Of course! This program had been running for a couple of days and the machine was in verbal command mode, left that way most of the time even when he was entering data from the keyboard, programmed to record any words or sounds and respond if necessary. There would be a record of her voice.
It was easy enough to find. He jumped back, turned on the speakers — and heard himself snoring. Jumped forward and heard the morning news he had listened to while dressing. Forward and forward — and there she was! Humming along with the radio. Nothing wrong here; he skipped forward, the sound track making Donald Duck sounds — then stopped when he heard her voice. Talking on the phone.
“Sure, yes. If you insist. Soon. Right. Bye.”
Only one side of the conversation: he had never considered putting a tap on his phone. He did a high-speed forward, heard something, backtracked. It was Kim laughing.
Then a male voice said, “Do that again and there’s no stopping me.”
Brian rested his head on his fingertips, bent over the computer, the speaker close to his ear. Listening to what could only have been sounds of lovemaking. In his bed. With someone else. Listening to every humiliating sound and gasp, to her mounting little cries of delight.
Listened until it was all over. They were talking quietly but he listened no longer. The voices were nothing, meant nothing.
Finished. Through. The blood hammered in his temples as he was possessed by a terrible sense of betrayal. He had meant absolutely nothing to her — except maybe as an unpaid tutor, or maybe that was how she paid for his lessons! She had never been serious about him, never felt what he felt. What he realized shamefully now was that his puppy love had been completely one-sided. She hadn’t shared it — probably didn’t even know his overwhelming and consuming feelings for her. His fingers were trembling with rage, mortification, as he wiped the program and the voices of betrayal, struck out the file, deleted it. Then formatted tracks over it so it could never be restored. More destruction. He sought out every piece of work he had done for her and wiped the disk clean. Wiped out a com file of messages from her. His hands were shaking and there were tears of rage in his eyes. Love turned to anger, attraction to betrayal. His hands shook as he seized the keyboard, began to lift it to throw at the screen.
This was crazy. He dropped it and rushed from the room banged down the hall into the kitchen, stood in the doorway, fists clenched, shaking with conflicting emotions. The rack of knives was before him on the counter and he pulled out the largest, tested the edge with his thumb, longed to plunge it into her. Again and again.
Kill her? What was he thinking about? Did simple, rutting emotions control his life? What had happened to logic and intelligence? His hands were still shaking as he slid the knife back into the slot. He stood at the sink staring unseeingly out of the window.
You have a brain, Brian. Use it. Or let your emotions run your life. Kill her, get revenge, go to jail for murder. Not the world’s greatest idea, really. What is happening? How come emotion has taken the place of intelligent thought?
A subunit had taken control, that was what had happened. Think of the society of the mind and how it works. The mind is divided into many subunits, subunits with absolutely no intelligence of their own. What was the example his father had used when he explained it? Driving a car. A subunit of the mind can drive the car while the conscious mind is occupied with other things. Turning back control only when something unusual happened. The society of mind usually worked in a state of cooperation between all of its units. Now one stupid subunit had taken over and was controlling everything. One dumb, irrational subunit of infatuation — with gonads for brains and involved only with betrayal and jealousy and rage. Is this what he wanted to control his life?
“Hell, no!” He opened the refrigerator and took out a can of soda, popped the seal, drank half of it in one long chugalug. Much calmer and more rational now. He knew what was happening, one part of his brain had taken over and was calling all the shots and suppressing everything else. There was no such thing as a central me, though it was easy to believe that there was. The more he had studied the operation of intelligence, the more he had come to believe that each person was sort of a committee. The brain was made up of a lot of little subanimals — protospecialists, that’s what they were called.
The hunger-animal took over when looking for food. Or the fear-animal when there was trouble looming. And every night the sleep-animal took its place. It was King Solomon’s ring. All the machinery that Lorenz and Tinbergen had discovered. Those intricate networks of brain centers for hunger, sex, defense that had taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Not only in reptiles, birds and fish — but in parts of his own brain.
And now his own internal sex-animal was chomping and salivating and taking over. A primitive agency way down in the brain stem — and he had to fight it!
“That’s not me!” he shouted out loud, slamming his fist onto the table so hard it hurt. “Not the whole me. Just a singularly stupid but powerful part. Balls galore!”
He was more than a rutting animal. He had intelligence — so why couldn’t he use it? How could he let a stupid subunit take control? Where was the mental manager that should have evaluated it and put it into proper perspective and place?
He took the can of soda with him, sipping at it slowly. Sat in front of his computer and opened a new file labeled SELF CONTROL, then leaned back and thought about what came next.
Most mental processes work unconsciously, because most subunits of his mind had to become autonomous — as separate as his hands and feet — in order to work efficiently.
When he had learned to walk as a baby he must have done it badly at first, stumbling and falling, then gradually improving by learning from mistakes. The old subunits for not-good walking must slowly have been replaced or suppressed by new agents for good-walking agents that worked more automatically, with less need for reflective thinking. So many agents, he thought, to be controlled by what? Right now, they seemed to be quite out of control. It was time for him to take them in charge; he must exercise more self-control. It was time that he, himself, must decide which of those subunits should be engaged. That mysterious, separate He, must be the manager, the central control that would correspond to the essence of Brian’s own consciousness.
“Those stupid AI programs could sure use a managing machine like that,” he said, then choked on the soda.
Was it that simple? Was this the missing element that would pull together all the separate pieces? The AI research labs were filling up with so many interesting systems these days at universities like Amherst, Northwestern, and Kyushu Institute of Technology. Rule-based logic systems, story-based language understanders, neural-network learning systems, each solving its own kind of problem in its own way. Some could play chess, some could control mechanical arms and fingers, some could plan financial investments. All separate, all working by themselves — but none of them seemed to really think. Because nobody knew how to get all those useful parts to work together. What artificial intelligence needed was something like that internal he. Some sort of central Managing Machine to tie all the subunits into a single working unit.
It couldn’t be that simple. There can’t be any such he in charge — because the mind doesn’t contain any real people, only a lot of subunits. Therefore, that he could not be any single thing — because no single thing could be smart enough. So that he must itself be some sort of illusion created by the activity of yet another society composed of subunits. Otherwise there would still be something missing, something to manage that Manager.