Mad-Sci-Soc

by Arrand Pritchard

  Terri felt a dart hitting her other arm. The man with the taser was the last man standing and had  targeted her. The taser dart was connected by cable back to the dumb, and now terrified, looking terrorist guy. Terri only felt a tingle from the taser weapon but it had electrified her swirling hair into a sun-ray shaped halo and her cape had become stiff as a tombstone. Overcome with pain, anger and a bad hairdo, she unleashed her lightning bolt weapon with a snarl.

  That was a big mistake.

  Sure, it knocked out the last remaining bad guy but the lightning bolt also travelled back up the taser cable, as electricity has a habit of doing, and knocked her backwards into a display case.

  Terri died when a heavy 21 inch Cathode Ray Tube monitor dating from 1999 toppled over from the display shelf, and fell on top of her.

  ***

  Tuesday, January 29, 2123.

  Conrad related most of this story in the early evening of Tuesday, January 29. It not only described Terri's heroics but also to set the scene immediately afterwards.

  Conrad skipped desolation felt by the Mad-Sci-Soc members but Karmen's head in hands indicated just how bad they all felt. Five years on, the wounds were still fresh.

  The point that Conrad wanted to make concerned remarks made by Max after Terri's demise when Max was beside himself with grief and rage.

  ***

  Saturday, December 14, 2117.

  “Why! Why! Why won't they release her body to us!” ranted Max rhetorically marching repeatedly across the room.

  “We're not family. We're not doctors, at least not medical doctors,” sighed Conrad slumped in his chair. “Honestly, Max. What could we have done anyway?”

  This was the day after Terri had died. Her body was about to be returned to her mother, her funeral would be later that week. Conrad and Max were mooching in the Imaginarium not wanting to go anywhere or do anything except cry, mourn and swear at the gods.

  “You know what we could have done. Regenerate her. Her whole body if necessary.”

  “She was brain dead and brain damaged by the time the paramedics arrived.”

  “I could capture her whole mind from her corpse and rebuild it into an entirely new body. We have the technology.”

  “We have?”

  “Theoretically,” said Max with huff.

  “What about practically?”

  “I've done it with mice.”

  “The star trek transporter?”

  “Part of it. I could rebuild the body and use a mind transfer technique.”

  “Do the animal rights people know about this?”

  “You know that I have dispensation for Mad-Sci-Soc. Besides no mouse died in the process.”

  “Despite the puddles?”

  “If we consider a steady state, there would be no decrease in the overall mouse population and the gene pool would be unaffected.”

  “You merely recreated mice with the same DNA. We were talking about brain damage...”

  “Effectively the same mouse. The same mouse and the same mouse mind.”

  “I know about the maze puzzles. But is that sufficient for something as complex as the mind?”

  “I transfer using a holding matrix to freeze all brain functions and then copy from that!” said Max proudly.

  “Holding matrix?”

  “Sorry, Conrad. There's just some aspects of the technology that are a bit difficult to explain.”

  “Try. Besides, I’d thought you told me that the mind could not be held in a computer.”

  “That's not completely true. A copy of a whole person can be made, but transfer of the mind is the difficult part of the process. It is the difference between making a copy of hardware versus the transfer of operational software, while it is in the process of calculating. Hardware? A piece of cake. Matter is matter. The mind though... entirely different. Human minds and computer software? There's an analogy but in practise it’s vastly different. It would be fine if the mind was all electrical impulses, but it isn't. It is an electro-chemical system. Hence you need an electrical-chemical device for managing the transfer of human software in its working state, and by human software, I mean, the mind.”

  “So you’ve done that?”

  “I have a prototype. I have a prototype Holding Matrix. For mice.”

  “And you want to use it on Terri? After a thorough test on mice?” mocked Conrad.

  “I can regenerate whole mice. You know that. I can regenerate a whole Terri too. I do have a back up copy of her physical body. Just not a way of restoring her mind. And even if we did, it wouldn't be the same Terri. It would be a younger Terri.”

