The Mind Pool

Chapter 9

To the human observer, nothing had changed. The green balloon of the air-bulb still floated free among a tangle of space flotsam. The overlapping folds on its side suggested an entry point. The guard of the Sargasso Dump who gestured Luther Brachis towards the lock mumbled nothing intelligible.

But Brachis had been warned by Phoebe Willard. Instead of a suit designed for vacuum or atmosphere, he was wearing a tempered form used in extreme environments. He passed through the four folds of the lock, and found himself immersed in an inviscid fluid. The suit sensors reported the outside temperature: a hundred-and-ninety-six degrees below freezing, seventy-seven above absolute zero. Brachis was floating in a bath of liquid nitrogen.

He followed a guiding line towards the center of the bulb. In just a few meters he reached a second curved wall, with its own locks. He negotiated them. Inside that, at last, was a spherical chamber with its own atmosphere.

Brachis glanced again at the sensors. Temperature just a few degrees higher — and pure helium all around him as an atmosphere. He wouldn’t be taking his suit off for a while.

“Over this way, Commander.” A familiar voice spoke in his ear. He looked to the directional signal recorded by his suit, and saw the figure of Phoebe Willard halfway across the interior of the air-bulb. The lattice-work was still in position, but now at its center sat a new structure, a second bubble of dark green.

“Not exactly a shirtsleeve working-place.” Brachis floated towards her. “I tried to call you from the Dump’s control room. Why didn’t you answer?”

“Because I couldn’t hear you. I designed it that way. For the same reason as I built the cold barrier.” She pointed at the outer, liquid nitrogen shell. “I never told you to lose communication ability.”

“That was just a side effect. No signals can get through that outer wall. You told me you wanted a secure environment. This is it.”

“Taken to extremes. And beyond them.”

“I don’t think so. Nor will you, when I tell you what’s going on here. But first, let’s get this out of the way.” She pushed across to a magnetic board clamped to the lattice and lifted from it two cubes like a pair of oversized dice. “You insisted on hand-delivery. I’m hand delivering. This is it. The specification, the best one I’ve been able to derive by putting together information from every fragment.”

Brachis slipped the data dice into a frost-proof, fireproof pouch in his suit wall. “How complete is it?”

“For perfectionists like you and me, it’s lousy. There’s functions and neural paths I shouldn’t even have guessed at.”

“But you did.”

“Naturally. The whole thing’s a plausible Construct logic to anybody but an expert. In the old words of wisdom, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and that’s usually enough to get by.”

“If you say it s plausible, that’s good enough for me. So what’s the bad news?”

“I didn’t say there was any. But there is certainly news.” Phoebe took the arm of Luther Brachis’s suit and drifted them both closer to the central green balloon. It loomed over them, and from a few feet away Brachis could see hair-thin and delicate spider filaments running from a computer station into the tough balloon wall. “What’s inside that? More liquid nitrogen?”

Phoebe nodded. “Nitrogen. And one other thing. Part of a Construct — the one I told you about, with a big chunk of its brain intact.”

“It had better be only the brain.”

“Luther, I’ve reviewed the records from Cobweb Station over and over. They’re terrifying. I bet I’m more afraid of the Morgan Constructs than you are. Before I did anything else I took this one completely apart, removed anything that might possibly be a weapon, and isolated the brain. Then I separated the pieces of the brain itself, and ran connections among them that I can interrupt any time from here. And then I put the whole thing in a bath of liquid nitrogen to reduce available energy, cut off all communication channels with anything except the computer over there, and put a communications break between that and everything outside the air-bulb. What more should I have done?’

“Nothing. You should have done less, not more. I told you I wanted a good Construct specification. I never told you to try and put one back together.”

“And I haven’t. All that’s sitting in there is a naked brain fragment. Tell me you want me to destroy it, and I’ll do it. You’re the boss.”

Luther Brachis had eased his way over to the computer console. “Can you talk to it?”

Phoebe was poised with her fingers on a pair of keys. “Say the word, Commander. Destroy or not destroy?

Phoebe Willard — Frau Doktor Professor Willard — does it ever occur to you that I really am your boss? Do you ever say to yourself, Phoebe, I report to Commander Brachis?”

“I might — if you didn’t give me such off-the-wall assignments.”

“Which you love. Don’t push me too far. You will certainly not destroy your work. I said, can you talk to it?”

“As much as I want. The real question is, can it talk to me?”

“And what’s the real answer?”

“You won’t like it. I don’t know.” Phoebe was at the console, keying in sequences. “I know you won’t take my word for it. Try for yourself. You’re linked in now to the brain.”

“Vocal circuits?”

“The original had them, but now they show no response at all. I’ve had to work everything through a computer interface. That introduces its own level of ambiguity, so you’re probably better off avoiding oral inputs.”

Brachis nodded. He typed in, Who are you?

“There. You can’t get much more basic than that.”

But Phoebe Willard was laughing at him. “Commander, don’t you think that was just about the first thing I tried? Let’s see if you get what I did.”

The response was scrolling already onto the screen. More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“That’s it. Nine times out of ten that’s the message — the only message — that comes back.”

Brachis nodded, frowning at the screen. “Maybe it’s the way the question is phrased. Who are you implies a recognition of self-identity. Let’s try another.” He typed in, Tell me your name.

More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“Damn. What doesn’t get that reply?”

