Self-discovery

Chapter 13

Yes, he was leaving in order to become himself, and not the Krivoshein who lived and worked in Dneprovsk. He threw the apartment key which Val had tucked into his pocket out of the train window. He crossed out all the addresses and phone numbers of Moscow acquaintances from his book, including his Aunt Lapanalda. He had no friends, no relatives, no past — only the present, from the moment he entered the biology department, and the future. He knew a simple but dependable way of establishing himself in the future; the method had never let him down. It was work.

And he had more than that.

Once upon a time physicists had perfected the methods of measuring the speed of light, just so that they could achieve the greatest accuracy. They did. And they determined a scandalous fact: the speed of light did not depend on the speed of motion of the light source. “Impossible! The equipment is wrong! The results contradict classical mechanics!” They checked. They measured the speed of light another way — with the same results. And the almost completed, logically perfect universe rising in the scaffolding of right — angled coordinates, crumbled, raising an awful lot of dust. The “crisis of physics” began.

The human mind often strives for a reconciliation of all the facts in the world rather than for a deeper knowledge of those facts: the important thing is for everything to become simpler and more logical. And then some sneaky little fact floats out, irreconcilable with the neat theories, and you have to start all over again….

They had also created a simple and understandable picture in their minds of how a computer creates a man from information about man. The computer — womb was playing children’s games with blocks. In a liquid medium via electrical impulse it combined molecules into molecular chains, the molecular chains into cells, and the cells into tissue — with the sole difference that there were untold billions of “informational blocks.” The fact that the result of the game was not a monster or even another person, but Krivoshein’s informational double, proves that there was only one solution to the puzzle. Well, naturally, it couldn’t have been any other way: blocks can only fit into a picture that exists in their surfaces. The variants (a fragmented Lena, a fragmented father, the “delirium of memory,” the eyes and feelers) were merely informational garbage that could not exist independent of the computer.

This concept was not incorrect, merely superficial. It suited them, as long as the facts supported the theory that they were the same externally and in thoughts and deeds. But when irreconcilable differences came up on the use of biology in their work, this concept turned out to be inadequate.

Yes, it was their inability to understand each other, and not the interest in biology (which might have passed in Krivoshein — 2 with no harmful effects), that became to his discovery what the constancy of the speed of light was to the theory of relativity. A man never knows what’s banal about him and what’s original; that only comes in comparsion with others. And unlike other people, Krivoshein — 2 could compare himself to not only his acquaintances, but to “himself” as well.

Now it became very clear to graduate student Krivoshein what the difference between them was: their ways of appearing were different. Valentin Krivoshein appeared over three decades ago the way every living thing did — from an embryo, in which a program for building a human being developed over thousands of centuries and in which generations had been encoded by a specific arrangement of protein and DNA. But the computer — womb, even though it was working from individual Krivoshein information, was still dealing with random information; it had to seek out the principles of formation and all the details of the biological information system. And the computer found a way different from nature’s: a biochemical assembly instead of embryonic development.

Yes, now there was much that he understood. In a year he had passed from sensations to knowledge and from knowledge to mastery of himself. And then… then it had merely been a powerful attraction to biology and the inexpressible certainty that this was where he had to seek his answers. He couldn’t even explain it well to Krivoshein. He came to Moscow with the vague feeling that something was wrong with him. He wasn’t sick or imagining things, but he had to figure himself out, to make sure that his feeling was reality and not an idee fixe or a hypochondriacal hallucination.

He worked so hard that he could look back on the days at the institute in Dneprovsk as if they had been a vacation. Lectures, lab work, the anatomy theater, the library, lectures, seminars, lab work, lectures, the clinic, the library, lab work…. He never left the Lenin Hills campus during the first semester; he would walk down to the parapet before going to bed, to look down at the Moscow River, smoke, enjoy the lights glimmering and blending with the stars on the horizon.

A gray — eyed, second — year student who resembled Lena always sat next to him in Androsiashvili’s class, which he attended. Once she asked: “You’re so solid, so serious — were you in the Army?” “In prison,” he replied, jutting out his jaw. The girl lost interest in him. It had to be. Girls take up too much time.

