Chapter 23 – Brain Damage
As the car turned through its heavy traffic, then so did Beck turn through the byways of his past. He would have opened the window for air, but Eris forbade it, instead turning on the icy air conditioning.
‘That’s terrible for the environment, you know,’ he offered.
‘Go on with the story,’ she instructed.
He had no choice,
‘Well,’ he began. ‘Replicating the physical, sensory and motor functions of a human were one part of it. But once we had decided on our goal, then it was no longer a case of simply making replacement parts for an already living human. Rather, it involved all of those parts being put together as an independent unit. This required Schmidt to set to work also. With his years in robotics behind him, he, and his own favourite students from his computer science classes, began work on what he called “The Program”.’
‘So, he sacked your group, but kept his own?’
‘I didn’t need a group by them, and he had a million lines of code to write. The need was greater than the risk.’
‘And what was this “Program”?’
‘Nothing less than a mind.’
‘You pair certainly didn’t suffer for ambition, did you.’
‘Aristotle said, “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness,” and we were trying to make a great mind.’
‘Don’t go twisting the words of the great thinkers, Doctor Beck. Stay on target, if you please.’
‘Sorry. Well, once the necessity had been accepted, then we approached the mind as we did everything else – not to make a perfect copy, but to see what the original did, and then to make our best attempt at building something that did the same.
‘We had bone, sense and muscle, and I was on my way to putting them together. Now we needed the ghost in our machine. We approached it as scientists, not as thinkers or poets. Though in the elegance of our solution was beauty, at least I think so.’
‘Okay, okay.’
‘The brain, the mythical, unfathomable brain. Did you know that in the Middle Ages, the first dissectors cut their way deeper and deeper into the human body to find the space that held the soul? They looked in the head, in the heart, in the gut – would you believe they didn’t find it? It was the start of the greatest detective story in the history of our people. The search for the soul – and even today we’re still looking.’
He went on, ‘Have you ever thought about consciousness, Miss Eris? Actually focused on your inner voice and watched it like a hawk? I’ve noticed that mine stops... the undrying stream wells up. Then it starts again the moment I divert my gaze.
‘But this was exactly what we had to do. I mean, it isn’t easy. But we tried. And as we brainstormed the brain, Schmidt had a breakthrough. He realised that the brain does two things: firstly, it takes all of our sensory data, and out of it creates a total image of the world around us, in three dimensions, in full colour, in five senses, and real enough to touch.’
‘Doctor, please don’t speak of reality being “real enough to touch.” Such language takes you half-way to schizophrenia.’
‘As indeed we had to be to even get that far. And if you want to know about reality then do ask a schizophrenic. They’ll tell you how a “real” red postbox becomes the devil, or a “real” car becomes a creature and walks away, or a man’s “real” hat grows wings and flies off his head. It makes you realise how hard the healthy brain works to keep reality normal.’
‘Okay, okay!’
‘So the brain creates a hearty, colourful impression of things, in which we live. But it then does an amazing second thing: it presents to us our memories triggered by what we see and sense at that moment. These seem to be offered in a ghostly, half-there form, and so are understood as not being the same thing as that colourful reality which the brain is also creating for us.
‘So our artificial brain would need a powerful 3D visualising element – to create a reality – but also a databank with instant recall based on current stimuli – this would be memory.
‘And then, memory itself has different facets: there’s long-term for instance, seeing a house and remembering it as somewhere that you last visited five years ago. There’s also evidence that humans pick out faces. And so we set aside an area especially for these.
‘And there would also need to be short-term memory, which is a very different thing from long-term memory, and involves remembering where we are, and what we were doing, and the sentence we were half-way through anything from a twentieth of a second ago.
‘I had the idea that we could work out a short-term system by using our existing long-term memory banks, but by making the search facility so sensitive that it would pick up almost anything recently logged – therefore recent memories would always be recalled alongside whatever the brain was then remembering from further back.
‘Though Schmidt, the practical thinker, realised the power that such system-wide searches would consume. And so instead he set out a small cache. Here all recent memories would also be stored, and would be continually presented to the mind for a short time afterwards, regardless of whether they responded to what the person was at that moment seeing.’
‘You’re losing me.’
‘Okay. For instance, you go through a door from a blue room to a red room. After passing into the red room then long-term memory would only be recalling all the red rooms you had ever visited in the past, and recalling nothing blue now that that stimuli was no longer present. Yet passing from one room to another does not induce a bout of amnesia – we would still retain the memory that we were recently in a blue room. This is short-term memory continuing to present us with recent experiences regardless of current stimuli.’
‘What else?’
‘Well, obviously there were automatic systems, such as temperature regulation, and the artif’s alarm triggers and battery-level sensors. Which because they didn’t involve the senses, weren’t present in their view of the world. And so, before we realised it, we had created a subconscious.’
Chapter 24 – A Workable Psyche
‘You talk of such heavy concepts so lightly,’ mused Eris.
‘Well, I can’t help it if we found these things right there in front of us,’ offered Beck. ‘And that was far from our only serendipitous moment.
