The Cybernetic Brains

by Raymond F. Jones

  “The transmitter! You know of it?”

  “Yes, I know of it,” Jurgens said quietly. “But don’t be afraid. I am the only one of the Board who does. What I don’t understand is this—do you suppose that you can interrupt the cybernetic control temporarily while you renew your demands and try to enforce them?”

  “That is our hope—unless we are betrayed. But I doubt that one of us has any faith left in our success. I feel now as if the whole world would see its destiny only in our destruction. Nevertheless we intend to try.”

  DR. JURGENS’ white hair trembled with violence as he shook his head. “No—once you interrupt that control the schizophrenic brains will pour out the wild impulses from their own crazed worlds into the cybernetic channels. Every machine under their command will be wrecked beyond recovery! You didn’t know that, did you?”

  The frog was incapable of betraying emotion but Dr. Jurgens seemed to feel the sudden boiling flood that swirled in Al’s mind.

  “This is the way I planned it,” said Dr. Jurgens. “Exactly this way. This is the event that I predicted would follow from the shots that destroyed your body. You cannot offer them an ultimatum based on a temporary strike. The moment you send that wave of energy around the Earth the Welfare State is in existence no more.”

  He had spoken furiously, half rising from the pillow. Now he lay back with his eyes half closed. “Perhaps you will withhold it now. I need not have told you this but I could not let you act in ignorance of the responsibility that is yours. If you destroy the controls it is your own free will.”

  “I ought to kill you,” said Al. “You knew and you could have told us. Yet I wonder if I didn’t know—far down in the levels of my subconscious. Surely somewhere I had understanding of what would happen.

  “But how have we become gods to sit in judgment on an age? When they killed Kit I would have torn the world apart if I could. But that rage could not last forever. In the beginning we only wanted freedom—not destruction for ourselves and all the others.”

  “An accident of history has led to this day and hour,” said the tired old man. “Have we no right to undo that accident?”

  “And kill a hundred million by starvation in the first month?”

  “I have lived too long. I will be the first.”

  “No. I need you. That is what I came to arrange for tonight. Under penalty of the most abhorrent death I can bring you I want your help. And perhaps you know what Martha and John are doing, too?”

  “The anthropomorphs?”

  “Yes. They have almost succeeded. We’ll give them all the time that’s possible before turning on the transmitter. If they can make suitable forms for themselves you will put their brains into those forms and let them go. Perhaps it’s only a small chance but they want to live. For me there’s only Kit.”

  “I’ll do it gladly,” said Dr. Jurgens. “I pray for their success but the time is very short.”

  “I’ll leave the frog. You may call if there is need,” said Al.

  CHAPTER XIX

  Rebirth

  AL withdrew. He knew that John and Martha had heard nothing of what took place between him and Jurgens. They were intent upon their work. He returned to the laboratory in search of them.

  In the instant of his return, a pang of memory burned through him with a moment’s incandescence. For there, standing erect in the center of the room, was Martha—his sister as he had once known her.

  He understood. They had succeeded in their work—gloriously and miraculously succeeded but for a moment the scene had almost made him forget.

  He glanced at the still rippling liquid within the vat from which she had just stepped. Droplets coalesced upon her naked body and sparkled in the brilliant light.

  She raised her arms and ran her fingers, through the wet, golden hair. Droplets trickled down her arms.

  “Sis—it’s beautiful! You’re beautiful!”

  Slowly she let her arms fall to her sides. Her eyes looked down upon the creation that she and John had made. With the perfection of their moulding technique, they had built up almost cell by cell the exquisite planes and curves and hollows in duplication of Martha’s own body.

  “You were right the first time, Al,” she murmured. “It’s beautiful. Like something hammered out of marble with our hands. And just as cold and fruitless. It’s not me.”

  The clear and gentle voice broke suddenly. She clutched her flesh cruelly in her hands and turned her face upward and they looked into her crying eyes.

  “I have no right to be anything but dead! There’s no womb to prove there’s life in me. I’ll be a puppet at the end of a string, pretending to smiles and tears that can have no meaning.”