And he was convinced by every experiment, every calculation. Yes, in a cross section of a nerve bundle that goes from the brain to the pituitary gland, under a microscope you can actually count approximately a hundred thousand fibers — and that means that the pituitary is closely monitored by the brain. Yes, if you add beta — active calcium to a lab monkey’s diet of bananas and then use a Geiger counter on its excretions, it really is true that bone tissue renews itself approximately twice a year. Yes, if you stick electrode needles into muscle tissue and conduct sound into earphones, you can really hear a rhythmic quacking or a fragmented pulse of the nerve signals, and these sounds corresponded with what he was feeling! Yes, skin cells actually do move up toward the surface, changing structure, dying, so that they can slough off and make room for new ones.

He studied his own body. He took blood samples and lymphatic samples; he got a piece of muscle tissue from his right hip and examined it under an optical microscope and then an electronic one; he calumnied himself to get a Wassermann at the school clinic. And he determined that everything in him was normal. Even the amount and distribution of nerves in the tissue was the same as in the bodies they dissected in anatomy class. The nerves went up to the brain, but he couldn’t get in there with the use of laboratory technology. He would have to implant too many electrodes into his skull and plug into too many oscilloscopes to understand the secrets of his self. And would he understand them then? Or would he come up with “streptocidal striptease” — not in binary alphabet, but in the jagged lines of an electroencephalogram?

The situation — a living person studying his own organism can’t even breech the mysteries of his body with laboratory equipment — was paradoxical. After all, this wasn’t a question of discovering invisible “radiostars” or synthesizing antiparticles. All the information was in man. All that remained was to translate the code of the molecules, cells, and nerve impulses into the code of the secondary signal system — words and sentences.

Words and phrases are necessary (but not always) for one man to understand another. But are they necessary to understand oneself? Krivoshein didn’t know. That’s why he tried everything: analysis, imagination, books, monitoring the sensations of his body, conversations with Androsiashvili and other teachers, observation of patients at the clinic, autopsies….

Everything that Vano Aleksandrovich had argued in that memorable December conversation was right, since it was defined by Androsiashvili’s knowledge of the world and his faith in the indisputable expediency of everything created by nature.

But the professor did not know one thing: that he was conversing with an artificial man.

Even Vano Aleksandrovich’s doubts about the success of his plan were solidly based, because Krivoshein’s starting point was an engineering computer solution. That December he began planning an “electropotential inductor” — a continuation of the idea of Monomakh’s Crown. A hundred thousand microscopic electrode needles, connected to the matrices of a self — learning automated machine (in the lab the bionics people modeled reflex actions on it), were supposed to supply the brain cells with auxiliary charges, bringing artificial biowaves through the skull, and thereby connecting the thinking centers of the cortex with the autonomous nervous system.

Krivoshein laughed. How silly to think that such primitive apparatus could have punched up his organism! At least he hadn’t dropped his physiology studies for that project. When he performed an autopsy, he mentally revived the corpse: he imagined that he himself lay on the dissecting table, that it was his white nerve fibers running through the muscles and cartilage to the purple, yellow fat — encrusted heart, to the watery clusters of salivary glands under the chin, to the gray rags of collapsed lungs. Other fibers wove into white cords of nerves that went to the pelvis, the spinal cord and up, through the neck, under the skull. Signal commands ran along them from there: contract the muscles, speed up the heart, squeeze out saliva!

In the student cafeteria he followed the movement of every gulp of food to his stomach, trying to imagine and feel how, in the darkness, it was slowly kneaded by the smooth muscles, broken down by hydrochloric acid and enzymes, how the dull yellow mash was absorbed into the walls of the intestine. Sometimes he spent two hours sitting over a cold cutlet.

Actually, he was remembering. Nine — tenths of his discoveries were due to the fact that he remembered and understood how it had happened.

The computer — womb had no reason to begin with a fetus; it had enough material to assemble an adult. Krivoshein, the original, had made sure of that. At first the vague biological mixture in the tank contained only “wandering” currents and “floating” potentials from external circuits — these colorful terms from theoretical electronics were quite literal in this case. Then the transparent nerve fibers and cells appeared — a continuation of the electronic circuits of the computer. The search for informational equilibrium continued. The nervous system was becoming more and more voluminous and complex, and the layers of nerve cells turned into the cortex and subcortex. That’s when his brain appeared, and from that moment on, he existed.

