Frank Herbert - Destination - Void

Perhaps they realized - at least unconsciously - when they set me to watch over him, Flattery thought.

"You try to resolve the basic question into smaller and smaller parts," Bickel said. "Smaller and smaller labels. But that's just avoiding the issue."

"Are we conscious?" Prudence whispered, rolling the thought over and over in her mind.

And she thought of her experience with the marijuana derivative, THC - tetrahydrocannabinol. She'd sought an anti-ataraxic, a selective stimulator of consciousness - something to hold the darkness at bay in a very special manner. But the instant she'd neared the stimulation experience, darkness had spilled over all the edges of her awareness.

Adrenochrome, she thought.

It was a sudden and explosive thought, as of something that had crouched in her path and leaped out at her.

Adrenochrome... nitrogen to CH3 If she inverted it and gave it a common CH3 bond with one of the THC forms... Ahhh, that was very like some of the deadly ones. But in an extremely small dosage... Would it get through the blood-brain barrier? And adrenochrome was one of the hallucinogens. What of that?

"You get your fingernails over the ledge," Bickel was saying, "and you haven't yet raised your eyes to the lip - you can only see the dim reflection of light, but you lie and tell those around and below you that you can see to the horizon."

As though his words unlocked a door, the memory of a dream flooded through Prudence. She had dreamed it... sometime during a long sleep... sometime when...

In hyb!

She had dreamed it in the hybernation tank!

In the dream, there had been others around her, but she had been rejected by them. The others built a low wall and taunted her to climb it. But each time she tried, the others raised the wall higher.

Higher and higher.

Until she no longer even attempted it.

Finally, the others had ignored her, but she had heard them laughing and talking on the other side of the wall.

Remembering that dream, Prudence looked at Bickel and understood the thing he had probably seen from the beginning. The problem of creating an artificial consciousness was the problem of consciousness itself. It was an enormous structure, like a tall cliff (or a wall) that they must climb. It loomed over them, dour and black - with only the taunting hint of light at the top.

"You did that deliberately to make me feel small," she accused.

"Welcome to the club," Bickel said.

"What're you saying?" Timberlake demanded. "Are you trying to say that even if we build an analogue of a human, we still might not achieve this... this consciousness?"

"Let's take another look at what happened to the ship brains," Bickel said. "What's the basic command they were supposed to obey?"

"Remain conscious and alert at all times," Timberlake said. "But, hell, if you're saying they succumbed to fatigue, that's nonsense. They were buffered against all -"

"Not fatigue," Bickel said. "I'm just wondering, what if they took that order literally, that order to remain conscious?"

"The degree of consciousness," Prudence mused.

"Threshold," Flattery said and there was wonder in his voice.

"Yes," Prudence said. "A hyperconscious subject has a low threshold. Impulses pass into his awareness with ease. You're suggesting the OMC brains couldn't handle hyperconsciousness."

"Something like that."

"Look," she said, "the assault of nerve impulses on the human... consciousness..." She looked defensively at Bickel. "Well, what else are we going to call it?"

"Okay," Bickel said. "Go on."

She stared at him a moment. "This assault is constant, gigantic. The impulses are always present. They swarm around you. There has to be a limiting factor, a threshold. Impulses have to pass a certain threshold before you grow... aware of them."

"And that threshold varies from person to person, even minute to minute in the same person," Flattery said:

"But how do nerve impulses get over that wall?" Bickel asked.

Why did he use that word? she wondered.

"Sometimes the impulses grow stronger," Flattery said.

"But that isn't the whole story," Prudence said. "There's activity on the side of the... experiencer, too. You focus your attention on something and that lowers your threshold."

"Danger can lower it, too," Flattery said. And he waited to see if Bickel would pick up that cue.

Bickel looked at Flattery, wondering. "We're in danger right now, Raj. Is that something they did to us - deliberately?"

"You think that danger out there isn't real?" Flattery asked, unconsciously hooking a thumb toward the shortest distance between himself and the outer hull.

Bickel held his silence, feeling his tongue go dry. Unreasoning terror pervaded him. It was a towering oblivion that threatened to engulf him.

"John," Prudence asked, "are you all right?"

"Just a touch of ship vertigo," Bickel managed. He forced a smile. "Perhaps... maybe I'm tired. I went more than two shifts at that haywire setup in the shop, and I haven't really had a good rest for I don't know how long."

Knowing when to relax the pressure is half the job, Prudence reminded herself. "Get some chow and shuteye. It might help if we let up on this problem a bit."

And she thought: I can give him that advice but I won't take it myself.

Those last chemical experiments on her own body were playing hob with her sense of reality. She wondered if she should take Raj into her confidence, but rejected this thought as soon as it occurred. Raj would say she was meddling. He'd force her to stop and she felt that she didn't dare stop now. There was something... something... something so close....

"What about answering Hempstead?" Bickel asked.

"Let 'em sweat," Timberlake growled.

"They'll figure it was a transmission breakdown if we go too long beyond the delay period," Bickel said. "They'll retransmit the message."

"That gets us the retransmission without committing ourselves," Flattery said.

"Isn't that a rather devious suggestion for our cleric?" Bickel asked.

"That was the psychiatrist speaking," Prudence said. "Go on, get your sleep."

"And I can sit here and twiddle my thumbs," Timberlake said.

Bickel looked at Timberlake, recalling the man's bitter anger over Hempstead's suggestion. For the first time in many hours, Bickel focused his full attention on Timberlake, seeing the pride the man had swallowed in relinquishing command of the ship, seeing Timberlake's primary concern - for the human lives around him.

There was no easing Timberlake's tensions right now, Bickel realized. The lives were in danger... every life on the Tin Egg from the lowliest chick embryo in the hyb tanks right up to Timberlake himself.

Timberlake sometimes saw through things intuitively, Bickel realized. And Timberlake was an engineer. It might help him if he were kept occupied... and this crew could use any available edge.

"Tim," Bickel said, "we have to solve for consciousness the way you solve for a specific effect in a transceiver or a tuner or an amplifier. You might be chewing that over while I get some rest. I need specific answers that can be translated into working schematics."

"But we're stuck with that thing in the shop," Timberlake protested.

"Only as a beginning. We have to use the Ox, yeah, because it's our only entrance into the computer for some of our vital data... now. But it's still a place to begin. Nothing's changed, really."

"Except we're two days closer to our deadline and no closer to a solution," Timberlake growled.

Bickel put down a surge of anger. "Suit yourself." He turned away, crossed to the hatch into quarters, let himself through, sealed the hatch behind him.

The sound of the hatch expanders hissed through him like a sigh and he found himself standing in the galley-round wondering if he had enough energy left to eat and get into a sleeping cubicle.