Self-discovery

Chapter 9

We made a beeline through the park: the wind whistled in the branches and in our ears. Asphalt — colored clouds blanketed the sky.

The lab smelled like a warm swamp. The ceiling bulbs glowed like lighthouses in a fog. I stepped on a hose near my desk that had not been there before, and pulled my foot away. The hose was moving!

The flasks and bottles were covered with thick gray dust; there was no way to tell what was going on inside them. Streams of water bubbled from the distillers and the relays clicked in the thermostats. In a far corner, which could not be reached through the jumble of wires, tubes, and hoses, the lights on the TsVM — 12’s control panel blinked at me.

There were many more hoses than before. We made our way through them, as if through a jungle of lianas. Some hoses were contracting, pushing lumps through themselves. The walls of the tank were covered with some kind of mold. I wiped it off with my sleeve.

In the golden, murky medium there was a silhouette of a man. “Another double? No….” I looked closely. The contours were a woman’s, contours that I could never confuse with anyone else’s. A hairless head fluttered in front of my face.

There was some mad logic in the fact that precisely now when the double and I were fighting over Lena, the computer was struggling with our problem. I was scared.

“But the computer doesn’t know her!”

“You do. The computer is re — creating her from your memory.” We were whispering for some reason. “Look!”

A skeleton was beginning to form beyond Lena’s ghostly outline. Her feet solidified into white cartilage and toes; her ankle and shin bones took shape. Her spine formed into a long white form and ribs branched off from it; her shoulder blades grew. Seams appeared on her skull, and the outline of her eye sockets formed. I can’t say that it was a pleasant sight — seeing your girlfriend’s skeleton — but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. We were watching something that no one had ever seen — how a machine creates a person!

“With my memory, my memory…” I was thinking feverishly. “But that’s not enough. Or has the computer mastered the laws of constructing a human body? From where? I certainly don’t know them!” The bones in the tank were becoming sheathed with dark blue strips and coils of muscle, and they were covered by a yellowish layer of fat, like a chicken’s. The circulatory system shot red throughout the body. All this fluctuated in the mixture, changing shape and form. Even Lena’s face, with its closed lids, behind which we could see her watery eyes, was distorted by horrible grimaces. The computer seemed to be trying on ways to make a person.

I know too little about anatomy in general and female anatomy in particular to judge whether the computer was building Lena correctly. But soon I sensed that something was wrong. The original contours of her body were changing. The shoulders, which just a few minutes ago had been round and soft, became angular and grew in breadth. What was it?

“Her feet!” my double shouted. “Look at her feet!”

I looked at her feet that took a size thirteen shoe — and when I understood I broke out in cold sweat. The computer had run out of information on Lena and was finishing her off with my body! I turned to my double; his forehead was glistening with sweat too.

“We have to stop it!”

“How? Cut off the current?”

“We can’t. That will erase the memory bank in the computer. Turn on the cooling…?”

“To slow down the process? It won’t work. The computer has large heat reserves….”

The distorted body in the tank was taking on clearer features. A transparent mantle moved over it, and I recognized the style of the simple dress in which I liked Lena best. The computer with an idiot’s diligence was dressing its creation in it.

I had to order the computer to stop, convince it… but how?

“Right!” My double leaped over to the glass case, took out Monomakh’s Crown, pushed the “translation” button on it, and handed it to me. “Put it on and start hating Lena; think how you want to destroy her… go ahead.”

I grabbed the shiny helmet, turned it around in my hands, and gave it back.

“I can’t….”

“Jerk! What else is there? That thing will be opening its eyes soon and….”

He pulled on the helmet and started screaming and waving his arms:

“Stop, computer! Stop immediately, do you hear me? You’re not creating a good copy of a human! Stop, you idiot! Stop right now!”

“Stop, machine, do you hear me?” I turned to the microphones. “Stop, or we’ll destroy you!”

It’s disgusting to remember that scene. We, men who were used to pushing buttons to stop and direct any process, shouting and explaining… and to what? A collection of test tubes, electric circuits, and hoses. Phooey! We were panicked.

We yelled some more in disgusting voices, when the hoses near the tank began shaking with energetic convulsions, and the hybrid specimen in the tank was covered with a white mist. We shut up. Three minutes later the mist cleared. There was nothing in the gold liquid. Only ripples and color gradations spreading from the center to the edges.

