The silicon man, p.1
The Silicon Man, page 1
The
Silicon
Man
CHARLES PLATT
BANTAM BOOKS NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND
THE SILICON MAN A Bantam Spectra Book / March 1991
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed "s" are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1991 by Charles Platt.
Cover art copyright © 1991 by Jean François Poderin.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
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the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.
ISBN 0-553-28950-0 Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trade-mark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 666
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
In memory of Fred Beyer,
friend, computer programmer, and mentor,
who died too soon.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Vernor Vinge, a mathematician and impor-tant science-fiction writer in his own right, for helping me with some of the details and implications of the central idea in this novel. I hope he doesn't feel I played too fast and loose with the science.
Roberta Lannes read the early drafts and played an indis-pensable role encouraging me to develop the human qualities of the narrative. John Douglas gave valuable advice after reading an initial outline of the novel. Jonathan Post advised me on the policies and procedures of aerospace contractors. Robert Frenay, Richard Kadrey, and Bruce Sterling read the manu-script and were good enough to take the time to offer valuable suggestions for improvements. My editor, Betsy Mitchell, of-fered helpful advice. Nancy Weiner provided medical informa-tion. Many others have assisted me by discussing and/or disputing the ideas in the book.
Although electronic immortality is pure fiction at this time, there are real possibilities for achieving longevity by being fro-zen after death in the hope of subsequent resuscitation. For details contact the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, 12327 Doherty Street, Riverside, California 92503, telephone (800) 367-2228.
I must emphasize that I have extremely high regard for the ethical codes followed by Alcor, and the cryonics organization that plays a minor part in the plot of my novel is not in any way intended to resemble Alcor or any other organization in the real world.
Author's Note
The equipment and procedures that I have described in this novel do not yet exist. In fifty to one hundred years, however, such techniques may be possible, and at that point they will enable us to achieve a form of immortality.
I believe that not everyone will welcome this. Indeed, pio-neers in the field may be forced to conduct their research under clandestine conditions in order to escape restrictive regulations or conservative backlash.
One way or another, though, there surely will come a time when the mind may outlive the body; and I myself look for-ward to this as a form of liberation—for future generations, if not for my own.
PART ONE
Obsession
At first LifeScan had been a challenge, luring her with the promise of freedom and power. Ten years later it had become an obsession, ruling her days, haunting her nights. When she lay in bed alone, restlessly seeking sleep, her mind still fretted at unsolved problems: how to obtain materials for the next phase of development, how to hide purchase orders, how to lay false trails and store fake data. The project had long since vio-lated ethical guidelines and federal law; if they were found out now, it would ruin their careers. But even the prospect of prison sentences seemed trivial compared with their biggest fear—that LifeScan would be dismantled and their work would be lost.
Each morning, muzzy from too little sleep and too many pills, she ate a breakfast of instant eggs and soy toast, thinking about it still: how to filter out noise that was corrupting the data, how to suppress vibration from the refrigeration unit, how to refine the scanning resolution of the probes. The project was like a metronome setting the rhythm of her life.
Her name was Rosalind French and she worked at North Industries, a defense contractor just off the Long Beach free-way. Her laboratory was a big, bare, high-ceilinged room with beige walls and a black plastic floor, barred windows looking onto a courtyard of eucalyptus trees. It was cluttered with monitoring and diagnostic gear in gray aluminum cabinets, metal-working tools, a scanning-tunneling electron micro-scope, tissue samples in a large freezer, sheets of steel and bar stock, keyboards and flat-panel data displays. At the center of the space, ringed by the other equipment, a Cray-12 computer stood like a small black tombstone beside a cylindrical stain-less-steel tank the size of a baby's crib. Tonight, like most nights, two other scientists shared the lab with her: Michael Butterworth, a tall, skinny neurophysiologist who looked down on the world around him with an enigmatic air of detachment, and Hans Voss, a Polish-born engineer and craftsman of the old school. Butterworth was something of a mystic, a dreamer who once told her he'd chosen his vocation after a two-hour stint of meditation followed by a session with the I Ching. By contrast, Voss was a little old man with a pink bald head rimmed by wisps of white hair. He was shy and unimposing, yet he had a special rapport with machinery. To Rosalind it almost seemed as if systems sensed his authority and surrendered to his special, gentle touch.
This, of course, was irrational nonsense. But the more time she spent in the lab, the more each piece of equipment seemed to acquire a personality filling the void that friends had once occupied in her life. Sometimes she even found herself talking to the hardware—praising it for performing correctly, scolding it for defying her.
Strange behavior for someone who believed in the scientific method, and yet as the months passed she was growing more and more superstitious. If she sensed there were bad omens—if the mix of people and equipment wasn't propitious in some mystical way she couldn't even explain—she'd cancel a test run without hesitation. Her burden of responsibility had grown so heavy, the only way she could deal with it was by going with her gut feelings.
