"So your white box didn't kill you," Flattery said. "Too bad. All you did was kill the ship."
Bickel shook his head, still unable to speak.
The stillness of the ship had awakened him from a sleep so deep he could still feel the fog of it clinging to his mind. A profound weariness dragged at his muscles. Movement sent odd aches angling through his body, stirring this terrible torpor.
The first thing to catch his attention as he awakened had been the mobius energizer, his clever installation to give the Ox a constant source of energy reference. A fan of gray char crackled from its broken seals and its motors lay silent. The virtually frictionless motors and spools, the thousand-year units, were blobs of fused plastic and metal.
It had taken several minutes for him to gather enough energy to move close to the unit and study it. His mind had labored over the simplest observations - charred insulation on the power leads and in the timing circuits....ape spools twisted out of line.Slowly, it came to him: something had altered the power to the motors... and their synchronization. Something had tried to change the timing of this pulse... and its intensity.
Forcing the movement of every muscle, he had unplugged the unit, stumbled and crawled with it back to Com-central. The dead stillness of the ship pressed him as he moved.
Raj... Tim... somebody with his mind turned on... has to see this, he thought.
But now that he had made it to Com-central, he couldn't find the energy to speak.
Timberlake recovered the fused energizer unit from the deck, studied it.
Flattery crossed to Bickel's side, felt the pulse at his temple, lifted an eyelid, looked at his lips and tongue. Presently, he stooped to the med'-kit, removed a slapshot and pressed it against Bickel's neck.
Energy began to burn through Bickel's veins.
Flattery pressed a squeeze bottle against his lips. "Here, drink this."
Something cool and tingling poured down Bickel's throat. Flattery removed the squeeze bottle.
Bickel found a husky half-whisper that would serve him as voice. "Tim," he rasped.
Timberlake looked at him.
Bickel nodded toward the energizer, began explaining what had happened.
Flattery interrupted: "Do you think the black box - white box transfer was completed?"
Bickel examined the question. He could feel his mind clearing under the pressure of the stimulant - and there in his memory was the sensation that the ship was his body, that he was a creature of hard metal and thousands of sensors.
"I... think so," he said.
Timberlake held up the block of plastic. "But... it destroyed this and... apparently shut itself down."
A thought began stirring in Bickel's mind and he said: "Could this be a message to us... a kind of ultimate message?"
"God telling us we've gone too far," Flattery muttered.
"No!" Bickel snapped. "The Ox telling us... something."
"What?" Timberlake asked.
Bickel tried to wet his lips with his tongue. His mouth felt so dry. His lips ached.
"When nature transfers energy," Bickel said, "almost all that transfer is unconscious." He fell silent a moment. This was such a delicate plane of conceptualizing. It had to be handled so gently. "But most of the energy transfers for all the enormous amount of data in the Ox-computer is routed through master programs... and total consciousness would turn all of them on, force the system as a whole to suppress some while letting others through. It'd be like riding herd on billions of wild animals."
"You gave it too much consciousness?" Timberlake asked.
Bickel looked at the transceiver panel of the Accept And Translate system beside his own action couch.
Timberlake turned, followed the direction of Bickel's stare.
Prudence stirred and moaned. Flattery bent to her.
But Timberlake ignored them, beginning to see the direction of Bickel's thoughts. The ship was dying, but here was hope.
"All the master programs dealing with translation of symbols are monitored through feedback loops linked to the AAT," Timberlake said. "Symbols!"
"Remember," Bickel said, "that impulses going out from the human central nervous system have that additional integration/modulation factor added to them - synergy. An unconscious energy transfer."
Flattery, kneeling beside Prudence, wondered why he could bring only part of his awareness to bear on ministering to her. The conversation between Timberlake and Bickel electrified him.
Something was added to impulses going out from the central nervous system.
The thought boiled in Flattery's mind, and he had to force his attention onto Prudence, pressing a stimulant shot against her neck.
An addition. Gestalt addition.
To be addible, qualities had to have sufficient similarity. Otherwise, how could human sense take two superimposed sensations of a color and say one was a more intense version of the color than the other? What made one green more intense than another - to the senses? Increase in intensity had to be a form of addition.
"It could be in the axon collaterals of the Ox's high-speed convergence fibers," Bickel said.
Flattery sank back on his heels, waiting for the stimulant to work on Prudence.
Bickel's right, he thought. If you superimposed a sufficiently rapid convergence of sense data, that itself could be interpreted as intensification. One of the images would contain more bits than the other.
But bits of what? All this didn't account for the way data overlapped in the human consciousness... awareness...
Flattery looked up at Bickel and Timberlake. They appeared lost in their own thoughts.
Prudence said: "Fmmmsh."
Almost automatically, Flattery put a hand to her temple, checking her pulse.
When I search my memory, Flattery thought, I find data separated against a background. Whatever that background is, consciousness operates against it. That background is what gives consciousness its size and reference - its dimension.
"The Ox's sense organs were modeled on ours but with a wider range," Timberlake said.
Bickel nodded. "The differences," he said. And he remembered the nightmare quality of those superimposed and merging globes of radiation.
"How about all that contact with the hybernating humans and livestock in the tanks?" Timberlake asked. "Has any woman ever carried that many... children... in just that way?"
"If consciousness results from combining sensations," Bickel said.
"Of course it does!" Timberlake said.
"Very likely;" Bickel said. "And it can receive and discriminate across the entire radiation spectrum. You can't say it hears or sees or smells... or feels. Those are just different forms of radiation."
"And the combinations could produce strange sense qualities, ones we can't even visualize," Timberlake said.
"They do," Bickel whispered, remembering.
"But it's dead," Flattery said. "It... refused to live." He looked up at them while still keeping a check on Prudence's return to consciousness.
"It's not like a human, though," Bickel said. "If we can find the answer - why it turned itself off - why it sent us this message..."
"You'd turn it back on?" Flattery asked.
"Wouldn't you?" Timberlake demanded.
"Are you forgetting how it turned vicious?" Flattery asked. "You were there with me... trapped."
We're playing a kind of blind man's bluff, Bickel thought. We know something's out there - something useful and something dangerous. We grope for it and try to grasp it and describe it, but Raj is right. We don't know if what we get will be the useful thing or the monster - the tool or the Golem.
"But it'll go beyond our consciousness, beyond our abilities," Timberlake said.
"Exactly," Flattery said.
"It contains an infinite progression of shades of consciousness, all within that new form of awareness," Bickel said. "We've built a kind of ultimate alien here. Raj's question is as good as yours. Should we turn it on? Can we turn it on?"