Semmant (3 page)

I laid all this out for him quite coherently, but he made no attempt to write it down – not a word. He even waved it away, as if he didn’t want to spoil the picture he had already put together. Most likely he was afraid of contradictions, of shaky ground. It seems to me he sometimes doesn’t follow through. He doesn’t want to strain himself – maybe he’s just too lazy. It’s funny to see: he thinks I’m a sociopath. Of course, that’s the easiest way; but to me it’s clear: my “problem” lies somewhere else. Some might claim it’s in naïveté and stubbornness, and they wouldn’t be too far off. Naïveté is at the forefront, that’s true, but I’ll say it again: I was selfless and only wanted the best – judge me now for that. Cast as many stones at me as you like; I admit, I chose hastily, but the choice was logical and simple. An idea as a panacea, a plan complex in nature but comprehensible with the slightest effort – it’s not easy to think up, believe me!

Never despise anyone, our teachers told us again and again. Never despise the weak, the incompetent, the dim-witted. That is unworthy of those who are fortunate, they said; though fortunate depends on who’s looking. No matter what, we learned to bear no malice and not to hold others in contempt. You cannot go against training from early childhood; only for some – the ones who didn’t learn the rules – ire still overflows from their souls. That’s why they’re fruitless – and formless, according to our standards; that is, there’s nothing to distinguish them from all the rest.

But I’m not talking about them. I now mean the weak, the mediocre; I mean those who require little, who are easy to satisfy. Their needs are simple: some kind of fear to repress animal instincts, and a sweet lie – hope – so that the meaninglessness of life does not hurl them into despair every day. There is, as a rule, no lack of fear; the issue is always the sweet lie. And this is where I come in: here is your sweetest of lies. Only this time it’s no lie. It’s the truth.

Really, what could be more desirable? What could be more understandable than the ghost of freedom – from creditors and loans, from boring jobs and low wages, from the full-court press of the world that leans in with all its might and squeezes hard until it wrings out your juices? How symbolic it is to restrain the world’s power using its most insatiable essence, looking straight into the most evident of its various faces. How right and deserved this is: to establish the means of salvation from its malicious sins! To overturn the greed of the ruthless despots, their aggressive hubris, their desire to waylay another, to stomp him down, crush him, obliterate him…

So, it’s not surprising that I am now in an insane asylum. All the same, I’m not offended. I can always take solace in the simplest of facts: there is no point in my being ashamed of what’s happened to me. Just like Semmant has no reason to be ashamed of what he’s done. Or of what I did for him. Or of what the two of us didn’t get a chance to do.

And yes, I’ll tell you, finally, what he is. He’s a robot, nothing more – a program installed in an iron heart. But his own heart is by no means made of iron – so there’s no cause to look down on him. There’s no cause to resort to contempt, even if your teachers didn’t reproach you for that. In the end, every individual is the way the installed program makes him. And if nothing is installed – well, then, it’s unfortunate, very bad luck.

My Semmant is the most sophisticated program, nearly indistinguishable from a human being, especially if you work with him a bit. Because you need to work on a person to awaken what is human in him. Otherwise, everyone is just – I’ll say it nicely – such senseless cattle!

But in Semmant, at least, the program was flawless. Almost flawless. Almost.

Chapter 4

To create him, I went a long way, straying and stumbling, but never losing my sense of direction. After leaving the School, I landed in the sleepy town of Sheffield, where I quickly convinced the administration of my aptitude for the exact sciences. They transferred me to Manchester, to a good place with old traditions. Camaraderie reigned there, not the noxious arrogance of Oxford or Cambridge. Everything was beautiful, lavish, and comfortable. Wherever you looked, you were greeted with the smiling faces of young students from good families. This was an ideal university setting, but for me it became unbearably dull.

