Tablino

            The young engineer stood waiting for the elevator, his mind trying to make sense of the message that had brought him here. It seemed likely to be a good opportunity, a great boost for his career, but what it was about he could not guess. Obviously, it had something to do with computers; probably with artificial intelligence. At least that was the only thing that made any sense; nothing, he remembered, was absolutely certain.

            The elevator came, and he stepped into it. He pushed the button for the outermost floor and waited. He pulled the enigmatic letter from his pocket. He must have read it every hour on the way up to orbit, but this short elevator ride gave him a chance to puzzle over it one more time.

 

Dear Dr. Nathaniel Howe,

            I must congratulate you on your success with the recent human memory chip project. It is my understanding that your contributions were central to the design of the chip, and in light of this and of your recent statements to the press, I wish to offer you the prospect of undertaking a project of even greater magnitude and potential. If you are interested, please arrange to meet me in my residence in orbit to discuss details.

 

                                                            Sincerely,

                                                            Matthew Sullivan

 

It was a strange letter, indeed. Nathaniel had initially believed it to be a hoax, but a call to Mr. Sullivan’s secretary had confirmed its authenticity, however improbable. He had accepted the invitation – How could he have not? – and had scheduled the appointment to which he was now headed. Why though, he wondered continually, did Mr. Sullivan want to meet with him?

            Mr. Sullivan was, one might say, a businessman and quite a successful one at that, but the term did not really do him justice. He had begun his life as an astronaut. While at the lunar base he had developed, in his limited free time, an efficient method for collecting the helium-3 deposited over eons on the moon by the solar wind. With the help of a friend more experienced in business than himself, he had started a company to export the rare isotope. This was a year before the first commercial fusion reactors opened; when they did Sullivan was ready to provide them with fuel. Soon afterwards – some said in the very first quarter in which he turned a profit – he had expanded the company into asteroid mining, and within a few years he was making a profit on imports of platinum, palladium, nickel, and other metals. With the traffic to and from Earth increasing and with a pressing need for a cheaper method of importation, Sullivan had undertaken his third hugely profitable venture – the space elevator. With that completed, he, at the age of only forty-seven, had retired from business and built the orbital palace in which Nathaniel now found himself. Since then Sullivan had spent his time writing several bestselling books, advising the new leaders of his company, contributing to various charities, advocating the settlement of Mars, and using his personal fortune to fund space exploration.

            Matthew Sullivan was a rare man who combined the qualities of a dreamer and a doer. His detractors said that he subordinated the romance and discovery of space exploration to the tyranny of the bottom line. His supporters countered that he had fulfilled the great dream of many young space enthusiasts and, human nature being what it was, had simply found the profit motive to be the most efficient means to that noble end of making humanity a truly space-faring civilization. Sullivan just said he loved space exploration and was thrilled to learn he could make money doing it. Nathaniel admired him at any rate. Whether selfish capitalist or visionary leader, Sullivan had made something extraordinary of his life. Nathaniel, having just completed his Ph.D., hoped to have a successful career ahead of him, but he didn’t imagine himself accomplishing anything so grandiose as Sullivan had. Still, he had a promising start and expected to leave a mark in his field.

            Nathaniel, while working on his Ph.D., had been involved in the successful human memory chip project, which had succeeded in augmenting a person’s memory with an implanted computer chip. It had not yet been approved for widespread use, but it had the potential to revolutionize human life, and Nathaniel was proud of his small part in it. His Ph.D. adviser had led the development of the actual hardware, and Nathaniel had assisted him in this part of the project. They had had a difficult job, having to mimic as best they could the still-poorly-understood process by which the brain stores memories. The chip was to abandon the traditional linear architecture of computers for a more organic system which, when combined with the proper algorithms, would encode and retrieve information using the same complex web of associations that the mind seemed naturally to employ. Despite the daunting obstacles, they had succeeded in producing a chip that integrated nearly flawlessly with the biological memory. Within a few weeks, the test subjects had not only been able to use it without difficulty, they had actually found it difficult to determine which memories were stored in the chip and which in the brain. Although only a student, Nathaniel had made a few important contributions and suggestions of his own, and he had certainly learned a lot from the project. Still, it seemed odd that Mr. Sullivan would not seek out someone more experienced for whatever he had in mind.

            The letter had also mentioned statements to the press. Nathaniel didn’t remember saying anything particularly noteworthy when he had been interviewed. They had talked about the project, his part in it, and what he had learned. He had also discussed a little of his hopes for the future of such research, suggesting that eventually even the entire brain might be replicated. He had obviously said something, though, that had impressed the orbital billionaire. He did not know what it had been, but he would have to do that kind of thing more often.

            The elevator stopped and the door opened. A robot met Nathaniel and escorted him down a corridor to a room at the end. Entering the room, Nathaniel stopped, looking down a moment in wonder.

