He was accompanied by Mae Ortlieb and Jeeta Anwar from the Assembly President’s staff, as well as admiral Lalwani and Maynard Khanna’s replacement, Captain Amr al-Sahhaf. The presence of the two presidential aides he found mildly annoying; an indication of how his decisions and prerogatives were increasingly coming under political scrutiny. Olton Haaker had that right, Samual acknowledged, but it was being wielded with less subtlety as the crisis drew out.
For the first time he was actually thankful for the Mortonridge Liberation. Positive physical action on such a massive scale had diverted the attention of both the Assembly and the media companies from Navy activities. The politicians, he conceded grimly, might have been right about the psychological impact such a campaign would create. He’d even accessed a few rover reporter sensevises himself to see how the serjeants were doing. My God, the mud!
Dr Gilmore and Euru greeted the small elite delegation with little sign of nerves. A good omen, Samual thought. His spirits lifted further when Gilmore started to lead them along to the physics and electronics laboratory section, away from the demon trap.
Bitek Laboratory Thirteen was almost the same as any standard electronic research facility. A long room lined with benches, several morgue-like slabs arranged down the centre, and glass-walled clean rooms at one end. Tall stacks of experimental equipment were standing like modern megaliths on every surface, alongside ultra-high-resolution scanners and powerful desktop blocks. The only distinguishing items the First Admiral could see were the clone vats. Those you normally wouldn’t find outside an Edenist establishment.
“Exactly what are you demonstrating for us?” Jeeta Anwar asked.
“The prototype anti-memory,” Euru said. “It was surprisingly easy to assemble. Of course, we do have a great many thoughtware weapons on file, which we’ve studied. And the neural mechanisms behind memory retention are well understood.”
“If that’s the case, I’m surprised no one has ever designed one before.”
“It’s a question of application,” Gilmore said. “As the First Admiral pointed out once, the more complex a weapon is, the more impractical it becomes, especially in the field. In order for the anti-memory to work, the brain must be subjected to quite a long sequence of imprint pulses. You couldn’t just fire it at your opponent the same way you do a bullet. They have to be looking straight into the beam, and a sharp movement, or even an inappropriately timed blink will nullify the whole process. And if it was known to be in use, retinal implants could be programmed to recognize it, and block it out. However, once you hold a captive, application becomes extremely simple.”
Mattox was waiting for them by the last clean room, looking through the glass with the air of a proud parent. “Testing has been our greatest stalling point,” he explained. “Ordinary bitek processors are completely useless in this respect. We had to design a system which duplicates a typical human neurone structure in its entirety.”
“You mean you cloned a brain?” Mae Ortlieb asked, a blatant note of disapproval in her voice.
“The structural array is copied from a brain,” Mattox said defensively. “But the construct itself is made purely from bitek. There was no cloning involved.” He indicated the clean room.
The delegation moved closer. The room was almost empty, containing a single table which held a burnished metal cylinder. Slim tubes of nutrient fluid snaked out of the base to link it with a squat protein cycler mechanism. A small box protruded from the side of the cylinder, half-way up. Made of translucent amber plastic, it contained a solitary dark sphere of some denser material, set near the surface. The First Admiral upped the magnification on his enhanced retinas. “That’s an eye,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Mattox said. “We’re trying to make this as realistic as possible. Genuine application will require the anti-memory to be conducted down an optic nerve.”
A black electronic module was suspended centimetres from the bitek eye, held in place by a crude metal clamp. Fibre optic cables trailed away from it, to plug into the clean room’s utility data sockets.
“What sort of routines are you running inside the construct?” Mae Ortlieb asked.
“Mine,” Euru said. “We connected the cortex to an affinity capable processor, and I transferred a copy of my personality and memories into it.”
She flinched, looking from the Edenist to the metal cylinder. “Isn’t that somewhat unusual?”
“Not relative to this situation,” he replied with a smile. “We are attempting to create the most realistic environment we can. For that we need a human mind. If you would care to give it a simple Turing test.” He touched a processor block on the wall beside the clean room. Its AV lens sparkled.
“Who are you?” Mae Ortlieb asked, with some self-consciousness.
“I suppose I ought to call myself Euru-two,” the AV lens replied. “But then Euru has transferred his personality into a neural simulacrum twelve times already to assist with the anti-memory evaluation.”
“Then you should be Euru-thirteen.”
“Just call me junior, it’s simpler.”
“And do you believe you’ve retained your human faculties?”
“I don’t have affinity, of course, which I regard as distressing. However, as I won’t be in existence for very long, it’s absence is tolerable. Apart from that, I am fully human.”
“Volunteering for a suicide isn’t a very healthy human trait, and certainly not for an Edenist.”
“None the less, it’s what I committed myself to.”
“Your original self did. What about you, have you no independence?”
“Possibly if you left me to develop by myself for several months, I would become reluctant. At the moment, I am Euru senior’s mind twin, and as such this experiment is quite acceptable to me.”
The First Admiral frowned, troubled by what he was witnessing. He hadn’t known Gilmore’s team had reached quite this level. He gave Euru a sidelong glance. “I’m given to understand that a soul is formed by impressing coherent sentient thought on the beyond-type energy which is present in this universe. Therefore, as you are a sentient entity, you will now have your own soul.”
“I would assume so, admiral,” Euru junior replied. “It is logical.”
“Which means you have the potential to become an immortal entity in your own right. Yet this trial will eliminate you forever. This is an alarming prospect, for me if not for you. I’m not sure we have the moral right to continue.”
“I understand what you’re saying, Admiral. However, my identity is more important to me than my soul, or souls. I know that when I am erased from this construct, I, Euru, will continue to exist. The sum of whatever I am goes on. This is the knowledge which rewards all Edenists throughout their lives. Whereas I now exist for one reason, to protect that continuity for my culture. Human beings have died to protect their homes and ideals for all of history, even though they never knew for certain they had souls. I am no different to any of them. I quite plainly choose to undergo the anti-memory so that our race can overcome this crisis.”
“Quite a Turing test,” Mae Ortlieb said sardonically. “I bet the old man never envisaged this kind of conversation with a machine trying to prove its own intelligence.”
“If there’s nothing else,” Gilmore said quickly.
The First Admiral looked in at the cylinder again, contemplating a refusal. He knew such an instruction would never be allowed to stand by the President. And I don’t need that kind of interventionism in Navy affairs right now. “Very well,” he said reluctantly.
Gilmore and Mattox exchanged a mildly guilty look. Mattox datavised an instruction to the clean room’s control processor, and the glass turned opaque. “Just to protect you from any possible spillback,” he said. “If you’d like to access the internal camera you can observe the process in full. Not that there will be anything much to see. I assure you the spectrum we’re using to transmit the anti-memory has been blocked from the sensor.”