I can't describe how my father made his appearance in the tank — it's too terrible. That's the way he had looked on the day he died: a flabby, heavy old man with a broad shaven face and a cloudy mane of white hair around his skull. The computer had picked the last and most depressing memory of him. He had died before I got there. He wasn't breathing, but I still tried to warm his cooling body.
Then I dreamed about him several times, and it was always the same dream: I rub my father's cold body for all I'm worth and it gets warmer and he starts breathing, with difficulty at first, a death rattle, and then normally. He opens his eyes and gets up out of bed. “I was sick a little, son,” he says in an apologetic voice. “But I'm fine now.” The dream was like death in reverse.
And now the computer was creating him so that he could die once more before our eyes. We understood rationally that this was not our father but a regular information hybrid that could not be permitted to be completed; we knew that it would be a body, or a mad creature, or something along those lines. But neither he nor I could put on Monomakh's Crown and command the computer to stop. We avoided looking at the tank and each other.
Then I walked over to the panel and pulled the switch. It was dark and quiet in the lab for a moment.
“What are you doing?” My double ran over to the panel and turned the juice back on.
The filter condensers did not discharge in that second, and the computer went on working. But everything disappeared from the tank.
Later I saw all the chaos of my memory in the tank: my fifth — grade botany teacher Elizaveta Moiseevna; Klava, my love interest in those days; some old acquaintance with a poetic profile; the Moldavian driver I glimpsed briefly at a bazaar in Kishinev…. It's a hell to list them all. It wasn't a “model of the world” either; everything was formed vaguely, in fragments, the way it's stored in human memory, which knows how to forget. For instance, only Elizaveta Moiseevna's small, stern eyes under forever frowning brows were right, and the only thing left of the Moldavian was the sheepskin hat lowered all the way to his mustache….
We took turns sleeping. One always had to keep watch at the tank to put on the crown in time and say “No!”
My double was first to think of sticking a thermometer in the tank. (It was nice to observe the pleasure he derived from his first independent creative act!) The temperature was 104°F.
“It's feverish delirium.”
“We should give it an aspirin,” I joked.
But, thinking about it, we decided to lower the computer's temperature by pouring quinine into the flasks and bottles that fed the tank. The temperature went down a few degrees, but the delirium continued. The computer was combining images the way they occur in a nightmare — the face of the institute's first department head, Johann Johannovich Kliapp, smoothly took on the features of Azarov, who then grew Hilobok's mustache….
When the temperature dropped some more, flat images, like on a screen, of political figures, movie stars, productive workers with miniature Boards of Commendation, Lomonosov, Faraday, and Maria Trapezund, a popular local singer, appeared on the surface of the liquid in the tank. These two — dimensional shadows — some in color, some in black and white — would appear for a second and then melt away. It looked as if my memory was drying out.
On the sixth or seventh day (we had lost track of time) the temperature of the golden liquid dropped to 98.6°.
“It's normal!” And I went off to get some sleep.
My double stayed on duty.
That night he shook me awake.
“Get up! The computer is making eyes.”
I sent him to hell. He poured a mug of water on my head. I had to go.
At first, I thought that there were bubbles in the liquid. But they were eyes — white spheres with pupils and colorful irises. They floated up from the bottom, bounced against the transparent sides of the tank, watched our movements and the blinking lights on the TsVM — 12's control panel. They were blue, gray, brown, green, black, huge horse's eyes with violet irises, cat's eyes, glowing and with a vertical pupil, and black bird's eyes. It was a collection of every kind of eye I had ever seen. Since they had no lids or lashes, they seemed surprised.
By morning eyes were appearing near the tank as welclass="underline" muscular growths stuck out from the hoses, ending in lids and eyelashes. The lids opened. New eyes stared at us intently and expectantly. The infinite silent stares were driving us crazy.
And then. feelers and trunks grew like bamboo runners from the tank, the flasks, and hoses. There was something naive and childlike in their movements. They interwove, touched the apparatus and bottles, the room. One little feeler reached an uninsulated clamp, touched it, and jerked back, drooping.
“Hey, this is getting serious!” my double said.
It was. The computer was moving from a contemplative method of getting information to an active one, and was growing its own sensors and executive mechanisms for it. Whatever you called this development — a striving for informational equilibrium, self — construction, or a biological synthesis of information — you couldn't help being impressed by the tenacity and power of the process.
But after all we had seen, we were in no mood for awe or academic curiosity. We guessed how it might end.
“Enough!” I picked up Monomakh's Crown. “I don't know if we'll be able to make it do what we want. ”
“It would help if we knew what we wanted,” my double added.
“. but for a start we have to keep it from doing what we don't want.”
“Get rid of the eyes! Get rid of the feelers! Stop gathering information! Get rid of the eyes. Get rid of the feelers! Stop!” We repeated these thoughts through the crown, spoke them into the microphones.
But the computer went on moving its feelers and following us with its hundreds of eyes. It was beginning to look like a showdown.
“The result of our work,” my double said.
“So!” I said. “If that's the way.” I punched the tank. All the feelers quivered and stretched out for me. I moved away. “Val, turn off the water! Disconnect the feed hoses!”
“Computer, you're going to die. Computer, you'll die of hunger and thirst if you don't obey.”
Of course, that was crude and obvious, but what else could we do? My double slowly turned the handle on the water supply. The stream of water from the distillers turned into a drip. I clamped the hoses. The feelers shuddered and drooped. They started curling up and going back into the tank. The eyes dimmed, teared, and crinkled.
An hour later everything was gone. The liquid in the tank was once more golden and clear.
“That's better!” I took off the crown and rolled up the wires.
We turned the water back on, removed the clamps and stayed in the lab until late at night, smoking, talking about nothing, waiting to see what would happen. We didn't know what we were more afraid of: a new delirium from the computer or that the system, muzzled so harshly, would fall apart and cease existing. On the first day we talked about “covering up the discovery.” But now we couldn't stand the thought that it might cover itself and disappear.
My double and I took turns approaching the tank, sniffing carefully, afraid to smell decay or degeneration; not trusting the thermometer we kept touching the sides of the tank and the warm living hoses. Were they cooling off? Were they enflamed with fever again?
But the air in the room stayed warm, humid, and fresh, as if there was a large, clean animal in the room. The computer was alive. It simply wasn't undertaking anything without us. We had tamed it!
After midnight, I looked at my double, like a mirror. He was blinking with tired red eyes and smiled:
“Everything seems okay, Shall we go to bed?”
There was no artificial double for me. A comrade, a colleague, was sitting next to me, just as tired and happy as I was. And — how strange! — I had not felt joy at meeting him in the institute grounds and I hadn't been soothed by the phantasmagoric memory show in the tank… but now I was at peace and very happy.