Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  Other investors had put up forty million for preferred stock, and banks had loaned four hundred million, but Gray always owned all the common stock. He always had control. He had purchased a long-closed petrochemical plant at a scrap-metal auction, rehired all the plant workers, converted it for processing of PVCs, and had five years of back orders by the time it was brought into production.

  He had guessed right. There had been a huge upsurge in world demand for plastic pipes. Gray had again foreseen a market swing missed by everyone else.

  Laura's eyes drifted from the screen. There had been no mention of a "neural network" being used in spotting trends in the market for PVC products as there had been in the stock market investigation. The programs were used routinely for things like that now, she knew.

  Stockbrokers regularly advertised their pet programs in magazines and newspapers and on television, giving them catchy names like "Primus One" and "Trendline 2000." But could Gray have developed one back then? she wondered. In 1984? Nineteen eighty-four. Laura did the math. In 1984, Gray had been twenty-one years old.

  She searched further back in the database. A short article in Business Week had a picture of Gray at age twenty. He sat on a table next to a computer wearing an open-collared dress shirt and blue jeans. He looked… normal, for that time anyway. The article was written in a humorous style — laughing "with" Gray, not "at" him.

  "The young prodigy claims the 'analog neural network' is ideally suited to discern problems he called 'fuzzy' (a term computer experts on the BW staff seemed at a loss to define). When the program was asked to solve the problem 'What is two plus two?' however, it replied, 'Four-ish.' Gray's superiors at Drexel Burnham were silent when asked whether they were pleased with Gray's creation, which is supposed to accept large numbers of loosely related variables and identify patterns or relationships to assist in market analysis."

  There were very few articles about Gray before 1983. His name appeared in lists with numerous others who had closed this financing or advised on that merger.

  But what she already knew about the man swirled in her head.

  Russian missiles, antitrust violations, stock market manipulation, failed S&Ls, junk bonds, chemical plants… She rapidly scanned the remaining articles. As the full flavor of all she had read settled in, Laura grew disgusted at herself that she'd even considered taking that man's offer. She reached for the button to turn the terminal off.

  With her finger resting on the Exit key, she decided once and for all that she was wasting her time.

  But Laura couldn't bring herself to push the button. She'd just look at one more thing, she decided. Feeling guilty for the obsessive behavior, she hit the Home button to scan all the way back to the very first entry her search had retrieved on Gray. The year was 1976. It was a short article — a "blurb," really — from a small newspaper in Indiana. "Izeal Boy Wins Admission to Harvard at 13." Joe Gray was headed off to study philosophy. Philosophy? she thought.

  She stared at the grainy snapshot of the boy. At his sad eyes through which shone unmistakable brilliance.

  4

  "Professor Paulus?" Laura said.

  The frail chairman of the philosophy department looked [garbled] behind his messy desk.

  "Ah, come in! Come in!"

  There were loose papers covering every inch of his shelves, chairs, and couch. "Oh, put those anywhere," he said waving his hand. "Have a seat. Have a seat." His voice was raspy and had lost its vigor. He was due to retire this year, she knew. She'd heard of the scramble for his seat.

  Laura put his illegible, handwritten notes on the floor. "Thank you for taking time to see me."

  "I always have time for my students."

  "Oh, um, I'm an associate professor over in the psychology department."

  "Good lord! I am sorry." He took his thick glasses off and wiped them with his handkerchief, putting them back on and squinting at her.

  "Hmmmph," he said after his inspection, obviously deciding his error was understandable. Laura looked younger, she knew, than her age.

  "Well, what can I do for my esteemed colleague, Miss…?"

  "Aldridge. Laura Aldridge." She decided not to say "Doctor," fearing an appearance of pretentiousness and a perceived feminist slap at the kindly man. "I was just wondering. It's been a long time, but do you happen to remember a student of yours by the name of Joseph Gray? He was…"

  "Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant, but…" The old man was alert now, his eyes far off but staring intently at a fixed point in space.

  "What?"

  "Why do you ask?" he said, suddenly on guard.

