Host, p.22
Host, page 22
‘Sure, that happens. But ARCHIVE doubles up on its memory, and stores everything in two different places. If both get wiped, it can still remember where it got the original information from in the first place. When you read a book, you store away the memory of bits of it in your long-term memory, right? Sometimes you can’t recall those bits any more, so you have to go back to the book and read it again. It’s not that different.’
‘Have you ever had any trouble? If ARCHIVE just goes around hacking into things at random, surely it must get noticed sometimes?’
A male student walked past them and Joe waited until he had gone into the computer room. He decided not to rake up the incident of ARCHIVE and the US warship, which had caused enough upset at the time. ‘Well, we had some teething troubles, but now I have a system that makes it impossible to trace – so far.’
‘I thought you were a responsible man. You’re like a schoolboy!’ Juliet grinned at him.
Infected by her warmth, Joe put his arm lightly around her and propelled her back to the computer room. He showed her how to use the back-propagation correlation program on ARCHIVE, then told her he would come by and see how she was getting on later, and bring Harriet Tait down, when she appeared, to show her the ropes.
As he climbed back up the stairs to his office, he felt a surge of optimism, and a sensation of wellbeing he had not experienced for a long time. He felt particularly glad that Edwin Pilgrim had gone off in a huff: it meant he hadn’t had to inflict him on Juliet on her first day. Only a week ago, he reflected, he’d been wondering how to get rid of her in the shortest polite space of time.
Now Juliet Spring was someone he did not want to lose.
*
Joe had an afternoon lecture followed by a series of tutorials and was not clear until a quarter past six. He wondered if Juliet was still working or had gone home; he assumed she had to commute back to London. He went down to the computer room.
She was seated in front of Feynman, engrossed, and did not even seem to notice Clinton going through his soft-drinks routine as Joe entered. He stood behind her for some moments, watching; the other computer screens were all dark, and apart from Juliet the room was empty. She sat staring at the endlessly changing lines of figures on her screen. Joe often found them mesmerizing.
Back-propagation correlation was an immensely slow and tedious business. Even searching out the simplest information could take hours. Unless Juliet got extremely lucky, it could be many weeks before she started to make any progress. If there was any progress to be made.
‘How’s it going?’ Joe said quietly.
‘It’s about a thousand times faster than the Sun at Cob-bold. There’s a couple of things it’s come up with so far I’d like to show you.’
Joe was surprised. ‘Sure.’
She pressed a key and the figures became static, suddenly, on the screen. Then she stood up, went over to the laser printer and picked up a handful of print-outs. She laid them out on top of the printer.
‘When I scanned my brain without the drug, I used photographs for stimuli,’ she said. From her attaché case she removed several photographs, each of them labelled with a number and a code. The first showed a substantial Edwardian house, with a conservatory and a large, orderly garden. ‘That’s my parents’ house – my family home.’
Then she showed him a second photograph of a red-haired young man in his early twenties standing beside an old MG. ‘My brother, Roger.’ Next she showed him her father, a tall, rather distinguished-looking silver-haired man, and her mother, who Joe thought looked very cold. She showed him further photographs of her school, her oldest friend, and of the family’s labrador. Joe wondered if she was going to produce any photographs of her boyfriends and felt a strange sense of relief when she did not.
Then she showed him three sheets of the cactus-like printout he had seen in her lab. They were marked A/STIMULUS DOWNLOAD HOUSE, B/STIMULUS DOWNLOAD HOUSE, C/STIMULUS DOWNLOAD HOUSE. Each was dated and marked with a time. ‘I did a control test,’ she said. ‘I was put under the scanner, with no drug, at different times of different days, then presented with each of the photos. These three show my brain activity in response to the photograph of the house.’
Joe studied them carefully, fascinated. They were all distinctly similar. Too close to be mere chance. Much too close. But were they human thought? Did these strange cactus-like spikes really hold the key to Juliet Spring’s memory of her childhood home?
