The Turing Option

by Harry Harrison

  “Why are you working on his childhood—when it is the adult we need to answer our questions?”

  “Because the old expression about the child being the father of the man is quite true. There is no way we can restore the higher level brain connections until the lower levels begin to operate. This means that the enormous structure of the human mind can be rebuilt only from the bottom up—in much the same way it was built in the first place …”

  “When you say building a mind—built of what?”

  “The mind is made of many small parts, each mindless by itself. We call these basic parts agents. Each agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. But when the agents get connected up, in certain very social ways, they work together as societies—that’s how intelligence emerges from non-intelligence.

  “Fortunately, most of the agents themselves are okay, because their brain cells are located in the uninjured gray matter. But most of the connections between the agents thread their way through the brain’s white matter—and too many of those connections have been severed. That is where I am now. Locating and reconnecting large numbers of the simplest agents, at the sensory and motor levels. If I can reconstruct enough of the society of agents formed during each stage of Brian’s development, that will give me a foundation for repairing the structures that were formed in his next period. Stage after stage. Layer after layer. And the different kinds of cross-connections between them. While at the same time I have to restore the feedback loops between the agents at each level, as well as the systems in other parts of the brain that control reasoning and learning. These different kinds of loops and rings are crucial because they are what supports the thoughtful and reflective activity that distinguishes human from animal thinking. At the present time I am almost at the end of this first period of rebuilding. In a few days I will know if I have succeeded or not.”

  Benicoff shook his head in wonderment. “You are getting me used to thinking the unthinkable as a daily habit. What you are doing is so new, so different, that I find it basically—I’m sorry to say this—incomprehensible. That you can enter Brian’s head, listen to his thoughts and repair the damage done! Better you than me. Does he feel anything while you are doing this?”

  Snaresbrook shrugged. “There is really no way to tell. I suppose the experience will be indescribable because it is happening to a mind that is not yet human. My personal belief, however, is that while his brain is being reconstructed his mind might very well be retracing and reliving the important early events of his life.”

  Dolly could hear the clatter of computer keys as she came down the hall; she smiled. Brian was usually alone so much, it was nice to see him with a school friend.

  “Anyone for a fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookie?” she said, holding out the plate. Kim squeaked with pleasure.

  “Me for one, Mrs. Delaney. Thanks!”

  “Brian?”

  “Finish this first,” he muttered. “Come on, Kim. It would be a lot better if you did this before you take a break. You are just beginning to understand what basis vectors are.”

  “We can finish it later. Take one.”

  Brian sighed and pushed one of the still-warm cookies into his mouth. “Good,” he spluttered.

  “I’ll get some cold milk to go with that.”

  When Dolly brought the tray with the filled glasses she had her purse with her. “I’ve got to go to the market and it is going to be crowded. Which means I’ll be late and your father will be upset if he gets in before I do. Tell him that dinner will be at six like always and it’s ready for the microwave now. You won’t forget?”

  Brian shook his head and drained the glass as Dolly left. He put it down and turned back to the computer. “Now to pick up where we left off.”

  “No!” Kim said. “We’re taking a break, remember?” She pushed the books aside and dropped onto the bed, punched his pillow into a mound and settled it behind her back. “A break is a break—and you have to learn that.”

  “Work is work and you have to learn that. Just look at your term paper, for instance.” He spun his revolving chair about and punched the scroll button. The copy flipped by in the screen, most of it white letters against red blocks. “Do you see all the red copy? You know what it means?”

  “You had a nosebleed?”

  “You ought to take this seriously, Kim. You know that I’ve been helping you with this paper for Bastard Betser, adding bits and straightening it out when you get it wrong. Just for the heck of it I wanted to check up on my input and started marking off the blocks of what I was doing in red, all the corrections and changes that I had made. There is sure a lot more red than white here.”

  “There is a lot more to the world than AI. Since you are standing up, bring me over a cookie.”

  “You’re going to flunk this course.” He got up and passed her the plate.

  “Big deal. So maybe I flunk out of school altogether and marry a millionaire and travel around the world on my own yacht.”

  “You talk big for a Redneck from the Rigs. I bet you’ve never even been ashore.”

  “I have been around, leetle man, I have been around.” She licked the chocolate from her fingertips and half closed her eyes, spoke huskily in a fake French accent. “I have zeen zee world, have driven ziz prince mad with passion.”

  “Mad with boredom! You’ve got a good mind, Kim. You just don’t like to use it.”

  “Mind! Enough zee mind. What about zee body?”

  She pulled at the top of her blouse to disclose her cleavage. Pulled a little too enthusiastically and the blouse opened wide disclosing one bare breast, a sweet pink nipple. She giggled as she buttoned the blouse.

  “I drive zee men mad …”

  Her voice died away as she saw the effect the accident had had on Brian. His skin had gone pale, his eyes wide.

