would spend the rest of the day there, usually having lunch with Leo, and then drive back to Sussex for a couple of days before returning to London for the rest of the week.

David found the routine an invaluable distraction. Ironically, even though he was spending most of his waking hours working on the problem of how to revive Matt’s mind, it stopped him thinking about the son he had lost.

Sophie didn’t have this luxury. She kept herself busy and distracted as best she could by making sure that David had everything he needed, and by learning about the process that David and Vic were carrying out.

Her partners in the GP surgery had willingly agreed to her request for an extended leave of absence. She found that by spending half the week in London and half in Sussex she could avoid spending much time with her friends and colleagues without causing offence. When asked, she explained that David was coping with his grief by keeping busy, working with Vic on a number of projects, but that given Vic’s military connection she wasn’t able to go into detail. She reflected that if you’re trying to keep a secret, the best cover story is as close to the truth as possible. She remembered Leo once telling her that the very best way to keep a secret is to tell the
truth, but in such a way that you won’t be believed. She
smiled briefly at the idea, but dismissed the idea of finding out if it worked in practice.

Media interest in Matt remained high, but Sophie agreed with David, Leo and Vic that they should give no interviews, offer no comments, and generally do nothing to encourage attention. They acknowledged Matt’s belief in transparency and openness, but they each secretly wondered whether it had effectively
killed him. They knew there were many difficult deci
sions ahead of them, depending how the scanning and modelling project proceeded, and taking those decisions would be many times harder if they had to do it in the glare of a media circus. They all recognised that agreeing to be open and transparent when the time was right was not unlike St Augustine’s famous prayer ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ But none of them could face the alternative.

Deprived of access to Matt’s family and close friends, and assuming along with everyone else that he had died and been buried in the normal way, journalists focused on Bartholomew Campbell, his killer. Campbell himself was being held on remand, and no interviews were being granted. So Malcolm Ross conducted an extended interview with the leader of the group he belonged to – the man in the leather jacket who had accosted David as he left the studio that night. The same studio lights which had made Matt uncomfortable and self-conscious the evening he died now bathed a man whose beliefs had caused that death.

‘Stephen Coombes,’ Ross began, ‘I know that you disown the actions of Bartholomew Campbell, the assassin of Matt Metcalfe, but he was a prominent
member of your group, the
Anti-Transhumanist League, so you presumably share many of his opinions.’

‘Bartholomew is a very disturbed person,’ Coombes replied. ‘As you know I can’t comment in detail on what he did for legal reasons, but he is no longer a member of our organisation, and we do not sanction what he did. We have made it very clear all along, and I am pleased to have the opportunity of this programme to make it very clear again, that we are strongly opposed to violence in all shapes and forms. I can only guess at the pain and anguish that Matt’s murder is causing his family and friends, and like everyone else listening to this I’m sure, I offer them my sincere condolences for their loss. Matt was fast becoming a poster child for a set of beliefs and activities which we deplore, but that in no way justifies the action that was taken against him.’

‘So what are these beliefs that you think Matt was becoming a champion for?’ Ross asked. ‘What is it that you object to?’

‘We object to the idea that humans can create intelligent life. We do not believe that scientists should seek to create a new species, or tamper with individual humans in a way that would effectively make them members of a new species.’

‘Is this opposition based on religious grounds?’

‘Not exclusively, but it’s true that many of our members are religious. We have members from all the major religions, united in the belief that the gift of life is bestowed by God alone, and that if humans seek to usurp that role they are committing blasphemy.’

‘And you think that your religious beliefs confer the right to prevent non-religious people doing what they think is right? Even though they argue their case with equal conviction?’

‘Blasphemy is blasphemy, whether the non-believer accepts it or not,’ replied Coombes. ‘But we also have members who are not religious, and they also believe it is arrogant and foolhardy for humans to take it upon themselves to try to create intelligent life.’

‘Why foolhardy?,’ Ross asked. ‘If you don’t think that humans can create intelligent life because only God can do that, surely you have nothing to worry about?’

Coombes bridled, sensing that Ross was slyly ridiculing him. ‘Blasphemy tempts the wrath of God, and that is no laughing matter, Mr Ross,’ he said. ‘But for those who think the scientific endeavour could succeed, there is a whole raft of dangers ahead. How do we know an artificially intelligent creature would be safe? On your own programme the night that Matt was killed, you had an eminent scientist telling us that the arrival of artificial intelligence will be the beginning of the end for humanity. Isn’t it an incredible arrogance for a group of scientists to take that risk without consulting the rest of humankind first?’

Sophie switched off the TV, thankful once again for the decision not to go public with the project to upload her son.

All the while, the scanning continued. Layer after micron-thick layer, the tissue of Matt’s brain was sliced away from his cortex, placed on a slide, scanned, recorded and filed. The storage space required for the slices was many times larger than the volume of the brain they were removed from. It seemed to be going well, although there would be no way to tell whether the project would be successful until it was complete.

After the first couple of weeks, Vic stopped coming to the scanning room every day. The process was well-established, and Vic trusted David to make sure that everything stayed on course. In addition to David, a significant team of dedicated and highly-qualified people were fully engaged in the work, as well as a large amount of very expensive equipment. One day David asked Vic if he knew what the overall cost was. Vic replied that his accountants had told him that by the time the project was over, the cost would probably be in excess of twenty million dollars.

When Vic did come to the scanning room, his conversations with David always began with questions about the progress of the work. But they turned increasingly often to questions about how to judge whether the upload had been a success, and who would make the final judgement if there was any disagreement. Along with Sophie, they discussed how to handle numerous scenarios, mostly ones they hoped would never happen.

‘The nightmare that haunts me,’ Sophie said one day, ‘is that we bring Matt back to life, only to place him in some kind of unspeakable hell, suffocating with pain and terror.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ agreed Vic, ‘which is why I think we should assume that the upload has not been successful unless we have positive proof that it has worked properly. I think we need to agree a period for Matt to respond, and if there is no response within that time we de-activate the programme and start again.’

‘I can’t fault the logic,’ said David, ‘but it means we could terminate the consciousness of a locked-in Matt, even if he had acquired full self-awareness. He could become the first person in history to be killed several times over!’

‘That’s true, but he wouldn’t experience the switch-off. It would be instantaneous, and if we re-animate him afterwards he would have no memory of the previous aborted consciousness.’

David sighed. ‘I suppose you’re right. But I’m glad we have longer to think about this. I can’t disagree with you, but I’m not at all happy about it.’

Something else that made them all uncomfortable was the prospect of the memorial service. Sophie had been taking care of the arrangements, and she was grateful for Leo’s assistance. They knew that it would not be possible to restrict access as tightly as for the funeral. And the more advanced the project became, the harder it would be to conceal the work that David and Vic were doing.