Self-discovery

He worked so hard that he could look back on the days at the institute in Dneprovsk as if they had been a vacation. Lectures, lab work, the anatomy theater, the library, lectures, seminars, lab work, lectures, the clinic, the library, lab work…. He never left the Lenin Hills campus during the first semester; he would walk down to the parapet before going to bed, to look down at the Moscow River, smoke, enjoy the lights glimmering and blending with the stars on the horizon.

A gray — eyed, second — year student who resembled Lena always sat next to him in Androsiashvili's class, which he attended. Once she asked: “You're so solid, so serious — were you in the Army?” “In prison,” he replied, jutting out his jaw. The girl lost interest in him. It had to be. Girls take up too much time.

And he was convinced by every experiment, every calculation. Yes, in a cross section of a nerve bundle that goes from the brain to the pituitary gland, under a microscope you can actually count approximately a hundred thousand fibers — and that means that the pituitary is closely monitored by the brain. Yes, if you add beta — active calcium to a lab monkey's diet of bananas and then use a Geiger counter on its excretions, it really is true that bone tissue renews itself approximately twice a year. Yes, if you stick electrode needles into muscle tissue and conduct sound into earphones, you can really hear a rhythmic quacking or a fragmented pulse of the nerve signals, and these sounds corresponded with what he was feeling! Yes, skin cells actually do move up toward the surface, changing structure, dying, so that they can slough off and make room for new ones.

He studied his own body. He took blood samples and lymphatic samples; he got a piece of muscle tissue from his right hip and examined it under an optical microscope and then an electronic one; he calumnied himself to get a Wassermann at the school clinic. And he determined that everything in him was normal. Even the amount and distribution of nerves in the tissue was the same as in the bodies they dissected in anatomy class. The nerves went up to the brain, but he couldn't get in there with the use of laboratory technology. He would have to implant too many electrodes into his skull and plug into too many oscilloscopes to understand the secrets of his self. And would he understand them then? Or would he come up with “streptocidal striptease” — not in binary alphabet, but in the jagged lines of an electroencephalogram?

The situation — a living person studying his own organism can't even breech the mysteries of his body with laboratory equipment — was paradoxical. After all, this wasn't a question of discovering invisible “radiostars” or synthesizing antiparticles. All the information was in man. All that remained was to translate the code of the molecules, cells, and nerve impulses into the code of the secondary signal system — words and sentences.

Words and phrases are necessary (but not always) for one man to understand another. But are they necessary to understand oneself? Krivoshein didn't know. That's why he tried everything: analysis, imagination, books, monitoring the sensations of his body, conversations with Androsiashvili and other teachers, observation of patients at the clinic, autopsies….

Everything that Vano Aleksandrovich had argued in that memorable December conversation was right, since it was defined by Androsiashvili's knowledge of the world and his faith in the indisputable expediency of everything created by nature.

But the professor did not know one thing: that he was conversing with an artificial man.

Even Vano Aleksandrovich's doubts about the success of his plan were solidly based, because Krivoshein's starting point was an engineering computer solution. That December he began planning an “electropotential inductor” — a continuation of the idea of Monomakh's Crown. A hundred thousand microscopic electrode needles, connected to the matrices of a self — learning automated machine (in the lab the bionics people modeled reflex actions on it), were supposed to supply the brain cells with auxiliary charges, bringing artificial biowaves through the skull, and thereby connecting the thinking centers of the cortex with the autonomous nervous system.