“God is an iron,” I said.
“Eh? Oh, yes, I remember the conceit. A person who commits irony is an iron. God knows, cold and hot iron have figured prominently in His ironies. Yes, God is an iron. Switzerland produced me. And my Uncle Albert. Not really my uncle. A friend of my mother’s, a chemist who worked in the big laboratory across town.”
A jigsaw piece clicked into place. “Jesus. Basel. Sandoz Laboratories. Dr. Albert Hofmann.”
“It was the day after my fourth birthday. Uncle Albert ingested what he thought was an infinitesimal amount of LSD-25, climbed onto his bicycle to pedal home, and took the world’s first trip. The day was beautiful; I was playing outside with my new toys when he pedaled past. Even at four years old I was aware that something extraordinary was going on with him. He seemed to shine. He saw me and he smiled at me as he rode past. He did not wave or call out; he only looked at me, turning his head as he went by, and smiled. You can think of the contact-high phenomenon if it suits you. I say that for those few seconds time stopped and we were telepathic. I remember today the exhilaration…” He frowned down at his coffee and drank of it.
“My,” Karen murmured.
“Never, even with my parents, had I felt so close to another human being, adult or child. There was a bond between us. Eighteen years later to the day, the day after my twenty-first birthday, he gave me my first dose of lysergic acid diethylamide under controlled conditions. It had been decided before my birth, possibly before my conception, that I was to be a doctor. It was Uncle Albert who suggested I go into neuroanatomy. At that time there were less than a dozen neuroanatomists on this planet, and they were some of the most eccentric men alive. I fit right in. I was something of an odd duck.”
“I can imagine.”
“By this time, you see, I was already deeply interested in the interface between the brain and the mind. Next to nothing was known about the brain, and I felt that better maps might be the key. It was a wide-open field, an exciting puzzle with the answers seemingly just out of reach, possible of attainment.
“The year I began my medical training, I read an article in Scientific American about the work of two men, James Olds and Peter Milner, at McGill University in Canada. They had discovered that if you placed an electrode in a certain part of the brain of a rat—”
“We know about Olds,” Karen interrupted. Her voice was harsh.
“Of course you do. Forgive me. I worked with Olds, later, and with others who followed him. Lilly, Routtenberg, Collier, Penfield. After a time I worked only with myself. Routtenberg had put me onto the connection between the brain-reward system and memory formation, and I was absolutely fascinated by memory. I had decided that life is the business of making happy memories—and I was offended as a neurophysiologist to be completely ignorant of the process by which this most basic task was accomplished.
“But I had no intention of publishing my results in Scientific American. Or anywhere else. I had learned from John Lilly’s experiences with the CIA involving brain-reward research, and Uncle Albert’s experiences with the same group and others like it, that the kinds of answers I was looking for were dangerous answers.”
“Tell me about your personal life during all of this,” Karen said.
He sighed and sipped coffee. He got up and poked the fire with an andiron, then put on more wood. “While I was acquiring an M.D. and becoming a neuroanatomist, there was of course not much personal life to talk about. I received my doctorate at twenty-six. I had friends. I had lovers, but only the friends lasted. I don’t think there was enough of me left from my work to satisfy a lover, to give to her. When I was thirty-two I met Elsa. She was as stable as I was wild. She calmed me, housebroke me. She was a cyberneticist; she could make a computer do anything, and she was deeply interested in holography. We learned from each other. We were married and had six wonderful years. Then—”
He finished his coffee and put the cup down with infinite care and attention. Then the words came out a little faster than before.
“Then a piece of equipment exploded in her laboratory. Below and to the side; a fragment evaded anything vital and entered the skull. The hippocampus and several associated structures in both temporal lobes were virtually destroyed. She lived. With anterograde amnesia.”
He was silent for a few moments.
“The skills and knowledge she had acquired up until that time remained largely intact. She seemed able to register limited amounts of new information. But she could no longer retain it. Her short-term memory system and her long-term storage had been disconnected. She never again learned to recognize anyone she had not known before the accident, not even the specialists who worked with her daily. Each time she met them was the first time. Her memory had a span of perhaps ten minutes. She lived another five years, perpetually puzzled by the fact that the date always seemed to be later than it could possibly be. She never got more than ten minutes past 1978, and it seemed to confuse her a little, the way the world went on ahead without her. But she was fairly happy in general.
“I was familiar with the syndrome from correspondence with Milner. I lived with it with her until she died, working ferociously to understand her condition so that I could alleviate it. I failed. When she died I gave myself to my work entirely, as a kind of memorial. If that word is not too ironic.
“She had given me many tools, many leads. She had taught me more about computers than any university could have. She had taught me much about holography. By the time of her death, it was well established that memory storage takes place in a manner analogous to holography.”
Karen frowned. “I don’t think I follow.”
