The Turing Option

by Harry Harrison

  “Of course.”

  It was not only papers that had to be signed, but there were numerous circuitry searches and phone-backs, as well as identity checks by three different government agencies. Benicoff sent everything off by registered fax, yawned and stretched.

  “Now we wait,” he said.

  “How long?”

  “If it takes an hour that will be a long time. Before electronic transfers this would have taken days—even weeks.”

  “A lot has changed in the ten years since—since I have been away,” Brian said. “I look at the news and some things haven’t changed at all. Others I look at, I miss a lot of the references.”

  But it was done within the hour—and brought results less than ten minutes later. The printer hummed and rustled out the sheets of eternitree. Benicoff brought them over to Brian.

  “You have accounts with six different firms.”

  “That many?”

  “That few. This one is a scientific data base, one of the ones that are updated hourly. They replace technical libraries—and work a lot faster. Access time is usually under a second. This one is a mailbox, this gets tickets for everything from baseball games to plane flights. These four here are the best bets. Would you try them first?”

  “What do I do? Can I get out of bed, Doc?”

  “I would prefer it if you didn’t.”

  “No need to,” Benicoff said, going to the terminal and unplugging the keyboard. “This has an infrared link, you don’t need wires. And I’ll phone down for holospecs.”

  Brian really enjoyed the holospecs. They were lightweight eyeglasses with a tiny bulge of circuitry in each earpiece. The lenses seemed to be just windowpane, though he guessed that they could have been ground with a prescription if he wore glasses. When they were turned on the image of a computer screen floated in space in front of him.

  “Right. What do I do next?”

  “Call up the data base, identify yourself and give them your code number. Then guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every account has a security code known only to the owner. Try any old ones that you remember. If that doesn’t work guess at new ones. These companies have been told what is happening and have switched off the alarm software. Usually, after the third attempt, the connection is cut and the police are given the number of the calling phone that is making the attempt to break in.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “A court order is needed to crack in. Which will take a couple of days at the fastest.”

  Brian found that old habits die hard. Three of the four opened at once to some of his favorite Irish code words. Nothing as gross as SHAMROCK, but ANLAR opened the first and LEITHRAS the other two.

  “An Lar means city center, it’s on the front of all the buses. Leithras is the Gaelic word for toilet,” he explained. “Bathroom humor is greatly enjoyed by kids. But I have no idea what will open this last one. Can we save it for a bit and see what’s in the other three? It’s a little like getting my memory back, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is,” Benicoff agreed. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll start the proceedings for a court order on the last one, just in case. More papers for you to sign.”

  The first account turned out to be a letter box, only a little over two years old. Brian went to the oldest letters and read through them. It gave him an uneasy feeling. None of the correspondents was familiar—and his own letters had an alien ring to them. Yes, he had signed them—but, no, it did not sound like him at all. It was very much like reading someone else’s correspondence. There were occasional mentions of AI, but only in passing—and never in detail.

  He pushed all of it into the computer’s memory for his attention at some other time, then looked at the other two. One held his financial statements and IRS reports and was fascinating in a depressing sort of way. He had started earning money from royalties when he was quite young, he remembered that, from software for the most part. Then there was a large deposit, from the sale of their house—then more from his father’s estate. He hurried on. So did the money. In a few years it was all gone—just before he went to work for Megalobe. The correspondence with the corporation made fascinating reading, particularly the details of his contract. There was much food for thought here. He stored this one as well and turned to the last account.

  Flipped through a few screens, read very closely for a while—then wiped it. The doctor had gone out and Benicoff was bent over the phone, punching in a number. It was almost sunset and the room was growing dark.

  “Ben—got a moment?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I’m really getting tired. I’ll look at these in the morning.”

  “Let me put the keyboard away. Find anything about AI?”

  “Nothing in these.”

  “Then I’ll accelerate the court order. After you get a night’s sleep try to think of more passwords, okay?”

  “Sure thing. See you in the morning.”

  “You are beginning to look tired. Get some rest.”

  Brian nodded and watched the big man leave. Not tired. Totally depressed.

  He had read just enough of the contents to know that he did not like it. The opening was familiar enough, the notes he had made after the disastrous end of his affair with Kim. Once the depression and hatred had ebbed a bit he had made more notes on his Managing Machine theory. This he remembered developing into his AI work—but he also remembered noting that it could be a means of personal control. Apparently he had carried this idea even further, developing it into a new mind science, more theory than fact from what he had seen in the file, called Zenome Therapy. It didn’t sound so way-out and nutty as Dianetics but there were, to put it kindly, large undercurrents of megalomania running through it. It had not made nice reading—and he was pretty sure that he did not like the person who had written it.

  Some decisions are easy to make once the facts are in front of you. He had been thinking about this for the last week and the so-called science of Zenome Therapy made his mind up. One of the paging buttons was on the bedside table and he pressed it. The nurse entered a moment later.

