Stanislaw Lem: Memoirs of a Space Traveler

“All right, then, but you must be striving for something. Heading in some direction. Therefore you expect something. What? Construction of a genius…?”

Diagoras looked at me with his head tilted, and his beady eyes suddenly became mocking.

“You sound just like them,” he said finally in a quiet voice. “ ‘What does he want? To build a genius? A superman?’ You ass, if I don’t want to plant McIntoshes does that mean I’m condemned to Winesaps? Are there only small apples and big apples, or could there be a whole vast class of fruits? From among the unimaginable number of possible systems, nature built just one — the one she realized in us. Because it was the best system, you think? But since when does nature strive for Platonic perfection? She built what she could, period. Neither constructing Eniacs — or other calculating machines — nor imitating the brain will get you anywhere. From Eniacs you can go only to other, still more rapid mathematical cretins. As for plagiarisms of the brain, one can produce them, but that’s not the most important thing. Please forget everything you’ve heard about cybernetics. My ‘kybernoidea’ and I have nothing in common with it except a common beginning. But that’s an old story now, because this stage" — again he indicated the dead-silent hall — “is behind me. I keep these freaks… I don’t know why… perhaps out of sentimentality…”

“Then you’re exceptionally sentimental,” I mumbled with an involuntary glance at his arm.

“Perhaps. If you want to see another of the closed chapters of my work, follow me.”

We descended the winding stone staircase, passed the first floor, and went down into the basement. There, under a low ceiling, burned lamps in wire caps. Diagoras opened a heavy steel door. We found ourselves in a square, windowless room. In the middle of the cement floor, which sloped as if toward a catch basin, I saw a round, cast-iron, padlocked hatch. I was surprised that the basin was shut in this way. Diagoras opened the padlock, gripped the iron handle, and with a twist of his fat body lifted the heavy lid. I leaned over beside him and looked down. The steel-lined opening was closed off from below by a thick plate of wired glass. Through this great lens I could see the interior of a spacious bunker. On the bottom of it, amid an indescribable chaos of charred metal cables and rubble, there rested, covered with plaster dust and crushed glass, a torpid, dark mass that resembled the body of a split octopus. I glanced at Diagoras’s face; he was smiling.

“This experiment might have cost me dearly,” he confessed, straightening his corpulent figure. “I wanted to introduce into cybernetic evolution a principle unknown in biological evolution: I wanted to build an organism endowed with the capacity for self-complication. That is, if the task it sets itself (I did not know what that might be) proves too difficult, then it can reconstruct itself. Down there I kept eight hundred elementary electronic blocks that were able to combine with one another freely, according to the rules of permutation…”

“And you succeeded?”

“All too well. I’m not sure what pronoun to use here; let’s say he" — Diagoras pointed to the torpid monster — “decided to escape. That’s generally their first impulse, you know…” He broke off and stared into space, as though surprised by his own words. “I don’t understand why, but their spontaneous activity always begins in this way; they want to free themselves, to break loose from the restrictions I impose on them. I can’t tell you what they would do after that, because I never permitted it. Perhaps my fears were a little exaggerated.

“I was careful, or at least I thought so. This bunker… the contractor I had make it must have been amazed, but I paid him well and he asked no questions. Five feet of reinforced concrete… and the walls were steel-plated, not with rivets — rivets are too easy to tear out — but welded electrically. Twenty-three centimeters of the best armor plate I could obtain, from an old battleship. Why don’t you take a closer look?”

I knelt at the edge of the shaft and leaned over to see the bunker wall. The armor plate was ripped apart from top to bottom and bent like the sides of a huge tin can. Between its jagged edges yawned a deep hole, from which protruded wires studded with chunks of cement.

“He did that… ?” I asked, unconsciously lowering my voice.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I did build him out of steel, but I purposely used soft steel, not tempered. Moreover, there were no tools in the bunker. I can only guess. Whether I did it out of foresight I can’t say, but I had reinforced the ceiling particularly well with a triple layer of armorplate. And the glass cost me a fortune. It’s the kind used in bathyscaphes. Not even an armor-piercing shell can break it. I think that’s why he didn’t spend much time on it. I assume he produced a sort of induction furnace in which he tempered his head — or maybe he induced currents in the wall plates themselves — I tell you I don’t know. When I observed him he behaved quite calmly; he bustled about in there, combined things…”

“Were you able to communicate with him in any way?”

“How could I? His intelligence, for all I know, was on the level of a lizard’s — at least initially. How far he advanced I can’t tell you, because I was more interested then in how to destroy him than in asking him questions.”

“What did you do?”

“It was at night. I awoke with the impression that the whole house was starting to collapse. He had cut through the armor plate instantly, but the concrete required work. By the time I had run here, he was already halfway in the hole. In half an hour at the most, he would reach the ground under the foundation and pass through it like butter. I had to act fast.”

“You turned off the electricity?”

“Immediately. But without result.”

“Impossible!”

“Yet true. I wasn’t careful enough. I knew where the power line supplying the house was, but it hadn’t occurred to me that there might be a deeper line. There was, and he reached it and became independent of my circuit breakers.”

“But that presupposes intelligent behavior!”

“Nothing of the kind; it’s an ordinary tropism. A plant grows toward the light, an infusorian moves toward a concentration of hydrogen ions; he looked for electricity. The power I had supplied him with wasn’t enough, so he sought another source.”

“And what did you do?”

“At first I was going to call the power station, or at least the substation, but that would have revealed my projects and perhaps made it difficult to continue them. I used liquid oxygen; luckily I had some. My whole supply went in there.”

“He was paralyzed by the low temperature?”

“It did not so much paralyze him as destroy his coordination. He thrashed about… I tell you, that was a sight! I had to hurry — I didn’t know whether he would adapt to the bath, too — so I didn’t waste time pouring out the oxygen, but threw it in together with the Dewar vessels.”

“Vacuum bottles?”

“Yes, they’re like large vacuum bottles.”

“Ah, that’s why there’s so much glass.”

“Exactly. He smashed everything within reach. An epileptic fit… It’s hard to believe — the house is old and has two stories, but it shook. I felt the floor tremble.”

“What happened next?”

“I had to render him harmless before the temperature rose. I couldn’t go down myself — I would have frozen instantly. Nor could I use explosives; I didn’t want to blow up my home, after all. When he had stopped rampaging and was only quivering, I opened the hatch and let down a small robot with a carborundum circular saw.”