He seemed to come back from a far place, to recall that he had listeners and a reason for speaking. “If you cut the corner off a hologram transparency, you do not take a corner off the image it yields. Both it and the cut-off corner will produce the complete, uncut image. The former will be very slightly fuzzier than before the mutilation; the latter will be quite fuzzy, but still complete. Similarly, you cannot remove a given memory by removing a specific portion of the brain. Each memory is stored all over the brain, in the form of a multiply redundant pattern. Each neuron thus represents many potential bits of information—and there are as many neurons in a brain as there are stars in this galaxy.”
“So the question,” I said, “is how are the memories encoded and how are they retrieved?”
“Precisely. Computer theory was essential. And my hunch was right: brain-reward was the key to the puzzle. The brain-reward aspect of memory formation was the only one I knew how to detect, and to measure and track accurately. The task was rather like a space explorer studying purely economic data for a planet, then trying to deduce or infer the body of its inhabitants’ psychology. But I knew where I was going, I had known for years, and I was determined to be the first one there. By that time I had transferred my personal allegiance to the human race. The last few decades have not been such as to encourage ethical behavior by scientists, and a relatively large number of people were chasing the secrets I sought. A psychologist stood up at a Triple-A-S meeting in the mid-seventies and declared that the information-storage code of the human brain would be cracked within ten years. That frightened me. While pursuing my own researches, I did my best to cripple the work of others by feeding false data into the literature. Red herrings, blind alleys, false trails. I succeeded. By the late 1980s, I was the only one still digging at the spot marked X, unnoticed by the crowd over at the other end of the field. Simple surgery and brain/computer interface were the last tools I needed. By 1989 I had a rudimentary and cumbersome, but fairly effective, version of mindwipe. It was of some help to me in capturing the wirehead industry, and concealing the extent of my own involvement in it.”
“You run the whole thing?” Karen exploded.
“I am and plan to remain the whole thing. I assure you that no one now living can prove that statement—although you, Joe, guessed or learned more than I would have thought po
ssible. But the whole industry is and has been my personal monopoly.”
“How could you—” she began, and ran out of words. She had begun to like him, and could not swallow this new information.
“Most of the basic patents are mine, under an assortment of names. If I did not do it, someone else would. Once it became possible, it became inevitable. I accepted the responsibility, destroyed all would-be competitors, and kept the industry just as small and stunted as possible. Do you remember anything of how fast marijuana and LSD spread in the sixties and seventies, when organized crime realized their economic potential? Has the growth of the wirehead industry been anything like that?”
No. It had not. It got a lot of talk in the media, but the numbers said it was nothing like the social problem alcohol or cocaine posed. That had always struck me as odd. People dumb enough to flirt with heroin would not touch the wire; it was strictly for born losers. Could that be because the wire was simply not being marketed aggressively?
“Those who seek pleasure at any cost are those to whom ethics matter least. I have been weeding the human race of its most selfish and self-indulgent.”
“I’m selfish and self-indulgent,” Karen said darkly.
He smiled. “Is that what brings you to Nova Scotia?”
She got her knee out of the way in time; the spilt coffee landed on the rug.
“Of course you were obsessed with ecstasy, having been denied it all your life. Once you tasted it in full, you established normal relations with it—one of your customers reports to me—and turned your attention to other things. To an ethical task.”
She frowned, but said nothing.
“And you, Joe. I supplied you with the most comfortable and carefree existence that modern society affords, no taxes, no mortgage, no bills, and what did you do? You dumped it all for a crusade. Or did you ever seriously expect to survive this?”
“No,” I said. “Not once, even from the beginning. But I had a responsibility to Karen.”
“To Karen? Why?”
“I meddled in her life, spoiled a perfectly good and painless suicide. I had to accept the con—”
“Bullshit,” Karen snapped.
“She is right, Joe. Paramedics spoil suicides every day, then punch out and go home. You perceived a responsibility. Because it suited you. Underneath it is something else. You saw the horror of Karen’s experience. In your heart, you believe her cause is just. You believe, like her, that every man’s death diminishes you. Don’t you?”
I said nothing.
“I could be wrong, of course. It could simply be emotional involvement—”
My voice was bleak. “You, of all people, should know that I am unable to love.”
This smile reached his eyes. “I don’t know any such thing.”
The sentence hit me like a surprise slap in the face that bewilders, hurts, and angers. “The hell you don’t!” I shouted.
“Your sex drive is disconnected, yes. But these days sex and love don’t even write to each other much. I think your love for Karen is very much like the love your sister has for me. And Karen’s love for you is much like mine for Madeleine.”
I tried to gain control of my emotions. “Perhaps I do agree with Karen about wireheading. In any case, I believe I’m ready now to render the judgment you asked for.”
“Be patient. I’ve given you the background. I have yet to present my defense.”
