Page 48 of Destination Void (The Pandora Sequence 0.5)

Bickel examined the question. He could feel his mind clearing under the pressure of the stimulant—and there in his memory was the sensation that the ship was his body, that he was a creature of hard metal and thousands of sensors.

“I … think so,” he said.

Timberlake held up the block of plastic. “But … it des-troyed this and … apparently shut itself down.”

A thought began stirring in Bickel’s mind and he said: “Could this be a message to us … a kind of ultimate message?”

“God telling us we’ve gone too far,” Flattery muttered.

“No!” Bickel snapped. “The Ox telling us … something.”

“What?” Timberlake asked.

Bickel tried to wet his lips with his tongue. His mouth felt so dry. His lips ached.

“When nature transfers energy,” Bickel said, “almost all that transfer is unconscious.” He fell silent a moment. This was such a delicate plane of conceptualizing. It had to be handled so gently. “But most of the energy transfers for all the enormous amount of data in the Ox-computer is routed through master programs … and total consciousness would turn all of them on, force the system as a whole to suppress some while letting others through. It’d be like riding herd on billions of wild animals.”

“You gave it too much consciousness?” Timberlake asked.

Bickel looked at the transceiver panel of the Accept and Translate system beside his own action couch.

Timberlake turned, followed the direction of Bickel’s stare.

Prudence stirred and moaned. Flattery bent to her.

But Timberlake ignored them, beginning to see the direction of Bickel’s thoughts. The ship was dying, but here was hope.

“All the master programs dealing with translation of symbols are monitored through feedback loops linked to the AAT,” Timberlake said. “Symbols!”

“Remember,” Bickel said, “that impulses going out from the human central nervous system have that additional integration/modulation factor added to them—synergy. An unconscious energy transfer.”

Flattery, kneeling beside Prudence, wondered why he could bring only part of his awareness to bear on ministering to her. The conversation between Timberlake and Bickel electrified him.

Something was added to impulses going out from the central nervous system.

The thought boiled in Flattery’s mind, and he had to force his attention onto Prudence, pressing a stimulant shot against her neck.

An addition. Gestalt addition.

To be addible, qualities had to have sufficient similarity. Otherwise, how could human sense take two superimposed sensations of a color and say one was a more intense version of the color than the other? What made one green more intense than another—to the senses? Increase in intensity had to be a form of addition. “It could be in the axon collaterals of the Ox’s high-speed convergence fibers,” Bickel said.

Flattery sank back on his heels, waiting for the stimulant to work on Prudence.

Bickel’s right, he thought. If you superimposed a sufficiently rapid convergence of sense data, that itself could be interpreted as intensification. One of the images would contain more bits than the other.

But bits of what? All this didn’t account for the way data overlapped in the human consciousness … awareness …

Flattery looked up at Bickel and Timberlake. They appeared lost in their own thoughts.

Prudence said: “Fmmmsh.”

Almost automically, Flattery put a hand to her temple, checking her pulse.

When I search my memory, Flattery thought, I find data separated against a background. Whatever that back-ground is, consciousness operates against it. That background is what gives consciousness its size and reference—its dimension.

“The Ox’s sense organs were modeled on ours but with a wider range,” Timberlake said.

Bickel nodded. “The differences,” he said. And he remembered the nightmare quality of those superimposed and merging globes of radiation.

“How about all that contact with the hybernating humans and livestock in the tanks?” Timberlake asked. “Has any woman ever carried that many … children … in just that way?”

“If consciousness results from combining sensations,” Bickel said.

“Of course it does!” Timberlake said.

“Very likely,” Bickel said. “And it can receive and discriminate across the entire radiation spectrum. You can’t say it hears or sees or smells … or feels. Those are just different forms of radiation.”

“And the combinations could produce strange sense qualities, ones we can’t even visualize,” Timberlake said.

“They do,” Bickel whispered, remembering.

“But it’s dead,” Flattery said. “It … refused to live.” He looked up at them while still keeping a check on Prudence’s return to consciousness.

“It’s not like a human, though,” Bickel said. “If we can find the answer—why it turned itself off—why it sent us this message …”

“You’d turn it back on?” Flattery asked.

“Wouldn’t you?” Timberlake demanded.

“Are you forgetting how it turned vicious?” Flattery asked. “You were there with me … trapped.”

We’re playing a kind of blind man’s bluff, Bickel thought. We know something’s out there—something useful and something dangerous. We grope for it and try to grasp it and describe it, but Raj is right. We don’t know if what we get will be the useful thing or the monster—the tool or the Golem.

“But it’ll go beyond our consciousness, beyond our abilities,” Timberlake said.

“Exactly,” Flattery said.

“It contains an infinite progression of shades of, all within that new form of awareness,” Bickel said. “We’ve built a kind of ultimate alien here. Raj’s question is as good as yours. Should we turn it on? Can we turn it on?”

Prudence reached up, groping, pushed Flattery’s hand away from her head. She tried to sit up. Flattery helped her.

“Easy now,” he said.

She put her hand to her throat. How sore her throat felt. She had been absorbing the conversation around her for several minutes, remembering. She remembered there had been a train of thought, frantic efforts to raise Bickel on the intercom and communicate with him. She remembered the effort and the urgency, but the precise reason for aban-doning her post and rushing off to try to tell Bickel eluded her.

“We have to weed false information out of our minds,” Bickel said. “We’re assuming a totally conscious robot, all of its activity directed by consciousness. That cannot be, unless every action is monitored simultaneously.”

His words aroused a vague sense of anger in Prudence. He kept skirting the … what was that thought?

“Would it have the illusion that it’s the center of the universe?” Timberlake asked.

“No.” Bickel shook his head, remembering: “The universe has no center.” That’s what it had said to him.

This was a coding problem contained in the concept of you and the concept of—of identity. Bickel nodded to himself. Are you aware? Am I aware? He looked at the others.

The object and its surround.

A moment of intense despair overcame him. He felt like groaning.

“Life as we know it,” Timberlake said, “started evolving some three thousand million years ago. When it got to a certain point, then consciousness appeared. Before that, there was no consciousness … at least in our life form. Con-sciousness comes out of that unconscious sea of evolution.” He looked at Bickel. “It exists right now immersed in that universal sea of unconsciousness.”

As though Timberlake’s words had released a dam, Prudence remembered the train of thought so urgent it had forced her to abandon her post to go in search of Bickel.

Determinism at work in a sea of indeterminism! And she held the mathematical key to the problem. That was the train of thought. She had been trying to narrow down a new definition, mathematically stated, of quantum

probability. She had sensed a three-dimensional grid forming in her awareness and a probing beam of consciousness focusing into that grid.

Again, she felt that enormous increment of conscious-ness and the memory of that sudden knowledge—she had pushed her body’s chemistry beyond a balance point. She remembered how the darkness had engulfed her just as the mathematical beauty, the simplicity of the thought had spread itself out in her mind.

Everything depended on the origins of impulses and the reflection of them. It was a field of reflections—and this held the key to the sensation of consciousness.

We construct consciousness this way.

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