Arthur Clarke - Cradle

They were standing in front of a large tank with crystal-clear water. About half a dozen small whales were swimming in circles around the tank, occasionally going to the surface for air. “You came and asked my opinion in the beginning, my young friend,” he said quietly. “And I told you that I thought your souls were not compatible. Do you remember what you said to me?”

“Yes,” she answered with a rueful smile. “I asked you what the chief scientist of MOI could possibly know about souls. I’m sorry, Oscar. I was sorry at the time. I was so headstrong. Dale looked great on paper and I wanted your approval—”

“Forget it,” he interrupted her. “You know how I feel about you. But never underestimate a scientist. Some of them,” he said abstractedly, “want to know facts and concepts so that ultimately they can understand the overall nature of everything. Including the putative soul.

“Now take these whales,” Oscar continued, increasing the tempo and adroitly changing the subject. “We have been mapping their brains for almost a decade now, isolating various kinds of functions in specific locations, and trying to correlate their brain structure with that of a human being. We have been reasonably successful. The language function that governs their singing has been separated and the location of the physical controls for all parts of the body have been identified. In fact, we have found an area in the whale brain that corresponds to the equivalent function for every major capability in the human brain. But there’s still a problem, a mystery if you will.”

One of the whales stopped in its normal circuit about the tank. It seemed to be watching them. “There’s a large section of their brain that we have been unable to allocate to any specific function. A brilliant scientist years ago, after listening to the whales’ songs while they were migrating and correlating those songs with the rest of their behavior, postulated that this large, unmapped portion of their brain was a multidimensional memory array. His hypothesis was that the whales store entire incidents in that array, including sights, sounds, and even feelings, and that they relive these incidents during migration to alleviate the boredom. Our tests are starting to confirm his theory.”

Carol was intrigued. “You mean, they might put in that array the entire set of sensory impressions from something important, like calving, and then have, in a sense, a full instant replay during a particularly boring part of the migration route? Wow. That’s fascinating. My memory irritates me all the time. It would be great if somehow I could go in there, in a directed sense, and pull out anything I want. Complete with feelings.” She laughed. “There have been times in the summers when I couldn’t remember exactly how great it felt to ski and I have almost panicked, worrying about whether or not that feeling might be gone the next winter.”

Oscar waved at the whale and it swam away. “Be careful,” he said. “Other people have also thought that it would be fantastic if our memories were more complete, like a computer’s. But suppose we did have a perfect, multidimensional memory like that hypothesized for the whale. And suppose we had the same lack of entry control that is characteristic of human memory as it now exists. You know, where what we remember and when we remember it are not under our individual control. Then there would be problems. We might even be nonfunctional as a species. A song, a picture, a smell, even the taste of a cake might suddenly force us to confront anew the full emotions associated with the death of a loved one. We might have to see again a painful fight between our parents. Or even the trauma of our own birth.”

Oscar was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said finally, “evolution has served us in good stead. It couldn’t develop an entry control mechanism for our memories. So to protect us, to keep us from being demolished by mistakes or past events, evolution built a natural fade process into our memories—”

“Carol Dawson. Carol Dawson. Report immediately to the audiovisual conference room adjacent to the director’s office.”

The loudspeaker interrupted the quiet in the MOI aquarium. Carol gave Oscar a hug. “It’s been great, Ozzie, as always,” she said, watching him wince as she used her pet name for him. “But it looks like they’ve finished developing the pictures. Incidentally, I think the whole business about the whales’ memories is fascinating. I want to come back and do a feature on it Maybe next week sometime. Give my love to your daughter and grandson.”

Carol had become so engrossed in the discussion with Oscar that she had momentarily forgotten why she had flown to Miami early that morning. Now she felt anew a keen sense of excitement as she drove back to the main MOI administrative building from the aquarium. Dale had been confident at breakfast that processing the infrared images would reveal something of interest. “After all,” he had said logically, “the foreign object alarm was triggered repeatedly And nothing could be seen in the visual images. Therefore, either the infrared observations caused the alarm or the algorithm did not work properly. The second possibility is very unlikely, since I designed the data flow myself and my best programmers tested it after it was coded.”

Dale was uncharacteristically excited when she walked into the conference room. Carol started to ask him a question but was silenced by a vigorous negative motion of the head that followed his smile of greeting. Dale was talking to two of the image-processing technicians. “Okay, then, we’re squared away? Display the images in this sequence. I’ll call for each one by using the pickle.” The technicians left the room.

Dale came over and grabbed Carol. “You are not going to believe this,” he said, “what a bonanza. What a fucking bonanza!” He settled down a little. “But first things first. I promised myself that I would not spoil it for you. “He showed her to a seat at the conference table in front of the large screen and then sat down beside her.

He pushed the remote-control switch. Up on the large screen came a still frame of the three whales in the reef area under the boat. The fissure could clearly be seen to the right and beneath the whales. Dale looked at Carol. “I see,” she shrugged, “but what’s the deal? I took pictures with my underwater camera that are just as good.”

Dale turned back to the screen and pushed thc remote several more times. The successive scenes zoomed in on the hole in the coral reef, eventually isolating and centering on a small glint in the lower left side of the fissure. Again Dale looked at Carol. “I have a similar blowup,” she said pensively. “But it’s impossible to tell if something is really there or if it’s an artifact of the photographic process. “She stopped herself. “Although the fact that two distinctly different techniques found the light in essentially the same place suggests that it might not be a processing distortion.” She leaned forward, interested. “So what’s next?”

There was no way he could contain himself Dale jumped up and started pacing around the room. “What’s next,” he began, “could be your ticket to the Pulitzer dinner in New York. Now I am going to show you exactly the same sequence of images, only these were taken in the infrared a fraction of a second later. Watch closely, especially in the center of the fissure.”

The first processed infrared image covered the same area underneath the boat that the first visual image had shown. In the infrared picture, however, what was shown were thermal variations in the scene. In the processing, each pixel (an individual picture element in the image) was given a specific temperature based on the infrared radiation observed from that portion of the frame. Similar temperatures were then grouped together by the computer processing and assigned the same color. This process created isothermal regions, or regions of roughly the same temperature, that were visually connected by color. The result was that in the first picture the whales stood out in red, most of the reef plants were blue, and the normalized water temperature formed a dusky gray background. It took Carol a moment to adjust to the display. Dale was smiling triumphantly. Before Carol had a chance to focus on two small regions, one red and another brown down in the center of the hole in the reef, the zoom process had begun. In a few seconds an infrared close-up of the fissure clearly demonstrated why Dale was so excited.