“Wow…” said my double. “I somehow never appreciated the fact that man is seventy percent water. Now I’ve got it.”

We made our way to the window. The humid stuffiness made my body sticky. I unbuttoned my shirt, and so did my double. It was evening. The sky had cleared. The windows of the institute across the way reflected the sunset as though nothing had happened. They reflected it like that on every clear evening — yesterday, last month, last year — when this had not existed. Nature was making believe nothing had happened.

The skeleton enveloped in translucent tissue stayed in my mind.

“Those anatomical details, the grimaces… brrrr!” said the double, lowering himself into a chair. “I don’t even feel like seeing Lena right now.”

I said nothing, because he had expressed my thoughts. It was over now, but then… it’s one thing to know, even intimately, that your woman is a human being made of flesh, bones, and innards, and another thing to see it.

I took out the lab journal and looked at the last few notes… vague and pointless. It’s when the experiment is working or when you get a good idea that you write at length; here I had:

April 8. Decoded numbers, 800 lines. Unsuccessful.

April 9. Decoded extracts from five rolls. Didn’t understand a thing. Some kind of schizophrenia!

April 10. Decoded with the same results. I added to the flasks and bottles: Numbers 1, 3 and 5–2 liters of glycerine; Numbers 2 and 7 — 200 ml. of tyomochevina; and 2–3 liters of distilled water to all of them.

April 11. “Streptocidal striptease with the trembling of streptococci.” That does it….

And now I’ll pick up the pen and write:

April 22. The complex has re — created me, V. V. Krivoshein, Krivoshein Number 2 is sitting next to me scratching his chin. A real joke!

And then I was engulfed with a wave of satanic pride. After all, this was some discovery! It encompassed systemology, electronics, bionics, chemistry, and biology — everything you could want and then some. And I did it all. How I did it was another question. But the important thing was me, ME! Now I could invite the State Commission and demonstrate the emergence of a new double in the tank. I could imagine the look on their faces. And my friends would have to say: “Boy he really did it! That Krivoshein is something!” And Voltampernov would run over to see…. I had an uncontrollable urge to giggle; only the presence of my double stopped me.

“Who cares about friends and Voltampernov,” I heard my voice say and I didn’t realize at first that it was my double speaking. “This, Val, is a Nobel Prize!”

That’s right: the Nobel Prize! My portrait in all the papers… and Lena, who treats me a little high — handedly now — and why not, she’s beautiful, and I’m not — will appreciate me then. The run — of — the — mill name Krivoshein (once I tried looking in the encyclopedia for famous people with my name and didn’t find any; there was a Krivoshilkov and a Krivonogov, but no Krivosheins yet) will resound. Krivoshein! The same….

I was made uneasy by these meditations. My vain thoughts disappeared. Really, what would happen? What should be done with this discovery?

I shut my journal.

“So, are we going to create in our image? A crush of Krivosheins? I guess we could make others if we recorded them into the computer. Damn it! This is… it just doesn’t make sense.”

“Hm. And things were so peaceful….” My double shook his head.

Precisely. Everything had been peaceful — “Nice weather, miss. Which way are you going?” “In the opposite direction!” “Me too. What’s your name?” “What’s it to you?” — and so on right up to the wedding palace, the maternity ward, a licking for killing a cat with a slingshot, and burning the hated zoology textbook after graduation. The chairman of the Dneprovsk Registration Office put it so well in his article: “The family is the method of propagating the species and increasing the state’s population.” And suddenly — hail science! — there is a rival method; we pour and sprinkle reagents from the local chemistry manual, pass input through sensors, and get a person. And a mature one at that, with muscles and an engineering degree, with habits and life experience.

“It looks as if we’re taking aim at the most human of man’s qualities: love, parenthood, childhood!” I was beginning to shudder. “And it’s profitable. It’s efficient and profitable, the most terrible things in our rationalistic age!”

My double looked up and there was anxiety and tension in his eyes.

“Listen, but why is that terrible? Okay, we worked — rather, you worked. So you made an experimental determination and on its basis a discovery. A method of synthesizing information into a person. The ancient dream of the alchemist…. That’s very nice! Once upon a time kings financed ventures like that very generously. Of course, they chopped off the heads of researchers who had failed, but if you think about it, they were right. If you can’t do it, don’t take it on. But nothing will happen to us. Just the reverse. Why is it so terrible?”

