3

  I destroyed the intervening entries after my crisis with Maxine. Just couldn’t bear to read all that protracted late adolescent Sturm und Drang. I’ve decided to pick it up again—I owe it, arguably, to the dead. So let’s start with an instant recap:

  I fell in love at last, or so I thought at the time, four years later. Maxine Bukowski wasn’t one of us, but she was fearsomely bright, by her own standards; she danced like a flame caught in a light breeze, and her hair was the tawny flame of triploid cultivar daylily Hemerocallis fulva. So much of my life had to remain concealed, partitioned, which tortured me, and Maxy, too, at some level of masked perception she wasn’t able to deny. One day she found the three paperbacks of my Starlight Genera trilogy, which I’d written over a long school holiday when I was thirteen and published as Peter Regan two years later.

  “What’s this? Not the kind of thing you usually read, Saul?”

  I was distracted with circuit design. “Uh, a friend gave it to me. He wrote them.”

  Leafing through the opening pages, she hummed a jazz tune. “Hey, this isn’t bad. How come you’ve never introduced us?”

  “That’s not his real name. He’s embarrassed, I think.”

  “Can’t see why. I hope he made pots of loot.” I saw her settle into my big chair, flipping pages fast. After a while it got dark, and I flicked on the overhead fluoros. Maxine was halfway through volume 2. I squirmed, but secretly hoped to hear words of praise. By the time I shut down and showered, and pulled her to me on the bed, she was polishing off the final book. “Hey, that was fun.”

  “No, this is fun,” I said, and it was. But a couple of weeks later she found a mint copy, in a sealed baggie, of Jeri Steiner’s The New Astrologies. “Oh my god, Saul, wtf?” (She spelled it out, as people did that year.)

  “I’d rather you didn’t open—” But she had unsealed the bag. “That’s an investment, sweetheart. Pennies today, zillions in half a century.”

  “Not funny.” She blew a raspberry, and starting reading down the contents page, in a sarcastically excited yet dazed rendition of a diphead: “Ethnoastrology. Neuroastrology.”

  “That’s my favorite,” I said, and tried to grab it from her. She squirmed away. “I googled it, and of course neuroastrology.org and neuroastrology.com were domain names. Luckily, they’d expired.”

  “Luckily? But wait, there’s more: Relativistic astrology.” She laughed a little uncertainly. “I love it! astrology at the speed of light. String astrology. Does that included Brane astrology?”

  “Brainless astrology, I imagine,” I said, getting nervous, watching a contest inside her between humor and censure. “Look, can’t we—”

  “Genome astrology. Demon astrology. Non-Euclidean astrology. Galactic and of course for extra credit extra-galactic astrology. Dark matter astrology. Dark matter astrology! Wait, wait! Dark energy astrology. Post-poststructural astrology. Oh, Saul, this has to be a send-up. Green eco-astrology. And lastly, Virtual astrology.”

  “The universe as a computational simulation. Don’t mock it unless you’ve tried it. Have you never read Bostrom or Tegmark?”

  “I saw the Matrix trilogy.” Her mood settled. “No, it’s really not funny. This Steiner woman is preying on the vulnerable.”

  “On the intellectually underpowered but pretentious, anyway.”

  “It’s gross, Saul. What are you doing with this sort of iniquitous dreck hidden under your bed?”

  I made my first and last mistake with Maxine. “I wrote it.”

  Aghast. “You what?”

  “I co-wrote it. Dictated it to the machine. With Marius. One day when it was raining heavily. Don’t hate me, babe. We made more money than you could imagine. Pots.”

  Now she wasn’t laughing. Or smiling. Maxine, my beautiful tawny lily, put the book down on the bed as if she needed to wash her fingers, and got dressed. She left. She never came back. I cried quite a lot, and ranted at Marius, and sobbed on Ruth’s wearable-cluttered bony shoulder, and got over her, eventually, when I met Andrea. And learned, even more than I’d learned before, to keep my damn mouth shut.

  But I wondered, as always, and now even more poignantly: What could it be like to be a Maxine Bukowski? And what would it be like for a Maxine to discover, though unimpeachable direct experience, what it’s like to be a Saul Collins?

  What attracted me to Andrea was her playfulness. Well, and her short dresses, but hey.

