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Chapter 4: Waxy's Travel Lounge

Ten minutes later Vernor arrived at the Angels' hang-out, Waxy's Travel Lounge. It was early evening and the place was beginning to fill up.

There was a sculptured black plastic bar along the left wall. The area in front of the rear wall was occupied by a Hollowjuke, and there were booths along the right wall.

The Hollowjuke was running, and the image of a larger-than-life couple making love occupied the rear of the room. The Hollow couple were singing a muffled duet punctuated by a yas-yas chorus from four Hollow massage robots busy hosing off the lovers.

The booths on the right seemed to be occupied. Noises of sex came from some, and over the door of some of the others you could see the bottles of intravenous feeding set-ups, dripping mixtures of sudocoke, synthoin, vitamins, and glucose into the arms of those inside.

There was a group of Angels near the bar and Vernor walked over. An Angel called Oily Allie was describing her latest attempt to build a flying machine. Apparently she stole pieces of machinery from the factory where she worked, and reassembled them in her own mad scientist fashion. Vernor didn't know her too well, but tended to stay out of her way, as Allie was something of a practical joker.

As Vernor walked up, Oily Allie looked at him, shouted "Have a drink," and pitched the contents of a thermos she was holding in Vernor's direction.

It appeared to be a boiling liquid, and Vernor dove to the floor to avoid it. Strangely, however, the steaming liquid turned into a cloud of gas before it reached Vernor. As the gas diffused, the coals on the Angels' reefers brightened, and Vernor realized that it had been liquid oxygen.

"Man, you looked funny, scrambling around," Oily Allie said, helping Vernor up. "Let me buy you a hit of seenz." Allie punched the order into the bar robot and fed in the coins. The robot extended a tube towards Vernor and he put it in his nose, snorting up the synthetic cocaine. His adrenaline dissolved in a rush of well-being and he was finally able to return Oily Allie's grin. She was a muscular woman with dark, spiky hair, not overly clean.

"What's happening?" Vernor asked.

"Moto-O's been looking for you. He's over there." Allie pointed down the bar. Moto-O was sitting near a light, writing rapid precise symbols with his Rapidograph pen. Vernor thanked Allie for the seenz and walked over to Moto-O.

"Ah, Vernor," Moto-O said, looking up. "I have new idea for mechanical mind." Both of them were interested in the problem of how one might go about making a machine which is conscious.

The problem was challenging, since the Second Incompleteness Theorem, proved by Kurt Gödel in 1930, seems to say that no machine can be conscious, i.e. aware of its own existence. The reason is that the only way a machine can be aware of itself is to form an internal model of itself and look at the model . . . and it is impossible for anyone, man or machine, to fully know himself.

To see why this might be so, try to become completely conscious of yourself and all your thoughts. Easy, you may say, no problem. But wait, did you include the act of examining your thoughts when you made your mental inventory of what's going on in your head? And once you tack that on, will you be able to include the act of tacking it on? And that inclusion?

The problem is that every attempt to fully map your inner landscape adds new features to it. The map has to include a picture of itself, which has to include a picture of itself, and so on forever towards the Royal Baking Powder vanishing point. No matter how fast you move your mental reference point, you're always a jump behind.

It's easy to see that a computer would run into the same type of problems when it tries to form a mental image of itself. But how is it, you may ask, that we humans do, after all, seem to have consciousness and self-awareness? It cannot come from internal modeling, so how does it arise? Well it's . . . easy to do, but hard to describe. Be Here Now's one slogan that sort of captures the idea, but that's not too helpful if you're interested in programming a machine. As a matter of fact, Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem says that there is in fact no way to describe how it is that we do it.

Moto-O had spent a few years studying Zen, and he seemed to think that the answer to their problem was contained in the principle of the Zen koan, an apparently nonsensical problem (e.g. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?) which beginners wrestle with in an effort to break the shackles of rationality.

"Consciousness is paradox," Moto-O was saying now to Vernor at Waxy's bar. "But we exist in paradox. I raise my finger and all the world is there."

"I don't see how you plan to program this into Phizwhiz, Moto-O," Vernor responded, sipping a beer.

"I plan to split Phizwhiz work-space into two parts which monitor each other. First part will say 'This statement is false.' Other part tries to decide if statement is true or false. First part will evaluate truth or falsity of other part's decision. Infinite regress."

"'This statement is false'," Vernor mused. "If that's a true statement than it's false. And if it's false, then it's true."

"Exactly. This trick is heart of Gödel's original proof." Moto-O grinned and took a swallow of speed-tea. "Phizwhiz need built in paradox like human to be alive."

"But won't he just reject the program after finding the loop?" Vernor objected. "Won't he refuse to assimilate it?"

"Phizwhiz need firm master," Moto-O replied. "When program enter, and before he can reject, I will administer tripled operating voltage surge to him."

"Like Rinzai hitting the monks with his stick?" Vernor asked, referring to the Zen master Moto-O had talked about the most.

"Yes," he answered, "and more technical reason is voltage surge will cause memory banks to open so that loop can be forced in."

