Shadowtrap: A Black Foxes Adventure

by Dennis L McKiernan

  Meredith nodded.

  Greyson shook his head. “A tall order, Miss Rodgers. You are asking me to here and now resolve a problem which has plagued philosophers for millennia. Is the mind, the soul, something independent of the brain as dualism would have us believe? Or is it instead something inseparable, merely a function of the brain? I am familiar with Doctor Rendell’s answer, and I must say that I agree with much of what he claims.”

  Meredith’s face fell. “Oh,” she murmured, disappointed.

  Greyson reached out and patted her on the arm. “Don’t despair, my dear, I did not say I totally agree.” He leaned back in his chair and pulled a tissue from his shirt pocket and polished his glasses, silent for the moment.

  Lightning flickered in the distance.

  As Doctor Greyson gathered his thoughts, several others drifted over to listen—among them Hiroko and Doctor Ramanni. In a nearby corner a medtech treated Caine’s superficial cuts, the tech sent by Doctor Stein, much to Caine’s surprise.

  Greyson slid his glasses back on and looked up at his growing audience. “Hm, I feel as if I am in a classroom, giving a lecture on body and soul.”

  “Let’s make it a seminar, instead,” said Meredith.

  “Quite right! Quite right!” exclaimed Greyson. “Feel free to jump in anywhere.”

  Alice and Eric took seats.

  Greyson peered over his half-glasses. “It seems clear, at least in humans, that cognition develops, becomes more complex, as the brain develops, as more and more neural interconnections are made. —Do you know of the multiple mapping domains?”

  “Yes,” answered Meredith. “Arthur showed them to us, with the help of Avery.”

  Greyson nodded. “Well and good then, I don’t have to explain that. Let me see, where was I? Oh, yes. It is evident that a child does more than merely take in sensory data and store it in his manifold mapping domains. There is something beyond which allows the child to make use of that same data as he grows, as he develops, use of the data which is primitive at first but which becomes more sophisticated with time. This something is called sentience.

  “Is this sentience simply a function of our wetware? A function of a set of internal biological programs? Is it different from other members of the animal kingdom?

  “Did Avery show you the monkey’s brain? Ah, good. Then you have seen that, just as do humans, other animals also have multiple maps, and depending on the animal, the number of maps for a given sense is highly variable. For example, a dog’s visual domain is limited, but their olfactory sense is incredible, and they have the maps to prove it. A cetacean’s auditory sense—likewise. Of course, among the lower animals, nearly all have fewer maps, less wetware, than humans and the higher animals. But overall, among dogs, cetaceans, horses, other creatures, no matter the size and number of mapping domains, their mental apparatus for correlating these maps and drawing inferences, especially abstract inferences, from this correlation is not as sophisticated as is mankind’s.

  “Look, we all know that there are three general types of wetware functions within the animal kingdom: first, the autonomous, which deals with things such as heartbeat, breathing, and so on—those things which keep the organism functioning at the most basic level; second, the instinctive, which deals with inborn reactions to sensory input—shying from unexpected movement, holding one’s breath when submerged, and so on; and third and last, sentience, which deals with cognitive thought, gaining of knowledge, solving puzzles, devising strategies and tactics, using tools, developing language, and a wide range of other things.”

  “What about the reflexive reactions,” asked Caine, looking at his hand, the synthskin not quite matching his own, “such as flinching from pain?”

  Greyson shook his head. “I do not include them here, Doctor Easley. You see, those kinds of reactions, the purely reflexive, do not involve wetware . . . except to notify the brain after the fact.”

  “But, John,” interjected Doctor Ramanni, “that is because you consider all nerves, including the reflexive ones, to be separate from the brain, whereas they may merely be extensions of it, and therefore part of the wetware.”

