A Meeting With Medusa (14 page)
A quarter of a billion people picked up their receivers, to listen for a few seconds with annoyance or perplexity. Those who had been awakened in the middle of the night assumed that some far-off friend was calling, over the satellite telephone network that had gone into service, with such a blaze of publicity, the day before. But there was no voice on the line; only a sound, which to many seemed like the roaring of the sea; to others, like the vibrations of harp strings in the wind. And there were many more, in that moment, who recalled a secret sound of childhood—the noise of blood pulsing through the veins, heard when a shell is cupped over the ear. Whatever it was, it lasted no more than twenty seconds. Then it was replaced by the dial tone.
The world’s subscribers cursed, muttered ‘Wrong number’, and hung up. Some tried to dial a complaint but the line seemed busy. In a few hours, everyone had forgotten the incident—except those whose duty it was to worry about such things.
At the Post Office Research Station, the argument had been going on all morning, and had got nowhere. It continued unabated through the lunch break, when the hungry engineers poured into the little café across the road.
‘I still think,’ said Willy Smith, the solid-state electronics man, ‘that it was a temporary surge of current, caused when the satellite network was switched in.’
‘It was obviously
something
to do with the satellites,’ agreed Jules Reyner, circuit designer. ‘But why the time delay? They were plugged in at midnight; the ringing was two hours later—as we all know to our cost.’ He yawned violently.
‘What do
you
think, Doc?’ asked Bob Andrews, computer programmer. ‘You’ve been very quiet all morning. Surely you’ve got some idea?’
Dr John Williams, head of the Mathematics Division, stirred uneasily.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have. But you won’t take it seriously.’
‘That doesn’t matter. Even if it’s as crazy as those science-fiction yarns you write under a pseudonym, it may give us some leads.’
Williams blushed, but not much. Everyone knew about his stories, and he wasn’t ashamed of them. After all, they
had
been collected in book form. (Remaindered at five shillings; he still had a couple of hundred copies.)
‘Very well,’ he said, doodling on the tablecloth. ‘This is something I’ve been wondering about for years. Have you ever considered the analogy between an automatic telephone exchange and the human brain?’
‘Who hasn’t thought of it?’ scoffed one of his listeners. ‘That idea must go back to Graham Bell.’
‘Possibly. I never said it was original. But I do say it’s time we started taking it seriously.’ He squinted balefully at the fluorescent tubes above the table; they were needed on this foggy winter day. ‘What’s wrong with the damn lights? They’ve been flickering for the last five minutes.’
‘Don’t bother about that. Maisie’s probably forgotten to pay her electricity bill. Let’s hear more about your theory.’
‘Most of it isn’t theory; it’s plain fact. We know that the human brain is a system of switches—neurons—interconnected in a very elaborate fashion by nerves. An automatic telephone exchange is also a system of switches—selectors and so forth—connected with wires.’
‘Agreed,’ said Smith. ‘But that analogy won’t get you very far. Aren’t there about fifteen billion neurons in the brain? That’s a lot more than the number of switches in an autoexchange.’
Williams’ answer was interrupted by the scream of a lowflying jet. He had to wait until the café had ceased to vibrate before he could continue.
‘Never heard them fly
that
low,’ Andrews grumbled. ‘Thought it was against regulations.’
‘So it is, but don’t worry—London Airport Control will catch him.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Reyner. ‘That
was
London Airport, bringing in a Concorde on ground approach. But I’ve never heard one so low, either. Glad I wasn’t aboard.’
‘Are we, or are we
not
, going to get on with this blasted discussion?’ demanded Smith.
‘You’re right about the fifteen billion neurons in the human brain,’ continued Williams, unabashed. ‘And
that’s
the whole point. Fifteen billion sounds a large number, but it isn’t. Round about the 1960s, there were more than that number of individual switches in the world’s autoexchanges. Today, there are approximately five times as many.’
‘I see,’ said Reyner slowly. ‘And as from yesterday, they’ve all become capable of full interconnection, now that the satellite links have gone into service.’