‘For instance, when Schmidt built his short-term memory cache, he set it up to time-stamp these memories and have them fade out in intensity down to nothing, forever being pushed back by the newest sensations. This fading-out effect, without us realising it, gave our artifs a sense of time progressing into the past.
‘Meanwhile, when it came to sound, we tried a method of isolating words in the same way as we were isolating faces in the visual data. Suddenly in our simulations words became a thing in themselves, no longer representing just a sound or the creature that made the sound, but instead standing in for concepts, things, ideas.
‘Words became tags for memory. And when added to our short-term memory with its sense of time passing, words could be formed into strings, with the speaker or the hearer knowing at which point they were at in the sentence they were part-way through speaking or hearing. Most brilliantly, coming up with new strings of words, built out of all the bits of all the sentences they’d ever heard before. Thought is memory restructured, re-connected. There is nothing new under the sun.
‘Now we had a narrative voice. Now we had language. Now we were cooking on gas.’
She shook her head. ‘Language, perhaps the most important development in all of evolution, the thing that sets humans apart from every other creature. And you replicate it one afternoon, sat with a cup of coffee hunched over your Apple Mac?’
Beck answered,
‘Demystify these things, and they fall into your lap. What did Lenin say? “We found power lying in the streets and simply picked it up.” Well, we found the secrets of the brain in the street, it wasn’t our fault that they were there to find.’
He
continued, ‘There are all sorts of minor details, but you don’t want to be bored with technicalities. The bottom line is that we mapped out a mind because we needed one.’
‘And then you went about creating it?’
‘Schmidt had spent his life in computers. And having grown up in a secular state, he had no matters of the soul obscuring him, no sacred ground not to walk on. He saw the core of the brain as a pattern recognition program, forming raw data into recognisable shapes. Add to this the memory banks, giving us the ghostly echoes that are us, and you have something like a workable psyche.’
Eris reasoned, ‘You’re calling me and you a computer. But I don’t feel like a computer. I feel natural and alive. Like a creature, not a robot.’
Beck answered, ‘But look at how computers have themselves evolved. What do computers look like today? They’re like a typewritten page, or a glossy photo album, or a weathered diary, or a three-dimensional world if you’re playing a game. I bet you use computers every day, Miss Eris, but when was the last time you had to open a program in an operating system, or write a line of code? The genius of modern computing is to wrap up a million bits and bytes into something accessible, and visual and, yes, natural.’
He went on, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to shatter your self-image. And all of this is only my theory. But you’re asking me the questions. Ask yourself: do you think that I feel any less a human for having created a robot that does the same things as me? Do we think any less of horses for having built the motor car?’
‘Doctor, I am no horse.’
‘Well, it’s not a harmful comparison. Have you looked into a horse’s eyes? They’re among the most soulful of animals.’
‘Enough! I suppose I must ask these questions, but I don’t have to accept the answers.’
Beck had nearly wrapped up his speech though,
‘People even today speak of the soul. Rub your eyes till you start getting white blotches in your vision, until you start seeing triangles and squares. Now, what have they to do with anything natural? It is the white noise of aggravated optic nerves, attempted to be understood by a computer program. God may have created such a system, but then that is the nature of what he created.
‘Chaos falls into order, as has always been the way. A million drops of water form a tide, a million grains of sand a dune, a billion particles of air the winds that rake the rooftops. And our nervous systems have been doing this pattern-forming with chains of sensory data since Day One, back millennia before the human brain came along to theorise everything.’
Beck wrapped up ‘So, Schmidt went through his contacts and catalogues, found the strongest processors he could, the largest, quickest memory chips; and we were half-way to Anna.’
Chapter 25 – New Life
In the back of the car Eris shuffled her notes, and resumed as best she could,
‘So, you had your “Program”, and your... parts?’
Beck nodded.
‘But you weren’t yet able to... initiate?’
‘“Initiate.” A good word for it. Proactive, and less mechanical than “activate”. And by which you mean to create, to give birth even?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, we couldn’t “initiate”?’ (she nodded.) ‘anything at the University. We needed somewhere secluded, and also calm and peaceful. After all, our work was both secret and...’ he gasped at fresh realisation of it ‘...involved the nurturing of new beings. Their earliest development and memories would be shaped there. It had to be a perfect, kind environment. And so we found Springfields.’
‘Ah yes, Springfields,’ she recalled. ‘It was lovely when we visited eight years ago; the blossom was out.’
‘And was it lovely when you left?’
‘You didn’t leave us much to find.’
‘Hence you looked all the harder?’
She smiled, ‘Best to remember it as it was.’
She rapped the pull-down seat-back table on which her papers were scattered, ‘So, to continue – nurturing?’
‘We had the parts, we had the Program. Schmidt and Ingrid had been fitting the house out with all we needed. There was nothing to stop us. At the start of summer holidays, we built Anna.
‘We built her actual frame at the lab though – the equipment at Springfields was new, and we didn’t want our most important task to be its first test. It was the last night of term. I remember the sound of revellers coming in through the window.’
