The Turing Option

“Not really. It was sort of like groping for a memory, something like a word almost on the tip of one’s tongue. Reaching and finding it.”

“Can you do it again?”

“I hope so — yes, why not? I don’t know how it worked in the dream, but I think that I can do it again. But I have no idea how I do it.”

“I think I know what is happening. But in order to verify my diagnosis I’ll have to hook you up to the connection machine again. See what is going on in your brain. Will that be all right?”

“Of course. I must find out how this is happening.”

She turned on the connection machine while he settled into the chair. The delicate fingers made their adjustments and he leaned back, ordered his thoughts.

“Then here is what we will do.” She moved the cursor through the menu on her screen. “Here is an article I downloaded into my computer yesterday from a journal. It’s titled ‘Protospecialist Intensities in Juvenile Development.’ Do you know anything about the subject?”

“I know a bit about what protospecialists are. The nerve centers located in the brain stem that are responsible for most of our basic instincts. Hunger, rage, sex, sleep — things like that. But I don’t think that I ever read any article like that.”

“You couldn’t have, it was only published a few months ago. Then I am going to load it into your implant CPU’s memory — under that title.” She quickly touched the keys, then turned back to him. “It should be there now. See if you are aware of it. Are you?”

“No, not really. I mean I can remember the title because I just heard it.”

“Then try to do what you did a little while ago, what you did in the dream. Tell me about the article.”

Brian’s lip tightened as he frowned, struggling inside his brain with invisible effort.

“Something — I can’t tell. I mean there is something there if I can only get close to it. Get a handle on it…” His eyes opened wide and he began to speak, the words tumbling from his lips.

“…as the child grows, each primitive protospecialist grows level after level of new memory and management machinery and, at the same time, each of them tends to find new ways to influence and exploit what the others can do. The result of this process is to make the older versions of those specialists less separate and distinct. Thus, as those different systems learn to share their cognitive attachments, the resulting cross-connections lead to the more complex mixtures of feelings characteristic of more adult emotions. And by the time we’re adults, these systems have become too complicated even for ourselves to understand. By the time we’ve passed through all those stages of development, our grown-up minds have been rebuilt too many times to remember or understand much of how it felt to be an infant.”

Brian clamped his lips shut, then spoke again, slowly and hesitantly. “Is that… it? What the article was about?”

Dr. Snaresbrook looked at her screen and nodded. “That is not what it was about — that is it word for word. You’ve done it, Brian! What sensations are connected with it?”

He frowned in concentration. “It’s like a real memory, though not exactly. It’s there but I don’t know all about it. I sort of have to read through it in my thoughts before it is complete, understandable.”

“Of course. That’s because it is in the computer’s memory, not yours. You can access it but you won’t understand it until you have gone through it, paying attention to and thinking about what each sentence means. Making the proper sort of links with other things you already know. Only then will you have made the cross-connections that are true understanding.”

“No instant plug-in knowledge in the head?”

“I’m afraid not. Memory is made of so many cross-connections, that can be accessed in so many ways, that it is not linear at all like a computer’s memory. But once you have gone through it once or twice it will be part of your own memory, accessible at any time.”

“It’s fun,” he said, then smiled. “My goodness, I even know the page numbers and footnotes! Do you think we could do it with a whole book — or an encyclopedia?”

“I don’t see why not, since there is still plenty of memory available in the implant CPU. It would certainly speed up the process of relearning. But — this is such a wonderful thing! Direct access to a computer by thought alone. It is such a wide-open concept with such endless possibilities.”

“And it could help my work. Is there any reason why I couldn’t load in all my earlier research notes so I could access them just by thinking about it?”

“No reason that I can think of.”

“Good. It would be nice to have everything there to digest. I’ll do it now, upload all of the retrieved notes from my backup GRAM here—” He yawned. “No, I won’t. Tomorrow will be soon enough. I want to think about this a bit in any case. It all takes some getting used to.”

“I agree completely. But this is more than enough for one day. If you are thinking of going back to the lab — don’t. You are now through with work.”