That’s why I was always being pushed to the periphery. I did not fit in with the ones I was supposed to – rather, I had a preference for the underground. Instead of bustling faculty parties, I frequented suspicious bars where I would get drunk, often severely, with shady characters from the outskirts of town. Sometimes I would hook up with seasoned hoodlums and get into fights with football fans. I spent a couple of nights in lock-up. I smoked grass with guitar players from the local scene and orderlies from the city morgue. Not that I found them very interesting – I was just looking for release from the garish despair of the conventional, the common. I feared it – subconsciously – and fled from it at full speed. In place of well-mannered co-eds from campus, I wound up with pimply emo chicks. One of them even bestowed a nasty little disease on me. That left an impression; after that, I gave girls a wide berth for a while.

I could be rough, and I could be irascible. My inner instability, which later manifested itself, was already rearing its head then. One time, in the dormitory, I lashed out screaming at the concierge – that gave him a real fright. Later, during a tennis match, I jumped over the net to pick a fight with my opponent right on the court. This incident became widely known, and I was barred from the university team. But it did not get out of hand, and I remained in good graces. Besides, I had no equal in terms of my academics.

Pretty soon, several department chairs all had me in their sights. One professor was able to ensnare me with serious science – the world of particles and quantum fields. It seemed to me my future was predetermined, and I liked it a lot. Theoreticians comprised a special caste: the problems they faced were truly on a grand scale.

My professor loved to repeat, “We are putting a challenge out for God himself!” That was really how it was too. The question of higher powers was being decided right in our notebooks. The properties of the universe determined all answers. Anisotropy or symmetry, accident or intelligent design… Looking at things that way disciplined my mind. Though, I must admit, almost all of us were a little mystical at heart.

I joined in with the community and enjoyed its spirit. Microphysics, at first glance a fantasy world, proved to be the most real of disciplines. The clarity of its predictions was beyond compare. Much of it was downright bewitching, especially the greatest of freedoms: existing in all points at once – until a detector slams its trap shut. Besides, any attempt to peer inside would inevitably destroy the magic – I saw a great deal of meaning in this. I envisioned a strictly guarded secret: it is impossible to get an answer unless you make your presence felt. A passion for cognizance awoke within me, followed by a passion for accomplishment. I tried my hand, in complete seriousness, at the main problem: the collapse of the wave function, the disappearance of all – and every possible – freedom. I remembered round-shouldered Bradley and my badge with the acacia branch. “One thing leads to another,” I told myself. “The connection is obvious. I’m on the right path.”

Then the time for my diploma came, and everything changed, abruptly and forever. I forgot the quantum realm in an instant as it gave way to abstractions and neural networks. A shrewd scout, a talent recruiter, knocked me off the path in about a quarter of an hour. He got a large order, and I was one of the first to bite at the bait he was offering. It was a decision I never regretted.

I entered a new world – the world of thinking machines. With a helping hand from the scout, I ended up in Basel at a giant corporation engaged in everything under the sun, in addition to its famous pills and vaccines. I got an Austrian for a boss, energetic and greedy for success. I had never even imagined Austrians could have so much ambition. He thought up a bold move: creating the model enterprise of the future. This meant, first of all, getting rid of several divisions, sacking the idlers, and replacing them with an electronic brain. Let computers do the same job, only better – thinking faster and never getting tired or asking for a raise. Knowledge engineering – this is what it was called then. The naïveté of the idea shared a common thread with the naïveté of the Director’s dream at the School. Later, when everything ended, this became as plain as day. But at that time nobody knew enough, and the Austrian did a mind job on his bosses by skillfully choosing the most appealing arguments.

They gave us carte blanche and, along with it, half of a new building, decent money, and all the technology our hearts desired. There were twelve of us, all young and filled with a passion to change the world. I remembered three from Brighton, and one of them, the short, dark-haired Anthony, soon became the unofficial leader – to the surprise and envy of the ambitious Austrian. He was the one who devised the rigid rules that brought order to the initial confusion. It was his methodology, later named for someone else, that was applied widely and then forgotten or even forbidden.

