The Mind Like A Strange Balloon | Page 4

Medical School. It's no coincidence that she's in this line of work, you know."
"I wondered about that."
"She's obsessed, Jerry. She wants her eyes back."
"Fine, and I wish her luck. But I need to see those programs at work."
"I'll explain that you have no choice . . . that you're just doing your job and so forth. She'll catch on."
"What do you mean?"
"She doesn't have any choice either," Toshi said.
That night (day and night are what you make them, of course, on Athena) I cadged liquor rations from two of Alice's Bright Young Things. I got mildly drunk and wondered if I had done the right thing in taking this job.
The next morning Alice promised to open negotiations to get me into the I-Sight Lab, and I had a look at one of the other projects. Biops/Life Studies bordered on the station's weightless center. They were running a strange combo of old-fashioned behaviorism-- observing rats in zero-g mazes, that sort of thing--and experimental interface technology. Rats, guinea pigs, and hamsters had their skulls permanently sawed open and microelectrodes embedded in their brains to connect them to Aleph.
Doctor Chin, a large-boned Chinese in a white jumpsuit, led me around the animal labs. At times we scuffed through the corridors on magnetic-soled shoes; at other times we clung to straps or anchored ourselves with Velcro pads--I found the whole experience difficult and vaguely nauseating. "We are looking for radical changes in organism-environment interaction," he said. "Zero gravity is one novel factor, interface with the Aleph system another. Between the two, there is the possibility of evolutionary emergence--a species genetically identical to its earthbound members but capable of grossly different behaviors."
A hamster floated in its cage, watching me--perhaps it thought I was the new brain surgeon. The entire top of its head had been shaved back to pink skin, and a small area had been cut away to reveal the fine tracery of blood vessels across the top of the brain. "Where are the microelectrodes?" I said.
"They are in place . . . too small to see, however."
"Doesn't it bother them to have their brains exposed like that?" The hamster now ignored me; it had a sunflower seed clutched between its paws, and its cheek pouches were bulging.
"I don't know. That is the least of their problems, I should think."
A few hours spent at one of Doctor Chin's terminals convinced me that Biops/Life Studies had little for me.
The ASPCA might like a shot at Doctor Chin with a high-speed router, but that was another issue.
Back at the Ops Room about half a dozen of the KEs were hard at work. "I am the Aleph and the omega," I said to one as I passed. I doubt that she got the reference. I spent most of the day sorting through other ICOG projects. ITT, AT&T,;Nippon Electric, NT&T,;Telletra, Siemens AG, CIT Alcatel, McDonnell-Douglas, Boeing, Hughes Aerospace--ICOG's member groups formed a seemingly infinite matrix of multinationals, utilities, and state-owned monopolies, each with a different level of commitment to ICOG, most ready to cut and run at the first sign of serious trouble. The individual balance sheet ruled, not the project. That's why macroengineering ventures like this one were always held together by such a slim thread.
I punched up a decisions-flow hologram. Above my head a tracery of lights sprang into being, shot through with the billions of scintillations representing the path of LIPS, logical inferences per second, through the system. I keyed for Biops/l-Sight, where according to the realtime display, not much was happening--routine employment of the CAV system.
Alice called in from her living quarters. "I've convinced her," she said. "But she didn't give in gracefully, so good luck to you. Come up with something, Jerry Toshi's getting awfully morose. He just looks at you with those soulful eyes, and he's driving me crazy."
I told her I would do what I could.
I looked at the light paths over my head, the life processes of the giant Aleph system. Those were the slim threads holding ICOG together.
The next week I was a constant presence at Biops/I-Sight. Diana Heywood seemed inclined to run me off to their biolabs, where in zero gravity they were laminating sheets of protein for the biocomputer and tailoring clumps of E. coli for chemical interface with Aleph. All very interesting but nothing for me there.
Back in the rooms on the outer rim very little was happening, despite her claims of urgent work. I became convinced that she was hiding something, but I couldn't imagine what. I decided to brace her with the accusation and see what happened. It was time for me to show some progress or move on. So one night I called her, she was working in her office, twin tan cables snaking out of her neck. "When are you going to