At first his brain was also a continuation of the computer’s circuits. But now he received impulses of external information, sifted it and tried combinations, and looked for a way to realize the information in a biological medium. He was assembling himself! In the vat a system of nerves — for now still random — spread. Muscle tissue, vessels, bones, and inner organs began appearing around the nerves — in that practically liquid state when they could dissolve, blend, change structure under orders of the nerve impulses. No, this wasn’t an intelligent assembly of a body following a blueprint, since there was no blueprint. The building block game continued, a sifting through many variants and choosing of the only one among them that reflected the information on Krivoshein. But now, like the computer which evaluated every variant of the solution with binary signals, his computer brain evaluated the synthesis of a body with a binary code of sensation: Yes meant it felt good, No, that it hurt. Unsuccessful combinations of cells, the incorrect distribution of organs were transmitted to the brain as a dull or sharp pain; the successful and correct one, as delicious satisfaction.

And the memory of the search, the memory of the sensations of the body under construction remained within him.

Life creates people who differ little in the properties of the organism, but are very different in their psychology, personality, knowledge, and spiritual refinement or crudity. The computer — womb acted in the opposite manner. The graduate student Krivoshein was identical to Krivoshein in psychology and intellect, but that was understandable. Those qualities in a person develop through the same process of random retrieval and choice. The computer merely repeated the retrieval. But biologically they differed the way a book differs from its rough draft. Not just one draft, but all the drafts and sketches that went into creating a finished and polished work. Of course, the contents were the same, but the drafts retain the path of finding and choosing the right words in their corrections, additions, and deletions.

“Actually, that comparison is imperfect, too,” the frowning student mused. “The drafts of books appear before the books, not afterwards. And if you show a scribbler all the drafts of War and Peace would that make him a genius? Well, I guess they would teach him something…. No, I guess it’s better to leave comparisons out of this!” Man recalls what he knows in only two situations: when he must recall it — goal recollection — and when he encounters something that even remotely resembles the code in his brain. This is called associative recall. The biology books were the hint that stimulated his memory. But the difficulty lay in the fact that he did not remember words or even images, but only sensations. Even now he couldn’t convey it all in words — and probably would never be able to.

Of course, that’s not the important thing. What is important is the fact that such information exists. Because “knowledge in sensation” gave birth to a clear, thought — out idea in him to control his own metabolism.

It happened the first time on the evening of January 28 in the forms. It turned out just like Pavlov’s dogs — artificial salivation. But he wasn’t thinking about food (he had had a dinner of kefir and sausage), but about the nerve regulation of the salivary glands. As usual he tried to visualize the entire path of the nerve impulses from the taste receptors in the tongue through the brain to the salivary glands and suddenly felt his mouth fill up with saliva!

Still only fully aware of how it had happened, he concentrated on a frightened protest — “No!” — and his mouth went dry instantly!

That evening he repeated the mental orders “Saliva!” and “no!” until his mouth convulsed.

He spent the rest of the week in his room — luckily it was a school vacation, and he didn’t have to be distracted by lectures and labs. Other organs listened to his mental orders. At first he could only command them crudely. Streams of tears poured from his eyes; sweat appeared in profusion all over his skin or immediately dried up; his heart either quieted down to a near comatose rate or else beat wildly at a hundred forty beats a minute — there was no middle ground, And when he commanded his stomach to stop excreting hydrochloric acid he had such intense diarrhea that he barely had time to get to the bathroom. But gradually he learned to control external excretions gently and locally; once he even managed to spell out “IT’S WORKING!” on his back with beads of sweat, like a tattoo.

Then he moved his experiments to the lab and first of all repeated the effect of the sugar injection made famous by Claude Bernard. But now he didn’t have to open the skull and inject the midbrain. The amount of sugar in his blood increased as a result of a mental command.

But in general it was much more complex dealing with internal secretion. The results were not so apparent or so fast. He made puncture marks all over his fingers and muscles checking whether the glands were obeying his commands to secrete adrenaline, insulin, glucose, or hormones. He irritated his gullet with probes trying to determine the reaction to his commands on changing acidity. Everything was working — and everything was very difficult.

Then he caught on. He should give his organism a specific goal, to do this and that, produce certain changes. And really when he walked, he didn’t command the muscles: “Right rectus — contract… biceps — now… left gastrocnemius….” He didn’t have time for that. The conscious mind sets a specific goal: go faster or slower, go around the post, turn into the driveway. And the nerve centers of the brain take care of the muscles. And that’s how it should be with this. It wasn’t his business which glands and vessels would produce individual reactions, as long as they did what he wanted!

