Harry Harrison - The Turing Option

Breakfast was a welcome intrusion. A lot of the chemical taste was gone from his mouth now and he was hungry. The orange juice was cold — but so were the poached eggs. Still he finished them and used a bit of toast to wipe up the last bits. The nurse had just cleared the dishes away when Dr. Snaresbrook came in. There was a woman with her — and it took a long moment to recognize Dolly. If she noticed his startled expression she did not let on.

“You’re looking good, Brian,” she said. “I’m so happy that you are getting better.”

“Then you have seen me here before, here in the hospital?”

“Seen is the wrong word. You were hidden behind all those bandages, pipes and tubes. But that’s all in the past.”

So was he. In the past. This thin woman with the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and graying hair, was not the maternal Dolly he remembered. Memory had taken on a new meaning for him now, something to be raked over, examined, rebuilt. Remembrance of things past, mat was what old Proust had written about in such a long-winded way. He would see if he could do a better job of it than the Frenchman had done.

“Dolly has been of immense help,” the surgeon said. “We’ve talked about you and your recovery and she knows that your memories stop some years back. When you were fourteen.”

“Do you remember me, when I was fourteen years old?” Brian asked.

“A little hard to forget.” She smiled for the first time, looking far more attractive with the worry lines gone from around her eyes, the tension from her mouth. “You were going into graduate school the next year. We were very proud of you.”

“I’m really looking forward to it. Though I guess that is land of stupid to say now. I’ve gone and graduated already, the doctor has told me. But I remember all too clearly the trouble I’m having — had! — with the registrars. They know I have all the credits that I need and it is just the administration still standing in the way. Because I’m too young. But that’s all in the past, isn’t it? I guess it all worked out well in the end.”

It was odd hearing him talk like this. Dr. Snaresbrook had explained to her that Brian could remember nothing of the years since he had been fourteen, that it was her job to help him recover those years. She did not understand it — but the doctor had been right so far.

“They didn’t cause trouble for very long. Your father and some of the others got in touch with the companies funding the university. They couldn’t have cared less if you were five years old — or fifty. It was the search for talents like yours that had caused them to start the school in the first place. The word came down from on high and you were admitted. I’m sure that you made a success of it, but of course I wouldn’t know.”

“I don’t understand.”

Dolly took a deep breath and glanced at the doctor. Her face was expressionless; there was no help there. Going through it the first time had been bad enough; reliving it for Brian’s benefit was not easy.

“Well, you know that your father and I had — have — our-difficulties. Or maybe you didn’t — don’t — know.”

“I do. Adults think kids, even teenagers, are dim when it comes to family matters. You keep your voices down but there have been a lot of fights. I don’t like it.”

“Neither did I.”

“Then why do you — why did you — fight with Dad? I have never understood.”

“I’m sorry it caused you pain, Brian. But we were two different kinds of people. Our marriage was as sound as most, sounder maybe since we didn’t expect too much of each other. But we had little in common intellectually. And once you joined us I began to feel a little like a fifth wheel.”

“Are you blaming me for something, Dolly?”

“No. Quite the opposite. I’m blaming me for not making everything work out for the best. Maybe I was jealous of all the attention he lavished on you, how close you two were and how left out I felt.”

“Dolly! I’ve always — loved you. You are the closest thing to a real mother I have ever had. I don’t remember my mother at all. They told me I was only a year old when she died.”

“Thanks for saying that, Brian,” she said with a slight smile. “It really is a little too late to assign blame. In any case I and your father separated, had a very amicable divorce a few years later. I went back to live with my family, got a new job and that is where I am now.” Sudden anger flared and she turned on Snaresbrook.

“There it is, Doctor. Is that what you want? Or a bit more guts spilled on the floor.”

“Brian has the physical age of twenty-four,” she said calmly. “But his memories stop at age fourteen.”

“Oh, Brian — I am so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Of course you didn’t, Dolly. I suppose that everything you have just told me about was in the wind and I should have seen it coming. I don’t know. I guess kids think that nothing basic will ever change. It’s just that school is so busy, the AI work so exciting—” He broke off and turned to Dr. Snaresbrook. “Am I at least fifteen by now, Doctor? I’ve certainly learned a lot in the past few minutes.”

“It doesn’t quite work that way, Brian. You heard a lot — but you don’t have your own memories of the events. That’s what we must restore next.”

“How?”

“By using this machine. Which I am very proud to say you helped to develop. I am going to stimulate memories which you will identify. The computer will keep track of everything. When other memories have been matched on both sides of the lesion they will be reconnected.”

“There can’t be enough wires in the world to reconnect all the nerves in the brain. Aren’t there something like ten-to-the-twelfth hookups?”

“There are — but there are plenty of redundancies as well. Associations with one sector of memory will permit compatible reinforcement. The brain is very much like a computer and the opposite is true as well. But it is important to always be aware of the differences. Memory is static in a computer — but not in the human mind. Recalled memories get stronger, untouched memories weaken and vanish. My hope is mat when enough pathways have been reconnected, other interconnections will be reestablished as well. We will be looking for nemes.”

“What are nemes?”

“A neme is a bundle of nerve fibers that is connected to a variety of agents, each of whose output represents a fragment of an idea or a state of mind. For example, what is red and round, with a sweet taste and a crunchy texture, a fruit about the size of your fist and…”

“Apple!” Brian said happily.

“That’s exactly what I had in mind, but notice I never used that word.”

“But it’s the only thing that fits.”

“Yes, indeed — but you’d only know that if you had an ‘apple-agent’ that was connected so that it would automatically get activated when enough of the right other nemes are activated — like the ones for red, round, sweet and fruit.”

“And also cherries. I must have nemes for cherries too.”

“You do. That’s why I added ‘fist-sized.’ But you didn’t have those nemes two months ago. Or, rather, you certainly had some apple-nemes, but their inputs weren’t wired up right. So you didn’t recognize that description before, until we connected them up during therapy.”

“Strange. I don’t remember that at all. Wait. Of course I can’t remember that. It happened before you restored my memory. You can’t remember anything until you have some memory.”

Snaresbrook was becoming accustomed to that startling sharpness, but it still kept taking her by surprise. But she continued in the same manner. “So that is how nemes hook up. By making the right kinds of input and output connections. So far, we’ve been able to do this for the most common nemes — the ones that every child learns. But now we’ll be looking for more and more complex nemes and discover how they connect as well. I want to find higher and higher levels of your ideas, concepts and relationships. These will be increasingly harder to locate and describe, because we’ll be getting into more areas that are unique to your own development, ideas that were known to you and you alone, for which there are no common words. When we find them, it may be impossible for me — or anyone else — to understand what they mean to you. But that won’t matter because you will be learning more every day. Every time the correlation machine discovers ten new nemes, it will have to consider a thousand other possible agents to connect them to. And every twenty nemes could trigger a million such possibilities.”