Destination Void by Frank Herbert
“So we install inhibitions, fail-safe features,” Prudence said.
“How?” Bickel asked. “Can we develop this consciousness without giving it free will? Maybe that was the original problem with our Creator—giving us consciousness without permitting us to turn against … what? God?”
Consciousness, the gift of the serpent, Flattery thought. He wet his lips with his tongue. “So?”
“So this ship has an ultimate fail-safe device to protect Earth and the rest of humanity,” Bickel said. “The only sure one I can think of, given all the variables, is a human being—one of us.” He looked at each of them. “One of us set to pull the pin and blow us all to hell if we go sour.”
“Oh, come now!” Flattery said.
“It could be you,” Bickel said. “Probably is … but maybe you’re too obvious.”
Prudence put a hand to her breast, thought: Holy Jesus! I never once considered that. But Bickel’s right … and it’s Raj, of course. He’s the only one that fits. What do I do now?
Timberlake stirred out of a deep silence. He had heard the argument and the only thing that surprised him was how easy it was to accept Bickel’s summation. Why was Bickel right? He was right, of course. But why did they accept it when the thing really wasn’t that obvious? Was it awe of Bickel—clearly the strongest mind among them? Or was it that they already knew the facts—unconsciously?
“I tell you something,” Timberlake said. “Bickel’s right and we know it. So one of us is set to pull the pin. I don’t want to know who.”
“No argument,” Bickel said. “Whoever it is … if this thing goes sour, I’d be the last person in the … Tin Egg to stop him.”
Chapter 14
The Zen master tells us that an omnipresent idea can be hidden by its own omnipresence—the forest lost among the trees. In our normal daily behavior we are most estranged, most in the grip of an illusory idea of the self. Every enchanting inclination of pride and its ego, of convention and its master—social training—conspires to maintain the illusion. The semanticist calls it the inertia of old premises. And this is what holds our analyses of consciousness within fixed limits.
She wrote “Prudence Lon Weygand” at the foot of the log tape, started it rolling through the autorecorder, made the synchronous shift to Flattery’s tape as he took over the board. The counter said it was her thirty-fifth change of shift.
Flattery squirmed in his couch, settling himself for the four-hour watch. Reflections on the dial faces were hypnotic. He shook his head to bring himself to full alertness, heard the hiss of fabric as Prudence got out of her couch. She stood there a moment stretching, did a dozen deep-knee bends.
How easily they accept the possibility that I’m the executioner, Flattery thought. He noted how wide awake and alert Prudence appeared. This four-hours-on, four-hours-off routine could be endured as long as no serious problems arose, but it played hob with the metabolic cycle. Prudence should be headed for food and rest, but she obviously was wide awake.
She glanced at Flattery, saw he was settled in for the watch, checked the repair log. Nothing was flagged urgent. That made it a bit more than twenty-five hours with nothing more than minor adjustments on the big board. Smooth. Too smooth.
Danger keeps you honed to a fine edge, she thought. Extended peace makes you dull.
But she wondered if Project had anticipated the special danger she had found for herself, and she thought: Am I the stick to beat not only the others, but myself?
The line of her own research seemed so obvious, though: define the chemical sea in which consciousness swam. The ultimate clue lay, she thought, in the serotonin adrenalin fractions. The thing she sought was an active principle, something between synhexyl and noradrenalin, a flash producer of neurohormones. The end product would be the root-stimulator of human consciousness. Find that chemical analogue and she could give fine detail to the workings of consciousness; provide a point-to-point sequencing which they could follow with machine simulation.
On the course she had chosen, the dangers to her person were enormous. She had no other guinea pig upon whom to test the derivatives her ingenuity produced. The possibility of deadly error was always present. The last substance, a relative of cohoba with an extra nitrogen addition, had ignited her mind, transported her into a weird consciousness. All sounds had become liquids which merged within her to be translated by a centrifuge process of awareness. It had been a terrifying experience, but she refused to stop.
It was only possible to make the tests during the deep rest periods in her own private cubby, and there was always the possibility some physical response would betray her. She could not afford that; the others would unite to prevent the tests, she knew. Such was their conditioning.
“You’d better get something to eat and try to rest,” Flattery said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“At least try to rest.”
“Maybe later. Think I’ll wander in and see how Bickel and Tim’re doing.” She looked at the big screen overhead. It was tuned to the peak-corner lenses of the computer shop.
“We have to have a constant monitor on each other,” Timberlake had argued. “We can’t wait for somebody to yell help.”
The screen showed Bickel alone in the shop, but another eye had been keyed; it showed Timberlake asleep in his cubby adjoining the shop.
Four hours on and four hours off plus this constant looking over each other’s shoulders will have us batty in a week, she thought.
Bickel looked up to his own screen-eye, saw Prudence watching, said: “Satan finds mischief for idle hands.”
They mock me, Flattery thought. They laugh at God, at the Devil, at me.
“How about some coffee?” Prudence asked, speaking to Bickel.
