“But Alex is alive,” Ellen insisted. “He’s alive.”
“His body is alive,” Torres agreed. “And it’s kept alive by seventeen separate microprocessors, each of which is programmed to maintain and monitor the various physical systems of his body. Three of those microprocessors are concerned with nothing except the endocrine system, and four more handle the nervous system. Some of the systems are less complicated than those two, and could be lumped together in a single chip with a backup. Four of the chips are strictly memory. They were the easy ones.”
“Easy ones?” Ellen echoed, her voice weak.
Torres nodded. “This project has been under way for years, ever since I became interested in artificial intelligence — the concept of building a computer that can actually reason on its own, rather than simply make computations at an incredibly rapid speed. And the problem there is that despite all we know about the brain, we still have no real concept of how the process of original thought takes place. It very quickly became obvious to me that until we understood the process in the human brain, we couldn’t hope to duplicate it in a machine. And yet, we want machines that can think like people.”
“And you found the answer,” Marsh said, his voice tight.
Torres ignored his tone. “I found the answer. It seemed to me that since we couldn’t make a machine that could think like a man, perhaps we could create a man who could compute like a machine.
“A man with the memory capacity of a computer.
“The implication was obvious, and though the technology was not there ten years ago, it is today. The answer seemed to me to involve installing a high-capacity microprocessor inside the brain itself, giving the brain access to massive amounts of information, and enormous computational abilities, while the brain itself provides the reasoning circuits that are not yet feasible.”
“And did you do that?” Marsh asked.
Torres hesitated, then shook his head. “The risks seemed to me to be entirely too great, and the stakes too high. I had no idea what the results might be. That’s when I began work on the project of which Alex is the end result.” He smiled thinly. “It’s no accident that the Institute for the Human Brain is in the heart of Silicon Valley, you know. All our work is highly technical, and extremely expensive. And we have very little to show for it, despite all those articles out in the lobby.” Marsh seemed about to interrupt him, but Torres held up a restraining hand. “Let me finish. As I said, my work is highly technical, and very expensive, but this is one area of the country that has an abundance of money available to just such work. And so I took my proposed solution to the problem to certain companies and venture capitalists, and managed to intrigue them to the point where they have been willing to fund my research. And what my research has been, for the last ten years, is nothing more or less than reducing the monitoring and operation of every system in the human body to language a computer can understand, and then programming that information into microprocessors.”
“If it’s true,” Marsh breathed, “that’s quite incredible.”
“Not quite as incredible as it is useless,” Torres replied. “At first glance, it might seem quite marvelous, with all kinds of applications, but I’m afraid that isn’t the case. Usually, when a system goes bad in the human body, the dysfunction is caused by disease, not a failure of the brain. And good as my programs are, they can only function with healthy systems. What they don’t need is a healthy brain.
“You see,” he said quietly, “I decided years ago that I couldn’t experiment on someone who had a normal life ahead of him. I was only willing to work with a hopelessly brain-damaged case — someone who would unquestionably die unless I tried installing my processors — but whose body was basically intact. And that meant that the memory and computation chips wouldn’t be enough. So I spent ten years developing all the systems-maintenance programs as well.”
Raymond Torres opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a Lucite block, which he pushed across the desk to Marsh. “If you’re interested,” he said, “that block contains duplicates of the processors that are in Alex’s brain.”
Marsh picked up the block of Lucite — only a couple of inches on a side — and gazed into the transparent plastic. Floating in the apparent emptiness were several tiny specks, each no bigger than the head of a pin. “Those,” he heard Torres saying, “are the most powerful microprocessors available today. They’re a new technology, which I don’t pretend to understand, and they can operate perfectly on the tiny amount of current generated by the human body. Indeed, I’m told they require less electrical energy than the brain itself.”
Finally, as he stared at the tiny chips held prisoner in the lucite, Marsh began to believe what Raymond Torres had been telling him, and when he finally shifted his gaze to the other doctor, his eyes were brimming with tears.
“Then Alex was right,” he said, his voice unsteady. “When he told me last night that he thought maybe he hadn’t really survived the operation — that maybe he really was dead — he was right.”
Torres hesitated, then reluctantly nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. “Certainly, in one sense, at least, Alex is dead. His body isn’t dead, and his intellect isn’t dead, but almost certainly, his personality is dead.”
“No!” Ellen was on her feet, and she took a step toward Torres’s desk. “You said he was all right! You said he was getting better!”
“And part of him is,” Torres replied. “Physically and mentally, he’s been getting better every day.”
“But there’s more,” Ellen protested. “You know there’s more. He … he’s starting to remember things—”
“Which is exactly why I wanted him to come back here,” Torres said smoothly. Until this moment, he had told them the truth.
Now the lies would begin.
“He’s remembering things that he couldn’t possibly remember at all. Some of them are things that happened — if they happened at all — long before he was born.”
“But he is remembering things,” Ellen insisted.
Torres only shook his head. “No, he’s not,” he said flatly. “Please listen to me, Ellen. It’s very important that you understand what I’m about to tell you.” Ellen looked uncertain, then lowered herself back into her chair. “There are some things you still aren’t accepting, and although I know it’s difficult, you have to accept them. First, Alex has no memories of what happened before his accident. All he knows is what was programmed into the memory banks I installed during the operation, together with whatever experiences he’s had since then. Basically, when he woke up he had a certain amount of data that were readily accessible to him. Vocabulary, recognition of certain images — that sort of thing. Since then, he has been taking in data and processing it at the rate of a very large computer. Which is why,” he went on, turning to Marsh, “he appears to have the intelligence of a genius.” Torres picked up the little block of lucite and began toying with it. “What he actually has is total recall of everything he’s come in contact with since the operation, plus the ability to do calculations in his head at an astonishing rate, with total accuracy, plus the very human ability to reason. Whether that makes him a genius, I don’t know. Frankly, what Alex is or is not is for other people to decide, not me.
“But he has limitations, as well. The most obvious one is his lack of emotional response.” For the first time that afternoon, Torres picked up his pipe, and began stuffing it with tobacco. “We know a great deal about emotions. We even know from which areas of the brain certain of them spring. Indeed, we can create some of them by stimulating certain areas of the brain. But in the end, they aren’t anything I’ve been able to write programs for, which is why Alex is totally lacking them. And that,” he added, almost incidentally, “brings us back to the reason why I’ve told you all this at all.” As he lit his pipe, his eyes met Marsh’s, and held them steadily. “If you accept the truth of what I’ve been telling you, then I think you’ll agree that Alex is quite incapable of murder.”