  “Do you know if Doc Snaresbrook is still here?”

  “I believe that she is, supervising the equipment installation. The doctor is moving into a new office that has been assigned to her here.”

  “Could I see her, please.”

  “Of course.”

  The last colors of twilight were fading and Brian overrode the lighting controls to watch them. When the sky was dark he allowed the blinking warning button to have its way. The curtains closed as the lights came on. The doctor came in a moment later.

  “Well, Brian, you have had a busy day. Feeling the worst for it?”

  “Not really. I was tired earlier but a nap fixed that. How about my vital readouts?”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  “Good. Then you would say that I am on the road to recovery, reasonably sane other than suffering from the delusion that I am only fourteen years old—though I am really over twenty-one.”

  “Take out the word ‘delusion’ and I would agree.”

  “Have I ever thanked you for what you have done for me?”

  “You have now and I’m grateful—and tremendously happy at the way things are turning out.”

  “I don’t want to make you unhappy, Doc. But would you be terribly put out if we stopped the memory restoration sessions pretty soon?”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Put it another way. I’m satisfied with the way I am. I think that I would like to grow up on my own from now on. Become an older me, if you see what I mean. If the truth be known I don’t really care about the other me, the one that was wiped out by the bullet. I don’t mind going on with the sessions to find out how badly my memory has been affected, if there are things I should know—that I don’t. I want my past restored as much as possible. Then as soon as you are satisfied with that, maybe you will consider s
topping there. Though I would like to go on with the experiments you suggested to see if I really can interface with the internal CPU. Is that okay with you?”

  Erin Snaresbrook was shocked, tried not show it. “Well, of course you can’t be forced. But sleep on it, please. We can talk about it tomorrow. It is rather a big decision to make.”

  “I know. That’s why I am making it. Oh yes, one other thing. But we can take care of that tomorrow as well.”

  “What is that?”

  “I want to see a lawyer.”

  15

  November 11, 2023

  Benicoff waited until Brian had finished his breakfast before he went in to see him. Made small talk about his health, the weather, told him that he was trying to get a court order to unlock the computer file which might be in later in the day, waited for Brian to open the topic. Waited in vain. Had to do it himself in the end.

  “I got a pretty disturbed call from Dr. Snaresbrook. She tells me that you want to stop the memory sessions. Want to tell me about it?”

  “It’s, well, a kind of personal matter, Ben.”

  “If it’s personal—then I’m not asking. But if it bears upon my investigation, or AI, then I’m interested. They are all really tied up together, aren’t they?”

  “I guess so—which doesn’t make it any easier. Can I talk to you as a friend, then? Which I think you are.”

  “I take that as a compliment. And we were pretty good friends before all this happened. What you have gone through was damned rough—I can tell you truthfully that a lot of people wouldn’t have made it. You’re a tough mick and I like you.”

  Brian smiled. “Thanks.”

  “No thanks needed or expected. And I’ll be happy to be taken into your confidence. With the qualifier that you shouldn’t forget that I am still in charge of the Megalobe investigation. Anything that you say that has to do with the case will have to be for the record.”

  “I know that—and I still want to help with that as much as I can. For my own sake as well. When I grow up—or when I grew up—past tense—I invented AI, then had it stolen from me along with my memory. So now that I know that AI can be built, I’m going to reinvent it if I have to. But I am going to do it, not another guy with my name. Am I making any sense?”

  “In a word—no.”

  They both laughed at that. Brian threw back the covers and put on his robe, kicked into his slippers. The window was open and he went and stood before it, breathing in the clean ocean air. “A lot better here than the Gulf. Too humid there, too hot, I never did get used to it.” He dropped into the armchair.

  “I’ll say it another way. Let’s imagine that what happened to me, the shooting and everything, let us say that this thing happened to you. There you sit, thirty-seven years of age …”

  “Many thanks. Fifty is closer to it.”

  “Right. So how do you feel if I told you that you got knocked on the head and that you are really seventy years old? But that’s okay because I’ve got an invention that will jiggle around with your mind and make you seventy again.”

  And Benicoff frowned into the distance. “I’m beginning to get to what you mean. I don’t really want to be that old without having lived to be that old. Bringing back those memories would be like letting a stranger into my head.”

  “You said it better than I could. That’s exactly how I feel. If I find out that there are holes in my past memory, things that I need to know but have forgotten, sure I would like to fill the holes, so we are keeping on with the brain sessions. But I’m going to grow into the future, not have it pumped into my head.”

  “What about your education? You can’t very well say that you have a degree in something that you can’t remember.”

  “Point taken. If I can’t remember something then I’ll just have to relearn it. I have a transcript from graduate school, lists all the courses and lectures—and I’ve a copy of my reading list. And the doc says that if those memories are still there we might be able to find them. I’m willing to do that. If not—I’ll just learn them again. In fact a lot of the texts are completely outdated and I’ll need help on my reading list.”