  I was sitting at the back of a dizzyingly canted lecture theater trying to remain focused on the most boring neurophysiology presentation the world has ever known. Herr Doktor Professor Faxon Bander is one of the great experts in cortical structure and connectivity, but if his presenter skills were an index of his surgical prowess, he’d be doing serious time in the Big House. I yawned. I shuffled my feet. I parsed into Farsi everything he was saying four or five times. I’d known all this stuff backwards and forwards, which is pretty much the way he was presenting it, since my early adolescence, but the geniuses in charge of the course insisted that all Ph.D. candidates must audit every lecture. On the blank pad under my left hand, I scribbled Much more of this backing and filling and I will run down and kill him with my bare paws.

  A snigger, and a bare female right paw wielding an old-fashioned fountain pen, fashionable again that year, reached across and scratched on the pad This toing and froing.

  I did not glance to my left but wrote Hither and yoning. A tiny bit of naughty under the surface. Was that embedded yoni too racy? I hoped she was not a nun fluent in Sanskrit. Hi-ing and lo-ing wrote the woman’s hand. I scribbled Inning and outing. The hand instantly annotated Upping and downing, hesitated a moment, and then went back to add a T at the start. A fan of Shakespeare, I thought: Othello, Act I, Scene I. A nicely ribald sense of humor, which allowed me to relax a bit. This time, finally, I shot a glance her way. Green amused eyes met mine. Older than I, but perhaps not by much. She was not beautiful in any conventional sense. I felt my heart lurch, and other parts. Awake the snorting citizens. I wrote Sniggering and snorting, and left my hand resting on the pad. She wrote No time like the present. My name is Andrea. The smooth back of her hand brushed my wrist. In a moment of shivery delight, our qualia fell into synch. Stayed that way, for a while.

  Busy, busy, busy. I should pick this up again. Oh, Ruthie, Ruthie.

  After the first commercial 1024-qubit adiabatic computer was released by D-Wave, a Canadian company, several years later than anticipated but sooner than the doom-criers of vaporware had gloomily warned, the four of us bought one outright with our research funds and had it shipped with extreme care to my neurosci lab. (I was completing that doctorate under a friendly prof who’d known the Patriarch for years and asked few questions; it was helpful, despite the tedium and convenience, to patch into the university’s infrastructure.) The potential power of the thing was breathtaking, if Ruthie could get her software to run right. In principle, the number of states it could address simultaneously was greater than 10300. The number of atoms in the entire observable universe was a comparatively minuscule 1080.

  We’d decided on an end run around the philosophers. We were building a Qualia Engine.

  That name was our nod of acknowledgement to Dean Charles Babbage’s marvelous 19th century designs of a pre-electronic mechanical Difference Engine (a sort of programmable clockwork computer, never built until enthusiasts put one together a century later) and an Analytical Engine (a genuine Turing machine). Aside from the raw grunt of the quantum computer we’d put at its core, our device—our congeries of cobbled-together devices—more closely resembled a magnetoencephalographic scanner, and in fact used a shrunken version that fitted over the upper body, and especially the scalp, listening for traces of . . . feelings. Affective responses to the outer empirical world and the inner subjective world of imagination. Qualia.

  “Oh the quale machine,” sang Janey, deliberately mispronouncing it to rhyme with Quayle, like the late Vice President, “the quale machine, it reaches inside where nothing is seen. It knows if you’re happy or feeling mean—that wonderful, sensitive quale machine.”

  I couldn’t let her get away with that. “You’re a deeply ignorant woman, Jane. Those are not the lyrics of the song.” I ad-libbed, “It goes like this:

  I’ll parlay my quale

  for a look at your soul,

  and a ride on your Harley

  in the back streets of Bali,

  as long as your hol-

  ism isn’t reductively

  loitering palely,

  like watery gravy,

  at the lee of the sea, be-

  cause—”

  She clipped me over the head, and settled back into the MEG sensor web of superconducting quantum detectors, excruciatingly sensitive to the 10 femtoTesla magnetic fields of the neocortex in working order.

  I shut the door and went back into the shielded control room.

