Frank Herbert - Destination - Void

The overhead screen showed Prudence on Com-central about midway through her watch and Flattery dozing in his action couch.

Strange he wouldn't take off for quarters, Timberlake thought.

Bickel emerged from between the Ox's two branchings just as a wash of green splashed down on him from the wall.

"That last reading's off only .008," Timberlake said.

"Insignificant," Bickel said. "Waveforms?"

Timberlake nodded at the oscilloscope in front of him, feeling a sharp pain shoot through his neck. He felt tired and stiff. Bickel had driven them, working through three shifts. Timberlake rubbed his neck.

Bickel turned from studying the scope. "Remember I told you to remind me about all the oscillations involved in life? Rhythms, vibrations just one great big series of drumbeats."

"Yeah," Timberlake said. "You about ready for the full-scale run-through?"

Bickel stared at the flickering lights reluctant to move now that the moment of test had come. He knew the source of his reluctance - the secret thing he had done, and fear of its consequences.

One more test... and then... what?

Black box - white box.

"You think it's not going to work?" Timberlake asked. He felt impatient with Bickel but sensed this couldn't be pushed.

"The human nervous system - including the region of the brain we assume influences consciousness - has come through one hell of a lot of tests," Bickel said.

"And this thing..." Timberlake nodded toward the Ox, "is a logically simple analogue of the human brain."

"Logical simplicity has damn little bearing on our problem. We're engineering something, all right, but not by the old bridge-building rules."

He's stalling, Timberlake thought. Why? "Then what're we doing?"

"It doesn't take much, just a word sometimes to upset the logical applecart," Bickel said. "The brain's had to meet a lot of requirements that had nothing whatsoever to do with design simplicity. For one thing, it had to survive while it developed. Its size and shape had a bearing on that. It had to adapt existing structure to new functions."

Bickel met Timberlake's eyes. "The human brain's an obvious hybrid mating of function and structure. There are strengths in that, but weaknesses, too."

"So?" Timberlake said, and shrugged. "What's upsetting the applecart now?"

"Raj's talking about psychospace and psychorelationships. That damn causal track of neuron impulses spreading out to form new kinds of space. It's quite possible for our normal universe to be twisted through an infinite number of psychospaces."

"Yeah?" Timberlake stared at him, wondering at the fear in Bickel's voice.

Bickel went on: "There can be an infinite number of types of consciousness. Every time I come near turning this thing loose, I start wondering what space it'll inhabit."

"Raj and his damn horror stories," Timberlake said.

Bickel continued to stare at the Ox structure, wondering if he had done the right thing to act secretly.

Was this damn electronic maze going to create its own guilt?

To reach a level where it could accept a black-box imprint the Ox-cum-computer had to surmount barriers, Bickel knew. It had to flex its mental muscles. And guilt was a barrier.

By blank-space programming, supplying data with obvious holes in it, he had inserted an information series on the subject of death. The on-line operative command was for the computer to fill in the gaps. Now, by parallel insertion of the address data for the life-maintenance program on a cow embryo in the farm-stock hyb tanks, Bickel had provided the computer with a simple way to fill the gaps in its information.

It could kill the embryo.

I had to act secretly, Bickel told himself. I couldn't ring in Timberlake - now with his inhibitions. And any of the others might've told Tim.

"You think we're missing some fault in the system?" Timberlake asked. "What's bugging you? The fact that the random search stopped of its own accord?"

"No." Bickel shook his head. "That search pattern ran into an irregularity, a threshold it couldn't cross."

"Then what's holding you back, for Christ's sake?"

Bickel swallowed. He found it required increasing effort to hold his attention on an unbroken thread of reasoning where it concerned bringing the Ox to consciousness. There was a sensation of swimming against a stiff current.

With what kind of a mirror can consciousness look at itself? he wondered. How can the Ox say: "This is myself?" What will it see?

"Human nervous systems have the same kinds of irregularities and imperfections," Timberlake said. "Their properties vary statistically."

Bickel nodded agreement. Timberlake was right. That was the reason they had introduced random error into the Ox - statistical imperfection.

"You worrying about pulse regulation?" Timberlake asked.

Bickel shook his head. "No." He put his palm against a plastic-encased neuron block protruding from the Ox. "We've got a homeostat whose main function is dealing with errors - with negative reality. Consciousness is always looking at the back side of whatever confronts us, always staring back at us."

"You've left the gaps in it so it'll need us," Timberlake said. "You're fussed about threshold regulation."

Bickel looked at Timberlake, thinking: Threshold? Yes, that was part of it. The brain cells and peripheral neurons in a human tied together so that their differences averaged out. You got the effect of smooth gradation. The effect. Illusion.

"We're missing something," Bickel muttered.

Timberlake wondered at the fear in Bickel's voice, the way the man's head turned from side to side like a caged animal.

"If this thing takes off on its own, we have no control over it," Bickel said. "Raj is right."

"Raj's Golem stories!" Timberlake sneered.

"No," Bickel was fearfully serious. "This thing has new kinds of memories. They have only the vaguest relationship to human memories. But memories Tim - the nerve gets stacked in psychospaces - they're the patterns that create behavior. What's this thing going to do when we turn it on... if we don't give it experiences of the kind the human race has survived?"

"You don't know what the racial traumas are and that's where you're hung up."

The voice was Flattery's, and they looked up to the overhead screen to see him sitting still half-cocooned in his action couch and rubbing sleep from his eyes. Beyond him, Prudence maintained her vigil at the big board as though that were the only thing concerning her.

Bickel suppressed a feeling of irritation with Flattery. "You're the psychiatrist. Isn't knowledge of trauma supposed to be one of your tools?"

"You're asking about racial trauma," Flattery said. "We can only guess at racial trauma."

Flattery stared out of the screen at Bickel, thinking:

John's panicky. Why? Because the Ox suddenly started acting on its own?

"We have to bring this thing into being," Bickel said, looking at the Ox. "But we can't be sure what it is. This is the ultimate stranger. It can't be like one of us. And if it's different... yet alive and aware of its aliveness..."

"So you start casting around in your mind for ways to make it more like us," Flattery said.

Bickel nodded.

"And you think we're the products of our racial and personal trauma?" Flattery asked. "You don't think consciousness is the apparent effect of a receptor?"

"Dammit, Raj!" Bickel snapped. "We're within a short leap of solving this thing! Can't you feel that?"

"But you wonder," Flattery said, "are we making a creature that'll be invulnerable... at least invulnerable to us?"

Bickel swallowed.

"You think," Flattery went steadily on, "this beast we're creating has no sexual function; it can't possibly be like us. It has no flesh; it can't possibly know what flesh fears and loves. So now you're asking: How do we simulate flesh and sex and the racial sufferings through which humans have blundered? The answer's obvious: We can't do this. We don't know all our own instincts. We can't sort the shadows and reflections out of our history."