They had also created a simple and understandable picture in their minds of how a computer creates a man from information about man. The computer — womb was playing children's games with blocks. In a liquid medium via electrical impulse it combined molecules into molecular chains, the molecular chains into cells, and the cells into tissue — with the sole difference that there were untold billions of “informational blocks.” The fact that the result of the game was not a monster or even another person, but Krivoshein's informational double, proves that there was only one solution to the puzzle. Well, naturally, it couldn't have been any other way: blocks can only fit into a picture that exists in their surfaces. The variants (a fragmented Lena, a fragmented father, the “delirium of memory,” the eyes and feelers) were merely informational garbage that could not exist independent of the computer.
This concept was not incorrect, merely superficial. It suited them, as long as the facts supported the theory that they were the same externally and in thoughts and deeds. But when irreconcilable differences came up on the use of biology in their work, this concept turned out to be inadequate.
Yes, it was their inability to understand each other, and not the interest in biology (which might have passed in Krivoshein — 2 with no harmful effects), that became to his discovery what the constancy of the speed of light was to the theory of relativity. A man never knows what's banal about him and what's original; that only comes in comparsion with others. And unlike other people, Krivoshein — 2 could compare himself to not only his acquaintances, but to “himself” as well.
Now it became very clear to graduate student Krivoshein what the difference between them was: their ways of appearing were different. Valentin Krivoshein appeared over three decades ago the way every living thing did — from an embryo, in which a program for building a human being developed over thousands of centuries and in which generations had been encoded by a specific arrangement of protein and DNA. But the computer — womb, even though it was working from individual Krivoshein information, was still dealing with random information; it had to seek out the principles of formation and all the details of the biological information system. And the computer found a way different from nature's: a biochemical assembly instead of embryonic development.
Yes, now there was much that he understood. In a year he had passed from sensations to knowledge and from knowledge to mastery of himself. And then… then it had merely been a powerful attraction to biology and the inexpressible certainty that this was where he had to seek his answers. He couldn't even explain it well to Krivoshein. He came to Moscow with the vague feeling that something was wrong with him. He wasn't sick or imagining things, but he had to figure himself out, to make sure that his feeling was reality and not an idee fixe or a hypochondriacal hallucination.
He worked so hard that he could look back on the days at the institute in Dneprovsk as if they had been a vacation. Lectures, lab work, the anatomy theater, the library, lectures, seminars, lab work, lectures, the clinic, the library, lab work…. He never left the Lenin Hills campus during the first semester; he would walk down to the parapet before going to bed, to look down at the Moscow River, smoke, enjoy the lights glimmering and blending with the stars on the horizon.
A gray — eyed, second — year student who resembled Lena always sat next to him in Androsiashvili's class, which he attended. Once she asked: “You're so solid, so serious — were you in the Army?” “In prison,” he replied, jutting out his jaw. The girl lost interest in him. It had to be. Girls take up too much time.
And he was convinced by every experiment, every calculation. Yes, in a cross section of a nerve bundle that goes from the brain to the pituitary gland, under a microscope you can actually count approximately a hundred thousand fibers — and that means that the pituitary is closely monitored by the brain. Yes, if you add beta — active calcium to a lab monkey's diet of bananas and then use a Geiger counter on its excretions, it really is true that bone tissue renews itself approximately twice a year. Yes, if you stick electrode needles into muscle tissue and conduct sound into earphones, you can really hear a rhythmic quacking or a fragmented pulse of the nerve signals, and these sounds corresponded with what he was feeling! Yes, skin cells actually do move up toward the surface, changing structure, dying, so that they can slough off and make room for new ones.
He studied his own body. He took blood samples and lymphatic samples; he got a piece of muscle tissue from his right hip and examined it under an optical microscope and then an electronic one; he calumnied himself to get a Wassermann at the school clinic. And he determined that everything in him was normal. Even the amount and distribution of nerves in the tissue was the same as in the bodies they dissected in anatomy class. The nerves went up to the brain, but he couldn't get in there with the use of laboratory technology. He would have to implant too many electrodes into his skull and plug into too many oscilloscopes to understand the secrets of his self. And would he understand them then? Or would he come up with “streptocidal striptease” — not in binary alphabet, but in the jagged lines of an electroencephalogram?
The situation — a living person studying his own organism can't even breech the mysteries of his body with laboratory equipment — was paradoxical. After all, this wasn't a question of discovering invisible “radiostars” or synthesizing antiparticles. All the information was in man. All that remained was to translate the code of the molecules, cells, and nerve impulses into the code of the secondary signal system — words and sentences.
Words and phrases are necessary (but not always) for one man to understand another. But are they necessary to understand oneself? Krivoshein didn't know. That's why he tried everything: analysis, imagination, books, monitoring the sensations of his body, conversations with Androsiashvili and other teachers, observation of patients at the clinic, autopsies….
Everything that Vano Aleksandrovich had argued in that memorable December conversation was right, since it was defined by Androsiashvili's knowledge of the world and his faith in the indisputable expediency of everything created by nature.
But the professor did not know one thing: that he was conversing with an artificial man.
Even Vano Aleksandrovich's doubts about the success of his plan were solidly based, because Krivoshein's starting point was an engineering computer solution. That December he began planning an “electropotential inductor” — a continuation of the idea of Monomakh's Crown. A hundred thousand microscopic electrode needles, connected to the matrices of a self — learning automated machine (in the lab the bionics people modeled reflex actions on it), were supposed to supply the brain cells with auxiliary charges, bringing artificial biowaves through the skull, and thereby connecting the thinking centers of the cortex with the autonomous nervous system.
Krivoshein laughed. How silly to think that such primitive apparatus could have punched up his organism! At least he hadn't dropped his physiology studies for that project. When he performed an autopsy, he mentally revived the corpse: he imagined that he himself lay on the dissecting table, that it was his white nerve fibers running through the muscles and cartilage to the purple, yellow fat — encrusted heart, to the watery clusters of salivary glands under the chin, to the gray rags of collapsed lungs. Other fibers wove into white cords of nerves that went to the pelvis, the spinal cord and up, through the neck, under the skull. Signal commands ran along them from there: contract the muscles, speed up the heart, squeeze out saliva!