The Turing Option

“That is very good. Do you think you can answer the question now?”

“I don’t know. I know you have asked me that before.”

“I have. It is very smart of you to remember that.”

“It’s my head — isn’t it? Something has happened to my head.”

“That is perfectly correct. Your head has been hurt. It is much better now.”

“I think with my head.”

“Correct again. You are getting much better, Brian.”

“I’m not thinking right. And my back, my arm. They hurt. My head — ?”

“That’s right. You have had head injuries, your back and arm were injured as well — but they are mending very well. But your head injuries were not good, which will give you some confusing memories. Don’t let that worry you because it will come right in time. I am here to help you. So when I ask you a question you must help me. Try to answer — as well as you can. Now — do you remember how old you were at your last birthday?”

There had been a party, candles on the cake. How many of them? He closed his eyes, saw the table, the candles.

“Birthday party. Cake — a pink cake.”

“With candles?”

“Plenty candles.”

“Can you count them, Brian? Try to count the candles.”

His lips moved, his eyes still closed, working at the memory, stirring in the bed with effort.

“Lit. Burning. I can see them. One, two — more of them. All together, I think, yes, there are fourteen.”

The gray-haired woman smiled, reached out and patted him on the shoulder. Smiled down at him when his eyes fluttered open and he looked at her.

“That is good, very, very good, Brian. I am Dr. Snaresbrook. I have been taking care of you since the accident. So you can believe me when I say that your situation is greatly improved — and will improve steadily now. I will tell you about that later. I want you to sleep now—”

It wasn’t easy. At times it seemed to be two steps backward for every one ahead. The pain appeared to be lessening but it still bothered him; at times that was all he wanted to talk about. He had little appetite, but wanted the intravenous drip removed. For one day he just sobbed with fear; about what, she never discovered.

Yet, bit by bit, with dogged insistence, she helped the boy put his memories together. Slowly the tangled and cut skeins of his past were gathered up, rejoined. There were still large sections of memory missing. She was aware of that even if he wasn’t. After all — how can one miss something one does not remember? The personality of Brian was slowly and surely emerging, stronger each day. Until one day he asked:

“My father — Dolly, are they all right? I haven’t seen them. It has been a long time.”

The surgeon had been expecting the question, had prepared a carefully worded answer.

“When you were wounded there were other casualties — but none of them were people you know. Now the best thing for you to do is get some rest.” She nodded to a nurse and out of the corner of his eye Brian could see her inject something into the drip that led to his arm. He wanted to talk, ask more questions, tried to move his lips but plunged down into darkness instead.

When Dr. Snaresbrook next visited Brian she was accompanied by her neurosurgical resident, Richard Foster, who had closely followed the Delaney case.

“I’ve never seen so much recovery from such a grave injury.” Foster said. “Unprecedented. This kind of gross brain damage always leads to major deficiencies. Serious muscle weaknesses and paralyses. Massive sensory deficits. Yet all of his systems seem to be operating. It’s amazing that he’s recovered any mental function at all, with such an extensive injury. Normally such a patient would be permanently comatose. He ought to be a vegetable.”

“I think you’re using the wrong concept,” Snaresbrook explained patiently. “Brian has not, in fact, ‘recovered’ in the usual sense of the word. No natural healing process has repaired those connections of his. The only reason that his brain acts like more than a bunch of disconnected fragments is that we have provided all those substitute connections.”

“I understand that. But I can’t believe that we got enough of them right.”

“I suspect you’re completely correct about that. We were only able to approximate. So now, when an agent in one part of his brain sends a signal to some other place — for example, to move the arm and hand — that signal may not be precisely the same as it was before his injury. However, if we got things nearly right, then at least some of those signals will arrive in the right general area, somewhere they can have roughly the right effect. And that is the important thing. Give the brain just half a chance, and it will do the rest for you. The same as in any surgery. All the surgeon can do is approximate. One can never restore exactly what was there before — but that usually doesn’t matter that much because of how much the body can do.”