“Welcome to Biosyn, Martin,” Urquhart said cheerfully. “Why didn’t you signal you were coming and let us pick you up at the airport?”
“Thanks, John.” M’tobo’s warm dry hand closed over Urquhart’s. “I didn’t want to inconvenience you—you must be very busy just now.”
“We’re never too busy to greet an old friend,” Urquhart assured him, weighing the implication that the company’s management was experiencing difficulties.
“Thank you, but this is a business visit more than anything else. Is Colonel Crowley available?” They began walking towards the glowing green organ-pipes of the dropshafts.
“Ah … no. We’re temporarily out of contact—but why didn’t you use the microwave link to call him? It would have saved you….”
“I had a feeling he wouldn’t be available, and my business is mainly with you, John. Is it safe to speak here?”
Urquhart stopped walking. “Yes.”
“The position—in a nutshell—is that a general election is being forced on my Government, probably within two months. You’ve heard about the riots in Losane?”
“We all have.” Urquhart was enveloped in the cold unease of premonition. ‘But I assumed it was merely teachers demanding equal pay with students, or something like that. I didn’t think they were serious.”
“I assure you that they are. O’ringa’s Democratic Reform party has gathered much support in the past year, so much that we have no option but to agree to an election—an election we might lose without the active support of Colonel Crowley.”
“Active?” Urquhart laughed as he glanced up at M’tobo’s glistening chestnut face above the wall-like torso. The saffron-tinged eyes were uncomfortably intent on his own.
“Active in the political sense—which means being available at all times to speak to his people and to give his overt blessing to the Loyalist Government. That is no more than we were promised by Biosyn.”
“Of course, of course.” Urquhart glanced around him at the scattered knots of people in the reception hall. “Martin, perhaps we shouldn’t talk here. I’m going to take you down to the Tank level.”
M’tobo took an involuntary step backwards and collided with a pert secretary who was wearing one of the latest vi-bras. The impact threw the tiny impulse motors in the vi-bra out of synchronisation and the girl hurried away looking disgusted as she tried to control the wild oscillations of her bosom.
“Interesting effect, that,” Urquhart smirked desperately, but the huge man’s eyes were blank and Urquhart suddenly understood a little more of what was happening in the African state he represented. If a person of M’tobo’s education and experience had doubts and fears—what would the mass of his people be like?
M’tobo recovered his composure almost immediately. He talked about inconsequentials while Urquhart used his key to get them into the special shaft which went a hundred metres down into bedrock. The drop took a matter of seconds, then they were stepping into the Tank room. It was fifty metres square and hewn from solid rock, but each wall was covered with magnified scenes brought down from the roof in light pipes, creating the impression of being in a penthouse. Urquhart glimpsed the same wooded hill in the misty morning light, his hill, and he made up his mind to go there at the weekend. The Tank itself occupied the centre of the room, its mirrored sides stretching from floor to ceiling, and desks of varying sizes formed a line around it. Most of the desks had two or more technicians seated at them.
“Martin!” Bryan Philp, teeth and glasses screening his face with light, advanced on them. “Good to see you, good to see you!”
You ham, Urquhart thought, don’t overplay the welcome. But M’tobo’s attention was held by the Tank. He took several paces towards it and stood with his back to the others. Watching him, Urquhart remembered his own early dismay, the emotional upheavals which were a result of intellect forcing instinct to accept the impossible….
“It is so difficult for me to credit this thing,” M’tobo said. “I attended Colonel Crowley’s private funeral and cremation, and yet I have to believe he is alive in there.” He seemed subdued, slightly less Herculean, and Urquhart realised that bringing him face-to-face with the Tank had been a good tactical move. M’tobo turned to speak to Philp. “The technology involved goes far beyond my understanding, and yet I wish I could learn….”
Philp’s eyes lit with excitement. “Come into my office, Martin. I’ve got something you’ll be interested in.” He took M’tobo’s elbow and steered him into his long office which had a glass partition on one side and an old-fashioned blackboard on the other. Urquhart followed with brooding suspicions that his technical director was about to go off the rails, as he usually did when not closely confined to his own work. Philp waved M’tobo into a chair and busied himself with the controls of a 3D projector.
“Bryan,” Urquhart whispered. “I hope you’re not going to show that animation I’ve heard about. The one you and your cretinous mechanics put together while you were supposed….”
“Hello,” said a pink cigar with fins at one end and a comicbook face at the other. It had appeared in the air close to the blackboard and was bowing grotesquely while introducing itself. “I am an intercontinental ballistic missile and, believe it or not, I am a direct ancestor of the bionics Tank in which a human personality can be synthesised and preserved indefinitely.
“Let me tell you something about a little family problem I had a long time ago. Like all other early complex computer systems I was … well, let’s face it, I was downright unreliable. My designers did their best with my individual parts, and managed to give them a reliability factor of something like 99.9993 per cent, but even this allowed me only a reasonable chance of working properly. Increasing the reliability of individual components was an engineering dead-end, because any minute gains were more than cancelled by my growing size and complexity.”
The pink cigar paused to demonstrate this process by becoming a little longer and sprouting an extra fin. M’tobo stared at it fixedly.
“You’ll roast for this,” Urquhart snarled quietly in Philp’s ear. “Our PR consultants gave strict instructions that this abortion of yours was to be destroyed. Turn it off at once!”
“And yet there is one very common type of computer which has achieved the opposite effect—this is the human brain,” the cigar continued blithely, and smiled as a greenish object resembling a boiled cauliflower appeared in the air beside it.
“It consists of ten thousand million neurons, each of which is less dependable than a transistor—and still the complete system is millions of times more reliable than any of its single parts. The brain is not perfect, mind you. Being a survival device, it is somewhat inflexible as a result of its conditioning, and, quite frankly, it is not very well adapted to handling problems in logic.”
“I must agree,” the brain said in a coy feminine voice and Urquhart groaned aloud. “The problems don’t end there, either. My neurons are exactly like my friend’s electronic switches in that they have to be either on or off, with no in-between state possible—but they are very much slower in operation than switches.
“How do I overcome these drawbacks? The answer is simple—I act in parallel. Many different connections are made simultaneously, with the result that a defective biological switch is immediately outvoted, giving me high reliability. Acting in parallel also makes up for the comparative slowness of my neurons.”
“Absolutely true,” the pink cigar cut in. “With the example of the brain before them, computer designers began turning away from sequential or serial operation as far back as the Nineteen-Sixties. They investigated parallel operation systems modelled on the brain and the technique proved successful—machines capable of human-like, alogical, heuristic thinking came into being—but the biggest breakthrough of all was the development of microminiature electrochemical components.” The cauliflower-like brain abruptly vanished and was replaced by a swarm of multi-coloured specks, striped like wasps.