Tonight—a warm spring California night—the setup did feel propitious. She waited beside the stainless-steel tank, a tall woman in her early thirties with alert gray eyes, black hair pulled severely back. Her self-control and her formal posture— the product of a venerable East Coast finishing school—allowed no clue to her inner anxieties.
She waited, and Hans Voss waited with her. Butterworth got ready for the run, settling into his seat at the control desk, his head hidden beneath the black hemisphere of the viewing hood, his hands groping inside waldoes—metal gauntlets lined with pressure and motion sensors.
"Ready," he said finally.
Rosalind pressed the on-button of her log unit. It functioned like an airplane's flight recorder, tracking the real-time status of more than two hundred key components. Company policy specified that archival facilities in the basement were the cor-rect place to store this kind of data, but LifeScan's experi-mental results had long since been taken off the official record.
"Looks okay," said Butterworth. "I'm starting the peel." Rosalind stared through the observation panel in the side of the tank. It was cold in there—minus 170
degrees Celsius—and there were tiny ice crystals on the inside of the glass. Metal clamps were holding a gray lump of tissue the size of a child's fist, glistening in the light from two halogen lamps. The razor-thin red beam of a laser scalpel flicked into life. Hundreds of gossamer-thin, gleaming probes swung down, moving so slowly they seemed to be drifting through oil. Delicately, they touched the slick gray surface of the tissue sample, conforming to it, preparing to tease secrets from its cells. The laser edged forward, mimicking Butterworth's hand movements on a microscopic scale. Carefully, it began peeling a layer of cells like skin from a plum—skin so thin, it was trans-parent. Metal clips like tiny clothespins lifted the peel, and a second set of probes started exploring its underside, digitizing the information and transmitting it from the tank along a wrist-thick cable to the Cray alongside. Rosalind had long ago learned to suppress her expectations. This was just another test run, and it could founder like those before it. But tonight—tonight it really did feel propitious. She stood peering intently into the tank like a stern mother observ-ing her child's attempts to walk. The laser completed its pass. Voss, beside her, gave a little grunt of satisfaction. "Good," he said. But she hardly heard him; she was aware of nothing but the gleaming red line of the laser and the clusters of whiskery probes performing arabesques around it. The muscles in her neck and back were rigid with tension.
"There's some mistracking." Butterworth's voice was muf-fled by the viewing hood, but the words were clear enough. Rosalind glanced quickly at a display depicting the operation in false colors at high magnification. It showed the surface of the tissue as a landscape of lumpy, rolling hills, probes dancing over the terrain in a complex ballet. But one of them had fallen behind, out of step with its neighbors. It was searching dumbly from side to side like a blind man's cane.
She let out her pent-up breath in a groan of frustration. She hit the off-button of her log unit. "Damn it, Mike!"
The laser winked out and the probes slowly retracted. But-terworth pulled back from the hood and withdrew his wrists from the gauntlets. He sat there for a moment, restlessly flexing his fingers like a synth musician whose solo performance had been aborted by a loose connector. He gave Rosalind a faint, ironic smile. "Too bad," he said.
"There has to be some dumb little thing that we missed." The night wasn't propitious anymore; that had been an illusion, a deception, and she felt betrayed, determined to find out how or why the hardware had conspired against her. She turned to Voss. "Hans—"
"Is not the stepping motors." He hunched his shoulders as if bracing himself for bad weather. "Please, we don't strip them again, okay?" Even though he was twice her age, he looked like a kid facing a school principal.
She studied him with her steady gray eyes. "You're really certain?"
"I think Hans has it right," said Butterworth, pushing back from the control desk and getting calmly to his feet, seemingly unaffected by the tension between Rosalind and Voss. He was a Zen Buddhist, and he preached fatalism, yet in his own quiet way, Rosalind sensed he was as tenacious and ambitious as she was herself. She wished he kept less hidden; it meant he was that much outside her control.
"So what's the problem?" she said. "We've wasted three weeks trying to find the source of this malfunction. I want to know what's wrong."
He shrugged, turning away from her. "You want to strip it down again, go right ahead." It was that time of night, Rosalind realized, when it was easier to snap at each other than cooperate. She tried to control her irritation. "Am I right in thinking that both of you still believe there's a bug in the terrain-tracking software?"
Butterworth nodded. "Yep."
"Jeremy has checked that software, line by line. He's done simulations, he's run it under—" She paused, sensing his adamancy. "All right. Maybe you should go upstairs and tell Jeremy to check it again."
Butterworth shook his head. "It's getting kind of late."
Rosalind knew from experience that he tended to dig in his heels if she was too aggressive.
"Michael." She switched to her softer, be-reasonable voice. "With all that we have at stake here . . ." Butterworth wandered over to the Cray. He methodically erased the persistent RAM, then started powering the system down.
"He's tired," said Voss. "It is a strain, you know, working the waldoes. We all need some rest. Even you, perhaps."
His tact was almost more irritating than Butterworth's de-tachment. Nothing could really please her, right now, short of the equipment magically fixing itself. She felt like screaming, Why doesn't it work?
