by Robert Berke
"Tomorrow they are going to wire my prefrontal cortex. Bayron wants to do this while my brain tissue is still healthy enough to work in tandem with the model for a while. He says my brain can only survive on life support for another week or two. If the model works as expected, how can we know whether I actually survived, how can I know whether I've remained human or become something else? How will you or anyone else know?"
Sharky took out his pipe and packed a fresh bowl. He took one long hit and held it before exhaling a fog of smoke in front of his computer monitor.
He put his feet up on his desk as he felt the marijuana begin to relax his muscles and then his mind. He lit up again and tried to formulate a response to Smith's question. He couldn't. All that would come to mind were song lyrics.
"Smith needs to ask a poet, not a engineer," Sharky thought aloud.
A moment later he was typing a reply to Smith's question.
"Isn't that the ultimate question, really? What is a human? Who will decide if you're alive or dead when your entire body becomes divorced from your brain and your brain is divorced from all living tissue. If all that is human can be quantified, measured and stored, in ‘x' or ‘y' megabytes or so many boxes, then we would have to reach one of only two possible conclusions about the soul, which we've otherwise discussed to death. (1) Either a soul can be quantified and measured and hence replicated and thus, by definition not be inherently unique, which negates one of the fundamental religious beliefs about souls; or (2) there is no such thing as a soul and thus the existence of a soul is not a part of being human, which would be more compatible with scientific method. Of course, all that begins with the presumption that you are still human. We can't ignore the possibility that once you are quantifiable, you aren't human anymore. Take your pick."
As he hit the send button, it dawned on Sharky that perhaps these words were too harsh considering what Smith was facing in the morning, so he promptly composed another message:
"I suppose only you would know," He typed. "We would have to design a test that would answer the question to your own satisfaction. Problem is, if we run the test and ask you to report the result, the result you report has only a 50-50 chance of being true. No offense, its just that if you lacked a soul then you would have no inherent sense of right and wrong and thus would have no conscience to prevent you from lying. We would always be left guessing"
Smith wrote back:
"Unless I were to do some selfless act proving my humanity."
Sharky replied, "How can there be a selfless act in the absence of a self. Once you are digitized, there are so many opportunities for file corruption that even a seemingly selfless act could be a lie. For instance, you are backed up every night. If you had the ability to make a backup copy of yourself, you could seemingly sacrifice your life over and over without having made any sacrifice at all."
Smith's reply was only a moment in coming. "Feign self-sacrifice for personal advantage? That would seem to be a very human thing to do. So I will be the only one who knows if I'm human or not."
Sharky responded, "unless you're dead, in which case not even you would know, but there would be a machine capable of calculating your thoughts and feelings sufficiently to fool even your closest family and friends."
Smith's next e-mail was quick and short, "What would it take to satisfy you?"
"All I've got is the Turing test. That's accepted science and its good enough for me. But these are not scientist issues at their core they're philosopher issues. Don't you think there's someone better than me to talk to about this?"
Again, Smith's reply was almost instantaneous: "No." Smith was satisfied that Sharky was an ally in his campaign to gain internet access. He also knew for sure that Bayron was not.
"You should talk to my mother," Sharky typed, followed by an ":)" to convey that he meant it as a joke.
"Maybe I should. By the way, If I remember correctly, you speak some Russian" Smith's next email to Sharky read, "what does ‘Kodeks nomer tri' mean in English?"
"It just means ‘Code Number Three,'" Sharky replied.
"Forget I asked." Smith's last email that day read, "Go get some sleep. Goodnight."
CHAPTER VII.
Bayron looked into Smith's shiny new camera that served as his eyes and spoke into the mirrorlike, polished, microphone that served as his ears while Smith himself, the lifeless, emaciated body with the tubes and the wires leading in and out, lay eerily still on the bed behind him.
"Okay, Buddy, today's the big day." Bayron said with unfeigned enthusiasm. "We're going to activate the artificial prefontal cortex. We're going to keep talking through the whole process."
Bayron pointed Smith's camera to the screen over his bed.
"What I've rigged to your screen is monitors for two EEGs. One is a real EEG measuring the electrical activity in your biological brain. The second one is a virtual EEG measuring the virtual electrical activity from your virtual brain. By watching both EEGs we can tell which of your two brains are working. The left one is your real brain. See how its showing activity now?" Bayron pointed to the left side of the screen where a green line was drawing an everchanging mountain range.
"You don't see anything happening on the right side because we haven't activated the artificial prefrontal cortex yet." In fact, the right side of the screen showed a glowing green line drawing a straight horizon across the middle of the screen.
"Well even if the prefrontal cortex isn't activated, shouldn't the virtual EEG be showing activity for listening, speaking, and memory which are already being controlled by the virtual brain?" Smith asked.
"We've filtered all that out of the result because we are only interested in the higher functions today." Bayron answered matter-of-factly. "Are you ready for this?"
"What, no speech this time?" Smith asked.
"Is it necessary? As far as I know you have a perfect-perfect- memory."