And the key to immortality?
A tingle of excitement riffled through him. ‘So you’ve loaded all these into ARCHIVE?’
‘The downloads from them, yes.’ She took the photograph of her parents’ house, then showed Joe two print-outs. ‘Can you see any resemblances?’
Joe studied them carefully. One was marked A/STIMULUS DOWNLOAD HOUSE, the other SCAN PRINT-OUT A? There were a few trace similarities that he could see after some moments, one or two spikes of approximately the same length.
‘I don’t see anything significant here,’ he said. ‘I think there’re just coincidental similarities in the neuron firing patterns being picked up by the back-prop program. We’ve maybe set the parameters too wide. Why don’t we try narrowing them and running these through again?’ He was aware of the intense look of hope in her eyes.
Joe pulled up a chair and spent the next half hour adjusting the program to be more selective in the correlations it sought in the data patterns. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s put through your family home and that section again.’
‘It’ll take a few minutes to search back for it,’ she said.
Joe glanced at his watch. Half past seven. Something niggled his mind. Something he was meant to be doing that he had forgotten. Then with a sinking feeling he remembered. Shit, he thought, jumping up.
‘I’ll be right back,’ he said, then hurried out of the room and down the corridor to the deserted payphone by the vending machines. He wanted privacy and this was quicker than going to his office; he dialled his home number.
Karen answered rather frostily. ‘Where are you, Joe? You said you’d be home by half-five. Jack was really upset.’
‘I’m sorry, hon. I had my new postgrad starting and I got all behind today. How did he get on?’
It was Jack’s first day at playschool and he’d been nervous about going. Joe had promised he would be home early to help him build a Lego bridge.
‘He got on fine,’ she said, not offering any details. ‘Blake just rang you, he can’t play squash on Wednesday.’ Because Karen didn’t like Blake, she always made it sound as if she had just bitten into a lemon when she said his name.
‘Oh, right, thanks. I’ll be home as soon as I can.’ He hesitated. ‘So, he enjoyed his first day at school?’
‘Well enough.’
‘Want to put him on?’
‘He’s in bed,’ she explained. ‘It’s half-seven.’
‘So he liked his teacher? The other kids?’
‘He cried this evening when you didn’t come home.’
The comment made Joe feel lousy. It always chewed him up when he saw his son crying. Jack was a strong, resourceful little chap, normally. But when he did break, it was like watching a soul in torment.
‘I’ll get back as soon as I can.’
‘Your dinner’ll be in the oven. I have a headache and I’m going to bed myself.’ She hung up.
Joe hated the feeling he was getting, more and more recently, that Karen was at war with him. It had begun a few months after Baity had died. It was as if she blamed him for having let Barty go on that trip to Niagara, because by doing that, by having someone else to blame, she could in some way ease and transfer her own guilt.
Joe reckoned the root of the problem lay in religion. In the Christian religion you had Original Sin. In the Jewish faith you had Original Guilt. Karen’s family lived in the shadow of guilt but they thrived on it also. Guilt was an essential part of their daily life, both their weakness and their strength; in that kind of an upbringing if you had no guilt, you had no focus.
And Karen had hang-ups, also, about her background. Hers wasn’t a financially privileged family, both her parents were teachers, but she felt wealthy compared to the poverty of the world’s underclasses. She had guilty feelings about the advantages her education had given her, and although life had forced her to make the social transition from rebellious teenager to responsible adult, she had never quite completed the mental transition.
But she had great strengths that Joe admired and respected. He loved her for her generosity of spirit and a certain inner determination. She had been game enough to agree to move to England when Joe had been offered the post and the research funding, in spite of there being no job for her, and no one she knew. And until recently, she had always supported him vigorously, regardless of her own feelings about some of his views.
