Val, the studios aren't planning a movie about us yet. Though now, who
knows."
"Listen here, I'm not Val to you, but Valentin Vasilyevich Krivo-shein!
Some pushy guy like you...."
The man smiled, obviously enjoying my anger. I could tell that he was
much more prepared for our meeting and was relishing his upper hand.
"And... be so kind as to explain: who you are, how you come to be on
institute grounds, and why you are wearing that makeup and outfit to look
like me?"
"Sure," he said. "Valentin Vasilyevich Krivoshein, head of the New
Systems Lab. Here's my pass, if you like." He displayed my worn, used pass.
"And I came here from the lab, naturally."
"Ah, so that's it?" It's important not to lose your sense of humor in
situations like this. "Very nice to meet you. Valentin Vasilyevich, you say?
From the lab? I see ... uh-huh."
And then I realized that I believed him. Not because of the pass, of
course. You could fool anyone with a pass. Either it was the realization
that the scar over my eyebrow and the brown birthmark on my cheek, which I
always saw in the mirror on my left, actually were supposed to be on the
right side of the face. Or it was something in his behavior that absolutely
ruled out the possibility of a practical joke. I was scared. Had I really
gone mad during the experiments and run into my split personality? "I hope
no one sees us. I wonder, to anyone else, am I here alone or are there two
of us?" I thought.
"So-from the lab, you say?" I tried tricking him. "Then why are you
coming from the old building?"
"I was in accounting. Today's the twenty-second." He took out a roll of
five-ruble notes and counted off part of it. "Here's your cut."
I took the money and counted it. Then:
"Why only half?'
"Oh, God!" my double sighed expressively. "There are two of us now, you
know."
(That exaggerated, expressive sigh-I'll never sigh like that. I didn't
know you could demean someone with a sigh. And his diction-if you can call
the absolute absence of diction diction!-do I really spit out words like
that?)
"I took the money from him, and that means he really exists," I
thought. "Or are my senses tricking me? Damn it, I'm a researcher, and I
couldn't care less about senses until I know what's going on here!"
"So you maintain that... you've come out of a locked and sealed lab?"
"Uh-hum. Definitely from the lab. From the tank."
"From the tank, my, oh.... What do you mean, from the tank?"
"Just that, from the tank. You could have set up some handles. I barely
managed to get out."
"Listen, drop this! You don't think you could really convince me that
you were . . . that I was . . . no, that you were made by the computer?"
The double sighed once more in the most demeaning manner possible.
"I have the feeling it's going to take you a long time to get used to
the idea that this has happened. I should have known. After all, you saw
that there was living matter in the flasks?"
"Big deal. I've seen mold, too, growing in damp places. But that didn't
mean that I was present at the conception of life. All right, let's assume
that something living did arise in the flasks. I don't know. I'm no
biologist. But what do you have to do with it?"
"What do you mean?" Now it was his turn to get angry. "And what did you
think it would create: an earthworm? a horse? an octopus? The computer was
collecting and processing information about you. It saw you. It heard,
smelled, and observed you. It counted the biowaves of your brain! You were
around so much you callused its eyes! There you are. If you have motorcycle
parts you can only make a motorcycle, not a vacuum cleaner."
"Hm, all right. Then where are the shoes, the suit, the pass, and the
raincoat from?"
"Damn it! If it can create a person, how hard do you think it is for
the computer to grow a raincoat?"
(The victorious glint in the eye, the clumsy gestures, the arrogant
tone of voice. Am I really that obnoxious when I feel I'm right about
something?)
"Grow?" I felt the fabric of his coat. A shudder ran through me. A
raincoat wasn't like that.
Major things don't fit into the brain immediately, at least not in
mine. I remember when I was in school I had to take charge of a delegate to
a youth festival, a young hunter from the Siberian tundra; I showed him
around Moscow. He took in the sights implacably and calmly: the bronze
statues at the Economic Achievement Exhibits, the subway escalators, the
heavy traffic. And when he saw the tall building of MSU, he simply said,
"With poles and skin you can build a small hut- with rock, a big one." But
when we were in the lobby of the Nord Restaurant, where we had stopped off
for a bite, he came face to face with a stuffed polar bear with a tray in
its paws- and that amazed him! That was what happened to me. My double's
raincoat resembled mine very much, down to the ink spot that I had added one
day trying to get my pen to work. But the fabric was more elastic and almost
greasy. The buttons were attached to flexible outgrowths, and there were no
stitches in the fabric. "Listen, is it attached to you? Can you take it
off?" My double was driven to a frenzy.
"That does it! It's not necessary to undress me in this cold wind to
prove that I'm you! I can explain it without that. The scar over the eye-
that's when you fell down when your father was teaching you to ride a horse.
The torn ligament in the right knee happened during the soccer finals in
high school. What else do I have to remind you of? How you used to secretly
believe in God as a child? How as a freshman you used to boast that you had
known many women, when actually you lost your virginity in Taganrog just
before graduation?" (That son of a bitch! The examples he picked!) "Hm, all
right; but you know, if you're me, I'm not so crazy about me.
"Neither am I," he grunted. "I thought I had some smarts...." His face
tensed. "Shhhh, don't turn around!" Footsteps behind me. "
"Good day, Valentin Vasilyevich," said Harry Hilobok, assistant
professor, sciences candidate, scientific secretary and institute busybody.
I didn't get a chance to open my mouth. My double grinned marvelously
and nodded:
"Good day to you, Harry Haritonovich!"
A couple walked past us in the light of his smile. A plump brunette
clicked her heels merrily on the pavement and Hilobok, walking in step,
minced along as though he was wearing a tight skirt.
"Perhaps, I didn't quite understand you, Lyudochka," he buzzed in his
baritone, "but I, from the point of view of not understanding completely, am
only expressing my opinion."
"Harry has a new one," my double announced. "You see, even Hilobok
accepts me, and you have doubts. Let's go home!"
The only explanation I can think of for following him so quietly to
Academic Town was that I was completely flabbergasted.
In the apartment, he headed straight for the bathroom. I heard the
shower running, and then he stuck out his head:
"Hey, sample number one, or whatever your name is. If you want to make
sure that I'm all in order, come on in. And you can soap my back while
you're at it."
So I did. It was a living person. And he had my body. By the way, I
didn't expect such thick folds of fat on my stomach and sides. I have to
work out with my barbells more often.
While he washed, I paced the room, smoked and tried to accustom myself
to the fact that a computer had created a man. A computer had re-created me.
Oh, nature, is this really possible? The ridiculous medieval ideas about a
homunculus, . . . Wiener's idea that the information in a man could be
decoded into impulses, transmitted over any distance, and reordered into a
man again, in the form of an image on a screen, . . . Ashby's assertion that
there was no major difference between the work of the brain and of a
computer (but of course, Sechenov had maintained that earlier, too),... all
that had just been clever talk to keep the brain going. Try to do something
practical with any of those ideas!
And now it looked as if it had been done? There, on the other side of
the door, splashing and snorting, was no Ivanov, Petrov, or Sidorov-I would
have tossed them out on their ear-but me. And those rolls with the numbers?
I guess I had burned the "paper" me.
I was trying to extract short, usable truths from the combinations of
numbers, but the computer went deeper than that. It stored information,
combining it this way and that, compared it through feedback, picked and
chose what was necessary and at some level of complexity "discovered" life!
And then the computer developed it to the level of man. But why? I
wasn't trying to do that!
Now, as I think about it calmly, I can figure it out. It did exactly
what I was trying to do. I wanted a machine that could understand man and
that's all. "Do you understand me?" "Oh, yes!" answers the listener, and
both go about their business, happy with each other. In conversation it's
much easier. But in experiments with computers I shouldn't have confused
understanding with agreement. That's why (better late than never) it's
important to figure out what understanding is.
There is practical, or goal, understanding. You put in a program; the
computer understands it and does what is expected of it. "Attack, Prince!"
and Prince grabs the pants cuff of a passerby, "Gee!" and the horses turn to
the right. "Haw!" and they go left. This kind of primitive understanding of
the gee-haw type is accessible to many living and inanimate systems. It is
controlled by achievement of the goal, and the more primitive the system,
the simpler the goal must be and the more detailed the programmed task.
But there is another understanding: mutual understanding. A complete
transferral of your information to another system. And for this, the system
receiving the information must not be any simpler than the system giving the
information. I didn't give the computer a goal. I was waiting for it to
finish building itself and making itself more complex. But it never
finished-and that's natural. Its goal became the complete understanding of
my information, not only verbal, but all of it. (The goal of a
computer-that's another loose concept that shouldn't be played with. Simply
put, information systems behave according to certain laws that somewhat
resemble the rudiments of thermodynamics. In my system sensors, crystal
units, TsVM-12 had to reach an informational equilibrium with the
environment-just as the iron ingot in the oven must achieve temperature
equilibrium with the coals. This equilibrium is mutual understanding. And it
cannot be achieved on the level of circuitry nor on the level of simple
organisms.)
And that's how it happened. Only man is capable of mutual understanding
with man. And for good mutual understanding, a close friend. My double was
the product of informational equilibrium between the computer and me. But,
incidentally, the pointers on the informational scales never did match up. I
wasn't in the lab then and didn't meet face to face with my newly hatched
double. And later everything went differently for us anyway.