            The floor of the room was transparent, displaying and awe-inspiring vista. As the station turned one would see alternately Earth and space. Right now the planet covered approximately half the field of view with the depths of the universe occupying the rest of the scene. Nathaniel could see Africa beneath him. The continent was making progress in industrializing, he knew, but down there were still many people for whom a herd of cattle was the difference between life and death, a computer was magic, and a space station was in the realm of the Gods.

            Nathaniel had little chance for reflection, however, as the robot led him into the spacious but mostly empty room toward a lone chair, to the side of which stood a somewhat cluttered table. Sullivan sat reclined in the chair. He was clearly deep in thought, appearing even somewhat as one meditating. He seemed not to have noticed Nathaniel.

            “Mr. Sullivan,” said the robot, “Dr. Howe is here to see you.”

            Sullivan sat up abruptly and looked at Nathaniel. Nathaniel was instantly struck by his frail appearance. He had heard that Sullivan was sick but had not realized how sever the illness was. The man was only sixty, but he looked to be over a hundred. His shriveled body, wracked by disease, seemed already dead. Only his bright blue eyes shone with life, evincing a will unconquerable by the ravages of nature.

            Greetings and welcome to my little orbital abode,” said Sullivan. “I hope you are enjoying the spectacular view. Please make yourself at home. I am very glad to see you.”

            “It is an honor to be here,” said Nathaniel.

            They shook hands; Sullivan’s grip was weak, but an indefinable strength of spirit seemed to lurk behind it. Nathaniel sat down in a chair provided to him by a serving robot and waited to hear more.

            Sullivan did not immediately speak, and Nathaniel cast his eyes over some of the books sitting on the table. He was surprised by what he saw; books on mysticism, the near-death experience, and out-of-body travel. Interest in such spiritual subjects was uncommon and frowned-upon in the modern age, certainly in someone of Sullivan’s caliber.

            “I have called you here in the hope that you will be able to assist me in a somewhat. . . unorthodox project,” Sullivan began.

            He paused again briefly and then took a different approach.

            “As you can see,” he said, “I am sick. And I am dying. It’s some rare genetic disease with a name I can’t remember or pronounce, one of those things that occurs once in a generation, and it’s my luck to have it. I guess it has been in me all along, but it chose this time to come out. Now it’s eating my body, though at least it hasn’t touched my mind. The doctor’s aren’t sure if it will; I do hope I can at least keep that much until the end, but death is death either way.

            “I’m thankful, of course, for the time I had had, but it just hasn’t been enough. I have more to do, more to be in life. It’s not time to leave yet and lose all that possibility. I have the will to live and to see the future that is only just beginning, and I am quite literally going to succeed or die trying.”

            “So this is it,” thought Nathaniel. “He wants me to find a way to replace his dying body with a robotic one or perhaps to download his brain somehow.”

            “I intend to transfer my soul into a computer,” Sullivan said.

            “Your soul?” asked Nathaniel, taken aback. “Do you mean you want to copy all the information in your brain. . . .”

            “No,” said Sullivan, not at all surprised by the reaction he had received. “Well yes, I do want to do all that, and that’s where you come in, but when I said ‘soul,’ I did mean soul – the immortal, non-physical part of oneself. But you only need to design a computer to mimic my brain as closely as possible and then transfer the information from the real thing into it. I’ll deal with the soul myself.

            “But surely you don’t actually believe in the soul, do you?” asked Nathaniel, still somewhat shocked. He found it difficult to believe that this man, greatly accomplished and considered by many a genius, could be seriously planning what amounted to magic based on outdated beliefs.

            “I do,” replied Sullivan, “but of course most people are like you and don’t. I can’t blame them – most haven’t seen any proof, after all – but it makes this a difficult project. That’s why I asked you; one of the established leaders in the field never would have touched it. But you’re young; you’ve shown promise but still have a long way to go and so are, I hope, willing to take risks to get there.

            “I may be,” said Nathaniel, doubtful yet intrigued. “Could you tell me more about it – how you plan to transfer your soul, for instance.”

            “Watch this screen,” Sullivan said, pointing to Nathaniel’s own handheld-computer, which was sitting on the table. He then sat back and closed his eyes. He did not move a muscle, his breathing was slow and rhythmic, and he soon appeared to be in a deep sleep.

            Nathaniel was so captivated by Sullivan’s trance that he nearly forgot to look at the computer. He glanced at in just in time to see the screen go suddenly blank. For a moment he thought the computer had crashed, but then words began to appear on the screen. They were in the plain style used by the computer when announcing a serious problem, but the content was far more unusual:

            “Hello Dr. Howe. This is me, Mathew Sullivan. I am inside, you might say I have possessed the computer.”

