The Turing Option

by Harry Harrison

  “Morning, Doc. I have some interesting news for you.” After he finished describing what had happened there was a long silence on the line. “You still there?”

  “Yes, sorry, Brian, just thinking about what you said—and I believe you might very well be right.”

  “Then it is good news?”

  “Incredibly good. Look—I’m going to shift some appointments around and see if I can’t get out there by noon. Is that all right with you?”

  “Sounds great. I’ll be in the lab.”

  He spent the morning skimming through his recovered backup notes, trying to get a feel for the work he had done, the research and construction—all of the memories the bullet had destroyed. It was a strange sensation reading what he had written, almost a message from the grave. Because the Brian who had written these notes was dead and would remain dead forever. He knew that there was no way that he at the age of fourteen would ever grow into the very same man of twenty who had written this first report, based on several years of research. In the end to build the world’s first humanlike intelligence.

  Nor could he understand any of the shorthand notes and bits of program that his twenty-year-old self had written. He smiled ruefully at this and turned back to the first page. The only way to proceed was to follow everything, step by step. He would read ahead, whenever he could, to avoid dead ends and false starts. But basically he would have to recreate everything that he had done, do it all over again.

  Dr. Snaresbrook phoned him at twelve-thirty when she arrived: he shut down his work and joined her in the Megalobe clinic.

  “Come in, Brian,” she said, looking him up and down with a critical eye. “You’re looking remarkably fit.”

  “I’m feeling that way as well. An hour or two reading in the sun every day—and a short walk like you said.”

  “Eating well?”

  “You bet—the army rations are very good. And look at this …” He took off his cap and rubbed the fuzz growing there. “A mini crew cut. It’ll be real hair one day soon.”

  “Any pain from the incisions?”

  “None.”

  “Dizziness? Shortness of breath? Fatigue?”

  “No, no and no.”

  “I’m immensely pleased. Now—I want you to tell me exactly what happened, every detail.”

  “Listen to this first,” he said, passing over a disk. “I recorded this just after I had the dream. If I sound sort of stoned it’s because I took that sleeping potion you gave me.”

  “That fact alone is interesting. It was a tranquilizer and that might have been one of the contributing factors to the incident.”

  Snaresbrook listened to the recording three times, making notes each time. Then she questioneded Brian closely, going over the same ground again and again until she saw that he was tiring.

  “Enough. Let’s have a cup of coffee and I’ll let you go.”

  “Aren’t you going to see if I can do it again—but consciously this time?”

  “Not today. Get some rest first—”

  “I’m not tired! I was just falling asleep from saying the same things over and over again. Come on, Doc, be a sport. Let’s try it now while the whole thing is fresh in my mind.”

  “You’re right—strike while the iron is hot! All right—let’s start with something simple. What would be the square of … of 123456?”

  Brian visualized the number, tried to find somewhere to put it. He pulled and pushed mentally, twisting his thoughts about it. Tried harder, grunted aloud with the effort.

  “15522411383936! That’s the square, I’m sure of it!”

  “Do you know how you did it?” she asked excitedly.

  “Not really. It was sort of like groping for a memory, something like a word almost on the tip of one’s tongue. Reaching and finding it.”

  “Can you do it again?”

  “I hope so—yes, why not? I don’t know how it worked in the dream, but I think that I can do it again. But I have no idea how I do it.”

  “I think I know what is happening. But in order to verify my diagnosis I’ll have to hook you up to the connection machine again. See what is going on in your brain. Will that be all right?”

  “Of course. I must find out how this is happening.”

  She turned on the connection machine while he settled into the chair. The delicate fingers made their adjustments and he leaned back, ordered his thoughts.

  “Then here is what we will do.” She moved the cursor through the menu on her screen. “Here is an article I downloaded into my computer yesterday from a journal. It’s titled ‘Protospecialist Intensities in Juvenile Development.’ Do you know anything about the subject?”

  “I know a bit about what protospecialists are. The nerve centers located in the brain stem that are responsible for most of our basic instincts. Hunger, rage, sex, sleep—things like that. But I don’t think that I ever read any article like that.”

  “You couldn’t have, it was only published a few months ago. Then I am going to load it into your implant CPU’s memory—under that title.” She quickly touched the keys, then turned back to him. “It should be there now. See if you are aware of it. Are you?”

  “No, not really. I mean I can remember the title because I just heard it.”

  “Then try to do what you did a little while ago, what you did in the dream. Tell me about the article.”

  Brian’s lip tightened as he frowned, struggling inside his brain with invisible effort.

  “Something—I can’t tell. I mean there is something there if I can only get close to it. Get a handle on it …” His eyes opened wide and he began to speak, the words tumbling from his lips.

