The Cybernetic Brains

by Raymond F. Jones

  And for all its hopelessness there was, nothing to lose. He had endless days and he had nights when other men slept. There was no barrier but the difficulty of the task itself.

  He turned to the flow of signals that was like unbidden melody in the background of his mind. With a mighty surge of consciousness he seized upon that flow, twisted an impulse with experimental fury—and waited for the feedback alarm to challenge his intervention.

  He lost all track of time. He abandoned the useless mental scale he had devised. He simply worked at a ceaseless maddening pace that he sensed was more than human but he dared not question the miracle by which it was possible.

  There were long hours of careful experimentation by which he learned to control and divert the flow of the giant chemical works. He had to maintain the production and quality intended by the tape instructions.

  His own goal was to divert from that flow such materials as he needed, assemble them in vats and tubes that were temporarily unused and guide their flow where none of the rare human inspectors might question.

  After four days of this he had made a thing.

  His first product was a white grub the size of a man’s fist. It was shapeless and immobile and somehow terrible in its twitching semblance of half life but at its core was a cluster of synthetic neurons. And on one side of it was a fantastic Cyclopean eye.

  It was a crude thing—like some mistake that Nature had produced and buried at the bottom of the sea. The blank lidless eye was perpetually open, its only expression one of idiocy.

  Actually John did not know how it looked nor would he have cared. He had nourished that small colony of specialized cells carefully for a single purpose.

  And it was done. He hesitated, considering the feeble grotesque thing he had made—and sent out a call.

  He could close the vision channels connected to the orthocon cells. He closed them now and turned his visual perception in another direction—through the darkness beyond the glass walls and the brick and steel ones, through a thousand feet of space—

  Into that effort he threw all the vast forces his mind could command. He delved deep into his brain with powers he had never before possessed and activated neurons that had lain half dormant, only partially completed by the forces of biology that had formed him. He thrust the energy at his command into those cells, activated them, burned them with the flaming energy of birth. And then he saw—

  Light! A hazy image of almost no definition but it brought a surge of hope that far surpassed that first glimpse when the orthocon cells had been turned on.

  Crude and imperfect as his creation was he had reached out and brought in the telepathic impulses generated by those unique specialized cells he had built. Across the barrier of distance and impeding walls they sent a message of light and image.

  He barely recognized the outlines of laboratory apparatus upon which the gaze of that idiotic Cyclopean eye rested. But it was enough. He knew he could do better. He could build a better eye and he could multiply those telepathic cells.

  The incessant labor of his mind brought him no fatigue. With the facilities the plant at hand he could carry on a thousand experiments at once in separate laboratories and shops. He sent out commands and caused to be built a score of experimental sites that had not existed.

  And through it all he kept the mountainous flow of chemical products turning out at a steady pace in strict accordance with the instructions set up. He had found it wholly possible to relegate those to the subconscious levels of his mind, leaving his consciousness free for his own work.

  Never before had a cybernetic brain or any other brain operated as his was now doing. He knew it but he gave it little concern. If the miraculous were in operation he was willing to accept it.

  As for the few human inspectors who patrolled the plant occasionally, they knew so little of the giant workings that an extra shop here, an unfamiliar laboratory there passed wholly unnoticed by their eyes. Production was what counted. Only when production failed did they investigate the mechanisms or call in the cybernetic engineers. Only once in a decade did this occur at most plants.

  His second creation was as unbeautiful as the first.

  It gave him clear sight. Its telepathic powers brought to him an accurate vision of the laboratory in which it was created. He comprehended, as he saw it for the first time, the beauty of sheer sensation. He absorbed every detail of that room over a thousand feet away from him. Its gray metal walls were the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

  More than this he had built into his creation. There was a tiny auditory diaphragm. He sought for neuron chains that would respond to telepathed sounds.

  And he heard it. A faint hiss, the rush of flowing air from an escape valve, the intermittent click of guiding relays, the slow thunder of tumultuous chemical whirlpools in nearby vats.

  He heard them all—the faint whispers of sound, the roaring, deafening cadences of the mighty plant. He saw and he heard.

  He had no eyes and he had no tear ducts but he cried at the miracle. He cried solemnly and thankfully for the blessings of sight and of sound that he had once abandoned without hope.

  BUT there was more yet to come. Had the final synthesis of cells been successful?

  He sent out an impulse. The vision in his mind leaped crazily, twisting and turning, then jerked still, revealing a glimpse of the floor of the distant laboratory.

  The thing was on its “face.”

  Into the base of it he had built two simple bands of muscle tissue. Their contraction would produce a sudden projection in the base of the thing—causing it to leap into the air.

  It worked. But he had not looked for this eventuality. It lay helpless now and immobile. It would be as useless as a rock if he could not right it.

  He jerked the muscles at random. The thing pulsed and quivered, transmitting an image that jerked and hopped—and abruptly stood upright.

  He experimented again—just a faint-pulse this time to both muscles. A slightly stronger one in the rear. It gave a hop forward and landed upright.

