"That's it," Timberlake said. "That's what hits me right in the pit of the stomach. We start out to build something and we don't know what it is we're building."
It's time to hit them with it, Flattery thought.
"You're wrong, Tim," Flattery said. "And so're you, John. Prudence does know what consciousness is, just as you do. She's a human being. Humans are the only creatures within our ken who can possibly know what consciousness is. Computers can't do that job; humans must."
"Then let her define it," Bickel said.
"Maybe she can't," Flattery said. "But she possesses it."
"A while back you were saying we might not have to define it," Prudence said, and she stared accusingly at Bickel.
"It's just damn poor engineering," Bickel said. "Copy the original and hope you get the same results. We can't be sure we're copying everything in the human model. What're we leaving out?"
He's frustrated and striking out, she thought. Now's the time to push, while Raj has him set up for me. "Okay, engineer, where do you think you're going with your field-theory idea?"
Bickel stared at her, realizing abruptly that she was deliberately pushing him. All right, I'll play her game, he thought. Am I supposed to be angry? No... that'd be too easy. The best attack comes from an unexpected quarter.
"Stretch yourself a bit, Prue, and try to follow what I'm saying," he challenged her. "The field-theory approach deals with three forces: first, you have the source of experience, the universe which inflicts itself upon us."
"That has to be deeply involved with the way your nervous system functions," she said. "Don't try to teach me my specialty."
"I wouldn't think of it. And you're right. That's the second element: there has to be someone who experiences that universe."
"And third?"
"Third, you have the really tricky one. This is the relationship between that someone and all of this neural raw material which we call experience. This relationship, this third-order phenomenon, that's our field."
"The self," she said.
"A field," Bickel countered.
She shrugged. "Huxley's 'spatio-temporal cage' with its 'confused swarm of ideas.'"
"Yeah, Huxley said the conscious self had to derive from memory, but he was just playing with words because he was frightened by what lay beyond the words."
"And you're not?" Flattery demanded.
"You'd better listen closer," Bickel said. "When you try to say that a conscious self derives only from our memory function, you're identifying the someone who experiences with that which supplies the experience."
"Memory is experience," Prudence agreed.
"We have to focus on this third-order relationship," Bickel said.
"The total field that's greater than the sum of its parts," she said.
She's ready for her shock, Bickel thought. For that matter, so's Raj.
"You self-satisfied medicos give me a pain. You say only humans are conscious. From Raj, that's sacrilege. From you, Prue, that's stupidity. You see one corner of the spectrum and immediately say you know what the whole universe of light is like. Never once has either one of you asked: Am I really conscious?"
Flattery felt an unexplainable pain across his chest. The console in front of him blurred for a heartbeat. Then he had himself under control.
Back at UMB, they laughed and quoted Edgar Allan Poe, Flattery thought. They had said individual humans might not have Poe's "organ of analysis," but that a whole society could create such an organ out of one of its members. Had they realized what a dangerous monster they were creating? What could you hide from Bickel if he turned his attention to it? That was what Prue meant, of course, when she cautioned against underestimating Bickel. But had the UMB manipulators known what a knight they had loosed among the pawns?
Perhaps they realized - at least unconsciously - when they set me to watch over him, Flattery thought.
"You try to resolve the basic question into smaller and smaller parts," Bickel said. "Smaller and smaller labels. But that's just avoiding the issue."
"Are we conscious?" Prudence whispered, rolling the thought over and over in her mind.
And she thought of her experience with the marijuana derivative, THC - tetrahydrocannabinol. She'd sought an anti-ataraxic, a selective stimulator of consciousness - something to hold the darkness at bay in a very special manner. But the instant she'd neared the stimulation experience, darkness had spilled over all the edges of her awareness.
Adrenochrome, she thought.
It was a sudden and explosive thought, as of something that had crouched in her path and leaped out at her.
Adrenochrome... nitrogen to CH3 If she inverted it and gave it a common CH3 bond with one of the THC forms... Ahhh, that was very like some of the deadly ones. But in an extremely small dosage... Would it get through the blood-brain barrier? And adrenochrome was one of the hallucinogens. What of that?
"You get your fingernails over the ledge," Bickel was saying, "and you haven't yet raised your eyes to the lip - you can only see the dim reflection of light, but you lie and tell those around and below you that you can see to the horizon."
As though his words unlocked a door, the memory of a dream flooded through Prudence. She had dreamed it... sometime during a long sleep... sometime when...
In hyb!
She had dreamed it in the hybernation tank!
In the dream, there had been others around her, but she had been rejected by them. The others built a low wall and taunted her to climb it. But each time she tried, the others raised the wall higher.
Higher and higher.
Until she no longer even attempted it.
Finally, the others had ignored her, but she had heard them laughing and talking on the other side of the wall.
Remembering that dream, Prudence looked at Bickel and understood the thing he had probably seen from the beginning. The problem of creating an artificial consciousness was the problem of consciousness itself. It was an enormous structure, like a tall cliff (or a wall) that they must climb. It loomed over them, dour and black - with only the taunting hint of light at the top.
"You did that deliberately to make me feel small," she accused.
"Welcome to the club," Bickel said.
"What're you saying?" Timberlake demanded. "Are you trying to say that even if we build an analogue of a human, we still might not achieve this... this consciousness?"
"Let's take another look at what happened to the ship brains," Bickel said. "What's the basic command they were supposed to obey?"
"Remain conscious and alert at all times," Timberlake said. "But, hell, if you're saying they succumbed to fatigue, that's nonsense. They were buffered against all -"
"Not fatigue," Bickel said. "I'm just wondering, what if they took that order literally, that order to remain conscious?"
"The degree of consciousness," Prudence mused.
"Threshold," Flattery said and there was wonder in his voice.
"Yes," Prudence said. "A hyperconscious subject has a low threshold. Impulses pass into his awareness with ease. You're suggesting the OMC brains couldn't handle hyperconsciousness."
"Something like that."
"Look," she said, "the assault of nerve impulses on the human... consciousness..." She looked defensively at Bickel. "Well, what else are we going to call it?"
"Okay," Bickel said. "Go on."
She stared at him a moment. "This assault is constant, gigantic. The impulses are always present. They swarm around you. There has to be a limiting factor, a threshold. Impulses have to pass a certain threshold before you grow... aware of them."