Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they're playing a strange game, one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it's easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that you can't. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed. If you wait for the flash, intending to keep from pressing the button afterwards, the flash never appears. No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press. There's no way to fool a Predictor.

  The heart of each Predictor is a circuit with a negative time delay — it sends a signal back in time. The full implications of the technology will become apparent later, when negative delays of greater than a second are achieved, but that's not what this warning is about. The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there's no such thing as free will.

  There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic. Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and that's what a Predictor provides.

  Typically, a person plays with a Predictor compulsively for several days, showing it to friends, trying various schemes to outwit the device. The person may appear to lose interest in it, but no one can forget what it means — over the following weeks, the implications of an immutable future sink in. Some people, realizing that their choices don't matter, refuse to make any choices at all. Like a legion of Bartleby the Scriveners, they no longer engage in spontaneous action. Eventually, a third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won't feed themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma. They'll track motion with their eyes, and change position occasionally, but nothing more. The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.

  Before people started playing with Predictors, akinetic mutism was very rare, a result of damage to the anterior cingulate region of the brain. Now it spreads like a cognitive plague. People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we've all encountered: the idea that free will doesn't exist. It just wasn't harmful until you believed it.

  Doctors try arguing with the patients while they still respond to conversation. We had all been living happy, active lives before, they reason, and we hadn't had free will then either. Why should anything change? "No action you took last month was any more freely chosen than one you take today," a doctor might say. "You can still behave that way now." The patients invariably respond, "But now I know." And some of them never say anything again.

  Some will argue that the fact the Predictor causes this change in behaviour means that we do have free will. An automaton cannot become discouraged, only a free-thinking entity can. The fact that some individuals descend into akinetic mutism whereas others do not just highlights the importance of making a choice.

  Unfortunately, such reasoning is faulty: every form of behaviour is compatible with determinism. One dynamic system might fall into a basin of attraction and wind up at a fixed point, whereas another exhibits chaotic behaviour indefinitely, but both are completely deterministic.

  I'm transmitting this warning to you from just over a year in your future: it's the first lengthy message received when circuits with negative delays in the megasecond range are used to build communication devices. Other messages will follow, addressing other issues. My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know that they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

  And yet I know that, because free will is an illusion, it's all predetermined who will descend into akinetic mutism and who won't. There's nothing anyone can do about it — you can't choose the effect the Predictor has on you. Some of you will succumb and some of you won't, and my sending this warning won't alter those proportions. So why did I do it?

  Because I had no choice.

  © 2005 Nature PublishingGroup

  Understand, by Ted Chiang

  Ted Chiang writes...

  The initial impulse to write "Understand" arose from an offhand remark made by my roommate in college; he was reading Sartre's Nausea at the time, whose protagonist finds only meaninglessness in everything he sees. But what would it be like, my roommate wondered, to find meaning and order in everything you saw? To me that suggested a kind of heightened perception, which in turn suggested superintelligence. I started thinking about the point at which quantitative improvements -- better memory, faster pattern recognition -- turn into a qualitative difference, a fundamentally different mode of cognition.

  Something else I wondered about was the possibility of truly understanding how our minds works. Some people are certain that it's impossible for us to understand our minds, offering analogies like "you can't see your face with your own eyes." I never found that persuasive. It may turn out that we can't, in fact, understand our minds (for certain values of "understand" and "mind"), but it'll take an argument much more persuasive than that to convince me.

  Understand

  A layer of ice; it feels rough against my face, but not cold. I've got nothing to hold on to; my gloves just keep sliding off it. I can see people on top, running around, but they can't do anything. I'm trying to pound the ice with my fists, but my arms move in slow motion, and my lungs must have burst, and my head's going fuzzy, and I feel like I'm dissolving--

  I wake up, screaming. My heart's going like a jackhammer. Christ. I pull off my blankets and sit on the edge of the bed.

  I couldn't remember that before. Before I only remembered falling through the ice; the doctor said my mind had suppressed the rest. Now I remember it, and it's the worst nightmare I've ever had.

  I'm grabbing the down comforter with my fists, and I can feel myself trembling. I try to calm down, to breathe slowly, but sobs keep forcing their way out. It was so real I could feel it: feel what it was like to die.

  I was in that water for nearly an hour; I was more vegetable than anything else by the time they brought me up. Am I recovered? It was the first time the hospital had ever tried their new drug on someone with so much brain damage. Did it work?

  The same nightmare, again and again. After the third time, I know I'm not going to sleep again. I spend the remaining hours before dawn worrying. Is this the result? Am I losing my mind?

  Tomorrow is my weekly checkup with the resident at the hospital. I hope he'll have some answers.