  Frog, he thought.

  It jumped again and again. And once more it landed helpless and jerking. He righted it and practised ceaselessly. Slowly his control improved. He gained facility enough to be able to make the frog turn over in mid-air and land upright. He could make it turn quickly to shift his point of view as if it had a neck and a head.

  He sent it through the doorway and out of the building in which it had been created.

  For the first time in many days he felt a trace of actual fatigue. The energy, required to control the frog was not great but the process of learning how to manipulate it tested the capacity of the nutrient fluids to replace his powers.

  He rested while the frog surveyed the surroundings outside. John had toured the plant of General Biotics during his development of processes they were now using. He remembered vaguely the general layout of the multiple buildings and forests of vats, chambers, retorts, and furnaces. But he could not identify the location of the frog.

  He moved it at random, exploring, surveying his surroundings. But dusk had fallen and it was almost too dark to see. The frog eye was as sensitive as a human eye but no more. The next one he would make responsive to infra-red, he thought. He turned it around and led it back in the direction from which it had come.

  After minutes, he knew he was still on unfamiliar ground and that he had taken the wrong turn somewhere. He had lost the laboratory. The best thing he could do was to back the frog into some corner for the night. No use risking it in the dark and getting it damaged. He would be able to use it in the making of others. It would provide sight he had badly needed in the production of this one.

  He sent it into a corner against a building and left it there.

  The presence of night outside and his awareness of it through the frog sent a longing for sleep through him again. He felt tired—tired of the intense mental effort that he had performed the past days, tired of the existence that was
forced upon him.

  His thoughts went wearily back to the day of the accident as if it were some magnet that drew them when he was in despair. Sometimes he still thought it would have been best if he had died.

  He had tried a thousand times to understand how that accident had happened. Memory had gradually grown clearer. He remembered that another car had met them on the curve, forced them to the soft shoulder of the road—through the guard rail. It was the stupid purposeless kind of accident that was so bitter because of its utter stupidity. He supposed the occupants of the other car had been wholly unhurt.

  But that memory had lost some of its terror and bitterness in the days that had passed, he thought. He had even managed a degree of resignation toward his present situation—but that was perhaps wholly due to his success with the frog.

  Yet always would bitterness shroud the memory of Martha. He had abandoned all hope of learning her fate, but now it seemed within the bounds of possibility. He could send the frogs out as messengers. With them he could read news and listen to conversations.

  With the frogs he might even find a way of contentment and reconciliation with his fate, if he could but learn that Martha was well and happy.

  But he couldn’t believe she was. He remembered her scream and her white deathlike face as she was thrown from the car. If she lived he felt that she couldn’t be happy. Somehow she would have found him and come to him. He sensed that somehow he could feel the sorrow that was within her. He could almost hear her crying, he thought.

  He could almost hear her crying!

  It was no dream! Her voice was in his brain. He would know it among ten thousand others. She was sobbing, slowly and in fear, as if she had been crying for a long time.

  Involuntarily, he cried out in his own imprisoned brain, “Martha! Martha, darling—where are you? Martha, tell me it is you!”

  And, before his newly conditioned reflexes could conceal the impulsive cry, there came an answering call, “I’m here, John! Let me touch you. Oh, John, darling—where have you been so long?”

  CHAPTER VI

  The Frogs

  THE frog lay dormant in the darkness, its gray-white blot scarcely visible against the concrete yard and the walls of the building by which it huddled, But through the telepathic cells that formed its major organ pulsed the cries that burst from the lost and abandoned souls of John and Martha Wilkins.

  John held his silence, not daring to speak for the emotion that was in him. For a brief moment there had been an utter blankness of disbelief, then the swarming flood of realisation. He had heard Martha’s voice—and it meant only one thing.

  She was somewhere on these grounds, imprisoned as he was. He had left his mind in contact with the frog and it had picked up the impulses of her mind, transmitting them as vocal cries.

  All the devastating fears that he had tried to reason away crashed down upon him. He had hoped and prayed that somehow Martha could be spared this fate of his.

  He thought of her words. She sounded as if she did not yet know where she was or what had happened. Could they have delayed this long in using her for control?

  “John! Why won’t you answer me? Did I just dream that I heard you speak or was it real?”

  “It’s real, darling,” he answered softly. “Wait just a moment and I’ll come closer.”

  He moved the frog clumsily in the darkness but he could guide it in the direction from which her thoughts originated. It was in the very building against which he had hidden the frog.

  He followed cautiously around the wall. On the far side he finally found an open doorway. In the control room it was dark, but he knew what it was by the flash of panel lights that activated relay cells. As nearly as he could see it was in a turmoil of half finished construction. That was why Martha had not yet found out where she was, but it was a typical cybernetic control room like his own.

  He had seen such setups hundreds of times. But never one that formed his own wife’s living tomb.

  “Martha—can you hear me?”

