They sat and looked him over while he braced himself. Fortunately, they, like he, had more important things on their minds than Ariel’s ID tags.
“I understand that Korolenko has told you a little about memory restoration,” Dr. Powell said.
Derec remembered an exchange from an earlier visit. He nodded. “Memory traces are not memory. Yes.”
“Quite so. A memory trace is the synapse-the nerve connection in the brain-that leads to the memory, which is stored in chemical form. It is these synapses that are being erased by the neurotoxin of the plague. The actual memories remain untouched.”
They looked at him. If only you knew how much I know about this; he thought. “Right,” he said. “But since their addresses are unknown-to put it in computer jargon-the memories are as lost as if the records had been wiped.”
“Almost,” said Dr. Li. “There are ghost memories flitting about the patient’s mind, and many little things will jolt a few of the memories loose.”
“Smell is one of the subtlest and most powerful memory keys,” said Dr. Powell, nodding.
Derec knew. “Yes.”
“So. In what we loosely call a memory restoration, we merely supply new synapses as nearly identical to the old as possible.”
“And in the functioning of the new memory traces,” Derec said, parroting what he’d been told, “the patient reactivates the old chemical memories.”
“Quite so. The more accurate and detailed the new memory traces are, the more complete not only the restoration of the memories, but the restoration of the patient’s original personality. I hope you can see that. “
It was an angle that had never occurred to him. He supposed he had the same basic personality as ever: pragmatic, problem-solving, not given to abstract thought, not artistic or poetic. An equable temperament. The engineering mind.
Now that he thought of it, though, perhaps his personality was different. He had known Ariel in his former life. He must have had strong feelings about her. He did again. Not still -again.For if he had not met her since his memory loss, and had not continuously been practically in solitary confinement with her, he might well not have felt that way about her again.
His parents, for instance. He no longer felt about them as he once must have done. His friends-all those parts of his personality were gone. If he acquired new friends, his emotional responses would be much the same, of course. His personality had not changed in any basic way, or so he supposed. He did not seem very strange to Ariel. Still, he was a new and different person from the old Derec, whatever his name had been.
Perhaps Ariel was right; perhaps it was a form of death.
Yet-”If the memory traces are close enough to the original-?”
“Ideally, it would be like copying a program into a blank positronic brain,” said Dr. Li. “The second robot would, for all practical purposes, become the old one.”
“We always explain what’s been done to them,” Derec said absently.
“Yes. But if the original was destroyed-” Derec frowned. “-the new one would, for all intents and purposes, be the same one in a new body.”
True, it was not unlike shifting a positronic brain to a new robotic body. Derec had an uneasy flash. On Robot City there had been an accidental death, of a boy called David, which Derec and Ariel had investigated for the robots. This David had looked just like him
He usually shrugged that fact off, but now he was jolted. Maybe the other was the duplicate-or was it himself?
“In a human, of course, it is not quite so simple,” said Dr. Powell, not noticing his jolted expression. “We could activate a significant fraction of the locked memories without reactivating the old personality. It’s a matter of knowing which memories are important to the patient.”
“How close can we come?” Derec asked.
“It depends on how much we know. The robots are, of course, recording and analyzing everything she says, and there’s a tendency to relive the most important memories first and most often, till they’re gone. So we’re developing a good sketch, too crude to be called a diagram.”
Derec nodded. “That’s where you need my help.”
“Quite so. You know her better than we, or the robots, can hope to.”
“Not well enough, I’m afraid,” said Derec steadily, wishing for some of that tranquilizer they were keeping Ariel on. “I’ve only known her for a few weeks.”
And already married,their expressions said. Spacer morals. Derec didn’t enlighten them. “I can go into a lot of detail about our time together, but before that…she was a very private person.”
Again, their expressions spoke for them: Spacers lived alone, on the surface, surrounded only by robots, and had few human contacts……Not true, but try to explain. Besides, he’d had his own quota of chauvinistic nonsense about Earthers to lose.
“Whatever you can do, you must do,” Dr. Li said heavily.
“Uh…well…I can’t,” Derec said lamely.
If he mentioned his amnesia, they’d be allover him. The question of their identities would arise in a way he couldn’t duck. The Terries would certainly be called in, and the Spacer embassy at the port would be queried. The whole house of cards would come down-next thing you knew, they’d have learned about Dr. Avery-and Robot City.
That secret must be kept at all costs.
“Why not?” Dr. Powell barked.
“It’s…a matter of privacy, sir.”
“Oh.” Greatly mollified. Spacers! “Well, there’s a lot more than you could do sitting here…why don’t you take all the material we have with you, go home, and do your dictating there?”
Derec had been so used to having First Law-driven robots intruding on his life that he was startled by this easy acquiescence. A robot wouldn’t let anything be put into Ariel’s head without checking it over first
“And the memory traces? Will they be kept private?”
The doctors looked at each other. “Well, they have to be coded,” Dr. Li began.
Dr. Powell said, “They use a technique modified from one used to implant synapses in positronic brains. Of course that can’t be used on human brains, but it’s based on the same idea, as it were. I don’t know the full details, myself -”
“But it’s a matter of coding,” said Dr. Li. “We’re having a specialist come in from the Mayo. If he could teach you-perhaps you could code the more private portions…?”
It took several conversations and a conference before it was decided to let Derec attempt coding memory traces for Ariel. His education stood him in good stead; he had the necessary background to do the work. Spacer! said the expressions again, this time with approval. Spacer education in robotics and computers in general was notoriously the best.
The work called for the use of a good computer, and with some trepidation he revealed the existence of R. David during the conference.
“Of course,” Dr. Powell said. “A Spacer would naturally have a robot in his apartment.”
They seemed to take it quite for granted, and to be a little amused by it.
“Scots sleeping with bagpipes,” someone muttered at the back of the room, a reference that sounded so funny that Derec meant to look it up, but forgot. He didn’t think of it again till weeks later…far too late to ask.
So, once he was instructed in the technique-not simple, but not too hard to learn-of coding memories as synapses, Derec sat up, day and night, dictating his memories of his life with Ariel.
“Any time she remembers something, playing the memory trace, there is a certain strong chance that she will unlock the actual memory of the event, or of part of it,” the expert told Derec. “Each such unlocked memory will be retained, and will strengthen the memory trace leading to it, and to the fields about it. All this was worked out at the Lahey within the past ten years.”
She was a sharp-nosed, unpretty woman, tiny and quite dark of skin. The breeds of mankind, or races as they were called on Earth, remained far more distinct than on the Spacer worlds. Darla, her name was, and she knew her stuff. She seemed to be hundreds of years old; he supposed vaguely that she might be sixty or seventy.