In a word, it was horrifying how poorly I had run the experiment. The
only point in my favor was that I had finally thought of setting up the
feedback mechanism.
An interesting thought: if I had run the experiment strictly,
logically, throwing out dubious variants, would I have gotten the same
results? Never in my life! I would have come up with a steady, sure-fire
Ph.D. thesis, and nothing more, hi science, mostly mediocre things
happen-and I was prepared for mediocrity.
So everything was all right? Why does sadness gnaw at me? Why do I keep
harping on my mistakes? I succeeded. Because it didn't go by the rules? Are
there any rules for discoveries? Much happens by accident that you can't put
down to your scientific vision. What about Galvani's discovery, or X-rays,
or radioactivity, or electronic emissions, or any discovery that is the
basis of some science or other and is related to chance. I still don't
understand a lot of it? That's the situation with many scientists. Nothing
to be upset about. Then why this self-torture?
I guess the problem is something else: you can't work that way now.
Science has become very serious now, not like in the days of Galvani and
Roentgen. This is the way, without thinking, that you can come up with a
force that can destroy the whole world instantly-with a brilliant
experimental proof....
My double came out of the bathroom rosy pink and in my pajamas and
settled in front of the mirror to comb his hair. I stood behind him. Two
identical faces stared out from the mirror. Only his wet hair was darker.
He took out the electric razor from the closet and plugged it in. I
watched him shave and almost felt that I was visiting him; his behavior was
so casual and at-home. I couldn't resist speaking up:
"Listen, do you at least realize how unusual this situation is?" "What?
Don't bother me!" He was obviously beyond being interested in the fact.
The graduate student put down the diary and shook his head: well,
Valentin the Original didn't know people very well.
He had also been in shock. His sense had told him that he woke up in
the tank, understanding everything: where he was and how he got there.
Actually, his discovery began then. And his insolence was only a cover-up.
He was searching for a mode of behavior that would keep him from being
reduced to a lab guinea pig.
He picked up the diary.
"But you appeared from a machine, not from a mother's womb! From a
machine, do you understand?"
"So what? Appearing from a womb is such a snap? A human's birth is much
more mysterious than my appearance. Here you can trace the logical sequence,
but there? Will it be a boy or a girl? Will it favor father or mother? Will
it be smart or a dope? It's all in a fog! That business seems normal only
because of its frequency. Here, the computer took down information and
re-created it. Like a tape recorder. Of course, it would have been better if
it had re-created me from Einstein... but what can you do? If you tape
boogie-woogie you can't expect to hear a Tchaikovsky symphony."
No, I wasn't a boor like him. He must have been acutely aware of the
ticklishness of his situation and didn't want me to realize it. And what was
there that I couldn't realize. He appeared out of flasks and bottles, like a
medieval homunculus, and he was wildly angry. I've often noticed that people
who have an inferiority complex are always more obnoxious than the rest.
And he was trying to behave with the spontaneity of a newborn. A baby
isn't overwhelmed with the event (Man is born!), but instead immediately
makes a fuss, sucking, and messing his diapers.
Graduate student Krivoshein merely sighed and turned the page.
"But do you feel all right?"
"Absolutely!" He splashed on some after-shave. "Why shouldn't I feel
all right? A computer is an apparatus without fantasy. I can just picture
what it might have done if it had an inkling of imagination. But I'm fine:
I'm not a two-headed monster. I'm young, healthy. I'm going to have dinner
and go to Lena's. I've missed her."
"What?"
He watched me with interest, sparks dancing in his eyes.
"Yes, we're rivals now! Listen, you seem to have a very primitive
attitude toward all this. Jealousy is old-fashioned and in poor taste. And
who are you jealous of, anyway? Think about it. If Lena's with me, it
doesn't mean that she's being unfaithful to you. You can only be unfaithful
with another man, someone different, more attractive, for instance. And as
far as she's concerned, I'm you. Even if we have children, you can't
consider yourself cuckolded. You and I are identical-all the same genes and
chromosomes. Easy!"
He had to hide behind the closet door. I grabbed a dumbbell and headed
for him.
"I'll kill you! Don't try logic with me. I'll give you logic, you
homunculus! I gave you life and I'll kill you, understand? Don't you dare
even think about her!"
My double fearlessly stepped out from the closet door. He was frowning.
"Listen, Taras Bulba, put down the dumbbell. If you're going to talk
like that, we might as well agree on some terms right now. I'm leaving
'homunculus' and 'kill' aside as products of your hysteria. And as for
locutions like 'I gave you life'... well, you didn't. I exist without any
help from you, and you might as well forget any ideas of being my lord and
master."
"What do you mean?"
"Just that. Put down the dumbbell. I'm serious. If you want precision,
I was created despite your plans simply because you didn't stop the
experiment in time, and when you wanted to, it was too late. In other
words," he snorted, "it's quite analagous to the situation when you appeared
in this world because of your parents' carelessness."
(Look, he knows everything! It's true. My mother once said, after some
prank of mine, to make me obey:
"I was going to have an abortion, but changed my mind. And you...."
She shouldn't have said that. I was unwanted. I might never have
existed.)
"But as distinguished from your mother, you didn't bear me, didn't
suffer labor pains, didn't nurse and clothe me," he continued. "You didn't
even save me from death because, after all, I existed before this
experiment. I was you. I don't owe you my life, my health, my engineering
degree-nothing! So let's start even."
"And even with Lena?"
"With Lena... I don't know. But you ... you...." Judging by his
expression he wanted to add something, but held his tongue, exhaling
sharply. "You have to respect my feelings as I do yours, understand? I love
Lena too, you know. And I know that she's mine-my woman, understand? I know
her body, the smell of her skin and hair, her breath... and how she says,
'Really, Val, you're just like a bear!' and how she wrinkles her nose."
He suddenly stopped. We looked at each other, overwhelmed by the same
thought. "Let's get to the lab!" I ran for my coat first.
If you want a cab and fate offers a bus, take the bus; at least it runs
on a schedule.
-K. Prutkov-enzhener, Thought 90
We made a beeline through the park: the wind whistled in the branches
and in our ears. Asphalt-colored clouds blanketed the sky.
The lab smelled like a warm swamp. The ceiling bulbs glowed like
lighthouses in a fog. I stepped on a hose near my desk that had not been
there before, and pulled my foot away. The hose was moving!
The flasks and bottles were covered with thick gray dust; there was no
way to tell what was going on inside them. Streams of water bubbled from the
distillers and the relays clicked in the thermostats. In a far corner, which
could not be reached through the jumble of wires, tubes, and hoses, the
lights on the TsVM-12's control panel blinked at me.
There were many more hoses than before. We made our way through them,
as if through a jungle of lianas. Some hoses were contracting, pushing lumps
through themselves. The walls of the tank were covered with some kind of
mold. I wiped it off with my sleeve.
In the golden, murky medium there was a silhouette of a man. "Another
double? No...." I looked closely. The contours were a woman's, contours that
I could never confuse with anyone else's. A hairless head fluttered in front
of my face.
There was some mad logic in the fact that precisely now when the double
and I were fighting over Lena, the computer was struggling with our problem.
I was scared.
"But the computer doesn't know her!"
"You do. The computer is re-creating her from your memory." We were
whispering for some reason. "Look!"
A skeleton was beginning to form beyond Lena's ghostly outline. Her
feet solidified into white cartilage and toes; her ankle and shin bones took
shape. Her spine formed into a long white form and ribs branched off from
it; her shoulder blades grew. Seams appeared on her skull, and the outline
of her eye sockets formed. I can't say that it was a pleasant sight-seeing
your girlfriend's skeleton-but I couldn't take my eyes off it. We were
watching something that no one had ever seen-how a machine creates a person!
"With my memory, my memory..." I was thinking feverishly. "But that's
not enough. Or has the computer mastered the laws of constructing a human
body? From where? I certainly don't know them!" The bones in the tank were
becoming sheathed with dark blue strips and coils of muscle, and they were
covered by a yellowish layer of fat, like a chicken's. The circulatory
system shot red throughout the body. All this fluctuated in the mixture,
changing shape and form. Even Lena's face, with its closed lids, behind
which we could see her watery eyes, was distorted by horrible grimaces. The
computer seemed to be trying on ways to make a person.
I know too little about anatomy in general and female anatomy in
particular to judge whether the computer was building Lena correctly. But
soon I sensed that something was wrong. The original contours of her body
were changing. The shoulders, which just a few minutes ago had been round
and soft, became angular and grew in breadth. What was it?
"Her feet!" my double shouted. "Look at her feet!"
I looked at her feet that took a size thirteen shoe-and when I
understood I broke out in cold sweat. The computer had run out of
information on Lena and was finishing her off with my body! I turned to my
double; his forehead was glistening with sweat too.
"We have to stop it!"
"How? Cut off the current?"
"We can't. That will erase the memory bank in the computer. Turn on the
cooling... ?"
"To slow down the process? It won't work. The computer has large heat
reserves...."
