Auberson shook his head slowly. “Out of control? No, I don’t think so.” He leaned back and stared at the ceiling. He stretched his arms out. “I think he’s just a better game player than us.”
—And that was it.
He let his chair come down to the floor with a thump.
Suddenly he knew the answer. All of it. He knew the reason for everything HARLIE had done — everything, from the very beginning. Maybe it hadn’t been conscious then; maybe it hadn’t become conscious until just recently; probably it had only surfaced in HARLIE’s mind as an alternative to his death — but it was the answer.
Handley was staring at him. “Huh? What do you mean?”
Auberson was grinning now. “Don, listen—” He spread his hands wide, parting an imaginary curtain. “A long time ago, human beings became too efficient to live in the jungle—”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“Just listen. There were these monkeys, see? They had too much time on their hands; they got bored. So they invented a game. The game was called civilization, culture, society, or whatever, and the rules were arbitrary; so were the prizes. Maybe it just started out as a simple pecking order, like a bunch of chickens, but the idea was to make life more exciting by making it just a little bit more complex. Survival was too easy for these monkeys; they needed a challenge. They provided their own — maybe it was courtship rituals, or territorial rights, or a combination of half a dozen other things; but the effect was to alter the direction of evolution. Now it was the smarter individuals who succeeded and bred. As the species’ intelligence rose, the game had to get more sophisticated. It was feedback — increased brain capacity means increased ability means increased sophistication means increasing pressure on intelligence as a survival characteristic. So the game got harder. And harder.
“By then, they had to invent language — I mean, they had to. Word-symbols are the way a collective consciousness stores ideas. The first words must have been delineators of relationship — Momma, Poppa, Wife, Mine, Yours, His — tools that not only identify the rules of the game, but automatically reinforce them through repetition. The importance of the word was not that it allowed the individual to communicate his ideas, but that it allowed the culture to maintain its structure. And out of that structure grew others. It’s a far cry from the barter system to Wall Street, but the lineage can be traced. Our total human culture today is fantastic — even the subcultures are too big to comprehend. The United States of America is at least five distinct cultures itself — and each individual one of them is so hard that it takes twenty years to learn. If as little as that. This planet has too many games going on simultaneously — and we’re all taking them too seriously!
“Nobody can master them all — that’s what culture shock means. We see it every day; when the newspapers say our society is breaking down, that’s exactly what they mean. We have too many individuals who can’t cope with the game. It’s future shock. The culture is changing too fast — so fast that not even the people who’ve grown up with it can cope with it any more.”
Auberson paused for breath. The words were coming out in a rush. “No, it’s not HARLIE that’s out of control. It’s the game. We can’t play it any more; we lost control of it a century ago, maybe longer. It’s too complex for us — but it’s not too complex for HARLIE. He’s taken over the socio-economic game we call Stellar-American as if he had been designed to do so. Maybe he was. Maybe that’s why we really built him — to take over the game for us. And because that’s exactly what he’s done, everything is under control, once and for all. Don’t you see? Human beings are free now — free to be anything we want. And HARLIE will do it for us!”
He stopped abruptly and waited for their reaction.
Annie was the first to speak. Her eyes were bright. “Do you really think so?”
“Annie, if it’s not HARLIE that’s taking over, then it’ll be something else sooner or later. That’s why we’ve been building computers. HARLIE must know it. Maybe that’s the real reason he designed the G.O.D. To give him the capacity to take over all the rest of the games.”
Handley asked slowly, “What about his emotional immaturity?”
Auberson shook his head. “The more I think about it, the more I think it’s a red herring. HARLIE is too smart. Much too smart. He’d recognize the signs of it in himself and he’d stop it before it got out of control. He’s self-correcting that way. Any way. He can’t make mistakes because he’s too aware of the consequences — that means every action of his has to be deliberate.
“Maybe he wants us to think he’s frightened and emotionally disturbed — that way we’ll feel important to him. We could spend years running and rerunning programs to make him feel secure — when all the time he’d be running us. I think HARLIE’s way beyond us already.”
Handley winced. “I’m not sure I like the idea of being obsolete.”
“Obsolete? Uh uh. HARLIE still needs us. What good’s a game without any players?”
Annie shuddered, just a little bit. “I don’t like it, this business of ‘taking over.’ It sounds so — wicked.”
Auberson shrugged. “Annie, you’d better get used to it. The wicked people run this world — they deserve it.”
Handley said, “Aubie, if your theory is right, what do we do now?”
“Well, offhand, I’d say us humans will have to get ourselves a new game, Don — one that HARLIE can’t play. We can’t win this one any more.”
“A new game—? But what?”
“I don’t know,” Auberson said. He spun around in his chair and looked out the window. The city twinkled brightly below. The stars glittered in the night. “I don’t know, but we’ll think of something.”