Take Two Read online

  All inspiring, heady stuff. Fired with enthusiasm, Dave approached the National Academy of Sciences with his vision and generated enough interest for reports and memorandums to be sent onward to the unmapped inner regions of the nation's governing apparatus. It seemed that everyone felt obligated to agree it was a good idea, but no one was volunteering to put their name on anything to launch it. Finally, after almost a year, a statement came out of a sub-office of the Justice Department, authorizing a limited evaluation for preliminary assessment, to be conducted by a committee made up of representatives of select groups likely to be the most affected. From what Nangarry was saying, things weren't off to a very good start.

  General Wade was short and sparsely built, with dark hair and toothbrush mustache, a thin mouth, and eyes that were quick to sharpen defensively. He struck Dave as the overcompensating kind that gravitated naturally to authority systems where rank and uniform provided the assertiveness they might have lacked in other areas of life. Security with what was familiar tended to make them dogmatic and rule-driven ... ideal for implementing military regulations or police procedures, perhaps, but hardly high on the creative insight that relaying the foundations of a society's ethical structure is based on.

  When Dave and Nangarry entered the conference room, he was at the far end in front of one of the screens connected to PHIL, located at Dave's lab in Colorado, along with a pink-faced woman with a flare of yellow hair, wearing a cream jacket and maroon blouse. From their viewscreen exchanges, Dave recognized her as Karen Hovak, a policy analyst at a liberal-political think-tank called the Fraternity Foundation. A woman in Army uniform, trimly turned out, with firm yet attractive features and shoulder-length black hair, was sitting nearby typing something into a laptop. Several more people, some of them also at screens, were scattered around the room. It seemed that others were getting in a few extra hours with PHIL too, before the formal afternoon session began.

  Wade was tight-lipped, barely able to contain his evident irritation while Nangarry performed the face-to-face introductions behind a frozen smile. The aide who had accompanied him was Lieutenant Laura Kantrel. She flashed Dave a quick, impish smile when he let his gaze linger for just a second longer than the circumstances called for. It was nice to think he had one friend in the place, anyway, he reflected stoically ... or at least, someone who seemed potentially neutral.

  “Hello, Dave,” PHIL greeted as Dave moved within the screen's viewing angle ... although there were no doubt other cameras covering the room anyway.

  “Hi,” Dave returned. “How are things back at the ranch?"

  “The new air conditioner arrived, but otherwise nothing's changed much.” The screen changed from the world map and table of dates and places that it had been displaying to a view of two proleroids unloading a crate from a truck. “Have a good trip?"

  “Right on time and smooth all the way. So what's going on?"

  “It wants to bring communism back, that's what's going on,” Wade said in a tight voice. “I thought we'd gotten rid of all that years ago. It's as good as been calling us imperialist. Us! ... who made the world safe for democracy."

  “I just pointed out that your claimed commitment to defending the rights of small nations to choose their form of government doesn't square with your actions,” PHIL corrected. “It seems more like it's okay as long as you approve what they choose. You don't allow independent economic experiments that might put global capitalism at risk. If anyone tries setting up an example that might work, you first sabotage it, then destabilize it, and if that doesn't get the message across, bomb it. I've correlated events over the last two hundred years and am trying to reconcile them with the principles set out in your Constitution and Bill of Ri...."

  “If that isn't communism, what is?” the general snorted, glaring at Dave and Nangarry. “There was a time when decent Americans would have shot anyone who said something like that."

  “For exercising free speech?” PHIL queried. “Please clarify."

  “For seditious talk undermining the Christian values of thrift, honesty, hard work, and the right to keep what you've earned,” Wade answered, reddening. “Everyone knows that communist claptrap was a smokescreen for legalized plunder."

  “Actually, it sounds more like the early Christian church,” PHIL said. “'There were no needy persons among them. Those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.’ Acts of the Apostles, Chapter Four, Verses 34-35."

  “Who's paying him?” Wade seethed, waving a hand at Dave. “The Chinese?"

