Self-discovery

“And right away, the problem no longer exists. I'll write off the reagents I used up and make up some excuse about the work. And I'll start work on something simpler and more innocent….” “I'll go to Vladivostok to be a fitter in the ports.” We stopped talking. Venus blazed over the black trees outside the window. A cat cried with a child's voice. A howling note pierced the grounds' silence — they were running tests on a new jet engine in Lena's construction bureau. “Work goes on. It's right; 1941 cannot be repeated.” I was thinking about it so that I could put off my decision a little longer. “Deep underground, plutonium and hydrogen bombs are going off. Highly paid scientists and engineers are determined to master nuclear arms. And pointy — nosed rockets peer into space from their concrete silos all over the world. Each is pointed at its objective; they're wired up. Computers are constantly testing them: any problems? As soon as the predetermined time of reliability runs out on an electronic unit, technicians in uniform unplug it and quickly, quickly, replace it with another unit, as though the war they absolutely had to win was about to start any second. Work goes on.”

“Nonsense!” I said. “Humanity isn't mature enough for many things — nuclear energy and space flight — so what? The discovery is objective reality; you can't cover it up. If not us, someone else will come upon it. The basic idea of the experiment is simple enough. Are you sure that they will deal with the discovery better than we? I'm not. That's why we must think what to do to keep this discovery from becoming a threat to mankind.”

“It's complicated,” my double sighed and stood up. “I'll take a look at what's happening in the tank.” He was back in a flash. Stunned. “Val, there's… father's in there!”

Radio operators have a sure sign to go by: if a complex electronic circuit works the first time after it's put together, expect trouble. If it doesn't foul up in the trials, then it will embarrass the workers when the inspection commission is there; if it manages to pass the commission, then it will exhibit one flaw after another in mass production. The weak points always show up.

The computer was trying to achieve informational equilibrium not with me, the direct source of information, but with the entire information environment that it found out about from me, with the entire world. That's why Lena appeared and that's why my father appeared.

And that's why all the rest happened. That's why my double and I worked nonstop for a whole week. This activity of the computer's was a logical extension of its development; but from a technical point of view it was an attempt with lousy equipment. Instead of a “model of the world” the tank contained a nightmare.

I can't describe how my father made his appearance in the tank — it's too terrible. That's the way he had looked on the day he died: a flabby, heavy old man with a broad shaven face and a cloudy mane of white hair around his skull. The computer had picked the last and most depressing memory of him. He had died before I got there. He wasn't breathing, but I still tried to warm his cooling body.

Then I dreamed about him several times, and it was always the same dream: I rub my father's cold body for all I'm worth and it gets warmer and he starts breathing, with difficulty at first, a death rattle, and then normally. He opens his eyes and gets up out of bed. “I was sick a little, son,” he says in an apologetic voice. “But I'm fine now.” The dream was like death in reverse.

And now the computer was creating him so that he could die once more before our eyes. We understood rationally that this was not our father but a regular information hybrid that could not be permitted to be completed; we knew that it would be a body, or a mad creature, or something along those lines. But neither he nor I could put on Monomakh's Crown and command the computer to stop. We avoided looking at the tank and each other.

Then I walked over to the panel and pulled the switch. It was dark and quiet in the lab for a moment.

“What are you doing?” My double ran over to the panel and turned the juice back on.

The filter condensers did not discharge in that second, and the computer went on working. But everything disappeared from the tank.

Later I saw all the chaos of my memory in the tank: my fifth — grade botany teacher Elizaveta Moiseevna; Klava, my love interest in those days; some old acquaintance with a poetic profile; the Moldavian driver I glimpsed briefly at a bazaar in Kishinev…. It's a hell to list them all. It wasn't a “model of the world” either; everything was formed vaguely, in fragments, the way it's stored in human memory, which knows how to forget. For instance, only Elizaveta Moiseevna's small, stern eyes under forever frowning brows were right, and the only thing left of the Moldavian was the sheepskin hat lowered all the way to his mustache….