            “Impossible,” Nathaniel said aloud. He stood still a moment, surprised and uncertain. Then he picked up the computer, extended its small retractable keyboard, and typed: “It certainly appears so, but can you prove it?”

            His words did not appear on the screen, but they were received nonetheless. The computer-Sullivan combination responded by clearing the screen of its first message and displaying another.

            “Ah yes, skepticism is smart, but I assure that I am the supposed impossibility you perceive me to be. As this is your computer, you know that it is not programmed to behave like this. For further proof, ask me a question, any question, that Sullivan would know but this computer would not.”

            Nathaniel thought briefly about what he could ask. Then he typed, “This computer has no eyes, but you have. Tell me then what I look like, including what I am currently wearing.”

            “Well,” came the reply, “you are a thin man of average height with brown hair and glasses. You are wearing a white shirt with a red tie and, I think, blue pants. I can’t actually see you at the moment, so if you would like I could leave the computer for a minute and return to provide a more detailed description.”

            “No,” answered Nathaniel, “that isn’t necessary.”

            The computer screen went blank again and then returned to the normal desktop. Sullivan opened his eyes and sat up.

            “So you believe it now?” he asked.

            “I guess I do,” said Nathaniel with hesitation. “It will be a little while before I can really get myself to believe it fully, but I’ll accept it for now.”

            “Good enough,” the old billionaire replied. “I wouldn’t have believed it myself until I experienced it.”

            “Then how did you learn to do it to begin with?” inquired Nathaniel, intent on understanding as fully as possible the strange situation in which he was getting involved.

            “Pure luck,” responded Sullivan. “About three years ago, back when I was still mostly healthy, I was sleeping peacefully one night when I found myself floating above my own body. After convincing myself I wasn’t dead, I tried flying around a bit. It was quite fun really. Eventually I returned to my body again, slept a little longer, and woke up with more than the average strange dream in my memory.

            “That could have been the end of it, but I was sufficiently interested to learn more. I read some books on the subject, had the experience randomly a couple more times, and eventually learned to travel out of body at will. I have come to believe from my experiences that we possess spirits separate from our material bodies. I am not religious, at least in the traditional sense, for I don’t pray or worship anything or follow dogma, and I certainly don’t know whether God exists, but I have taken another look at things spiritual, and I think there’s more to a person’s self than meets the eye. Honestly, I hope it will all be explained scientifically one day, but for now it certainly is not, and so I have only my own unverified experience, which logically can serve as proof only to me.

            “But getting back to the point that concerns us now, I discovered in time that it is possible for the soul to temporarily inhabit something else. In fact, I believe it is possible to possess another animal or person even, although control would be limited since the owner’s soul is still there, and I have not experimented for ethical reasons. I have, however, done a lot with machines, especially computers. I can interfere with their workings and utilize their capabilities and processing power.”

            Sullivan paused for a moment, and Richard spoke another question that was growing in his mind. “If you can inhabit computers as you describe and as you demonstrated on my perfectly ordinary one, why do you need a special computer made?”

            “I need one that can stand in for my brain,” Sullivan answered. As long as I’m living, I’m still connected to my own mind, and I believe I’m still thinking with it. I even did some EEG tests which seem to indicate that. But once I’m dead that link will presumably break. I don’t know really what will happen, but I think that if I’m already settled in a comfortable, powerful substitute brain, there’s a good chance I’ll be able to stay. A regular computer isn’t powerful enough to actually think, nor do I feel properly at home for the long term in it.

            “I do own one of the few truly “intelligent,” Turing-test capable computers, and I have experimented with that. I can inhabit it and it is quite powerful, although I am afraid I have no new insight into whether it is actually sentient as a human is or not, but at any rate I have difficulty using it. Its way of thinking is too alien, too unlike the processes of the biological mind. No, I need somewhere I can be at home.”

            “I see,” said Nathaniel. “Well, sir, there’s a part of my mind that still says you must be delusional, but I’m willing to take the risk. It is an interesting project you’ve offered me, and I do accept it. I’ll get started right away.”

            “Good,” replied Sullivan, a frail smile visible on his face. “I will give you use of any laboratories, manufacturing capabilities, or anything else you need that my companies can provide. I will pay you a standard wage while you work on the project and a one billion dollar award when you deliver it to me. Farewell and good luck.”

            “Goodbye,” returned Nathaniel. “I will bring you a silicon brain soon, I hope.”

            The serving robots led Nathaniel out. He took a last glance through the floor as he left, taking in both Earth and stars. He stepped into the elevator. He was returning to Earth. The project before him was daunting, but to undertake great things was his dream, at last being realized. Not simply for his career, or for Sullivan, or for the advancement of science and engineering, but by all those things to give himself purpose, to fulfill the meaning he made for his own life did he accept the task.