Self-discovery

Chapter 8

A man was walking toward me on the paved path. I could see the green trees and white columns of the old institute building behind him. I was headed for the accounting office. Everything was normal in the grounds. The man had a slightly rolling gait, swinging his arms, and he didn’t quite limp, but stepped more carefully with his right foot than with his left. I noticed that particularly. The wind made his raincoat flap and ruffled his red hair.

My first thought: “Where have I seen this guy?”

The closer we got to each other, the more I saw of him: his sloping forehead with a widow’s peak and steep ridges over the eyes, flat cheeks with a reddish, week — old stubble, haughtily pursed lips, and bored, squinting eyes. No, we had definitely met before. It was impossible to forget an obnoxious face like that. And that jaw — my God! — it should be worn only in the closet.

My second thought: “Should I say hello or walk by indifferently?”

And then everything around me no longer existed. I tripped on the flat pavement and stood stock still. The person coming toward me was me.

My third thought (edited): “What the….”

The man stopped in front of me.

“Hello.”

“H — h — hello….” A thought sprang up from the chaos that ruled in my brain. “Hey, are you from the film studio?”

“The film studio? I recognize my independence!” My double smiled. “No, Val, the studios aren’t planning a movie about us yet. Though now, who knows.”

“Listen here, I’m not Val to you, but Valentin Vasilyevich Krivo — shein! Some pushy guy like you….”

The man smiled, obviously enjoying my anger. I could tell that he was much more prepared for our meeting and was relishing his upper hand.

“And… be so kind as to explain: who you are, how you come to be on institute grounds, and why you are wearing that makeup and outfit to look like me?”

“Sure,” he said. “Valentin Vasilyevich Krivoshein, head of the New Systems Lab. Here’s my pass, if you like.” He displayed my worn, used pass. “And I came here from the lab, naturally.”

“Ah, so that’s it?” It’s important not to lose your sense of humor in situations like this. “Very nice to meet you. Valentin Vasilyevich, you say? From the lab? I see… uh — huh.”

And then I realized that I believed him. Not because of the pass, of course. You could fool anyone with a pass. Either it was the realization that the scar over my eyebrow and the brown birthmark on my cheek, which I always saw in the mirror on my left, actually were supposed to be on the right side of the face. Or it was something in his behavior that absolutely ruled out the possibility of a practical joke. I was scared. Had I really gone mad during the experiments and run into my split personality? “I hope no one sees us. I wonder, to anyone else, am I here alone or are there two of us?” I thought.

“So — from the lab, you say?” I tried tricking him. “Then why are you coming from the old building?”

“I was in accounting. Today’s the twenty — second.” He took out a roll of five — ruble notes and counted off part of it. “Here’s your cut.”

I took the money and counted it. Then:

“Why only half?

“Oh, God!” my double sighed expressively. “There are two of us now, you know.”

(That exaggerated, expressive sigh — I’ll never sigh like that. I didn’t know you could demean someone with a sigh. And his diction — if you can call the absolute absence of diction diction! — do I really spit out words like that?)

“I took the money from him, and that means he really exists,” I thought. “Or are my senses tricking me? Damn it, I’m a researcher, and I couldn’t care less about senses until I know what’s going on here!”

“So you maintain that… you’ve come out of a locked and sealed lab?”

“Uh — hum. Definitely from the lab. From the tank.”

“From the tank, my, oh…. What do you mean, from the tank?”

“Just that, from the tank. You could have set up some handles. I barely managed to get out.”

“Listen, drop this! You don’t think you could really convince me that you were. that I was. no, that you were made by the computer?”

The double sighed once more in the most demeaning manner possible.

“I have the feeling it’s going to take you a long time to get used to the idea that this has happened. I should have known. After all, you saw that there was living matter in the flasks?”

“Big deal. I’ve seen mold, too, growing in damp places. But that didn’t mean that I was present at the conception of life. All right, let’s assume that something living did arise in the flasks. I don’t know. I’m no biologist. But what do you have to do with it?”