The distorted body in the tank was taking on clearer features. A
transparent mantle moved over it, and I recognized the style of the simple
dress in which I liked Lena best. The computer with an idiot's diligence was
dressing its creation in it.
I had to order the computer to stop, convince it... but how?
"Right!" My double leaped over to the glass case, took out Monomakh's
Crown, pushed the "translation" button on it, and handed it to me. "Put it
on and start hating Lena; think how you want to destroy her... go ahead."
I grabbed the shiny helmet, turned it around in my hands, and gave it
back.
"I can't...."
"Jerk! What else is there? That thing will be opening its eyes soon
and...."
He pulled on the helmet and started screaming and waving his arms:
"Stop, computer! Stop immediately, do you hear me? You're not creating
a good copy of a human! Stop, you idiot! Stop right now!"
"Stop, machine, do you hear me?" I turned to the microphones. "Stop, or
we'll destroy you!"
It's disgusting to remember that scene. We, men who were used to
pushing buttons to stop and direct any process, shouting and explaining ...
and to what? A collection of test tubes, electric circuits, and hoses.
Phooey! We were panicked.
We yelled some more in disgusting voices, when the hoses near the tank
began shaking with energetic convulsions, and the hybrid specimen in the
tank was covered with a white mist. We shut up. Three minutes later the mist
cleared. There was nothing in the gold liquid. Only ripples and color
gradations spreading from the center to the edges.
"Wow..." said my double. "I somehow never appreciated the fact that man
is seventy percent water. Now I've got it."
We made our way to the window. The humid stuffiness made my body
sticky. I unbuttoned my shirt, and so did my double. It was evening. The sky
had cleared. The windows of the institute across the way reflected the
sunset as though nothing had happened. They reflected it like that on every
clear evening-yesterday, last month, last year-when this had not existed.
Nature was making believe nothing had happened.
The skeleton enveloped in translucent tissue stayed in my mind.
"Those anatomical details, the grimaces... brrrr!" said the double,
lowering himself into a chair. "I don't even feel like seeing Lena right
now."
I said nothing, because he had expressed my thoughts. It was over now,
but then ... it's one thing to know, even intimately, that your woman is a
human being made of flesh, bones, and innards, and another thing to see it.
I took out the lab journal and looked at the last few notes... vague
and pointless. It's when the experiment is working or when you get a good
idea that you write at length; here I had:
April 8. Decoded numbers, 800 lines. Unsuccessful.
April 9. Decoded extracts from five rolls. Didn't understand a thing.
Some kind of schizophrenia!
April 10. Decoded with the same results. I added to the flasks and
bottles: Numbers 1, 3 and 5-2 liters of glycerine; Numbers 2 and 7-200 ml.
of tyomochevina; and 2-3 liters of distilled water to all of them.
April 11. "Streptocidal striptease with the trembling of streptococci."
That does it....
And now I'll pick up the pen and write:
April 22. The complex has re-created me, V. V. Krivoshein, Krivoshein
Number 2 is sitting next to me scratching his chin. A real joke!
And then I was engulfed with a wave of satanic pride. After all, this
was some discovery! It encompassed systemology, electronics, bionics,
chemistry, and biology-everything you could want and then some. And I did it
all. How I did it was another question. But the important thing was me, ME!
Now I could invite the State Commission and demonstrate the emergence of a
new double in the tank. I could imagine the look on their faces. And my
friends would have to say: "Boy he really did it! That Krivoshein is
something!" And Voltampernov would run over to see.... I had an
uncontrollable urge to giggle; only the presence of my double stopped me.
"Who cares about friends and Voltampernov," I heard my voice say and I
didn't realize at first that it was my double speaking. "This, Val, is a
Nobel Prize!"
That's right: the Nobel Prize! My portrait in all the papers ... and
Lena, who treats me a little high-handedly now-and why not, she's beautiful,
and I'm not-will appreciate me then. The run-of-the-mill name Krivoshein
(once I tried looking in the encyclopedia for famous people with my name and
didn't find any; there was a Krivoshilkov and a Krivonogov, but no
Krivosheins yet) will resound. Krivoshein! The same....
I was made uneasy by these meditations. My vain thoughts disappeared.
Really, what would happen? What should be done with this discovery?
I shut my journal.
"So, are we going to create in our image? A crush of Krivosheins? I
guess we could make others if we recorded them into the computer. Damn it!
This is ... it just doesn't make sense."
"Hm. And things were so peaceful...." My double shook his head.
Precisely. Everything had been peaceful-"Nice weather, miss. Which way
are you going?" "In the opposite direction!" "Me too. What's your name?"
"What's it to you?"-and so on right up to the wedding palace, the maternity
ward, a licking for killing a cat with a slingshot, and burning the hated
zoology textbook after graduation. The chairman of the Dneprovsk
Registration Office put it so well in his article: "The family is the method
of propagating the species and increasing the state's population." And
suddenly-hail science!-there is a rival method; we pour and sprinkle
reagents from the local chemistry manual, pass input through sensors, and
get a person. And a mature one at that, with muscles and an engineering
degree, with habits and life experience.
"It looks as if we're taking aim at the most human of man's qualities:
love, parenthood, childhood!" I was beginning to shudder. "And it's
profitable. It's efficient and profitable, the most terrible things in our
rationalistic age!"
My double looked up and there was anxiety and tension in his eyes.
"Listen, but why is that terrible? Okay, we worked-rather, you worked.
So you made an experimental determination and on its basis a discovery. A
method of synthesizing information into a person. The ancient dream of the
alchemist.... That's very nice! Once upon a time kings financed ventures
like that very generously. Of course, they chopped off the heads of
researchers who had failed, but if you think about it, they were right. If
you can't do it, don't take it on. But nothing will happen to us. Just the
reverse. Why is it so terrible?"
"Because this isn't the Middle Ages," I thought to myself. And not the
last century. And not even the beginning of the twentieth century, when
everything was still ahead of us. In those days, discoverers had the moral
right to spread their arms and say: well, we had no idea things would turn
out badly.... We, their lucky descendants, don't have that right. Because we
know. Because it's all happened before. It had all happened before: gas
attacks, according to science; Maidanek and Auschwitz, according to science;
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, according to science. Plans for global
warfare-science with the use of mathematics. Limiting warfare-also
science.... Decades had passed since the last world war. The ruins had been
rebuilt. Fifty million corpses had rotted and enriched the earch. Hundreds
of millions of people had been born and grown up-and the memory had not
faded. It was horrible to remember and more horrible to forget. Because it
had not become part of the past. The knowledge remained: people can do that.
The inventors and researchers are merely specialists in their field. To
obtain new information from nature they have to expend so much energy and
inventiveness that they have neither strength nor ideas left for thinking
outside their fields-what will this do in real life? These people and their
chosen fields-people for whom any change or discovery is just another means
of achieving old aims: power, wealth, influence, and buyable pleasures. If
we gave them our process, they would see only one new thing in it: it's
profitable! Should they make doubles of famous singers, actors, and
musicians? No, that isn't profitable. It's better to produce records and
posters. But it would be profitable to mass-produce people for a special
goal: voters to beat a political opponent (much easier than spending
hundreds of millions on the usual election campaign), women for brothels,
workers in rare fields, cannon-fodder soldiers ... and even specialists with
narrow vision and tame temperament who would continue inventing without
getting involved in things that were none of their business. A man with a
specific function-a man-thing. What could be worse? How do we deal with
things and machines that have outlived their usefulness and have fulfilled
their function? They're recycled, burned, compressed, discarded. And you can
treat men, things, the same way.
"But that's the way it is over there...." My double waved in a vague
direction. "Our society wouldn't permit it."
"And we don't have people who are ready to use everything from the
ideas of communism to false radio reports, from their work situation to
quotes from the classics in order to become wealthy, and have a good
position, and then to get more and more for themselves, at no matter what
cost? People who see the least attempt to reduce their privileges as a
phenomenal catastrophe?"
"We do," my double agreed. "But people basically are good or else the
world would have turned into a mass of bums attacking each other a long time
ago, and died without thermonuclear war. But... if you don't count the minor
natural disasters-floods, earthquakes, epidemics-people are at fault in all
their problems, including the most horrible ones. It's their fault that they
submitted to what they shouldn't have submitted to, agreed to what they
should have fought, and thought that they weren't involved. At fault that
they did work that paid better instead of work that was needed by everyone
and themselves. If more people on earth coordinated their work and business
with the interests of mankind, we would have nothing to worry about with our
discovery. But that's not the way it is. And that's why, if there is at
least one influential and active bastard in dangerous proximity, our
discovery will turn into a hideous monstrosity."
"Because the application of scientific discoveries is mere technology.
Once upon a time, technology was invented to help man in his battle between
man and man. And in that use technology didn't solve any problems; it only
increased them. Think how many scientific, technological and sociological
problems there are now instead of the one that was solved twenty years ago:
how can you synthesize helium from hydrogen?
"If we announce our discovery, life will become even scarier. And we
will have fame. Every man, woman, and child will know exactly whom to curse
and why."
"Listen, maybe you're right . . . ?" my double asked. "We saw nothing,
know nothing. People have enough terrible discoveries to deal with as it is.