“Coffee later,” he said. “No more food of any kind in here, anyway. We have to keep the cover plates open and we can’t risk contaminating the fine structure. If you’re free, I could use some help.”
She took one low-grav step across to the hatch lock, let herself through, stopped just inside the shop to study what Tim and Bickel had accomplished since her last free period.
Where the optical character reader had been, on the big panel across from the lock, now stretched a mechanical excrescence—a piled and jutting structure of plastic blocks: Eng multiplier circuits, each sealed in plastic insulator. Linking the blocks were loops and tangles and twists—a black spiderweb of insulated pseudoneuron fiber.
Bickel had heard her entrance. Without turning from his work at one end of that protruding angular construction, he said: “Take that other micro-tie viewer on the bench. I need 21.006 centimeters of the K-A4 neurofiber with random spaced endbulbs and multisynapses. Connect it as I’ve indicated on that schematic labeled G-20. It should be the top one in that pile on the right end of the bench.”
Bickel sat down on the deck, slid a new block of Eng multipliers into position. He swung a portable micro-tie viewer across the block, leaned into the viewer’s forehead rests, began making the connections.
Yes, sir! she thought.
She found the indicated schematic, reeled off the neurofiber, fed it into the viewer, bent to the eyepiece. The enlarged image of the conductor line with its green-coded synapse sections and yellow endbulbs leaped into view. She looked once more at the schematic, began making the required connections.
“What’re we doing now, boss?” she asked.
“Installing a system of roulette cycles,” Bickel said.
“Why?”
“A machine can reproduce any form of behavior,” Bickel said. “We can engineer this device to satisfy any given input-output specifications. It’ll behave any way we want under any specified circumstances. Raj set me straight on that.”
She kept her tone light. “That was wrong, huh?”
“You bet your sweet life. Specified environment and behavior—that’s deterministic. The manufacturer is still in control. What’s worse, it requires a completely detailed memory—ever
She reeled off a required length of side fiber, made the loop indicated in the schematic. “Infinite design. That means an indeterminate form and, by definition, the indeterminate is impossible to construct. So what do we do now?”
“Don’t be dull,” Bickel said. “We build for a random inhibitory pattern in the net—behavior that follows probability requirements.” He leaned back from his viewer, wiped perspiration from his forehead. “A behavior pattern that results from built-in misfunction.”
The way this ship was programmed to behave for us, she thought.
“Deterministic behavior from unreliable elements,” she said. And she sensed Flattery’s hand in this, an argument, a gentle nudge.
“Bickel,” she said, “I’ve been stewing about your suspicions. Even if you’re right—about one of us being set to blow us up if we go sour—how can you be sure this failsafe person is still among us? I mean, three of the original crew are dead.”
“Okay,” Bickel said. “Let’s say we brought you out of hyb and you found our chaplain-psychiatrist had been killed. What were your orders?”
“Orders?”
“Come off that! We all had special orders.”
“I’d have insisted we bring another chaplain-psychiatrist out of hyb,” she said in a small voice. “What would you have done?”
“I had my orders, same as you.”
She looked up at Flattery visible on the overhead screen. He appeared intent on the big board, paying no attention to the conversation coming over the intercom from the shop. That was sham, she knew. Everything said here was going into his brain, being weighed and analyzed.
Bickel’s right, she thought. It’s Raj.
“Pay attention to what you’re doing!” Bickel said.
She turned, saw him watching her.
“You foul up the ties on that loop and I’ll put you back in hyb,” he said.
“Don’t make threats you can’t carry out,” she said. But she turned back to the micro-tie viewer, finished off an interringed series of loops, tested to be sure they weren’t mutually oscillating, traced the output sheaf, and attached a plug for an Eng multiplier connection.
“Let me have that G-20 assembly as soon as you’re finished,” Bickel said. He yawned, put his knuckles to his eyes.
Prudence checked her assembly against the schematic, saw it matched, lifted it gently out of the viewer and took it to Bickel. He was overdue for a rest and still driving himself, she saw.
“Here,” she said, presenting the assembly. “When you get this tied in, why don’t you take a break.”
“We’re almost ready to put this on an initial program,” Bickel said. He took the assembly, began connecting it to the newly installed Eng multiplier block, running one sheaf back to a plugboard connection on the computer panel.
Prudence stepped back, studied the mechanical growth that jutted from the wall. As though she saw it for the first time, the construction abruptly took on a new meaning for her.
“That’s more than a setup for analysis,” she said.
“That’s right.”
Bickel stood up, wiped his hands on the sides of his vacsuit, swung his own micro-manipulator and viewer to one side.
“This, in addition to giving us our analysis of built-in misfunction, this little ‘Ox’ we’re driving will provide a three-way energy interchange.”
“You’re tied into the computer,” she accused, pointing to the connections in the plugboard.
“Every line in that board has a diode in it. Pulses can come from the computer to our test setup, but anything going into the computer has to be coded by one of us and inserted over there.” Bickel pointed to the input heads lined up at the right corner of the wall.
