The Cybernetic Brains Read online

  Al’s face was a white mask. Henniger glanced and turned hastily from him. “Sorry. I forgot. Kind of a rugged thing to be joking about anyway. Sorry, Demming.”

  He stuck the cigar back in his mouth and resumed brusquely, “You say this installation should be operating satisfactorily within a week now?”

  “Yes, it will be functioning within that time.” Al’s voice was only a whisper of sound. The Steward of General Biotics shifted uncomfortably. The depth of emotion he sensed in the cyberneticist was beyond his capacity.

  “I’ll be in tomorrow, then. I want to see how you remove the collapse.”

  Al watched his broad blunt back all the way to the end of the balcony and down the iron stairways that led to the lower levels.

  He had made a grave mistake in supposing that an appeal to Henniger would have any effect, he thought. He had forgotten why a man like Henniger was not among the ranks of the non-workers. He had forgotten that in a world where no man was required to labor, men like Henniger chose to work because it was their only source of power.

  There was probably no man alive who understood all the engineering and processes of General Biotics. Its components had been so long under cybernetic control that such men had died without finding successors.

  To Thornton Henniger, who understood it least of all, it was a badge of power, Al thought. Though the Steward could not have described the processing of a single one of the thousands of compounds that the chemical giant produced, yet he could say yes or no to the installation of the revolutionary dual cybernetic control that Al had designed.

  Why could the Hennigers drive themselves into such posts of authority? There would never be an answer to that until men became angels, Al supposed.

  The public seldom heard of the Hennigers, seldom saw their faces. They didn’t need to. His kind were men elected by the men elected by the people.

  They were like second order invariants. The whims of the populace changed and swept new officers into powers. But always the Hennigers seemed to know the people elected by the people.

  Al turned away and moved slowly down the steps to the main floor. He approached the double-locked doors of the glass-walled central. Inside he passed between the maze of equipment and machinery that served the control within the platinum box.

  His face worked in bitter lines as he sank down on one knee before the bank of equipment beneath the box. All the agony of his own despair closed upon him. He choked helplessly upon the throbbing that rose in his throat.

  The technicians outside could see him. He dared not let them glimpse his face. He pretended to examine the pulsing heart of glass and platinum that kept the flow of nutrient surging through the arteries that had held the blood of a man.

  “John—John—” he whispered.

  He whirled at the sound of tapping on the glass wall. Outside, the pixie face of Kit, his wife, was grimacing at him. She was smiling then but the smile vanished as she glimpsed his expression.

  She squeezed his arm as he let her in. “Al—you look sick. Why don’t you turn this over to someone else?”

  “I can’t, Kit. I’ve got to be near—them.”

  SHE hesitated. “You turned on the visual today?” He nodded. “John. It was just like the rest of them. I set the initial stimulus as low as possible. Then I turned on the focused observation image of the control panel. There was the usual moment of renewed response until it went wild and collapsed. There isn’t a doubt any more, Kit. It wouldn’t do that if they weren’t alive!”

  His arm closed tightly about her shoulders, pressing her small dark-haired head against his shoulder. She turned her face up to his.

  “Darling, I can understand a little of how it must seem to you because you have helped put them, there. But you’ll be sick with your worry. You can’t help what has been done. You can do something to put a stop to it in the future—but not if you kill yourself with worry.”

  “In a few more days I’ll have to turn on the visual excitation for Martha. I can’t do it, Kit! Think of her! She knows something terrible has happened to her. She’s blind and deaf and without sensory mechanisms of any kind. But she has every reason to suppose that she is being cared for.

  “Then when I turn on the visual stimulus and let her see the guide panel she’ll know. She’ll know that she is wholly lost and abandoned. I’ll have to find some way to kill her rather than let her endure that. John too—”

  “No,” said Kit. “Not that—as long as they’re alive there’s hope of some kind.”

  “Hope! Blind—deaf—dumb—beyond all human touch forever—what kind of hope can you find in that? I’ve got to find some way to see that they die mercifully and quickly.”

  “They have sight. If you’re careful you can communicate by printed messages. You can let them know you understand.”

  “What use would that be to them—if it were possible? What hope or comfort can we offer? They could give no response of any kind. They knew they are slaves—a part of a machine. They know there is no escape but death. Do you think I want to kill them? But they might live ten lifetimes if I don’t. There is no other answer.”

  He bent over, resting his hands upon the guardrail about the controlling center of this vast chemical plant. Kit reached up and stroked his hair with her small gentle fingers.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” she said softly. “Martha would want it that way. She could not endure decades of such imprisonment without going insane. She’d want to go quickly if she knew. But”—tears started in Kit’s eyes—“she was Martha. As much my sister as yours—”

  Al raised his eyes to survey the scene about him, the score of technicians intent on their jobs of installing the controls for the vast flow of materials through the plant. His gaze encompassed the shops and factories and laboratories that formed the whole expanse of General Biotics.