  “Relax,” she said. “You’ve seen lots of bare skin before down on flesh beach where all the kooks hang out.”

  “I’ve never been there,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  “Well I don’t blame you. Some pretty ugly guys and gals are naturists.” She looked up at him and arched her eyebrows. “Hey, how old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  She bounced up onto her knees and looked him in the eye. “You’re as tall as I am and not too bad looking. Ever kissed a girl?”

  “Let’s go to work,” he said uncomfortably as he turned away. She took him by the shoulder and pulled him back. “That’s no answer—and I know you know about girls because I found some old Playboys under your bed—with scorch tracks that your eyes had left on all the centerfold nudes. Maybe you know what they look like—but I’ll bet dollars to dongles that you are sweet thirteen and have never been kissed—so you’re going to learn now.”

  Brian did not pull away when she took his head gently in her hands and pulled his mouth down to hers. She made a happy humming sound and let her tongue drift inside his lips, felt his hands harden on her back. She moved her hand down; that wasn’t the only thing that was hard.

  She opened his belt.

  What Brian could not understand was why everyone didn’t know what had happened just by looking at him. It was so momentous, earth-shattering, that it must show on his face. Whenever he thought about it he could feel his skin glow with the strength of his memories. Kim was gone by the time Dolly came home; he heard his father arrive a few minutes later. He stayed in his room as long as he could, waiting until he was called a second time for dinner.

  But neither of them noticed a thing. Brian ate in silence, face lowered over his plate. They were discussing a barbecue they had been invited to next weekend; neither wanted to go. But it was business not pleasure and in the end they made the obvious decision. They were barely aware that he had left the table and was back in his room.

  The thing that bothered Brian most was that what had happened did not seem to have affected Kim in the slightest. The next morning she passed him in the hall wit
h a “Hi!” and nothing else. He thought about it all day in school, muttered some incorrect answers which shocked his teachers, then cut all of his afternoon classes and went out on the rigs. Alone above the sea.

  If he felt so strongly about what had happened—why didn’t she? The answer was pretty obvious when he asked the question that way. Because she had done it before. She was eighteen, five years older than him, had had five years to get interested in boys. He was jealous of them—but who were they? He couldn’t dare ask her. In the end he said the hell with it and tried to put it from his mind. And sought for an excuse to see her alone as soon as possible.

  Brian was waiting in the hall next morning, caught her before class. “I stayed up late last night, finished your term paper.”

  “My hearing is going. Did you just say what I thought I heard you say?”

  “Mm-hmm. Thought it would be easier to get it done all at once than take you through it step by step. Maybe that way you will remember what you wrote.” He tried to be more casual than he felt. “Come over this afternoon and I’ll give you a first run-through of how it works.”

  “You bet. See you there.”

  The day dragged by. It was Dolly’s afternoon to play bridge and the house would be empty.

  “This is the final surgery,” Snaresbrook dictated quietly. “The implants are all in place. The CPU put into position. The regrowth of new nerve connections to the damaged portions of the cortex is almost completed. The replacements for the corpus callosum connections are being stimulated. The fiber-optic interfaces between the chips have been installed, the last of the intracranial procedures. The meningeal tissues have been repaired or replaced and I am now coating the edges of the section of bone that was removed to give access to the brain. This will grow and seal the section of skull into place. The procedure now begins.”

  She did not add her silent thoughts that this was just the end of the surgical procedures. But the new and untried procedures that would hopefully restore the connections inside Brian’s brain were only in their opening stages. New, unproven—would they work?

  Stop thinking about it. Complete this and move on.

  It was a muggy and torrid July afternoon when Brian finally got away from the computer lab. He had worked out what he hoped would be an improvement on LAMA, and AI programming language that his father had helped to develop. If he was right the cross-linking nemes of the CYC information nets could be speeded up by a factor of 10. But his new technique had to be tested and this would have taken days to work through on his own computer—so he managed to borrow some time on the Cray 5 and if all went well he should get some results by morning. Which meant there wasn’t much else he could do until then.

  And there was a good chance Kim might be waiting for him at home. He walked faster now and his sweat-soaked shirt stuck to his skin. She had no classes this afternoon so she might come over for what she called tutoring. Yes, there would also be some tutoring because she really needed it. She was cutting classes now and ignoring lectures because she knew that he would be there to tell her what to do before the exams. She really hated the schoolwork and was always happy to find something better to do. Brian slowed down when he realized he was gasping for breath. Easy did it in this heat or he would get back dead.

  The cool air puffed out and embraced when he opened the front door.

  “Anyone home?” he called out, but silence was his answer. Then he heard the music playing, smiled and pushed open the half-closed door to his room.

  “I called—you didn’t hear me.”

  The stereo was on, switched to the Mississippi soul food station, but the room was empty. His bed was rumpled and his pillows pushed into a backrest the way she liked them. He looked around for a note, Kim still wrote them, never thinking to access the network, found nothing. He turned off the music and the only sound was the whir of the fan on the computer. It muttered to itself while it accessed a disk. The kitchen—that was it. Kim was the world’s best nibbler. The glass and dirty dish in the sink proved it. But she wasn’t there.

