The Turing Option

“General Schorcht keeps bugging me for more detailed reports. So I bug you.”

“Niet prahblem, as our Russian friends say. But what about your end? Progress there?”

“An absolute dead end. If there is a trail, and I doubt it, it gets colder every day. No hints, no clues, no idea of who did it or how they did it. I’m not supposed to know this, but the FBI has managed to get undercover data taps into every AI lab or department of every university, every major industry in the country, to report any sudden changes or input of new information. They are looking out for the AI data stolen from Brian. Of course the trouble is that they don’t exactly know what to look for.”

“Sounds sort of illegal, snooping like that.”

“It is. But I’ll put up with it for a short time before I blow the whistle on them. But that’s not what worries me. The real question is whether the security agencies have enough experts to interpret any or all of that data. We must get a lead. Which of course is why the General is bugging me.”

“Because the possibility that Brian may remember something, recover, respond in any way — is the only chance we have? Fascinating. I’ve read in bad novels ‘he nodded gloomily’ Now I know what it looks like because you just did it.”

“Gloomily, depressingly, suicidally — take your pick. And Brian?”

“Our progress has been good, but we are running out of time.”

“He’s getting worse, regressing!”

“Not that, you misunderstood. Modern medicine can stabilize a body, keep it alive for years when the mind is not in control. Physically, I could leave Brian in the recovery unit until he died of old age. I don’t think we want to do that. What I mean is that I have traced and reconnected nearly a million nerve fibers. I’ve tracked and accessed Brian’s earliest memories, from birth right up until about age twelve. The film connectors and computer are in place and in the very near future they should have hopefully made all of the possible connections. I have gone about as far as I can go with this technique.”

“Why are you working on his childhood — when it is the adult we need to answer our questions?”

“Because the old expression about the child being the father of the man is quite true. There is no way we can restore the higher level brain connections until the lower levels begin to operate. This means that the enormous structure of the human mind can be rebuilt only from the bottom up — in much the same way it was built in the first place…”

“When you say building a mind — built of what?”

“The mind is made of many small parts, each mindless by itself. We call these basic parts agents. Each agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. But when the agents get connected up, in certain very social ways, they work together as societies — -that’s how intelligence emerges from non-intelligence.

“Fortunately, most of the agents themselves are okay, because their brain cells are located in the uninjured gray matter. But most of the connections between the agents thread their way through the brain’s white matter — and too many of those connections have been severed. That is where I am now. Locating and reconnecting large numbers of the simplest agents, at the sensory and motor levels. If I can reconstruct enough of the society of agents formed during each stage of Brian’s development, that will give me a foundation for repairing the structures that were formed in his next period. Stage after stage. Layer after layer. And the different kinds of cross-connections between them. While at the same time I have to restore the feedback loops between the agents at each level, as well as the systems in other parts of the brain that control reasoning and learning. These different kinds of loops and rings are crucial because they are what supports the thoughtful and reflective activity that distinguishes human from animal thinking. At the present time I am almost at the end of this first period of rebuilding. In a few days I will know if I have succeeded or not.”

Benicoff shook his head in wonderment. “You are getting me used to thinking the unthinkable as a daily habit. What you are doing is so new, so different, that I find it basically — I’m sorry to say this — incomprehensible. That you can enter Brian’s head, listen to his thoughts and repair the damage done! Better you than me. Does he feel anything while you are doing this?”

Snaresbrook shrugged. “There is really no way to tell. I suppose the experience will be indescribable because it is happening to a mind that is not yet human. My personal belief, however, is that while his brain is being reconstructed his mind might very well be retracing and reliving the important early events of his life.”

* * *

Dolly could hear the clatter of computer keys as she came down the hall; she smiled. Brian was usually alone so much, it was nice to see him with a school friend.