  “Somehow,” he said, “somehow there has to be a way to smash the whole concept of cybernetic engineering as now practised. In the world there are more than two million brains—men and women with life and feeling and human souls—more than two million of them imprisoned like John and Martha. What a cry they would raise to heaven if they could speak for an instant!

  “Nothing can be done for them but we can smash the system that would imprison millions more. Somehow it has to be told that these are living beings—not the dead brain cells that cyberneticists have so long believed.”

  “They’ll fight,” said Kit. “Men like Thornton Henniger. What would he do?”

  “He’d kill me for even thinking such thoughts.”

  “How can you tell them? Where will you go?”

  “The Institute, of course. They’ll believe me. Men like Dr. Jurgens and Ryberg. If they thought for a minute that this were true they’d bring a halt to cybernetic brain installations.

  “But I have to be sure of my position. The responsibility of a brain lies with the engineer. One failure would endanger my position and my chance to be heard. If both the brains on this first dual installation should be destroyed—I don’t know how I can kill Martha and John without endangering my chances to attack the whole system.”

  “Then wait,” said Kit. “I can’t believe there’s no way out for John and Martha. I can’t think of them being dead. Somehow you can find a way to do something for them.”

  Her hands were gripping his arms fiercely. Her head bent to rest upon his shoulders as tears renewed themselves in her eyes.

  “Sure, Kit,” he said softly, “we’ll find a way. Tomorrow I’d planned to try something on John that I’ve never done before. I’m going to increase the power of the electronic forcing to break down his block. At the same time this should serve to diminish destructive neural feedback and circularity of thought.

  “It should increase his peace of mind—if he can know such—by eliminating the kind of feedback that produces neuroses and psychoses. It may spare him a great deal of agony.

  “Eventually, there’s no reason why we should not find a way
to give them a voice. Then they can say for themselves what they would have—death or such existence as is possible to them.”

  CHAPTER III

  What of Martha

  IT was Martha’s hair that he was remembering when consciousness returned. He was remembering the fragrance of it and the soft touch of it against his face. He remembered how it was to hold her head against his shoulder and gather up the long golden threads in his fingers and kiss the white slope of her neck.

  He wanted to remember for just a moment, to hold back the catastrophic flood of more recent memories before he wrestled with them and felt their torment twisting his soul.

  Martha was tall and her beauty of the kind sometimes called handsome in a woman because she had none of the diminutive fragility that was Kit’s.

  “We Swedes had to be big,” Al used to say, “in order to get the world civilized.”

  John Wilkins was—had been, rather, he thought grimly—framed more sparingly than the Demming Swedes. His eyes had barely leveled at Martha’s height and his body seemed fueled with pure energy.

  Like him Martha was a worker and a biochemist. He had courted, her amid the incredible odors of synthesizing animal products. He shuffled through memories, affixing them carefully that they might never fade—like the filling of an album.

  Martha, white coated, frowning through an encompassing maze of glassware in which refractory molecules refused her their secrets.

  Martha swimming, her body golden and glistening in the sunlight.

  Martha walking with him, her long-limbed stride a flow of grace and tender loveliness.

  Martha standing solemnly and fervently beside him, whispering the brief words of their marriage ceremony.

  Martha, whom he would never see or hear again—

  It spilled over, that accumulated flood, and choked within him. But now the barrier that bore against it seemed stronger and higher. He could look upon the dead lost memories and upon himself and know himself for what he was—and he could still feel a magic circle where rational thought prevailed, into which he could retreat before the flood.

  Deliberately he put away the memories and challenged the present. He took out the thought of what he now was and let it possess his mind. His reason stood up before it.

  He pictured the naked cortex of a brain, a grayish-white wrinkled thing shot through with strands of capillaries. That was his embodiment. All else had been sheared away. Only the thinking living core of him remained.

  But he shouldn’t be living. He had died in the plunging wreck on the mountainside.

  He was a brain. A cybernetic control brain. And cybernetic brains were dead things. How could he be living?

  He did not know but if he lived then they all lived—all those millions like him, he thought. For three quarters of a century the neurons of dead men had been robbed to serve a society where men survived by the labor of their machines that had relieved human hands of all obligation.

  And with them living, this civilization was a pious congregation in whose church an undead vampire slept beneath the stones.

  His pain diminished somewhat, as if the nerve channels had burned themselves out. He understood its source now. Severed by the knife that had removed his brain from its skull, his nerve endings cried out with the sensations of organs that no longer existed. They gave ghostly testimony of a pain-ridden body he no longer possessed.

  But they were dying, healing over now, just as all the rest of him was healing in the decaying mold of earth. All but the brain of him, the core that held the life and being that was once known among men as John Wilkins.

  He remembered that moment when knowledge had come, when the blast of recognition had been more than his synapses could endure. He knew he had blacked out in the face of that unbearable understanding. But now it seemed like a far away dream that was not of much consequence.