"No it's not necessary, but I always found it a little calming before the operations. Helps me to relax."
"Well, would it help you to relax if you knew I already started? Look at the screen."
Smith looked at the screen. Even though most of the activity was still on the left side, on the right side which had been still, the straight line was now showing signs of life in the form of little hiccups and skips.
"Honestly, it would relax me more if Hermelinda was here."
"Alice is here."
"I know," Smith said, "Hermelinda won't be back until after the baby."
"Have you been e-mailing each other?"
"Everyday."
"Do you want to make a confession, Smith?"
"Nothing everybody doesn't already know," Smith said.
"She's a sweet girl, Smith. The way she tends to you... it's hard to keep anything secret around here. But outside of the lab, I get a lot of questions. I wish you'd go public so they stop accusing me."
"Ah, so you're a suspect too. Do me a favor, can we keep it that way for a little bit? I mean, look..." Smith paused. The right side of the monitor was coming to intermittent life, throwing off a little light each time it registered a peak or a valley. "When I was a kid, you never even saw interracial dating. What would we call a couple consisting of a flesh and blood human being and a transhuman – basically a sentient machine. And ..." Smith stopped speaking abruptly. The line on the right side of the screen -- the one monitoring the model -- began to jump and flash. For a moment, the line on the left side became small and quiet.
"You alright, buddy?" Bayron asked trying to mask a tone of worry when he noticed the unusual change in the display.
"Yes, just something strange just happened."
"You have to tell me what happened. I don't want to damage the last functioning part of your body."
"Well, I was thinking...about Hermelinda... what kind of relationship... the baby ... other things... what I was talking about when suddenly... I don't know how to explain it, but I was thinking faster, more... I don't know. Like a t
housand circuits just came on line. Like waking up, but real fast." Smith stopped talking for a moment, obviously trying to think of a better way to describe what he just felt to Dr. Bayron.
"I need to keep you talking, Smith. Remind me what you were saying when that happened."
"Well, I was just a about to say, how will Hermelinda, or the baby, know its me and not just some sophisticated computer program? Will anyone respect our relationship after I'm freed from this corpse?"
"We've never really discussed that aspect you and I, have we?"
"Can you believe that I'm having doubts about the wisdom of this experiment?"
"It's a little late for that, isn't it?"
"Humor me for a second doc. What if a man really is more than just a sum of his parts?"
"To the extent that the blank spaces in between the physical parts count, we've already considered and accounted for that."
"Assume for the moment that what we call the soul is replicated in the model. The soul existing in the form of a bunch of 0's and 1's stored on a hard-drive. Would turning off the machine constitute murder? That's a legal question, I suppose. And if the data were copied could there then be two identical souls? And what if the data was stored on removable media and removed from its operating environment. Could that removable media have a soul? Imagine a computer disk with a soul trapped in it."
"These are theological questions, Smith. I'm just a humble doctor. I think you'll be the first to know the answer to those questions and you can tell all the priests and rabbis."
"Me, or a fancy toy capable of calculating what it thinks I would have said and saying it?"
"As long is it makes those calculations in perfect replication of what your flesh-and-blood mind would have done, I really don't see the difference."
"The difference is that I'll be dead." Smith's laughs, chuckles, and other verbalizations of amusement all came out of the machine as one or more 'ha's'. How amused he was could be gleaned from the number of 'ha's' that came out of the speakers, but all the other subtleties of laughter were lost. Before Smith continued a single 'ha' reported through the speaker. "Of course, if the machine does a good job of calculating my responses, no one will even know I'm dead."
"No one but you and God. So who'll say Kaddish? The rest of us will just have to trust you."
"But would you trust the machine?"
"If you are honest and the machine replicates your responses perfectly, then we can count on the machine to be honest too, right?" Bayron changed the subject abruptly, not because he wasn't enjoying the conversation, but because he needed Smith's attention on something else for the moment. "I think what you felt before was the sensation of your biological brain passing some processing to the artificial one. Because you were dealing with a philosophical issue, a paradox really, the entirety of the artificial mind got involved all at once. Kind of like the intensity of your thought created a mini-power surge. You have to admit, if I'm right, that's pretty cool. Watch the monitor and tell me what you feel."
Both sides of the monitor where showing persistent activity now. The right side was keeping the rhythm of a rhumba, the left side was only doing a waltz.
"It could be," Bayron speculated, "that the artificial cells have lower electrical resistance than the biological ones and thus emit as more energy. Or it could be that you're not really using the biological cortex for much anymore. I'm going to isolate each side so that we can make some assessments."
"If it's higher energy, imagine what we could do with that," Smith said.
Bayron frowned, "What are you thinking, Smith?"
"How about telekinesis for starters."
"Listen, Smith, lets not get ahead of ourselves. I'll be happy if it even adds two and two."
Over a period of several days, Smith learned to think with either brain and sometimes with both. He enjoyed the speed and clarity of thought he experienced with the artificial brain as it seemed to operate in a perpetual state of hyper-alertness but he always made sure to double check his results against his real brain. He no longer relied on his real memory at all.