  “ … as the child grows, each primitive protospecialist grows level after level of new memory and management machinery and, at the same time, each of them tends to find new ways to influence and exploit what the others can do. The result of this process is to make the older versions of those specialists less separate and distinct. Thus, as those different systems learn to share their cognitive attachments, the resulting cross-connections lead to the more complex mixtures of feelings characteristic of more adult emotions. And by the time we’re adults, these systems have become too complicated even for ourselves to understand. By the time we’ve passed through all those stages of development, our grown-up minds have been rebuilt too many times to remember or understand much of how it felt to be an infant.”

  Brian clamped his lips shut, then spoke again, slowly and hesitantly. “Is that … it? What the article was about?”

  Dr. Snaresbrook looked at her screen and nodded. “That is not what it was about—that is it word for word. You’ve done it, Brian! What sensations are connected with it?”

  He frowned in concentration. “It’s like a real memory, though not exactly. It’s there but I don’t know all about it. I sort of have to read through it in my thoughts before it is complete, understandable.”

  “Of course. That’s because it is in the computer’s memory, not yours. You can access it but you won’t understand it until you have gone through it, paying attention to and thinking about what each sentence means. Making the proper sort of links with other things you already know. Only then will you have made the cross-connections that are true understanding.”

  “No instant plug-in knowledge in the head?”

  “I’m afraid not. Memory is made of so many cross-connections, that can be accessed in so many ways, that it is not linear at all like a computer’s memory. But once you have gone through it once or twice it will be part of your own memory, accessible at any time.”

  “It’s fun,” he said, then smiled. “My goodness, I even know the page numbers and footnotes! Do you think we could do it with a whole book—or an encyclopedia?”

  “I don’t see why not, since there is still plenty of memory available in the implant CPU. It would certainly speed up the process of relearning. But—this is such a wonderful thing! Direct access to a computer by thought alone. It is such a wide
-open concept with such endless possibilities.”

  “And it could help my work. Is there any reason why I couldn’t load in all my earlier research notes so I could access them just by thinking about it?”

  “No reason that I can think of.”

  “Good. It would be nice to have everything there to digest. I’ll do it now, upload all of the retrieved notes from my backup GRAM here—” He yawned. “No, I won’t. Tomorrow will be soon enough. I want to think about this a bit in any case. It all takes some getting used to.”

  “I agree completely. But this is more than enough for one day. If you are thinking of going back to the lab—don’t. You are now through with work.”

  Brian nodded agreement. “In all truth I had planned to take a walk, think this new thing out.”

  “A good idea—as long as you don’t tire yourself.”

  He put on his sunglasses before he stepped out in the midday desert glare. An armed corporal opened the door for him, fell in a few paces behind as he spoke softly into his lapel microphone. Other soldiers were out on both flanks, another walking ahead. Brian was getting used to their constant presence, barely noticed it now as he strolled along the path to his favorite bench by the ornamental pool. The Megalobe executive buildings were on the other side of the water, but shielded from sight by the trees and shrubbery. He was the only one who ever seemed to come here and he enjoyed the silence and privacy. He scowled when his phone buzzed. He thought of not answering it, then sighed and unclipped it from his belt.

  “Delaney.”

  “Major Wood at reception. Captain Kahn is here. Says you weren’t expecting her today but would it be okay to talk to you?”

  “Yes, of course. Tell her I’m at …”

  “I know where you are, sir.” There was more than a hint of firmness in the Major’s voice at the suggestion that he didn’t know Brian’s location down to the nearest millimeter. “I’ ll escort her to you.”

  They came down the path from the main entrance, the wide-shouldered bulk of the Major dwarfing Shelly’s small but shapely figure. She wasn’t in uniform today and was wearing a short white dress more suitable to the desert climate. Brian stood up when she came close; Woody turned sharply on his heel and left them alone.

  “I’m not disturbing your work, am I?” There was a thin line of worry between her eyes.

  “Not at all. Just taking a break as you see.”

  “I should have called first. But I just got back from L.A. and wanted to put you in the picture about progress. I have been working with some of the best investigators in the LAPD. With the kind of work you are doing I’m sure you know all about Expert Systems?”

  CONTOUR MAP OF BORAEGO, FROM USGS

  SATELLITE SCAN DATA

  “I wouldn’t say all—and I am surely out of touch with work done in the last years. But tell me, what language do you write your programs in?”

  “LAMA 3.5.”

  He smiled. “That’s good news. My father was one of the team that developed LAMA, Language for Logic and Metaphor. Is your machine detective up and running?”

  “Yes, it is in a working prototype stage. Works well enough to be interesting. I call it ‘Dick Tracy.’”

  “How does it work?”

  “Basically, it is pretty straightforward. Three main sections. The first is a bunch of different Expert Systems, each with a specific job to do. These specialists are controlled by a fairly simple manager that looks for correlations and notices whenever several of them agree on anything. One of them has already searched through data bases all over the country, making lists of all transportation methods. Now it is compiling its own data bases about automobiles, trucks, air travel and so on. Even water transportation systems.”

  “Out here in the desert?”