“Because this isn’t the Middle Ages,” I thought to myself. And not the last century. And not even the beginning of the twentieth century, when everything was still ahead of us. In those days, discoverers had the moral right to spread their arms and say: well, we had no idea things would turn out badly…. We, their lucky descendants, don’t have that right. Because we know. Because it’s all happened before. It had all happened before: gas attacks, according to science; Maidanek and Auschwitz, according to science; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, according to science. Plans for global warfare — science with the use of mathematics. Limiting warfare — also science…. Decades had passed since the last world war. The ruins had been rebuilt. Fifty million corpses had rotted and enriched the earch. Hundreds of millions of people had been born and grown up — and the memory had not faded. It was horrible to remember and more horrible to forget. Because it had not become part of the past. The knowledge remained: people can do that.

The inventors and researchers are merely specialists in their field. To obtain new information from nature they have to expend so much energy and inventiveness that they have neither strength nor ideas left for thinking outside their fields — what will this do in real life? These people and their chosen fields — people for whom any change or discovery is just another means of achieving old aims: power, wealth, influence, and buyable pleasures. If we gave them our process, they would see only one new thing in it: it’s profitable! Should they make doubles of famous singers, actors, and musicians? No, that isn’t profitable. It’s better to produce records and posters. But it would be profitable to mass — produce people for a special goal: voters to beat a political opponent (much easier than spending hundreds of millions on the usual election campaign), women for brothels, workers in rare fields, cannon — fodder soldiers… and even specialists with narrow vision and tame temperament who would continue inventing without getting involved in things that were none of their business. A man with a specific function — a man — thing. What could be worse? How do we deal with things and machines that have outlived their usefulness and have fulfilled their function? They’re recycled, burned, compressed, discarded. And you can treat men, things, the same way.

“But that’s the way it is over there….” My double waved in a vague direction. “Our society wouldn’t permit it.”

“And we don’t have people who are ready to use everything from the ideas of communism to false radio reports, from their work situation to quotes from the classics in order to become wealthy, and have a good position, and then to get more and more for themselves, at no matter what cost? People who see the least attempt to reduce their privileges as a phenomenal catastrophe?”

“We do,” my double agreed. “But people basically are good or else the world would have turned into a mass of bums attacking each other a long time ago, and died without thermonuclear war. But… if you don’t count the minor natural disasters — floods, earthquakes, epidemics — people are at fault in all their problems, including the most horrible ones. It’s their fault that they submitted to what they shouldn’t have submitted to, agreed to what they should have fought, and thought that they weren’t involved. At fault that they did work that paid better instead of work that was needed by everyone and themselves. If more people on earth coordinated their work and business with the interests of mankind, we would have nothing to worry about with our discovery. But that’s not the way it is. And that’s why, if there is at least one influential and active bastard in dangerous proximity, our discovery will turn into a hideous monstrosity.”

“Because the application of scientific discoveries is mere technology. Once upon a time, technology was invented to help man in his battle between man and man. And in that use technology didn’t solve any problems; it only increased them. Think how many scientific, technological and sociological problems there are now instead of the one that was solved twenty years ago: how can you synthesize helium from hydrogen?

“If we announce our discovery, life will become even scarier. And we will have fame. Every man, woman, and child will know exactly whom to curse and why.”

“Listen, maybe you’re right.?” my double asked. “We saw nothing, know nothing. People have enough terrible discoveries to deal with as it is. Let’s cut off the juice and turn off the faucets. How about it?”

“And right away, the problem no longer exists. I’ll write off the reagents I used up and make up some excuse about the work. And I’ll start work on something simpler and more innocent….” “I’ll go to Vladivostok to be a fitter in the ports.” We stopped talking. Venus blazed over the black trees outside the window. A cat cried with a child’s voice. A howling note pierced the grounds’ silence — they were running tests on a new jet engine in Lena’s construction bureau. “Work goes on. It’s right; 1941 cannot be repeated.” I was thinking about it so that I could put off my decision a little longer. “Deep underground, plutonium and hydrogen bombs are going off. Highly paid scientists and engineers are determined to master nuclear arms. And pointy — nosed rockets peer into space from their concrete silos all over the world. Each is pointed at its objective; they’re wired up. Computers are constantly testing them: any problems? As soon as the predetermined time of reliability runs out on an electronic unit, technicians in uniform unplug it and quickly, quickly, replace it with another unit, as though the war they absolutely had to win was about to start any second. Work goes on.”

