'You sound pretty sure about that, but those cars go around so fast. What if they're not totally cured?'
'The Model Threes' trouble with errors is over.'
Laura fell silent after Gray's brusque answer. They stepped down off the last fringe of concrete. The earth all around was scalded from the steam of a launch. From repeated launches, Laura guessed. The undergrowth, such as it was, was young and dead, the brittle sprigs crunching with each step the two of them took. They sat on the trunk of a toppled and charred palm tree. The beautiful white sand and transparent green waters were broken only by the series of massive pipes heading out from the shore. 'Water intakes,' Gray said simply.
The pipes lay half buried in the sand at the beach.
They remained visible as they descended into the water, which was calm inside the island reef. Laura opened the basket. She saw iced strips of salmon and black bread, a delicious-looking pate already spread across small toasted wafers, a pasta salad mixed with shrimp and bay scallops… and a ham-and-cheese sandwich on white bread.
'All right!' Joseph exclaimed, snatching the sandwich from the basket. 'My favorite!'
They ate in total silence but for the distant sound of the surf crashing against the barrier reef. The breeze kept the sun from growing too warm. They sat close. She could smell the soap he'd used to bathe.
Gray finished his sandwich, slipped off the log, and picked up a shell, which he hurled out into the sea. It disappeared into the water with a hollow plunk. 'So,' he said, 'do you have any more observations about the computer?'
Laura nodded, answering even though she didn't really want to discuss business. 'The computer said it hears voices — random, scattered thoughts — and it has to sort them out and make sense of them. It's doing exactly what humans do to create the illusion of a stream of consciousness. It's imposing a serial order — one thought at a time — on a massively parallel process. It seems to have created a self — personality — which it has superimposed on the hardware of the machine. To support that construct, the computer is rationalizing. The computer is telling itself that some thoughts are its thoughts, and others are subconscious, scattered, confused, or random thoughts that are not its.'
The more she spoke, the more excited she had grown about her discovery.
But Gray simply nodded and said, 'These other thoughts — these other voices — what do you make of them?'
'Well, that's not important. The point is that the computer has created a self. It thinks that 'it' is a thing, and that the computer — the circuit boards and cameras and peripheral devices, et cetera — are some other thing. Don't you see? It's done what all humans do. It's created a dualistic model of itself. There's a brain, which is the computer, and a mind, which is 'it.' Joseph, I think the computer is a conscious being!'
'Yeah,' Gray said, nodding. He was missing the point, she felt sure. 'I thought you people didn't believe in dualism.'
'Screw dualism! This is a breakthrough! You've engineered a human brain by non-biological processes! By analyzing what you've done, how you've done it, we can open up some of the mysteries locked inside human brains!'
'What about these voices? As a psychologist, what do you make of the [missing]?'
'What do you mean?' Laura asked, irritated that he seemed to be overlooking the significance of her discovery.
'Are they symptoms of a problem — a psychiatric problem?'
It finally dawned on Laura that her discovery was old news to Gray. He had known all along what she had just discerned. The realization frustrated and angered her. 'If you already knew all this,' she asked, 'why the hell didn't you just go ahead and clue me in? Why have me waste my time figuring it all out for myself?'
'If I had brought you here and told you that my computer was a conscious, thinking being, and then asked you to find out if it was mentally ill, whose sanity would you have questioned? It's the process of learning, Laura, of putting it together for yourself piece by piece, that's the whole point of the effort.'
Laura wasn't totally convinced by his argument, but she did feel a good bit calmer. 'Do you consider the computer to be alive?'
'By my definition, yes,' he replied.
''I think, therefore I am'?' He nodded. 'And what you want to know is whether this… machine is mentally disturbed?'
'As one possible explanation for the errors. It could be an interruption or it could be, sabotage. I've got to consider all the possibilities.'
'Including whether the computer suffers from depression.'
'Actually,' he said as he turned back to her, 'I was thinking more about acute schizophrenia or multiple personally disorder.'
The car sped noisily over the gravel away from the launch pad. Laura kept her eyes on the road ahead, cringing in anticipation of every turn. Gray sat beside her, staring distractedly out the window on his side. He'd gotten a call on his cellular phone that they had freed up enough capacity to load the phase-three. His mood had changed entirely. He seemed deeply saddened now.
'Do you mind if we talk?' Laura asked cautiously, and Gray shook his head. 'Well, it's just that schizophrenia doesn't manifest itself until the subject has reached a pretty advanced level of emotional development — usually in their teens or early twenties. Before I could even begin to form any opinions, I'd have to know a whole lot more about the sophistication of the computer's emotional… database, or whatever. In human therapy, that takes the form of months, sometimes years of analysis.'
'You've got one hour,' he said, and Laura stared at him in disbelief. 'In one hour, we're loading the phase- three… unless you stop us.'
'Stop you? How could I possibly stop you?'
He took a deep breath, and he let it out slowly. 'Laura, we're going to load the phase-three.'
'Do you have any idea what it'll do if it finds performance-related disabilities on the order of schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder?'
'Actually, no… I don't.' Gray turned to stare again out the window.
'Joseph,' Laura said in a whisper, 'how am I supposed to do months' worth of analysis of the computer's emotional maturity in just an hour?'
'The back prop reports,' Gray mumbled, still staring out the window as they sped past the assembly building.
'The what?'
His eyes were attracted to something. 'Stop the car!' he commanded suddenly, and the deceleration began immediately.
A small crowd had gathered outside the assembly building. Everyone wore hard hats except the man in the center, who slung his hat across the field and stormed off.
'What's going on—?' Laura began, but she was cut off by the opening of Gray's door.
Gray got out, but leaned back inside before departing. 'Ask Margaret to pull up the back prop reports.' He then took off, running to catch up with the departing worker.
Laura stuck her head out the car's open door. 'Excuse me!' she called out to a worker. When he walked up to the car, she said, 'What's going on?'
'O-o-oh, we just had a man up and quit.'
'Quit? Why?'
He shrugged. 'Said it's getting too dangerous in there. Too many malfunctions.'
'What kind of malfunctions?'
'Well, it's kinda hard to put your finger on it. It's just a feelin' you get, you know? They're misbehavin'. They're actin' like they got somethin' more important to do than work.'
'I'm sorry, but I don't understand. Who's misbehaving?'
'You know… the robots.'
24