I had to admire his nerve.
“Proceed,” Karen said after a while. She struck another cigarette.
“Thank you. As to wireheading, you must admit that the way I set up the industry, it is something that can only happen by choice. The subject has to assist in the placement of the wire. Inductance—wireheading without consent, from outside the skull—is a childishly simple refinement. I have made it my business to kill any entrepreneur who tries to introduce it.
“Should I manufacture automobiles instead, and kill more people than wireheading does without the element of choice?
“What you dislike about wireheading is not the wire itself. There were wirehead personalities long before the wire existed. What it is that horrifies you is what it displays: the component of human nature that wants the wire, that wants pushbutton pleasure badly enough to pay any price, that is so blind and afraid that it will suicide with a smile. You would like, rightly, to eliminate that part of human nature. I tell you that you cannot do that by eliminating the wire.
“My first mindwipe technique was a very clumsy and primitive thing. I could not erase a memory pattern, but I could, in a sense, erase its retrieval code. The memory remained in the skull, but the mind could not access it. I redoubled my efforts, because I wanted direct access to memory itself.”
“True mindwipe,” I said.
“If you will,” he agreed. “But recall this: the same man, Heinrich Dreser, discovered both heroin and aspirin. Consider an analogy, shall we? You are an aborigine genius. Someone gives you a good reel-to-reel tape recorder. He explains electronic theory in some detail, and you are so bright you follow most of it. Then he rips out the heads and all their circuitry, destroys them, and departs—leaving behind tapes containing directions to a buried fortune. The tape transport still functions, but the heads are gone.
“Now suppose, against all odds, you somehow manage to make that tape recorder functional again. Perhaps it only takes you a few hundred years and requires a complete reorganization of your tribe. Forget all that. Which will you succeed in reinventing first: the record head or the erase head?”
Answering the question took a split second; it was seconds later before the implications registered. Then I was startled speechless.
“The erase head, of course,” he said. “It is a much simpler device—a single blanket signal that disrupts any and all frequencies. It is an infinitely simpler task to destroy information than to encode it in the first place. Which is easier to do: create a book, or burn it?”
“My God,” Karen cried. “You weren’t after mindwipe. You wanted—”
“Mindfill,” he said quietly, and the room seemed to rock around me as my beliefs began rearranging themselves.
“To continue the analogy,” he went on, “I have recently learned how to build both record and playback heads. Neither process will ever be as elegant and simple as the erasure process.” Suddenly there was a weapon in his hand, so suddenly that neither Karen nor I jumped. It looked like a water pistol. “With this I could remove twenty-four hours from your mind, and put your memory on hold. You experienced a taste of the latter this afternoon. To dub off a copy of those twenty-four hours’ worth of memories would require much more equipment, power, and time. To play my memories into your skull would take nearly twice as much of all three. But I could do both of those things.
“Understand me: to copy your memories from last night to this moment, I would have to wait several hours, until the information has had time to soak into long-term storage. And any information that your mind’s metaprogrammer elected not to store would be lost.”
“Then you haven’t got a handle on short-term memory?” I said, watching the water pistol.
“I know only how to erase it. Record and playback heads for it will take me about fifteen years to develop…if all goes well.”
“And then you’ll have true telepathy,” Karen breathed.
“That is correct. And I have devoted my life to ensuring that no individual, group, or government will gain exclusive control of these developments. At present, I have a monopoly. I live for the day when I can responsibly abdicate. My secrets must belong to all mankind—or to no one.”
He fell silent then. He put the weapon away. I didn’t even see where. He let us have about five minutes of silence, to think it through.
The first, and least important, implication was that the deadly threat of mindwipe could be at least partially mitigated. By the record head. If there is a memory you especially want to ensure against theft, make a recording of it and put it in a safe p
lace. If someone wants to steal your memory of this moment, right now, you have several hours to try and escape him—though that may be difficult if he has a water pistol that destroys your short-term memory as it forms, holds you mindless and happy.
But the second implication! The playback head…
Suppose you could give a Hindu peasant the memories of, say, a scientific farmer? Not an account of those memories, translated into words and retranslated into print and retranslated into Hindi—but an actual, experiential memory. What soil looks like and smells like when it is most fruitful. The sound of a correctly tuned engine. The difference between hand-tight and wrench-tight. The smell of disease. Principles of health care. They say experience is not just the best, but the only teacher. What if it were willing to travel?
Suppose you could give a student the memories of a professor. Log tables. Tensor calculus. Conversational Russian. The extraordinary thing about Kemal Ataturk. Pages of Shakespeare. The Periodic Table.
Suppose you could give a child the memories of an adult—of several adults.
Suppose you could give an adult the memories of a child, fresh and vivid.
Suppose you could show a Ku Klux Klanner what it is really like to be black.
Mindkiller Page 24