Let's cut off the juice and turn off the faucets. How about it?"
"And right away, the problem no longer exists. I'll write off the
reagents I used up and make up some excuse about the work. And I'll start
work on something simpler and more innocent...." "I'll go to Vladivostok to
be a fitter in the ports." We stopped talking. Venus blazed over the black
trees outside the window. A cat cried with a child's voice. A howling note
pierced the grounds' silence-they were running tests on a new jet engine in
Lena's construction bureau. "Work goes on. It's right; 1941 cannot be
repeated." I was thinking about it so that I could put off my decision a
little longer. "Deep underground, plutonium and hydrogen bombs are going
off. Highly paid scientists and engineers are determined to master nuclear
arms. And pointy-nosed rockets peer into space from their concrete silos all
over the world. Each is pointed at its objective; they're wired up.
Computers are constantly testing them: any problems? As soon as the
predetermined time of reliability runs out on an electronic unit,
technicians in uniform unplug it and quickly, quickly, replace it with
another unit, as though the war they absolutely had to win was about to
start any second. Work goes on."
"Nonsense!" I said. "Humanity isn't mature enough for many
things-nuclear energy and space flight-so what? The discovery is objective
reality; you can't cover it up. If not us, someone else will come upon it.
The basic idea of the experiment is simple enough. Are you sure that they
will deal with the discovery better than we? I'm not. That's why we must
think what to do to keep this discovery from becoming a threat to mankind."
"It's complicated," my double sighed and stood up. "I'll take a look at
what's happening in the tank." He was back in a flash. Stunned. "Val,
there's ... father's in there!"
Radio operators have a sure sign to go by: if a complex electronic
circuit works the first time after it's put together, expect trouble. If it
doesn't foul up in the trials, then it will embarrass the workers when the
inspection commission is there; if it manages to pass the commission, then
it will exhibit one flaw after another in mass production. The weak points
always show up.
The computer was trying to achieve informational equilibrium not with
me, the direct source of information, but with the entire information
environment that it found out about from me, with the entire world. That's
why Lena appeared and that's why my father appeared.
And that's why all the rest happened. That's why my double and I worked
nonstop for a whole week. This activity of the computer's was a logical
extension of its development; but from a technical point of view it was an
attempt with lousy equipment. Instead of a "model of the world" the tank
contained a nightmare.
I can't describe how my father made his appearance in the tank-it's too
terrible. That's the way he had looked on the day he died: a flabby, heavy
old man with a broad shaven face and a cloudy mane of white hair around his
skull. The computer had picked the last and most depressing memory of him.
He had died before I got there. He wasn't breathing, but I still tried to
warm his cooling body.
Then I dreamed about him several times, and it was always the same
dream: I rub my father's cold body for all I'm worth and it gets warmer and
he starts breathing, with difficulty at first, a death rattle, and then
normally. He opens his eyes and gets up out of bed. "I was sick a little,
son," he says in an apologetic voice. "But I'm fine now." The dream was like
death in reverse.
And now the computer was creating him so that he could die once more
before our eyes. We understood rationally that this was not our father but a
regular information hybrid that could not be permitted to be completed; we
knew that it would be a body, or a mad creature, or something along those
lines. But neither he nor I could put on Monomakh's Crown and command the
computer to stop. We avoided looking at the tank and each other.
Then I walked over to the panel and pulled the switch. It was dark and
quiet in the lab for a moment.
"What are you doing?" My double ran over to the panel and turned the
juice back on.
The filter condensers did not discharge in that second, and the
computer went on working. But everything disappeared from the tank.
Later I saw all the chaos of my memory in the tank: my fifth-grade
botany teacher Elizaveta Moiseevna; Klava, my love interest in those days;
some old acquaintance with a poetic profile; the Moldavian driver I glimpsed
briefly at a bazaar in Kishinev.... It's a hell to list them all. It wasn't
a "model of the world" either; everything was formed vaguely, in fragments,
the way it's stored in human memory, which knows how to forget. For
instance, only Elizaveta Moiseevna's small, stern eyes under forever
frowning brows were right, and the only thing left of the Moldavian was the
sheepskin hat lowered all the way to his mustache....
We took turns sleeping. One always had to keep watch at the tank to put
on the crown in time and say "No!"
My double was first to think of sticking a thermometer in the tank. (It
was nice to observe the pleasure he derived from his first independent
creative act!) The temperature was 104 F.
"It's feverish delirium."
"We should give it an aspirin," I joked.
But, thinking about it, we decided to lower the computer's temperature
by pouring quinine into the flasks and bottles that fed the tank. The
temperature went down a few degrees, but the delirium continued. The
computer was combining images the way they occur in a nightmare-the face of
the institute's first department head, Johann Johannovich Kliapp, smoothly
took on the features of Azarov, who then grew Hilobok's mustache....
When the temperature dropped some more, flat images, like on a screen,
of political figures, movie stars, productive workers with miniature Boards
of Commendation, Lomonosov, Faraday, and Maria Trapezund, a popular local
singer, appeared on the surface of the liquid in the tank. These
two-dimensional shadows-some in color, some in black and white-would appear
for a second and then melt away. It looked as if my memory was drying out.
On the sixth or seventh day (we had lost track of time) the temperature
of the golden liquid dropped to 98.6 .
"It's normal!" And I went off to get some sleep.
My double stayed on duty.
That night he shook me awake.
"Get up! The computer is making eyes."
I sent him to hell. He poured a mug of water on my head. I had to go.
At first, I thought that there were bubbles in the liquid. But they
were eyes- white spheres with pupils and colorful irises. They floated up
from the bottom, bounced against the transparent sides of the tank, watched
our movements and the blinking lights on the TsVM-12's control panel. They
were blue, gray, brown, green, black, huge horse's eyes with violet irises,
cat's eyes, glowing and with a vertical pupil, and black bird's eyes. It was
a collection of every kind of eye I had ever seen. Since they had no lids or
lashes, they seemed surprised.
By morning eyes were appearing near the tank as well: muscular growths
stuck out from the hoses, ending in lids and eyelashes. The lids opened. New
eyes stared at us intently and expectantly. The infinite silent stares were
driving us crazy.
And then . . . feelers and trunks grew like bamboo runners from the
tank, the flasks, and hoses. There was something naive and childlike in
their movements. They interwove, touched the apparatus and bottles, the
room. One little feeler reached an uninsulated clamp, touched it, and jerked
back, drooping.
"Hey, this is getting serious!" my double said.
It was. The computer was moving from a contemplative method of getting
information to an active one, and was growing its own sensors and executive
mechanisms for it. Whatever you called this development- a striving for
informational equilibrium, self-construction, or a biological synthesis of
information- you couldn't help being impressed by the tenacity and power of
the process.
But after all we had seen, we were in no mood for awe or academic
curiosity. We guessed how it might end.
"Enough!" I picked up Monomakh's Crown. "I don't know if we'll be able
to make it do what we want . . ."
"It would help if we knew what we wanted," my double added.
". . . but for a start we have to keep it from doing what we don't
want."
."Get rid of the eyes! Get rid of the feelers! Stop gathering
information! Get rid of the eyes. Get rid of the feelers! Stop!" We repeated
these thoughts through the crown, spoke them into the microphones.
But the computer went on moving its feelers and following us with its
hundreds of eyes. It was beginning to look like a showdown.
"The result of our work," my double said.
"So!" I said. "If that's the way." I punched the tank. All the feelers
quivered and stretched out for me. I moved away. "Val, turn off the water!
Disconnect the feed hoses!"
"Computer, you're going to die. Computer, you'll die of hunger and
thirst if you don't obey."
Of course, that was crude and obvious, but what else could we do? My
double slowly turned the handle on the water supply. The stream of water
from the distillers turned into a drip. I clamped the hoses. The feelers
shuddered and drooped. They started curling up and going back into the tank.
The eyes dimmed, teared, and crinkled.
An hour later everything was gone. The liquid in the tank was once more
golden and clear.
"That's better!" I took off the crown and rolled up the wires.
We turned the water back on, removed the clamps and stayed in the lab
until late at night, smoking, talking about nothing, waiting to see what
would happen. We didn't know what we were more afraid of: a new delirium
from the computer or that the system, muzzled so harshly, would fall apart
and cease existing. On the first day we talked about "covering up the
discovery." But now we couldn't stand the thought that it might cover itself
and disappear.
My double and I took turns approaching the tank, sniffing carefully,
afraid to smell decay or degeneration; not trusting the thermometer we kept
touching the sides of the tank and the warm living hoses. Were they cooling
off? Were they enflamed with fever again?
But the air in the room stayed warm, humid, and fresh, as if there was
a large, clean animal in the room. The computer was alive. It simply wasn't
undertaking anything without us. We had tamed it!
After midnight, I looked at my double, like a mirror. He was blinking
with tired red eyes and smiled:
"Everything seems okay, Shall we go to bed?"
There was no artificial double for me. A comrade, a colleague, was
sitting next to me, just as tired and happy as I was. And-how strange!-I had
not felt joy at meeting him in the institute grounds and I hadn't been
soothed by the phantasmagoric memory show in the tank ... but now I was at
peace and very happy.