“What do you mean?” Now it was his turn to get angry. “And what did you think it would create: an earthworm? a horse? an octopus? The computer was collecting and processing information about you. It saw you. It heard, smelled, and observed you. It counted the biowaves of your brain! You were around so much you callused its eyes! There you are. If you have motorcycle parts you can only make a motorcycle, not a vacuum cleaner.”

“Hm, all right. Then where are the shoes, the suit, the pass, and the raincoat from?”

“Damn it! If it can create a person, how hard do you think it is for the computer to grow a raincoat?”

(The victorious glint in the eye, the clumsy gestures, the arrogant tone of voice. Am I really that obnoxious when I feel I’m right about something?)

“Grow?” I felt the fabric of his coat. A shudder ran through me. A raincoat wasn’t like that.

Major things don’t fit into the brain immediately, at least not in mine. I remember when I was in school I had to take charge of a delegate to a youth festival, a young hunter from the Siberian tundra; I showed him around Moscow. He took in the sights implacably and calmly: the bronze statues at the Economic Achievement Exhibits, the subway escalators, the heavy traffic. And when he saw the tall building of MSU, he simply said, “With poles and skin you can build a small hut — with rock, a big one.” But when we were in the lobby of the Nord Restaurant, where we had stopped off for a bite, he came face to face with a stuffed polar bear with a tray in its paws — and that amazed him! That was what happened to me. My double’s raincoat resembled mine very much, down to the ink spot that I had added one day trying to get my pen to work. But the fabric was more elastic and almost greasy. The buttons were attached to flexible outgrowths, and there were no stitches in the fabric. “Listen, is it attached to you? Can you take it off?” My double was driven to a frenzy.

“That does it! It’s not necessary to undress me in this cold wind to prove that I’m you! I can explain it without that. The scar over the eye — that’s when you fell down when your father was teaching you to ride a horse. The torn ligament in the right knee happened during the soccer finals in high school. What else do I have to remind you of? How you used to secretly believe in God as a child? How as a freshman you used to boast that you had known many women, when actually you lost your virginity in Taganrog just before graduation?” (That son of a bitch! The examples he picked!) “Hm, all right; but you know, if you’re me, I’m not so crazy about me.

“Neither am I,” he grunted. “I thought I had some smarts….” His face tensed. “Shhhh, don’t turn around!” Footsteps behind me. “

“Good day, Valentin Vasilyevich,” said Harry Hilobok, assistant professor, sciences candidate, scientific secretary and institute busybody.

I didn’t get a chance to open my mouth. My double grinned marvelously and nodded:

“Good day to you, Harry Haritonovich!”

A couple walked past us in the light of his smile. A plump brunette clicked her heels merrily on the pavement and Hilobok, walking in step, minced along as though he was wearing a tight skirt.

“Perhaps, I didn’t quite understand you, Lyudochka,” he buzzed in his baritone, “but I, from the point of view of not understanding completely, am only expressing my opinion.”

“Harry has a new one,” my double announced. “You see, even Hilobok accepts me, and you have doubts. Let’s go home!”

The only explanation I can think of for following him so quietly to Academic Town was that I was completely flabbergasted.

In the apartment, he headed straight for the bathroom. I heard the shower running, and then he stuck out his head:

“Hey, sample number one, or whatever your name is. If you want to make sure that I’m all in order, come on in. And you can soap my back while you’re at it.”

So I did. It was a living person. And he had my body. By the way, I didn’t expect such thick folds of fat on my stomach and sides. I have to work out with my barbells more often.

While he washed, I paced the room, smoked and tried to accustom myself to the fact that a computer had created a man. A computer had re — created me. Oh, nature, is this really possible? The ridiculous medieval ideas about a homunculus, Wiener’s idea that the information in a man could be decoded into impulses, transmitted over any distance, and reordered into a man again, in the form of an image on a screen, Ashby’s assertion that there was no major difference between the work of the brain and of a computer (but of course, Sechenov had maintained that earlier, too)…. all that had just been clever talk to keep the brain going. Try to do something practical with any of those ideas!

