Terminal Man (11 page)

“It isn’t printing periods consistently,” Richards said. “When did that start?”

“That’s nothing,” Gerhard said. “Just keep watching.”

Richards winced. Cats were programmed to be something that both George and Martha disliked. Giving George a cat was a very hostile move.

“Really nasty,” Richards said. “What are the other interactions like?”

“Pretty much the same,” Gerhard said.

“As bad as this?”

“Pretty much.”

They were accustomed now to the idea that when the computers interacted, the results were unpredictable. The general form of interaction could be guessed, but the specific results were uncertain. It was like a computer playing checkers—it was probably going to win, but it would win a different way each time, depending on what the opponent did.

Richards watched with interest. Saint George had no background for eggplants. But he disliked cucumbers and bananas.

“What’s happened to Saint George?” Richards asked. “His responses are too much the same.”

“That’s what’s bothering me.”

“What’s he cycling through on the program?”

“I was looking for it when you came in.”

“George!” Richards said, almost without thinking.

“George is breaking down,” Richards said. “He’s not a saint any more.”

The screen was filled with white dots. “What does that mean, unprintable response?” Richards said.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before tonight.”

“How many times has this program been run?” Richards asked.

“One hundred and ten, against Martha.”

“Any learning erasures?”

“No.”

“I’ll be goddamned,” Richards said. “He’s getting to be a short-tempered saint.” He grinned. “We can write this one up.”

Gerhard nodded and went back to the print-out. In theory, what was happening was not puzzling. Both George and Martha were programmed to learn from experience. Like the checkers-playing programs—where the machine got better each time it played a game—this program was established so that the machine would “learn” new responses to things. After one hundred and ten sets of experience, Saint George had abruptly stopped being a saint. He was learning not to be a saint around Martha—even though he had been programmed for saintliness.

“I know just how he feels,” Richards said, and switched the machine off. Then he joined Gerhard, looking for the programming error that had made it happen.

J
ANET
R
OSS SAT IN THE EMPTY ROOM AND
glanced at the wall clock. It was 9 a.m. She looked down at the desk in front of her, which was bare except for a vase of flowers and a notepad. She looked at the chair opposite her. Then, aloud, she said, “How’re we doing?”

There was a mechanical click and Gerhard’s voice came through the speaker mounted in the ceiling. “We need a few minutes for the sound levels. The light is okay. You want to talk a minute?”

She nodded, and glanced over her shoulder at the one-way mirror behind her. She saw only her reflection, but she knew Gerhard, with his equipment, was behind, watching her. “You sound tired,” she said.

“Trouble with Saint George last night,” Gerhard said.

“I’m tired, too,” she said. “I was having trouble with somebody who isn’t a saint.” She laughed. She was just talking so they could get a sound level for the room; she hadn’t really paid attention to what she was saying. But it was true: Arthur was no saint. He was also no great discovery, though she’d thought he might be a few weeks ago when she first met him. She had
been, in fact, a little infatuated with him. (“Infatuated? Hmm? Is that what you’d call it?” She could hear Dr. Ramos now.) Arthur had been born handsome and wealthy. He had a yellow Ferrari, a lot of dash, and a lot of charm. She was able to feel feminine and frivolous around him. He did madcap, dashing things like flying her to Mexico City for dinner because he knew a little restaurant where they made the best tacos in the world. She knew it was all silly, but she enjoyed it. And in a way she was relieved—she never had to talk about medicine, or the hospital, or psychiatry. Arthur wasn’t interested in any of those things; he was interested in her as a woman. (“Not as a sex object?” Damn Dr. Ramos.)

Then, as she got to know him better, she found herself wanting to talk about her work. And she found, with some surprise, that Arthur didn’t want to hear about it. Arthur was threatened by her work; he had problems about achievement. He was nominally a stockbroker—an easy thing for a rich man’s son to be—and he talked with authority about money, investments, interest rates, bond issues. But there was an aggressive quality in his manner, a defensiveness, as if he were substantiating himself.

And then she realized what she should have known from the beginning, that Arthur was chiefly interested in her because she was substantial. It was—in theory—more difficult to impress her, to sweep her off her feet, than it was to impress the little actresses who hung out at Bumbles and the Candy Store. And therefore more satisfying.

As time went on, she no longer drew pleasure from being frivolous around him, and everything became
vaguely depressing. She recognized all the signs: her work at the hospital became busier, and she had to break dates with him. When she did see him, she was bored by his flamboyance, his restless impulsiveness, his clothes, and his cars. She would look at him across the dinner table and try to discover what she had once seen. She could not find even a trace of it. Last night she had broken it off. They both knew it was coming, and—

“You stopped talking,” Gerhard said.

“I don’t know what to say … Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the patient. The quick brown fox jumped over the pithed frog. We are all headed for that final common pathway in the sky.” She paused. “Is that enough?”

“A little more.”

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? I’m sorry I don’t remember the rest. How does the poem go?” She laughed.

“That’s fine, we have the level now.”

She looked up at the loudspeaker. “Will you be interfacing at the end of the series?”