Words and images got in the way. He was overexplaining. He told the liver how to synthesive glycogen from amino acids and fats, break down the glycogen into glucose, and excrete it into the blood; he told the thyroid to contract and squeeze out drops of thyroxin into the blood; he told the circulatory system to expand the capillaries in the large chest muscles and to contract the other vessels — and nothing happened, his pectorals didn’t grow bigger. After all, the liver didn’t know it was the liver, and the thyroid didn’t have the slightest idea what thyroxin was and couldn’t picture a drop of it. Krivoshein cursed himself for excessive attention at his lectures and in the library. The result of all this exertion was only a headache.

The problem was that in order to control metabolism within himself, he had to avoid numbers, terms, and even images, and think only in sensations. The problem came down to changing “knowledge in sensation” into a tertiary signal system of controlling internal secretions with the aid of sensations.

The funniest part was that he didn’t need lab apparatus or control circuits. All he had to do was lie in a darkened room, eyes closed and ears plugged, and listen to himself in a half — dreaming state. Strange sensations came from within: the spleen, changing the blood, itched, and intestines tickled when they contracted; the salivary glands felt cold under his chin; the adrenals reacted to nerve signals with a delicious shudder, and the part of the blood enriched with adrenalin and glucose spread warmth through the body like a sip of wine. The sick cells in the muscles made themselves known with a gentle prickling.

Using engineering terminology, he was checking out his body with nerves the way an assembler checks out a circuit with a tester.

By this time he had a clear understanding of the binary arithmetic of sensation: painful — pleasant. And it occurred to him that the simplest way of subjugating the cellular processes to his consciousness was to make them hurt. It was quite possible that the incident with the icicle prompted this discovery; the idea came to him right after it.

Of course, the cells that were deteriorating and dying from various causes let themselves be known very palpably. The organism itself, without any orders from “above” sent leucocytes, feverish tissue, enzymes, and hormones to help. All he had to do was either speed up or slow down these microscopic struggles for life.

He injected and cut muscles everywhere he could reach with a needle or a scalpel. He injected fatal doses of typhus and cholera bacteria cultures. He inhaled mercury vapor, drank mixtures of corrosive sublimate and wood alcohol. (He didn’t have the nerve to try faster — acting poisons, however.) And the more he tried the better his organism handled all the dangers he was aware of.

And then he caused cancer in himself. Cause cancer! Any doctor would spit in his eye for an announcement like that. To cause cancer you have to know what causes cancer. To be perfectly honest, he wouldn’t maintain that he knew the causes of cancer, but this was simply because he couldn’t translate into words all the feelings that accompanied the changes in the skin on his right side. He began with questioning the patients who were undertaking gamma therapy at the lab. What did they feel? This was not kind — asking terrified, exhausted people, contorted by pain, about their experiences and not promising anything in return — but that was how he understood the image of a cancer patient.

The growth was getting bigger and harder. Smaller growths began branching off from it — strange greenish purple ones, like cauliflower. Pain chewed up his side and shoulder. At the university clinic, where he went for a diagnosis, they suggested an immediate operation, without even letting him leave the place. He got out of it by lying and saying that he wanted to undergo radiation therapy first.

Graduate student Krivoshein, crumpling a cigarette, stepped out onto the balcony. It was a warm night. A car, waving its headlights, raced down a side road. Two little lights, a red one and a green one, traveled from Cygnus to Lyra. Behind them followed the roar of a jet engine. Like a match across a cover, a meteor struck the sky.

Back in his room, standing in front of the mirror, he concentrated his will and feelings, and the growth melted away in fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes later there was nothing but a purple spot the size of a saucer. Another ten minutes later there was just his usual skin, in goose bumps — it was chilly in the room.

But he couldn’t express his knowledge about stopping cancer in either prescriptions or medical advice. What he could describe in words wouldn’t heal anyone, except maybe other doubles like himself. So all his knowledge applied only to them.

With time, probably, he would learn to overcome the barrier between the doubles of the computer — womb and regular people. After all, biologically they were not too different. And the knowledge was there. Even if he couldn’t express it verbally, they could record the fluctuations of his biopotentials, graph his temperatures, develop numbers of analysis in computers — medicine was a precise science now. And finally they would come around to recording and transmitting precise sensations. Words were not necessary. The important thing for a sick person was to get well, and not to write a dissertation on his recovery. That wasn’t the point.

The student’s attention was riveted by a light exploding below. He looked closely: leaning against a lamp post, the fellow in the cape from yesterday, the detective, was lighting a cigarette. He tossed the match and walked away slowly.

“So he found me, the damn creep! He’s stuck on me like a burr!” Krivoshein’s mood was ruined. He went back inside and sat down to read the diary.