Mind Over Ship

patterns of light, not the branches, per se, or even the trees. Because it’s the pattern of synaptic firing that encodes memory. The brain can lift a pattern from one set of trees and impose it on others. This is essentially what happens when a memory trace goes from working memory through short-to long-term memory.

“When we create a machine memory, as we do for sims and proxies, we are essentially scanning the whole forest down to individual lights and duplicating them in toto in a pseudo-living substrate — paste. We’ve gotten very good at this process, but what we’ve had difficulty doing is going in the other direction. How do you impose outside patterns on living neurons?

“The way artificial brains do it, including the mentar brain, is through electrical impulses. But that’s not practical with living brains. You’d have to implant and coordinate hundreds of trillions of electrodes in people’s heads, and our cells’ insulation just isn’t that good.”

“Wait a minute,” Meewee said. “If we can scan down to the molecular level to make sims, why can’t we just extrude new brains from scratch?”

“Excellent question!” Koyabe said. “It shows you are able to follow my confusing explanation. The answer is simple. If we scanned an entire brain with all the memories intact and then duplicated it in a new body with nanotech, we would just be making a new copy of an old brain. That is, biologically it would be just as old as the original. It’s a catch-22: we can’t rejuvenate senescent brains without destroying their memories, and we can’t copy memories without also copying senescent brain structures.

“What we need to do is make new brains, like baby clone brains, and train them how to remember old memories. The method we’ve developed involves delivering memory patterns to the brain in the form of packets of tiny protein factors that stimulate the body’s own means of consolidating short-term memory. These factors migrate throughout the brain and, in our Christmas tree analogy, latch on to branches. We don’t particularly care which branch or which tree they settle on, as long as they’re in the right tree lots and the overall patterns are retained.”

Dr. Koyabe paused to see how well Meewee was following, and he, in his turn, struggled to please her by not appearing clueless. “Which is why,” she concluded, “the memory traces have to be injected or eaten instead of being zapped in.”

Elaine added, “But it’s hard work!”

“It’s why we still have to sleep eighteen hours a day.”

“And we have to forget as much as we remember.”

“And sometimes it’s hard to be certain if the memory is hers or mine.”

Meewee said, “But why are you sharing each other’s memories in the first place?”

Elaine, or maybe it was Liz — Meewee’s working memory had already faded — answered, “Soon we will be leading two distinctly separate lives, but we’ll each be able to remember both of them.”

Meewee hadn’t considered this possibility, and it impressed him. He had often wondered how his life would have turned out if he had chosen to follow a different path than the one he did. With a clone’s memory, he could, in effect, lead two lives at once.

“And we’re sharing the big tuna’s memories too. She sends out hundreds of proxies every day to do tasks out there. And when they return with results, we don’t even have to listen to a report. The big fish just sends over a milkshake, and we remember what they did.”

The other El said, “Proxy memory feels different; it’s flat.”

Dr. Koyabe said, “That’s because it lacks the emotional indexing of biological memory.”

“And Cabinet’s memories are harder to understand. They’re more like — when you talk to yourself? But you’re not making much sense?”

“But very distinctive.”

“Which makes them easy to recall.”

“And her visuals are great.”

The girls laughed, and one of them added, “You may be interested to know, Bishop Meewee, that Saul Jaspersen had pan-fried trout for lunch yesterday.”

Meewee was astonished. “What did I have for lunch yesterday?”

In unison they said, “Lentil soup!”

THE BRAINFISH CROWDED the edge of the pool for a virtual pat on the head, including a dozen juvenile newcomers. Meewee was beginning to be able to tell the individual fish apart. He told them, “I just learned that Andrea clones and E-P copies have joined all of the Lucky Five ships except the King Jesus.”

Eleanor’s holo appeared in the room and replied, “Yes, I know.”

Meewee turned to the holo. “But you said E-P will destroy the ships in order to quarantine humans to this system. Why go on board only to be destroyed?”

“No doubt it’s part of a backup suicide sabotage plan.”

“Then how will we defeat them?”

“Not to worry, Merrill. We’ll deal with the original E-P and Andrea well before the launch. As to their shipboard clones, let’s just say there’s a handy feature built into the ship design that allows me to rapture any mentar on board at will. And without the E-P mentars, the Andrea clones are powerless.”

The news that she could destroy shipboard mentars brought the bigger picture into focus. With Cabinet at her side, no mentar opposition, and a detachment of russes backing her up, whichever El shipped out on the Hybris would become its self-appointed ruler.

The pipe grid over the pool clanked open, and a shower of flakes fell on the water surface. The brainfish quickly gobbled them up. Memories from the front?

“You’re not human anymore,” he said simply.

Eleanor’s bushy eyebrows rose in amused surprise. “No, Merrill, I suppose I’m not.”

“You are posthuman, as posthuman as Andrea. You are using the GEP and me, not to seed the galaxy with humans, but to spread your own kind.”

“What an active imagination you have.”

“Really? What about ‘A thousand Eleanors ruling under a thousand suns’? What about your ten-thousand- year reunion?”

That got her attention. “Did I say that? My, what a gabby fish I was. I wonder what else I said.”

“Enough to open my eyes! You’ve been using me from the start for your own dreams of empire!” At the tone of his voice, the brainfish all dove to the deep end of the pool, and Eleanor’s sim crossed her arms.

“Go on.”

“You told me all about it, how mentars want bodies. How mentar/human hybrids are scheming to become the next stage in our evolution, how we ordinary humans will soon be as extinct as the Neanderthals. But all this time you were doing the exact same thing. You’re using me to help destroy my own species! And for what? Your own glory?”

As she listened, Eleanor nodded her head and knit her brows in thought. When she spoke at last, her voice was gentle. “A lot of what I said no doubt sprang up from somewhere in my unconscious; I won’t deny it. But don’t we all harbor thoughts of grandeur or revenge or lust or some equally antisocial behavior? It’s only human, and the job of our higher faculties is to suppress or moderate these baser impulses. So in that regard I am still very much human. I won’t attempt to deny what I might have told you, but let me offer a little moderating explanation.

“Evolution is largely a temporal phenomenon, Merrill. The environment changes, and populations in that environment must change in turn, or they languish. Individual organisms don’t evolve; populations do. Nature doesn’t give a damn about individuals. The only role we play in evolution is surviving long enough to give birth to offspring who are slightly different from us. Some of our offspring will prosper in a changing environment, and some of them will not. As for us individuals, once we’ve reproduced, nature has no more use for us. We perish along with our ill-adapted young. Death has always been an essential factor in species survival.

“Now consider the human race. We are a partial exception to the rule. Unlike other species, we have developed culture. Instead of adapting to a changing environment biologically, we can sometimes adapt to it culturally. If an Ice Age comes along, we don’t need to grow fur on our bodies if we invent the fur coat. Culture allows us to adapt to almost any environment, including the harshest, like space. In fact, our cultural adaptation is so robust that it all but obviates the need to evolve biologically.