Containment (5 page)

"What about fuel?" Fai said.

"Until we figure out how to make our own propellant, we could easily get enough fuel from Earth to get us into orbit around Venus."

"Orbital velocity maybe, but escape velocity is an entirely different story."

"All we have to do is get ourselves into a parabolic orbit, and we can use a gravitational slingshot to get us to Earth, and another gravitational slingshot to slow us down once we get there. Since we'll be moving away from the Sun, we'll steadily lose speed which means we should be able to slow down enough to get into lunar orbit without aerobraking. We can use physics to do most of the work."

"Arik, we all know you're smart," L'Ree said. "Nobody doubts your intelligence, and I don't think anyone even doubts your ability to figure this out given enough time. But that's not the point. The point is that we need you working on other things. We have to solve the air problem before we can do anything else."

"The environmental systems are stable," Arik said. "They've been stable for years."

"They're stable, but we aren't. We can't support a single additional human on Venus right now. Doesn't that strike you as problematic? Don't you think Gen V is going to want to get married and start having children someday?"

"We can get additional air from Earth," Arik said. "We have hundreds of tanks we've never even used."

L'Ree leaned back and looked at Zorion, seemingly reluctant to continue. Arik could tell that something needed to be said that she didn't feel she had the authority to say.

"Arik," Zorion said, "we fully appreciate that you and your generation have a unique perspective on life here. That's why we're so anxious for your contributions. But you have to realize that
we
have a perspective that
you
don't."

Zorion paused. He appeared to be gathering his thoughts, choosing his next words cautiously. He leaned forward and looked up at the heavy closed door at the back of the auditorium before continuing.

"Arik, it is extremely important that we reduce our dependency on Earth as much as possible. If our environmental systems fail, or if they can't keep up, we'll be dependent on Earth for
the
most basic of human necessities. That's not a very strong position for a colony to be in, is it?"

Arik suddenly realized that the discussion wasn't about whether decolonization could happen — they were already debating what to do about it. The committee had accepted the premise of his argument before he'd even sat down; it was his conclusion that they were calling into question. Arik was arguing for proactive measures while they were already thinking defensively.

"I'm not trying to scare you, Arik," Zorion continued, "and there's certainly no cause for concern at the moment. But you have to understand that things need to be done in a specific order here, and right now, we
need
to solve the air problem. Arik, we need you in the Life Pod."

"But we won't
have
an air problem if we can avoid decolonization," Arik said. "That's the whole point."

"Arik, what was the first thing you said about colonization?"

Arik took a moment to recall his words, then suddenly realized the trap he had laid for himself. "That it inevitably leads to decolonization."

"The definition of 'inevitable' is that which is certain to happen and cannot be avoided or prevented. That was your word, not mine. Now, being a colony of extremely limited resources, does it make more sense to apply those resources toward trying to prevent something which cannot be prevented, or toward preparing for it, instead?"

Arik knew that his question was rhetorical, and that the hearing was over.

A
rik's hospital bed had been turned 90 degrees from the position it was in when he woke up. It was now perpendicular to the door, facing the largest expanse of uninterrupted polymeth in the room. His workspace filled the entire surface in front of him from just above his feet all the way to the ceiling. The wall was alive with shapes, diagrams, video feeds, and hundreds of lines of scrolling code.

Arik watched the movement in front of him, deadpan, his hands flat on the bed beside his body. He was wearing the BCI that his father had brought him. A BCI was sometimes referred to as a mindmouse, wavecap, NP (neuro-prosthetic), or, probably most descriptive of all, a headcrab. It consisted of a white polymer hub that sat on the back of the head with wide flat fingers reaching forward above all four lobes of the brain. Although it was commonly referred to as a BCI, it was technically an NIBCI, or a Non-invasive Brain-Computer Interface, meaning that it sat on your head as opposed to being embedded inside of it.

Not everyone could use a BCI. Most people preferred soft polymeth keyboards, or to stand and trace out commands on a horizontal polymeth surface, or if they were really committed, to train themselves on a Prehensile-Computer Interface. PCIs were usually long glove-like devices that could sense a wide array of movements, impulses, and gestures, and translate them into various commands. And, of course, all these methods could be combined with eye tracking and voice input. But a BCI was by far the most efficient method ever conceived for communicating with machines — if you were able to master it.

For most of its existence, the field of BCI research had been considered "fertile" which is a scientifically polite way of saying that it had a long way to go. The problem was the learning curve. Researchers had a fair amount of success with invasive BCIs since they were able to pinpoint regions of the brain associated with very specific tasks; subjects were literally able to just think about doing certain things, and watch their intentions realized on their workspaces in front of them. However, as scar tissue built up around the implants, the signal tended to degrade, and neurosurgery was not something you wanted to undergo on a regular basis. There was also the small matter of occasionally needing to upgrade the hardware in order to accommodate more sophisticated software — a process which required 16 hours of brain surgery.

The focus gradually shifted to non-invasive BCIs, but the problem was that they required unrealistic levels of training. Since sensors on the outside of your brain picked up far more noise, the subject had to learn to focus and control their thoughts in order to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Additionally, it was very difficult to pinpoint precise signals when reading brainwaves so far away from their origins. It was more like trying to understand what someone was saying to you from across a noisy room as opposed to having them whisper it directly into your ear.

BCI researchers generally fell into two camps: those who believed it was up to hardware and software to extract precise patterns from noise, and those who felt it was the subject's responsibility to learn how to produce cleaner signals. As always, the answer turned out to be somewhere in the middle. It was an African neurobiologist named Nsonowa who finally reinvigorated the field by constructing systems that enabled computers and humans to grow and learn together. She described the process to laymen as one very similar to raising children (she came from a large family — a fact which clearly had a significant impact on her work). Children don't always do what their parents want, and parents can't always do what their children want, so the two have to learn to compromise. Ultimately the parents are in charge (which she emphasized for those who feared BCI technology would lead to humans being enslaved by computers, not unlike the parents of extremely bratty kids), but the point was that both parties had to be willing and able to adapt to each other.

Nsonowa also theorized that this coevolution needed to start at as early an age as possible. Part of the reason most BCI experiments failed was because it was simply unrealistic to expect a subject and a computer to adapt to each other over the course of just a few hours or days. Of course, the people funding these studies who hoped to one day market the resulting technology weren't interested in solutions that required training from an early age and that were largely inaccessible to anyone old enough to have the money to pay for it, but Nsonowa was a patient woman, and insisted on long term studies with subjects as young as possible. She discovered that seven-year-olds who had been training on BCIs since they were three could interact with machines as efficiently as any adult using any other method or combination of methods of human-computer interaction. By the time subjects were 12, they were at least twice as proficient as adults, and by the age of 14, children were able to perform complex tasks between 10 and 20 times more efficiently than any adult in the world.

Nsonowa had proven that people who grew up with BCI technology could control machines as easily as their own limbs.

She was able to make this key breakthrough because she understood the paradox inherent in the process of thinking about thought: you could only think about thought using your own thoughts which meant that you were unable to think about any forms of thought which were inconsistent with your own thinking. She talked about DNA as being alterable, but not adaptive, and about the more primitive parts of our brains as not having the luxury of being creative about things like breathing, fleeing, mating, etc. But the cerebral cortex (which contains the four lobes that BCIs concern themselves with) are magnificently adaptive, flexible, and malleable. The cerebral cortex represents nothing less than infinite potential. Humans are inherently and physically unable to imagine all the extraordinary gifts hidden inside their own heads. The only way to find them is to go looking.

Arik's parents were familiar with Nsonowa's work, and therefore introduced him to BCIs at a very early age. The challenge fascinated Arik, and he and the computer mastered each other very quickly. Most of the training programs were in the form of games which Arik devoured, and by the age of six, he was more proficient with a computer than any adult in V1. At the age of 10, Arik began modifying the learning, acclimation, and adaptation algorithms, and by 12, his parents suspected he was several times more proficient with a BCI than anyone in human history. He was often asked how he did it, but Arik honestly didn't know. He understood how both the hardware and the software worked, but it was the organic part of the equation — his own brain — that he didn't understand. He described it to people as being able to punch a code into a keypad, but not actually being able to recite the sequence of numbers. The knowledge was stored in a part of his brain that conscious thought could not access directly.

Arik's parents were also familiar enough with Nsonowa's work to stop Arik's research into building a two-way BCI. It didn't take Arik long to realize that once the process of a human communicating with a computer using a BCI was mastered, the bottleneck became the process of the computer communicating with the human. After processing input, the computer had to convert its output into some sort of graphical form which it normally displayed by exciting molecules of polymeth at specified X, Y, and Z coordinates. The X and Y coordinates were needed to arrange the output into a coherent pattern, and the Z coordinate specified the depth of the event which helped determine which wavelengths of light were allowed to escape, resulting in billions of possible colors. The photons then had to span the distance between the polymeth and Arik's eyes, strike the rods and cones of his retinas, and get converted into electrical impulses which were carried by the optical nerve to the visual cortex in the occipital lobe all the way in the back of his brain. It was only then that Arik could even begin the process of making sense of the visual input which, depending on the task, was done in one or more completely different parts of his brain.

Arik imagined a far more efficient process of computer output. If a BCI could allow you to communicate with a computer more efficiently by bypassing primitive input methods, why not build a BCI that could bypass primitive output methods, as well? Why not skip the visual representation, the polymeth, and the eyes entirely, and send information directly into the brain? Nsonowa refused to do any work with two-way BCIs. She fit her own definition of wise in that she knew what she did not know, and she did not know the risks of bypassing all the safeguards evolution had seen fit to install between your eyes and your brain. What she did know, however, was that using your brain to control a computer was entirely different from using a computer to control your brain. The tiniest software bug, hardware malfunction, or physical miscalculation would have repercussions that she did want to be responsible for. She admitted that the technology was intriguing, probably even inevitable, but she insisted that it would not come from her, and Arik's parents made sure that it would not come from him, either.

The first time Arik had the BCI placed on his head after the surgery, he was terrified that he would no longer be able to use it. Since he didn't fully understand how it worked, and since he still didn't have a clear idea of what the embolism and the surgery had done to his brain, there was no way for him to know whether his neurological conditioning had been affected. To Arik, computers were prostheses. When he needed more storage capacity and processing power than he had in his own head, or when he needed to extend his ability to communicate, he put on his BCI, opened his workspace, and came closer than any other human in history to mentally merging with a machine. He knew if that relationship were ever to be damaged, he would probably never be able to fully repair it, and that an integral part of who he was would be dead.

Arik hypothesized that he would either have no trouble communicating with the computer at all, or that the computer would behave completely erratically. Either the portion of his brain that was conditioned to interact with the BCI was fully intact, or it had been irreversibly damaged. But what actually happened was, as Nsonowa herself would probably have predicted, somewhere in the middle. He seemed to be able to communicate with the computer normally, however there were occasional "lapses." In a typed out explanation (Arik still wasn't completely comfortable talking yet), he described it to Dr. Nguyen as having a normal and fluid conversation with someone, then suddenly not being able to come up with the next word in a sentence. Or like punching in a code on a keypad that you've done thousands of times before, but suddenly not being able to remember the next number in the sequence. Arik realized that there wasn't one specific part of his brain that knew how to use the BCI; rather the knowledge was distributed throughout its neural structure. But it wasn't just stored once. There seemed to be some redundancy since with enough practice, he was able to recover the knowledge, to fill in the gaps. It was just a matter of subconsciously locating the redundant information and re-sequencing the damaged routines. It took about a week of exhausting and repetitive practice, but Arik felt he had again become as proficient with the BCI as he had ever been.