  That year, Harvard were still working on a Mus connectome, using an automatic tape-collecting lathe ultramicrotome. Not recommended for human brains, or even mice, if they are still alive; it sliced its way through a brain, imaging in three dimensions as it peeled, creating with each chomp a twenty megapixel record of every synapse and its precise location. The Allen Institute was working toward a brain atlas using in situ hybridization. We planned to achieve much the same effect in a non-invasive scan, creating an instantaneous massive entanglement between each molecule in Janey’s brain and a separate dedicated register in the superposed state of the computer. No, we weren’t trying to upload her consciousness onto an inorganic substrate—just create a static map of one person’s momentary memories, sense impressions, plans, and . . . feelings. No point futzing around for years with murine qualia. Those dear little mousy critters are quite complex, in their way, far more so than the stupid psych behaviorists assumed back in the day of the Atom Kids, but still not up to scratch for the questions I needed to ask, the puzzles I hoped to resolve.

  But let’s pause a moment.

  As I look back over this interrupted and partly sanitized or reconstructed record, “Peter Regan,” the fluent author of the Starlight Genera trilogy hesitates, abashed. Far too much Tell here, not nearly enough Show. My predicament is that I don’t really know whom I’m writing this for. Is it my peers—hi Janey, Marius, Mom, Dad, you other Homines novissimi? Not for Maxine, long gone, nor for Andrea, sad-eyed lady. To the memory of Ruthie? Not really. I’m hardly the group’s archivist. Perhaps for some later generation who wasn’t here and now? I suppose, eventually. As an explanation, an Apologia pro vita sua, to H. sapiens readers, sometime soon, or maybe not for years? I guess that’s the audience I’ve had in the back of my mind all along. We went underground out in the open precisely to avoid that kind of explicit engagement—but hey, maybe things will change.

  I could go back a few pages and insert an exciting expository conversation with Maxine as we rappelled down the face of the Empire State building in driving snow, or during the successful bid by Andrea and me to prevent terrorists from nuking the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and maybe that’s the way we’ll do it in the movie, but let’s get a grip and cut to the chase. When I was “Peter Regan,” teaching myself to write blockbusters, I scouted the web for rules of narrative—and one prohibition I learned early was never to dump dollops of information and backstory through the pitiful contrivance of characters telling each other stuff. “As you know, Professor . . . ” But hey, this is my personal journal and I can do what I like, and it’s directed finally to an uncertain audience. So—

  The standard human brain has a lot of housekeeping and motivational apparatus tucked away in the middle—thalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, blah blah, thank you, Prof. Bander—along with cavities surging with transmitter-rich circulating fluids, wrapped in what amounts to a large dinner napkin of neocortex crumpled up to squeeze inside the skull. Data lines run in and out from processing brain to torso and limbs and back, a million or so fibers from the eyes, an equal number from the muscles and the touch sensors, as few as 30,000 dealing with auditory sensations. (So a picture is actually worth 333.3 words.)

  The two-millimeter thick cortex is where the heavy lifting is done among you brainy apes. Just consider this for a moment: a sheet of tissue no thicker than six stacked envelopes, stripping down a bit-torrent into schemas and holons, each cortical layer abbreviating and abstracting the incoming from below until finally the top layer, with its plethora of far flung connections, deals in a world of invariant representations very far removed from the jumpy, jittery, scatty flood of inputs that assails us every waking moment—but those invariant abstractions match the structure of the external world. Carving the world at its joints, as Plato put it in the Phaedrus. (That Plato detail won’t be on the exam.)

  What the H. novissimus plasmid genes do is persuade a growing fetal brain to add a seventh layer to the neocortex, plus a whole lot more synaptic connections. But wait, that’s not all. They beef up the brain’s ability to prune any coincidence links that turn out to be poorly informative or actively misleading. You remain stuck with a brain prey to illusions and superstitions, because your traditional gray matter assumes, as its default, post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Often that’s justified. Just as often, it’s a highway to gut-churning errors ardently embraced and enforced, provoking sectarian hatred, bloody war, and the purchase of expensive sports utility vehicles hardly anyone can afford gas for. But wait—I hear you object—wasn’t I just bellyaching about Father Paul’s equally baffling embrace of the Roman dog collar, and L.C.’s devotion to a belief system nearly as absurd as Norse worship of the cosmogonic cow Audhumla? Yes. I admit it. Even the Atom Kids are prey to emotional attachments and rushes of feeling to the head. They’re trapped, when all’s said and done, by their qualia.