It's really true? the most important thing for a person is to feel in
knows."
"Listen here, I'm not Val to you, but Valentin Vasilyevich Krivo-shein!
Some pushy guy like you...."
The man smiled, obviously enjoying my anger. I could tell that he was
much more prepared for our meeting and was relishing his upper hand.
"And... be so kind as to explain: who you are, how you come to be on
institute grounds, and why you are wearing that makeup and outfit to look
like me?"
"Sure," he said. "Valentin Vasilyevich Krivoshein, head of the New
Systems Lab. Here's my pass, if you like." He displayed my worn, used pass.
"And I came here from the lab, naturally."
"Ah, so that's it?" It's important not to lose your sense of humor in
situations like this. "Very nice to meet you. Valentin Vasilyevich, you say?
From the lab? I see ... uh-huh."
And then I realized that I believed him. Not because of the pass, of
course. You could fool anyone with a pass. Either it was the realization
that the scar over my eyebrow and the brown birthmark on my cheek, which I
always saw in the mirror on my left, actually were supposed to be on the
right side of the face. Or it was something in his behavior that absolutely
ruled out the possibility of a practical joke. I was scared. Had I really
gone mad during the experiments and run into my split personality? "I hope
no one sees us. I wonder, to anyone else, am I here alone or are there two
of us?" I thought.
"So-from the lab, you say?" I tried tricking him. "Then why are you
coming from the old building?"
"I was in accounting. Today's the twenty-second." He took out a roll of
five-ruble notes and counted off part of it. "Here's your cut."
I took the money and counted it. Then:
"Why only half?'
"Oh, God!" my double sighed expressively. "There are two of us now, you
know."
(That exaggerated, expressive sigh-I'll never sigh like that. I didn't
know you could demean someone with a sigh. And his diction-if you can call
the absolute absence of diction diction!-do I really spit out words like
that?)
"I took the money from him, and that means he really exists," I
thought. "Or are my senses tricking me? Damn it, I'm a researcher, and I
couldn't care less about senses until I know what's going on here!"
"So you maintain that... you've come out of a locked and sealed lab?"
"Uh-hum. Definitely from the lab. From the tank."
"From the tank, my, oh.... What do you mean, from the tank?"
"Just that, from the tank. You could have set up some handles. I barely
managed to get out."
"Listen, drop this! You don't think you could really convince me that
you were . . . that I was . . . no, that you were made by the computer?"
The double sighed once more in the most demeaning manner possible.
"I have the feeling it's going to take you a long time to get used to
the idea that this has happened. I should have known. After all, you saw
that there was living matter in the flasks?"
"Big deal. I've seen mold, too, growing in damp places. But that didn't
mean that I was present at the conception of life. All right, let's assume
that something living did arise in the flasks. I don't know. I'm no
biologist. But what do you have to do with it?"
"What do you mean?" Now it was his turn to get angry. "And what did you
think it would create: an earthworm? a horse? an octopus? The computer was
collecting and processing information about you. It saw you. It heard,
smelled, and observed you. It counted the biowaves of your brain! You were
around so much you callused its eyes! There you are. If you have motorcycle
parts you can only make a motorcycle, not a vacuum cleaner."
"Hm, all right. Then where are the shoes, the suit, the pass, and the
raincoat from?"
"Damn it! If it can create a person, how hard do you think it is for
the computer to grow a raincoat?"
(The victorious glint in the eye, the clumsy gestures, the arrogant
tone of voice. Am I really that obnoxious when I feel I'm right about
something?)
"Grow?" I felt the fabric of his coat. A shudder ran through me. A
raincoat wasn't like that.
Major things don't fit into the brain immediately, at least not in
mine. I remember when I was in school I had to take charge of a delegate to
a youth festival, a young hunter from the Siberian tundra; I showed him
around Moscow. He took in the sights implacably and calmly: the bronze
statues at the Economic Achievement Exhibits, the subway escalators, the
heavy traffic. And when he saw the tall building of MSU, he simply said,
"With poles and skin you can build a small hut- with rock, a big one." But
when we were in the lobby of the Nord Restaurant, where we had stopped off
for a bite, he came face to face with a stuffed polar bear with a tray in
its paws- and that amazed him! That was what happened to me. My double's
raincoat resembled mine very much, down to the ink spot that I had added one
day trying to get my pen to work. But the fabric was more elastic and almost
greasy. The buttons were attached to flexible outgrowths, and there were no
stitches in the fabric. "Listen, is it attached to you? Can you take it
off?" My double was driven to a frenzy.
"That does it! It's not necessary to undress me in this cold wind to
prove that I'm you! I can explain it without that. The scar over the eye-
that's when you fell down when your father was teaching you to ride a horse.
The torn ligament in the right knee happened during the soccer finals in
high school. What else do I have to remind you of? How you used to secretly
believe in God as a child? How as a freshman you used to boast that you had
known many women, when actually you lost your virginity in Taganrog just
before graduation?" (That son of a bitch! The examples he picked!) "Hm, all
right; but you know, if you're me, I'm not so crazy about me.
"Neither am I," he grunted. "I thought I had some smarts...." His face
tensed. "Shhhh, don't turn around!" Footsteps behind me. "
"Good day, Valentin Vasilyevich," said Harry Hilobok, assistant
professor, sciences candidate, scientific secretary and institute busybody.
I didn't get a chance to open my mouth. My double grinned marvelously
and nodded:
"Good day to you, Harry Haritonovich!"
A couple walked past us in the light of his smile. A plump brunette
clicked her heels merrily on the pavement and Hilobok, walking in step,
minced along as though he was wearing a tight skirt.
"Perhaps, I didn't quite understand you, Lyudochka," he buzzed in his
baritone, "but I, from the point of view of not understanding completely, am
only expressing my opinion."
"Harry has a new one," my double announced. "You see, even Hilobok
accepts me, and you have doubts. Let's go home!"
The only explanation I can think of for following him so quietly to
Academic Town was that I was completely flabbergasted.
In the apartment, he headed straight for the bathroom. I heard the
shower running, and then he stuck out his head:
"Hey, sample number one, or whatever your name is. If you want to make
sure that I'm all in order, come on in. And you can soap my back while
you're at it."
So I did. It was a living person. And he had my body. By the way, I
didn't expect such thick folds of fat on my stomach and sides. I have to
work out with my barbells more often.
While he washed, I paced the room, smoked and tried to accustom myself
to the fact that a computer had created a man. A computer had re-created me.
Oh, nature, is this really possible? The ridiculous medieval ideas about a
homunculus, . . . Wiener's idea that the information in a man could be
decoded into impulses, transmitted over any distance, and reordered into a
man again, in the form of an image on a screen, . . . Ashby's assertion that
there was no major difference between the work of the brain and of a
computer (but of course, Sechenov had maintained that earlier, too),... all
that had just been clever talk to keep the brain going. Try to do something
practical with any of those ideas!
And now it looked as if it had been done? There, on the other side of
the door, splashing and snorting, was no Ivanov, Petrov, or Sidorov-I would
have tossed them out on their ear-but me. And those rolls with the numbers?
I guess I had burned the "paper" me.
I was trying to extract short, usable truths from the combinations of
numbers, but the computer went deeper than that. It stored information,
combining it this way and that, compared it through feedback, picked and
chose what was necessary and at some level of complexity "discovered" life!
And then the computer developed it to the level of man. But why? I
wasn't trying to do that!
Now, as I think about it calmly, I can figure it out. It did exactly
what I was trying to do. I wanted a machine that could understand man and
that's all. "Do you understand me?" "Oh, yes!" answers the listener, and
both go about their business, happy with each other. In conversation it's
much easier. But in experiments with computers I shouldn't have confused
understanding with agreement. That's why (better late than never) it's
important to figure out what understanding is.
There is practical, or goal, understanding. You put in a program; the
computer understands it and does what is expected of it. "Attack, Prince!"
and Prince grabs the pants cuff of a passerby, "Gee!" and the horses turn to
the right. "Haw!" and they go left. This kind of primitive understanding of
the gee-haw type is accessible to many living and inanimate systems. It is
controlled by achievement of the goal, and the more primitive the system,
the simpler the goal must be and the more detailed the programmed task.
But there is another understanding: mutual understanding. A complete
transferral of your information to another system. And for this, the system
receiving the information must not be any simpler than the system giving the
information. I didn't give the computer a goal. I was waiting for it to
finish building itself and making itself more complex. But it never
finished-and that's natural. Its goal became the complete understanding of
my information, not only verbal, but all of it. (The goal of a
computer-that's another loose concept that shouldn't be played with. Simply
put, information systems behave according to certain laws that somewhat
resemble the rudiments of thermodynamics. In my system sensors, crystal
units, TsVM-12 had to reach an informational equilibrium with the
environment-just as the iron ingot in the oven must achieve temperature
equilibrium with the coals. This equilibrium is mutual understanding. And it
cannot be achieved on the level of circuitry nor on the level of simple
organisms.)
And that's how it happened. Only man is capable of mutual understanding
with man. And for good mutual understanding, a close friend. My double was
the product of informational equilibrium between the computer and me. But,
incidentally, the pointers on the informational scales never did match up. I
wasn't in the lab then and didn't meet face to face with my newly hatched
double. And later everything went differently for us anyway.
