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Strange he wouldn't take off for quarters, Timberlake thought.
Bickel emerged from between the Ox's two branchings just as a wash of green
splashed down on him from the wall.
"That last reading's off only .008," Timberlake said.
"Insignificant," Bickel said. "Waveforms?"
Timberlake nodded at the oscilloscope in front of him, feeling a sharp pain
shoot through his neck. He felt tired and stiff. Bickel had driven them,
working through three shifts. Timberlake rubbed his neck.
Bickel turned from studying the scope. "Remember I told you to remind me
about all the oscillations involved in life? Rhythms, vibrations just one
great big series of drumbeats."
"Yeah," Timberlake said. "You about ready for the full-scale run-through?"
Bickel stared at the flickering lights reluctant to move now that the moment
of test had come. He knew the source of his reluctance -- the secret thing he
had done, and fear of its consequences.
One more test . . . and then . . . what?
Black box -- white box.
"You think it's not going to work?" Timberlake asked. He felt impatient with
Bickel but sensed this couldn't be pushed.
"The human nervous system -- including the region of the brain we assume
influences consciousness -- has come through one hell of a lot of tests,"
Bickel said.
"And this thing . . ." Timberlake nodded toward the Ox, "is a logically
simple analogue of the human brain."
"Logical simplicity has damn little bearing on our problem. We're engineering
something, all right, but not by the old bridge-building rules."
He's stalling, Timberlake thought. Why? "Then what're we doing?"
"It doesn't take much, just a word sometimes to upset the logical applecart,"
Bickel said. "The brain's had to meet a lot of requirements that had nothing
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whatsoever to do with design simplicity. For one thing, it had to survive
while it developed. Its size and shape had a bearing on that. It had to
adapt existing structure to new functions."
Bickel met Timberlake's eyes. "The human brain's an obvious hybrid mating of
function and structure. There are strengths in that, but weaknesses, too."
"So?" Timberlake said, and shrugged. "What's upsetting the applecart now?"
"Raj's talking about psychospace and psychorelationships. That damn causal
track of neuron impulses spreading out to form new kinds of space. It's quite
possible for our normal universe to be twisted through an infinite number of
psychospaces."
"Yeah?" Timberlake stared at him, wondering at the fear in Bickel's voice.
Bickel went on: "There can be an infinite number of types of consciousness.
Every time I come near turning this thing loose, I start wondering what space
it'll inhabit."
"Raj and his damn horror stories," Timberlake said.
Bickel continued to stare at the Ox structure, wondering if he had done the
right thing to act secretly.
Was this damn electronic maze going to create its own guilt?
To reach a level where it could accept a black-box imprint the Ox-cum-computer
had to surmount barriers, Bickel knew. It had to flex its mental muscles.
And guilt was a barrier.
By blank-space programming, supplying data with obvious holes in it, he had
inserted an information series on the subject of death. The on-line operative
command was for the computer to fill in the gaps. Now, by parallel insertion
of the address data for the life-maintenance program on a cow embryo in the
farm-stock hyb tanks, Bickel had provided the computer with a simple way to
fill the gaps in its information.
It could kill the embryo.
I had to act secretly, Bickel told himself. I couldn't ring in Timberlake --
now with his inhibitions. And any of the others might've told Tim.
"You think we're missing some fault in the system?" Timberlake asked. "What's
bugging you? The fact that the random search stopped of its own accord?"
"No." Bickel shook his head. "That search pattern ran into an irregularity,
a threshold it couldn't cross."
"Then what's holding you back, for Christ's sake?"
Bickel swallowed. He found it required increasing effort to hold his
attention on an unbroken thread of reasoning where it concerned bringing the
Ox to consciousness. There was a sensation of swimming against a stiff
current.
With what kind of a mirror can consciousness look at itself? he wondered. How
can the Ox say: "This is myself?" What will it see?
"Human nervous systems have the same kinds of irregularities and
imperfections," Timberlake said. "Their properties vary statistically."
Bickel nodded agreement. Timberlake was right. That was the reason they had
introduced random error into the Ox -- statistical imperfection.
"You worrying about pulse regulation?" Timberlake asked.
Bickel shook his head. "No." He put his palm against a plastic-encased
neuron block protruding from the Ox. "We've got a homeostat whose main
function is dealing with errors -- with negative reality. Consciousness is
always looking at the back side of whatever confronts us, always staring back
at us."
"You've left the gaps in it so it'll need us," Timberlake said. "You're
fussed about threshold regulation."
Bickel looked at Timberlake, thinking: Threshold? Yes, that was part of it.
The brain cells and peripheral neurons in a human tied together so that their
differences averaged out. You got the effect of smooth gradation. The
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