Self-discovery

My double and I took turns approaching the tank, sniffing carefully, afraid to smell decay or degeneration; not trusting the thermometer we kept touching the sides of the tank and the warm living hoses. Were they cooling off? Were they enflamed with fever again?

But the air in the room stayed warm, humid, and fresh, as if there was a large, clean animal in the room. The computer was alive. It simply wasn't undertaking anything without us. We had tamed it!

After midnight, I looked at my double, like a mirror. He was blinking with tired red eyes and smiled:

“Everything seems okay, Shall we go to bed?”

There was no artificial double for me. A comrade, a colleague, was sitting next to me, just as tired and happy as I was. And — how strange! — I had not felt joy at meeting him in the institute grounds and I hadn't been soothed by the phantasmagoric memory show in the tank… but now I was at peace and very happy.

It's really true? the most important thing for a person is to feel in control of a situation.

Chapter 10

Is not the zealous search for causal connections another expression of the property instinct in man? Even here we seek to know what belongs to what.

— K. Prutkov — engineer, Thought 10

We went out into the institute grounds. The night was warm. Our exhaustion made us forget that we should not appear in public together, and we remembered only in the entry. Old man Vakhterych stared at us with his inebriated eyes. We froze.

“Ah. Valentin Vasilyevich!” the old man exclaimed happily. “Done for the day?”

“Yes…” we replied in unison.

“Good.” Vakhterych rose heavily and unlocked the front door. “And nothing will happen to the institute, and no one will steal it, and have a good evening, and I still have to sit here. People go off to enjoy themselves, and I have to sit here….”

We ran out into the street and hurried off.

“That's something!” I noticed that the facade of the new institute building was decorated with multicolored lights. “What's the date?”

My double counted on his fingers:

“The first… no, the second of May. Happy holiday, Val!”

“Belatedly… oh, boy!”

I remembered that I had a date with Lena for May I to go out with some of her co — workers and to go for a motorcycle excursion on the second. I had blown it. She would never forgive me.

“And Lena is out dancing right now. somewhere with somebody,” my double muttered.

“What do you care?”

We fell silent. Buses, decorated with branches, raced up and down the street. Neon rocket boosters were set up on rooftops. We could see people dancing, singing, drinking, through open windows.

I lit a cigarette and started rethinking my observations of the computer — womb (as we finally decided to call the complex). “First of all, it's not a computer — oracle or a computer — thinker, because there is no winnowing of information in it, only combinations — sometimes meaningful, sometimes not. Secondly, it can be controlled not only by energy (clamping the hoses, turning off water and power — in other words, grabbing it by the throat), but also by information. Of course, for now it responds only to the command 'No! — but it's a beginning. I think the most convenient way to command it is through Monomakh's Crown with brain waves. Third, the computer — womb, while very complex, is still only a machine, an artificial creation without a goal. The striving for stability, informational equilibrium, is not a goal but a characteristic, just like that of an analytic scale. But it is expressed in a more complex way: through synthesis in the form of living matter via external information. A goal always lies in solving a problem. There was no problem — and so it fooled around from an excess of possibilities. But…”

“… man must set its goals,” my double picked up; I was no longer amazed by his ability to think with me. “As for all other machines. Therefore, as the bureaucrats say, all responsibility lies with us.”

I didn't feel like thinking about responsibility. You work and work unstintingly — and then you get stuck with responsibility, too. And people go off to enjoy themselves. We missed the holiday. What dopes! And my whole life will go by in a smelly lab.

We turned down a chestnut — lined avenue which led to Academic Town. A couple strolled ahead of us. My double and I felt a pang — we poor, sober, hungry, and lonely men. That couple fit in so beautifully in the gaslit avenue. Tall and elegant, he held her by the waist. She bent her full mane of hair toward him. We unthinkingly sped up, in order to pass them and be spared the lyrical sight.