The others from the School also stood out. We were united by our common passion; something goaded us forward and would not let us look back. We carried the others along, urging and hastening them on mercilessly. At the forefront stood progress and the plan – and, besides, as soon as I felt sorry for someone, I would remember the Brighton waves or the wandering circus and that heart pounding under the sawdust – or, for some reason, Simon’s threadbare coat and bird-like profile. That was enough not to have sentiments, if you get what I mean.

Those who later had to be fired – something like several thousand – were not informed of the project’s goals. Of them, the Specialists – the best of the best, the most respected – were selected. It was from their heads in particular that we had to extract everything worthwhile. We brought them and ourselves to the brink of exhaustion, eliciting the necessary data and combining the fragments into a cohesive whole – comparing, systematizing, and linking them to each other. We needed to be inventive; the procedures included the “method of disbelief,” the “method of many repetitions,” and even the “grueling interrogation,” in which your active consciousness grows numb and shuts down, and your tongue wags freely to reveal what lies deep down inside, far away, locked up tight.

Of course, the Specialists didn’t like this, but at first no one complained openly. They feared only that our efforts would reveal their emptiness and falsehood, which is exactly what happened. Soon we saw gaping holes at every step. At times their ignorance was appalling. It seemed they had never studied a single science as they should have. Their expertise was in squeezing the juices from those who were young and voracious, tenacious and intelligent, able to think. They would use them and then push them aside to avoid breeding rivals. Some newcomers, though, were not to be pushed away so easily; they fought fiercely with their elbows. Then, in time, they themselves grew into Specialists – and lost all aptitude for using their brains in the process…

Our hopes were dashed one after the other. Disconcerted, we tried to find a solution – working even harder and shouting at the ones lagging behind. It was bitter for everyone; time after time we had to resort to “grueling interrogation” to overcome laziness, stagnation, and elementary fear. As a result, the Specialists decided they had had enough. They united to organize a plot and inundated the administration with grievances and denouncements. It nearly turned into a general strike by the staff of the entire corporation. The scandal gathered steam, and they closed down the shop. Everything was blamed on the Austrian and not at all on Anthony, who, by the way, was more emotionally involved than anyone.

My conscience was at peace, but the first doubts were beginning to worm their way in. I found out enough to be disappointed – in the human mind and in human nature. I saw how people inexcusably stop halfway. How the initial thirst for knowledge turns into an aspiration to show off. Just dig a little deeper and there you will find it: sketchy, desultory, tied together thoughtlessly, pasted with ambiguous words and topped with empty rhetoric. Each expert wanted more than anything to protect his elevated status, which, as a rule, had been undeservedly acquired. Everybody was concerned about getting a piece of the pie, but not about truth or the search for it. The world had no need for fulfillment. The world wanted to kick back, consume, and have a good time. In itself, this was not bad. The bad thing was that the world did not want anything more.

I needed to be convinced of the opposite and was greatly confused. I looked desperately for a change, and soon an interesting opportunity turned up; I changed my field and went to another country without a second thought. I really wanted to take Anthony with me, but he declined. Then, a year later, he got too reckless shooting up a dose of junk in someone else’s bungalow on the isle of Crete. His list of complaints to the world all of a sudden became way too long.

The new job was complicated and brimming with surprises. It really appealed to my tastes. The mystery of living molecules got hold of my head, and besides, autumn in Paris that year was soft and romantic. I thought the healing was right here, just a step away. I was surrounded by enthusiastic people; we again worked very hard, and we were happy because we were still young. I married a French artist and fell in love with Manet and Bonnard, steak tartare and red Bordeaux. But all the same, doubt kept gnawing like a worm. Everything was lovely, but it was all unstable – I felt it in my skin, recalled it in my sleep.

