Flattery glared at Bickel. He felt that the man was using real words and that communication was intended, but all the meanings slipped and slithered through his mind without making connection.
Prudence felt Bickel's words lifting her. There came an instant in which the universe turned upon one still point that was herself. The feeling shifted: self no longer was confined within her. As she gave up the self, clarity came. Flattery's words returned to her: "There's nothing concerning ourselves about which we can be truly objective except our physical responses."
The chemical experiments on her own body had never offered a real chance to solve their problem, but they had provided a ground for understanding her own identity. The hope of more had been illusory... because the experiments could not be conducted simultaneously on every occupant of the Tin Egg - their isolated world.
We share unconsciousness! she thought.
And she realized this must be the true reason the hyb tanks were filled with sleeping humans. Somewhere along the line, Project had seen that necessity. The umbilicus crew had to have a minimal ground of shared unconsciousness upon which to stand. They had to have a reference point, a tiny island in the vast dark which they could share with whatever they might produce out of their neuron fibers, and Eng multipliers. They'd needed a ground upon which to stand before they could reach up tall.
The mirror cannot reflect itself, she thought.
"Hypnotized," Bickel said. "We accept it as normal because it's virtually the only form of consciousness we've ever seen. You've watched the Earth video. You wouldn't expect an idiot to be fooled by the commercials, but that rhythmic hammering, that repetition..."
"Half dead," Prudence said. "Zombies."
She said, "Zombies," Flattery thought. Her voice frightened him.
Bickel saw the alertness spread through her eyes, the awakening.
"We should've thought of the AAT when the thing came alive during reception from UMB," Bickel said.
"You see what has to be done?" Prudence asked. "The energizer -"
"Stimulator," Bickel said.
"Stimulator," she said. "It has to be part of the AAT's input."
"Slack lines," Bickel said. "You can't hold the reins too tightly because the signals have multiple functions. They need room to spread!"
Timberlake looked from one to the other. He felt a sense of dullness lifting from his mind. Slack lines... sensory modules.
Symbols!
Timberlake's memory shot back to their conversation about the energizer. "All the master programs dealing with translation of symbols are monitored through feedback loops linked to the AAT." He heard his own voice replaying in his mind.
Symbols!
The whole form of their problem arrayed itself in Timberlake's memory with the sudden force of something thrown at him. Problem and solution set themselves up as a physical arrangement and he saw the nerve-nets they had built all arrayed as a series of triangular faces with a Mobius twist - prisms of cell triangles interlaced and marching with their energy flows through infinite dimensions, forming sense data and memory images outside conventional space, storing bits and altering relationships in limitless dimensional extensions.
Bickel saw the vitality flowing into Timberlake, said: "Think of the AAT, Tim. Remember what we were saying?"
Timberlake nodded. The AAT. It received hundreds of duplicates of the same message compressed into the modulated laser burst. It averaged out the blanks and distortions, filtered for noise, compared for probable meaning on the doubtful bits, fed the result into a vocoder and produced it at an output as intelligible sound.
"It closely approximates what we do when we hear someone say something to us... then repeat it to check if we heard correctly," Timberlake said.
"You're all forgetting something," Flattery said.
They turned, saw Flattery at his own action couch, his hand on his own repeater console. A single red light had come alive there.
Flattery stared from Bickel to Prudence to Timberlake, seeing the unnatural brilliance in their eyes. Madness! And the deep color in their faces, their sense of excitement.
"Raj, wait," Bickel said. He spoke soothingly, watching Flattery's hand poised over a key beneath that single red light.
I should've known there'd be another trigger, Bickel thought.
CHAPTER 31
Mundane existence is the source of renewed suffering. The human goal is to attain release from the bondage of material existence and, achieving release, to unite with the Supreme Self.
FOR A LONG, pulsing moment after Flattery spoke, they all gazed at that red button: the trigger of their destruction. They all knew this thing. Flattery's intrusion had ignited a mutual awareness. They were supposed to accept this moment of oblivion. But something new had happened on this venture.
"A few more seconds of life aren't important," Bickel said. He held up a hand, hesitant. "You can... wait for just a few seconds."
"You know I have to do this," Flattery said.
Even as he spoke, Flattery savored the "Ahhhhh" of suspense which charged this moment with an electrical sensation. It filled the air around them like ozone.
"You have control of the situation," Bickel said. His glance flickered toward the red switch with Flattery's hand poised to touch it. "The least you can do is hear what I have to say."
"We can't turn this thing loose upon the universe," Flattery said.
Timberlake swallowed, glanced down at Prudence. How odd, he thought, that we should die so soon after coming alive.
"How is it, Raj," Bickel asked, "that we can explain more about the unconscious networks of the human body than we can about the conscious?"
"You're wasting time," Flattery said.
"But the thing's dead," Bickel said.
"I have to be sure," Flattery said.
"Why can't you be sure after hearing what John has to say?" Prudence asked.
She looked at Bickel to draw Flattery's attention there. Two lights had begun blinking on the main computer console behind Flattery.
"It's a paradox," Bickel said. "We're asked to discard logical positivism while maintaining logic. We're asked to find a cause-and-effect system in a sea of probabilities where enormously large systems are based on even larger systems which are based on greater systems yet."
Flattery looked at him, caught by the trailing ends of Bickel's thoughts. "Cause and effect?" he asked.
"What happens if you push that key?" Bickel asked. He nodded to the trigger beneath Flattery's hand.
Prudence held her breath, praying Flattery would not turn. More lights were winking on the main computer console above Timberlake's couch. She couldn't say why the lights gave her hope, but the evidence of life in the ship...
"If I push this key," Flattery said, "an action sequence will be alerted in the computer." He glanced back at the winking lights. "You'll notice that part of the computer is becoming active. These circuits -" he returned his attention to Bickel "- have extra buffering and emergency power. The master program set off by this key instructs the computer to destroy itself and the ship - opening all the locks, exploding charges in key places."
"Cause and effect," Bickel said. And he marveled at how automatic Flattery's movements appeared. A zombie. "Cause and effect doesn't square with consciousness," he said.
A fascinating idea, Flattery thought.
"If any subsequent action proceeds with absolute and immediate causality from the sequence of past actions, then there can be no conscious influence of behavior," Bickel said. "Think of a row of dominoes falling. The human will power - the muscle and arm of our consciousness - couldn't decide what behavior to use because that behavior would all have been predetermined by a long line of preceding cause and effect."