• BIOSPHERE

“So tell me. What do you think of Elspeth?” Dr. Wolling asked as she poured and then passed him a cup of tea.

Nelson stirred in a spoonful of sugar, concentrating on the swirling patterns rather than meeting her eyes. “It’s … an interesting program,” he said, choosing words carefully.

She sat across from him, clattering her own cup and spoon cheerfully. Still, Nelson figured this wasn’t going to be an easy session—as if any with this teacher ever were.

“I take it you haven’t a lot of experience with autopsych programs?”

He shook his head. “Oh, they had ’em, back home. The school counselors kept offerin’ different ones to us. But y’know the Yukon is, well …”

“A land of immigrants, yes. Tough-minded, self-reliant.” She slipped with apparent ease into a North Canuck accent. “De sort who know what dey know, and damn if any wise-guy program’s gonna tell dem what dey tinkin’, eh?”

Nelson couldn’t help but laugh. Their eyes met and she smiled, sipping her tea and looking like anybody’s grandmother. “Do you know how far back autopsych programs go, Nelson? The first was introduced back when I was just a little girl, oh, before 1970. Eliza consisted of maybe a hundred lines of code. That’s all.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. All it would do is ask questions. If you typed ‘I feel depressed,’ it would answer either, ‘So you feel depressed?’ or ‘Why do you think you feel depressed?’ Good leading questions, actually, that would get you started picking apart your own feelings, even though the program didn’t understand the word ‘depressed’ at all. If you’d typed, ‘I feel … orange,’ it would have answered, ‘Why do you think you feel orange?’

“Funny thing about it, though, Eliza was positively addictive! People used to sit for hours in front of those old-fashioned screens, pouring their hearts out to a fictitious listener, one programmed simply to say the rough equivalent of ‘Hmm? I see! Oh, do tell!’

“It was the perfect confidant, of course. It couldn’t get bored or irritated, or walk away, or gossip about you afterward. Nobody would cast judgment on your deep dark secrets because nobody was exactly who you were talking to. At the same time, though, the rhythm of a true conversation was maintained. Eliza seemed to draw you out, insist you keep trying to probe your feelings till you found out what hurt. Some people reported major breakthroughs. Claimed Eliza changed their lives.”

Nelson shook his head. “I guess it’s the same with Elspeth. But …” He shook his head and fell silent.

“But Elspeth seemed real enough, didn’t she?”

“Nosy bitch,” he muttered into his teacup.

“Who do you mean, Nelson?” Jen asked mildly. “The program? Or me?”

He put the cup down quickly. “Uh, the program! I mean she … it … kept after me and after me, picking apart my words. Then there was that, um, free-association part.… ”

He recalled the smiling face in the holo tank. It had seemed so innocuous, asking him to say the first word or phrase to come to mind. Then the next, and the next. It went on for many minutes till Nelson felt caught by the flow, and words spilled forth quicker than he was aware of them. Then, when the session was over, Elspeth showed him those charts—tracing the irrefutable patterns of his subsurface thoughts, depicting a muddle of conflicting emotions and obsessions that nevertheless only began to tell his story.

“It’s the second-oldest technique in modern psychology, after hypnosis,” Jen told him. “Some say free association was Freud’s greatest discovery, almost making up for some of his worst blunders. The technique lets all the little selves within us speak out, see? No matter how thoroughly a bit or corner is outvoted by the rest, free association lets it slip in that occasional word or clue.

“Actually, we free associate in everyday life, as well. Our little subselves speak out in slips of the tongue or pen, or in those sudden, apparently irrelevant fantasies or memories that just seem to pop into mind, as if out of nowhere. Or snatches of songs you haven’t heard in years.”

Nelson nodded. He was starting to see what Jen was driving at, and felt intensely relieved. So all of this has something to do with my studies, after all. I was afraid she wanted me to face that program ’cause she thought I was crazy.

Not that he felt all that sure of his own mental balance anymore. That one session had exposed so many raw nerves, so many places where it hurt—memories from a childhood he’d thought normal enough, but which still had left him with his own share of wounds.

He shook his head to knock back those gloomy thoughts. Everybody has shit like that to deal with. She wouldn’t be wasting time on me if she thought I was nuts.

“You’re tellin’ me this has to do with cooperation and competition,” he said, concentrating on the abstract.

“That’s right. All the current multimind theories of consciousness agree on one thing, that each of us is both many and one, all at the same time. In that sense, we humans are most catholic beings.”

Obviously, she had just made a witticism, which had gone completely over his head. Fortunately, the session was being recorded by his note plaque and he could hunt down her obscure reference later. Nelson chose not to get sidetracked. “So inside of me I’ve got … what? A barbarian and a criminal and a sex maniac …”

“And a scholar and a gentleman and a hero,” she agreed. “And a future husband and father and leader, maybe. Though few psychologists anymore say metaphors like that are really accurate. The mind’s internal landscape doesn’t map directly onto the formal roles of the outer world. At least, not as directly as we used to think.

“Nor are the boundaries between our subpersonae usually so crisp or clear. Only in special cases, like divided personality disorder, do they become what you or I would call distinct characters or personalities.

