Society of the Mind

'Here,' was all he said.

The lenses were jet-black, and around the edges of the lenses was wrapped a black, semi-rigid fabric. 'What's this?' she asked.

'Put them on,' Griffith said as he donned his own pair. 'They prevent retinal damage from the lasers.'

'What?' Laura asked, her legs practically buckling underneath her as the tug of the elevators deceleration grew and grew. 'What lasers?' she asked, but didn't wait for the answer — quickly covering her eyes with the goggles just as Griffith had done.

The lenses were so heavily tinted it was practically pitch-dark in the small compartment. When the elevator reached bottom, the lights suddenly went out completely. 'Hey!' Laura blurted out.

'We have to prevent any stray light from corrupting the communications signals,' Griffith explained. 'There'll be a low level of red light in the observation platform.'

There was a long pause before the elevator doors opened one thousand feet beneath the computer center bunker. The parting of the doors revealed a small room, which was dimly lit and surrounded by windows.

A frigid tide of heavy air poured into the elevator. In the near-total darkness, Laura felt the freezing wave inundate her — washing over her legs like fluid and rising inch by inch up her body. Within seconds, she was totally immersed in the icy bath.

Laura waded into the cold air behind Griffith. He retrieved a heavy parka from a locker and vigorously shook the jacket before handing it to her. 'This ought to warm up once the chemical pouches in the lining get going.'

Laura was already ignoring him. As her eyes slowly adjusted to the low light, she became transfixed by the spectacular display glimmering through the ice-covered windows. She'd never seen anything like it before.

The dark world was ablaze with a billion sparkling stars. They twinkled on and off so rapidly each pulse seemed just a figment of her imagination — a trick of her eye. The effect was stunning. The mysterious cave was alive with light, and yet it was immersed in total darkness.

The numbing cold forced Laura to climb into the oversized jacket. With shaking hands, she tugged at the zipper and raised the fur-lined hood over her head. The quilted parka hung low like a military greatcoat, but her feet were still exposed to the air's wintry grip.

Carefully she edged her way across the observation deck toward the lights.

A shiver rippled up Laura's spine as the chill sank straight through the jacket. 'Man!' she whispered, the word vibrating through the chatter of her teeth.

'Yeah,' Griffith said — his voice quaking as well. 'It's co-o-old!'

'No, I mean what's this place?' she said, standing at the red-lit window. 'These lights! They're…'

'Otherworldly,' Griffith supplied. 'That's what I always think. It's like you're peering into another world, another dimension.'

Laura reached out to touch the glass. 'Don't!' Griffith warned, and she quickly withdrew her hand. 'You might get your skin burned by the cold.' Griffith pried an ordinary ice scraper from the sill and began to clear a spot on the window. 'We don't have visitors down here very often,' he said as he worked. After chipping off a large, irregular patch in the center of the pane, he quickly stuck his hand back into his pocket and awkwardly used his elbow to wipe the glass clean.

When he stood back, Laura leaned over to peer through the hole.

The twinkling was gone. The pulses of light shone brilliantly, each a fleeting pinprick in the coal-black canvas below. The scene was constantly changing, each momentary flash a singular, non-repeating event. Randomness, hinting at perfect order.

'That's the 'net,'' Griffith said, his voice lowered, almost reverent. 'A neural network. An optical, analog, neural network. The most innovative machine ever created. You're looking at the eighth wonder of the world, Dr. Aldridge. I only wish Archimedes were here to see it.'

'It's, beautiful,' Laura mumbled, mesmerized by the unearthly display.

'You can't tell in the darkness, of course, but we're standing on a terrace suspended over a big concrete pool. The pool's about ten meters deep, a couple of hundred meters long, and a hundred wide. It's filled with liquid nitrogen, which boils at minus two hundred and seventy degrees Fahrenheit. When the peripheral electronic components are cooled to that temperature, they become superconducting. What we do is lower racks that look like a child's erector set into the pool. Each rack holds a thousand circuit boards, and each board is about a hundred times more powerful than an old Cray-1 supercomputer.'

His voice was shaking, and he shifted from one foot to the other. It would be a short tour, Laura guessed, despite the chemical warmth now radiating down the length of her overcoat.

'On each of those circuit boards,' Griffith continued, 'there are about ten million nodes or, using your terminology, neurons. Ten million brain cells.'

What Griffith said were mere words. They were nothing compared to what she saw with her own two eyes. The sheer immensity of the display that lay before them was staggering. How could anything be constructed to produce such an effect. Blackness, filled with light.

'It's an optical computer,' Griffith continued, 'not an electronic one. It uses light instead of electricity to process its basic logical operations and to store its memories. Logic gates are opened or closed depending on the intensity of a laser beam and take the place of semiconductors.' Laura heard a rustle of fabric, and she tore herself momentarily from the light show to look at the opening in Griffith's hood. 'Do you know what a picosecond is?' he asked, dimly visible inside the furry fringe.

'Well… of course!' Laura's breath came out as steam only.

'It's a trillionth of a second. Ordinary electronic supercomputers take four hundred or so picoseconds to process a binary operation like adding two numbers together. This optical computer has cut that time down to point four picoseconds. And you're seeing only a minute fraction of those operations. Ninety-nine point nine percent of its signal traffic is passed along microscopic waveguides impregnated on the boards themselves.'

Laura gazed in wonder at the needles of light popping like troy flashbulbs out of thin air. It reminded her most of astronomers' pictures of deep space. Only this universe was alive and well — fast-forward — stars being born, shining brightly, and dying out in mere fractions of a picosecond. 'So those lights down there,' Laura asked, 'are just point one percent of the computer's operations?'

'Well, no, actually. They're a lot less than that. About ninety nine point something percent of the signal traffic that's not passed along a board's internal circuitry is routed by fiber-optic cables, which you also can't see.'

'So, wait,' Laura said. 'If we can't see the internal light signals on the boards themselves, and we can't see the fiber-optic signs' — she turned back to the miraculous sights visible through the thin patch of clear glass—'what are those?'

'Laser pulses. Communications between boards that aren't regular enough or sufficiently close to each other to justify hardwiring the two boards together. Those boards talk to each other by beaming lasers through the gaseous nitrogen above the pool. Those laser signals down there represent only about one out of every hundred million or so packets of data being passed from one logic gate to the next.'

Griffith went on to talk about the constant 'rationalizing' of the computer's wiring to improve efficiency, but Laura wasn't listening.

She was too astonished at the implications of what he was saying to follow the details. If this, she thought, looking at the extraordinary constellation of feeling stars, is one hundred-millionth of the total number of signals… It was impossible to comprehend. It was a rush of noise so constant, so dissonant, that it overwhelmed her imagination completely.

It's a brain. The thought came to her as clearly as if whispered into her ear. She was standing inside a living brain, watching the most elementary impulses of thought — synaptic interaction. Individual brain cells talking to one another. A tingle spread outward from her scalp and ran down her neck to her shoulders. She shivered, but not because of the cold. What she felt was the physical reaction to an entirely cerebral phenomenon.

For it was, Laura knew, from connections of similar complexity that thoughts arose in animal brains. It was, from a tangled web of impulses very much like the confusion of light down below, that a sense of consciousness emerged in humans.

'… signals come into the net from input devices — things like cameras, microphones, motion detectors, et cetera, or traditional electronic, input devices like keyboards, mice, or digitizers. They're converted from electron- based to light-based signals by…'