"There are no straight lines in nature," Flattery said.
Bickel sighed. What now? he wondered. "If you've got something to say, spit it out."
"Consciousness is a type of behavior," Flattery said.
"Agreed."
"But the roots of our behavior are buried so far away in the past we can't get at them directly."
"Emotion again, eh?" Bickel demanded.
"No," Flattery said.
"Instinct," Prudence said.
Flattery nodded. "The kind of genetic imprint that tells a chicken how to crack out of its shell."
"Emotions or instinct, what's the difference?" Bickel asked. "Emotions are produced by instinct. Are you, still saying we can't bring the Ox to consciousness unless it has instincts-cum-emotions?"
"You know what I'm saying," Flattery said.
"It has to love us," Bickel said. He chewed at his upper lip, caught again by the beautiful simplicity of the suggestion. Flattery was right, of course. Here was a loose rein that could satisfy the fail-safe requirements. It controlled without galling.
"It has to have an autonomic system of emotional reactions," Flattery said. "The system has to respond with a set of physical effects of which the Ox is... aware."
Emotion, Bickel thought. The characteristic that gives us our sense of person, the thing that summates personal judgments. A process in capsule form that can occur out
of sequence.
Here was a break with all machine concepts of time - emotion as process, an audacious way of looking at time.
"There's nothing of ourselves about which we can be objective," Bickel said, "except our own physical responses. Remember? It's what Dr. Ellers was always saying."
Flattery thought back to Ellers, UMB's chief of psych. "Bickel is 'purpose,' the force that will give direction to your search," Ellers had said. "You have substitutes, of course. Accidents do happen. But you've nothing honed as fine as Bickel. He's a creative discoverer."
A "creative discoverer" - the failures of all who went before him... all of those clone-brothers, all was preparation for this assault on the problem. If we succeed we survive, and if we fail...
And Bickel was thinking: Emotion. How do we symbolize it and program for it? What does the body do? We're inside, in direct contact with whatever the body's doing. That's the only thing we can really be objective about. What does the body...
"It has to have a completely interfunctioning body," Bickel said, seeing the whole problem and answer as an abrupt revelation. "It has to have a body that's gone through trauma and crises." He stared at Flattery. "Guilt, too, Raj. It has to have guilt."
"Guilt?" Flattery asked, and wondered why the suggestion made him feel angry and half fearful. He started to object, grew conscious of a rhythmic rasping. He thought at first it was a malfunctioning alarm, realized then it was Timberlake. The life-systems engineer had reclasped himself in his action couch cocoon. He was asleep - snoring.
"Guilt," Bickel said, holding his attention on Flattery.
"How?" Prudence asked.
"In program engineering terms," Bickel said, "we must install trapping functions, inner alarm systems - monitors that interrupt operations according to the functional needs of the entire system."
"Guilt's an artificial emotion; it has nothing to do with consciousness," Flattery objected.
"Fear and guilt are parent and child. You can't have guilt without fear."
"But you can have fear without guilt," Flattery said.
"Can you?" Bickel asked. And he thought: It's the Cain-and-Abel syndrome. Where'd the race pick that one up?
"Not so fast," Prudence said. "Are you suggesting we install... . that we make this... Ox afraid?"
"Yeah."
"Absolutely not!" Flattery said. He had his couch exerciser going, but shut it off, turned to stare at Bickel.
"Our creature already has a large, fast memory," Bickel said. "It has fixed memory - if you discount our addressing problems, which aren't interfering with function at any rate - and I'll bet this thing has a protected area of memory that's even ready with illusions when they're necessary for self-protection."
"But fear!" Flattery said.
"This is the other side of your coin, Raj. You want it to love us? Okay. Love's a kind of need, eh? I'm willing to give it a need for external program sources - that's us, you understand? I'll leave the necessary gaps in its makeup that only we can fill. It'll have emotions, but that means an unlimited spectrum of emotions, Raj. The spectrum includes fear."
Guilt and fear, Prudence thought. Raj will have to face it. She looked at Bickel, seeing the filmed-over, withdrawn look in his eyes.
"Pleasure and pain," Bickel muttered. He focused on Prudence, the sleeping Timberlake, on Flattery - each in turn. Did they see that the Ox had to be able to reproduce itself, too?
Prudence felt her pulse quickening, tore her attention away from Bickel. She put a hand to her temple, checked the pulse there, related this to her quickened breathing, to body temperature, to hungers, to stage of fatigue and awareness. The chemical experiments on her body were giving her an acute awareness of her bodily functions, and that awareness told her she needed chemical readjustment.
"Well, Raj?" Bickel said.
I must compose myself, Flattery thought, turning back onto his couch. I must appear natural and calm. He kept his eyes away from the false panel on his repeater board. Under that panel lay death and destruction. Bickel was growing exceedingly alert to the tiniest clues. Flattery marked the quiet green of the flashboard, the ticking of relays through the graph counters. Everything about the ship felt soothing and ordinary - all systems functioning.
Yet, deep inside himself, Flattery felt knotted up, like an animal poised at the sound of the hunter.
Pleasure and pain. It could be done, of course: the gradual orientation toward a goal, then denial... interference... removal....rustration... threat of destruction.
"I'm going back to the shop," Bickel said. "The way to do this is pretty clear, isn't it?"
"Perhaps to you," Flattery said.
"There's no stopping," Prudence said, and hoped Flattery heard the implication: There's no stopping him.
"Go ahead," Flattery said. "Assemble your blocks of nerve-net simulators. But let us think long and hard before we tie your system into the full computer." He looked at Bickel. "Do you still contemplate this black box - white box experiment?"
Bickel merely stared at him.
"You know the danger," Flattery said.
Bickel felt elation, a breakthrough in some inner factor that had resisted him. The ship - its living organisms, its problems - all were like marionettes and marionette toys. The way out was so clear to him - he'd only hinted at it before - so clear. He could see the necessary schematics stacked in his mind, like transparencies piled one on another.
Four-dimensional construction, he reminded himself. We have to construct a net in depth that contains complex world-line tracks. It has to absorb nonsynchronous transmissions. It has to abstract discrete patterns out of the impulse oversend. The important thing is structure - not the material. The important thing is topology. That's the key to the whole damn problem!
"Prue, give me a hand," Bickel said. He glanced at the chronometer beside the Com-central board, looked at Timberlake. Let him sleep; Prue could help. She did neat electronics work - surgical in its exactness, clean and with minimal leads and tight couplings.
"We're going to need a coupling area for each group of multiple blocks," Bickel said, looking at Prudence. "I'm going to turn that job over to you while I build up the major block systems."