Nelson pondered that—the cacophony within his head. Until coming to Kuwenezi, he had hardly been aware of it. He’d always believed there was just one Nelson Grayson. That core Nelson still existed. In fact, it felt stronger than ever. Still, at the same time, he had grown better at listening to the ferment just below the surface. He leaned forward. “We talked before about how—how the cells in my body compete and cooperate to make a whole person. And I been reading some of those theories ’bout how individual people could be looked at the same way … like, y’know, organs or cells cooperating and competing to make up societies? And how the same … metaphor—”

“How the same metaphor’s been applied to the role species play in Earth’s ecosphere, yes. Those are useful comparisons, so long as we remember that’s all they are. Just comparisons, similes, models of a much more complicated reality.”

He nodded. “But now you’re sayin’ even our minds are like that?”

“And why not?” Dr. Wolling laughed. “The same processes formed complexity in nature, in our bodies, and in cultures. Why shouldn’t they work in our minds as well?”

Put that way, it sounded reasonable enough. “But then, why do we think we’re individuals? Why do we hide from ourselves the fact we’re so many inside? What’s the me that’s thinkin’ this, right now?”

Jen smiled, and sat back. “My boy. My dear boy. Has anyone ever told you that you have a rare and precious gift?”

At first Nelson thought she was referring to his unexpected talent with animals and in managing the ecology of ark four. But she corrected that impression. “You have a knack for asking the right questions, Nelson. Would it surprise you to learn the one you just posed is probably the deepest, most perplexing in psychology? Perhaps in all philosophy?”

Nelson shrugged. The way he felt whenever Jen praised him was proof enough that he had many selves. While one part of him felt embarrassment each time she did this, another basked in the one thing he wanted most, her approval.

“Great minds have been trying to explain consciousness for centuries,” she went on. “Julian Jaynes called it the ‘analog I.’ The power to name some central locus ‘me’ seems to give intensity and focus to each individual human drama. Is this something totally unique to humanity? Or just a commodity? Something we only have a bit more of than, say, dolphins or chimpanzees?

“Is consciousness imbued in what some call the ‘soul’? Is it a sort of monarch of the mind? A higher-order creature, set there to rule over all the ‘lower’ elements?

“Or is it, as some suggest, no more than another illusion? Like a wave at the surface of the ocean, which seems ‘real’ enough but is never made of the same bits of water from one minute to the next?”

Nelson knew an assignment when he heard one. Sure enough, Jen next reached into her pouch and took out a pair of small objects, which she slid across the table toward him. “Here are some things to study. One contains articles by scholars as far back as Ornstein and Minsky and Bukhorin. I think you’ll find them useful as you write up your own speculations for next time.”

He reached for the items, perplexed. One was a standard gigabyte infocell. But the other wasn’t even a chip. He recognized the disk as an old-style metal coin and read the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA imprinted around its rim.

“Take a look at the motto,” she suggested.

He didn’t know what that meant, so he searched for the most incomprehensible thing on it. “E … pluribus … unum?” he pronounced carefully.

“Mmm,” she confirmed, and said nothing more. Nelson sighed. Naturally, he was going to have to look it up for himself.

By all the numbers, it should have happened long ago.

Jen thought about consciousness, a topic once dear to her, but which she’d given little attention to for some time. Until all these new adventures overturned her pleasant, iconoclastic existence and threw her back to contemplating the basics again. Now she couldn’t help dwelling on the subject during her walk back to the Tangoparu digs.

It’s close to a century since they’ve been talking about giving machines “intelligence.” And still they run up against this barrier of self-awareness. Still they say, “It’s sure to come sometime in the next twenty years or so!” As if they really know.

Stars glittered over the dusty path as she made her way from Kuwenezi’s compact, squat, storm-proof ark four, past fields of newly sprouted winter wheat, toward the gaping entrance of the old gold mine. The quandary stayed with her as she rode the elevator deep into the Earth.

Simulation programs keep getting better. Now they mimic faces, hold conversations, pass Turing tests. Some may fool you up to an hour if you aren’t careful.

And yet you can always tell, if you pay attention. Simulations, that’s all they are.

Funny thing. According to theoreticians, big computers should have been able to perform human-level thought at least two decades ago. Something was missing, and as her conversations with Nelson brought her back to basics, Jen thought she knew what it was.

No single entity, all by itself, can ever be whole.

That was the paradox. It was delicious in a way, like the ancient teaser, “This sentence is a lie.” And yet, hadn’t Kurt Gödel shown, mathematically, that no closed system of logic can ever “prove” all its own implied theorems? Hadn’t Donne said, “No man is an island”?

We need feedback from outside ourselves. Life consists of interacting pieces, free to jiggle and rearrange themselves. That’s how you make a working system, like an organism, or a culture, or a biosphere.

Or a mind.

Jen entered the well-lit chamber where the Tangoparu team had their resonator. She stopped by the main display to see where Beta was at present. A purple ellipse marked its current orbit—now rising at its highest point all the way past the outer core to the lower mantle, where quicksilver flashes seemed to spark and flare with every lingering apogee. Now Beta was losing mass at each apex—a true milestone—though it would be a while yet before its balance sheet went into debit full time and they could all draw a sigh of relief.