  Nor did she answer her phone. He searched more carefully a second time; she had left him handwritten messages more than once, probably the only person in computer-happy UFE that did his anymore, but still couldn’t find any note. Maybe she actually broke a long-standing dislike and actually left a message in the computer. He called up his communication program but there was nothing there.

  Mysterious—and he was beginning to get worried. Could something have happened to her? The front door had been closed, but not locked. It usually wasn’t locked except at night; the university was a cutoff and safe place. Except no place was really safe. Hadn’t they just caught the drug smugglers a few miles down the coast? The isolated rigs of UFE might be the ideal spot for another try. A sudden sound caught his attention as the computer whirred and a drive light came on.

  Of course! This program had been running for a couple of days and the machine was in verbal command mode, left that way most of the time even when he was entering data from the keyboard, programmed to record any words or sounds and respond if necessary. There would be a record of her voice.

  It was easy enough to find. He jumped back, turned on the speakers—and heard himself snoring. Jumped forward and heard the morning news he had listened to while dressing. Forward and forward—and there she was! Humming along with the radio. Nothing wrong here; he skipped forward, the sound track making Donald Duck sounds—then stopped when he heard her voice. Talking on the phone.

  “Sure, yes. If you insist. Soon. Right. Bye.”

  Only one side of the conversation: he had never considered putting a tap on his phone. He did a high-speed forward, heard something, backtracked. It was Kim laughing.

  Then a male voice said, “Do that again and there’s no stopping me.”

  Brian rested his head on his fingertips, bent over the computer, the speaker close to his ear. Listening to what could only have been sounds of lovemaking. In his bed. With someone else. Listening to every humiliating sound and gasp, to her mounting little cries of delight.

  Listened until it was all over. They were talking quietly but he listened no longer. The voices were nothing, meant nothing.

  Finished. Through. The blood hammered in his temples as he was possessed by a terrible sense of betrayal. He had meant absolutely nothing to her—except maybe as an unpaid tutor, or maybe that was how she paid for his lessons! She had never been serious about him, never felt what he felt. What he realized shamefully now was that his puppy love had been completely one-sided. She hadn’t shared it—probably didn’t even know his overwhelming and consuming feelings for her. His fingers were trembling with rage, mortification, as he wiped the program and the voices of betrayal, struck out the file, deleted it. Then formatted tracks over it so it could never be restored. More destruction. He sought out every piece of work he had done for her and wiped the disk clean. Wiped out a com file of messages from her. His hands were shaking and there were tears of rage in his eyes. Love turned to anger, attraction to betrayal. His hands shook as he seized the keyboard, began to lift it to throw at the screen.

  This was crazy. He dropped it and rushed from the room banged down the hall into the kitchen, stood in the doorway, fists clenched, shaking with conflicting emotions. The rack of knives was before him on the counter and he pulled out the largest, tested the edge with his thumb, longed to plunge it into her. Again and again.

  Kill her? What was he thinking about? Did simple, rutting emotions control his life? What had happened to logic and intelligence? His hands were still shaking as he slid the knife back into the slot. He stood at the sink staring unseeingly out of the window.

  You have a brain, Brian. Use it. Or let your emotions run your life. Kill her, get revenge, go to jail for murder. Not the world’s greatest idea, really. What is happening? How come emotion has taken the place of intelligent thought?

  A subunit had taken control, that was what had happened. Think of the society of the mind
and how it works. The mind is divided into many subunits, subunits with absolutely no intelligence of their own. What was the example his father had used when he explained it? Driving a car. A subunit of the mind can drive the car while the conscious mind is occupied with other things. Turning back control only when something unusual happened. The society of mind usually worked in a state of cooperation between all of its units. Now one stupid subunit had taken over and was controlling everything. One dumb, irrational subunit of infatuation—with gonads for brains and involved only with betrayal and jealousy and rage. Is this what he wanted to control his life?

  “Hell, no!” He opened the refrigerator and took out a can of soda, popped the seal, drank half of it in one long chugalug. Much calmer and more rational now. He knew what was happening, one part of his brain had taken over and was calling all the shots and suppressing everything else. There was no such thing as a central me, though it was easy to believe that there was. The more he had studied the operation of intelligence, the more he had come to believe that each person was sort of a committee. The brain was made up of a lot of little subanimals—protospecialists, that’s what they were called.

  The hunger-animal took over when looking for food. Or the fear-animal when there was trouble looming. And every night the sleep-animal took its place. It was King Solomon’s ring. All the machinery that Lorenz and Tinbergen had discovered. Those intricate networks of brain centers for hunger, sex, defense that had taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Not only in reptiles, birds and fish—but in parts of his own brain.