“Nonsense!” I said. “Humanity isn’t mature enough for many things — nuclear energy and space flight — so what? The discovery is objective reality; you can’t cover it up. If not us, someone else will come upon it. The basic idea of the experiment is simple enough. Are you sure that they will deal with the discovery better than we? I’m not. That’s why we must think what to do to keep this discovery from becoming a threat to mankind.”

“It’s complicated,” my double sighed and stood up. “I’ll take a look at what’s happening in the tank.” He was back in a flash. Stunned. “Val, there’s… father’s in there!”

Radio operators have a sure sign to go by: if a complex electronic circuit works the first time after it’s put together, expect trouble. If it doesn’t foul up in the trials, then it will embarrass the workers when the inspection commission is there; if it manages to pass the commission, then it will exhibit one flaw after another in mass production. The weak points always show up.

The computer was trying to achieve informational equilibrium not with me, the direct source of information, but with the entire information environment that it found out about from me, with the entire world. That’s why Lena appeared and that’s why my father appeared.

And that’s why all the rest happened. That’s why my double and I worked nonstop for a whole week. This activity of the computer’s was a logical extension of its development; but from a technical point of view it was an attempt with lousy equipment. Instead of a “model of the world” the tank contained a nightmare.

I can’t describe how my father made his appearance in the tank — it’s too terrible. That’s the way he had looked on the day he died: a flabby, heavy old man with a broad shaven face and a cloudy mane of white hair around his skull. The computer had picked the last and most depressing memory of him. He had died before I got there. He wasn’t breathing, but I still tried to warm his cooling body.

Then I dreamed about him several times, and it was always the same dream: I rub my father’s cold body for all I’m worth and it gets warmer and he starts breathing, with difficulty at first, a death rattle, and then normally. He opens his eyes and gets up out of bed. “I was sick a little, son,” he says in an apologetic voice. “But I’m fine now.” The dream was like death in reverse.

And now the computer was creating him so that he could die once more before our eyes. We understood rationally that this was not our father but a regular information hybrid that could not be permitted to be completed; we knew that it would be a body, or a mad creature, or something along those lines. But neither he nor I could put on Monomakh’s Crown and command the computer to stop. We avoided looking at the tank and each other.

Then I walked over to the panel and pulled the switch. It was dark and quiet in the lab for a moment.

“What are you doing?” My double ran over to the panel and turned the juice back on.

The filter condensers did not discharge in that second, and the computer went on working. But everything disappeared from the tank.

Later I saw all the chaos of my memory in the tank: my fifth — grade botany teacher Elizaveta Moiseevna; Klava, my love interest in those days; some old acquaintance with a poetic profile; the Moldavian driver I glimpsed briefly at a bazaar in Kishinev…. It’s a hell to list them all. It wasn’t a “model of the world” either; everything was formed vaguely, in fragments, the way it’s stored in human memory, which knows how to forget. For instance, only Elizaveta Moiseevna’s small, stern eyes under forever frowning brows were right, and the only thing left of the Moldavian was the sheepskin hat lowered all the way to his mustache….

We took turns sleeping. One always had to keep watch at the tank to put on the crown in time and say “No!”

My double was first to think of sticking a thermometer in the tank. (It was nice to observe the pleasure he derived from his first independent creative act!) The temperature was 104 F.

“It’s feverish delirium.”

“We should give it an aspirin,” I joked.

But, thinking about it, we decided to lower the computer’s temperature by pouring quinine into the flasks and bottles that fed the tank. The temperature went down a few degrees, but the delirium continued. The computer was combining images the way they occur in a nightmare — the face of the institute’s first department head, Johann Johannovich Kliapp, smoothly took on the features of Azarov, who then grew Hilobok’s mustache….