  John remembered that moment when he’d stood alone in the shadow in the city and watched the people passing by. Martha was uncovering for herself the vast and hidden secret of loneliness and he could not help her. Perhaps her loneliness was deeper and more remote in her barrenness, but a man’s yearning was no less poignant.

  “It’s, a strange life, he said, but not an unpleasant one. I walked along the streets and I felt like a man—even in that guise that I wore.”

  She straightened suddenly and rubbed away the tears from her face, “I’m terribly sorry, I’m being a fool, I should be thankful that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life in that tiny box. Bring yours out, John. I hope it is as wonderful as this we have made for me.”

  There was a struggling within the second vat and the figure moved stiffly out and stood erect at last upon the floor. “The legs,” said John. “We spent all our artistry on yours. These feel like solid hickory!”

  “It’s old age, darling!” Martha laughed in sudden spontaneous joy.

  She wasn’t alone any more, Al thought. Amusement filled him as he looked upon the figure John had made. It looked forty pounds heavier than the old John and was filled in Spartan proportions. The godlike figure now matched Martha’s classic inheritance.

  “What will we do,” said Martha, “about getting our brains removed from the control systems and put into these forms? I’ve worried about how it can be done.”

  “I’ve arranged it,” said Al. “Jurgens will do it.”

  “Dr. Jurgens!”

  Al explained the arrangement with the cyberneticist and the explanations of Jurgens’ actions.

  “I’m convinced that what he says is true now. In one way he’s played us like chess pieces. Yet somehow I don’t see how it could have come out any other way. I’ll call him at daybreak. He may be able to get in here tomorrow. I guess, he’d better bring some clothes along too—unless you can put together some molecules and make yourself some.”

  “Don’t get him here too soon, Al,” said Martha. “Yours is nearly finished, but not quite. Another half day will finish it.”

  FOR the first time Al gave attention to the last vat that was the nucleus of complex equipment. Dimly his own face seemed mirrored there beneath the liquid. It was serene and still. Like death, he thought.

  “No,” he said slowly. “I’m not going to take that. I don’t want it. You—you have each other. I have Kit. I want her. I have to go where she is.”

  “No!” Martha cried. “You can’t mean to cut off your life like the switching of an energy beam.”

  “I don’t think it’s like that at all,” he said quietly. “I think it’s going—somewhere. And Kit’s looking for me. If she’s still sick she needs me to make her well.”

  They felt the futility of argument. His voice would permit them none.

  While a moment’s dreadful silence endured between them, they caught a faint and distant cry. “Al—Al!”

  “What’s that?” said John. “Who—”

  “Jurgens!” Al’s mind leaped out, reaching for contact with the frog he had left in the old man’s room. He touched and John and Martha were but a moment behind.

  They scanned the scene within the scientist’s bedroom. His hair was almost invisible against the pillow beneath his
head. But the faint purple cast of his flesh showed against it. The cast of death—neuron blast.

  It took a moment to comprehend, then Martha spoke the thought of all of them. “There just isn’t anybody else, is there? No one at all whom we could trust!”

  Al thought of the godlike figures back in the laboratory. Martha had been right. She had known they were but dead things. She had never believed they held a semblance of life.

  “It means the Institute knows,” said John quietly. “They would not have murdered Jurgens without suspecting his relationship with us. They must be on the way to destroy our brains now. You’ve got to get the transmitter in operation!”

  “Yes,” murmured Al. “It’s the one thing left to us. Jurgens is dead and the one thing left is the act that he planned. I wonder if by some fantastic power of his own private gods he seized us at the moment of our birth and drove us to this hour.”

  “Come on!” cried John. “Is the transmitter ready?”

  “Ten minutes to warm up—”

  The transmitter was a vast and complex thing hidden deep within the mountainous structure that was the plant that Al controlled. Its building in utter secrecy was testimony of the more than human genius that was within them, John thought.

  Through the frogs they felt Al’s thoughts and impulses go out to it. They sensed the fall of mighty power switches. And then—

  —chaos!

  They had all but forgotten that their own minds would be subject to the corrupting energy of that mighty transmitter.