  "Well…" She debated whether she should tell him.

  "May I see your university ID?"

  "What?"

  "Your ID," he repeated, waggling the fingers of his outstretched hand like a cop to a motorist he'd just stopped. She fished it out of the fanny pack at her waist, and he looked it over.

  "I'm sorry, Dr. Aldridge," the old man said as he handed it back — his features mellowing and kindly again. "It's just… you can never be sure these days. So many people are asking questions."

  "About Gray?" she asked, and he nodded. "Who?"

  "Our government, for one. Sent somebody by here just last Thursday. FBI. And then, over the weekend, there was that break-in. Hit your department as well, I hear."

  "What break-in? Somebody broke into our offices?"

  "No, no, no. I guess I shouldn't have said anything. They want it kept hush-hush — something about not losing our security rating for defense work." He leaned across his desk and lowered his voice.

  "Somebody broke into the university network. Used that thing — the "Web." They browsed through computer files in the directories assigned to philosophy, linguistics, and your department — psychology?"

  "What did they do with the files? Was it a prank? Vandalism?"

  "No, no," he shook his head. "Didn't do anything, apparently. Didn't even copy any of the files, just browsed through." He laughed, shrugging, a comical expression on his face. "What it is in our departments' computer files that has people worried about national defense secrets certainly eludes me."

  "Well, what does any of that have to do with Gray? I mean, hackers are a real menace. They're one of the several hundred reasons I hate computers. In the last month alone, I got a notice printed on my checking account statement that the bank computer had been hacked into, and that they couldn't guarantee that people's records had been kept confidential. Then, if you can believe this, some… I don't know, loser kid, probably, with nothing better to do broke into the computers at the video store where I rent disks."

  She chuckled. "They had this big sign posted by the door to the X-rated part of the store informing everybody. I bet there were some nervous men running around worrying about those rental records."

  Laura laughed again, but Paulus seemed ill at ease. "Anyway," she continued, "I can't imagine why they'd think it might be Gray."

  The professor seemed lost in thought. He shrugged. "You're right." He nodded again. "You're right, I suppose." The old man's eyes grew unfocused, and he seemed to drift away. "That boy…"

  He shook his head. "What?"

  Paulus sighed. "It's just a shame. A true shame. He was the most brilliant mind whose path I ever crossed, bar none."

  "Were you his teacher?"

  A brief laugh burst from Paulus. "Not really. You see, Dr. Aldridge, nobody really ever taught that boy anything that I can recall." He shook his head again. "Oh, he'd read. He was a prodigious reader. Fast as lightning, with truly photographic memory. I seem to recall that someone in your department once wanted to test him. A Dr. Weems? Is he still over there?"

  Laura shook her head. "No, sir. He passed away before I joined the department."

  "Well, they never did, I can tell you that, because if there was one more thing about that boy, it was that he was stubborn. Headstrong."

  "I don't understand, Professor, when you say nobody ever taught him anything. He
attended class. He got a degree."

  "Oh, yes, yes. But he was just… just so far ahead, don't you see. It only stands to reason, with the amount of reading he'd do. The boy only needed four, five hours of sleep a night at most. And every night he would polish off increasingly obscure texts, gleaning some progressively more trivial points of view from an ever-narrowing set of as yet unread treatises."

  "You said he was brilliant. How did you know? I mean, you tested him, I'm sure — I mean academically."

  "Oh, yes, yes. Nothing really to compare him with, though. Just gave him the highest possible score." He suddenly laughed again. "Once… once a graduate teaching assistant gave Joe a B on a paper in logic. It was an upperclassman's course, and Joe had taken the most primitive tools of deductive reasoning and applied them to the most simplistic logical arguments." He was clearly amused as he recounted the story, smiling broadly. An educator, Laura thought with a wave of self-pity, at the end of a distinguished career reminiscing about his brightest student. "He used standard deductive reasoning, you understand. Plato's 'Aristotle was a man, all men are mortal, therefore Aristotle was mortal.' But Joe applied it to Descartes' 'Cogito, ergo sum'—'I think, therefore I am.' The point of his paper had been to fill in the missing operator — the middle argument that links the 'I think' with the 'therefore I am.'" Paulus laughed loudly. "The graduate teaching assistant thought it was too simplistic. He hadn't used any of the more sophisticated methods of symbolic logic. He hadn't even regurgitated any of the classic fallacies. The graduate student gave a fifteen-page critique of Joe's paper, which I think was only something like seven or eight pages long. He never wrote long papers."