  Cybernetics! The god-name of the age. The deity of the Welfare State.

  TEN thousand times the word had been upon his lips, the name of a science, the miracle worker of this day in which he lived. Cybernetics had made men free again—all but those like him, who lived unsuspected and enslaved now forever in terror and darkness, in silence and lonely agony.

  Cybernetics. It was the science first defined nearly a half millennium ago by the great mathematician, Wiener. With his colleagues, Wiener had shown the startling parallels between the functioning of the human brain and the machines of man’s invention.

  They pointed out that the microscopic neurons of man’s brain functioned like the gross vacuum tubes of his computing machines. That the study of neural activity is the study of communications engineering, an inquiry into message transmission, noise, coding and relaying.

  It had been only a step then—though one of prodigious magnitude—to the present formulation of cybernetic engineering. If those early pioneers could have seen this day—if they could have known what John Wilkins and two million others knew—surely they would have turned aside from that terrible course upon which they had set.

  But who could have known? There was no cyberneticist in the world who would have believed that John Wilkins still lived, that any of them lived. In ages past men forsook the forests and fields for factory dungeons where the dark, clanking hulks of machines were hailed as the liberators, the untiring, uncomplaining slaves of mankind.

  It was only when it was far too late that it had been discovered there was error in the identity of the slave.

  Tired generations served in their prison houses and died believing they had witnessed the upsweep of civilization.

  But the servitude could not endure forever when men witnessed, generation after generation, only the silence of their false gods.

  Their eyes opened and they saw who was the slave and who the master and they dared not rebel, for there was existence only in the slavery that they had always known.

  Cybernetics was the white goddess that turned the tables and again made the master the slave. Cybernetics put the machine forever under man’s control and released him from its chains. His hand was no longer bound to the levers, and the wheels. His voice alone could command the machine for long years of toil and the machine would obey without faltering.

  John thought of that historic day more than four centuries ago when the first completely automatic automobile factory had been put into operation. Television screens showed the world the momentous magic of raw materials being turned into finished vehicles in the giant factory where there was not the breath of a single human being. Only the hand of the white goddess, cybernetics, had touched those machines.

  Outside, fifty thousand displaced workmen watched grimly. They were not yet ready to give thanks for the great blessing of release from their slavery. They saw only that their master had been defeated and could supply them no more with food and houses, for which they had endured his whip.

  They stormed the plant and when they were beaten back two thousand of them lay dead.

  It was hard for a time but not nearly so hard as it might have been—for men were dreaming even then of the perfect Welfare State. It wast just that they had not yet seen that cybernetics was the key to the ultimate perfection of their goal.

  Two centuries after the first automatic factory the true Welfare State existed in reality in reality in the two Americas. It took only half a century more to encompass the world.

  There were only a comparative handful of men who ever knew that it almost broke down during that third century of its existence. They were the cyberneticists who still retained some understanding of the machines they had built.

  In Wiener’s generation it had been known that there is a limit of size which controls the functioning of any form of organization. In nature as well as in human engineering there is always a top limit of size beyond which a structure or organization cannot go without breakdown.

  In trees it is the mechanism of supplying water and food from roots to leaves that says the plant can be so big and no more. In animals it,
is the legs, which must support the weight of the creature. In buildings it the area occupied by elevator space that makes it impractical to build beyond a certain height. And beyond some great but definite span any structure will collapse under its own weight.

  In cybernetics it was the accuracy of function that could be maintained in the massive control instruments.

  Computers that did man’s thinking had become unwieidly cubes a thousand feet on a side, filled with millions of vacuum tubes relaying countless orders.

  This was the problem that confronted the early cyberneticists of the Welfare State. Machines had grown with the swarming population. Factories had become so vast and the cybernetic control problem so acute that they threatened to break down, carrying the short-lived Welfare State with them, placing it in history as a unique but tragic experiment—and forcing man back to his labor…

  But for four hundred years it had been known that the neuron of the human brain performs vacuum-tube functions.

  When it became necessary the cyberneticists bridged the gap that substituted one for the other.

  JOHN knew the history of that work. He had heard it often from Al, who worshiped his science with fanatical intensity.

  There had been some opposition, both technical and moral, but both had been overcome quite easily. The technical problems had been the most difficult.

  The public had long been used to such institutions as blood banks, eye banks, the storage and transformation of parts of human bodies. They became accustomed to the use of a human brain as part of a machine.

  The first was the brain of a brilliant young physicist who had been killed in an accident. Only the day before he had expressed a wish that he might take part in just such an experiment. His wife gave permission for the use of his brain.

  It had worked. It was still working. That human brain, no bigger than a half gallon jar, had replaced one of the thousand-foot cubes of the electronic machines.

  For seventy-five years it had functioned as a vast and complex relay in the merciless machines that drove it and were driven by it in order to solve the problems of industry and commerce.