“Three-way interchange?’ she asked.
“We’re going to test my field-theory approach. I have a source program ready to insert. If our Ox doesn’t work, it’ll just produce an unconditional transfer of the material at the readout. If the field is produced, it’ll act as a filter, and we’ll get truncation. It’ll pass only the significant digits.”
“What about the roulette cycles?”
“The zero suppress will be intermittent,” he said, “but we’ll still get only the significant digits at the readout.”
Prudence nodded, looking at Bickel with a new understanding of what he was doing. “All sense data are intermittent into the human consciousness.”
It was an explosive thought. Waveforms! Everything which consciousness could identify had to move in some organized way. It had to move against a background which set off … which outlined! … the organization. Therefore: intermittence. And Bickel had seen right through to this necessity.
She found the realization somehow deeply sexual, and awareness of this filled her with disquiet. There was no way she could include anti-S on her present testing regimen. She wondered if her body might finally betray her.
Forcing herself to a calmness which she did not feel, she said: “What we see and identify has to be discrete and significant, it has to dance against some other background.”
“Now you have it,” Bickel said. “But we assume that the one who views the data is continuous—a flow of consciousness. Somewhere inside us, the discrete becomes amorphous. Consciousness weeds out the insignificant, focuses only on the significant.”
“That’s judgment,” she said, “and it’s where physicalist theory falls flat on its face. If this is an introspection device, then it won’t be conscious. Introspection confuses consciousness with thinking. But sensing, feeling and thinking are physiological processes … and consciousness—”
“Is something else,” Bickel said. “It’s a relationship, a field, a selective interchange. It drops the insignificant digits. It’s a weeder. Now, we see if we have a device that can weed on the basis of intermittent data, some of which is erroneous.”
“Erroneous data—significant results,” she whispered.
“What?”
But she ignored Bickel to turn and look at the overhead screen where Flattery was revealed calmly monitoring the big board. Something Flattery had said came now into her mind as though it had been amplified to full volume:
“There’s nothing concerning ourselves about which we can be truly objective except our physical responses—the reflections of behavior. We exist in a forest of illusion where the very concept of consciousness merges with illusion.”
She turned to look at Bickel where he worked, seeing the stretch of his muscles under the vacsuit fabric as he bent to finish the assembly. And she thought: To be conscious, you must surmount illusion. Bickel saw that where I didn’t.
A moment of illumination filled her mind and she saw the man at his work as more than flesh and sinew and nerves—more than the physical chemistry with blanks to be filled in. Bickel was both a minuscule and vulnerable creature, but beyond that, he contained powers that could stretch across any universe. Something of this momentary understanding struck her as almost religious … holy. She savored it, realizing this was a private and personal thing she could never completely communicate to another creature.
Bickel finished the final tie of the G-20 assembly, stood up, and rubbed the small of his back. His hands trembled as he relaxed after the fierce concentration of the work he had just completed.
“Let’s give it a run,” he said. “Prue, you monitor the diagnostic board.” He gestured to the panel of dials and gauges waiting like so many glistening eyes at his left. “I’ll give each net of the roulette cycles a one-fifth-second burst from the shot generator.” He moved around to the right of the piled blocks of the test setup, stepping over the leads with elaborate care. He flipped the row of switches to start the source program through the inputs.
“Mark,” he said.
“Mark,” she said a
“Give me the mean synapse threshold, mean endbulb threshold, and action time on each net.” Bickel depressed three switches simultaneously. “Interchange activated.’”
He waited, feeling the suspense grow, a tightness in his stomach.
“Interchange now showing entrance pulse,” she said.
“Net one,” he said, introducing the timed burst from the shot generator.
“There’s a jam-up at the fifth-layer nodes,” she said. She concentrated on the gauges for the fifth layer as though her thoughts could activate them, but they remained at zero. “No impulses are getting through,” she said.
“I’ll try sweeping the roulette cycles,” Bickel said. He twisted a dial.
“Nothing,” she said.
Bickel kicked off his row of switches, moved the jacks to the left. “Here, let’s try a trigonometrically oscillating potential in the loops. Give me the new readings for each layer of the nets. Mark one.”
“You’re getting a nonlinear reaction across all the nets now,” she said. “It’s close to zero linearity.”
“That can’t be!” Bickel said. “These things are still open circuits no matter what we call them.” He depressed another switch. “Read the other nets.”
Prudence suppressed a sense of frustration, swept her gaze across the dials.
“Nonlinear,” she said.
Bickel stepped back, glared at the input panel. “This is nuts! What we have here is essentially a transducer. The outputs should match!”
Again, Prudence read her dials. “Your products are still zero.”
“Any heat?” Bickel asked.
“Nothing significant,” she said.
Bickel pursed his lips, thinking. “Somehow, we’ve produced a unitary orthogonal system for each net and the total assembly,” he said. “And that’s a contradiction. It could mean we have more than one system in each of these separate nets.”