Refining tales eternity has told
Into something finer still than gold,” said Cummings.
“Not bad. Your own?”
Cummings inclined his large and humble head.
“Good stuff. Pithy. Thought-filled.”
“Good of you to say, sir. If there is nothing else?”
Rat shook his head. Already his consciousness was slipping into that of the little girl.
Cummings stuck a little rubber pacifier in Rat’s mouth. “Very good, sir. I shall see you in the morning.”
Cummings’ parting words were Greek to Rat. He sucked contentedly at the pacifier and knew, somehow, that he was the first of his kind . . . unlike any other child that had ever been. Firstborn of the . . .
Intermind
The eleventh night
Tikita Bing was an unusual child, even apart from her name, in that she was born with a communications port in the delicate and otherwise normal nape of her neck. She was, in every other regard, a normal, beautiful, healthy baby. This fact was of secondary interest to the consortium of Simi Valley scientists who had taken part in her creation. She was, first and foremost, an experiment, the living, breathing result of the effort to unite technology and biology.
Previous experiments, involving the implantation of technological components into adult subjects, had failed. Disastrously. News of these failures had been leaked to the media, despite the project’s Top Secret government designation, and the public responded with predictable outrage; moral objections from the right, Frankenphobia from the left, all stirred to frenzy by talk show hosts, talking heads, and media pundits and experts of every persuasion.
The Senate subcommittee responsible for overseeing the experiment had been feeling the heat and threatened to cut funding unless dramatic, positive results were forthcoming in the following fiscal year, which through some curious alignment of the stars, was an election year. Competition between the various elements of the consortium had been intense.
It was at this juncture that Sim Tyang, molecular biologist affiliated with JPL Laboratories in Pasadena, revealed the results of her own experiments: the bio-chip, an organic microprocessor capable of both self-genesis—the ability to learn from experience—and molecular growth. The revelation rocked the insular scientific community. The implications were obvious: if the device could be successfully implanted in a living organism, preferably human, the world would have its first functioning Prime Node, the ultimate scale-free axon in which nature and technology would at last become one.
While her fellow scientists debated the ethical and procedural implications of the next logical step—the need for a suitable host—Sim Tyang covertly had the chip surgically inserted into the fetus of her eleven-week-old child. A girl. As the child grew, the chip grew accordingly, hard-wired to her brain.
In the fullness of time, Tikita Bing was born.
By that time, Sim Tyang had brought a few trusted colleagues into her secret. These were now gathered around the crib for the first viewing.
“I don’t understand the com port,” said Paul Renyi, Hungarian physiologist and mathematician whose thick, guttural accent obscured his words to all except those who worked with him most closely. He was skeptical. “You say it appeared. What means this ‘appeared’? It is a technological component. Not biological. How it comes to ‘appear’?
Sim Tyang didn’t know how it happened, but she knew it was not an innovation of her devising. When the child had first been placed on her breast, still warm and wet from the womb, she had taken the customary inventory; fingers, toes, eyes, ears, all in place and of the requisite number. But, running her careful fingers under the damp strands of hair at the base of the infant’s skull, she had discovered the anomaly. As the child nursed, she had studied the aberration carefully. “It is not technological,” she stated flatly. “It is biological. As much a part of her as her belly button.”
“This can’t be,” said Renyi with a brain-clearing shake of the head. “It is a birth defect. A congenital deformity.”
Dr. Stephanie Davies, double-threat theoretical physicist from the Australian Center for Astrobiology and board-certified brain surgeon, disagreed. “It’s not.” She stroked the child’s forehead gently. “I’ve inspected it closely. It is all flesh and cartilage. No synthetic components at all.”
“But . . . has anyone . . .” The hesitant speaker was Jhanes Singh, shy, brilliant transgenic theorist from the Sarbangh Institute in Bombay. “Surely you haven’t . . .”
“Of course I did,” said Tyang. “As soon as I saw what it was . . .”
“What you thought it might be,” Renyi corrected.
“What I presumed it was,” Tyang continued, “I took a USB cable from my laptop and inserted it. It even clicked. A little spur of bone or cartilage seems to act as the clip.”
Frank Pergee, M.I.T.’s Executive Director of Government Projects, had been pacing in the background. He was the prototypical ultra-nerd, down to the assortment of multi-colored pens in his shirt pocket and the little knot of white adhesive bandage on the bridge of his horn-rimmed glasses, an unnecessary accessory he wore as a badge of his nerdiness. “This is monstrous,” he said, thrusting his way toward the crib. “They’re going to crucify us in the press.”
“The press will never know,” said Davies calmly. “What has happened in this room is between the five of us.”
Ben Franklin said ‘three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
“But the funding!” Pergee objected. “The Pentagon will have to know. They’re the funding agency.”
“Screw the Pentagon,” snapped Sim. “Tell them it was a failure. We have what we want. The experiment can continue, without their interference.”
“But, this is your own child!” Pergee pressed. “Think how history has treated Freud for the experiments he conducted on his daughter . . .”
