The Mind Like A Strange Balloon | Page 4

line to high-tech success."
"But with a difference, Jerry. She had just finished her dissertation at
Caltech--it was in biochemistry--took a vacation in San Francisco, and
was attacked in Golden Gate Park. The man got a handful of plastic
cards and a little money. She got multiple depressed skull fractures and
blindness--severe bilateral trauma of both optic nerves."
"Jesus," I said.
"Three years later she was in Stanford 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.