Frank Herbert - Destination - Void

This is exceedingly cautious for Timberlake, Flattery thought. Is he coming around to Bickel's viewpoint?

Bickel found himself moving hesitantly, not knowing why, but unable to escape the logic in Timberlake's argument. He slid out the message print, shuttled it to the replay rack. If only the print had been the first step in the reception, instead of intermediate, he thought. He removed his feedback patches, sent the print directly into the Ox and then into AAT, routed the readout through the Optical Character Print system and into the screen above them.

Hempstead's original call appeared there, and they all looked up at it.

That had to be accurate, Bickel thought.

There came that original long delay, then: "CHOOSE BY LOT FROM THE COLONISTS IN HYBERNATION A SUITABLE BRAIN TO REPLACE YOUR ORGANIC MENTAL CORE PERIOD MEDICAL PERSONNEL ARE DIRECTED TO TAKE A HUMAN BRAIN COMMA INSTALL IT AS TEMPORARY ORGANIC MENTAL CORE COMMA AND RETURN SHIP TO BIDGEYBIDGEYBIDGEY SOMETIMES WITH THE HIT IT PERIOD PERIOD PERIOD PERIOD PERIOD ON THE QUESTION OF DEFINING CONSCIOUSNESS COMMA YOU HAVE THIS DATA SEVERAL TIMES IN YOUR COMPUTER COMMA AND YOU CAN REFER THERE PERIOD REFERENCE IS MADE TO DATA ITEM ANINSZERO FOR NERVE BARRIER AND THRESHOLD DATA ITEM YOUR COMPUTER PERIOD BEST DIVE YET PERIOD NEW ORGANIC MENTAL CORE PERIOD MEDICAL PERSONNEL ARE DIRECTED TO ABANDON ALL SUCH REPEATS IN THEIR WASTE OF ORDER PERIOD"

Bickel broke the sequence. "Do you want any more of it?"

"It's getting increasingly unreliable," Flattery said. "I see no need."

"Those callous, dirty sons-of-bitches!" Timberlake snarled.

FOR A LONG time after Timberlake's outburst they sat silently in the cocooned isolation of their action couches, absorbing their predicament. Only Flattery at the big board appeared animate. It was his couch which creaked with his movements. Switches clicked as he depressed them. The underlying stink of their enclosed quarters, by introspection, lifted across their awareness thresholds.

Take the brain from a colonist? Prudence thought. Had Hempstead really told them to commit such an atrocity? She believed it.

Bickel appeared almost asleep, but his hands clenched and unclenched.

Prudence looked at Timberlake, seeing how dark his face was, the way he instinctively bared his teeth. Those fools back at UMB, she thought. Didn't they realize they'd be stamping on the rawest inhibition of our life-systems engineer? Kill a helpless colonist in the hyb tanks!

No, she thought. What UMB asked was worse than killing.

Flattery, noting the effect of the message on Timberlake, felt the jangle of conscience... and personal fear. Where his own niche on the ship was concerned, Flattery maintained few illusions. He was both Judas goat and sacrificial goat, classic functions of religious extremity. He was giver of life and executioner - and lest he feel godlike in these powers, he was the ultimate victim of whatever would be the Earthling's destiny.

"As a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth from his place," he quoted to himself.

Aloud he said, "What they command, we cannot do that."

"You'd better not suggest it," Timberlake said.

"Then we'd better assess whatever it is we've built there in the computer shop, and go on from that point," Flattery said. "What have we built, John?"

"Damned if I know," Bickel said.

"Well, it doesn't seem to be a consciousness, anyway," Prudence said.

"Goddammit!" Bickel snapped. "There you go again! Consciousness! Conscious! It isn't flobblegobble! That's what you might as well say. You don't know how to define consciousness. You don't know what it is. But you go around throwing sentences together as though they had meaning and -"

"That's it," Timberlake said. "That's what hits me right in the pit of the stomach. We start out to build something and we don't know what it is we're building."

It's time to hit them with it, Flattery thought.

"You're wrong, Tim," Flattery said. "And so're you, John. Prudence does know what consciousness is, just as you do. She's a human being. Humans are the only creatures within our ken who can possibly know what consciousness is. Computers can't do that job; humans must."

"Then let her define it," Bickel said.

"Maybe she can't," Flattery said. "But she possesses it."

"A while back you were saying we might not have to define it," Prudence said, and she stared accusingly at Bickel.

"It's just damn poor engineering," Bickel said. "Copy the original and hope you get the same results. We can't be sure we're copying everything in the human model. What're we leaving out?"

He's frustrated and striking out, she thought. Now's the time to push, while Raj has him set up for me. "Okay, engineer, where do you think you're going with your field-theory idea?"

Bickel stared at her, realizing abruptly that she was deliberately pushing him. All right, I'll play her game, he thought. Am I supposed to be angry? No... that'd be too easy. The best attack comes from an unexpected quarter.

"Stretch yourself a bit, Prue, and try to follow what I'm saying," he challenged her. "The field-theory approach deals with three forces: first, you have the source of experience, the universe which inflicts itself upon us."

"That has to be deeply involved with the way your nervous system functions," she said. "Don't try to teach me my specialty."

"I wouldn't think of it. And you're right. That's the second element: there has to be someone who experiences that universe."

"And third?"

"Third, you have the really tricky one. This is the relationship between that someone and all of this neural raw material which we call experience. This relationship, this third-order phenomenon, that's our field."

"The self," she said.

"A field," Bickel countered.

She shrugged. "Huxley's 'spatio-temporal cage' with its 'confused swarm of ideas.'"

"Yeah, Huxley said the conscious self had to derive from memory, but he was just playing with words because he was frightened by what lay beyond the words."

"And you're not?" Flattery demanded.

"You'd better listen closer," Bickel said. "When you try to say that a conscious self derives only from our memory function, you're identifying the someone who experiences with that which supplies the experience."

"Memory is experience," Prudence agreed.

"We have to focus on this third-order relationship," Bickel said.

"The total field that's greater than the sum of its parts," she said.

She's ready for her shock, Bickel thought. For that matter, so's Raj.

"You self-satisfied medicos give me a pain. You say only humans are conscious. From Raj, that's sacrilege. From you, Prue, that's stupidity. You see one corner of the spectrum and immediately say you know what the whole universe of light is like. Never once has either one of you asked: Am I really conscious?"

Flattery felt an unexplainable pain across his chest. The console in front of him blurred for a heartbeat. Then he had himself under control.

Back at UMB, they laughed and quoted Edgar Allan Poe, Flattery thought. They had said individual humans might not have Poe's "organ of analysis," but that a whole society could create such an organ out of one of its members. Had they realized what a dangerous monster they were creating? What could you hide from Bickel if he turned his attention to it? That was what Prue meant, of course, when she cautioned against underestimating Bickel. But had the UMB manipulators known what a knight they had loosed among the pawns?