‘Precisely.’
There was silence for a moment, apart from the distant clanging of a fire-engine bell.
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Smith. ‘Are you suggesting that the world telephone system is now a giant brain?’
‘That’s putting it crudely—anthropomorphically. I prefer to think of it in terms of critical size.’ Williams held his hands out in front of him, fingers partly closed.
‘Here are two lumps of U-235. Nothing happens as long as you keep them apart. But bring them together’—he suited the action to the words—‘and you have something
very
different from one bigger lump of uranium. You have a hole half a mile across.
‘It’s the same with our telephone networks. Until today, they’ve been largely independent, autonomous. But now we’ve suddenly multiplied the connecting links, the networks have all merged together, and we’ve reached criticality.’
‘And just what does criticality mean in this case?’ asked Smith.
‘For want of a better word—consciousness.’
‘A weird sort of consciousness,’ said Reyner. ‘What would it use for sense organs?’
‘Well, all the radio and TV stations in the world would be feeding information into it, through their landlines.
That
should give it something to think about! Then there would be all the data stored in all the computers; it would have access to that—and to the electronic libraries, the radar tracking systems, the telemetering in the automatic factories. Oh, it would have enough sense organs! We can’t begin to imagine its picture of the world; but it would be infinitely richer and more complex than ours.’
‘Granted all this, because it’s an entertaining idea,’ said Reyner, ‘what could it
do
except think? It couldn’t go anywhere; it would have no limbs.’
‘Why should it want to travel? It would already be everywhere! And every piece of remotely controlled electrical equipment on the planet could act as a limb.’
‘Now I understand that time delay,’ interjected Andrews. ‘It was conceived at midnight, but it wasn’t born until 1:50 this morning. The noise that woke us all up was—its birth cry.’
His attempt to sound facetious was not altogether convincing, and nobody smiled. Overhead, the lights continued their annoying flicker, which seemed to be getting worse. Then there was an interruption from the front of the café, as Jim Small, of Power Supplies, made his usual boisterous entry.
‘Look at this, fellows,’ he said, and grinned, waving a piece of paper in front of his colleagues. ‘I’m rich. Ever seen a bank balance like
that
?’
Dr Williams took the proffered statement, glanced down the columns, and read the balance aloud: ‘Cr, £999,999,897.99.’
‘Nothing very odd about that,’ he continued, above the general amusement. ‘I’d say it means an overdraft of £102, and the computer’s made a slight slip and added eleven nines. That sort of thing was happening all the time just after the banks converted to the decimal system.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Small, ‘but don’t spoil my fun. I’m going to frame this statement. And what would happen if I drew a cheque for a few million, on the strength of this? Could I sue the bank if it bounced?’
‘Not on your life,’ answered Reyner. ‘I’ll take a bet that the banks thought of that years ago, and protected themselves somewhere down in the small print. But, by the way, when did you get that statement?’
‘In the noon delivery. It comes straight to the office, so that my wife doesn’t have a chance of seeing it.’
‘Hmm. That means it was computed early this morning. Certainly after midnight…’
‘What are you driving at? And why all the long faces?’
No one answered him. He had started a new hare, and the hounds were in full cry.
‘Does anyone here know about automated banking systems?’ asked Smith. ‘How are they tied together?’
‘Like everything else these days,’ said Andrews. ‘They’re all in the same network; the computers talk to each other all over the world. It’s a point for you, John. If there
was
real trouble, that’s one of the first places I’d expect it. Besides the phone system itself, of course.’
‘No one answered the question I had asked before Jim came in,’ complained Reyner. ‘What would this supermind actually
do
? Would it be friendly—hostile—indifferent? Would it even know that we exist? Or would it consider the electronic signals it’s handling to be the only reality?’
‘I see you’re beginning to believe me,’ said Williams, with a certain grim satisfaction. ‘I can only answer your question by asking another. What does a newborn baby do? It starts looking for food.’ He glanced up at the flickering lights. ‘My God,’ he said slowly, as if a thought had just struck him. ‘There’s only one food it would need—electricity.’
