E. Doctorow - Andrew's Brain

I see.

Uncanny, as if some dendrite winding through his brain was snappier than the billions of others. Because I was Android, all right. Tap me with your knuckle, hear the clunk.

So there you were.

He would never ask Android anything about himself, personal stuff, how his life had gone, whether he was married, those questions you ask if you have any curiosity. It was as if we were still at Yale.

Well, they had probably done a background check.

Why would he bother reading it?

Anyway, there you were.

Yes, to people’s puzzlement. Because I had to be a game first of all. Bright and early the first day I was there he summoned me to the Oval Office.

Just sit over here, Android, and don’t say a word. Don’t look up, don’t pay any attention. Here, read this magazine. Make believe you’re at the dentist’s office. And so I sat there off to the side while he conducted the morning’s business, receiving staff, holding meetings, my presence unexplained. As if he didn’t know I was there, as if I was an illusion of the others. Maybe I was Secret Service, though I hardly looked the part. But, if he didn’t seem to notice me, nobody could say anything. What a good time he was having keeping a straight face.

And were you enjoying the joke?

Would you in my position? The joke was my anonymity. I was like a shadow he’d cast. As if I was still his roommate. After a day or two of this, like everything in Washington it turned into news. That the president had a stranger hanging around his office was reported in the Spectator , a four-page subscription weekly: MYSTERY MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE! That makes two of us, the president said.

Chaingang scripted the White House response for the administration spokesman. Of course no reporter would be allowed near me. It was put out that I was a dear college chum just visiting for a few days. That had an element of truth but didn’t go down with the bloggers. I was to the president as Clyde Tolson was to J. Edgar Hoover. Or the president was seriously ill and required a physician constantly by his side. This was not to be borne: The chief of staff said I had to go. My presence was damaging to the president’s image as the leader of the free world. And there were questions of national security. Not that I ever heard anything interesting — they all talked like the newspapers. But I was remanded to my basement office in the cleaning closet. If the president wanted to kick back, he snuck down there when no one was looking.

What about your White House Office of Neurological Research? Why wasn’t that mentioned?

That the president’s science advisor knew nothing about? Never mind the CIA and the NSA. It would have sent the memos flying. Resignations. I might have actually had to do the work I was supposed to do. No, that was a secret that couldn’t be leaked. You remember the point was to make sure I kept my mouth shut.

Peachums’s idea.

Yes. Like the others, he didn’t like to see me upstairs. I heard him shouting one morning. As I walked into the Oval Office, he stormed out, taking up most of the doorway. But my old buddy would want me to have coffee just to sit around and talk about anything except being president. His war was not going well. He’d invaded the wrong country. You can’t imagine the anxiety that produces.

Amazing.

What’s amazing? You think I’m making this up?

No, it’s just that—

I was a story for a day or two before it all suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Where were you at the time? You of all people. And if not, it’s in the file, it would have to be.

What file?

Come on, Doc, at least have some respect. Do you know what Mind Reading is in cog science talk? It’s not about some magician up on a stage working his audience.

No?

No. Mind Reading is what, at the right temporoparietal junction of the brain, allows us in our social lives to know deductively, instinctively, what other people are thinking. The mood they’re in — happiness, boredom, whatever. Mind reading is our way of characterizing human sensitivity, like knowing, for instance, when someone is pretending not to know something.

I’m sorry you feel that way.

The Post and the Times had got as far as my past life — two marriages, one death, one divorce, a child farmed out, another died in infancy. I came to appreciate investigative reporting. It’s like obituary writing — they get everything but the feeling. They had my college grade average—3.25, something like an exoneration in my mind. And an old photograph from the college newspaper, the roomies with big smiles on their faces and arms around each other’s shoulders right there on the front page of the Post . I realized for the first time that, apart from my curly hair, we were look-alikes. There was almost a familial resemblance, at least then. I had since worn not as well as he. Surely you know something of this. Or else why am I here?

Good morning, class. Good morning, red of face and scowl of mouth. Good morning, starched of shirt and waved of hair. This morning we will speak of consciousness. Where does it come from? What does it do with itself? Does it connive? Does it seek advantages? How does it learn its ways — as billions of neurons self-conceiving in neural circuits, revise, adjust, reorganize, multiply responding behaviorally to outer-world creature experience — in a process of natural selection or neural Darwinism, according to Edelman? Does that include you, pretty-boy warmaker? Are you the culmination of this evolutionary brainwork? Crick, on the other hand, opts for the role of the claustrum or maybe the thalamus. Abjure claustrumphobia. Remember the thalamus! In any event you have no soul. But neither do Edelman or Crick. And neither does scowler here, though he will kill to prove that he has one. But that is the pretense of the brain. We have to be wary of our brains. They make our decisions before we make them. They lead us to still waters. They renounceth free will. And it gets weirder: If you slice a brain down the middle, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere will operate self-sufficiently and not know what the other is doing. But don’t think about these things, because it won’t be you anyway doing the thinking. Just follow your star. Live in the presumptions of the socially constructed life. Abhor science. Sort of believe in God. Put your failings behind you. Present your self-justifications to the bathroom mirror.

You really disliked those men, didn’t you.

Chaingang and Rumbum were self-appointed world strategists. They had ranks of ideologues and think-tank warriors behind them. The president was only that. These were complicated relationships among the three men, and at moments he had to feel outnumbered and outclassed. For every instance that he went along with their bidding, however persuasive and in accord with his own instincts, there had to be some resentment there, don’t you think? I understood that he was using me as a prod to annoy them, having me test them, knowing it was an affront to make them hear me lecture on neurological developments around the world. That’s what he kept saying: Android (with a sly smile), let’s hear about the neurological developments around the world.

Well, Mr. President, in Switzerland they are building a megacomputer to emulate the human brain. Slowly but surely they’re building circuitry to mimic its synaptical, neuronal capacities. As complex as our brains are, the number of elements that make them work are finite. That means it’s just a matter of time before we have a working out-of-body brain.

Is that true?

That’s what Chaingang asked with an ironic smile. This is not an old science fiction movie you’re giving us? The president had his hands full with Chaingang and Rumbum, men he’d appointed who had more or less taken over where the important decisions were to be made. So his next joke was to announce that I was a brain researcher doing a study of executive brains like theirs. They were busy men, they had things to do, a war to run, and here he was having fun at their expense.