  “Well, the Salton Sea is not very far. Then I have a lot of other specialist programs compiling various kinds of geographic data, especially satellite scans in this area for the period of time we are interested in.”

  “Sounds good.” Brian stood. “I’m getting stiff—want to walk a bit?”

  “Of course.” She looked about her as they strolled down the path. “Is this a military base? There seem to be an awful lot of soldiers about.”

  “All mine,” he said, and smiled. “You notice how they keep pace with us?”

  “I like that.”

  “I like it even more. As you might imagine I don’t really look forward to a fourth attack on my life. Now the question is, can the system you’ve put together help us catch up with those crooks? Has Dick Tracy come up with hot leads yet?”

  “Not really. It is still processing data.”

  “Then throw it onto a GRAM and bring it here. The big computer that I’m using will give you all the computational power that you could ever need.”

  “That would really speed things up. I’ll need a day or two to pull all the loose ends together.” She glanced up at the sun. “I think that I better go now. I am sure that I can get everything finalized by Wednesday, copy all my notes, and bring the GRAM out Thursday morning.”

  “Perfect. I’ll walk you back to the guardhouse—I’m not allowed near the gate—and let Woody know what is happening.”

  After she had gone he realized that he should have asked her for a copy of LAMA 3.5—then laughed at his stupidity. The days of carrying programs around on disks, other than those that needed top security, were long gone. He headed for the lab. He probably had a copy of the program there on CD ROM. If not he could download from a data base.

  This new-old world of 2024 still took some getting used to.

  22

  February 21, 2024

  Benicoff and Evgeni were waiting in front of Brian’s lab when he got there in the morning.

  “This is Evgeni’s last day here and we want to check you out on the whole system before he leaves.”

  “Back to Siberia, Evgeni?”

  “Soon I hope—you got too hot a place here. But first I go to do a bunch of tutorials in Silicon Valley, finish technical instruction on latest hardware. USA make them, Russia buy them, I fix them. Help design next version. Plenty of rubles in Evgeni’s future, bet my arse.”

  “Good luck—and plenty of rubles. What’s the program, Ben?” He touched his thumb to the plate and the door clicked open.

  “Troubleshooting. All the equipment has been set up and is operating—Evgeni is a great technician.”

  “Write that out on paper—recommendation worth plenty more rubles!”

  “I will, don’t worry. But when you go we don’t want to have any more technicians around this place.”

  “Sounds a winner. But what if a massive crash knocks out the whole system?”

  “There not one system—is network of couple systems. Each got copy of network program that contains all diagnostic material from every machine. On top of this every memory and diagnostic report is copied from each machine to a couple of others every few minutes.”

  “So whatever goes wrong, we should usually be able to recover all the functions. At the worst, we might only lose what was computed in the past few minutes.”

  “Da. And in most cases, lose nothing at all.”You got trouble, E-mail to me in …”

  “Visitors at the front entrance,” the security computer said.

  Brian touched an ikon on the screen, and it displayed a view from the outside video pickup. Two soldiers were standing at attention, one on each side of Captain Kahn.

  “Back in a minute,” he said, then walked the length of the lab to the entrance and thumbed open the door for her.

  “I hope I’m not too early? The Major told me that you were already here.”

  “No, perfect timing. Let me show you your terminal and get you set up. I guess you’ll want to download your program and files first.”

  She took a GRAM out of her purse. “All in here. I didn’t want to send them through public lines. This is now the only copy—the rest has been wiped from the police computer. There is an awful lot of c
lassified material that we don’t want anyone else looking at.”

  He led the way through the lab to a partitioned office at the far end.

  “Just the terminal, desk and chair here now,” he said. “Let me know if there is anything else you might need.”

  “This will be fine.”

  “Done,” Ben said, standing and stretching. “I double-checked and Evgeni has done a great job. All the instructions for accessing and using the programs are right here in RAM.”

  “I want to see that—but can you wait half a mo’? Shelly just came in and we can talk to her as soon as she has downloaded her Expert Program. This is a good chance for us to find out how far she has gotten.”

  They walked Evgeni to the entrance, where he pumped their hands strenuously.

  “Good equipment, good fun working here!”

  “Good luck—and plenty rubles.”

  “Da!”

  Shelly turned around in her chair when they came in and pointed to the empty office.

  “Sorry about the hospitality.”

  “I’ll get a couple of chairs,” Ben said. “And some coffee. Anyone else interested? No? Two chairs then and one coffee.”

  “Any results to tell us about?” Brian said.

  “Some. I have written the program to link the data-base manager with the discovery program and the human interface. It is mostly—I I hope—debugged. I started it up with the goal of solving the Megalobe robbery. It has been running now for a couple of days. By now it might be ready to answer some questions. I held off until you were both here at the same time. This is your investigation, Ben. Do you want to go ahead?”

  “Sure. How do I get into the program?”

  “I started out using a working label of ‘Dick Tracy’—and it stuck, I’m afraid. That and your name are all you need.”