Zendegi

Over the months she’d spent working on the problem, Nasim had tried all manner of high-powered statistical techniques and classification schemes from abstract network topology, but the approach that was finally showing signs of a payoff involved searching for distinctive sub-networks, not by their pattern of connections per se, but by their function. An engineer staring at a circuit diagram could group the components into various kinds of functional blocks – say, half-a-dozen that formed an oscillator, another half-dozen comprising a filter – without requiring an absolutely rigid, unvarying design for each of these meta-components. An oscillator was anything that oscillated; it didn’t have to be a perfect match for the first one you’d encountered in a textbook. Similarly, if a group of neurons had the same general effect on their inputs as another group, it didn’t really matter if there happened to be thirty-nine neurons in one group and forty-five in the other. ‘The same general effect’ was easier said than defined, but Nasim had been refining the notion for weeks now, and she was convinced that she was finally closing in on a set of meaningful categories.

She tweaked a few definitions in her code and started it running again. It would take a couple of minutes to process the full data set; she looked away from her screen and across the lab. Everyone was unnaturally quiet today; Redland was down in Washington, testifying before a House Select Committee on the mooted Human Connectome Project, and Judith had gone with him. The Committee had been holding hearings for a month, and Redland was just one of dozens of scientists who’d been called to give testimony, but the occasion of his trip had reminded everyone that their funding, and their future, lay in the balance.

The composite map appeared on the screen. Nasim was about to slip on her headphones when a mischievous impulse took hold of her. She pulled the headphone plug out of its jack, rerouting the computer’s audio to its speakers. Then she fired up the software syrinx and ran the latest simulation of the finch brain’s vocalisation pathways.

The infantile babbling of her early trials had slowly been giving way to a more ordered song, but this time hairs rose on the back of her neck. The distinctive rhythms of an adult bird’s call – the whole style, the whole structure – were finally present.

With the song still playing, she checked the simulation’s virtual EEG. The waveforms were not an exact match to any of the biological recordings on file, but the statistics all fell within the population ranges. If she’d handed the traces to a neurobiologist, they would not have been able to pick the artificial one from the real.

Mike stepped away from his bench and looked around, annoyed. ‘Who took the bird out of the animal house?’ he demanded. He was wearing a hairnet and something that resembled a plastic shower cap. ‘If I get droppings in my cell cultures, that’s a month’s work down the tube!’ He finally homed in on the sound and turned to glare angrily at Nasim. ‘Where is it?’

It took her a moment to realise that he wasn’t joking. She said, ‘No droppings, Mike, I promise.’

Mike, Shen and Dinesh gathered around her desk and watched as she ran through a battery of further tests. She kept the syrinx warbling, trying to shake off the eerie feeling that she’d stitched together something gruesome from the corpses of the birds and could now feel the awakened result fluttering its wings in her hand.

Shen said, ‘We should play this to a female bird and see if she’s attracted. A Turing test for zebra finches.’

‘No,’ Mike countered, ‘we should simulate a female’s auditory centres, and see if that simulation is attracted.’

‘One program fools another program? How is that a test?’ Shen demanded.

‘It’s not a test,’ Mike agreed, ‘but it would be much easier for them to consummate the relationship.’

Shen pondered this. ‘I think the Media Lab could put together some avian tele-dildonics faster than we could construct a purely software female capable of mating.’

‘Can we cut the Bride of Frankenfinch crap?’ Nasim pleaded. ‘There’s nothing in there but the vocalisation PDP. If that can feel lust all by itself, then so can a Casio keyboard.’

Dinesh said, ‘There’s nothing in there that can feel lust, yet. But now that you can integrate maps from different imaging techniques, it would take us, what, eighteen months to do the whole finch brain?’

‘Who’s this “us”?’ Mike replied. ‘You mean the people who are actually sticking around to fight for the HCP?’

Nasim plugged her headphones into their jack, cutting off the speakers. ‘The recital’s over,’ she said. ‘I have work to do.’

At lunchtime, Nasim joined the others gathered around a wide-screen monitor in the conference room, watching Redland give his testimony to the Select Committee. The session had taken place a few hours before, and the video had been posted on the web.