  “That doesn't sound so bad. At least she wouldn't have had the experience she’s just been through. We could make some improvements in her training... But I thought you didn't have equipment for a complete human body replication.”

  “I can build that in a couple of weeks. But we would just create a pile of flesh. A very nice looking body but nothing more.”

  “But I've seen the mouse experiment, their speed around the maze...”

  “Did you understand anything about what I was just saying?” said Max.

  “I have a PHD. I understand,” sniffed Conrad, although clearly he did not. “You need this mind matrix thing? What did you call it?”

  “The Holding Matrix,” said Max irritably.

  “And without it?”

  “The mind is scrambled. The human brain is wonderful at self organising after a brain injury, but mind transfer could lose everything: the ability to walk, talk, see, smell. Let alone more subtle aspects of memory or personality.”

  “So let's do it.” encouraged Conrad. “Let's build this matrix. And recover Terri.”

  “The matrix for the mouse took years to develop,” sighed Max. “I wouldn't be able to do the same thing for a human mind and make it reliable. I could cheat with a mouse mind but you can't take short cuts with a human mind, can you? It would take too long.”

  “So its not possible at all?”

  “I think a self-organising nano-tech solution could achieve a viable platform. But that would take hundreds of years to build and hundreds of years to test. The funny thing is, and I find this hilarious, although no-one else would. The holding matrix is only required for short time; the time taken for the physical brain itself to be rebuilt. Just a few seconds at most.”

  Conrad coughed, “I'm sorry, Max. I have been away from your research for quite a while. Are you saying you could have a solution in a few hundred years?”

  Max said, “I'm pretty certain that in five hundred years, with the right starting conditions and organising program, I'd be able to develop a suitable holding matrix for human mind transfer.”

  Conrad said, “I cannot even begin to contemplate your calculations for this. Why five hundred years?”

  Max shrugged, “It is just math. The number of atoms multiplied by the number of actions to be performed multiplied by the time taken by the processor, the organic computer processor.”

  “And it can't be paralleled? An infinite number of processors?”

  “No, it's layered, one action on top of another and so on. There's thousands of steps that need to be completed. It is like playing thousands of games of three dimensional chess to spot the checkmate conditions. Each check-mate being a location in the brain that potentially could hold a memory or a synapse that could make a decision.”

  “Can the supercomputer help?”

  “It helped devise the program. But no, this needs to be on an organic system. An organic processing machine.”

  “Organic?”

  “Yep. Who'd have thought it, huh? Human minds need organic material to support the electrical charges, chemical composition and so on. And to build the matrix you need an organic computer.”

  The conversation finished uncompleted as a synchronous communications call came through to Max.

  ***

  Tuesday, January 29, 2123.

  Conrad paused in his story. Terri and Karmen
were transfixed by Conrad's words. Meanwhile I was scratching my head. While I could recall the whole story Conrad had outlined from my G-Phone’s Life-Recorder app, any appreciation of what I was listening to went right over my head.

  Conrad finished the story quickly. He stated that a few days after that exchange,  Max came up with a plan to regenerate Terri and when asked about the problem of the Holding Matrix, he merely stated he had found a way around it.

  “I guess,” said Conrad, his deep voice shaking with emotion, “that I should have asked more questions. He never discussed the Holding Matrix with me again or the need for an organic computer.”

  “An organic computer?” I said bemused. “What is that? I just can't even begin to imagine what that is.”

  Terri stared daggers at me as if to say, butt-out.

  “A reasonable question, Aaron,” mused Conrad.

  I felt triumphant.

  “We can make nano-machines from anything: metal, plastic, old tea leaves. Even viruses. To make products, say for the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, we would use bacteria.”

  “E. coli, for example,” added Karmen.

  “Oh right. We poisoned half the planet with the GMO sweeteners made from such bacteria a hundred years ago,” added Terri.

  “Right. So more recent developments have been the use of fungi due to their comparative robustness and stability when compared to bacteria,” said Conrad.

