The Cybernetic Brains

by Raymond F. Jones

  Yet deep within each human brain lay huddled in terror the thing that was a man. It understood the human prison house that held it trapped and it despaired of the devious, uncertain way that led to other human touch. It knew how poor a thing was human speech to tell of love and hate and sorrow. It knew how men’s myopic vision peered through a narrow spectral slit while unseen worlds spread out on either side.

  John turned again into the stream of moving people. He raised his head higher and looked out upon them. He did not mind their gasps of startled horror. He had no cause for sorrow. It was they who should bow their heads, for they were lonely men and did not know there was no other way for men to be.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Wolf Pack

  JOHN brought the Oscar up on the outskirts of the crowd. He continued to watch their faces, fascinated by the sorrow he felt for them. He had hated them and now it all seemed burned out of him. They seemed like the faces of little children, some with the innocence, some with the unrepressed viciousness of little children. And each marked with the stamp of the Welfare State.

  Wiener had once hoped that a society might develop on a basis of ideas when cybernetics should come into full flower.

  These children had ideas, John thought. They had conceived the Society of Artificial Dangers. They had killed Kit. That was the kind of ideas these immature ones thought.

  Their magic key word was security!—and they had none. Within each was the secret belief that some day the Welfare State must break down—as if some subconscious guilt harassed them for their wasted lives. With each passing decade the secret fear grew sturdier.

  Would the brains ever be freed, he thought desperately. Something was afoot tonight that could increase the burden ten thousandfold. It was what Al had felt from the beginning, what had driven him to despair when they had fought for Kit’s life. John understood it now. Did any of them have any more chance than Kit had had?

  Humphries was speaking almost before John was aware of it. He sat down in the shadow of a tree. Humphries stood alone in the lights. Power, John thought—that’s why Humphries was not among the workless ones.

  He waited before the crowd as if inhaling ponderous import from the very air about him. “I speak upon a grave issue tonight,” he said. “In the halls of your government there have been many weeks of solemn conference over a problem that concerns us all.

  “I need not remind you upon what foundation this glorious civilization of ours is built, I need not take you back through the pages of history and show you the millennia of man’s sweat and toil by which he slaved for his daily bread.I need not relate the details of that mighty struggle between man and the machine nor recall to your minds the centuries in which man suffered ignoble defeat in that struggle.

  “Suffice to say that man did, in the end, emerge victorious and become master of the machine which he had served in bondage,

  “But there is yet another mistress whom we must serve if our greater mastery is to be maintained, the mistress, cybernetics. She does not demand our toil and our slavery. She does not demand some vast portion of our substance. She is patient and asks only a token offering. And yet we have failed to yield her small demand.”

  Humphries paused. His eyes shifted rapidly as he gauged the nurture being given the seed of uncertainty and fear that he had dropped.

  “It was as much as a year ago,” he said finally, “that we received a distressing report from the Institute of Cybernetics. The report stated simply, that the number of contracts on hand was insufficient to meet the needs of cybernetic installations during the coming year.

  “I need not dwell upon the implications of that. You will all understand it. It means that the very foundations of our society are threatened by neglect and carelessness.

  “Yet I do not mean to indict the vast body of you loyal and unselfish citizens. I know that tomorrow there will be thousands of you offering your contracts to the Institute for the cybernetic use of your brains for the welfare of society.

  “However, this alone is not enough.

  You are aware that the need is frequent for controls who, in life, obtained special qualifications. And it is these very individuals who pass on without offering society the just services for which we should have claim on every man upon his death.

  “Therefore, in order to give the Institute the powers to exercise such just claim, I am proposing to your Congress a public law which will have to be ratified by you in referendum—a law which will allot the Institute the right to make cybernetic use of any citizen’s brain upon his death without the need of his contract or any other form of consent.

  “This is a simple thing I ask of you, my fellow citizens. But upon it rests the future of our glorious civilization. Upon your answer rests our ability to go forward or backward. Our people are growing, our needs are increasing daily—but unless our cybernetic progress keeps in step it means just a little less for each of you tomorrow—a little less the day after that. And who knows where it may stop?

  “This is a dismal picture, my friends. It is not the picture that I see. Let me tell you the vast scope of the future that appears before my mind’s eye—”

  JOHN understood now. And, by their silence and their grief, he knew that Al and Martha understood, too.

  They had provided the springboard from which the Institute could launch the demand that they had secretly pressed upon the government for so long. For more than a decade they had sought a law giving them full power to recruit cybernetic brains regardless of the person’s willingness during his lifetime. But the Congress had resisted this final invasion of constitutional freedom.

  Now the Institute had what it wanted. John and Martha and Al had given it to them.

  John reached out and touched gently the minds of his neighbors. In each the same bitter panic stirred and yielded groveling acquiescence to Humphries. Prophet Humphries—come to warn the people of the wrath of their goddess.