  "What did you do?"

  "Well… I changed it to an A, of course. It was pure genius."

  "What was his conclusion about Descartes' argument?"

  "He agreed with Descartes."

  After a moment's hesitation, Laura laughed, but Paulus wasn't sharing in her amusement.

  "It was really quite a compliment to Descartes," the old man said, and the smile faded from Laura's face. He was serious. "You should have heard how he filleted poor Immanuel Kant."

  Laura was uncertain how to react. A teenager who deigned to agree or disagree with the likes of Descartes and Kant. "So, if all he did was agree with Descartes, what was the big deal?"

  "Oh, it was the way he agreed!" Paulus's voice had a dreamy quality to it. "That was what it was like. It was so frustrating" — Paulus grabbed the air with clenched fists in front of him—"to be around Joe. It was so difficult to get things out of him. You had to pry his mind open, and even then he just gave you glimpses. He once said when I tried to draw him out that it wasn't that he didn't want to talk to people, it was just that it would take too long to define terms for them. You see" — Paulus pointed to his skull—"there were thoughts and concepts flourishing in his head that had no definition in the English language. In any language. He even said that he thought of things and then assigned to them nonverbal labels that he called… Oh, dear. What did he call them?" the old man said, looking suddenly perplexed.

  "Tokens?" Laura asked.

  "Yes! How did you know? Oh. Psychology, right?" Laura smiled and nodded. "Well, anyway, he would store those 'tokens' for times when he later revisited the subject. I mean, imagine thoughts so complex as to encompass the entire discipline you've spent your life studying. Suppose, for a moment, that you wanted to encapsulate the whole of psychology, with a certain meaning or logic or formula for every single disputed point, with a resolution from among competing theories for every uncertainty, into one term for use in your thoughts and discussions."

  "Instantiation," Laura said, finding her voice assuming the low and almost reverent tones with which Paulus discussed Gray. "The concrete embodiment of an immensely complex concept. You're not suggesting that's possible for a human?"

  Paulus shrugged. "Have you met Joe Gray? The boy was the epitome of a genius. I don't mean your garden-variety high-IQ types. This place is brimming with those." Paulus wore a warm, genuine smile. "I mean the transcendent intelligence required to encompass the size of two completely different disciplines. That's the true [missing] sure you know. Your little tests are quite fine for ordinary mortals. But when you try to measure a boy like Joe, well…" He held his hands out, shaking his head. "True geniuses apply proofs from one science in solving problems in another. Maybe you use physics to make a breakthrough in biology. Or math to solve a chemist's problem."

  "And Joseph Gray had that type of mind?" A look of complete serenity descended on Paulus's face. Laura knew she was not there to him now. He was far away.

  "I once saw the most amazing thing." His voice was prayerful. "Joe was standing in a corridor of the fine arts building, just standing there. His head was kind of" — Paulus tilted his head—"kind of leaning to one side. He was frozen there, holding his books. People bustled by but he didn't even notice. I walked up to him. Frankly, I was worried. It just didn't look… right. I tapped him on the shoulder, and he looked around at me startled. And then he just took off." Paulus laughed. "I was a bit more sprightly back then and I caught up with him in an empty classroom. He was bent over a notebook scribbling furiously. I looked at what he was writing, but it was gibberish to me. Just a page full of formulas — arrays, I think they're called — composed of a variety of symbols that I'd never seen before. I asked him. I said, 'Joseph? Joseph, what are you doing?' He mumbled something about 'Fouer transformations,' something like that, so I just left him there. He was still sitting at that desk scribbling at nine o'clock that night, twelve hours later. I made him go home."