  “So, Max's experiments with mould... ?” said Karmen, with realisation.

  “Taking hundreds of years... ?” said Terri in the same tone.

  “So, yes. You've got it. It does all makes sense now. So Terri... I agree with you,” said Conrad with tears in his eyes.

  Conrad and Terri embraced and then Karmen came up and hugged the two of them.

  They had connected all the dots. But I had not.

  “Er...” I said.

  The three of them looked at me like they were all in telepathic sync. Like members of the Borg. And I was an alien invader.

  “We should make this clear. I'm sorry, Aaron,” said Conrad paternally. Ouch, that hurt more than the Borg-like stares.

  Conrad explained.

  Mould is a type of fungus and, strangely enough, there are numerous analogies with the properties of mould and the mammalian brain. Hence why “magic mushrooms” are so effective. The chemistry in fungi translates and interacts effectively with the human brain.

  Max was working on experiments with mould.

  Max was working on experiments with organic computers that needed to run for hundreds of years to build the Holding Matrix for mind transfer.

  Max had developed technology to travel to the future, as Terri had already discovered.

  He could probably send multiple selves into the future.

  One of his future selves had found time travel technology to travel to the past. This was the point that Conrad had previously disputed but now conceded. Once that mental block was removed, Conrad had concluded, like Terri, that Max could really have travelled back in time.

  Conrad was now working with that hypothesis. He theorised, that Max had gone even further into the past to start the organic computer program using a mould that was affiliated with Gruyere cheese production in order to build the Holding Matrix.

  This allowed the Holding Matrix to be ready and available in the present day...

  And allow Max, Conrad and Karmen to revive Terri.

  I spluttered a response. How did they work all this stuff out, was the question I needed to ask, but it came out as, “Wha-a-ah? Eh-um? Phhhhhh...”

  “Don't you see?” Conrad explained kindly. “There is no such thing as coincidence. The Holding Matrix is built on cheese. The mould inside cheese.”

  “No, still nothing,” I said pointing to my head.

  “Traditional, organic cheese has some embedded mould. Some have really active mould, the blue cheeses like Stilton or Gorgonzola, but all organic cheeses are alive with organisms.”

  “Ugh. I just had a cheese sandwich,” I said not feeling so well thinking of mould and mites.

  “All natural products are alive. And being a living creature yourself, this is exactly the right thing to be eating, natural food, not genetically bio-engineered petroleum products from the corporations.”

  “Ok... But how does this help Max build the Holding Matrix?”

  “How else would Max ensure that his program would persist for hundreds of years except by inserting it into a traditional process that could last hundreds of years. A cheese making process. Into a cheese that Max knew was Terri's favourite?”

  “OMJ. You're saying...”

  “Yes.”

  “And that...?” (I wasn't even allowed to complete the question.)

  “Yes. That too!”

  “And the robot? The giant rampaging fridge robot? He planned that too?”

  “Oh no.” Conrad looked at Karmen and Terri and they all shook their heads.

  “That is most probably the result of Unintended Consequences,” said Karmen.

  “The cheese has become sentient and, I presume, hyper-intelligent. Who could have predicted that!?” offered Conrad.

  ***

  Tuesday, January 29, 2123 evening.

  Without doubt, that was the longest Tuesday I had ever experienced. Maybe the longest day ever. Recently, it seemed like each of my days had been getting longer and longer.

  My brain was numb with the number of leaps and bounds it had made through physics, psychology, philosophy, time travel and emotion. Hearing about my girl friend, the love of my life, dying as a super-hero, regenerating from a yottabyte of data with the help of a thousand year old lump of cheese. But more than that I had to wrestle with understanding the very nature of consciousness, to question the very meaning of life, personality and humanity. Not the sort of problems I would normally encounter on a Tuesday night, which usually consisted of recovering from a weekend of over-use of reality escape vehicles: soft mind-altering chemicals, virtual reality environments or extreme sports. This day of philosophy had really made a deep impression upon me. Made even deeper with the realisation that Terri could still be dumping me!

