He shook his head. “Oh, they had ’em, back home. The school counselors kept offerin’ different ones to us. But y’know the Yukon is, well…”
“A land of immigrants, yes. Tough-minded, self-reliant.” She slipped with apparent ease into a North Canuck accent. “De sort who know what dey know, and damn if any wise-guy program’s gonna tell dem what dey tinkin’, eh?”
Nelson couldn’t help but laugh. Their eyes met and she smiled, sipping her tea and looking like anybody’s grandmother. “Do you know how far back autopsych programs go, Nelson? The first was introduced back when I was just a little girl, oh, before 1970. Eliza consisted of maybe a hundred lines of code. That’s all.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. All it would do is ask questions. If you typed ‘I feel depressed,’ it would answer either, ‘So you feel depressed?’ or ‘Why do you think you feel depressed?’ Good leading questions, actually, that would get you started picking apart your own feelings, even though the program didn’t understand the word ‘depressed’ at all. If you’d typed, ‘I feel… orange,’ it would have answered, ‘Why do you think you feel orange?’
“Funny thing about it, though, Eliza was positively addictive! People used to sit for hours in front of those old-fashioned screens, pouring their hearts out to a fictitious listener, one programmed simply to say the rough equivalent of ‘Hmm? I see! Oh, do tell!’
“It was the perfect confidant, of course. It couldn’t get bored or irritated, or walk away, or gossip about you after-ward. Nobody would cast judgment on your deep dark secrets because nobody was exactly who you were talking to. At the same time, though, the rhythm of a true conversation was maintained. Eliza seemed to draw you out, insist you keep trying to probe your feelings till you found out what hurt. Some people reported major breakthroughs. Claimed Eliza changed their lives.”
Nelson shook his head. “I guess it’s the same with Elspeth. But…” He shook his head and fell silent.
“But Elspeth seemed real enough, didn’t she?”
“Nosy bitch,” he muttered into his teacup.
“Who do you mean, Nelson?” Jen asked mildly. “The program? Or me?”
He put the cup down quickly. “Uh, the program! I mean she… it… kept after me and after me, picking apart my words. Then there was that, um, free-association part…”
He recalled the smiling face in the holo tank. It had seemed so innocuous, asking him to say the first word or phrase to come to mind. Then the next, and the next. It went on for many minutes till Nelson felt caught by the flow, and words spilled forth quicker than he was aware of them. Then, when the session was over, Elspeth showed him those charts — tracing the irrefutable patterns of his subsurface thoughts, depicting a muddle of conflicting emotions and obsessions that nevertheless only began to tell his story.
“It’s the second-oldest technique in modern psychology, after hypnosis,” Jen told him. “Some say free association was Freud’s greatest discovery, almost making up for some of his worst blunders. The technique lets all the little selves within us speak out, see? No matter how thoroughly a bit or corner is outvoted by the rest, free association lets it slip in that occasional word or clue.
“Actually, we free associate in everyday life, as well. Our little subselves speak out in slips of the tongue or pen, or in those sudden, apparently irrelevant fantasies or memories that just seem to pop into mind, as if out of nowhere. Or snatches of songs you haven’t heard in years.”
Nelson nodded. He was starting to see what Jen was driving at, and felt intensely relieved. So all of this has something to do with my studies, after all. I was afraid she wanted me to face that program ’cause she thought I was crazy.
Not that he felt all that sure of his own mental balance anymore. That one session had exposed so many raw nerves, so many places where it hurt — memories from a childhood he’d thought normal enough, but which still had left him with his own share of wounds.
He shook his head to knock back those gloomy thoughts. Everybody has shit like that to deal with. She wouldn’t be wasting time on me if she thought I was nuts.
“You’re tellin’ me this has to do with cooperation and competition,” he said, concentrating on the abstract.
“That’s right. All the current multimind theories of consciousness agree on one thing, that each of us is both many and one, all at the same time. In that sense, we humans are most catholic beings.”
Obviously, she had just made a witticism, which had gone completely over his head. Fortunately, the session was being recorded by his note plaque and he could hunt down her obscure reference later. Nelson chose not to get sidetracked. “So inside of me I’ve got… what? A barbarian and a criminal and a sex maniac…”
“And a scholar and a gentleman and a hero,” she agreed. “And a future husband and father and leader, maybe. Though few psychologists anymore say metaphors like that are really accurate. The mind’s internal landscape doesn’t map directly onto the formal roles of the outer world. At least, not as directly as we used to think.
“Nor are the boundaries between our subpersonae usually so crisp or clear. Only in special cases, like divided personality disorder, do they become what you or I would call distinct characters or personalities.
Nelson pondered that — the cacophony within his head. Until coming to Kuwenezi, he had hardly been aware of it. He’d always believed there was just one Nelson Grayson. That core Nelson still existed. In fact, it felt stronger than ever. Still, at the same time, he had grown better at listening to the ferment just below the surface. He leaned forward. “We talked before about how — how the cells in my body compete and cooperate to make a whole person. And I been reading some of those theories ’bout how individual people could be looked at the same way… like, y’know, organs or cells cooperating and competing to make up societies? And how the same… metaphor—”
“How the same metaphor’s been applied to the role species play in Earth’s ecosphere, yes. Those are useful comparisons, so long as we remember that’s all they are. Just comparisons, similes, models of a much more complicated reality.”
He nodded. “But now you’re sayin’ even our minds are like that?”
“And why not?” Dr. Wolling laughed. “The same processes formed complexity in nature, in our bodies, and in cultures. Why shouldn’t they work in our minds as well?”
Put that way, it sounded reasonable enough. “But then, why do we think we’re individuals? Why do we hide from ourselves the fact we’re so many inside? What’s the me that’s thinkin’ this, right now?”
Jen smiled, and sat back. “My boy. My dear boy. Has anyone ever told you that you have a rare and precious gift?”
At first Nelson thought she was referring to his unexpected talent with animals and in managing the ecology of ark four. But she corrected that impression. “You have a knack for asking the right questions, Nelson. Would it surprise you to learn the one you just posed is probably the deepest, most perplexing in psychology? Perhaps in all philosophy?”
Nelson shrugged. The way he felt whenever Jen praised him was proof enough that he had many selves. While one part of him felt embarrassment each time she did this, another basked in the one thing he wanted most, her approval.
“Great minds have been trying to explain consciousness for centuries,” she went on. “Julian Jaynes called it the ‘analog I.’ The power to name some central locus ‘me’ seems to give intensity and focus to each individual human drama. Is this something totally unique to humanity? Or just a commodity? Something we only have a bit more of than, say, dolphins or chimpanzees?
“Is consciousness imbued in what some call the ‘soul’? Is it a sort of monarch of the mind? A higher-order creature, set there to rule over all the ‘lower’ elements?