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.
“Not good enough. I haven’t got it quite right yet. It will need a lot more working out.”
He saved the file with his thoughts — then noticed that there was one KIM file left on disk. The term paper for Betser. She had a copy of it — but she would never understand it, much less explain it when she was queried. Maybe he should save this one as well, after all she had been responsible for his idea about a managing program. No way! He hit delete and it vanished with all the rest.
The very last thing he did was put a lock on the computer so it would not accept calls from her phone. But this wasn’t good enough — she could still call from a public phone. He added a program that would turn away all incoming calls, no calls now or forever from anyone.
In the end he sat there tired and dry-eyed. Betrayed in every way.
Nothing like this was ever going to happen to him again. No one was ever going to get close enough to him to hurt him. He was going to think about his AI managing program and see if he could get it to work and forget about her. Forget about girls. Something like this was never going to happen to him again. Ever.
9
Coronado
April 2, 2023
The helicopter came in over the bay, past the bridge that connected the hooked peninsula of Coronado to San Diego. The roads below were sealed tight by security: the copter was not only the safest but was the fastest way in and out of the base. It swooped low over the gray shapes of the mothball fleet, quietly rusting into extinction since the end of the Second World War. They dropped down to the HQ helipad, dust clouds roiling out, and saw a stretched limo pull up.
“This seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to for a meeting,” Erin Snaresbrook snapped. “Some of us have work to do. This is totally ridiculous — when we could have had a teleconference.”
“All of us have work to do, Doctor, all of us,” Benicoff said. “You have only yourself to blame — this meeting was your idea. You must have realized that this was the only way that we could guarantee security.”