Butterworth finished with the Cray, picked his way across the tangle of power cables, and started shutting off servo sys-tems under the tank. The faint whine of motors gradually died away. A vacuum pump chugged briefly, then fell silent. "You know, it's just a matter of days," he said laconically. "We've done some excellent animal scans, we've verified our model, we know it works. All we have to do is shake out the last couple of bugs, and then—" His eyes had a distant look, as if he could already see the world that LifeScan promised to open up.
Rosalind succeeded in repressing her anger. "All right, I'll go upstairs and tell Jeremy you think it's the software." She un-plugged her log unit and slid it into the pocket of her lab coat. "I'll see you both tomorrow." She flashed them a brief, stiff smile. "Good night." Codeworld
The building was silent, this late. Sometimes she would en-counter a security guard checking each office and laboratory through the wire-glass windows in the gray steel doors, but tonight she had the hallways to herself. The quick tap-tap of her footsteps sounded loud in the stillness. She started up a flight of stairs to the second floor—and stopped, gripping the handrail, gasping involuntarily as pain gripped her legs and radiated from her hips up her back. She propped herself against the wall and closed her eyes. The pain was so intense, it made thought almost impossible. The condition had a name—systemic lupus erythematosus— but its origins were still not understood. It was an autoimmune disorder, usually ending in renal failure. Along the way, it could cause severe arthritis. It had been diagnosed in her just over ten years ago, which was when they had told her that ten years was the median life expectancy after diagnosis. She tried as much as she could to forget that fact; but the bouts of crip-pling pain were getting more frequent and more severe, and sometimes, when she was tired, she feared that her muzzy-headedness might be the first sign of kidney dysfunction. Just a few more weeks, she thought to herself, as if begging one last favor from her body. After that, it won't matter. After that, do anything you want.
She stood waiting for the stabbing sensations to diminish. She imagined how it would be to live without pain, in a future where all physical ailments were eliminated and the spirit was free. The fantasy frightened her. She wanted it too much.
When she was able to, she went on up the stairs moving slowly, tentatively, afraid of doing anything that would trigger another attack.
Finally she reached the next floor and made her way to Jer-emy Porter's office. It was a little windowless cubicle, and since Porter had re-moved the fluorescent tubes from the ceiling panel, the only light came from a low-wattage bulb in a battered metal desk lamp that he'd scrounged from a thrift shop. Beyond its dim circle of radiance the room was lost in shadows. Cardboard boxes of hardcopy and stacks of technical maga-zines were scattered across the floor like a minefield to trip intruders. The plain beige walls had been papered with a mo-saic of charts listing specifications of computer components. Company-issue bookshelves had been engulfed with heaps of loose-leaf reference manuals. Once the cubicle had been no different from all the others on this floor; but now it was Porter-ized.
He was a fat man with unkempt frizzy hair and a black, bushy beard. He wore white shirts that were rumpled and stained with coffee, corduroy pants that were baggy at the seat, and he peered out at the world through antique wire-framed glasses whose lenses were never clean. When Rosalind had first started working with him she'd been exasperated to see him squinting at his computer screen through a patina of grease, and she'd gotten into the habit of wiping his glasses for him. Bit by bit, she'd found herself taking on other chores he never seemed to notice were necessary: cooking him real meals once in a while, buying him a new pair of socks, even trimming his beard. He'd received her favors with shy, confused gratitude. Though the two of them had absolutely nothing in common beyond their dedication to LifeScan, a bond had been created. When Porter's landlady filed plans to turn his building into condos, Rosalind offered to let him stay temporarily in the spare room at her home. Her husband had left her the year before, and she felt she needed some company. Of course, Por-ter was no company at all; he seemed to have trouble remem-bering that she existed. Yet she liked having him there, and he'd stayed ever since.
She waited in the doorway of his cubicle. He was slouched in his chair staring at a screen full of program code. His fingers rattled briefly on the keyboard, and he addressed a couple of muttered commands to the system. Finally he squirmed around in his chair, blinking in the fight from the hallway.
"Uh, Rosa-lind." He slid his fingers under his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "You were going to do another run, is that right? How'd it turn out?"
She walked in, pushed a couple of dirty coffee cups out of the way, and perched on the corner of his desk. It was heaped with scribbled notes, crumpled sheets, documentation, RAMcards, and unanswered memos.
"One of the probes lost acquisition again. Mike and Hans are more convinced than ever that it has to be a software problem. They swear they've eliminated everything else." Porter didn't say anything. He continued staring up at her. He spent most of his life living inside the programs he wrote. Codeworld, she called it. Once, with an embarrassed smile, he'd told her he even had dreams in program language. The real world was of secondary importance; he put it on hold, in some sort of mental input buffer, till his brain found time to process the interruptions. Porter blinked, which was generally a sign he was coming back online. "So what exactly—"
"Maybe you should review the event sequence." Distantly, she was aware of sounding severe and impatient. The pain that she often felt made it hard to project human warmth. But she assumed Jeremy knew her well enough to ignore her manner.