  I drive into downtown Boston, and after half an hour Dr. Hooper can see me. I sit on a gurney in an examining room, behind a yellow curtain. Jutting out of the wall at waist-height is a horizontal flatscreen, adjusted for tunnel vision so it appears blank from my angle. The doctor types at the keyboard, presumably calling up my file, and then starts examining me. As he's checking my pupils with a penlight, I tell him about my nightmares.

  "Did you ever have any before the accident, Leon?" He gets out his little mallet and taps at my elbows, knees, and ankles.

  "Never. Are these a side effect of the drug?"

  "Not a side effect. The hormone K therapy regenerated a lot of damaged neurons, and that's an enormous change that your brain has to adjust to. The nightmares are probably just a sign of that."

  "Is this permanent?"

  "It's unlikely," he says. "Once your brain gets used to having all those pathways again, you'll be fine. Now touch your index finger to the tip of your nose, and then bring it to my finger here."

  I do what he tells me. Next he has me tap each finger to my thumb, quickly. Then
I have to walk a straight line, as if I'm taking a sobriety test. After that, he starts quizzing me.

  "Name the parts of an ordinary shoe."

  "There's the sole, the heel, the laces. Um, the holes that the laces go through are eyes, and then there's the tongue, underneath the laces..."

  "Okay. Repeat this number: three nine one seven four--"

  "--six two."

  Dr. Hooper wasn't expecting that. "What?"

  "Three nine one seven four six two. You used that number the first time you examined me, when I was still an inpatient. I guess it's a number you test patients with a lot."

  "You weren't supposed to memorize it; it's meant to be a test of immediate recall."

  "I didn't intentionally memorize it. I just happened to remember it."

  "Do you remember the number from the second time I examined you?"

  I pause for a moment. "Four zero eight one five nine two."

  He's surprised. "Most people can't retain so many digits if they've only heard them once. Do you use mnemonic tricks?"

  I shake my head. "No. I always keep phone numbers in the autodialer."

  He goes to the terminal and taps at the numeric keypad. "Try this one." He reads a fourteen-digit number, and I repeat it back to him. "You think you can do it backwards?" I recite the digits in reverse order. He frowns, and starts typing something into my file.

  I'm sitting in front of a terminal in one of the testing rooms in the psychiatric ward; it's the nearest place Dr. Hooper could get some intelligence tests. There's a small mirror set in one wall, probably with a video camera behind it. In case it's recording, I smile at it and wave briefly. I always do that to the hidden cameras in automatic cash machines.

  Dr. Hooper comes in with a printout of my test results. "Well, Leon, you did... very well. On both tests you scored in the ninety-ninth percentile."

  My jaw drops. "You're kidding."

  "No, I'm not." He has trouble believing it himself. "Now that number doesn't indicate how many questions you got right; it means that relative to the general population --"

  "I know what it means," I say absently. "I was in the seventieth percentile when they tested us in high school." Ninety-ninth percentile. Inwardly, I'm trying to find some sign of this. What should it feel like?

  He sits down on the table, still looking at the printout. "You never attended college, did you?"

  I return my attention to him. "I did, but I left before graduating. My ideas of education didn't mesh with the professors'."

  "I see." He probably takes this to mean I flunked out. "Well, clearly you've improved tremendously. A little of that may have come about naturally as you grew older, but most of it must be a result of the hormone K therapy."

  "This is one hell of a side-effect."

  "Well, don't get too excited. Test scores don't predict how well you can do things in the real world." I roll my eyes upward when Dr. Hooper isn't looking. Something amazing is going on, and all he can offer is a truism. "I'd like to follow up on this with some more tests. Can you come in tomorrow?"

  I'm in the middle of retouching a holograph when the phone rings. I waver between the phone and the console, and reluctantly opt for the phone. I'd normally have the answering machine take any calls when I'm editing, but I need to let people know I'm working again. I lost a lot of business when I was in the hospital: one of the risks of being a freelancer. I touch the phone and say, "Greco Holographics, Leon Greco speaking."

  "Hey Leon, it's Jerry."

  "Hi Jerry. What's up?" I'm still studying the image on the screen: it's a pair of helical gears, intermeshed. A trite metaphor for cooperative action, but that's what the customer wanted for his ad.

  "You interested in seeing a movie tonight? Me and Sue and Tori were going to see Metal Eyes."

  "Tonight? Oh, I can't. Tonight's the last performance of the one-woman show at the Hanning Playhouse." The surfaces of the gear teeth are scratched and oily-looking. I highlight each surface using the cursor, and type in the parameters to be adjusted.

  "What's that?"

  "It's called Symplectic. It's a monologue in verse." Now I adjust the lighting, to remove some of the shadows from where the teeth mesh. "Want to come along?"

  "Is this some kind of Shakespearean soliloquy?"