And now it looked as if it had been done? There, on the other side of the door, splashing and snorting, was no Ivanov, Petrov, or Sidorov — I would have tossed them out on their ear — but me. And those rolls with the numbers? I guess I had burned the “paper” me.

I was trying to extract short, usable truths from the combinations of numbers, but the computer went deeper than that. It stored information, combining it this way and that, compared it through feedback, picked and chose what was necessary and at some level of complexity “discovered” life!

And then the computer developed it to the level of man. But why? I wasn’t trying to do that!

Now, as I think about it calmly, I can figure it out. It did exactly what I was trying to do. I wanted a machine that could understand man and that’s all. “Do you understand me?” “Oh, yes!” answers the listener, and both go about their business, happy with each other. In conversation it’s much easier. But in experiments with computers I shouldn’t have confused understanding with agreement. That’s why (better late than never) it’s important to figure out what understanding is.

There is practical, or goal, understanding. You put in a program; the computer understands it and does what is expected of it. “Attack, Prince!” and Prince grabs the pants cuff of a passerby, “Gee!” and the horses turn to the right. “Haw!” and they go left. This kind of primitive understanding of the gee — haw type is accessible to many living and inanimate systems. It is controlled by achievement of the goal, and the more primitive the system, the simpler the goal must be and the more detailed the programmed task.

But there is another understanding: mutual understanding. A complete transferral of your information to another system. And for this, the system receiving the information must not be any simpler than the system giving the information. I didn’t give the computer a goal. I was waiting for it to finish building itself and making itself more complex. But it never finished — and that’s natural. Its goal became the complete understanding of my information, not only verbal, but all of it. (The goal of a computer — that’s another loose concept that shouldn’t be played with. Simply put, information systems behave according to certain laws that somewhat resemble the rudiments of thermodynamics. In my system sensors, crystal units, TsVM — 12 had to reach an informational equilibrium with the environment — just as the iron ingot in the oven must achieve temperature equilibrium with the coals. This equilibrium is mutual understanding. And it cannot be achieved on the level of circuitry nor on the level of simple organisms.)

And that’s how it happened. Only man is capable of mutual understanding with man. And for good mutual understanding, a close friend. My double was the product of informational equilibrium between the computer and me. But, incidentally, the pointers on the informational scales never did match up. I wasn’t in the lab then and didn’t meet face to face with my newly hatched double. And later everything went differently for us anyway.

In a word, it was horrifying how poorly I had run the experiment. The only point in my favor was that I had finally thought of setting up the feedback mechanism.

An interesting thought: if I had run the experiment strictly, logically, throwing out dubious variants, would I have gotten the same results? Never in my life! I would have come up with a steady, sure — fire Ph.D. thesis, and nothing more, hi science, mostly mediocre things happen — and I was prepared for mediocrity.

So everything was all right? Why does sadness gnaw at me? Why do I keep harping on my mistakes? I succeeded. Because it didn’t go by the rules? Are there any rules for discoveries? Much happens by accident that you can’t put down to your scientific vision. What about Galvani’s discovery, or X — rays, or radioactivity, or electronic emissions, or any discovery that is the basis of some science or other and is related to chance. I still don’t understand a lot of it? That’s the situation with many scientists. Nothing to be upset about. Then why this self — torture?

I guess the problem is something else: you can’t work that way now. Science has become very serious now, not like in the days of Galvani and Roentgen. This is the way, without thinking, that you can come up with a force that can destroy the whole world instantly — with a brilliant experimental proof….

My double came out of the bathroom rosy pink and in my pajamas and settled in front of the mirror to comb his hair. I stood behind him. Two identical faces stared out from the mirror. Only his wet hair was darker.

He took out the electric razor from the closet and plugged it in. I watched him shave and almost felt that I was visiting him; his behavior was so casual and at — home. I couldn’t resist speaking up:

“Listen, do you at least realize how unusual this situation is?” “What? Don’t bother me!” He was obviously beyond being interested in the fact.

The graduate student put down the diary and shook his head: well, Valentin the Original didn’t know people very well.

He had also been in shock. His sense had told him that he woke up in the tank, understanding everything: where he was and how he got there. Actually, his discovery began then. And his insolence was only a cover — up. He was searching for a mode of behavior that would keep him from being reduced to a lab guinea pig.

