Copernick's Rebellion Read online

  “Why not? It doesn’t cost any more to have a thing grow large. Anyway, my work has been taking up more and more room lately. I don’t want to have to go through the bother of moving again for some time.”

  “Oh. Is this the bathroom?”

  “Yes. You cut the membrane on one of the shower nozzles to make them work. The five nozzles on the left vent a soapy water; the five on the right are fresh. In each set the one to the left is the hottest; the others get progressively cooler. Once you cut a membrane, you drain a fifty-gallon tank. Whether you want that much or not.”

  “Fifty gallons! At school the water was rationed.”

  “It’s rationed in most places these days. But a tree house recycles everything, so you can afford to splurge.”

  “Can I use it now? Please?”

  “Of course, darling.”

  Mona eagerly stripped off her clothes, folded them neatly, and set them on a bench. No one had ever told her that people should be ashamed of their bodies. Hers was something to be proud of. The only flaw was that her navel was twice the usual diameter. Heinrich made a note to correct that as soon as possible.

  Soon she was splashing and playing like a child in the warm sudsy water. Copemick was tempted to join her, but she seemed to be having so much fun that he was afraid of dampening it. He sat on a recliner chair, lit a cigar, and enjoyed. Having Mona around was going to be wonderful.

  “Where are the towels?” Mona said after she had drained all ten nozzles.

  “You use that white blanket thing over there.”

  “Okay—oh! It’s stuck to the wall.”

  “It’s part of the house. Cleans itself. Come on. I want show you the rest of the place.”

  “Just a minute.” Mona ran over to her clothes.

  “Leave them.”

  “But I bought them especially for you! I’d hoped you would like them.”

  “I do. But I like the outfit you’re wearing better.”

  Mona thought a moment, then smiled. “Thank you.”

  Copernick led her to a small room.

  “This elevator is one of my animals. Nonsentient, of course. It’s really little more than a box hanging at the end of a single muscle, with a door at each floor. It works like an ordinary elevator. Press these nubs for the floor you want.” Copernick pressed for the second basement.

  Mona ran her fingers through the fur on the wall. “Mink?”

  “Pretty close. As I said, these things don’t cost extra. I do most of my work down here. The lights are biolu—minescent. And automatic.”

  “But they are on now.”

  “Because we are not alone.” Copernick started to lead her to the computer room.

  “Ay, boss! Them’s nice tits on that one!” a heavy voice shouted from a strong steel cage. A hulking shape was barely visible.

  Mona cringed. “Who was that?”

  “One of my failures. I wanted something to do heavy labor and defense work. At the time, modifying a great ape seemed to be the easiest route.”

  “He’s so ugly.” The black bull mountain ape had a bulging forehead.

  “Them bastard! He don’t make no girls like me!”

  “And I’m not going to make any more boys like you, either.” Copernick led Mona away.

  “What went wrong?”

  “Nothing. And everything. I thought that by increasing his gray matter and giving him an adequate vocal apparatus, I’d get something useful.”

  “And that didn’t work?” Mona asked.

  “It worked. The problem is that intelligence, in any animal, is the servant of more basic emotions and drives. That ape has the ability to be useful, but not the motivation.”

  “But can’t you do something about that?”

  “I’ve tried. I’ve chemically taken him apart three times and put him together four. But I’ve never been able to come up with a reliable computer analog of his motivational matrix. It’s as if he takes a perverted joy in confounding me. I’ve wasted two years on him. But no more.

  “Anyway, I’ve come up with something better for a labor and defense unit. I’m giving up on that ape; I started the reversion process a week ago.”

  “Reversion? What do you mean?” Mona said.

  “I built him up and I can tear him down. I’m going to change him back to a normal mountain ape and sell him.”

  “You’re going to destroy his brain? Isn’t that like murder?”

  “What am I supposed to do with him? I can’t let him out. He’s a killer! It isn’t even safe to keep him in a cage. He’s bright enough to figure a way out of it. No. It’s either kill him or revert him. And as an ape, he’s worth a lot of money to a zoo.”

  “But still…”

  “He was an animal when I bought him and he’ll be an animal when I sell him. I fail to see where I’ve committed any crime.”

  “But there must be something…”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” Heinrich said.

  Mona was silent. Heinrich took her arm—her skin was so incredibly soft!—and led her into the next hall.

  “This is something that I want your help with. If you want to, that is.” Copernick opened the door on a surrealistic scene. One wall was a computer bank with multicolor displays that changed periodically. The wall opposite was a complex array of automated chemical apparatus.

  Mona’s eyes locked in on a line of twenty glass cylinders in the center of the room. Each was a yard tall and a foot in diameter. Each contained a small humanoid form floating motionless in the fluid.

  “Are they alive?” Mona said.