  The way Ruthie died was unforgivable: stupid, stupid, heartbreakingly stupid.

  I was still driving the aging Ford Focus, her birthday gift to me when I turned 16. It did the job, didn’t require explanations. She didn’t drive. That night Andrea was at the Pillbox until late, rehearsing Mother Courage. She’d dropped out of neuro; somehow I’d discouraged her, hadn’t meant to, I swear. I was taking Ruth home from the lab. By then she had so much hardware hooked up to her wearable ensemble that most of the time she might as well have been flying through Second Life. Ruthie had never been scanned by our juicy system, because it would’ve made a mess of her onboard equipment, which in turn would have munged ours, probably.

  On one level, her connection to reality was larger than mine; miniature LEDS cast a non-stop data feed into the upper visual field of both eyes, her fingers danced a coding echo in sim space via the thread transponders printed on the back of her hands and wrists, music and other chopped, sped-up acoustic feeds went directly to her mastoid bone. I never tried it directly, but a sim-set let me emulate a pale shadow of the experience (or so she said, disdainfully), and it was a Niagara of noise even my much-vaunted seventh cortical layer couldn’t quickly reduce to meaningful pattern. Ruth followed a dozen RSS feeds along a hundred, a thousand blog links; she attended the launch of the first Chinese moon orbit, a remedial operation on the cleft palate of a five year old girl in Tanzania, a football game at Notre Dame (she liked the hunks), the stock market streaming quotes and nasdaq Level II negotiations . . .

  What was it like to be Ruthie? Like drowning in the world, or like surfing atop its oceanic wave. Yet her focus was intense. I think she was the smartest of us, maybe as smart as the Atom Kids our parents, and with the incomparable advantage of thriving in an epoch when the parallel quasi-intelligence of the web gave everyone entrée to everything anyone had ever said, written, painted, shaped, made manifest from their thoughts and dreams and hungers and schemes. For someone as glowing as Ruthie, that was a free 100 points of IQ on top of the icing.

  I turned with the green light, carefully, maybe too carefully, and the benighted fool with his lights off, his cell phone stuck in his ear and his small anthropoid brain in neutral went into the side door at 60, maybe, according to police analysis, caved the steel and glass into a jagged fist that slammed Ruth so hard her brain caromed off the inside of her skull and . . . broke, bled, died.

  Somehow I escaped with only a cracked ulna, shock, and the kind of furious agony that never goes away, never, never, just ebbs bit by slow shuddering bit in weeks and then months of grief. It would catch me at moments as I sat alone (Andrea left me when my bitterness turned, unfairly, against her, as it turned against everyone who tried to comfort and sustain me, and drove her away), it would bring up choking sobs that were her name, somewhere in the swimming light and the snot and thickened juices of my throat. It lacerated some protected autistic part of me I’d never understood was my emotional protection against a world where I didn’t belong.

  I wanted her back.

  “Give me back my Ruthie,” I said aloud, in my empty living room before the meaningless jabbering TV, and wept, and noanswered, because she was gone and could never return.

  It wasn’t as if I’d been in love with the girl, the woman. I know why, too—in effect, we were “kibbutz siblings;” she was out of emotional bounds, like Janey, due to over-exposure at some pivot of childhood. Maybe Piaget could pin-point it, or Bettelheim. Fond as I was of little Ruth, and I was—I loved her with all my heart—it was not a sexual bond. It held no magical spark. She was not Maxine, nor Andrea. But losing her really did tear an ancient scab off my heart, or maybe punched through a defective barrier I’d had cloaking it since childhood.

  I wept as we buried her in the old Catholic church where Father Paul laid her crushed flesh to rest (Ruthie was an atheist, like me), and when the moment came for me to approach the front of the gathering and add words of remembrance, I simply could not do it. My heart was poisoned with rage and grief, and it rose to block my mouth. It blocked my heart against Andrea, too, and I did not know why that should be. I stood beside her at the grave, mute and useless and felt nothing but wretchedness.

  Later, later, I understood what had been done for me in that tragedy. I will hate that drunken fool until the day I die, and carry his name in wrath unspoken before me, but his wicked stupidity was the occasion (and how I wish it had been otherwise, that I could turn it back and make it not happen) of my admission into the mysteries of the Qualia Engine.