‘This nonsense has gone far enough,’ said Smith. ‘What the devil’s happened to our lunch? We gave our orders twenty minutes ago.’
Everyone ignored him.
‘And then,’ said Reyner, taking up where Williams had left off, ‘it would start looking around, and stretching its limbs. In fact, it would start to play, like any growing baby.’
‘And babies
break
things,’ said someone softly.
‘It would have enough toys, heaven knows. That Concorde that went over us just now. The automated production lines. The traffic lights in our streets.’
‘Funny you should mention that,’ interjected Small. ‘Something’s happened to the traffic outside—it’s been stopped for the last ten minutes. Looks like a big jam.’
‘I guess there is a fire somewhere. I heard an engine just now.’
‘I’ve heard two—and what sounded like an explosion over toward the industrial estate. Hope it’s nothing serious.’
‘Maisie! What about some candles? We can’t see a thing!’
‘I’ve just remembered—this place has an all-electric kitchen. We’re going to get cold lunch, if we get any lunch at all.’
‘At least we can read the newspaper while we’re waiting. Is that the latest edition you’ve got there, Jim?’
‘Yes. Haven’t had time to look at it yet. Hmm. There
do
seem to have been a lot of odd accidents this morning—railway signals jammed—water main blown up through failure of relief valve—dozens of complaints about last night’s wrong number…’
He turned the page, and became suddenly silent.
‘What’s the matter?’
Without a word, Small handed over the paper. Only the front page made sense. Throughout the interior, column after column was a mess of printer’s pie, with, here and there, a few incongruous advertisements making islands of sanity in a sea of gibberish. They had obviously been set up as independent blocks, and had escaped the scrambling that had overtaken the text around them.
‘So this is where long-distance typesetting and autodistribution have brought us,’ grumbled Andrews. ‘I’m afraid Fleet Street’s been putting too many eggs in one electronic basket.’
‘So have we all, I’m afraid,’ said Williams solemnly. ‘So have we all.’
‘If I can get a word in edgeways, in time to stop the mob hysteria that seems to be infecting this table,’ said Smith loudly and firmly, ‘I’d like to point out that there’s nothing to worry about—even if John’s ingenious fantasy is correct. We only have to switch off the satellites, and we’ll be back where we were yesterday.’
‘Prefrontal lobotomy,’ muttered Williams. ‘I’d thought of that.’
‘Eh? Oh, yes—cutting out slabs of the brain. That would certainly do the trick. Expensive, of course, and we’d have to go back to sending telegrams to each other. But civilisation would survive.’
From not too far away, there was a short, sharp explosion.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Andrews nervously. ‘Let’s hear what the old BBC’s got to say. The one o’clock news has just started.’
He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a transistor radio.
‘…unprecedented number of industrial accidents, as well as the unexplained launching of three salvos of guided missiles from military installations in the United States. Several airports have had to suspend operations owing to the erratic behaviour of their radar, and the banks and stock exchanges have closed because their information-processing systems have become completely unreliable.’ (‘You’re telling me,’ muttered Small, while the others shushed him.) ‘One moment, please—there’s a news flash coming through…. Here it is. We have just been informed that all control over the newly installed communication satellites has been lost. They are no longer responding to commands from the ground. According to…’
The BBC went off the air; even the carrier wave died. Andrews reached for the tuning knob and twisted it around the dial. Over the whole band, the ether was silent.
Presently Reyner said, in a voice not far from hysteria: ‘That prefrontal lobotomy was a good idea, John. Too bad that Baby’s already thought of it.’
Williams rose slowly to his feet.
‘Let’s get back to the lab,’ he said. ‘There must be an answer, somewhere.’
But he knew already that it was far, far too late. For
Homo sapiens
, the telephone bell had tolled.
First published in
Boy’s Life
, March 1964, as ‘Sunjammer’
Collected in
The Wind from the Sun
