I buried my eyes in my hands: futile gesture, in a room already dark.
I glanced over at Robert. He kept his eyes on Joe without opening his mouth. He knew Joe would back off if the boss spoke up.
Hell if I would say anything, either.
“You know what we lacked before, don’t you?” said Meg, interjecting.
“Basic know-how,” he said.
“No-how, Joe. Whatever we have at any one time—that’s basic know-how. It isn’t something you can ever not have.” Meg spoke slowly yet with conviction and a steadiness, despite her partially nerveless lips, that brooked no interruption. “How can we ever lack what’s always there? What we needed was enabling technology. You know what that is. Like the telephone. The telephone is part of the enabling technology of the computer network.”
“I know about that but what about—”
“Right. The quest for the augmentation machine.”
“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t say that—”
“But it’s still on your mind and it’s still on ours. A simulated human mind. That’s what we want. And we still think the way to get it is by simulating the entire human. And we’re closer. We can do it. We can! Tony here’s our key.”
I held my breath.
Tony piped in. “It is the arrays of parallel processors that did it, just like they might make it possible to make a real augmentation machine,” he said to Joe, before Joe had a chance to recover his wits. “We needed them all because it’s the only way of constructing working DNA for a robot.”
“Not rabbit,” said Verry, with a smile.
“A rabbit and a robot. But the thing is, to model the macrocosm we had to—”
The words this kid used! He talked to Means too much.
“But your rabbit isn’t a robot!” Joe said.
“Says who?”
“Says me! What you’ve done is created a virtual rabbit, down to the DNA, with all your multiprocessors working like crazy to imitate what normal cells do; and it’s a simulation, not a robot, because your physical here-and-now rabbit is dependent on the computational power assembled outside your frigging rabbit Hocus! Because even if your cells are self-re-producing and diversifying to the point of creating an apparently living being, it’s still connected by an umbilical! It’s still computer-dependent! What I want to do—”
He stopped.
I cannot describe the sudden sense of tension—not a tension that arose then and there, but one that vanished: for around us had been the hovering and squeezing kind of tension never known to be there until its departure.
Joe had taken the bait and run.
“Every tool has a handle,” Robert said to me not long after we met. Nearly a decade ago, now. “By that I mean there’s an interface between us and the tool. You know what ‘interface’ means.”
“Sure as hell do,” I said, maybe more hotly than I intended. I had yet to make up my mind about this Mr. Means.
A man leaving middle age who about had it with everything, I had just emerged from a part of the hospital I never imagined existing: recovery and rehab.
Not from drugs.
Recovery from violence.
Rehabilitation from who I was.
From me.
Robert Means worked with the Virchco outfit that produced the testing program at St. Mary’s for social misfits of all stripes. They believed antisocial behavior often results from under-utilization.
People come into this world equipped with different arrays of abilities, inclinations, and talents. If they fall within the normal range, fine. If not, society may fail to use them.
One way to effect rehab, then: you devise radical new tests—in the case of Virchco, a V.R. system set of infinite-permutation routines. They make a stab at evaluating such elusive characteristics as imagination, flexibility, spatial perception, mental coordination, and adaptability to changing frames of reference. What else do you test for? Speed in comprehending complex situations? High thresholds of patience? Aptitude for character analysis? These, yes, and anything else you can think of—which suggests the utter impossibility of the task.
“You know, Fred,” Robert said, looking across the metal desk in the off-white room serving as his office in St. Mary’s, “I came here with only the faintest hope I’d find someone useful to my own work. But here you are. And you were practically under my nose. I would never have guessed.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “I mean, you’ve shown me I did OK—”
“Doing OK isn’t the point,” Robert said. “Anyone can do OK because we don’t have any standards for what’s OK and what isn’t. We aren’t working from some scale you have to score high on. I want the unexpected—so I guess you could say I’m looking for whatever I’m not looking for. I certainly wasn’t looking for you.”
I fidgeted. I had no idea why I should be in this office. I knew, however, that my initial resentment dissipated. I felt no anger. This interview had novelty.
Usually resentment grew—it always grew, no matter what I did— and turned gradually into nastiness.
It felt novel and right not to feel like a mean sonofabitch.
“Let me ask you this,” Robert said. “And I know this goes back a ways. A lot of years back. I’ve checked.”
I felt a hint of the knife-edge of bitterness, as if it rested against a tendon in my arm, ready to press and cut. I waited for what he would ask.
“Do you know why your parents thought you were mentally retarded?”
A red-flash of anger erupted briefly until I registered and considered and turned over for re-examination that one word in his question: thought. My parents thought I was mentally retarded.
A thousand answers sprang into my mind. All died within me, just as suddenly. All of them, except one:
“No,” I said.
“I have an idea. Want to hear it?”
I suddenly regarded the man opposite me with fear. He had transformed himself once already from an anonymous nobody good at devising gimmicks with a machine into a human being who had surprised me—startled me—by forcing me into revealing myself. I never revealed myself. Never. Hide is the word. Hide! Now he transformed again into a spectacled mystery who could peer into darkness. Time, and my mind: I regarded both as darknesses.
“Yes,” I said even as I cried inside— “No! No! No!”
Part of me ran away, down the hall, out the door, out into the sunlight outside St. Mary’s, screaming the whole time.
The rest of me stayed and heard out this man.
“You were delayed in a lot of things,” he said. “Extremely delayed. I won t list them all. But one was speaking. You were slow about that.”
Yes, I thought.
“When you finally talked, though, you did exactly as well as your peers. You fit right in. But by then you were already with other slow-Iearners.” Robert spoke in an odd way, with eyes slightly held wide and a tension around the muscles of the nostrils—I notice such things—that spoke of some kind of excitement, as though these thoughts he was expressing surprised and affected him, too. “And what was going on was exactly the opposite of being slow—you were tremendously fast. But no one knew it because you never showed it. In a way you didn’t have anything to show—because it wasn’t just our usual spoken language you were learning.”