Michael Crichton - The Terminal Man

"Go on to four," Gerhard said. He wrote out a few notes:

#1 -? memory trace (ham sand.).

#2 - bladder fullness.

#3 - no subjective change.

#4 -

He drew the dash and waited. It was going to take a long time to go through all forty electrodes, but it was fascinating to watch. They produced such strikingly different effects, yet each electrode was very close to the next. It was the ultimate proof of the density of the brain, which had once been described as the most complex structure in the known universe. And it was certainly true: there were three times as many cells packed into a single human brain as there were human beings on the face of the earth. That density was hard to comprehend, sometimes. Early in his NPS career, Gerhard had requested a human brain to dissect. He had done it over a period of several days, with a dozen neuroanatomy texts opened up before him. He used the traditional tool for brain dissection, a blunt wooden stick, to scrape away the cheesy gray material. He had patiently, carefully scraped away - and in the end, he had nothing. The brain was not like the liver or the lungs. To the naked eye, it was uniform and boring, giving no indication of its true function. The brain was too subtle, too complex. Too dense.

"Electrode four," Richards said into the recorder. "Five millivolts, five seconds." The shock was delivered.

And Benson, in an oddly childlike voice, said, "Could I have some milk and cookies, please?"

"That's interesting," Gerhard said, watching the reaction.

Richards nodded. "How old would you say?"

"About five or six, at most."

Benson was talking about cookies, talking about his tricycle, to Ross. Slowly, over the next few minutes, he seemed to emerge like a time-traveler advancing through the years. Finally he became fully adult again, thinking back to his youth, instead of actually being there. "I always wanted the cookies, and she would never give them to me. She said they were bad for me and would give me cavities."

"We can go on," Gerhard said.

Richards said, "Electrode five, five millivolts, five seconds."

In the next room, Benson shifted uncomfortably in his wheelchair. Ross asked him if something was wrong. Benson said, "It feels funny."

"How do you mean?"

"I can't describe it. It's like sandpaper. Irritating. Gerhard nodded, and wrote in his notes, "#5 - potential attack electrode." This happened sometimes. Occasionally an electrode would be found to stimulate a seizure. Nobody knew why - and Gerhard personally thought that nobody ever would. The brain was, he believed, beyond comprehension.

His work with programs like George and Martha had led him to understand that relatively simple computer instructions could produce complex and unpredictable machine behavior. It was also true that the programmed machine could exceed the capabilities of the programmer; that was clearly demonstrated in 1963 when Arthur Samuel at IBM programmed a machine to play checkers - and the machine eventually became so good that it beat Samuel himself.

Yet all this was done with computers which had no more circuits than the brain of an ant. The human brain far exceeded that complexity, and the programming of the human brain extended over many decades. How could anyone seriously expect to understand it?

There was also a philosophical problem. Goedel's Theorem: that no system could explain itself, and no machine could understand its own workings. At most, Gerhard believed that a human brain might, after years of work, decipher a frog brain. But a human brain could never decipher itself in the same detail. For that you would need a superhuman brain.

Gerhard thought that someday a computer would be developed that could untangle the billions of cells and hundreds of billions of interconnections in the human brain. Then, at last, man would have the information that he wanted. But man wouldn't have done the work - another order of intelligence would have done it. And man would not know, of course, how the computer worked.

Morris entered the room with a cup of coffee. He sipped it, and glanced at Benson through the glass. "How's he holding up?"

"Okay," Gerhard said.

"Electrode six, five and five," Richards intoned.

In the next room, Benson failed to react. He sat talking with Ross about the operation, and his lingering headache. He was quite calm and apparently unaffected. They repeated the stimulation, still without change in Benson's behavior. Then they went on.

"Electrode seven, five and five," Richards said. He delivered the shock.

Benson sat up abruptly. "Oh," he said, "that was nice."

"What was?" Ross said.

"You can do that again if you want to."

"How does it feel?"

"Nice," Benson said. His whole appearance seemed to change subtly. "You know," he said after a moment, "you're really a wonderful person, Dr. Ross."

"Thank you," she said.

"Very attractive, too. I don't know if I ever told you before."

"How do you feel now?"

"I'm really very fond of you," Benson said. "I don't know if I told you that before."

"Nice," Gerhard said, watching through the glass. "Very nice."

Morris nodded. "A strong P-terminal. He's clearly turned on."

Gerhard made a note of it. Morris sipped his coffee. They waited until Benson settled down. Then, blandly, Richards said, "Electrode eight, five millivolts, five seconds."

The stimulation series continued.

At noon, McPherson showed up for interfacing. No one was surprised to see him. In a sense, this was the irrevocable step; everything preceding it was unimportant. They had implanted electrodes and a computer and a power pack, and they had hooked everything up. But nothing functioned until the interfacing switches were thrown. It was a little like building an automobile and then finally turning the ignition.

Gerhard showed him notes from the stimulation series. "At five millivolts on a pulse-form stimulus, we have three positive terminals and two negatives. The positives are seven, nine, and thirty-one. The negatives are five and thirty-two."

McPherson glanced at the notes, then looked through the one-way glass at Benson. "Are any of the positives true P's?"

"Seven seems to be."

"Strong?"

"Pretty strong. When we stimulated him, he said he liked it, and he began to act sexually aroused toward Jan."

"Is it too strong? Will it tip him over?"

Gerhard shook his head. "No," he said. "Not unless he were to receive multiple stimulations over a short time course. There was that Norwegian…"

"I don't think we have to worry about that," McPherson said. "We've got Benson in the hospital for the next few days. If anything seems to be going wrong, we can switch to other electrodes. We'll just keep track of him for a while. What about nine?"

"Very weak. Equivocal, really."

"How did he respond?"

"There was a subtle increase in spontaneity, more tendency to smile, to tell happy and positive anecdotes."

McPherson seemed unimpressed. "And thirtyone?"

"Clear tranquilizing effect. Calmness, relaxation, happiness."

McPherson rubbed his hands together. "I guess we can get on with it," he said. He looked once through the glass at Benson, and said, "Interface the patient with seven and thirty-one."

McPherson was clearly feeling a sense of high drama and medical history. But Gerhard wasn't; he got off his stool in a straightforward, almost bored way and walked to a corner of the room where there was a computer console mounted beneath a TV screen. He began to touch the buttons. The TV screen glowed to life. After a moment, letters appeared on it.

POSSIBLE ELECTRODES: 40, designated serially

POSSIBLE VOLTAGES: continuous POSSIBLE DURATIONS: continuous POSSIBLE WAVE FORMS: pulse only