“Probably,” Gerhard said, “if it goes well. Rog is in a hurry to get him onto tranquilizers.”

She nodded. This was the final stage in Benson’s treatment, and it had to be done before tranquilizers could be administered. Benson had been kept on sedation with phenobarbital until midnight the night before. He would be clearheaded this morning, and ready for interfacing.

It was McPherson who had coined the term “interfacing.” McPherson liked computer terminology. An interface was the boundary between two systems. Or between a computer and an effector mechanism. In
Benson’s case, it was almost a boundary between two computers—his brain and the little computer wired into his shoulder. The wires had been attached, but the switches hadn’t been thrown yet. Once they were, the feedback loop of Benson-computer-Benson would be instituted.

McPherson saw this case as the first of many. He planned to go from organic seizures to schizophrenics to mentally retarded patients to blind patients. The charts were all there on his office wall, projecting the technology five years into the future. And he planned to use more and more sophisticated computers in the link-up. Eventually, he would get to projects like Form Q, which seemed farfetched even to Ross.

But today the practical question was which of the forty electrodes would prevent an attack. Nobody knew that yet. It would be determined experimentally.

During the operation, the electrodes had been located precisely, within millimeters of the target area. That was good surgical placement, but considering the density of the brain it was grossly inadequate. A nerve cell in the brain was just a micron in diameter. There were a thousand nerve cells in the space of a millimeter.

From that standpoint, the electrodes had been crudely positioned. And this crudeness meant that many electrodes were required. One could assume that if you placed several electrodes in the correct general area, at least one of them would be in the precise position to abort an attack. Trial-and-error stimulation would determine the proper electrode to use.

“Patient coming,” Gerhard said over the loudspeaker. A moment later, Benson arrived in a wheelchair, wearing his blue-and-white striped bathrobe. He
seemed alert as he waved to her stiffly—the shoulder bandages inhibited movement of his arm. “How are you feeling?” he said, and smiled.

“I’m supposed to ask you.”

“I’ll ask the questions around here,” he said. He was still smiling, but there was an edge to his voice. With some surprise, she realized that he was afraid. And then she wondered why that surprised her. Of course he would be afraid. Anyone would be. She wasn’t exactly calm herself.

The nurse patted Benson on the shoulder, nodded to Dr. Ross, and left the room. They were alone.

For a moment, neither spoke. Benson stared at her; she stared back. She wanted to give Gerhard time to focus the TV camera in the ceiling, and to prepare his stimulating equipment.

“What are we doing today?” Benson asked.

“We’re going to stimulate your electrodes, sequentially, to see what happens.”

He nodded. He seemed to take this calmly, but she had learned not to trust his calm. After a moment he said, “Will it hurt?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he said. “Go ahead.”

Gerhard, sitting on a high stool in the adjacent room, surrounded in the darkness by glowing green dials of equipment, watched through the one-way glass as Ross and Benson began to talk.

Alongside him, Richards picked up the tape recorder microphone and said quietly, “Stimulation series one, patient Harold Benson, March 11, 1971.”

Gerhard looked at the four TV screens in front of
him. One showed the closed-circuit view of Benson that would be stored on video tape as the stimulation series proceeded. Another displayed a computer-generated view of the forty electrode points, lined up in two parallel rows within the brain substance. As each electrode was stimulated, the appropriate point glowed on the screen.

A third TV screen ran an oscilloscope tracing of the shock pulse as it was delivered. And a fourth showed a wiring diagram of the tiny computer in Benson’s neck. It also glowed as stimulations traveled through the circuit pathways.

In the next room, Ross was saying, “You’ll feel a variety of sensations, and some of them may be quite pleasant. We want you to tell us what you feel. All right?”

Benson nodded.

Richards said, “Electrode one, five millivolts, for five seconds.” Gerhard pressed the buttons. The computer diagram showed a tracing of the circuit being closed, the current snaking its way through the intricate electronic maze of Benson’s shoulder computer. They watched Benson through the one-way glass.

Benson said, “That’s interesting.”

“What’s interesting?” Ross asked.

“That feeling.”

“Can you describe it?”

“Well, it’s like eating a ham sandwich.”

“Do you like ham sandwiches?”

Benson shrugged. “Not particularly.”

“Do you feel hungry?”

“Not particularly.”

“Do you feel anything else?”

“No. Just the taste of a ham sandwich.” He smiled. “On rye.”

Gerhard, sitting at the control panel, nodded. The first electrode had stimulated a vague memory trace.

Richards: “Electrode two, five millivolts, five seconds.”

Benson said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Ross said, “It will pass.”

Gerhard sat back from the control panel, sipped a cup of coffee, and watched the interview progress.

“Electrode three, five millivolts, five seconds.”

This one produced absolutely no effect on Benson. Benson was quietly talking with Ross about bathrooms in restaurants, hotels, airports—

“Try it again,” Gerhard said. “Up five.”

“Repeat electrode three, ten millivolts, five seconds,” Richards said. The TV screen flashed the circuit through electrode three. There was still no effect.

“Go on to four,” Gerhard said. He wrote out a few notes: