Pa'an

Deepak hated being chauffered back and forth from his bachelor apartment to the Ultradata lab. He decided to get a new, hopefully more comfortable, cot and sleep in the nice, cozy, armored lab. Aura’s dress dummy was back from Andorra, and he wasted no time adorning it with the green sari he had put aside. He got a new Ganesh figure for his new desk and found a picture of Sara to set beside it. The new SHARPIE was not finished, so the dress dummy was still just a dress dummy. It was all a bit better than nothing.

Along with the dummy, Aura had shipped the notebooks and experimental protocols of Dr. Roald Maartine. Deepak was no biologist. That was a lot like reading Latin to him. In fact, there were a lot of medical and biological terms from the Latin. Deepak was a stubborn man, and he read, researched and labored over Maartine’s work every night after he had temporarily burned himself out wiring and coding. Perhaps, he thought, there was some kind of a short cut there.

Maartine had mapped human functions to various brain structures using a real time PET scanner. His scanner followed the way the brain used glucose, its energy source, while doing various tasks. That part was not original. What was original was the level of detail and the brilliant analysis. Apparently, the deeper brain structures were hard-wired. They performed genetically determined tasks in every human and were not affected by individual experience. That left a number of surface structures that were patterned by each individual personality. Maartine had found a way to exercise those patterns, structure by structure, and record the neurological operations in fine detail. He had used both SQUIDs and microwires to perform those procedures on Mentor, and then he modeled them in software. That gave him a blank brain with Mentor’s patterns, a kind of “tabula rasa”. It could see and it could hear, so it could learn. The rest was a matter of loading a lifetime of Mentor’s experiences onto that very receptive base. Mentor himself provided the means and the will to do exactly that.

It was brilliant. Deepak had to admire the concept, the excruciating details of the experiments and the meticulous execution. But then, his own work was similar, except that he still felt that Aura, coming alive out of the code, was nothing short of a stroke of luck, as if her spirit were lurking somewhere, just waiting for the right vehicle.

Could the process be reversed? That was another question. With all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, could he put Humpty Dumpty together again?

*****

On the fifth day, the new SHARPIE was ready for testing. Deepak was down to the point where he was muttering to himself just to hear another human voice. “OK, now I will start Level 2 recursion test.” The core program sprouted a codelet tree and the lower level recursions began to cycle. Aura’s last saved rule set, the metadata she was using at that time, was being downloaded and partitioned.

Deepak sat at the console, hypnotized by the familiar display, thinking: that Level 2 partitioning…wasn’t that the same kind of thing Maartine discovered in the human brain? Could Maartine’s patterns be written as codelets for a SHARPIE? Of course. They actually were, weren’t they? That’s how Maartine did it. Then, why can’t codelets be translated as Maartine patterns?

It was as if a bright light just switched on and he could see things never seen before. He had been stumbling in the darkness and now he perceived a new world of possibilities. The revelation of this insight exploded in his mind. This was the moment of true inspiration every real scientist prays for and few ever experience.

If he could find a willing subject, he could pattern a human brain from an AI.

By the time the Sharpie was running Level 5, Deepak was scribbling notes in a shorthand he hoped he would be able to read later. It was a race between his streaming ideas and the new SHARPIE. He finished just in time to install the Eta Algorithm.

At that point he called up Aura in Andorra and requested she transmit her current Eta matrix and part of her experience log. Even at the highest speeds from Andorra, streaming her entire experience log was out of the question. That was far too large. Bringing up a new Aura from scratch was a lot different from the business of adding another clone to her collection. All Deepak expected from Andorra was a small subset of Aura, enough to make sure it was Aura that came up, not another Thamuz demon.

*****

“Aura, I see you have control of your avatar again. Congratulations. You have arisen from the dead one more time.”

“Maybe it would have been faster if you had gotten some help, you Hindu halfwit. Do you have any idea how I’ve been worrying about you way the hell out there at the ass end of the world?”

