Karl lifted the steel lid on the prep container and removed a transparent plastic cylinder. Martin took the cylinder from him and examined it briefly by eye. Medical nano past its prime betrayed a telltale rainbow sheen. This container was over a year old but still fresh, with the right grayish pink color. Martin returned the cylinder and Karl fitted it into the saline bottle. Gray clouds of prochines quickly dulled the crystalline liquid. Margery removed the cylinder when it was empty, inserted a nutrition vial and squeezed it into the saline while Erwin hooked up the tubes to Goldsmith’s neck entry. A simple clamp prevented the charged saline from flowing down the tube.
Carol and David released a second nanomachine cylinder into a second bottle of saline. These were prochines equipped with drugs; they would travel through the arm entry into the heart and bring the body’s metabolism slowly, cautiously down to deep dreamless neutral sleep, something the sedation fields could not do. The prochines also carried immune system buffers that would control reaction to the nanomachines when they entered at Goldsmith’s neck.
Carol hooked up the arm tube. She removed the clamp. Charged saline flowed into his arm.
“Reduce field strength to reference level,” Martin said. The control panel manager did so. Martin peered curiously at Goldsmith’s face, waiting for signs of narcosis. He lifted back an eyelid. “Give him five more minutes, then release the main charge.”
He backed away and glanced up at the gallery. Circled O with forefinger and thumb. Albigoni did not react.
“Cheerful man,” he muttered to Carol.
Carol followed him behind the curtain. “Lunch,” she suggested. “We can take at least an hour off. The others can monitor him.”
Martin sighed and looked at his slate. He shivered slightly with some pentup tension. “Now is as good a time as any.”
“The prober has to be in the proper state of mind,” she reminded him with a mother’s chiding voice. She looked at him intently. “Relaxed, clear thinking.”
“Faust was never relaxed,” he said. “He couldn’t afford to be.” He jerked his head in the direction of the gallery and noticed with some puzzlement that the glass had been opaqued. “Albigoni’s spooking me. He acts like a zombie.”
“You should talk to him before we go to lunch.”
Martin smiled abruptly, tool Carol by her shoulders and hugged her. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
“We’re a team,” Carol said, pushing back his hug gently. “Let’s go talk.”
They walked through the exit and up the stairs to the gallery. When they entered, Albigoni was in subdued conversation with Lascal and another man. Martin recognized him: Francisco Alvarez, grant and funding director for UC Southern Campuses. Now Martin understood; the glass had been blocked to prevent Alvarez from seeing into the theater below.
Alvarez smiled and stood. “Dr. Burke. Glad to meet you again.”
“It’s been a few years,” Burke said. They shook hands, Alvarez gripping lightly.
“I’m arranging for your funding,” Albigoni said, glancing up at Martin. His eyes were hooded, dark. “Tomorrow I’ll be meeting with the chief counsel for the President. I’m true to my word, Dr. Burke.”
“Never doubted it,” Burke said.
“I’m not even going to ask what’s going on here,” Alvarez said with a little laugh. “It must be important, if it involves the President.”
“Funding is always important,” Albigoni said. “You had something to say, Dr. Burke?”
Martin looked between the three for a moment, staggered by the connections and money involved in this simple scene. The President’s counsel. Perhaps next the Attorney General? A winding down of the investigation into the IPR’s alleged connections with Raphkind?
Carol touched his arm lightly.
“The process is started,” Martin said. “Everything will be ready by this time tomorrow. We have a lot of work to do between now and then but we can take a break, get ready for the main event.”
“I understand,” Albigoni said. “Mr. Alvarez and I have more things to discuss.”
Martin nodded. He and Carol backed away and Martin closed the gallery door behind them.
“Jesus, what arrogance, bringing Alvarez here,” Martin said as they walked up the rear stairs to ground level. He realized he was sweating and his neck was tense. “Maybe Albigoni controls him, too.”
“At least he’s functioning,” Carol said. “Albigoni, I mean.”
48
LitVid 21/1 A Net (David Shine, Evening Report): “The only news we have from AXIS may or may not be significant. A recently received analysis shows that at least three of the circular tower formations discovered by AXIS on Alpha Centauri B-2 are made up of mixes of minerals and organic materials, the minerals being calcium carbonate and aluminum and barium silicates, and the organic materials being amorphous carbohydrate polymers similar to cellulose found in terrestrial plant tissue. AXIS has told its Earth-based masters that, in its opinion, the towers may not be artificial structures…That is, not created by intelligent life. We’ve been given no clue as to how they might have been created.
“Will we suffer a kind of backlash of disappointment if it turns out that the circles of towers on B-2 are natural? Have we prepared ourselves, in the last few days, for a new age of wonder and challenge, when in fact it has only been a false alarm?
“As always, LitVid 21, interested in economic survival, has found a topic that might be of equal interest to our viewers…should the towers prove to be an enormous fizzle.
“Since LitVid 21 broadcast poems created by AXIS’s thinkers, protein and silicon based, our audience has become increasingly interested in what sort of ‘personality’ AXIS has. As we can no longer communicate effectively with AXIS, each round-trip signal taking over eight and a half years, we have to go to Jill, the advanced thinker which has as part of its duties the earthbound simulation of AXIS’s thinking processes.
“While its name is female, Jill is neither male nor female. According to designer and chief programmer Roger Atkins, Jill has the potential to become a fully integrated, self aware individual, but has not yet done so.”
Atkins (Interview clip): “When we began constructing the components that would go to make up Jill, some fifteen years ago, we thought that self awareness would follow almost naturally at some level of complexity. This has not proven to be the case. Jill is much more complex than any single human being, yet still it is not self aware. We know this because Jill finds no humor in a joke designed specifically to test self-awareness. This is the same joke we programmed into the original AXIS, an older less advanced thinker that is also in most respects as complex as a human being. That neither AXIS nor Jill perceive the joke is frankly a puzzle.
“When we began designing AXIS, over three decades ago, we thought we grasped at least the rudiments of what constitutes self awareness. We thought self awareness would arise from a concatenation of modeling of social behavior and self application of that modeling—that is, feedback loops. For our thinker systems, we believed that if a system could model itself, in the sense of creating a functioning, realtime or faster than realtime abstraction, self awareness would emerge. This seemed to have been a good explanation for the evolution of human self awareness.
“Our present thinking is that self awareness is not strictly a function of complexity, nor even of design as such; self-awareness may be a kind of accident, catalyzed by some internal or external event or process that we do not understand.