  But the beginnings of fear had come with Kit’s face, shown on the news screens, charging the Institute with crime, demanding the end of cybernetic brain controls because the brains lived.

  It had been just the right amount of fear, the conditioning that made their minds ripe for Humphries’ plea. Never could another such fortuitous circumstance have been found. It had been perfect.

  But the people were thinking too of Kit’s charge that the brains still lived. As if he read their minds, Humphries spoke of it.

  “We have witnessed in recent days a sad experience. I refer to the delusional charges brought before the Court by the wife of one of our late respected scientists. I refer to her fantastic assertions that the cybernetic brains still live. I have consulted with the psychologists of the Institute, who inform me that it was a very plausible thing for her to suffer such distortions of reason following the shock of her husband’s sudden death.

  “As to her charges, they are, of course, fantasy. The cyberneticists do not take the brains of live men. The Institute is not manned by inhuman monsters! Never has any indication been given that any trace or semblance of life remains within these dead organs which we have placed in our use. Never has one come back to—”

  “I have come back!”

  John walked slowly forward into the lights. Bareheaded, his awful features were revealed in the white glare. Around him he felt the sudden bursting terror as if each mind were a ripe pod in the summer sun.

  Humphries stopped. In midair his hand left uncompleted a furious, dramatic gesture and dropped slowly to his side. He stuttered a moment, then whirled to the figure on the platform behind him. “Call the police. Have that man arrested and removed at once!”

  But there was no one to do the arresting immediately. The Welfare State was an orderly culture. No disturbances had been anticipated. None had occurred in the memory of most of those present.

  They could have picked him up and borne him bodily away but they shrank from that scarred and dreadful flesh.

  John advanced unhindered
and climbed the platform steps. Humphries backed away from that unhurried advance.

  “This is unheard of,” he bellowed.

  John ignored him. He stood before the orthocon eye and a gasp of horror and revulsion went around the world as his image came on a hundred million screens.

  “I have come back,” he repeated.

  He faced the crowd and turned slowly from side to side to look at them all.

  “They tell you the brains are dead,” he said. “Do you believe that they know? I have come back and I tell you they live. I am a cybernetic brain. John Wilkins—John Wilkins, biochemist.

  “This thing you see is not a man. I made it to bring you the voice and thoughts of a man—a man who dares you to enter the prison of dark and silent loneliness with him.

  “They tell you the brains are not alive. I tell you they are! Two millions of them who live and would curse you until the end of time if they could speak.

  “How many of you have a brother there? Or a son or perhaps a mother or father? There is scarcely anyone who has not at least a close friend in this noble service of humanity. Would you like to know the prison in which they serve? Then think of all eternity. Think of it without light, without sound, without the existence of another human being. Think of it in a tomb where death cannot enter.

  “Who will be next? Come with me! I invite you to share my prison! The Welfare State calls upon you to serve the goddess, cybernetics, in the name of humanity! Pass a law that each of you may have a chance at eternity in hell.

  “I hear no joyous acceptance. Are you cowards?”

  THEIR murmur was like a distant wind of fury, heard dimly because it was far away. He watched them somberly, sick with hopelessness. There was not time to reason and explain, not time to tell them they could keep their golden image if they would only abandon the slavery.

  “I am not brave, either,” he said. “Not brave enough to endure hell forever. I ask for freedom. I ask you for it. It is in your hands. Do not give these slave masters the power over you that they ask. Rather, demand an end to it.

  “Electronic brains once served cybernetics. They can do it again. Those of us who are in darkness will serve willingly until glass and metal can replace our flesh and blood if only you promise freedom.

  “Tonight someone who hears my voice will die. Tomorrow there will be a bright new prison and a human soul that screams in darkness. It can be yours!”

  The murmur became a gathering thunder.

  He reached out swiftly and touched a hundred minds. In each there swirled a fear that grew and fed upon itself like hurricane winds. But it was not a fear of the things of which he had spoken. He probed past the fear. An impassable block that words could not shatter lay athwart the neural pathways, barring forever an understanding of what he had tried to tell them.

  They were afraid, hysterically afraid, robbed of all reason. But they were not afraid of the prison he had described to them. They did not believe it.

  Conditioned by ten generations or more of the Welfare State there was only one thing they were capable of fearing—its destruction. The thought of eternity, even though in hell, could not stand in their minds beside a threat to the bounties of the immediate present.

  He opened his mouth to speak again but he left the words unsaid. From behind came the sharp hiss of a gun discharge. He felt the bolt of energy splash against the back of the Oscar.

  Slowly he turned. The attackers were staring in astonishment, for they knew the charge had struck. He glanced all about. He examined each nearby face of the surrounding mob. They meant no chance for him to leave alive.

  He knew that he would soon be dead. Not just this Oscar that they were about to destroy but that small core of being that was John Wilkins. In hours or days they would kill him but they would have to go on living—some in the hell from which he had tried to save them.