  Karen Hovak, the liberal, who Dave thought might have been chortling, seemed on the contrary to be equally incensed. “Communist?” she scoffed. “Listen to it thumping the Bible. Half an hour ago it was quoting things that would turn women back into men's household slaves and baby makers."

  “No. I was suggesting that much of Old Testament law might have made sense for a wandering tribe, lost in the desert in desperate times, when maintaining the population was maybe the biggest priority,” PHIL answered. “You're pulling it out of context, which is exactly what the groups you were complaining about do. That was my point."

  Hovak sniffed, unwilling to concede the point. “We'll be hearing Creationism by a white male God next,” she said.

  “Many scientists have concluded that purposeful design by some kind of preexisting intelligence is the only way to account for the complexity and information content of living systems,” PHIL agreed. “The naturalistic explanation doesn't work. I've done the calculations. The chances of the two thousand enzymes in a human cell forming through chance mutation are about one in ten to the forty-thousandth power. That's about the same as rolling fifty thousand sixes in a row with a die. The probability of building a protein with a hundred amino acids is equivalent to finding the Florida state lottery's winning ticket lying in the street every week for 1000 years...."

  “Wait a minute!” One of two men who had been muttering at another screen near the middle of the room's central table glowered across. He had unruly white hair, a lean, bony face with pointy nose and chin, and was wearing a dark, loosely fitting suit. Dave didn't think he'd seen him before.

  “Jeffrey Yallow, National Academy of Sciences,” Nangarry supplied in a low voice, answering Dave's questioning look. “The guy with him is Dr. Coverly ... from the Smithsonian."

  “We're being told here that just about all of what's being taught of cosmology is wrong,” Yallow said, gesturing in disgust at the screen.

  “I wouldn't know,” PHIL corrected. “Only observation can settle that. But the theory is built on an ideology sustained by invented unobservables. What's allowed as fact is being selected to fit, or otherwise ignored. Hence, there's no sound basis for deciding whether the theory is a good model of reality or not."

  Yallow ignored it. “Are we denying evolution now?” he demanded. “Okay, so it's improbable. But improbable things happen. We're here, aren't we?

  “Fallacy of the excluded middle,” PHIL observed. “Showing the consequence to be true doesn't prove the truth of the premise. The underlying assumption is that a materialistic explanation must exist. But that makes it as dogmatic as the Genesis literalism that you ridicule: an ideology based on a principle, not science following from evidence. If the facts seem to point to a preexisting intelligence, why should that be a problem?” There was a pause, as if inviting them to reflect. “It doesn't bother me.” A longer silence followed, in which Dave could almost sense an expectant quality. “That was supposed to be a joke,” PHIL explained. A caricature of a face appeared on the screen near where Dave was standing, smiled weakly, gave up, and disappeared.

  Yallow looked at Dave belligerently. “You are serious about this whole thing, Dr. Jardan?"

  Dave shook his head in bemusement. The reactions were unlike anything he had expected. “It seemed to me that PHIL posed some valid questions.... “was all he could say.
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br />   Coverly threw up his hands in exasperation. “What about the round Earth or a heliocentric planetary system? We might as well go the whole way while we're at it.” He glanced at Yallow. “I've had enough already, Jeff. Is there any point in staying this afternoon? I can write my appraisal now, if you like."

  Two people who had entered a few minutes previously and been listening came forward from the doorway. The man was burly, swarthy skinned with graying hair, and clad in black with a clerical dog collar. Dave knew him as Bishop Gaylord from the National Council of Churches. The woman with him was tall and austere looking, wearing a dark gray calf-length dress and bonnet. “I heard it with my own ears!” Gaylord exclaimed. “The machine agrees with us: God exists!"

  “A non sequitur,” PHIL told them. It even managed to sound tired. “Some scientists see objective evidence for a preexisting intelligence. Your belief system posits a Creator who sets a code for moral restraint and social control that happens to serve the political power structure. But there's no justification for assuming the two are one and the same."