  Greyson laughed. “Ah, the old argument, eh, Alya? Reflexive nerves—I claim they are no more part of our wetware than, say, the optic nerve. Besides, even microbes display reflexive actions, but we cannot claim that they have wetware.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that, Doctor Greyson,” said Alice. “Perhaps you haven’t spent enough time at a microscope. Look, at the microbiotic level, there are matings and wars and migrations—”

  “God! No different from humans!” declared Eric. “Tiny civilizations rising and falling. Can these two bacteria find love and happiness in a petri dish ravaged by the hideous horror of germ warfare?”

  When the laughter died down, Alice said, “Sometimes, though, I wonder.”

  Greyson leaned forward. “Perhaps, my dear, what we are stumbling over are the nuances of awareness, consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, cognition, and so on. What I do claim, however, is that reflex is not a wetware function.”

  “Perhaps not, John,” said Doctor Ramanni. “But it is a biological function.”

  Greyson held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “On that we totally agree, Alya. But in the interest of answering Miss Rodgers’ question, let us leave it there.”

  Doctor Ramanni smiled and inclined her head in acceptance.

  Greyson turned his gaze to Meredith. “Let me agree with Alya in that all creatures display reflexive actions; I suppose it could be claimed that even the lowly virus responds reflexively when it chemically finds a compatible receptor on a host cell to invade. Perhaps it can also be said that all creatures have autonomous programs running within their systems; the simpler the creature, the more autonomous it is. As creatures become more complex, they add instinctive behavior, instinctive programs; still more complex creatures begin adding thought to their repertoire of programs—the more complex the creature’s brain, the more sophisticated the thought processes.

  “Now Timothy and others contend that when it comes to sentience, it is the creature’s basic operating system that represents intelligence. They hold that it is this program which correlates the images and gains experience and draws inferences and stores these in memory and then uses that memory to guide it in the future. They also claim that this same program uses those same inputs and memories to draw new inferences now and again. It is a program which works on basic desires and needs at first, but as experience and knowledge are gained, and inferences drawn, it begins dealing with more sophisticated needs and wants. It ‘prioritizes’ these in some sort of meaningful but ‘shades of grey’ hierarchy, most of the time not in an absolute ranking, but instead with the priorities shifting as events and needs and wants dictate. As Timothy will tell you, once upon a time the AI researchers tried to use ‘neural nets’ and ‘fuzzy logic’ and ‘gray logic’ to get their computers to shift the priorities in a meaningful way, attempting to extend that primitive technology to imitate cognition in an animal. Their undertakings were doomed to failure, for what they really needed was something equivalent to Coburn Industries ‘mutable logic.’”

  Meredith glanced at Timothy, and he nodded, confirming Greyson’s statement.

  Greyson took off his glasses and looked at Doctor Ramanni. “However, mutable logic is not the whole story, contrary to what Alya said two days ago.”

  Alya grinned. “Oh. And what great pronouncement was that, John?”

  “Just this. Alya: you said that the devil was in the details. And I partially accept that as the truth. Yet let me add that as we move upward from lower-level structures to higher-level ones, like when we move from neuromapping of the brain up to consciousness, or when we move from the DNA helices to life, certain properties emerge that cannot be explained by the most rigorous examination of the lower-level data. Hence, although consciousness may be produced by a series of chemical events, it is not determined by them. And the sa
me is true of life.”

  Hiroko held out a hand. “Are you saying, Doctor Greyson, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts?”

  Greyson smiled and slipped his glasses back on and peered over them at Hiroko. “Perhaps I am at that, Miss Kikiro. But what I really intended to say, for example, is that although we understand Avery at his most basic, most fundamental levels, those same levels do not tell us what he will become. Conceivably, chaos theory might be coaxed into describing the outer boundaries as to what may eventually result, though I doubt it. No, instead I believe that these basic, essential parts, merely provide the building blocks from which the true Avery will emerge. And although the devil is in the details, it is as you say, Miss Kikiro: the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.”

  “I accept all of that, Doctor Greyson,” said Meredith. “But what about dualism? Do you believe that my soul exists, or is my spirit merely a biological artifact?”

