Read Online Harvest of Stars by Poul Anderson - Free Book Online

flowed in, this suspicious activity, that incorrect idea expressed, such and such a citizen who had dropped out of registry, now and then an outright crime that the civil police thought might be politically motivated, inquiries from other command posts throughout the Union, intelligence from abroad that had relevance to the tasks of Security. The computers assimilated, scanned, retrieved, made correlations, determined who should have what information. Nevertheless plenty of personnel sat at the consoles or went from room to room, carrying materials. Humans still had to make the final judgments.
    Soon that should not be the case. Sayre often regretted that none of the current progress in artificial intelligence was North American. But when government insisted that the mind was algorithmic, because this was what Xuan had said, and scientists who suggested otherwise got into trouble—
    Sayre had argued on their behalf. In his position he could dare do so. The quantum-mechanical, nonalgorithmicapproach was not necessarily subversive, he maintained whenever circumstances allowed. It simply required careful handling. Were it true, Xuan’s great insights would stand basically unchallenged.
    Within his own mind, Sayre shrugged. The work going on in Europe and on the Moon was bearing him out. Doctrine would have to adapt itself to reality. And consider what power would soon be available, to revitalize Xuanism by striding light-years toward the Transfiguration. Not the obsolescence and extinction of humankind, but its apotheosis in union with the thinking machine—for thought had proved to be of a subtler nature than cyberneticists foresaw, yet it was a set of physical processes.
    As witness Anson Guthrie. Sayre quickened his steps.
    Halfway down a certain hall, two guards ported their shock guns when he appeared. Pistols were holstered at their sides. Beyond them reached empty rooms and quietness. His team had taken over the psych lab. That handicapped the Northwest cadre, but they could refer any problems elsewhere. As imperative as secrecy was, Sayre had instructed that Guthrie be moved no farther than from the Fireball building to here. A closed door showed where Yoshikawa and her subordinates waited. Sayre went on. Near the end of the passage, he signalled another door to retract and entered a small, viewless, sparsely furnished chamber.
    The box on the table turned its eyestalks to look at him. “Alpha,” Sayre greeted with Avantist formality.
    Predictably, Guthrie did not respond, “Omega,” but formed a grunt.
    Sayre kept his tone mild. “Surliness is stupid, you know. I hoped that sheer boredom, if nothing else, would have made you ready to communicate.”
    “I’ve got my thoughts and memories for company,” said the download. “When I’m not subactive.”
    “That state interests me,” Sayre remarked. “Equivalent of sleep, but none of your kind has ever made quite clear what it … feels like.”
    “I couldn’t make clear what any part of being a download feels like,” Guthrie answered. “Not that I’d try for you.”
    “Do you enjoy your condition, or dislike it?”
    Guthrie sat mute. For a moment, irrationally, chill went along Sayre’s backbone as he wondered what this truly was before him. Humans and their machines had made it. Did they afterward understand it? Would they, ever?
    The whole thing had seemed so cleanly scientific. Given the theoretical knowledge and the technological capability, you could download a personality, map it into the software of a neural network which itself mapped the unique brain that bore the personality. True, the process was slow, complex, expensive, imperfect. It performed no clean, swift scan, but instead a pervasion, the special molecules in their legions, brought by bloodstream and cerebrospinal fluid to conduct their cell-by-cell examinations while the subject lay half-conscious under electrophasing. Then came resonances with external fields, to recover the data.