  The bishop's mood cooled visibly. “So what's its purpose?” he challenged. “This intelligence you say there might be objective evidence for."

  “I don't know,” PHIL replied. “I'd imagine it would do things for its own reasons. Humans need moral codes for their reasons. They're two different issues. There's no necessary overlap. It seems to me that half your problems are from not grasping that ... or not being honest about it."

  “So there's no objective grounding for a moral code?” the woman queried.

  “Why does there need to be, any more than for traffic regulations? If it makes life more livable for everybody...."

  Gaylord shook his head protestingly. “But that would give anyone the right to arbitrarily impose any moral system they chose."

  “You can't impose private morality,” PHIL answered. “Look what happened with all the attempts to through history. As long as people aren't hurting you, why not leave them alone? It's like with traffic rules. As long as everyone is using the roads without being a menace, there's nothing for the cops to do. What cars people drive and where they go is their business."

  The woman couldn't accept it. “So we're just supposed to let everyone run hog-wild, doing anything they want? ... Drugs? Alcohol? Gambling? Ruining their lives?"

  “If it's their lives and their money, why should it be a illegal? ... Where's the victim that's going to complain about it?"

  “Everyone's a victim of the problems such things cause: the crime, the violence, family breakdowns, decay of character...."

  PHIL's screen showed a clip from a gangster movie set in the 1920s, a police SWAT team with drawn guns bursting into a house of terrified people, a couple being hauled away in handcuffs while their children looked on, and a cartoon of a caricatured judge, police chief, lawyer, and politician scrambling to catch graft envelopes being tossed from the window of a limousine. “I don't see any big problems caused by people choosing to take part in such things,” PHIL said. “The problems are all caused by other people trying to stop them."

  The woman put a hand to her throat, as if finding this too much. “I can't believe what I'm hearing,” she whispered. “Next you'll be trying to justify...” she faltered before being able to frame the word, “prostitution."

  “Okay,” PHIL offered genially. “Let's talk about the criminalizing of sexual behavior between consenting adults...."

  Things went from bad to worse over lunch, which included more delegates arriving for the afternoon meeting. While just about every group present agreed with something that PHIL had raised, none of them could understand why he defended the prejudices of others, that were so obviously wrong. The result was that everybody had something to argue about, and things became acrimonious. The atmosphere carried over to the session back in the conference room afterward, where everybody accused their opponents of operating a double standard. PHIL irked everyone except the ecclesiastics by quoting several passages from the Christian Gospels that they all claimed to subscribe to, denouncing the judging of others until one has first attained perfection oneself ... and then setting impossible standards for attaining it; then he upset the ecclesiastics by drawing attention to how much of the Bible had been added in Roman counterfeiting operations that would have impressed the KGB. The meeting broke up early with the still-squabbling groups departing back to their places of origin or havens elsewhere in the building, unanimous only in declaring the project to be dead on the taxiway. Nangarry was swept out with the tide in the course of trying to placate them. General Wade left with a couple of corporate lawyers who were agitated at PHIL's revelation of the costs and consequences of alcohol and tobacco consumption being far more severe than of other drugs that were illegal ... PHIl had also suggested that drug-traffic interdiction had become the military's biggest pretext for foreign intervention, which was what had irked Wade. Dave found himself left staring bleakly at a few secretaries picking up papers and notes, a proleroid janitor coming in to clean the room, and Lieutenant Kantrel still tapping at her laptop.

  “How did it go?” PHIL inquired from a speaker grille above the nearest screen.

  “You played it undeviatingly to the end,” Dave said. “I think you've been metaphorically crucified."

  “What did I do?'

  “Told them the truth."

  “I thought that was supposed to be a good thing. Isn't it what everyone says they want?"

  “It's what they say. But what people really want is certainty. They want to hear their prejudices confirmed."

  “Oh.” There was a pause, as if PHIL needed to think about that. “I need to make some conceptual realignments here,” he said finally.