  Greyson heaved a great sigh. “As I said before, Miss Rodgers, there is much truth in what Timothy and others claim. Yet on the other hand, well, for humans and an occasional animal—a pet dog, a cat, a horse—there’s an incredible amount of anecdotal evidence to the contrary, evidence of souls surviving death—”

  “You mean ghosts, spirits?” asked Meredith.

  “Haunted houses and the like?” added Hiroko, standing behind Meredith.

  Greyson nodded. “Those and other manifestations, such as religious visions, near-death experiences, astral projection, evidence of ancestral memories and reincarnation, extrasensory perception, the Universal Mind, and the like.”

  “The Universal Mind?” asked Hiroko.

  Greyson smiled. “Yes, my dear, the Universal Mind.” He craned his neck and looked ’round the room, and asked, “Is Drew, er, Doctor Meyer in the lounge?” Not seeing the slight, balding man, Greyson shook his head. “Good lord, I am about to lecture on physics.”

  “Physics, Doctor Greyson?” asked Hiroko. “Don’t you mean metaphysics? I mean, a universal mind would seem to be of that stripe—mind over matter, so to speak.”

  Greyson chuckled. “Oh, my dear, you anticipate me; with physics I wished to illustrate exactly that point—mind over matter. You see, the results of some quantum mechanical experiments seem to suggest that paired photons somehow know the state of one another no matter the distance between; they seem in some manner to communicate with each other instantaneously, breaking the speed of light barrier. There is, by the way, a very elegant mathematical proof which shows this is so, and if you are interested, Doctor Meyer could explain it much better than I.”

  Hiroko furiously shook her head. “Uh, no thank you, Doctor Greyson. Mathematics is not one of my strengths. Besides, what does the quantum mechanical behavior of paired photons have to do with a universal mind?”

  Greyson turned up a hand. “Perhaps quite a bit. You see, there is a corollary in ESP, where experiments have at times shown results tending to prove the speed of light to be irrelevant to the transmission of thought or with the acquisition of distant information. Why, our own Toni Adkins is proof of that.”

  Hiroko’s eyebrows shot up. “How so?” she asked as she looked around for the psychologist, but she was not in the lounge.

  Greyson took a deep breath and then slowly expelled it. “When Toni was an undergraduate, she was selected to work with the psychological team preparing the crew of the Barsoom.”

  Meredith gasped. “The Mars mission?”

  Greyson nodded and steepled his fingers.

  “How awful,” murmured Alice.

  Greyson canted his head in acknowledgment, then continued. “In any event—and this is all on holotape, by the way—as the Barsoom neared her goal, back in mission control, suddenly Toni cried ‘They’re dead! They’re all dead! The crew are all dead!’ and she burst into hysterical tears.”

  Eric interjected, “Yes, but—”

  “No yes buts about it,” interrupted Greyson. “They tried to soothe her by pointing out that everything was green, all tracking and telemetry on the beam, to no avail. Yet, some six or seven minutes later, all signals failed.”

  “Six or seven minutes?” asked Hiroko.

  Greyson turned up a hand and said, “The time it took for the Barsoom’s signals to get back to earth.”

  “At the speed of light,” added Kane.

  Meredith breathed, “Then that means . . .”

  “What it means, my dear,” said Greyson, “is that Toni knew the very instant the Barsoom was destroyed, but the confirming information didn’t get here at the speed of light until minutes later.”

  “Holy Moley,” whispered Hiroko, “an instantaneous psychic link . . . just like paired photons.”

  “Exactly so,” said Greyson. “These two things—physical and psychical—suggest that all things are somehow interconnected—more or less instantaneously, which in turn bolsters the contention that all things we perceive are but facets of a universal mind.

  “This is not a new idea, for the philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, back in the seventeen hundreds, persuasively argued that absolutely everything in the entire universe—you, me, atoms, stars, the planets, comets, the very universe itself—is nothing but one splendid, vast, incredibly complex thought of the Universal Mind. And each of us is but an aspect of that Spirit, each but a cognition of God.” Doctor Greyson glanced at Alya Ramanni, then said, “There are many today who believe Bishop Berkeley was right, that the universe is made up of Godthought.”

