Self-discovery

Krivoshein laughed. How silly to think that such primitive apparatus could have punched up his organism! At least he hadn't dropped his physiology studies for that project. When he performed an autopsy, he mentally revived the corpse: he imagined that he himself lay on the dissecting table, that it was his white nerve fibers running through the muscles and cartilage to the purple, yellow fat — encrusted heart, to the watery clusters of salivary glands under the chin, to the gray rags of collapsed lungs. Other fibers wove into white cords of nerves that went to the pelvis, the spinal cord and up, through the neck, under the skull. Signal commands ran along them from there: contract the muscles, speed up the heart, squeeze out saliva!

In the student cafeteria he followed the movement of every gulp of food to his stomach, trying to imagine and feel how, in the darkness, it was slowly kneaded by the smooth muscles, broken down by hydrochloric acid and enzymes, how the dull yellow mash was absorbed into the walls of the intestine. Sometimes he spent two hours sitting over a cold cutlet.

Actually, he was remembering. Nine — tenths of his discoveries were due to the fact that he remembered and understood how it had happened.

The computer — womb had no reason to begin with a fetus; it had enough material to assemble an adult. Krivoshein, the original, had made sure of that. At first the vague biological mixture in the tank contained only “wandering” currents and “floating” potentials from external circuits — these colorful terms from theoretical electronics were quite literal in this case. Then the transparent nerve fibers and cells appeared — a continuation of the electronic circuits of the computer. The search for informational equilibrium continued. The nervous system was becoming more and more voluminous and complex, and the layers of nerve cells turned into the cortex and subcortex. That's when his brain appeared, and from that moment on, he existed.

At first his brain was also a continuation of the computer's circuits. But now he received impulses of external information, sifted it and tried combinations, and looked for a way to realize the information in a biological medium. He was assembling himself! In the vat a system of nerves — for now still random — spread. Muscle tissue, vessels, bones, and inner organs began appearing around the nerves — in that practically liquid state when they could dissolve, blend, change structure under orders of the nerve impulses. No, this wasn't an intelligent assembly of a body following a blueprint, since there was no blueprint. The building block game continued, a sifting through many variants and choosing of the only one among them that reflected the information on Krivoshein. But now, like the computer which evaluated every variant of the solution with binary signals, his computer brain evaluated the synthesis of a body with a binary code of sensation: Yes meant it felt good, No, that it hurt. Unsuccessful combinations of cells, the incorrect distribution of organs were transmitted to the brain as a dull or sharp pain; the successful and correct one, as delicious satisfaction.

And the memory of the search, the memory of the sensations of the body under construction remained within him.

Life creates people who differ little in the properties of the organism, but are very different in their psychology, personality, knowledge, and spiritual refinement or crudity. The computer — womb acted in the opposite manner. The graduate student Krivoshein was identical to Krivoshein in psychology and intellect, but that was understandable. Those qualities in a person develop through the same process of random retrieval and choice. The computer merely repeated the retrieval. But biologically they differed the way a book differs from its rough draft. Not just one draft, but all the drafts and sketches that went into creating a finished and polished work. Of course, the contents were the same, but the drafts retain the path of finding and choosing the right words in their corrections, additions, and deletions.

“Actually, that comparison is imperfect, too,” the frowning student mused. “The drafts of books appear before the books, not afterwards. And if you show a scribbler all the drafts of War and Peace would that make him a genius? Well, I guess they would teach him something…. No, I guess it's better to leave comparisons out of this!” Man recalls what he knows in only two situations: when he must recall it — goal recollection — and when he encounters something that even remotely resembles the code in his brain. This is called associative recall. The biology books were the hint that stimulated his memory. But the difficulty lay in the fact that he did not remember words or even images, but only sensations. Even now he couldn't convey it all in words — and probably would never be able to.