He walked deep in thought back down the corridor and into the computer room. Clinton rolled jerkily and noisily towards him, greeted him, then retreated and was still. Joe barely noticed the robot, his thoughts focusing on his son’s face. He had a sudden deep longing to see Jack running across the hall to greet him, flinging his tiny arms around him, hugging him with all his strength. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would get home real early, maybe go out somewhere at lunchtime and buy a present, some simple mechanical toy that Jack could take apart and put back together.
‘OK to start?’ Juliet forced him back to his surroundings, and to ARCHIVE’S decoding analysis.
‘Go ahead.’
As he sat down and watched the digits moving, he thought back to when he had been under the scanner. Memory was complex, so damned complex. A single image retained from childhood, like a tree or a house, probably needed between one and two million pixels. Even allowing for some of the memory to fade, that probably meant at least a million bytes. One million out of ten thousand billion was not a lot. But it was enough to identify, to make a correlation, if the back prop could find it.
It took an hour for the revised program to decide that there was no correlation, after all, on the sections it had previously picked out. Juliet looked bitterly disappointed.
‘You’d have been very lucky to have hit anything on day one.’
‘I thought maybe my luck had turned,’ she said despondently. ‘It’s been a bit thin on the ground recently.’
‘Let’s call it a day and I’ll buy you a drink,’ Joe said, almost before he realized it. He ought to be getting home; but Jack was already asleep; Karen was in a bolsh and had one of her regular bad headaches, which meant she’d have knocked herself out with her pills. There wasn’t too much to go home for right now, and Juliet looked desperately miserable.
‘Thank you, that would be nice,’ she said, her face brightening a little.
‘Time for bed,’ said a voice behind her. There was a sharp clatter.
They both spun round in surprise.
Then Joe breathed out, remembering. It was Clinton. The robot was removing a cable with a three-pin plug from a compartment in his front. In a slow, jerky series of motions he directed the plug slowly towards a wall socket. Clinton was battery operated. His neural network brain had learned to put itself on charge before the battery went flat.
Juliet watched, fascinated. ‘Pretty clever,’ she said.
‘Yup,’ Joe grinned. ‘Bet the President of the United States wishes he could do that!’ He stood up. ‘OK – how are you for time? You have to catch a train to London, right?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I’m staying in Brighton. My parents have a weekend flat they hardly ever use, so I’m staying there – going to be living there.’
‘That’s good. We could have a drink in the refectory here – or there’s a pub that’s quite pleasant a couple of miles down the road.’
‘Let’s try the pub.’
‘You have your car?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, you can follow me.’
The rain had stopped and it was a cold, blustery night. As Joe headed his Saab out of the COGS car park and checked in his mirror that Juliet was following, he had a fleeting moment of intense guilt.
If she really did have only a few months to live, he wondered whether it would be better to encourage her to enjoy herself, to do the things she’d always wanted to do, to travel, to go wild, to live, not spend her time closeted away in front of a computer screen on something that might be a total waste of precious time.
She was going to be cryonically frozen, and she would die with the belief that some day she would be thawed out and cured of her aneurism. Wouldn’t it be better to leave it at that? Fairer on her?
Except, Joe consoled himself, nothing in life was fair. And death was the least fair thing of all. In the fight against death you had to use every tool and every weapon. He was doing that with Juliet Spring; using her and exploiting her, and it was no use pretending any different.
The realization made him even more confused about his feelings for her.
25
Joe had expected the pub to be quiet on a Monday night, but from the line of cars along the narrow lane outside, and the problem he had finding a space in the car park, he was clearly wrong.
‘This is sort of our local,’ he said by way of apology as they walked through the front door into the mêlée of mostly students and university staff packed in the low-beamed interior.
Juliet went to the washroom. Joe ran his hands through his wind-blown hair, queued at the bar for some minutes, and finally managed to get a vodka and tonic for Juliet and an Irish whiskey on the rocks for himself.
