Self-discovery

Yes, he was leaving in order to become himself, and not the Krivoshein who lived and worked in Dneprovsk. He threw the apartment key which Val had tucked into his pocket out of the train window. He crossed out all the addresses and phone numbers of Moscow acquaintances from his book, including his Aunt Lapanalda. He had no friends, no relatives, no past — only the present, from the moment he entered the biology department, and the future. He knew a simple but dependable way of establishing himself in the future; the method had never let him down. It was work.

And he had more than that.

Once upon a time physicists had perfected the methods of measuring the speed of light, just so that they could achieve the greatest accuracy. They did. And they determined a scandalous fact: the speed of light did not depend on the speed of motion of the light source. “Impossible! The equipment is wrong! The results contradict classical mechanics!” They checked. They measured the speed of light another way — with the same results. And the almost completed, logically perfect universe rising in the scaffolding of right — angled coordinates, crumbled, raising an awful lot of dust. The “crisis of physics” began.

The human mind often strives for a reconciliation of all the facts in the world rather than for a deeper knowledge of those facts: the important thing is for everything to become simpler and more logical. And then some sneaky little fact floats out, irreconcilable with the neat theories, and you have to start all over again….

They had also created a simple and understandable picture in their minds of how a computer creates a man from information about man. The computer — womb was playing children's games with blocks. In a liquid medium via electrical impulse it combined molecules into molecular chains, the molecular chains into cells, and the cells into tissue — with the sole difference that there were untold billions of “informational blocks.” The fact that the result of the game was not a monster or even another person, but Krivoshein's informational double, proves that there was only one solution to the puzzle. Well, naturally, it couldn't have been any other way: blocks can only fit into a picture that exists in their surfaces. The variants (a fragmented Lena, a fragmented father, the “delirium of memory,” the eyes and feelers) were merely informational garbage that could not exist independent of the computer.

This concept was not incorrect, merely superficial. It suited them, as long as the facts supported the theory that they were the same externally and in thoughts and deeds. But when irreconcilable differences came up on the use of biology in their work, this concept turned out to be inadequate.

Yes, it was their inability to understand each other, and not the interest in biology (which might have passed in Krivoshein — 2 with no harmful effects), that became to his discovery what the constancy of the speed of light was to the theory of relativity. A man never knows what's banal about him and what's original; that only comes in comparsion with others. And unlike other people, Krivoshein — 2 could compare himself to not only his acquaintances, but to “himself” as well.

Now it became very clear to graduate student Krivoshein what the difference between them was: their ways of appearing were different. Valentin Krivoshein appeared over three decades ago the way every living thing did — from an embryo, in which a program for building a human being developed over thousands of centuries and in which generations had been encoded by a specific arrangement of protein and DNA. But the computer — womb, even though it was working from individual Krivoshein information, was still dealing with random information; it had to seek out the principles of formation and all the details of the biological information system. And the computer found a way different from nature's: a biochemical assembly instead of embryonic development.

Yes, now there was much that he understood. In a year he had passed from sensations to knowledge and from knowledge to mastery of himself. And then… then it had merely been a powerful attraction to biology and the inexpressible certainty that this was where he had to seek his answers. He couldn't even explain it well to Krivoshein. He came to Moscow with the vague feeling that something was wrong with him. He wasn't sick or imagining things, but he had to figure himself out, to make sure that his feeling was reality and not an idee fixe or a hypochondriacal hallucination.