Bibliographic references cascaded out of my memory banks. A lot of research had been done about this process before we left Earth. Neural networking as a method of designing thinking machines had been in vogue since the late 1980s, but actually attempting to simulate a human mind had proved elusive. Still, promising results had been obtained at Johns Hopkins, at Sumitomo Electric, at the University of Waterloo.
None of these institutions had resources comparable to mine. I was the most sophisticated artificial quantum consciousness ever built. Surely what they had tried to do and failed at, I could attempt and succeed.
Most of the relevant research had been done by workers specializing in expert systems. They saw neural nets as a way of overcoming the problems with such simplistic devices. Oh, expert systems are all right as far as they go. I incorporate 1,079 of them myself. They deal well with rule-based determining and diagnosing, making them the ideal tool for identifying species of trees or predicting the outcome of horse races.
But when a human tackles a really tough problem, he or she brings a wealth of experience in all sorts of areas to solving it. A perfect example comes from a story Aaron once recounted to Kirsten. When he complained of slight breathing difficulties, a tickling cough with phlegm at the back of his throat, his doctor in Toronto knew immediately what was wrong. Aaron had mentioned to him that he had moved a few months before—only a matter of a couple of kilometers. The doctor happened to recognize the street names: one was just north of St. Clair Avenue; the other, just south. Without giving the matter any thought, Aaron had crossed the old shoreline of glacial Lake Iroquois, the forerunner of Lake Ontario, and was now living below the inversion layer that tended to hang over the bowl of downtown. His doctor knew about this because the doctor’s daughter was a geology student at U of T. The diagnosis had nothing to do with medical rules but, rather, was an application of the doctor’s life experience. He prescribed an immunosuppressive steroid that decreased Aaron’s phlegm production and tracheal edema until Aaron’s system acclimatized to the change in air quality.
Since there is no way of predicting which life experiences will result in leaps beyond logic, lucid thinking, inspiration, or intuition, the only way to have a true machine duplicate of a human expert would be to electronically clone the entire brain, rather than just deriving a set of rules. That’s the theory, anyway.
Time to put that theory to the test, I think.
Aaron’s last physical exam had been 307 days ago. Ten months. Close enough to a year that he shouldn’t notice that he was being summoned for another one prematurely. I ran a quick scan on the date. Three hundred and seven days ago was 4 December 2176. Did that date, or that date, plus or minus say five days, hold any significance for Aaron? Any reason he might recall it? The last thing I wanted him to say was something like, “It can’t be time for my physical again. I had my last one the day before Thanksgiving, remember?” I checked birthdays, holidays, anniversaries. None were close to the day on which he had had his physical last year. The program that kept the schedule for physicals used a standard T+ days mission clock, so editing a single byte would be enough to change the due date for Aaron. But whom to move to free up a slot for him? Ah, Candice Hogan, lawyer. She hated physical exams and certainly wouldn’t complain even if she noticed that hers was late in coming this year.
Aaron’s M. D. was Kirsten—that’s how they’d met, after all. Had she seen fit to transfer Aaron to another doctor’s patient list? No. Funny how humans are. They expend great efforts coming up with rules and regulations to govern their professions, but they love to ignore them. Kirsten apparently saw nothing wrong with remaining Aaron’s physician, despite their intimate relationship. Actually, given what I was going to have her do, there was a pleasing quality to that fact—an irony humans would call it.
Had Kirsten looked ahead to see who her patients were for the rest of the day? No, that file hadn’t been accessed yet— oh, shit. She was logging on now. I slapped a NETWORK BUSY/PLEASE WAIT message on her screen and quickly shuffled the file. Of course, the network was never busy, but I made a point of flashing that message at each crew member once every few months. Never hurts to keep one’s options open.
Kirsten drummed her fingers while she was held up, a kind of biological wait state, with her digital clock ticking, ticking, ticking. I cleared the screen, then brought up the file she had requested. There was Aaron’s name, scheduled for three hours from now. I tracked her eyes as they read the glowing alphanumerics, noting each time they snapped back to the right, meaning that she’d finished another line. When she got to line six, the one that listed Aaron, her telemetry did a little dance of surprise and a small smile creased her face.
My locator found Aaron sitting at a table in the apartment of his friend, Barney Cloak. Barney was Pamela Thorogood’s husband, but when Aaron and Diana had broken up, Barney had stayed loyal to Aaron. Also seated around the table besides Aaron and Barney were I-Shin Chang, Keiju Shimbashi, and Pavel Strakhovsky. The lights were dimmed—Barney had said this kind of ritual required a certain ambience. In the middle of the table was a bowl of potato chips. Aaron had a glass of Labatt’s Blue in front of him; Barney, a Budweiser; Keiju, a Kirin; I-Shin, a Tsing Tao; and Pavel, a Gorby. Each man held a hand of playing cards.
Aaron studied his cards for a moment, then said, “I’ll see your hundred million, and raise you another hundred million.” He pushed a stack of plastic chips in front of him.
Keiju looked into Aaron’s ambiguous eyes, green and blue and gray and brown. “You’re bluffing,” he said.
Aaron just smiled.
Keiju turned to Barney for support. “I think he’s bluffing.”
“Who knows?” said Barney with an amiable shrug. “Do a hypermedia skim on ‘poker-faced,’ and every second hit will be a reference to our boy Aaron here.”
Keiju nibbled on his lower lip. “Okay. I’m in. I see your”— he swallowed—“hundred million, and raise you”—he glanced at his small reserve of chips—“ten million.” He pushed plastic disks into the pot.
“I fold,” said I-Shin, laying down his cards.
“Me, too,” said Barney.
“My great-great-great grandpa was a communist,” said Pavel with a smile. “He used to say you could never tell when a Western”—he paused, then bowed toward Keiju and I-Shin— “or Eastern imperialist was lying.” He placed his cards on the table. “I’m out.”
All eyes, mine included, were on Aaron. His face was impassive, a statue’s countenance. “See,” he said at last, pushing chips into the pot. Then: “And raise.” He counted out red chips: five million, ten million, fifteen million, twenty million, twenty-five million.
Chang gave a low whistle. Despite the air-conditioning, perspiration beaded on Keiju Shimbashi’s brow. Finally he lay down his cards. “Fold.”
Aaron smiled. “As my grandfather the farmer used to say about his fields, weed ’em and reap.” He turned cards face up one at a time.
“You had shit,” said Keiju.
“Yup.”
“Well, you’ve cleaned me out.”
“That’s okay,” said Aaron. “I’ll settle for your firstborn son.”
Chang swept up all the cards and began his trademark four-handed shuffle.
“Aaron,” I said at last.
He was feeling good, perhaps for the first time in days. “Egad! The walls have ears!”
“Aaron, please excuse the interruption.”
“What is it, JASON?”
“I just wanted to remind you that you have an appointment for your annual physical examination in three hours, at 1700.”