The somatic aides would have said that Austin Worms was the best ghoul in the Solar System, a zombie’s best friend. And they would have meant what they said even if they went on to joke.
Austin had vomited for the first and only time in his life when he learned the origin of the slang terms “ghoul” and “vampire.”
The sounds of Terry’s tour group faded as they moved up the hall to the psychetician laboratory. But Austin did not return to Bruhler’s The Central Equations of the Abstract Theory of Mind. He had been puzzled by what the eleven-year-old blond girl had said to him before sauntering off to catch up with the rest of the tour. She had said, “I bet that mind is gonna be in for a real shock when it wakes up with that thing on its backside.” He wondered how she could know that it wasn’t just part of the crazy-quilt system of tubes and wires that the jogger had on her back.
“I’m Candy Darling,” she had added as she left the room. Now he knew who she was. You never knew what to expect in a harmonizer.
Psycheticians take care of minds. That’s why they are sometimes called vampires. Somaticians are called ghouls because they take care of bodies.
Germaine Means grinned wolfishly at them. “I am a psychetician. What Terry would call a vampire. Call me Germaine if that does not appeal.”
They were seated facing a blackboard at one end of a large room which was otherwise filled with data cabinets, office cubicles, and computer consoles. The woman who addressed them wore severe and plain overalls. When she had first come to the Norbert Wiener Research Hospital—NWRH—the director had suggested that the chief psychetician might dress more suitably. That director had retired early.
“As you know from what Austin Worms told you, we think of the individual human mind as an abstract pattern of memory, skill, and experience that has been impressed on the physical hardware of the brain. Think of it this way: when you get a computer factory-fresh, it is like a blanked human brain. The computer has no subroutines, just as the brain has no skills. The computer has no data arrays to call on, just as the blanked brain has no memories.
“What we do here is try to implant the pattern of memory, skill, an experience that is all that is left of a person into a blanked brain. It is not easy because brains are not manufactured. You have to grow them. And, a unique personality has to be part of this growth and development. So, each brain is different. So no software mind fits any hardware brain perfectly. Except the brain that it grew up with.
“For instance,” Germaine Means continued, softening her tone so she would not alert Ms. Pedersen’s boyfriend, who was dozing in a well-padded chair, his elegant legs thrust straight out in full display, tights to sandals. “For instance, when pressure is applied to this person’s foot, his brain knows how to interpret the nervous impulses from his foot.” She suited her action to her words.
“His yelp indicates that his brain recognizes that considerable pressure has been applied to the toes of his left foot. If, however, we implanted another mind, it would not interpret the nervous impulses correctly—it might feel the impulses as a stomachache.”
The young man was on his feet, bristling. He moved toward Germaine, who had turned away to pick up what looked like a pair of goggles with some mirrors and gears on top. As he reached her, she turned to face him and pushed the goggles into his hands.
“Yes, thank you for volunteering. Put them on.” Not knowing what else to do, he did.
“I want you to look at that blond-haired girl who just sat down over there.” She held his arm lightly as he turned and his balance wavered. He appeared to be looking through the goggles at a point several degrees to the right of Candy Darling.
“Now I want you to point at her with your right hand—quick!” The young man’s arm shot out, the finger also pointing several degrees to the right of the girl. He began moving his finger to the left, but Germaine pulled his hand down to his side, outside the field of vision that the goggles allowed him.
“Try it again, quick,” she said. This time the finger was not as far off. On the fifth try his finger pointed directly to Candy Darling, though he continued to look to her right.
“Now off with the goggles. Look at her again. Point quick!” Germaine grabbed his hand the instant he pointed. Though he was not looking directly at Candy Darling, he was pointing several degrees to the left of her. He looked baffled.
Germaine Means chalked a head and goggles on the blackboard, seen as if you were looking down at them from the ceiling. She dress another head to the left of the line of sight of the goggled head and chalked “15°” in to indicate the angle.
“What happened is a simple example of tuning. The prisms in the goggles bend the light so that when his eyes told him he was looking straight at her, his eyes were in fact pointed fifteen degrees to her right. The muscles and nerves of his hand were tuned to point where his eyes were actually pointed—so he pointed fifteen degrees to the right.
“But then his eyes saw his hand going off to the right, so he began to compensate. In a couple of minutes—five tries—his motor coordination compensates so that he points to where his eyes tell him she is—he adjusted to pointing fifteen degrees to the left from usual. When I took the goggles off, his arm was still tuned to compensate, so he pointed off to the left until he readjusted.”
She picked up the goggles. “Now, a human can adjust to that distortion in a few minutes. But I could calibrate these so that they would turn the whole room upside down. If you then walked around and tried to do things, you would find it difficult. Very difficult. But if you kept the goggles on, the whole room would turn right side up after a day or two.
Everything would seem normal because your system would have retune itself.
“What do you think will happen if you then take the goggles off?”
Candy Darling giggled. Ms. Pedersen said, “Oh, I see. Your mind would have adjusted to turning the, ah, messages from your eyes upside down, so when you took the goggles off—
“Precisely,” said Germaine, “everything would look upside down to you until you readjusted to having the goggles off and it happens the same way. You stumble around for a day or so and then everything snaps right side up again. And the stumbling-around part is important. If you are confined to a chair with your head fixed in position, your mind and body can’t tune themselves.
“Now I want you to imagine what happens when we implant a mind into a blanked brain. Almost everything will be out of tune. The messages from your eyes won’t simply be inverted, they’ll be scrambled in countless ways. Same thing with your ears, nose, tongue—and with the whole nerve net covering your body. And that’s just incoming messages. Your mind will have even more problems when it tries to tell the body to do something. Your mind will try to get your lips to say ‘water,’ and Sol knows what sound will come out.
“And what’s worse is that whatever sound does come out, your new ears won’t be able to give your mind an accurate version of it.”
Germaine smiled at them and glanced at her watch. Terry stood up.
“Terry will be wanting to take you on. Let me wrap this up by saying that it is a very simple thing to play someone’s mind tape into a prepared brain. The great problem is in getting the rearranged brain, the cerebral cortex, speaking strictly, to be tuned into the rest of the system. As Austin Worms may have told you, we start an implant operation tomorrow. The initial tape-in will take less than an hour. But the tuning will take days and days. Even months, if you count all the therapy. Questions?”