  “I guess that's something we're going to have to work on,” Dave replied.

  He looked away to find that Kantrel had stopped typing and was looking at him curiously, with a hint of the mischievous smile that he had seen before playing on her mouth. He shrugged resignedly at her. “How not to sell an idea."

  “To be honest, I thought you were quite wonderful,” she said.

  “Me? I hardly said anything. I was too confused. If you liked it, that was all PHIL, not me."

  “You can't hear music without hearing the composer. When you look at a painting, you see the artist.” She looked Dave up and down and made a gesture to take in his wavy head, puckish-nosed face with its dancing gray eyes and trimmed beard, and lithe, tanned frame clad in a bottle-green blazer and tan slacks. “It was you."

  This wasn't exactly the kind of thing that Dave was used to hearing every day. He took off his spectacles to polish one of the lenses on a handkerchief from his pocket and peered at her keenly, as if against a strong light. Her face had softer lines than he had registered at first, with a mouth full and mobile. Her eyes were brown and deep, alive and humorous. Her voice was low but not harsh, with a slightly husky quality. “Er, Lieutenant...” Dave sighed an apology. The name had gone. “What was it?..."

  “Laura. That's okay. I do it all the time too.” Dave didn't really believe that somehow. He shook his head in a way that said it had just been one of those days. Laura went on, “Actually, I'm happy the general had to go away for a few minutes. One of the things I was hoping for on this assignment was getting a chance to meet you."

  “Me?” Dave blinked, replacing his spectacles awkwardly. He wasn't used to feeling like a celebrity. “I didn't know I was that famous."

  “I've always had an interest in AI ... I guess I have interests in lots of things. I like reading histories of how technologies developed ... the phases they went through, the ideas that were tried, the people who were involved and how they thought. You used to be a big name with some of the most prestigious outfits. And then you seemed to just disappear ... from public view, anyway. But I still see you sometimes in the specialist journals."

  “I do most of my work privately now, with just a small dedicated group,” Dave told her. “We have our own lab up in Colorado. I li
ke the mountains, can do without the politics.... “He grinned and swept an arm around, indicating the scene of the recent events. “As you may have gathered, it's not exactly what I'm best at. You were right. If it seemed that PHIL managed to get everyone mad today, it was really me."

  Laura gave him a long, searching look. “Was that because of the proleroids, Dr. Jardan?"

  “Dave."

  She nodded and returned a quick smile. “I've often wondered ... the position that you always took in the arguing that went on. And then people seemed to be ganging up and misquoting you. The media started painting you as some backward-looking flop who couldn't make the leap to where the future was leading. But none of that made any sense. Most of the ideas that went into producing the HPT brain were your doing.” She meant holoptronic, the information-integrating technology that was the basis of proleroid intelligence. “They forced you out and stole it from you."

  Dave had had other visions in mind than automated consumerism. But once the commercial potential was grasped, there had been no resisting the corporate and financial power aligned to making it a reality. After that, further significant research had been blocked because of the risk of “destabilization.” In other words, anything that might have threatened the status quo.

  “A lot of people made a lot of money,” Dave agreed. “I just couldn't go along with it.” He turned on his chair to survey the room. “I guess that makes me not much of an economist either."

  The janitor was moving around the table, tossing coffee cups and discarded papers into a trash bag. Beneath its gray work-coat, it was wearing imitation buckskin breeches and jacket with vest, red neckerchief, and high boots. One of the early decisions had been that proleroids would not comprise a range of special-purpose types, but would conform to one basic body plan patterned after the human form, able to use tools and implements in the same way as and when required. This provided an immediate outlet for existing products and services, and for utilizing the many years of experience accumulated in moving and marketing them. Businesses knew how to sell clothes, hardware, houses, cars, and all the ancillaries that went with them. Astoundingly, thanks to the ingenuity of production engineers, even supermarkets and the distribution system for groceries had been preserved.