  “Oh, yes, John. But I can’t see you or touch you. I’m blind—and I thought I was deaf. Yours is the first voice that I’ve heard. Take my hand. Let me touch you again. It’s been so long. I thought you must be dead. Are you hurt? Come closer to me. I’ve been so alone and so afraid!”

  “I’m right here, Martha,” he said tenderly, “and I’ll never be away from you again. We’ll never be apart again.”

  “Where am I? What has happened to me? I know I must be terribly hurt, but I want to know the truth.”

  He remained silent. How could he tell, her? What words could he use that would not destroy the last remnant of sanity.

  “John—please!”

  “Our bodies were destroyed in the accident,” he said slowly. “They removed our brains and put them to cybernetic use. That’s where we are now. In General Biotics. I’m in control of part of the plant production. You have not yet been given control.”

  “John! You’re insane! We’re alive, breathing, talking—cybernetic brains are dead!”

  “That is what has been supposed. It isn’t true. Every one of the millions imprisoned like us is a living human being. I learned how to make a device from the chemicals I control. I am talking to you through it but it is not speech. It is telepathy.”

  Her voice in his brain sounded hysterical now. “It isn’t like you, John. You’re playing some kind of crazy joke on me. How can you at a time like this? Give me your hand. Let me know you are here beside me, darling.”

  “I have no hands,” he said simply. “I have no voice. Listen a moment. What is it you hear? Are there words from my lips?”

  She was silent, as if listening. And then he heard the sound of terror. It was not a thing that voice could utter but the raw chaotic clash of neurons. He heard it begin as a low wild gob that mounted as she tested his statement. She searched through the vaults of memory for recognition of the thing that she heard in her brain—and found no familiar echo.

  Her scream of terror then shrieked again and again in repeating waves until he had to close his mind against it to keep that wild neural energy from crashing through the control chains that governed the plant.

  He was sick with the thing that he had done. Was there not some way that he could have been less crude, some gentler way of revealing their state? There should have been but he was not aware of it. He remembered his own collapse and pitied her.

  Cautiously he opened his mind to her again. She had not gone into coma but her mind was in utter chaos that transmitted only a low sobbing sound of ultimate loneliness and agony to him.

  “Martha—Martha! Can you hear me?”

  He sensed the slowly gathering forces of her mind, reorganizing themselves after that scattering blast. There was power and strength in her, he thought with silent admiration. He could feel it as order grew out of the ruinous dispersion of her forces.

  “Martha!”

  “I’m sorry, John—I couldn’t help it. You made me believe but I can’t comprehend it. I know what a cybernetic control room looks like but I—I can’t be in that platinum box in the center. This is all a very bad dream I’m having. When I wake up—”

  He could show her when there was light, he thought. He could transmit the image of her own control center as seen by the frog. But he decided against it. That shock could wait. It didn’t have to be piled on top of the one he’d already delivered.

  “How long have we been here? Tell me what you know of the events that have happened.”

  She was speaking with forced calmness now and that was good, he thought. She needed to take stock of the situation. Briefly he told her of his own painful awakening, the, days of darkness and silence, then the message from Al and the synthesizing of the frog.

  SHE listened without comment until he was through, then she said, “Why do you think Al never came back? I’m worried, John. He would have come unless something happened to him.”

  “I don’t know, darling. He’s our only l
ink with the outside and it’s possible his revelation of our state caused trouble in his relations with the Institute.”

  “Al can speak for us!” she said almost fervently. “We’ve got to reach him again!”

  It was not mere hope for a link with the outside, he knew. It was Martha’s little-girl faith in her brother. The big Swede, she called him to his face. It was the kind of thing he could never inspire in her, he had thought in many rueful moments. But it didn’t matter.

  “We’ll find out how,” he said. “It’s a sorry substitute for legs but the frog can make pretty good time and he’s due for brothers and sisters. When you get the means you can make some with me. Until then you can take control of some of mine.”

  “But how do you do it? While you’ve been talking I’ve been trying to reach out from—from this blackness but there’s only void. It’s so dark and so empty. I have to keep talking and thinking to keep from screaming.”

  “I’ll release it completely. See if you can grasp control.”

  She was silent a moment. He could sense faintly her struggling and groping. Then, “There’s nothing there,” she said. “Nothing at all that I can get hold of.”

  It had seemed so easy for him. He had instinctively sensed the telepathic powers dormant in him. It had been simple to seize upon them and put them to use. Why couldn’t Martha do it?

  He tried to explain it and she tried to find such powers within herself but in vain. Her ability to talk to him was more dependent upon his power to seize the content of her mind than upon her ability to project it.

  “We’ll try again later,” he said, “You’re exhausted by what I’ve told you. Try to rest and compose yourself for now.”

  She was silent for a time, then she spoke with a swift change of subject, “I don’t want to die, John.”

  “Die! What in the world are you talking about?”-

  “Shouldn’t we be wanting and praying for death? Is it sane for people to want to go on living under circumstances like these?”