When the temperature dropped some more, flat images, like on a screen, of political figures, movie stars, productive workers with miniature Boards of Commendation, Lomonosov, Faraday, and Maria Trapezund, a popular local singer, appeared on the surface of the liquid in the tank. These two — dimensional shadows — some in color, some in black and white — would appear for a second and then melt away. It looked as if my memory was drying out.

On the sixth or seventh day (we had lost track of time) the temperature of the golden liquid dropped to 98.6 .

“It’s normal!” And I went off to get some sleep.

My double stayed on duty.

That night he shook me awake.

“Get up! The computer is making eyes.”

I sent him to hell. He poured a mug of water on my head. I had to go.

At first, I thought that there were bubbles in the liquid. But they were eyes — white spheres with pupils and colorful irises. They floated up from the bottom, bounced against the transparent sides of the tank, watched our movements and the blinking lights on the TsVM — 12’s control panel. They were blue, gray, brown, green, black, huge horse’s eyes with violet irises, cat’s eyes, glowing and with a vertical pupil, and black bird’s eyes. It was a collection of every kind of eye I had ever seen. Since they had no lids or lashes, they seemed surprised.

By morning eyes were appearing near the tank as well: muscular growths stuck out from the hoses, ending in lids and eyelashes. The lids opened. New eyes stared at us intently and expectantly. The infinite silent stares were driving us crazy.

And then. feelers and trunks grew like bamboo runners from the tank, the flasks, and hoses. There was something naive and childlike in their movements. They interwove, touched the apparatus and bottles, the room. One little feeler reached an uninsulated clamp, touched it, and jerked back, drooping.

“Hey, this is getting serious!” my double said.

It was. The computer was moving from a contemplative method of getting information to an active one, and was growing its own sensors and executive mechanisms for it. Whatever you called this development — a striving for informational equilibrium, self — construction, or a biological synthesis of information — you couldn’t help being impressed by the tenacity and power of the process.

But after all we had seen, we were in no mood for awe or academic curiosity. We guessed how it might end.

“Enough!” I picked up Monomakh’s Crown. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to make it do what we want. ”

“It would help if we knew what we wanted,” my double added.

“. but for a start we have to keep it from doing what we don’t want.”

“Get rid of the eyes! Get rid of the feelers! Stop gathering information! Get rid of the eyes. Get rid of the feelers! Stop!” We repeated these thoughts through the crown, spoke them into the microphones.

But the computer went on moving its feelers and following us with its hundreds of eyes. It was beginning to look like a showdown.

“The result of our work,” my double said.

“So!” I said. “If that’s the way.” I punched the tank. All the feelers quivered and stretched out for me. I moved away. “Val, turn off the water! Disconnect the feed hoses!”

“Computer, you’re going to die. Computer, you’ll die of hunger and thirst if you don’t obey.”

Of course, that was crude and obvious, but what else could we do? My double slowly turned the handle on the water supply. The stream of water from the distillers turned into a drip. I clamped the hoses. The feelers shuddered and drooped. They started curling up and going back into the tank. The eyes dimmed, teared, and crinkled.

An hour later everything was gone. The liquid in the tank was once more golden and clear.

“That’s better!” I took off the crown and rolled up the wires.

We turned the water back on, removed the clamps and stayed in the lab until late at night, smoking, talking about nothing, waiting to see what would happen. We didn’t know what we were more afraid of: a new delirium from the computer or that the system, muzzled so harshly, would fall apart and cease existing. On the first day we talked about “covering up the discovery.” But now we couldn’t stand the thought that it might cover itself and disappear.

My double and I took turns approaching the tank, sniffing carefully, afraid to smell decay or degeneration; not trusting the thermometer we kept touching the sides of the tank and the warm living hoses. Were they cooling off? Were they enflamed with fever again?

But the air in the room stayed warm, humid, and fresh, as if there was a large, clean animal in the room. The computer was alive. It simply wasn’t undertaking anything without us. We had tamed it!

After midnight, I looked at my double, like a mirror. He was blinking with tired red eyes and smiled:

“Everything seems okay, Shall we go to bed?”

There was no artificial double for me. A comrade, a colleague, was sitting next to me, just as tired and happy as I was. And — how strange! — I had not felt joy at meeting him in the institute grounds and I hadn’t been soothed by the phantasmagoric memory show in the tank… but now I was at peace and very happy.

It’s really true? the most important thing for a person is to feel in control of a situation.