"I don't know," Vernor said finally. "I doubt if Phizwhiz'll stand still for it, though I know that he does want someone to program a soul for him. Are you going to actually try it?"

Moto-O nodded vigorously. "Oh yeah. Tomorrow I go talk to Mr. Burke of Governor's Research Council. If they give approval I begin real work on technical aspects."

Vernor thought about Moto-O's ideas, to the extent that he could. What is this that I am? What if Moto-O really was successful . . . would they still need the Angels once Phizwhiz could think? His reveries were interrupted by the prick of a needle in his biceps. He turned around to see Mick Turner pocketing an empty syringe.

"It's just a shot away," Turner grinned.

Vernor rubbed the spot on his arm nervously. A tingling was spreading up towards his head. "What the fuck was that?" he asked, but Turner was already dancing across the room. Mick Turner had been the first person after Andy Silver to become an Angel. His scientific and philosophic learning was minimal, but he had probably survived more trips than any three Angels combined.

Mick's main concern in his Phizwhiz sessions was to disrupt the functioning of the mechanical brain . . . to freak it out of its program. Vernor, Moto-O and a few of the others were more concerned with using the sessions to advance the cause of science; but the avowed purpose of Andy Silver, Mick, and most of the others was to radically alter Phizwhiz's functioning.

Occasionally Mick treated people the same way. There was really no telling what he had shot Vernor up with. Vernor started across the room after him, but the roar of the drug hit him before he made it, and he stood rooted in the center of the room, twitching to the beat of the Hollowjuke.

It was an electronic number now, played by robots, squat machines with mechanical hands fingering dials on their chests. The rhythm shifted constantly, as Vernor's stimulated brain hungrily followed the sound's convolutions. He began to dance, and danced through the rest of the song and into the next. When one song ended the accompanying images would disappear, and a new set of Hollows would be beamed out by the Hollowjuke.

The image for the new song was two-dimensional, not that Vernor, in his state, could tell the difference. It was a classical recording, the Rolling Stones doing "Gimme Shelter." The surf music introduction seemed to last several minutes. Vernor was dancing hard. The wild power of the main part of the song came on and the room faded, the singer's voice fatalistic over the god-like and authoritative surge of the guitar. In the background, a girl was screaming, "It's just a shot away, shot away, shot away, shot away," the sound dwindling like someone falling off a cliff...Alice? Vernor danced harder, eyes open, eyes closed. The song drove to its conclusion, "It's just a kiss away, kiss away, kiss away, kiss away." A shot or a kiss?

The drug wore off as quickly as it had come on. He was looking into Mick Turner's face. "You're the craziest of us all," said Mick, "We need you."

Too disoriented to form a question about the last few minutes' events, Vernor followed Mick back to the bar. "Is Alice here?" he asked finally.

"I saw her a while ago," Mick said. "She gave me this for you." He handed Vernor a suitcase. His stuff. The Angels were all he had now. "You want to sleep at my place?" Mick was asking.

Vernor shook his head, "I'm going to move back to the library. Starting tomorrow I've got to get myself back together." He felt shaky and frightened. The shot or the kiss?

"Have you seen Andy?" Mick asked.

"No," Vernor answered. "It's been awhile. I thought he was staying with Professor Kurtowski."

"Yeah," Mick said, "but I was just over at Kurtowski's. He hasn't seen Andy in a week."

Moto-O had wandered over, "Last week I see Andy at EM building," he put in. "He say he prepare for biggest trip."

Mick Turner shook his head slowly. "That's what I was thinking he did. We better go look for him."

"What do you mean?" Vernor said, looking from one to the other. "You think he took an over-dose?"

"No," Mick answered. "It's the machine, not the dope. Every time Andy was going a little farther into Phizwhiz. He had the idea that he could stay inside the machine and take over . . . live there as 'a stable energy configuration circulating freely among the memory banks and work spaces'!" He had said this last phrase in a sarcastically precise intonation, but the next sentence came straight from the heart. "He was getting tired of coming down."

"We must go to EM building and look for him," said Moto-O.

The three of them hurried out and rode uptown in a robot taxi. The door of the EM building was programmed to recognize the individual Angels' voiceprints, and it let them in. They hurried upstairs, checking all the places where Andy Silver might have installed a private hook-up to Phizwhiz. Finally they found it.

It was a spare room of the cybernetics lab. Vernor was the one who opened the door, and he saw Silver's body lying on the floor, a thick cable leading from his head to the panel of a Phizwhiz implementation. Apparently he had been plugged in for several days. His body was completely inert, and it seemed certain that he was dead.

Mick rushed forward to unplug his old friend, but to his amazement his hand went right through Silver's lifeless form. It seemed to be a ghost, no, a Hollow of Andy Silver. Suddenly the image moved to turn its face towards them, and it spoke, fading as they stood there.

"Tell them I was a martyr for the Revolution," the voice said. By the end of the sentence, the image of Andy Silver before them had dwindled up into the cable to Phizwhiz, leaving only a slowly dying chuckle behind.

 

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