He picked up the diary.

“But you appeared from a machine, not from a mother’s womb! From a machine, do you understand?”

“So what? Appearing from a womb is such a snap? A human’s birth is much more mysterious than my appearance. Here you can trace the logical sequence, but there? Will it be a boy or a girl? Will it favor father or mother? Will it be smart or a dope? It’s all in a fog! That business seems normal only because of its frequency. Here, the computer took down information and re — created it. Like a tape recorder. Of course, it would have been better if it had re — created me from Einstein… but what can you do? If you tape boogie — woogie you can’t expect to hear a Tchaikovsky symphony.”

No, I wasn’t a boor like him. He must have been acutely aware of the ticklishness of his situation and didn’t want me to realize it. And what was there that I couldn’t realize. He appeared out of flasks and bottles, like a medieval homunculus, and he was wildly angry. I’ve often noticed that people who have an inferiority complex are always more obnoxious than the rest.

And he was trying to behave with the spontaneity of a newborn. A baby isn’t overwhelmed with the event (Man is born!), but instead immediately makes a fuss, sucking, and messing his diapers.

Graduate student Krivoshein merely sighed and turned the page.

“But do you feel all right?”

“Absolutely!” He splashed on some after — shave. “Why shouldn’t I feel all right? A computer is an apparatus without fantasy. I can just picture what it might have done if it had an inkling of imagination. But I’m fine: I’m not a two — headed monster. I’m young, healthy. I’m going to have dinner and go to Lena’s. I’ve missed her.”

“What?”

He watched me with interest, sparks dancing in his eyes.

“Yes, we’re rivals now! Listen, you seem to have a very primitive attitude toward all this. Jealousy is old — fashioned and in poor taste. And who are you jealous of, anyway? Think about it. If Lena’s with me, it doesn’t mean that she’s being unfaithful to you. You can only be unfaithful with another man, someone different, more attractive, for instance. And as far as she’s concerned, I’m you. Even if we have children, you can’t consider yourself cuckolded. You and I are identical — all the same genes and chromosomes. Easy!”

He had to hide behind the closet door. I grabbed a dumbbell and headed for him.

“I’ll kill you! Don’t try logic with me. I’ll give you logic, you homunculus! I gave you life and I’ll kill you, understand? Don’t you dare even think about her!”

My double fearlessly stepped out from the closet door. He was frowning.

“Listen, Taras Bulba, put down the dumbbell. If you’re going to talk like that, we might as well agree on some terms right now. I’m leaving ‘homunculus’ and ‘kill’ aside as products of your hysteria. And as for locutions like ‘I gave you life’… well, you didn’t. I exist without any help from you, and you might as well forget any ideas of being my lord and master.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Put down the dumbbell. I’m serious. If you want precision, I was created despite your plans simply because you didn’t stop the experiment in time, and when you wanted to, it was too late. In other words,” he snorted, “it’s quite analagous to the situation when you appeared in this world because of your parents’ carelessness.”

(Look, he knows everything! It’s true. My mother once said, after some prank of mine, to make me obey:

“I was going to have an abortion, but changed my mind. And you….”

She shouldn’t have said that. I was unwanted. I might never have existed.)

“But as distinguished from your mother, you didn’t bear me, didn’t suffer labor pains, didn’t nurse and clothe me,” he continued. “You didn’t even save me from death because, after all, I existed before this experiment. I was you. I don’t owe you my life, my health, my engineering degree — nothing! So let’s start even.”

“And even with Lena?”

“With Lena… I don’t know. But you… you….” Judging by his expression he wanted to add something, but held his tongue, exhaling sharply. “You have to respect my feelings as I do yours, understand? I love Lena too, you know. And I know that she’s mine — my woman, understand? I know her body, the smell of her skin and hair, her breath… and how she says, ‘Really, Val, you’re just like a bear! and how she wrinkles her nose.”

He suddenly stopped. We looked at each other, overwhelmed by the same thought. “Let’s get to the lab!” I ran for my coat first.