Charles Sheffield - The Mind Pool

“Over this way, Commander.” A familiar voice spoke in his ear. He looked to the directional signal recorded by his suit, and saw the figure of Phoebe Willard halfway across the interior of the air-bulb. The lattice-work was still in position, but now at its center sat a new structure, a second bubble of dark green.

“Not exactly a shirtsleeve working-place.” Brachis floated towards her. “I tried to call you from the Dump’s control room. Why didn’t you answer?”

“Because I couldn’t hear you. I designed it that way. For the same reason as I built the cold barrier.” She pointed at the outer, liquid nitrogen shell. “I never told you to lose communication ability.”

“That was just a side effect. No signals can get through that outer wall. You told me you wanted a secure environment. This is it.”

“Taken to extremes. And beyond them.”

“I don’t think so. Nor will you, when I tell you what’s going on here. But first, let’s get this out of the way.” She pushed across to a magnetic board clamped to the lattice and lifted from it two cubes like a pair of oversized dice. “You insisted on hand-delivery. I’m hand delivering. This is it. The specification, the best one I’ve been able to derive by putting together information from every fragment.”

Brachis slipped the data dice into a frost-proof, fireproof pouch in his suit wall. “How complete is it?”

“For perfectionists like you and me, it’s lousy. There’s functions and neural paths I shouldn’t even have guessed at.”

“But you did.”

“Naturally. The whole thing’s a plausible Construct logic to anybody but an expert. In the old words of wisdom, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and that’s usually enough to get by.”

“If you say it s plausible, that’s good enough for me. So what’s the bad news?”

“I didn’t say there was any. But there is certainly news .” Phoebe took the arm of Luther Brachis’s suit and drifted them both closer to the central green balloon. It loomed over them, and from a few feet away Brachis could see hair-thin and delicate spider filaments running from a computer station into the tough balloon wall. “What’s inside that? More liquid nitrogen?”

Phoebe nodded. “Nitrogen. And one other thing. Part of a Construct — the one I told you about, with a big chunk of its brain intact.”

“It had better be only the brain.”

“Luther, I’ve reviewed the records from Cobweb Station over and over. They’re terrifying. I bet I’m more afraid of the Morgan Constructs than you are. Before I did anything else I took this one completely apart, removed anything that might possibly be a weapon, and isolated the brain. Then I separated the pieces of the brain itself, and ran connections among them that I can interrupt any time from here. And then I put the whole thing in a bath of liquid nitrogen to reduce available energy, cut off all communication channels with anything except the computer over there, and put a communications break between that and everything outside the air-bulb. What more should I have done?’

“Nothing. You should have done less, not more. I told you I wanted a good Construct specification. I never told you to try and put one back together.”

“And I haven’t. All that’s sitting in there is a naked brain fragment. Tell me you want me to destroy it, and I’ll do it. You’re the boss.”

Luther Brachis had eased his way over to the computer console. “Can you talk to it?”

Phoebe was poised with her fingers on a pair of keys. “Say the word, Commander. Destroy or not destroy?

Phoebe Willard — Frau Doktor Professor Willard — does it ever occur to you that I really am your boss? Do you ever say to yourself, Phoebe, I report to Commander Brachis?”

“I might — if you didn’t give me such off-the-wall assignments.”

“Which you love. Don’t push me too far. You will certainly not destroy your work. I said, can you talk to it?”

“As much as I want. The real question is, can it talk to me?”

“And what’s the real answer?”

“You won’t like it. I don’t know.” Phoebe was at the console, keying in sequences. “I know you won’t take my word for it. Try for yourself. You’re linked in now to the brain.”

“Vocal circuits?”

“The original had them, but now they show no response at all. I’ve had to work everything through a computer interface. That introduces its own level of ambiguity, so you’re probably better off avoiding oral inputs.”

Brachis nodded. He typed in, Who are you?

“There. You can’t get much more basic than that.”

But Phoebe Willard was laughing at him. “Commander, don’t you think that was just about the first thing I tried? Let’s see if you get what I did.”

The response was scrolling already onto the screen. More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“That’s it. Nine times out of ten that’s the message — the only message — that comes back.”

Brachis nodded, frowning at the screen. “Maybe it’s the way the question is phrased. Who are you implies a recognition of self-identity. Let’s try another.” He typed in, Tell me your name.

More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“Damn. What doesn’t get that reply?”

“Nothing, consistently. I’ve been working with this off and on all day, and I’ve not found any regular pattern.”

“Did it have a name? Maybe it doesn’t comprehend the idea of names. But Livia Morgan must have had some way of distinguishing one Construct from another.”

Brachis typed in, Tell me the way that you were described by Livia Morgan.

More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“We already know the identification that Livia Morgan used.” Phoebe was at another console, skipping around inside a hyperdatabase. “This one was called M-26A. It must have been built to respond to that — but maybe it only recognizes M-26A as its whole being. It may not accept an isomorphism between its whole self, and its alone. After all, you wouldn’t say that you and your brain are the same thing.”

“Sometimes I wonder if we’re even related.” Brachis typed in, Your identification is M-26A. What is your identification?

The reply was rapid. Identification is M-26A.

“Progress.”

“Of a sort.” Phoebe sounded unimpressed. “Ask it exactly the same thing again.”

“All right.” What is your identification?

More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“Damnation.”

“I know. I went through the same thing. It must have the information, because we gave it to it. We know it stored it, because it gave it back to us. But ask again, and you get nothing.’

“Maybe it can only hold data for a few seconds.”

“No. I gave my name, and waited for five minutes. Then I asked my name, and got the answer, Phoebe Willard. Then I asked again — and got that garbage about needing more information.”

My name is Luther Brachis. What is your name?

My name is M-26A.

“See, it can feed something back to me that wasn’t what I just fed in. And it realizes that name and identification are to be treated the same.”

Brachis typed in again, What is your name?

More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“The hell with it. Here we go again.”

“I went through the same thing.’