Renyi was studying the port. “It can’t work,” he declared. “It can’t actually connect to an electronic device.” He stood up. “Even if it did, there’s no way information could actually be transferred. She’d have to be programmed somehow. Some kind of biological software . . .”
“She is the biological software,” said Davies softly but emphatically. “If Dr. Tyang’s bio-chip performs according to theory, it will write its own programs. It’s platform independent. She will have only to think at a computer and it will perform whatever function she intends.”
“Think of it!” said Tyang, clutching the baby to her chest with an intensity that surprised the child from its rest. “She will be the Absolute Prime. Not only the hub of all knowledge, but knowledge informed by human consciousness!”
“And what of conscience?” said Singh.
And the child grew. And she played with other children. And she observed the world around her. And at night, while she slept, her mother would connect her to the Web. And so, by the bit, by the byte, by the kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, tetrabyte, teraflop, and googol flop, all the electronically-traded information in the world was downloaded into the child’s brain during the formative years when she was most receptive to input.
“It’s unnatural, the rate at which she learns,” said Davies. It had been her turn to tuck Tikita in for the night, a chore that awakened atavistic sensations in her mitochondrial DNA. Satisfying sensations. She poured herself a glass of Madeira and sank into the soft cushions of the Naugahyde sofa, across the coffee table from the child’s mother.
This was not news to Sim Tyang. “I have a theory about that.” Davies sipped and waited. “We acquire information through our senses. Our experiences.” She paused. Davies nodded.
“This information, as it is processed, creates connections in the synapses of our brain. Much like the monkey in the cage that, once it understands which button to push to get its treat, adopts that knowledge to the point where its response is no longer the result of deliberation, but reflexive.”
Again, Davies nodded.
“The inf
ormation is patterned into our neurocircuits, creating muscle memory.”
“I see that.”
“What if, somehow, Tikita’s bio-chip does not require sensory input to process information?”
“Sensory bypass?” said Davies. “An interesting notion. You’re saying the information she receives instantly forms patterns in her brain similar to those that would appear as the result of personal experience, or study . . . or practice?”
“It would explain how she learns so quickly. How she adapts and adopts.”
“But how does it work? How would you explain it?”
Sim Tyang shrugged. “I don’t know. It must be an ancillary action of the bio-chip. One I hadn’t anticipated.” She stared into the depths of her glass of wine. “Its power is phenomenal.”
By the time she was three, Tikita Bing could communicate perfectly in forty-seven languages, including all Chinese dialects, her accent indiscernible from that of native speakers. By the time she was four—gifted with a natural physical dexterity—she possessed the skills of a virtuoso with every musical instrument that came within her grasp. In her fifth year, she exercised logical capabilities that, in debate, reduced the most advanced thinkers in each field of scientific endeavor into stuttering, ham-tongued imbeciles.
The process was simple. Tikita called it extrapolative logic: following a thought, a concept, or theory backward to its genesis, and forward to its ultimate conclusion. In so doing she often revealed not only flaws in the original thought but demonstrated that, in the majority of cases, a person’s most adamantly held convictions were little more than inherited bias, misconceptions predicated on the beliefs and preferred theories of their own teachers and mentors.
Thus every concept had its Enlightened One, its apostles, prophets and seers, and these were the icons to which successive generations of disciples paid homage. These she called scientific fundamentalists. Like fundamentalists of every stripe, they engaged in perpetual acts of self-deception, sustaining error from generation to generation—like familial bigotry—labeling adherents to opposing views as heretics or dismissing them as idiots. Each field of study has many denominations, each with its proponents and detractors. These, she decided, were not thinkers, but biological repositories of ignorance, ensuring the perpetuation of error.
These observations bore in her the notion that thoughts, theories, and ideas are alive. Once born, they battle for life in the same way a plant or animal does. Tooth and nail. Feeding upon those susceptible to its dogma, thriving in its dissemination.
Survival of the fittest. Or, as Tikita saw things, survival of the least unfit.
Tikita had just celebrated her sixth birthday when the expanding, secretive group of scientists, specialists, and theorists that had made her their study, realized the experiment was over. They had become the subjects of her investigation.
Her first independent act, as might be expected of any organism contending for survival, had been to prohibit the research that had brought her into being. This she did first by developing a device that, when inserted in her port, allowed her to remain always connected to the Web, thus able to wirelessly monitor global communications. Minor modifications to the device enabled her to eavesdrop on telephone and cellular conversations, and to receive broadcasts from the full spectrum of frequencies. All of this information was fed into, and processed in nanoseconds, by compartments of her brain relegated to the purpose. No article in a scientific journal, no e-mail between researchers, no government directive, no private conversation, was free of her scrutiny.
Of course, no one knew why subsequent experiments failed. That would have given too much away,
No one was more aware than Tikita, that she had become a living, breathing ‘B’ movie nightmare. Those responsible for her creation—even her own mother—feared her. They talked in mime and whispers behind her back when they thought she couldn’t hear or see. They vented their petty misgivings in closed rooms they thought were beyond her abilities to penetrate. But not even in their wildest speculation, not in their most fevered conjecture, did they conceive of how powerful she had become. Such a simple thing to connect oneself to the power grid, to the copper wires and fiber-optic cables that knit the world like a ball of yarn, to the junction boxes and power outlets and telephone jacks in every room. Every hall. Every closet. Every bathroom. To the video cameras on every street corner.