Jen watched the mantle’s flickerings of superconducting electricity, those pent-up energy stores Kenda’s people tapped to drive the gazer effect. One brief, titanic burst had taken place while she was visiting Nelson—triggered in tandem by the Greenland and New Guinea resonators. The next run, scheduled in ten minutes, would unite this African device with New Guinea in an effort to shift Beta’s orbital line of apsides slightly.

At first she and the others had been fearful of the news from headquarters—that the NATO-ANZAC-ASEAN alliances had seized two of the four resonators. Kenda worried that all their work would be in vain. Then came word from George Hutton. Everything was to go on as before. The only difference, apparently, was that new supplies and technicians would flood in to help the effort. Jen had been cynical; it sounded too good to be true.

Sure enough, George went on to add that there would be limits to cooperation with Colonel Spivey. Easter Island and South Africa were to remain independent. He was adamant about that. No newcomers would be allowed at those two sites. Kenda’s team reacted with a mixture of resigned fatigue and relief. They would have loved the help, but understood Hutton’s reasons.

“George isn’t so sure about this association, yet,” Kenda told them all at a meeting several days ago. “And that’s enough for me.”

Jen wondered why there was no word from Alex. Now that they were communicating over secure military bands, completely independent of the World Data Net, shouldn’t the boy feel free to talk openly? Something was wrong, she sensed. More was going on than anyone said.

With a sigh she went to her own station to plug in the subvocal. By now it was almost as easy to calibrate as her home unit, though she still had to do most of it “by hand.”

Only this time, after that conversation with Nelson, she paid a little more attention to the extraneous blips and images that popped in and out of the peripheral screens.

At the upper left, several bars of musical score wrote themselves—an advertising jingle she hadn’t heard in years. Below that, poking from a corner, came the shy face of a young boy … Alex, as she remembered him at age eight or so. No mystery why that image crept in. She was worried about him, and so must have subvocalized unspoken words that the computer picked up. It, in turn, had gone into her personal archive and pulled out some old photo, feeding it then to an off-the-shelf enhancement program to be animated.

To the uninitiated, it might seem as if the computer had read her thoughts. In fact, it was only highlighting the surface bits, those which almost became words. It was like rummaging through your purse and coming up with an envelope of neglected pictures. Only now her “purse” consisted of terabyte sheets of optical memory, extrapolated by a tool kit of powerful subroutines. And you didn’t even have to intend in order to rummage. The mind “below” was doing it all the time.

Jen adjusted the sensitivity level, giving her associations more space to each side … it was a sort of visually amplified form of free association, she realized. Yet another type of feedback. And feedback was the way life-forms learned and avoided error. Gaia used feedback to maintain her delicate balance. Another word for feedback was “criticism.”

A pair of cartoon figures drifted toward each other from opposite screens. The first was her familiar tiger totem … a mascot that had been omnipresent, for some reason, ever since this adventure had begun. The other symbol looked like an envelope … the old-fashioned kind you used to send letters in. The two figures circled round each other, the tiger mewling lowly, the envelope snapping its flap at the cat.

Now why had these manifested when she thought the word “criticism”? As she reflected on the question, written words formed in the tank. The envelope said to the tiger, “YOUR ORANGE STRIPES ARE TOO BRIGHT TO CAMOUFLAGE YOU ON THIS SCREEN! I CAN SEE YOU TOO EASILY!”

“THANK YOU,” the tiger acknowledged, and switched at once to gray tones Jen found blurry and indistinct. “WHAT DO YOU CONTAIN?” the tiger asked the envelope in turn. “IT REALLY IS WRONG FOR ONE PART TO KEEP SECRETS FROM THE WHOLE.” And a slashing paw ripped open a corner, laying bare a bit of something that sparkled underneath. “WHAT DO YOU CONTAIN?” the great cat insisted.

Though amusing in its own way, Jen decided this was accomplishing nothing. “I’ll tell you what it contains,” she muttered, making the words official by saying them aloud. She wiped the screen with a simple tap of one tooth against another. “Just more bleeding metaphors.”

Gathering herself together, Jen concentrated on the matter at hand. Getting ready for the next run of the gravity laser. She’d gotten to quite enjoy each firing, pretending it was she herself who sent beams of exploration deep into the living world.

Meanwhile, though, a ghostlike striped pattern, like a faint smile, lingered faintly in one corner of the screen, purring softly to itself, watching.

The International Space Treaty Authority today released its annual census of known man-made hazards to vehicles and satellites in outer space. Despite the stringent provisions of the Guiana Accords of 2021, the amount of dangerous debris larger than one millimeter has risen by yet another five percent, increasing the volume of low earth orbit unusable by spacecraft classes two through six. If this trend continues, it will force repositioning or replacement of weather, communications, and arms-control satellites, as well as the expensive armoring of manned research stations.

“People don’t think of this as pollution,” said ISTA director Sanjay Vendrajadan. “But Earth is more than just a ball of rock and air, you know. Its true boundaries extend beyond the moon. Anything happening inside that huge sphere eventually affects everything else. You can bet your life on it.”