  Or maybe not.

  On the Auto Taxi ride back home, Terri cuddled up to me and after a few minutes of silence said, “Thank you for supporting me today.”

  “That was a hard day,” I said.

  “Totally torrid,” she said absently.

  “And to think all this time that the Captain was just a robot. I mean, who could have guessed? But why have a robot that looked soooo much like your secret identity? Except perhaps to disguise the robot as being a robot? A deception. A magic trick type distraction...”

  I heard the purr of gentle snoring.

  When the taxi arrived outside our apartment building, Terri was still asleep. I awkwardly fed a token into the taxi payment channel and carried her inside. Unlike Captain Kittoffery, I do not possess super strength and this was a feat of endurance for me despite her light weight. The biometric-active sliding doors allowed me easy access inside and I took considerable and deliberate care not to bang her head going through the doorways. She was in a deep baby-like sleep and even putting her on the bed and removing her shoes and her wearables, I didn’t wake her. I covered her with the duvet and checked that the bed temperature sensor was still set to “auto”. I put her in the middle of bed leaving no room for me and so I headed for the sofa to dream happy dreams.

  It seemed, at first, we were back at square one the next morning. I awoke when I heard the door slide shut. She'd left the apartment without waking me. We often don't talk in the mornings anyway.

  I sighed and tried to remember my dreams; but too late, they had left me too.

  A holo-alert was being projected from my G-phone. She'd left me a message reading, “Off to work. There's yogurt in the fridge.”

  My heart stopped. I practically swooned.

  “Yogurt in the fridge!” She... she... well, maybe not caring for me, bu
t expressed “consideration”. It could be she just wanted it used up. But it was tantamount to an offering, a gift, a demonstration of civility and compassion! I was psyched.

  This was the closest to a love letter I received from her since I accidentally released her sextexting photos onto my BragBook page in 2121. Unfortunately I did this mid-December just before we left for an off-the-grid skiing vacation. This meant that the erotic picture plastered on my page for over a week and was viewed extensively by rare visitors to my blog; not only friends but family, aunts and uncles leaving Christmas messages. I shuddered at the memory of my stupidity and the months of misery we both suffered afterwards.

  ***

  Friday, February 1, 2123.

  Terri's next day off was Friday. She left before me to get to Mad-Sci-Soc. When I entered the Imaginarium, she, Conrad and Karmen were viewing a holographic model of the Ms Bell Building in Brooklyn. Karmen was in full presentation mode, pointing to the building model and then back to one of her probability models.

  “Watzup?”

  Conrad replied, “We're just doing the sums. Thanks to Terri's analysis and logic, Karmen has programmed a probability model based on the Motive, Means and Opportunity characteristics of a time traveling super villain.”

  “Sums for SHUMMS, ha-ha, I geddit,” I said.

  Karmen's eyes narrowed at me.

  “We're talking about Max, right?” I said trying to recover my dignity after general humour failure around me.

  “We're taking the worse case scenario, that he really is a time traveling super villain. And stress testing our approach compared to other options: such as him being a time traveling humanitarian, or not a time traveller at all,” Conrad said stridently.

  “He could be any or all of those, I guess,” I said.

  “I'm sure he does not characterise himself as either humanitarian or villain. It is just a model,” Karmen uttered in her librarian-like voice.

  “And there could be more than one Max,” said Conrad.

  “We modeled that too. There could dozens of copies of him if he was a time traveling humanitarian but very much less if he was a time traveling evil doer,” said Karmen.

  “Oh?”

  “Paranoia. He wouldn't trust his other selves. Probably only two or three of him if his plans were truly dark,” she said.

  “I see,” I said, not seeing at all.

  “So our plan consists of doing... exactly what he expects us to do!” said Karmen.

  “Right. Dastardly,” I said, wondering whether I sounded ironic or simply just confused.