Harry Harrison - The Turing Option

She did not add her silent thoughts that this was just the end of the surgical procedures. But the new and untried procedures that would hopefully restore the connections inside Brian’s brain were only in their opening stages. New, unproven — would they work?

Stop thinking about it. Complete this and move on.

It was a muggy and torrid July afternoon when Brian finally got away from the computer lab. He had worked out what he hoped would be an improvement on LAMA, and AI programming language that his father had helped to develop. If he was right the cross-linking nemes of the CYC information nets could be speeded up by a factor of 10. But his new technique had to be tested and this would have taken days to work through on his own computer — so he managed to borrow some time on the Cray 5 and if all went well he should get some results by morning. Which meant there wasn’t much else he could do until then.

And there was a good chance Kim might be waiting for him at home. He walked faster now and his sweat-soaked shut stuck to his skin. She had no classes this afternoon so she might come over for what she called tutoring. Yes, there would also be some tutoring because she really needed it. She was cutting classes now and ignoring lectures because she knew that he would be there to tell her what to do before the exams. She really hated the school work and was always happy to find something better to do. Brian slowed down when he realized he was gasping for breath. Easy did it in this heat or he would get back dead.

The cool air puffed out and embraced when he opened the front door.

“Anyone home?” he called out, but silence was his answer. Then he heard the music playing, smiled and pushed open the half-closed door to his room.

“I called — you didn’t hear me.”

The stereo was on, switched to the Mississippi soul food station, but the room was empty. His bed was rumpled and his pillows pushed into a backrest the way she liked them. He looked around for a note, Kim still wrote them, never thinking to access the network, found nothing. He turned off the music and the only sound was the whir of the fan on the computer. It muttered to itself while it accessed a disk. The kitchen — that was it. Kim was the world’s best nibbler. The glass and dirty dish in the sink proved it. But she wasn’t there.

Nor did she answer her phone. He searched more carefully a second time; she had left him handwritten messages more than once, probably the only person in computer-happy UFE that did his anymore, but still couldn’t find any note. Maybe she actually broke a long-standing dislike and actually left a message in the computer. He called up his communication program but there was nothing there.

Mysterious — and he was beginning to get worried. Could something have happened to her? The front door had been closed, but not locked. It usually wasn’t locked except at night; the university was a cutoff and safe place. Except no place was really safe. Hadn’t they just caught the drug smugglers a few miles down the coast? The isolated rigs of UFE might be the ideal spot for another try. A sudden sound caught his attention as the computer whirred and a drive light came on.

Of course! This program had been running for a couple of days and the machine was in verbal command mode, left that way most of the time even when he was entering data from the keyboard, programmed to record any words or sounds and respond if necessary. There would be a record of her voice.

It was easy enough to find. He jumped back, turned on the speakers — and heard himself snoring. Jumped forward and heard the morning news he had listened to while dressing. Forward and forward — and there she was! Humming along with the radio. Nothing wrong here; he skipped forward, the sound track making Donald Duck sounds — then stopped when he heard her voice. Talking on the phone.

“Sure, yes. If you insist. Soon. Right. Bye.”

Only one side of the conversation: he had never considered putting a tap on his phone. He did a high-speed forward, heard something, backtracked. It was Kim laughing.

Then a male voice said, “Do that again and there’s no stopping me.”

Brian rested his head on his fingertips, bent over the computer, the speaker close to his ear. Listening to what could only have been sounds of lovemaking. In his bed. With someone else. Listening to every humiliating sound and gasp, to her mounting little cries of delight.

Listened until it was all over. They were talking quietly but he listened no longer. The voices were nothing, meant nothing.

Finished. Through. The blood hammered in his temples as he was possessed by a terrible sense of betrayal. He had meant absolutely nothing to her — except maybe as an unpaid tutor, or maybe that was how she paid for his lessons! She had never been serious about him, never felt what he felt. What he realized shamefully now was that his puppy love had been completely one-sided. She hadn’t shared it — probably didn’t even know his overwhelming and consuming feelings for her. His fingers were trembling with rage, mortification, as he wiped the program and the voices of betrayal, struck out the file, deleted it. Then formatted tracks over it so it could never be restored. More destruction. He sought out every piece of work he had done for her and wiped the disk clean. Wiped out a com file of messages from her. His hands were shaking and there were tears of rage in his eyes. Love turned to anger, attraction to betrayal. His hands shook as he seized the keyboard, began to lift it to throw at the screen.

This was crazy. He dropped it and rushed from the room banged down the hall into the kitchen, stood in the doorway, fists clenched, shaking with conflicting emotions. The rack of knives was before him on the counter and he pulled out the largest, tested the edge with his thumb, longed to plunge it into her. Again and again.

Kill her? What was he thinking about? Did simple, rutting emotions control his life? What had happened to logic and intelligence? His hands were still shaking as he slid the knife back into the slot. He stood at the sink staring unseeingly out of the window.

You have a brain, Brian. Use it. Or let your emotions run your life. Kill her, get revenge, go to jail for murder. Not the world’s greatest idea, really. What is happening? How come emotion has taken the place of intelligent thought?

A subunit had taken control, that was what had happened. Think of the society of the mind and how it works. The mind is divided into many subunits, subunits with absolutely no intelligence of their own. What was the example his father had used when he explained it? Driving a car. A subunit of the mind can drive the car while the conscious mind is occupied with other things. Turning back control only when something unusual happened. The society of mind usually worked in a state of cooperation between all of its units. Now one stupid subunit had taken over and was controlling everything. One dumb, irrational subunit of infatuation — with gonads for brains and involved only with betrayal and jealousy and rage. Is this what he wanted to control his life?

“Hell, no!” He opened the refrigerator and took out a can of soda, popped the seal, drank half of it in one long chugalug. Much calmer and more rational now. He knew what was happening, one part of his brain had taken over and was calling all the shots and suppressing everything else. There was no such thing as a central me, though it was easy to believe that there was. The more he had studied the operation of intelligence, the more he had come to believe that each person was sort of a committee. The brain was made up of a lot of little subanimals — protospecialists, that’s what they were called.

The hunger-animal took over when looking for food. Or the fear-animal when there was trouble looming. And every night the sleep-animal took its place. It was King Solomon’s ring. All the machinery that Lorenz and Tinbergen had discovered. Those intricate networks of brain centers for hunger, sex, defense that had taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Not only in reptiles, birds and fish — but in parts of his own brain.