  The reminder was sharp. Like a falling knife of infinite momentum it severed their minds from the controlling tapes which had fed in the cybernetic commands for so long. It was swift paralysis, so swift that its stunning left no pain.

  But their minds, so long familiar with the tens of thousands of tubes and vats and furnaces within the plants—their minds envisioned the creeping ruin.

  The fires would spread and batches of components would burst their vessels. The stores of raw materials would blast and burn and melt in a chemical flood of corroding fury.

  “Al,” Martha called. “Al!”

  In the sudden silence she reached out and found—nothing. Her voice was like a scream. “Al!”

  “Wait,” said John. “I can see the control station.”

  He moved the frog closer to where Al’s brain lay within its platinum case. Martha saw it too.

  “He wanted to be sure that nothing would keep him from Kit,” said John softly. “He arranged for the transmission beam to trigger the nutrient mechanism, cutting the flow.”

  “Al, take me with you too.”

  For a moment, sharp anger and pain bit into John at Martha’s impulsive “me.” It was almost as if she had forgotten him in the last minutes of their lives.

  But she turned back to him and he felt the warmth of her emotion. There was nothing in her mind that he could not probe, and he knew and understood the impulses that drove her.

  IN their minds they pictured momentarily the scene that existed now in all the cybernetic plants of the Earth. From the dream worlds of schizophrenic brains the great factories were racked with suicidal commands. The flow of materials twisted and spilled, wrecking the engines that shaped them into food and luxuries. Atomic destruction flared from the energy centers.

  “There’s nothing more that we can do, is there?” said Martha sadly.

  “Unless we stop the pumps.”

  “No—let’s wait as long as we can. It will be slower here than elsewhere. This plant may last quite a while. Lets take the Oscars and go into the city and walk in our familiar places once more.”

  It was not quite dawn and they secured clothing in a house whose occupants were gone. Outside again they watched the distant skyline. From General Biotics a fog of poison vapor spread into the morning sky. Billowing yellow smoke burst from a score of other points—the destruction of machines with insanity at the helm.

  And over the face of the whole Earth the same. In a single blow the Welfare State was gone—just as Seymour Jurgens had planned it. In a week men would begin to starve and kill.

  John wondered even now if it had had to be that way, if there weren’t some other answer. The memory of his people told him there was none.

  They moved toward the city but already the terror was rising there. They could hear it in the cries and the sounds of the city, which were like those of a wounded animal. There was the shriek of cars driven in panic, the distant bursts of exploding things, the muted fearful voices of the people.

  “We can’t get any farther,” said John. “There’s too much traffic. We haven’t much more time.”

  “All right. Let’s sit here on the hill. We can watch the sun come. Remember the last time we did it?”

  “This is the last time. Let’s remember it.”

  They sat on a grassy slope with their backs against a large rock. He put his arm about her waist and held her head against his shoulder.

  “This is real,” said Martha. She dug her fingers into the flesh of her leg and watched the white and red marks appear. She pressed his hand and explored his palm with her fingers.

  “This is you and I, isn’t it, darling?” she said. “That other—back there—it’s nothing but a bad dream that never happened.”

  “That’s all it is,” he murmured. His cheek rested against the soft hair of her head. He let his mind slip back to the control room where the brains lay.

  “Don’t, John! Stay here—for just as long as there is.”

  “Yes. There’s only a moment more. The flood of molten chemical is almost into the control rooms.”

  “You haven’t even kissed me,” she said with mock petulance. “It’s not every day that you get a complete new me!”

  Laughing, he bent her backwards in his arms and at that moment he saw her eyes slowly close and the laughter fade from her face. He felt only the tiniest shudder go through her body and then she was limp in his arms.

  “Martha!”

  He was crying then but only for a little while. After a time his dark head slowly relaxed against her golden one. Those who fled the city in the dawn saw their figures against the hill and enviously thought them a pair of lovers who had fallen asleep in each other’s arms.

  The End.

  original proofing history

  Scanned by Richard K. Lyon with preliminary proofing by ANN/A April 1st, 2008—v1.0

  from the original source: Startling Stories, September 1950.

  This story was reprinted in 1962 by Avalon Books.

  Original images added and and TOC etc added - - 30-12-2018