In a word, it was horrifying how poorly I had run the experiment. The
only point in my favor was that I had finally thought of setting up the
feedback mechanism.
An interesting thought: if I had run the experiment strictly,
logically, throwing out dubious variants, would I have gotten the same
results? Never in my life! I would have come up with a steady, sure-fire
Ph.D. thesis, and nothing more, hi science, mostly mediocre things
happen-and I was prepared for mediocrity.
So everything was all right? Why does sadness gnaw at me? Why do I keep
harping on my mistakes? I succeeded. Because it didn't go by the rules? Are
there any rules for discoveries? Much happens by accident that you can't put
down to your scientific vision. What about Galvani's discovery, or X-rays,
or radioactivity, or electronic emissions, or any discovery that is the
basis of some science or other and is related to chance. I still don't
understand a lot of it? That's the situation with many scientists. Nothing
to be upset about. Then why this self-torture?
I guess the problem is something else: you can't work that way now.
Science has become very serious now, not like in the days of Galvani and
Roentgen. This is the way, without thinking, that you can come up with a
force that can destroy the whole world instantly-with a brilliant
experimental proof....
My double came out of the bathroom rosy pink and in my pajamas and
settled in front of the mirror to comb his hair. I stood behind him. Two
identical faces stared out from the mirror. Only his wet hair was darker.
He took out the electric razor from the closet and plugged it in. I
watched him shave and almost felt that I was visiting him; his behavior was
so casual and at-home. I couldn't resist speaking up:
"Listen, do you at least realize how unusual this situation is?" "What?
Don't bother me!" He was obviously beyond being interested in the fact.
The graduate student put down the diary and shook his head: well,
Valentin the Original didn't know people very well.
He had also been in shock. His sense had told him that he woke up in
the tank, understanding everything: where he was and how he got there.
Actually, his discovery began then. And his insolence was only a cover-up.
He was searching for a mode of behavior that would keep him from being
reduced to a lab guinea pig.
He picked up the diary.
"But you appeared from a machine, not from a mother's womb! From a
machine, do you understand?"
"So what? Appearing from a womb is such a snap? A human's birth is much
more mysterious than my appearance. Here you can trace the logical sequence,
but there? Will it be a boy or a girl? Will it favor father or mother? Will
it be smart or a dope? It's all in a fog! That business seems normal only
because of its frequency. Here, the computer took down information and
re-created it. Like a tape recorder. Of course, it would have been better if
it had re-created me from Einstein... but what can you do? If you tape
boogie-woogie you can't expect to hear a Tchaikovsky symphony."
No, I wasn't a boor like him. He must have been acutely aware of the
ticklishness of his situation and didn't want me to realize it. And what was
there that I couldn't realize. He appeared out of flasks and bottles, like a
medieval homunculus, and he was wildly angry. I've often noticed that people
who have an inferiority complex are always more obnoxious than the rest.
And he was trying to behave with the spontaneity of a newborn. A baby
isn't overwhelmed with the event (Man is born!), but instead immediately
makes a fuss, sucking, and messing his diapers.
Graduate student Krivoshein merely sighed and turned the page.
"But do you feel all right?"
"Absolutely!" He splashed on some after-shave. "Why shouldn't I feel
all right? A computer is an apparatus without fantasy. I can just picture
what it might have done if it had an inkling of imagination. But I'm fine:
I'm not a two-headed monster. I'm young, healthy. I'm going to have dinner
and go to Lena's. I've missed her."
"What?"
He watched me with interest, sparks dancing in his eyes.
"Yes, we're rivals now! Listen, you seem to have a very primitive
attitude toward all this. Jealousy is old-fashioned and in poor taste. And
who are you jealous of, anyway? Think about it. If Lena's with me, it
doesn't mean that she's being unfaithful to you. You can only be unfaithful
with another man, someone different, more attractive, for instance. And as
far as she's concerned, I'm you. Even if we have children, you can't
consider yourself cuckolded. You and I are identical-all the same genes and
chromosomes. Easy!"
He had to hide behind the closet door. I grabbed a dumbbell and headed
for him.
"I'll kill you! Don't try logic with me. I'll give you logic, you
homunculus! I gave you life and I'll kill you, understand? Don't you dare
even think about her!"
My double fearlessly stepped out from the closet door. He was frowning.
"Listen, Taras Bulba, put down the dumbbell. If you're going to talk
like that, we might as well agree on some terms right now. I'm leaving
'homunculus' and 'kill' aside as products of your hysteria. And as for
locutions like 'I gave you life'... well, you didn't. I exist without any
help from you, and you might as well forget any ideas of being my lord and
master."
"What do you mean?"
"Just that. Put down the dumbbell. I'm serious. If you want precision,
I was created despite your plans simply because you didn't stop the
experiment in time, and when you wanted to, it was too late. In other
words," he snorted, "it's quite analagous to the situation when you appeared
in this world because of your parents' carelessness."
(Look, he knows everything! It's true. My mother once said, after some
prank of mine, to make me obey:
"I was going to have an abortion, but changed my mind. And you...."
She shouldn't have said that. I was unwanted. I might never have
existed.)
"But as distinguished from your mother, you didn't bear me, didn't
suffer labor pains, didn't nurse and clothe me," he continued. "You didn't
even save me from death because, after all, I existed before this
experiment. I was you. I don't owe you my life, my health, my engineering
degree-nothing! So let's start even."
"And even with Lena?"
"With Lena... I don't know. But you ... you...." Judging by his
expression he wanted to add something, but held his tongue, exhaling
sharply. "You have to respect my feelings as I do yours, understand? I love
Lena too, you know. And I know that she's mine-my woman, understand? I know
her body, the smell of her skin and hair, her breath... and how she says,
'Really, Val, you're just like a bear!' and how she wrinkles her nose."
He suddenly stopped. We looked at each other, overwhelmed by the same
thought. "Let's get to the lab!" I ran for my coat first.
If you want a cab and fate offers a bus, take the bus; at least it runs
on a schedule.
-K. Prutkov-enzhener, Thought 90
We made a beeline through the park: the wind whistled in the branches
and in our ears. Asphalt-colored clouds blanketed the sky.
The lab smelled like a warm swamp. The ceiling bulbs glowed like
lighthouses in a fog. I stepped on a hose near my desk that had not been
there before, and pulled my foot away. The hose was moving!
The flasks and bottles were covered with thick gray dust; there was no
way to tell what was going on inside them. Streams of water bubbled from the
distillers and the relays clicked in the thermostats. In a far corner, which
could not be reached through the jumble of wires, tubes, and hoses, the
lights on the TsVM-12's control panel blinked at me.
There were many more hoses than before. We made our way through them,
as if through a jungle of lianas. Some hoses were contracting, pushing lumps
through themselves. The walls of the tank were covered with some kind of
mold. I wiped it off with my sleeve.
In the golden, murky medium there was a silhouette of a man. "Another
double? No...." I looked closely. The contours were a woman's, contours that
I could never confuse with anyone else's. A hairless head fluttered in front
of my face.
There was some mad logic in the fact that precisely now when the double
and I were fighting over Lena, the computer was struggling with our problem.
I was scared.
"But the computer doesn't know her!"
"You do. The computer is re-creating her from your memory." We were
whispering for some reason. "Look!"
A skeleton was beginning to form beyond Lena's ghostly outline. Her
feet solidified into white cartilage and toes; her ankle and shin bones took
shape. Her spine formed into a long white form and ribs branched off from
it; her shoulder blades grew. Seams appeared on her skull, and the outline
of her eye sockets formed. I can't say that it was a pleasant sight-seeing
your girlfriend's skeleton-but I couldn't take my eyes off it. We were
watching something that no one had ever seen-how a machine creates a person!
"With my memory, my memory..." I was thinking feverishly. "But that's
not enough. Or has the computer mastered the laws of constructing a human
body? From where? I certainly don't know them!" The bones in the tank were
becoming sheathed with dark blue strips and coils of muscle, and they were
covered by a yellowish layer of fat, like a chicken's. The circulatory
system shot red throughout the body. All this fluctuated in the mixture,
changing shape and form. Even Lena's face, with its closed lids, behind
which we could see her watery eyes, was distorted by horrible grimaces. The
computer seemed to be trying on ways to make a person.
I know too little about anatomy in general and female anatomy in
particular to judge whether the computer was building Lena correctly. But
soon I sensed that something was wrong. The original contours of her body
were changing. The shoulders, which just a few minutes ago had been round
and soft, became angular and grew in breadth. What was it?
"Her feet!" my double shouted. "Look at her feet!"
I looked at her feet that took a size thirteen shoe-and when I
understood I broke out in cold sweat. The computer had run out of
information on Lena and was finishing her off with my body! I turned to my
double; his forehead was glistening with sweat too.
"We have to stop it!"
"How? Cut off the current?"
"We can't. That will erase the memory bank in the computer. Turn on the
cooling... ?"
"To slow down the process? It won't work. The computer has large heat
reserves...."