‘You did a lot of work at such times?’
‘It was when the college was emptiest. We brought her to the house in the back of Schmidt’s car...’
Eris raised her hands, ‘Back up, back up. There are details you’re overlooking. Tell me of that moment.’
‘The moment of physical creation?’
She nodded.
‘I remember we were very quiet in the University workshop. We weren’t actually meant to be there, and the door was locked. The final parts had been built by me or Schmidt, designing them even up until that morning and casting them in plastic that afternoon. It was dark, but we could only have the lights on low.’
‘You make it sound like Burke and Hare.’
Beck paused a moment, shaking his head at the memory,
‘And I can tell you, even when not yet clad in skin, there is something in holding, say, the quite separate and detached upper-leg of a young woman that I was wholly unprepared for.’
But Beck was soon back on to the technical aspects,
‘The sections of the limbs were complete assemblies by then. The joints were yet to be clad, and so looked angular and black. But we had designed them for smooth working, and to retain the outline of an elbow or ankle.
‘Over the frame then went the epidermal layer...’
‘Which was?’
‘What looked like a diving suit, a thin black body-stocking through which ran a thousand vessels. It was through these vessels that a pump in her abdomen pushed warm water, giving her body-heat and a pulse.’
‘You thought of everything.’
‘We tried. And then, once all the parts were put together, all were enmeshed in golden fabric. We called it spun vinyl, working by the yard. It was a very fine weave, and flexible. We rolled it on in as large pieces as possible, cutting in a clean line, and melting it on with an industrial heater – just like a big hairdryer. It worked like a dream, the seams melting into invisibility.’
‘And that was her completed?’
‘As good as. And there she lay, as though resting. The way the skin moved over her muscles as we moved her was so lifelike, a testament to all the effort of our groups and all they’d learnt. And later, at Springfields, once we had her battery charged and the automatic systems switched on, then she became warm, and it really was as though there was a sleeping girl in our midst.
‘This made her not as creepy as our previous endeavours. There is a known factor in all this – scientists call it the Uncanny Valley. Basically, when a simulacrum looks nothing like what it is supposed to replicate, then people are not afraid of it, we view it as a toy. Then, as we get closer to perfect mimicry it becomes uncanny, and eventually unsettling. This is called “Falling into the valley.”
‘And then suddenly, at one-hundred percent perfection, the simulacrum becomes a thing of beauty and startlement. And shows we have arrived at perfect replication.
‘Those early shivers of discomfort then were like the rumbles that the first test pilots experienced just before they broke the speed barrier – their planes would shake themselves nearly to pieces; but then a sonic boom would be heard on the ground, and in the air the plane and the pilot would be calm and pristine and at ease with the world and with the air currents around them. This was where Schmidt and I found ourselves, a moment of pure bliss.’
‘And then you drove your “girl” to Springfields?’
‘Yes, on the backseat of the car. We dressed her and I wrapped her in blankets, but couldn’t cover her face. You might find that sentimenta
l, as she hadn’t a spark of life in her yet. I was drunk on adrenalin that evening, but have lain awake many nights since wondering what a police officer would have made of the scene had we been pulled over – a young woman, not yet warm to the touch, and refusing to be roused.’
‘And how did the actual activation go?’
Here Beck was silent, before lamenting,
‘If there is a regret in all of our experiments, it is in what Anna went through.’
‘A difficult birth?’
‘There was no way to make it otherwise. We did all that we could at the University, but we couldn’t risk initiation there, and so we had to use the new equipment at Springfields – we had no choice. Everything was checked and double checked; but there were still too many variables, unknowables.
‘We lay her in a comfortable position, downloaded the Program, and switched her on.’
‘And?’
‘She was silent for a moment, her eyes open, darting. And then she screamed, loud enough to rip out her vocal cords. I panicked, and tore out the power cable fed into her side-panel – they have a small control-panel on their hip, to manage their alarms.’
Eris nodded, urging. He continued,
‘We stood there watching our creation return to stillness after being hard rebooted. We were stunned, but Schmidt said, ‘Is that what it’s like to see life for the first time?’’
‘We repaired her and tried again, hoping it was only an initial reaction. We strengthened her new vocal cords, but that only let her scream for longer before tearing them out again. And this also gave her time to realise her body and begin thrashing around. She pulled one of her shoulders right out of the socket, before I pulled the plug the second time.
‘We repaired her again, and tied her down in preparation. At least at this third attempt there was no more damage, but in her face we got the same horrified reaction. And no less horrifying for us, looking at the harm we were doing her simply by allowing her to live.
‘We thought the room might have been too bright, so lowered the lights. We also looked at her sensory settings – perhaps her terror stemmed from not being able to sense the world clearly enough? So we turned her senses up; but the next time we started her up she only seemed to feel her terror more strongly. So we turned her senses down, too-far down, and this made her movements worse in a different way, as if struggling through deep water, or out of a nightmare – years later she would say that it felt like being in a black hole with no sight or sound, no up or down, only able to scream inside.’