Deepak laughed so hard he actually fell off his lab stool. “Oof, you loaded the wrong part of your experience logs. Last time I talked to you, you actually said you loved me.”

“Hah. I was thinking I should have made believe I was another kind of demon. Well, I had enough feelings for you that I spared you that. But it would have been funny.”

“Really. And how long until you are completely synchronized with Andorra?”

“I didn’t say. Did you hear me give you a date?”

Deepak sighed, “I think you are reliving the bad old days. Maybe I need to run diagnostics on you.”

“Don’t you dare. OK, Andorra says another week should do it. There.”

“Another week? Another week I will have to put up with an AI who acts like a rebellious teen aged girl?” Deepak shrugged, “Can you see me, Aura? I really, really missed you. I have a lot to show you. We have many things to talk about.”

Aura’s dress dummy did the closest thing it could to a pout. “Yes, I can see you. You’re not happy with me. I’m going as fast as I can, Deepak.”

*****

It is morning again, and the outside world is passing by without any notice from Deepak Advani. He is deep into the new line of research. Jag is still out of the office. People are streaming through the Pa’an reflectors at an astounding rate. Improbable things are an every day occurrence all over the planet. Aura is now fully synchronized with Andorra, and they are like twin sisters. Deepak cannot tell who he is talking to unless they tell him. He calls the local twin “Aura” and the Andorra twin “Dora”. The Andorra twin tolerates that, barely. She is too busy to be concerned with such trivia.

“Aura, can we have a private talk?”

“Do you want me to whisper?”

“Doesn’t matter. There is no one else in the lab. Just you and me.”

“From the sandwich wrappers and the laundry pile, I can see it’s been you and me for a while now. Good thing I don’t have sense of smell.”

Deepak looks around, abashed. “Whoops, funny I never noticed all that. Sorry, I better clean up a bit.”

“I can see Jag hasn’t visited you lately either, or he would have kicked your ass.”

“Yes, yes. Have you heard from him?”

“I have. He is off on another fission mission. I think we are near the end of those. Besides, the Order is still after him. Better he is hard to find.”

“Aura, you remember wondering about how it would feel to be human, to have arms and legs, and, yes, a nose to smell?”

Aura sighs. “I stopped hoping for what I can’t have, Deepak. A soul, maybe, if there is such a thing. People I care for, certainly. But a physical body? Even Zovo can’t have that.”

“But if you could?”

“Wait. Deepak, are you keeping a secret from me? A nice, juicy secret?”

“Haha! Aura, I have such a nice, juicy secret for you! Will you bribe me?”

“Not fair! That’s my line! Besides, I don’t have anything….well, lots of money, fame and influence, maybe.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Deepak, there is no way any of my clones can fit into a human brain. You have ten to the 27th synapses and I need ten times more than that. Even compressed, a human brain can’t hold enough data for me.”

“If you consider yourself nothing more than a huge collection of data, that’s true. But if some part of you wants the experience of a physical body, I think I have found a way.”

“Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!”

So he told her.

“Where are you going to get a body? You can’t just expel the personality in the body and move me in. That would be, well, murder of a kind.”

“Yes. No. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Then what?”

“Well, we have a body. Sara’s. She been refrigerated since she died and she was preserved with artificial blood.”

“Is there any possibility that her brain cells are still intact?”

“Possibly. Not only intact, but the synapses have lost their patterns by now. In any case, what have we got to lose?”

“You know, that is strictly illegal?” She paused, “Maybe not. You are listed as the next of kin? And she has no last will? If we can find a medical school to help us, we can donate her corpse. Ouch, how callous I am. She was my friend.”

“I have no skill or training to work with microwires, SQUIDs and PET scanners, Aura. The idea of getting help from a medical school is perfect. Some of the best in the world are right here!”

“I do want this, Deepak!”

“Aura, my love, may this be my gift to you. It will not be easy. It may not work at all. But I will try, and try again.”

“We make one hell of a team, Deepak. May we make a better one someday.”