The distorted body in the tank was taking on clearer features. A
transparent mantle moved over it, and I recognized the style of the simple
dress in which I liked Lena best. The computer with an idiot's diligence was
dressing its creation in it.
I had to order the computer to stop, convince it... but how?
"Right!" My double leaped over to the glass case, took out Monomakh's
Crown, pushed the "translation" button on it, and handed it to me. "Put it
on and start hating Lena; think how you want to destroy her... go ahead."
I grabbed the shiny helmet, turned it around in my hands, and gave it
back.
"I can't...."
"Jerk! What else is there? That thing will be opening its eyes soon
and...."
He pulled on the helmet and started screaming and waving his arms:
"Stop, computer! Stop immediately, do you hear me? You're not creating
a good copy of a human! Stop, you idiot! Stop right now!"
"Stop, machine, do you hear me?" I turned to the microphones. "Stop, or
we'll destroy you!"
It's disgusting to remember that scene. We, men who were used to
pushing buttons to stop and direct any process, shouting and explaining ...
and to what? A collection of test tubes, electric circuits, and hoses.
Phooey! We were panicked.
We yelled some more in disgusting voices, when the hoses near the tank
began shaking with energetic convulsions, and the hybrid specimen in the
tank was covered with a white mist. We shut up. Three minutes later the mist
cleared. There was nothing in the gold liquid. Only ripples and color
gradations spreading from the center to the edges.
"Wow..." said my double. "I somehow never appreciated the fact that man
is seventy percent water. Now I've got it."
We made our way to the window. The humid stuffiness made my body
sticky. I unbuttoned my shirt, and so did my double. It was evening. The sky
had cleared. The windows of the institute across the way reflected the
sunset as though nothing had happened. They reflected it like that on every
clear evening-yesterday, last month, last year-when this had not existed.
Nature was making believe nothing had happened.
The skeleton enveloped in translucent tissue stayed in my mind.
"Those anatomical details, the grimaces... brrrr!" said the double,
lowering himself into a chair. "I don't even feel like seeing Lena right
now."
I said nothing, because he had expressed my thoughts. It was over now,
but then ... it's one thing to know, even intimately, that your woman is a
human being made of flesh, bones, and innards, and another thing to see it.
I took out the lab journal and looked at the last few notes... vague
and pointless. It's when the experiment is working or when you get a good
idea that you write at length; here I had:
April 8. Decoded numbers, 800 lines. Unsuccessful.
April 9. Decoded extracts from five rolls. Didn't understand a thing.
Some kind of schizophrenia!
April 10. Decoded with the same results. I added to the flasks and
bottles: Numbers 1, 3 and 5-2 liters of glycerine; Numbers 2 and 7-200 ml.
of tyomochevina; and 2-3 liters of distilled water to all of them.
April 11. "Streptocidal striptease with the trembling of streptococci."
That does it....
And now I'll pick up the pen and write:
April 22. The complex has re-created me, V. V. Krivoshein, Krivoshein
Number 2 is sitting next to me scratching his chin. A real joke!
And then I was engulfed with a wave of satanic pride. After all, this
was some discovery! It encompassed systemology, electronics, bionics,
chemistry, and biology-everything you could want and then some. And I did it
all. How I did it was another question. But the important thing was me, ME!
Now I could invite the State Commission and demonstrate the emergence of a
new double in the tank. I could imagine the look on their faces. And my
friends would have to say: "Boy he really did it! That Krivoshein is
something!" And Voltampernov would run over to see.... I had an
uncontrollable urge to giggle; only the presence of my double stopped me.
"Who cares about friends and Voltampernov," I heard my voice say and I
didn't realize at first that it was my double speaking. "This, Val, is a
Nobel Prize!"
That's right: the Nobel Prize! My portrait in all the papers ... and
Lena, who treats me a little high-handedly now-and why not, she's beautiful,
and I'm not-will appreciate me then. The run-of-the-mill name Krivoshein
(once I tried looking in the encyclopedia for famous people with my name and
didn't find any; there was a Krivoshilkov and a Krivonogov, but no
Krivosheins yet) will resound. Krivoshein! The same....
I was made uneasy by these meditations. My vain thoughts disappeared.
Really, what would happen? What should be done with this discovery?
I shut my journal.
"So, are we going to create in our image? A crush of Krivosheins? I
guess we could make others if we recorded them into the computer. Damn it!
This is ... it just doesn't make sense."
"Hm. And things were so peaceful...." My double shook his head.
Precisely. Everything had been peaceful-"Nice weather, miss. Which way
are you going?" "In the opposite direction!" "Me too. What's your name?"
"What's it to you?"-and so on right up to the wedding palace, the maternity
ward, a licking for killing a cat with a slingshot, and burning the hated
zoology textbook after graduation. The chairman of the Dneprovsk
Registration Office put it so well in his article: "The family is the method
of propagating the species and increasing the state's population." And
suddenly-hail science!-there is a rival method; we pour and sprinkle
reagents from the local chemistry manual, pass input through sensors, and
get a person. And a mature one at that, with muscles and an engineering
degree, with habits and life experience.
"It looks as if we're taking aim at the most human of man's qualities:
love, parenthood, childhood!" I was beginning to shudder. "And it's
profitable. It's efficient and profitable, the most terrible things in our
rationalistic age!"
My double looked up and there was anxiety and tension in his eyes.
"Listen, but why is that terrible? Okay, we worked-rather, you worked.
So you made an experimental determination and on its basis a discovery. A
method of synthesizing information into a person. The ancient dream of the
alchemist.... That's very nice! Once upon a time kings financed ventures
like that very generously. Of course, they chopped off the heads of
researchers who had failed, but if you think about it, they were right. If
you can't do it, don't take it on. But nothing will happen to us. Just the
reverse. Why is it so terrible?"
"Because this isn't the Middle Ages," I thought to myself. And not the
last century. And not even the beginning of the twentieth century, when
everything was still ahead of us. In those days, discoverers had the moral
right to spread their arms and say: well, we had no idea things would turn
out badly.... We, their lucky descendants, don't have that right. Because we
know. Because it's all happened before. It had all happened before: gas
attacks, according to science; Maidanek and Auschwitz, according to science;
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, according to science. Plans for global
warfare-science with the use of mathematics. Limiting warfare-also
science.... Decades had passed since the last world war. The ruins had been
rebuilt. Fifty million corpses had rotted and enriched the earch. Hundreds
of millions of people had been born and grown up-and the memory had not
faded. It was horrible to remember and more horrible to forget. Because it
had not become part of the past. The knowledge remained: people can do that.
The inventors and researchers are merely specialists in their field. To
obtain new information from nature they have to expend so much energy and
inventiveness that they have neither strength nor ideas left for thinking
outside their fields-what will this do in real life? These people and their
chosen fields-people for whom any change or discovery is just another means
of achieving old aims: power, wealth, influence, and buyable pleasures. If
we gave them our process, they would see only one new thing in it: it's
profitable! Should they make doubles of famous singers, actors, and
musicians? No, that isn't profitable. It's better to produce records and
posters. But it would be profitable to mass-produce people for a special
goal: voters to beat a political opponent (much easier than spending
hundreds of millions on the usual election campaign), women for brothels,
workers in rare fields, cannon-fodder soldiers ... and even specialists with
narrow vision and tame temperament who would continue inventing without
getting involved in things that were none of their business. A man with a
specific function-a man-thing. What could be worse? How do we deal with
things and machines that have outlived their usefulness and have fulfilled
their function? They're recycled, burned, compressed, discarded. And you can
treat men, things, the same way.
"But that's the way it is over there...." My double waved in a vague
direction. "Our society wouldn't permit it."
"And we don't have people who are ready to use everything from the
ideas of communism to false radio reports, from their work situation to
quotes from the classics in order to become wealthy, and have a good
position, and then to get more and more for themselves, at no matter what
cost? People who see the least attempt to reduce their privileges as a
phenomenal catastrophe?"
"We do," my double agreed. "But people basically are good or else the
world would have turned into a mass of bums attacking each other a long time
ago, and died without thermonuclear war. But... if you don't count the minor
natural disasters-floods, earthquakes, epidemics-people are at fault in all
their problems, including the most horrible ones. It's their fault that they
submitted to what they shouldn't have submitted to, agreed to what they
should have fought, and thought that they weren't involved. At fault that
they did work that paid better instead of work that was needed by everyone
and themselves. If more people on earth coordinated their work and business
with the interests of mankind, we would have nothing to worry about with our
discovery. But that's not the way it is. And that's why, if there is at
least one influential and active bastard in dangerous proximity, our
discovery will turn into a hideous monstrosity."
"Because the application of scientific discoveries is mere technology.
Once upon a time, technology was invented to help man in his battle between
man and man. And in that use technology didn't solve any problems; it only
increased them. Think how many scientific, technological and sociological
problems there are now instead of the one that was solved twenty years ago:
how can you synthesize helium from hydrogen?
"If we announce our discovery, life will become even scarier. And we
will have fame. Every man, woman, and child will know exactly whom to curse
and why."
"Listen, maybe you're right . . . ?" my double asked. "We saw nothing,
know nothing. People have enough terrible discoveries to deal with as it is.
Let's cut off the juice and turn off the faucets. How about it?"