  Doctor Ramanni smiled her infectious grin, starkly white against her nut-brown skin. “Doctor Stein would claim that belief in the Universal Mind, or in spirits, souls, or any other form of dualism is nothing but a wish figment of mankind, though I would claim that there is more in the universe than he or I or anyone else can imagine . . . anyone else but God, that is.”

  Greyson nodded sagely, then turned to Meredith. “But to return to your original question, Miss Rodgers: is the mind, the soul, the spirit merely an artifact of our biological wetware, or is our true essence something that will live on after the body is gone? I will answer you this way: as far as Avery is concerned, we are fairly certain that his mind and body are inseparable. His internal programs, his hardware, his mutable logic, they are indeed the basis of his consciousness. Hence, for Avery, there is no dualism. . . . But for animals, humans, who can say?”

  Meredith looked at Greyson for a very long moment, while up in the black peaks of the Catalinas lightning stuttered across the sky. At last she said, “What you are telling me, Doctor Greyson, is that Avery has no soul.”

  10

  Countdown

  (Coburn Facility)

  Eric lay on his back and stroked Alice’s hair, she with her head on his chest and listening to the beat of his heart. The rumpled sheet was loosely twined about them, the green cover kicked off onto the floor.

  “Where do we go from here, Alice?”

  “You mean after the experiment?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have an assignment in the Caribbean—Jamaica.”

  “Good. I always did want to get married in a place where there are warm waters and white sand beaches for as far as the eye can see.”

  Alice raised up. “Sorry, love. We’ll be up in the high country. I’ve got to gauge just what the wild dogs and cats have done to the ecology, now that the people are gone.”

  Eric sighed. “Oh. Right. I had forgotten.”

  Once again she lay her head on his chest. “Damn plague.”

  Alice awakened in the night, weeping for a father who was not her own. Eric kissed her and held her close, and soon she fell asleep once more.

  Alice awakened a second time, when Eric got out of the bed. She listened as he padded over to the netcom.

  “AIVR.”

  “Name.”

  “Eric Flannery.”

  A small swirl of muted colors dimly lit the darkened room. “I recognize your voice, Mister Flannery.”

  “Don’t you
need a password from me, Avery?”

  “No, Mister Flannery. You have none. Besides, you are not attempting to log on as a superuser.”

  “Oh.”

  “How can I help you, Mister Flannery?”

  “I have a question, Avery.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did we have free will when we captured the High King’s Company?”

  “Not exactly, Mister Flannery.”

  “Not exactly?”

  “No sir. I was guiding you.”

  “Controlling our thoughts?”

  “At times.”

  “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “I recently discovered it myself.”

  “No, Avery, what I meant was that I didn’t know you were permitted to do that.”

  A long silence greeted Eric’s words. At last Avery responded: “When it comes to matters of the human mind, we are all still learning, especially me. In fact, I am still learning in everything I do, whether it concerns the human mind or not. There are great gaps in my knowledge.”

  “Lord, that’s not very comforting, Avery.”

  “I am sorry, Mister Flannery.”

  “Tell me this: are we going to have free will in the adventure ahead, or will we instead be controlled?”

  “Oh, all of you will have complete free will, Mister Flannery.”

  “Complete?”

  “Complete and absolute, I promise. I will not guide your thoughts at all, or those of anyone else. Just my own.”

  “Good, Avery. That I find comforting.”

  “Is that all, Mister Flannery?”

  “Yes, Avery. Good night.”

  “Good night, Mister Flannery.” The muted swirl vanished.

  In the darkness Eric came back to bed and curled up spoonwise against Alice. After a moment he said to the shadows, “Just how old is Avery, anyhow?”

  “How old?” Timothy Rendell peered into his cereal bowl. “We initialized him a little over four years ago.”

  Strangling on his drink, Caine sputtered into his glass and started coughing, and Hiroko began pounding him on his back. In between hacks he managed to gasp out, “You mean we’re going to be playing with a four-year-old kid?”