Mind Over Ship

Somewhere, in some lab module, Meewee was sure there was a mother vine with a brass plaque that read, “Russ.”

SLOWLY, SO AS not to alarm them, Meewee lowered his open hand to the water. Two large, bulging foreheads broke the surface for a pat. More joined them, and soon the whole school was competing for his attention. Their heads were soft.

“No skulls?” he asked.

“Minimal skulls,” Strohmeyer replied. “The synaptic tissue is so plastic that it actually heats up and expands during the transfer. This way, there are no deadly pressure spikes.”

“Eleanor walked me through a necropsy of one of her panasonics. The human cells form a crust over the fish brain. Is it the same with these?”

“Yes, except that with these, the human/fish ratio is reversed. Each of these brainfish contains human midbrain and cortex tissue that masses about one-third of an adult human.”

There was a mechanical click, and a snowstorm of greenish flakes began to fall on the water from a system of overhead pipes. The fish abandoned Meewee and thrashed in the water in a feeding frenzy.

“Don’t bump your heads, guys,” Meewee said. He dried his hand on his pant leg before realizing it was only virtually wet. “If each of these brainfish has a third of a brain,” he asked Strohmeyer, “why do you need so many of them? Wouldn’t three brainfish do?”

“Theoretically.”

“Then why so many?”

“Well, there are redundancy and backup needs, and we set a few aside as controls, but I suppose the real reason is to give Myr Starke’s mind room to expand.”

“But how will you stuff all of that into the head of a single clone?”

“Who says that’s what we’re doing?”

“Eleanor told me they’re for temporary storage?”

The scientist had nothing to say to that.

WITH THE MEM Lab still at a high stealth level, Meewee dealt with plankholder business through Cabinet. He cast a proxy to attend a GEP board meeting where he was offered a free hand with the Lucky Five Oships if he agreed to drop his Trade Board appeal. With the appeal clouding the picture, Jaspersen and Singh were having difficulty attracting investors to their space condo project.

“They’ll have to do better than that,” Meewee said to his proxy when it reported back.

“That’s what I told them,” his proxy said.

“I’d settle for nothing less than the ninety-nine ships already chartered.”

“My words exactly.”

“Otherwise, let the appeal drag on.”

_____

A WEEK OR ten days after Meewee arrived, Dr. Koyabe informed him that the zoo module had docked with theirs and asked if he wanted to meet Arrow. She took him there in realbody. The visiting module did indeed sound and smell like a zoo. Dogs, toads, ants, bees — Starke’s scientists were trying them all out as possible vessels for human consciousness.

“We’ve had good results with birds,” she said as they passed rows of cages. “Crows, finches, and jays especially. But birds are too smart to begin with. Their hyperstriatum region is exceptionally well developed, and it tends to dominate the human cortex part. You end up with flying pests too clever for their own good.

“Ah, here we are.” They passed into a separate room, one devoid of animal cages. Lining the walls were kiosk-sized metal cabinets. “Incubators for our microbiota,” Koyabe said, leading him to the last one. Someone had stuck a piece of cloth tape to the door with the word “Arrow,” in marker pen. Koyabe opened a holocube that showed its main compartment. Inside was a heap of wet-looking scraps of brown paperlike material that was shot through with glistening yellow strands. A duller yellow crust covered the walls and partitions of the compartment.

“That’s Arrow?” Meewee said. “That looks like — like mold.”

“Tree mold,” Koyabe said. Her shoulder brushed his as they leaned over the holocube.

Meewee looked again. “You store human minds in mold?”

“No, no. This is from an earlier series of experiments when we were trying to discover an improved substrate for mentar brains. Hello, Arrow, it’s Momoko Koyabe. I’m here with Bishop Meewee to collect some spores. Do you think you could oblige us with a sample?”

Meewee said, “If I remember my college biology, mold has no nervous system whatsoever.”

“Correct, Merrill. We wanted to come up with nonneural cognitive networks. This strain is a variant of the slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, which has formidable powers of replication and organization. We got pretty far with it, but as you know from working with your Arrow, we were never able to completely crack the sentience threshold.”

Inside the holocube, little puffs of brown began to fill the space and were sucked out through vacuum ports.

“That’s enough, Arrow. That should do. Thank you.” Koyabe swiped away the holocube, and a moment later, a glass vial dropped into a basket on the side of the incubator. She held it up to the light, then labeled it with a marker. “I’ll get this started and have it put into something portable for you when you leave. Your old Arrow unit will be able to migrate to it.”

THE PANASONIC UPLOADING was 87 percent complete. They were mopping up fish that had scattered from the main schools. Meanwhile, thirty-four beans had developed into embryos and were still viable.

SEVERAL WEEKS INTO Meewee’s stay, Dr. Strohmeyer requested his assistance in the fish lab. Koyabe brought him by vurt to a storage room full of racks and shelves of laboratory instruments. Strohmeyer was sitting at a desk in the corner poring over a large dataframe.

“Ah, thank you for coming, Bishop Meewee. Perhaps you can shed some light on a problem we’re having. Downloading a person’s engrams and transferring them to an auxiliary brain is only half the battle. The cognitive reintegration of these engrams and the resurgence of personality are just as critical, and to be honest, we’ve had spotty success along those lines. By now we’ve got most of Myr Starke into the system, but I’m not entirely sure we can get her out.

“Anyway, Cabinet said to consult with you since you’re the only person to have actually coached Eleanor through the process.”

Meewee was flattered. “I’m no scientist, Dr. Strohmeyer, merely a farmer’s son. I don’t know that I actually did anything to help.”

“You’re too modest,” Koyabe said, touching his arm.

“Give a listen anyway,” Strohmeyer said, “and see if this sounds right.”

She played snippets of Eleanor’s voice: “Four little brass bells make a happy harmony,” and “Make mine a double,” and “I did not have sex with that woman.”

Meewee saw Strohmeyer’s problem. It was gibberish in English, which was the only language she heard, but it didn’t make much sense in Starkese either. From the look on Koyabe’s lovely face, Meewee could tell that she was confused by the messages in both languages.

<One half of human intelligence is located outside the brain> and <Any mentar with vision and drive is probably also insane> and <Samson taught me to see reflected shadows. They’re everywhere, but only artists see them.>

“Oh, that,” Meewee said. “Are you getting this on multiple channels?”

“Yes,” replied Strohmeyer. “Every brainfish is transmitting dozens of them, and all of it nonsense.”

“When I first started coaching Eleanor,” Meewee said, with a nod to Koyabe, “I thought she was nothing more than a jumbled collection of random memories and opinions. This is normal and may last for weeks.”