"And right away, the problem no longer exists. I'll write off the
reagents I used up and make up some excuse about the work. And I'll start
work on something simpler and more innocent...." "I'll go to Vladivostok to
be a fitter in the ports." We stopped talking. Venus blazed over the black
trees outside the window. A cat cried with a child's voice. A howling note
pierced the grounds' silence-they were running tests on a new jet engine in
Lena's construction bureau. "Work goes on. It's right; 1941 cannot be
repeated." I was thinking about it so that I could put off my decision a
little longer. "Deep underground, plutonium and hydrogen bombs are going
off. Highly paid scientists and engineers are determined to master nuclear
arms. And pointy-nosed rockets peer into space from their concrete silos all
over the world. Each is pointed at its objective; they're wired up.
Computers are constantly testing them: any problems? As soon as the
predetermined time of reliability runs out on an electronic unit,
technicians in uniform unplug it and quickly, quickly, replace it with
another unit, as though the war they absolutely had to win was about to
start any second. Work goes on."
"Nonsense!" I said. "Humanity isn't mature enough for many
things-nuclear energy and space flight-so what? The discovery is objective
reality; you can't cover it up. If not us, someone else will come upon it.
The basic idea of the experiment is simple enough. Are you sure that they
will deal with the discovery better than we? I'm not. That's why we must
think what to do to keep this discovery from becoming a threat to mankind."
"It's complicated," my double sighed and stood up. "I'll take a look at
what's happening in the tank." He was back in a flash. Stunned. "Val,
there's ... father's in there!"
Radio operators have a sure sign to go by: if a complex electronic
circuit works the first time after it's put together, expect trouble. If it
doesn't foul up in the trials, then it will embarrass the workers when the
inspection commission is there; if it manages to pass the commission, then
it will exhibit one flaw after another in mass production. The weak points
always show up.
The computer was trying to achieve informational equilibrium not with
me, the direct source of information, but with the entire information
environment that it found out about from me, with the entire world. That's
why Lena appeared and that's why my father appeared.
And that's why all the rest happened. That's why my double and I worked
nonstop for a whole week. This activity of the computer's was a logical
extension of its development; but from a technical point of view it was an
attempt with lousy equipment. Instead of a "model of the world" the tank
contained a nightmare.
I can't describe how my father made his appearance in the tank-it's too
terrible. That's the way he had looked on the day he died: a flabby, heavy
old man with a broad shaven face and a cloudy mane of white hair around his
skull. The computer had picked the last and most depressing memory of him.
He had died before I got there. He wasn't breathing, but I still tried to
warm his cooling body.
Then I dreamed about him several times, and it was always the same
dream: I rub my father's cold body for all I'm worth and it gets warmer and
he starts breathing, with difficulty at first, a death rattle, and then
normally. He opens his eyes and gets up out of bed. "I was sick a little,
son," he says in an apologetic voice. "But I'm fine now." The dream was like
death in reverse.
And now the computer was creating him so that he could die once more
before our eyes. We understood rationally that this was not our father but a
regular information hybrid that could not be permitted to be completed; we
knew that it would be a body, or a mad creature, or something along those
lines. But neither he nor I could put on Monomakh's Crown and command the
computer to stop. We avoided looking at the tank and each other.
Then I walked over to the panel and pulled the switch. It was dark and
quiet in the lab for a moment.
"What are you doing?" My double ran over to the panel and turned the
juice back on.
The filter condensers did not discharge in that second, and the
computer went on working. But everything disappeared from the tank.
Later I saw all the chaos of my memory in the tank: my fifth-grade
botany teacher Elizaveta Moiseevna; Klava, my love interest in those days;
some old acquaintance with a poetic profile; the Moldavian driver I glimpsed
briefly at a bazaar in Kishinev.... It's a hell to list them all. It wasn't
a "model of the world" either; everything was formed vaguely, in fragments,
the way it's stored in human memory, which knows how to forget. For
instance, only Elizaveta Moiseevna's small, stern eyes under forever
frowning brows were right, and the only thing left of the Moldavian was the
sheepskin hat lowered all the way to his mustache....
We took turns sleeping. One always had to keep watch at the tank to put
on the crown in time and say "No!"
My double was first to think of sticking a thermometer in the tank. (It
was nice to observe the pleasure he derived from his first independent
creative act!) The temperature was 104 F.
"It's feverish delirium."
"We should give it an aspirin," I joked.
But, thinking about it, we decided to lower the computer's temperature
by pouring quinine into the flasks and bottles that fed the tank. The
temperature went down a few degrees, but the delirium continued. The
computer was combining images the way they occur in a nightmare-the face of
the institute's first department head, Johann Johannovich Kliapp, smoothly
took on the features of Azarov, who then grew Hilobok's mustache....
When the temperature dropped some more, flat images, like on a screen,
of political figures, movie stars, productive workers with miniature Boards
of Commendation, Lomonosov, Faraday, and Maria Trapezund, a popular local
singer, appeared on the surface of the liquid in the tank. These
two-dimensional shadows-some in color, some in black and white-would appear
for a second and then melt away. It looked as if my memory was drying out.
On the sixth or seventh day (we had lost track of time) the temperature
of the golden liquid dropped to 98.6 .
"It's normal!" And I went off to get some sleep.
My double stayed on duty.
That night he shook me awake.
"Get up! The computer is making eyes."
I sent him to hell. He poured a mug of water on my head. I had to go.
At first, I thought that there were bubbles in the liquid. But they
were eyes- white spheres with pupils and colorful irises. They floated up
from the bottom, bounced against the transparent sides of the tank, watched
our movements and the blinking lights on the TsVM-12's control panel. They
were blue, gray, brown, green, black, huge horse's eyes with violet irises,
cat's eyes, glowing and with a vertical pupil, and black bird's eyes. It was
a collection of every kind of eye I had ever seen. Since they had no lids or
lashes, they seemed surprised.
By morning eyes were appearing near the tank as well: muscular growths
stuck out from the hoses, ending in lids and eyelashes. The lids opened. New
eyes stared at us intently and expectantly. The infinite silent stares were
driving us crazy.
And then . . . feelers and trunks grew like bamboo runners from the
tank, the flasks, and hoses. There was something naive and childlike in
their movements. They interwove, touched the apparatus and bottles, the
room. One little feeler reached an uninsulated clamp, touched it, and jerked
back, drooping.
"Hey, this is getting serious!" my double said.
It was. The computer was moving from a contemplative method of getting
information to an active one, and was growing its own sensors and executive
mechanisms for it. Whatever you called this development- a striving for
informational equilibrium, self-construction, or a biological synthesis of
information- you couldn't help being impressed by the tenacity and power of
the process.
But after all we had seen, we were in no mood for awe or academic
curiosity. We guessed how it might end.
"Enough!" I picked up Monomakh's Crown. "I don't know if we'll be able
to make it do what we want . . ."
"It would help if we knew what we wanted," my double added.
". . . but for a start we have to keep it from doing what we don't
want."
."Get rid of the eyes! Get rid of the feelers! Stop gathering
information! Get rid of the eyes. Get rid of the feelers! Stop!" We repeated
these thoughts through the crown, spoke them into the microphones.
But the computer went on moving its feelers and following us with its
hundreds of eyes. It was beginning to look like a showdown.
"The result of our work," my double said.
"So!" I said. "If that's the way." I punched the tank. All the feelers
quivered and stretched out for me. I moved away. "Val, turn off the water!
Disconnect the feed hoses!"
"Computer, you're going to die. Computer, you'll die of hunger and
thirst if you don't obey."
Of course, that was crude and obvious, but what else could we do? My
double slowly turned the handle on the water supply. The stream of water
from the distillers turned into a drip. I clamped the hoses. The feelers
shuddered and drooped. They started curling up and going back into the tank.
The eyes dimmed, teared, and crinkled.
An hour later everything was gone. The liquid in the tank was once more
golden and clear.
"That's better!" I took off the crown and rolled up the wires.
We turned the water back on, removed the clamps and stayed in the lab
until late at night, smoking, talking about nothing, waiting to see what
would happen. We didn't know what we were more afraid of: a new delirium
from the computer or that the system, muzzled so harshly, would fall apart
and cease existing. On the first day we talked about "covering up the
discovery." But now we couldn't stand the thought that it might cover itself
and disappear.
My double and I took turns approaching the tank, sniffing carefully,
afraid to smell decay or degeneration; not trusting the thermometer we kept
touching the sides of the tank and the warm living hoses. Were they cooling
off? Were they enflamed with fever again?
But the air in the room stayed warm, humid, and fresh, as if there was
a large, clean animal in the room. The computer was alive. It simply wasn't
undertaking anything without us. We had tamed it!
After midnight, I looked at my double, like a mirror. He was blinking
with tired red eyes and smiled:
"Everything seems okay, Shall we go to bed?"
There was no artificial double for me. A comrade, a colleague, was
sitting next to me, just as tired and happy as I was. And-how strange!-I had
not felt joy at meeting him in the institute grounds and I hadn't been
soothed by the phantasmagoric memory show in the tank ... but now I was at
peace and very happy.
It's really true? the most important thing for a person is to feel in