He asked for and was given several utility programs: a word processor, a scientific calculator, and (he wasn't sure how he had lived without it), a spreadsheet.
With very little practice he was able to 'think' right into these applications and instantly 'see' entire results. He amused his visitors by performing complex spoken operations instantly. One time, just for kicks he calculated pi for a full hour, marveling at how easy it was for him to visualize and remember one-thousand digits, then 100,000 then 1,000,000.
Bayron came into the room and checked the monitors. "The tissue in your real brain is almost completely atrophied. Frankly I'm surprised its still working at all. Look at the monitor."
Smith, of course, didn't actually have to 'look' at anything. The monitor was wired directly into his visual processor. Smith could see without eyes -- his brain was tricked into thinking it was seeing the image on the monitor simply by being fed a series of zeroes and ones.
And what Smith saw was very different from what he had seen on the monitor before. This time, the left side of the screen was virtually motionless: gentle rolling hills instead of high peaks and valleys. But the right side was a veritable light show, dancing and flashing, skipping and jumping.
"It looks like you're already using your artificial brain predominantly. Were you aware of that?" Bayron asked.
"Yes and no. I guess I knew that my mind was doing things that no human mind could actually do, but, it just feels like my own mind doing it, not some external apparatus."
"I think your flesh and blood are just empty baggage now. It seems to me that your mind is completely virtualized."
"What do you figure those little registers from my real brain are? I mean, its obviously still doing something, maybe not much, but something."
"I'd only be guessing, Smith, but my hunch is that the only activity occurring in your biological brain are the minimum functions necessary to keep itself alive. Why don't you leave the monitor on for a while and see if you can figure out what it is that your biological brain is still doing."
"I'll do that, Doc. Listen, have you heard from Hermelinda? I haven't had any news in days."
"Funny you should ask, papa. Hermelinda will be here this afternoon and she wants to introduce you to someone."
Both Smith and Bayron noticed that there was suddenly some wild action on the left side of the screen which was monitoring his biological cortex. As the screen lit up, the lights in the room dimmed-- slightly, and just for a moment--but it was definitely noticeable.
"What happened, Smith? What did you feel?"
"Something strong. Actually a lot of strong things. She's coming with the baby, isn't she?"
"Yes, it was supposed to be a surprise."
"Is it a boy or a girl?"
"A beautiful, healthy girl. 6 pounds, four ounces. Hair like her mother, eyes like her father's."
"You mean like her father's used to be. Ten and ten?"
"All the fingers and toes are present and accounted for. You are a very lucky man." Bayron said.
After a short silence, during which Bayron could only guess that Smith was mulling the prospect of new fatherhood, Smith began speaking again, surprising Bayron with the quick change of subject.
"By the way, doc, you told me to tell you if Flat Stanley showed up again." Smith said.
"Did you have another dream?" Bayron asked.
"No, a waking memory. You told me that you would be more concerned about waking memories than about dreams, and now I actually have some memories that are truly not my own." Smith's synthesized voice cackled.
"Really?" Bayron responded. "That's unexpected."
"The only thing it makes sense to expect is the unexpected. You told me that." Smith replied.
"So give me some idea what you're talking about." Bayron prodded.
The human voice is punctuated with breath's and sighs, Smith's voice was not. It m
ade everything he said sound abrupt. "There's one memory that's particularly disturbing. I have a very distinct recollection of being strangled to death. Big leathery hands. I can see the face of the killer, I was on a plane. The man who killed Flat Stanley, me, was named Gonzales. I actually remember what it felt like to die."
"Well, technically you did die," Bayron pointed out.
"But I remember my own 'death' very well. After all I lived through it. This memory is not of my death. It is a death I didn't survive. And I know its not me in the memory."
"How can you be so certain that it's a memory and not a dream? I mean, we're not all that certain that your virtual brain divides those states as clearly as a biological brain does," Bayron asked skeptically.
"For starters," Smith answered, "the memory is all in Russian."
Bayron made a note of this conversation in his black spiral notebook. He knew Smith didn't speak Russian. Bayron contained a brief chill that he felt in his spine. He didn't want his patient to think he was concerned.
Smith made a conscientious decision right then and there that he would not mention this subject to Bayron again. Instinctively, he felt like soon he would remember something that would endanger his friends.
Vakhrusheva had a memory that he knew was his own and no one else's. In fact, it was indelible. Years of effort and millions of dollars had been spent to repatriate Yuri Ashkot to Russia after he had been secretly apprehended by the Americans. Vakhrusheva had arrived at the airport to deliver Mr. Ashkot to men who had taken great risks and made substantial investments to ensure he was delivered alive. Vakhrusheva was waiting on the tarmac when the plane arrived. He remembered feeling that something was wrong, but there was no way he could have known. He readied his hand to draw his gun should the need arise. The door to the airplane flew open and like a bolt of lightning a man, who was definitely not Ashkot, jumped out of the plane and began running straight toward him.