  “Let me see your list for Expert Systems. I still try to keep up with the literature.”

  Brian looked up, startled. “But I thought you were …”

  “A civil service drudge! I just grew into that role—and not by choice. I started out writing Expert Systems and went from that into troubleshooting others. I got so good at it that I ended up here. The sad story of my life.”

  “Not too sad. Not everyone can phone up the President and have a chat—”

  As if on cue the telephone rang and Brian picked it up, listened then nodded. “Right. Tell him to come up.”

  “And I’ll be going,” Ben said. “I already made that lawyer you had on the phone just now wait an hour until I was through.” Ben laughed at Brian’s shocked expression. “The President’s investigator is all-seeing—never forget that. Part of that job is seeing that you stay alive. All visitors are screened. For the time being privacy is out.”

  As he said this Ben put his finger to his lips, then pointed upward and shaped his mouth to silently say General Schorcht. Brian nodded understanding and Ben left.

  He should have thought of that for himself. His terminal led right to the General and here, on a military base, it stood to reason that the room was probably bugged as well. That was something else that he had to keep in mind.

  “Come in,” he called out when he heard the knock. His eyes widened when the uniformed Army officer opened the door. His name tag read Major Mike Sloane.

  “You asked to see me.”

  “Not knowingly. But I did want to see a lawyer.”

  “Then that’s me.” He smiled, an easy grin on his lean, tanned face. “Adjutant General’s office. Cleared for Top Secret, which is how I got to read your file. So tell me, Brian—what can I do to help?”

  “Are you, well, sort of cleared for civilian law as well?”

  Mike laughed. “There is only one kind of law. I slaved in the legal snake pits of Wall Street before I opted for travel, education and career.”

  “How are you on contracts?”

  “A whiz kid. That was one of the reasons I enlisted—to get away from corporate law.”

  “An important question then. Will you be helping me—or the Army?”

  “A good question. If there is an overlap the military comes first. If this is strictly a civilian matter it is confidential between us, or until you hire civil counsel. Going to tell me what it’s about?”

  “Sure. As soon as I know that it is confidential. I know that my terminal is bugged—is there a chance that this room is bugged as well?”

  “Now that is what I call an equally good question. Give me a few minutes to make a call and I’ll see if I can give you an answer.”

  It was more than a few minutes, closer to an hour before the Major returned.

  “Right, Brian, what can I do for you?”

  “Was the room bugged?”

  “Naturally I cannot answer that. But I can assure you that our talk is confidential.”

  “Good. Then tell me—can I sue Megalobe for not protecting me, for putting me in a situation that was hazardous to my health?”

  “My first reaction is to say ‘Not easily.’ The government owns a good share of the company and no one ever got rich suing city hall. Then I’ll have to see a copy of your employment contract.”

  “It’s on the table, right over there. That is what got me upset. And I don’t really want to sue them, the threat will do. Any threat to get a better contract than that one. Do you know all about me—about my memory?”

  “Affirmative. I read the complete file.”

  “Then you will know that I have no memory of the past few years. So I was reading some of my correspondence and I discovered that far from being a benefactor, Megalobe put the financial squeeze on me when I ran out of money to finish developing my AI. I discovered, u
nhappily, that I was almost completely bereft of any financial sense. But I wanted to finish the work so much that I let myself be bullied into signing that contract. Which appears to give the company a lot more than it gives me.”

  “Then reading it takes top priority.”

  “Go to it. I’m getting an orange juice. You too? Or something stronger.”

  “Not on duty. Juice will do fine.”

  The Major read slowly and carefully. Brian read as well, a copy he had printed out of a tutorial article by Carbonell about the new mathematical field of excluor geometry. It was a subject of psychology, concerned basically with the question of why people begin to use diagrams whenever verbal explanations get too complicated. This was because language is still fundamentally serial and one-dimensional. We can say former or latter—but there is no easy way to refer to four or five things at the same time. With AI always in the front of his mind he realized that just because human intelligence worked this way did not put any limitations on artificial intelligence. Instead of three or four pronoun-like ideas, an AI could handle dozens of “pronomes” at the same time. He blinked and looked up when he heard the lawyer laugh as he put the contract down. He shook his head and drained the glass of juice before he spoke.

  “As we used to say back in law school—you been screwed without the benefit of being laid. This contract is worse than you said. I really think you wouldn’t profit at all from your work if you left their employment. And as long as you worked for them the profit would be all theirs.”

  “Can you write me a better contract?”

  “With pleasure. Since the Army wants to see AI developed as much as anyone does, it would be very much in our favor to sort this matter out at once. But there are some strange precedents here. The contract is legal and binding—but you didn’t sign it?”

  “No, the older me did. The me sitting here never saw it until yesterday.”