The only literal wiring, at first, was a temporary one--a fine
electrode aseptically introduced into the great nerve that leads to the
rhinencephalon--the "small brain," the area of the brain which contains
the pleasure centers that motivate human behavior.
More than a thousand Components had been spoiled and discarded before
the Pyramids had located the pleasure centers so exactly.
While the Component, Tropile, was being "programmed," the wire rewarded
him with minute pulses that made his body glow with animal satisfaction
when he functioned correctly. That was all there was to it. After a
time, the wire was withdrawn, but by then Tropile had "learned" his
entire task. Conditioned reflexes had been established. They could be
counted on for the long and useful life of the Component.
That life might be very long indeed; in the nutrient tank beside
Tropile's, as it happened, lay a Component with eight legs and a
chitinous fringe around its eyes. It had lain in such a tank for more
than a hundred and twenty-five thousand Terrestrial years.
* * * * *
The Component was placed in operation. It opened its eyes and saw
things. The sensory nerves of its limbs felt things. The muscles of
its hands and toes operated things.
Where was Glenn Tropile?
He was there, all of him, but a zombie-Tropile. Bereft of will, emptied
of memories. He was a machine and part of a huger machine. His sex
was the sex of a photoelectric cell; his politics were those of a
transistor; his ambition that of a mercury switch. He didn't know
anything about sex, or fear, or hope. He only knew two things: Input
and Output.
Input to him was a display of small lights on a board before his vacant
face; and also the modulation of a loudspeaker's liquid-borne hum in
each ear.
Output from him was the dancing manipulation of certain buttons and
keys, prompted by changes in Input and by nothing else.
Between Input and Output, he lay in the tank, a human Black Box which
was capable of Rashevsky's Number of switchings, and of nothing else.
He had been programmed to accomplish a specific task--to shepherd
a chemical called 3, 7, 12-trihydroxycholanic acid, present in the
catabolic product of the Pyramids, through a succession of more than
five hundred separate operations until it emerged as the chemical,
which the Pyramids were able to metabolize, called Protoporphin IX.
He was not the only Component operating in this task; there were
several, each with its own program.
The acid accumulated in great tanks a mile from him. He knew its
concentration, heat and pressure; he knew of all the impurities
which would affect subsequent reactions. His fingers tapped, giving
binary-coded signals to sluice gates to open for so many seconds and
then to close; for such an amount of solvent at such a temperature to
flow in; for the agitators to agitate for just so long at just such a
force. And if a trouble signal disturbed any one of the 517 major and
minor operations, he--it?--was set to decide among alternatives:
--scrap the batch in view of flow conditions along the line?
--isolate and bypass the batch through a standby loop?
--immediate action to correct the malfunction?
Without inhibiting intelligence, without the trammels of humanity on
him, the intricate display board and the complex modulations of the two
sound signals could be instantly taken in, evaluated and given their
share in the decision.
Was it--he?--still alive?
The question has no meaning. It was working. It was an excellent
machine, in fact, and the Pyramids cared for it well. Its only
consciousness, apart from the reflexive responses that were its
program, was--well, call it "the sound of one hand alone." Which is to
say zero, mindlessness, Samadhi, stupor.
It continued to function for some time--until the required supply of
Protoporphin IX had been exceeded by a sufficient factor of safety
to make further processing unnecessary--that is, for some minutes or
months. During that time, it was Happy. (It had been programmed to be
Happy when there were no uncorrected malfunctions of the process.)
At the end of that time, it shut itself off, sent out a signal that
the task was completed, then it was laid aside in the analogue of a
deep-freeze, to be reprogrammed when another Component was needed.
It was totally immaterial to the Pyramids that this particular
Component had not been stamped from Citizen but from Wolf.