“Nothing, consistently. I’ve been working with this off and on all day, and I’ve not found any regular pattern.”

“Did it have a name? Maybe it doesn’t comprehend the idea of names. But Livia Morgan must have had some way of distinguishing one Construct from another.”

Brachis typed in, Tell me the way that you were described by Livia Morgan.

More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“We already know the identification that Livia Morgan used.” Phoebe was at another console, skipping around inside a hyperdatabase. “This one was called M-26A. It must have been built to respond to that — but maybe it only recognizes M-26A as its whole being. It may not accept an isomorphism between its whole self, and its alone. After all, you wouldn’t say that you and your brain are the same thing.”

“Sometimes I wonder if we’re even related.” Brachis typed in, Your identification is M-26A. What is your identification?

The reply was rapid. Identification is M-26A.

“Progress.”

“Of a sort.” Phoebe sounded unimpressed. “Ask it exactly the same thing again.”

“All right.” What is your identification?

More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“Damnation.”

“I know. I went through the same thing. It must have the information, because we gave it to it. We know it stored it, because it gave it back to us. But ask again, and you get nothing.’

“Maybe it can only hold data for a few seconds.”

“No. I gave my name, and waited for five minutes. Then I asked my name, and got the answer, Phoebe Willard. Then I asked again — and got that garbage about needing more information.”

My name is Luther Brachis. What is your name?

My name is M-26A.

“See, it can feed something back to me that wasn’t what I just fed in. And it realizes that name and identification are to be treated the same.”

Brachis typed in again, What is your name?

More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“The hell with it. Here we go again.”

“I went through the same thing.’

What is my name?

More information must be provided before that question can be answered.

“Damn. You know, this thing could be addictive.” Brachis forced himself to move away from the console. “But I can’t stay here much longer. I’ve agreed to perform a guard review.”

“The guards here, at Sargasso Dump? That sounds like a barrel of laughs.”

“Knock it off, Phoebe. These people gave their lives — more than their lives — for System Security. They deserve better than the politicians are willing to give.”

“Which is nothing. Sorry, Commander. This place gets to me after a while.”

“So come watch the review.” Brachis was studying her eyes. “How long have you been at it here, without a rest?”

“All — hmm. Twenty-one hours? Nearly twenty-two.”

“Then you take a break, and come and watch the review. After that you have a meal and a rest. This time that’s an order, Dr. Willard.”

“I hear you.”

Brachis watched as Phoebe Willard went through the sequence to end the interaction with the hidden Construct. As she sealed all access points to the globe filled with liquid nitrogen, it suggested another idea to Luther Brachis.

“Do you have all your question-and-answer sequences stored?’

“Commander, what do you think I am? One of your unfortunate guards? Of course I do.”

“Good. I want a copy to take away with me and study.”

“The best of luck sorting it out. I couldn’t see any pattern. I’ll give you the record, but we’ll have to go over to the main control area to pick it up. I didn’t want to leave it on the computer here when I was away.”

“That’s not like you.” Brachis had caught a change in her voice. “Worried?”

“I guess so. But I can’t see any reason. I really have been ultra-careful. I didn’t just go by the book — I went way past the book.”

’Keep it that way. I have the same feeling myself. When Livia Morgan made those Constructs she took a step in a direction that no one has ever travelled before.”

They were passing through the outer nitrogen shell, emerging into the quiet graveyard of the Dump. A couple of hundred meters from them, drifting along in its own leisurely orbit, a massive dumbbell turned slowly end over end. Brachis paused to watch.

“A pulsed fusion ship built for a human crew. That’s ancient. It was the latest thing until the Mattin Link, then — instant obsolescence. I’ve never seen one before in the Dump. The place is full of stuff like this.”

“Oddities, you mean?” Phoebe was trailing after Luther Brachis, turning now and then to stare at the quiet bulk of the green balloon behind. “I know. When I’m not working I go cruising around. There’s a million of them, things you never see anywhere else. And so old. It’s a ridiculous thought, but as you move around the Dump you have the feeling that every great failure of the solar system has quietly made its own way here. People as well as equipment. It s scary.”

“I know what you mean. ‘And all dead years draw thither, and all disastrous things.’ ”

“Why, Commander.” Phoebe wanted to change the gloomy mood that seemed to be creeping up on both of them. “Do I detect a quotation — and one that’s not from Von Clausewitz’s On War? Someone has been civilizing you. And you’re looking different. What’s happening to the old Luther Brachis?”

But he would not respond. He made another subject switch of his own. “The trouble is, there’s no explanation for the Construct behavior that we’ve been finding.”

Phoebe sighed. No joking today. “That’s not true. I can suggest two explanations.”

“Let’s hear them.”

“All right. I don’t much like either of them. But Number One, the Construct has been damaged to the point where it is not functioning in any consistent way. In other words, it’s crazy.”

“Then it’s in the right place.”

“No insulting remarks about Sargasso Dump guards, you said. If I’m not allowed to say they’re crazy, nor should you.”

“Point made. All right, Phoebe. What’s Number Two?”

“It’s functioning just as it was intended to.”

“And we can’t understand it. Are you saying that the Morgan Constructs are a lot smarter and more complex than anyone ever suspected?”

“I didn’t know I was. But I seem to be.”

And now Phoebe wished that the conversation had stayed with the forlorn relics of the Sargasso Dump.