  He thought curiously of the ant plants of the tropics of Asia. Each species of ant has a permanent abode in its own kind of plant and away from that special plant the ant colonies are lost, disorganized and in chaos.

  That was the kind of symbiosis that man had set up between himself and the complex structures of cybernetics. An unhealthy, an unneeded symbiosis, but one that could be destroyed only by generations of chaos.

  Deliberately he turned his back on the guns and faced the mob. He felt another charge strike harmlessly. He had scarcely noticed the rising fury of sound but now it was a full hurricane that ripped and tore at him.

  He looked down, watching the individual faces of madmen. Crimson with fear and rage, each warped in its own pattern of hate, but the words that poured from the twisted lips were all the same.

  “Kill him! Kill—”

  From behind, a sudden blow crushed the skull of the Oscar. Curiously he remained standing. The small knot of controlling cells had not been damaged though one eye was blinded.

  He turned back without haste to face the frightened attacker. He was a huge man but he looked in terror at the figure that walked with its skull smashed.

  His rage stifled the fear and he rushed forward again. His face seemed no more human than the one upon which he looked. “I’ll kill you, you dirty—”

  The blow knocked the Oscar over the edge of the platform into the surging mob. They greeted it with shrieks and snarls of glee like a wolf pack setting upon a defeated former comrade.

  As long as the cells would function, John looked up into those faces while hands tore at him and clubs beat and crushed, and the hurricane of sound filled all space.

  Lonely little men, he thought. The poor frightened lonely little men—

  CHAPTER XVIII

  According to Plan

  DR. SEYMOUR JURGENS lived alone. He had been married once and had reared a large family but they were all gone. His wife had been dead for twenty-five years, and none of his children had chosen to be workers. It seemed almost fantastic to him now that his loins had ever produced. He was an old man, he thought, a very old man indeed.

  He turned out the light of his bedroom and sank back against the soft cradle of his bed. He had witnessed on his news screen the rioting in the park.

  He had witnessed, he thought, the close of an Age.

  He must have slept, he decided later, but it didn’t seem like it when he first became aware of the presence within the room. He didn’t know whether his name had been called or not. He only knew that it was there. He turned on the light.

  He recoiled at the sight of the frog facing him from the center of the floor. Then understanding came.

  “I should have known,” he said, “when they reported the Artificial Dangers mob had been killed by the pests from out of space. Who are you?”

  “Al.”

  “Do you intend to kill me or will you listen to what I have to say?”

  “I only want to know how much more time we have. When is it planned for our brains to be destroyed?”

  “The time is indefinite but your usefulness is done. As soon as replacement brains are obtained you will be removed—and killed. You triggered the fear that made possible the achievement of a law that will give the Institute the power it wants.

  “That is exactly what they wanted from you. I showed them exactly how they could get it. You never had a chance.”

  “I ought to kill you,” said Al slowly. “Maybe you saw on your screen the pictures of Kit’s killers—maybe you saw the frogs kill.”

  “I’m waiting,” said Dr. Jurgens calmly, “if that is your wish.”

  “No. I’m not going to do it. You have won and we have lost. And there is one thing yet that I can make you do for us. There is no more to be said than that.”

  “Don’t you wonder just a little if I am as evil as you think? Don’t you wonder if there might be a story that I could tell?”

  “I wonder about a great many things,” said Al. “I wonder if it was inevitable that the human mind should have been such an evolutionary failure after all. I wonder just where it stands now in the st
ream of its development.

  “Did it turn irretrievably downward in its course when it conceived the tragic double dream of cybernetics and the Welfare State? Or is it possible that there might yet be an upswing that would make this failure appear as only a minor depression?

  “I doubt the last. Long ago Wiener proposed that the human brain might even then be approaching a level of declining efficiency, that the limitations of its high degree of specialization would lead the species to extinction.”

  “I am not so pessimistic as to hold that view,” said Jurgens. “It was one of those tragedies that the race may rightfully expect to bear no more than once—the coincidence of cybernetics appearing in the same generation as the invention of the Welfare State.

  “If either had come two hundred years before or after there would have been a difference. But they grew up side by side, developing and flowering simultaneously. Their courtship and marriage were inevitable. Their monstrous offspring we did not recognize until too late.”

  SAID Al fervently, “I wish I knew you. You don’t sound like the man who signaled my executioner.”

  “But I did. I did because I believe what I have just said. I knew what an impact such brains as yours and your sister’s and John Wilkins’ would have on this sick thing that we call the Welfare State.

  “I knew of the increased field that you had developed and understood even better than you the freedom that it would give you. I knew that all the others had gone into schizophrenic worlds that were of their own creation. But I knew also what you three would do if you were free to act.”

  “What have we done! The Institute has gained its last bit of ground for complete domination. You have planned it. What right have you to criticize the Welfare State?”

  “What have you done? You have built a machine, have you not, that will kill one of those unholy marriage partners of which I spoke. Alone the other will die. That is what you have done!”