  Too much: with that lighting, the outer edges will be too bright. I specify an upper limit for the reflected light's intensity. "No, it's a stream-of-consciousness piece, and it alternates between four different meters; iambic's only one of them. All the critics called it atour de force."

  "I didn't know you were such a fan of poetry."

  After checking all the numbers once more, I let the computer recalculate the interference pattern. "Normally, I'm not, but this one seemed really interesting. How's it sound to you?"

  "Thanks, but I think we'll stick with the movie."

  "Okay, you guys have fun. Maybe we can get together next week." We say goodbye and hang up, and I wait for the recalc to finish.

  Suddenly it occurs to me what's just happened. I've never been able to do any editing while talking on the phone. But this time I had no trouble keeping my mind on both things at once.

  Will the surprises never end? Once the nightmares were gone and I could relax, the first thing I noticed was the increase in my reading speed and comprehension. I was actually able to read the books on my shelves that I'd always meant to get around to, but never had the time; even the more difficult, technical material. Back in college, I'd accepted the fact that I couldn't study everything that interested me. It's exhilarating to discover that maybe I can; I was positively gleeful when I bought an armload of books the other day.

  And now I find I can concentrate on two things at once; something I never would have predicted. I stand up at my desk and shout out loud, as if my favorite baseball team has just surprised me with a triple play. That's what it feels like.

  The Neurologist-in-Chief, Dr. Shea, has taken over my case, presumably because he wants to take the credit. I scarcely know him, but he acts as if I've been his patient for years.

  He's asked me into his office to have a talk. He interlaces his fingers and rests his elbows on his desk. "How do you feel about the increase in your intelligence?" he asks.

  What an inane question. "I'm very pleased about it."

  "Good," says Dr. Shea. "So far, we've found no adverse effects of the hormone K therapy. You don't require any further treatment for the brain damage from your accident." I nod. "However, we're conducting a study to learn more about the hormone's effect on intelligence. If you're willing, we'd like to give you a further injection of the hormone, and then monitor the results."

  Suddenly he's got my attention; finally, something worth listening to. "I'd be willing to do that."

  "You understand that this is purely for investigational purposes, not therapeutic. You may benefit from it with further gains in your intelligence, but this is not medically necessary for your health."

  "I understand. I suppose I have to sign a consent form."

  "Yes. We can also offer you some compensation for participating in this study." He names a figure, but I'm barely listening.

  "That'll be fine." I'm imagining where this might lead, what it might mean for me, and a thrill runs through me.

  "We'd also like you to sign a confidentiality agreement. Clearly this drug is enormously exciting, but we don't want any announcements to be made prematurely."

  "Certainly, Dr. Shea. Has anyone been given additional injections before?"

  "Of course; you're not going to be a guinea pig. I can assure you, there haven't been any harmful side effects."

  "What sort of effects did they experience?"

  "It's better if we don't plant suggestions in your mind: you might imagine you were experiencing the symptoms I mention."

  Shea's very comfortable with the doctor-knows-best routine. I keep pushing. "Can you at least tell me how much their intelligence increased?"

  "Every individual is differe
nt. You shouldn't base your expectations on what's happened to others."

  I conceal my frustration. "Very well, doctor."

  If Shea doesn't want to tell me about hormone K, I can find out about it on my own. From my terminal at home I log onto the datanet. I access the FDA's public database, and start perusing their current IND's, the Investigational New Drug applications that must be approved before human trials can begin.

  The application for hormone K was submitted by Sorensen Pharmaceutical, a company researching synthetic hormones that encourage neuron regeneration in the central nervous system. I skim the results of the drug tests on oxygen-deprived dogs, and then baboons: all the animals recovered completely. Toxicity was low, and long term observation didn't reveal any adverse effects.

  The results of cortical samples are provocative. The brain-damaged animals grew replacement neurons with many more dendrites, but the healthy recipients of the drug remained unchanged. The conclusion of the researchers: hormone K replaces only damaged neurons, not healthy ones. In the brain-damaged animals, the new dendrites seemed harmless: PET scans didn't reveal any change in brain metabolism, and the animals' performance on intelligence tests didn't change.

  In their application for human clinical trials, the Sorensen researchers outlined protocols for testing the drug first on healthy subjects, and then on several types of patients: stroke victims, sufferers of Alzheimer's, and persons -- like me -- in a persistent vegetative state. I can't access the progress reports for those trials: even with patient anonymity, only participating doctors have clearance to examine those records.

  The animal studies don't shed any light on the increased intelligence in humans. It's reasonable to assume that the effect on intelligence is proportional to the number of neurons replaced by the hormone, which in turn depends on the amount of initial damage. That means that the deep coma patients would undergo the greatest improvements. Of course, I'd need to see the progress of the other patients to confirm this theory; that'll have to wait.