She had become the electromagnetic field. There was nothing of importance she didn’t know or couldn’t find out. But if they knew how much she knew, they would first worship her in their own misbegotten way; goddess of the Prime Node. Then their fear, their very instinct for survival, would compel them to disable her. Perhaps kill her. Wasn’t this the fate of gods; either emasculation or death?
She kept these thoughts to herself. She behaved, in many ways, like a normal six-year-old to keep them off their guard.
Tikita sat cross-legged on the floor, eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich. She might have been any ten-year-old American girl of Asian ancestry except that, as she chewed and combed the long auburn hair of her favorite neoprene doll, her thoughts roamed the most remote, unexplored regions of theoretical physics. She had long ago resolved the Grand Unification dilemma; had tested, re-tested, and refined the solution to perfection. For her, the first and second laws of thermodynamics dwelt side-by-side in perfect harmony. The great quantum bridge had been crossed, and had proved but a footpath to worlds of thought her keepers would not conceive of for eons.
Yet, she knew nothing. All her knowing, all her accumulation of data, all her study of mankind, had revealed one unassailable truth: the more of creation she was able to discern through the powerful, unimpeded telescope of her mind, the tinier she realized was the sweep of that instrument. One universe gave way to another. Then another and another; a universe of universes; and a universe of universes of universes. And beyond all this, undiscovered layers of comprehension that opened each of these to numberless interpretations and withered her mind. There were not enough years to life. Not enough heartbeats. Not enough processing capacity in all of the computers, satellites, and databanks to which she was forever connected, to even pierce the membrane of so great a sack of secrets.
The unknowable was extreme. Yet, it beckoned. She could almost hear its voice. There was no returning from the intellectual voyage upon which she had embarked. The tentacles of her mind surged ever upward and outward. Not far off, she knew, just beyond the misted maze of computations that etched fantastical abstractions on her mind, was the Wisdom that orchestrated it all. The face of God. Not theories. Not theologies or philosophies. Not little manmade idols of wood and stone with no more power to affect being than her plastic doll, but God as He is known to Himself alone. A God as connected to every subatomic particle of creation as she was to the electronic infrastructure of the planet.
Tikita had a plan.
When she had her first period, Tikita became normal.
Though stunned and baffled, her mother and the other scientists attributed the change to the biological process. Nature, it seemed, had somehow overwritten the Prime Node. They breathed a collective sigh of relief. The experiment had been far too successful. They had pushed the boundaries too far. They’d come too close to creating an intelligence that would, in time, have mastered them. The book—the Pandora’s Box—was closed and sealed.
For the first time, Tikita went to school. She made friends. She made mostly B’s, and seemed to struggle for them. She giggled, and flirted, and had boyfriends, and went to parties. She was what everyone expected a teenage girl to be.
She graduated high school and went to college, though Sim Tyang had to foot the bill. No university would give Tikita a scholarship; her grades weren’t good enough, and her soccer only passable.
In time, Tikita fell in love and married.
A few years passed, and she had a son. They called him Emanuel. He had his father’s eyes, nose, and ears. But he had something else. Something specia
l he could only have inherited from his mother.
Now there were two.
The silver tray with which Cummings arrived at Rat’s bedchamber each morning was, this morning, laden with humble country fair: a plate of pancetta with eggs, fried potatoes, and tomato.
Rat, when he awoke, removed the rubber pacifier from his mouth and searched the room for his reflection, which he found where he had left it in the mirror framed with Disney characters atop the bureau across from the bed. The image had altered considerably, and not for the worse. Of the semi-prehensile tail, there was no sign. The elfin ears had rounded to a more homosapien-like contour. The skin was smoother, less scaly. The hair, as observed in a previous episode, was more of what it should be where it should be and less of what it shouldn’t where it wasn’t. These observations were absorbed in a twinkling of its large, cuddle-begging eyes, and almost as quickly dismissed for there was a new and unexpected addition to the tableau: the creature wore clothing.
Perhaps this is too liberal a description. The creature had a cloth; an ill-fitting vest, with three buttons down the front. That these were not attached to their corresponding button holes was of no consequence. Nor that the pattern of the cloth from which the vestment was cut failed to represent anything to be found in the natural realm. But that it wore anything at all was Big News.
“It’s got clothes on, Cummings,” said Rat, turning this way and that, so that the reflection responded in kind, allowing a better look from all angles. “It ain’t haute couture, more like neaux couture, for that matter, but it’s something.”
“A good sign indeed, sir,” said Cummings. He became aware of a curious sense of pride, as if he had some share in the credit for this development. He placed the tray on a bedside table and stood at servile attention, his eyebrows tossing subtle, inaudible comments back and forth betwixt themselves. “I trust your night was not an unpleasant one?” The comment was neither a statement nor a question, so he was not sure how to punctuate it. He delivered the last two words with a question mark.
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