As he carried the glasses through the throng, he bumped into several of his students and colleagues but he kept on moving, merely returning greetings with a cursory nod or a quick ‘Hi, how ya doing?’ and went into the adjoining room at the rear, which was usually less crowded.
To his relief he saw Juliet had beaten him to a couple of vacant chairs and a table in the far corner, where they settled down. Joe raised his glass. ‘Cheers.’
Juliet clinked her glass against his and drank deeply.
‘You want anything to eat at all?’ he said.
‘No, thanks, I’m fine.’ She took a pack of cigarettes from her handbag, shook one out and put it in her mouth, then lit it with her silver lighter.
‘So you’ve survived your first day! Harriet showed you round?’
She nodded, inhaling deeply, then blew smoke out of her nostrils. ‘She’s very sweet.’
‘Did you get some lunch? I meant to come by, but I didn’t get a chance.’
‘Harriet took me to the refectory; we had some pasta.’ She drew on her cigarette and blew the smoke out again in a fast, nervous motion, and looked at him expectantly.
Joe sipped his whiskey; it tasted good and calmed him a little almost instantly. ‘So whereabouts is your parents’ apartment?’
She spoke without taking her eyes from his face, the thread of cigarette smoke unwinding upwards beside her. ‘On the seafront in Hove; just a few yards from the promenade. It looks down on the beach and right out across the Channel. There’s a balcony where you can sit out in summer.’ She took another drag on her cigarette. ‘I love it there,’ she said, wistfully. ‘I love it there more than anywhere else in the world; just sitting on a clear day watching the ships go by on the horizon.’ She tapped ash off the end of her cigarette into a foil ashtray, still looking at him.
‘I like the ocean too,’ he said. Her stare was having a mesmerizing effect. He wanted to go to the flat right now with Juliet, make love to her, sit on the balcony, have breakfast and watch the sun rising over the sea as the ships went by on the horizon.
Except it was January and they’d freeze. And, anyway, he must have turned crazy; he never had those kinds of thoughts.
He wondered if she was trying to hypnotize him. There was something weird about her, maybe ARCHIVE was right. And yet he was enjoying being under the strange spell of this lovely creature.
She extinguished her cigarette, and cradled her glass nervously in her hands. ‘So from the analysis you did on the tape of your own brain scan, you really do think there’s something intelligent there, beyond background noise?’
As he swilled the ice cubes around in his glass, Joe tried to weigh up the situation. The balance between not raising her hopes and the truth. ‘I got a hint,’ he said. ‘But that’s all.’
He swirled the drink again. As he did so something exploded in front of him, spraying his hands and clothes with shards of glass and ice. He jumped, startled both by the bang and by the strange, faraway look on Juliet’s face. As if she wasn’t even aware what had happened. Didn’t realize that she was holding a broken glass and blood was running from her fingers. She had crushed the glass with her bare hands.
Joe pulled out his handkerchief, took her hand and dabbed the cut on the end of her forefinger.
‘Sorry,’ she said tensely.
‘It’s OK, no harm done. Give it a suck and it’ll be fine.’ An ice cube and several drops of vodka lay on her dress, and Joe wiped them off with his handkerchief, before dabbing his own clothes. She sucked her finger and smiled at him.
‘OK?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
‘Want a plaster?’
She glanced at it, then sucked it again. ‘No, it’s OK, thank you.’
‘I’ll get you another drink,’ he said.
She stood up adamantly. ‘I’ll do it. Let me get you another, too.’
Joe raised his hands in a shrug and smiled. ‘Jameson’s on the rocks, thank you.’
As she walked off, Joe picked up the pieces of glass from the carpet, and put them in the ashtray. The drink she brought him back looked like a treble.
Joe looked at it in amazement. ‘Any water in this?’
She shook her head. ‘I thought you might need a stiff drink to put up with me!’
He grinned and raised the glass. ‘Cheers.’
She raised hers back and stared intently at him again. ‘It’s going to take too long, isn’t it?’ She sucked her finger again.