  "What… what are you saying?"

  "I'm saying," Paulus replied, returning to the room and focusing on Laura again, speaking slowly, "that when Joe looked at art, it sparked storms of abstract mathematical fury!" He sat forward. "I saw him in the library one day listening to music. I went over to say hello! He…!" Paulus was shaking his head, barely managing to contain what Laura guessed was anger. "The music set it off, I just know it did. He began speaking and wouldn't stop! He built this gleaming spire of logic, each conclusion seamlessly forming the premise of the next argument! He spoke nonstop for half an hour! Symbols, proofs, reasoning so brutally unassailable that…" Laura was taken aback. Paulus was half out of his seat, his hands pressing down on his desk. "If only I could have him back." He sank into his chair, deflated. Exhausted. "If only I could have written down half of what he said to me in the library that afternoon. God, I would give everything…" Paulus's face was buried now in his hands.

  The office was still, and Laura hesitated before breaking the silence.

  "What was he saying?"

  Paulus held out his hands like a supplicant, palms-up. "I don't know." His head was shaking from side to side. "That's… that's the point. I just don't know!"

  After a respectful pause, Laura bid him good-bye. At the door, however, she stopped and turned back. "What was his proof of Descartes' argument, by the way? How did he connect 'I think' with 'therefore I am'?"

  Paulus hadn't moved from where she'd left him. He was too tired. Defeated. He answered in a lethargic voice. "Joe believed that every person is a world unto himself. What one person experiences can never be said to be the same as what anyone else experiences. All thinking beings, therefore, create and constitute their own world, their own universe. A 'virtual world' he once called it. Yes! A virtual world." Paulus seemed pleased, reinvigorated at recalling the words. "I asked him about that later, but he never would talk about it again. That was the way he was. When he was thinking something over, he would talk. But once he had his answer, he was on to something else, leaving the rest of us behind." He huffed loudly. "But I think those ideas, in particular — the ones about people's 'virtual worlds'—were to him… almost a… a religion. You see, the maker of each of those 'virtual worlds' is, to Joe, the god of the world they create. Something like that."

  "Everything is relative," Laura said.

  "Bite your tongue
! Joe hated relativism. He was very much an absolutist, an objectivist. There is one truth, one moral correctness, and only one."

  "But that's inconsistent."

  "Not to Joe. You see, only some people see the truth, the correctness. Those people whose heterophenomenological worlds — the worlds inside their heads — substantially overlap with the real, objective truth. In your world, you may think yourself to be totally in the right, but it is still valid to measure you by objective standards. You are still either good or evil based on how close the world inside your head compares to the real truth."

  "Meaning he's an egomaniac who thinks he sees the only truth," Laura said. Paulus cast her a glance that made her instantly regret her slight. "So, Professor Paulus, why did you say it was a shame? That Gray was brilliant, but it was a shame?"

  "Oh, well, he lost interest. He ran through our curriculum two years plus the three summers." Paulus shook his head. "If only he had kept at it. If only he had… had written."

  "So he graduated after two years? He got his B.A. at age fifteen?"

  Paulus nodded. "What did he do then?"

  Paulus flung his thumb toward the window. "MIT," he said as if in explanation of his disappointment.

  5

  "The greatest waste of human talent I've ever witnessed!" Professor Petry snapped. Laura sat in the spacious office of the chairman of the MIT mathematics department. She watched the man who'd only just settled into his chair rise to pace the floor behind his desk.

  "Just couldn't stick with it. Had to go to Wall Street and make money." His mouth was twisted in a show of contempt. "I wrote him a few years ago, you know, before all this television nonsense. I told him I would put forward his dissertation and get him his doctorates if he'd just write the damn thing."

  "Doctorates?" Laura asked. "Plural?"

  "Yes!" He tossed his pencil onto the desk. "I talked to the department heads over in engineering and computer science. They all agreed to an interdisciplinary project of Joseph's choosing, but…"