The artist, fair-haired Natalie, became the first woman of my dreams. She was exactly as I had imagined in my youth. She even had a familiar smell – like a crisp autumn wind with yellow leaves. Here it is, harmony itself, I would tell myself, transported to seventh heaven. And Natalie adored me in turn.

The work was exhausting. There was almost no one daring enough at the time to tackle those extremely complicated subjects. I was creating new worlds, making models of the “elementary blocks” that comprised the human body, building images of individual cells and colonies of them – fragile but well organized groups. Strange hybrids were born on my monitor screen, monstrosities called forth to produce new life, balls of protein chains, pieces of interwoven threads, “letters” upon “letters” composed in threes and containing the eternal code. It was the code of the universe – or so we thought at the time, and perhaps we were right. The mysteries of living matter were being revealed down to the fundamental level, arranging themselves row by row, exposed in one snapshot after another. It was magnificent, stunning, gorgeous. There was music and poetry there. I truly felt like a Creator.

Natalie did not understand what was going on in my head, but she sensed something, and it captivated her. At night, she would suddenly wake, look at me, and exclaim, “How strange!” Thinking I was asleep, she would run her fingers over my face and whisper almost inaudibly, “Where did you get all this? How do you do it?”

Threads of fine energy streamed from her fingers. She was all lit up like a sensitive live wire, and I was happy for a short while. Then, about six months later, her interest dried up. She grew tired and common – a quarrelsome, lazy soul. I was in despair and suffered like I never had before. Later, I threw her out. And I lost faith in everything.

Even living molecules became loathsome to me. I submitted to sloth, then I quit before bringing what I had started to a conclusion. There was no one to carry on after me, so my work was for naught. I loafed about for an entire month, almost never leaving the house. Then I suddenly came to my senses – and felt ashamed, embarrassed, and guilty. So I decided to start it all afresh.

This turned out to be easier than could have been expected. My passion for fulfillment formed and intensified. For four short years I followed it with redoubled effort as I polished my procedures and methods. I wandered from lab to lab, never staying in one place long, choosing my projects carefully, without being lured by either prestige or money. I latched onto whatever was most difficult, amorphous, or fragmentary and forced it into formal frameworks, imagined the unimaginable, and programmed what no other would attempt to program. I worked side by side with physicians and chemists, climatologists and pharmacists, astronomers, linguists, navy sea captains… All of them deserve my thanks. They broadened my range of vision. I learned the underlying rationale for the most varied things – no textbook could have helped me in this. A multitude of separate pieces coalesced like a giant puzzle. Something like a complete picture promised to appear in the immediate future. Of course it was an illusion. No such picture existed in the approximations I used in my work. But my grasp kept becoming tighter.

The School had trained me to poke persistently into the very depth of things. Again and again I attacked problems for which no solution existed – scorning simplicity, setting “correct” linearized systems aside. Now and then my colleagues whispered behind my back, assuming I was wasting my time. They had been told in their worthless schools that “correct” systems were what the world was composed of. Their worthless teachers taught them that whatever is unstable, not subject to analytics, is an exotic that can be ignored. Yet I saw: that’s not how it is at all. The real world consists of the nonlinear; it is rough, irregular, asymmetrical. The slightest deviations in the initial data often lead to unpredictable swings. And one must never close his eyes to that.

I learned the connection between cardiac arrhythmia and the strange music of high-voltage networks, understood the fundamental unpredictability of cyclones and the reasons for sudden “madness” in the webs of telephone lines. It turned out not everything can be disassembled and then put back together – no matter how hard you try. I saw how simple algebra, disrespected by any graduate student, suddenly gives rise to chaotic monsters with an immeasurably complex character. Activity itself, once it was over, often changed the rules by which it was supposed to be accomplished. The consequences could not be forecast by even the most powerful computer. This was a genuine challenge – the challenge of chaos on a cosmic scale. It confounded me, but did not stop me. It made me alert, but did not pull the rug from under my feet. I still believed in the power of the mind, annoyed only with the imperfection of reality.