  “Certainly.” Heinrich inhaled. “At present, not one human child in ten is getting a solid basic education. The poorer countries can’t afford to feed their children, let alone send them to school. And things are getting worse, not better. A poor educational level results in a poor allocation of limited resources, and hence more poverty. I’m hoping that these beings will help break that downward spiral. They are to act as tutors and primary school teachers. I call them fauns.”

  From the waist down the fauns were covered with fur. They had hoofs rather than feet, and their ears were pointed. Each faun had a large umbilical cord running from her naval to a placenta at the bottom of the cylinder.

  “They’re lovely,” Mona said. “But why the mythological appearance?”

  “They had to be quite human in appearance, or the human children that they raise might imprint improperly, or turn out autistic. Yet I didn’t want adults to confuse them with people. After all, we don’t want a competing species.

  “Since human children normally imprint before they can walk, looking up from their cribs, the kids should see the fauns as human,” Copernick said.

  “What am I supposed to do with them?”

  “Raise them.”

  “Raise twenty children at one time?” Mona said. “I couldn’t. I mean that it would be impossible!”

  “It’s not that bad. They are not human. They won’t have to go through the repetitive learning processes that a human child does. And they can already speak English.”

  “English! But they’re still in those bottle things.”

  “I’m using a direct computer interface with them while they are still in their cloning tanks,” Copernick said.

  “Then why do you need me to raise them?”

  “It’s not just busy work, Mona. True, I could educate the fauns completely by computer. If you don’t want the job, I’ll have to do it. The simulations I’ve run indicate that it will work. But future generations of fauns will have to be raised more naturally by their own parents. If there’s a hitch in the educational process, we’d better know about it before we let fauns raise human children.”

  “Well…”

  “The fauns won’t be ready for decanting for at least a week. Take your time making up your mind about working with them. Now let me show you the simulation room.”

  The room contained two desks covered with lighted buttons. Above each was a televisi
on display screen. Behind them, taking up most of the room, were four featureless gray cabinets. Each cabinet was a yard wide, two yards high, and sixty yards long.

  “These are the main simulation computers,” Copernick said.

  “They’re so big. I thought that computers were little things.”

  “Little computers are. These are two of the largest ever built. It requires around six hundred trillion bits of random access memory to keep track of all the chemical processes in a simple animal. A human requires twice that.”

  “They must have been awfully expensive.” Mona said.

  “They were. The reproduction cost for the equipment here at Pinecroft would be around eighty million dollars. The engineering cost was three times that. And Uncle Martin’s installation was almost as expensive.”

  “I didn’t know that you were that rich.”

  “I’m not. I never was. Copernicus, Inc., is worth several billion. I founded it. I built it and I ran it. But in order to get the capital I needed for expansion, I had to sell the bulk of my company’s stock to outsiders. By the time I was ready to retire, I owned only a small percent of my own company.”

  “Then how did you get all of this stuff?” Mona asked.

  “Owning a company is one thing. Controlling it is another. Stockholders usually leave you alone, as long as you declare a dividend. As president, I made sure that we had a large R & D budget. This equipment was all built in my own labs.”

  “You mean you stole it?”

  “No. I bought it. Through a third party, of course. And at scrap prices.” Copernick laughed.

  “It still sounds as if you stole it from your own stockholders.”

  “Nobody ever lost money doing business with Heinrich Copernick!”

  Mona looked at her bare feet and was silent.

  “Anyway, each of these computers can simulate the entire life-cycle of an organism. With a fifty-gigahertz clock, I can take a human being from a fertilized cell to an octagenarian in eleven hours. They are the most important single tool we use in bioengineering. They let me test out a design or modification in a matter of hours, when actually growing the organism could take decades. These displays let me see what is going on in any part of the simulation, right down to the molecular level. Or you can slow down the clock and look at it macroscopically; watch it work and play. Even talk to it.”

  “Talk to it!” Mona woke up.

  “Assuming that the being involved can talk. One of the surprises I had with these simulations was that the nervous systems were so well modeled that the programs attain a degree of self-awareness.”

  “You mean it’s alive?”

  “Of course not. They’re nothing but programs on a machine. But they think they’re alive. It causes some problems. For one thing, you have to program an enviornment for them to grow up in, or they go insane. For another, you need at least two computers running so that they can have someone to relate to.

  “On the other hand, this simulated self-awareness has its advantages. In training, for example. I loaded my own program into one computer and that of my new Labor and Defense Unit into the other. Then I set up a cross talk between them and let the ‘me’ program educate the LDU program. I ran it through twice to give ‘me’ some experience in training them. Right now I’m running it through a third time with a living LDU hooked into the circuit.”

  “You mean that you can educate somebody in a few hours?” Mona asked.

  “Not without causing neural damage. The fastest safe speedup factor is fifty. It means weeks instead of years, though. And a lot less work.”

  “Can we watch?” Mona was worried about training the fauns.

  “Not the actual LDU. It’s under sedation in the next room and shouldn’t be disturbed. I can show you the simulation if you like.”

  Copernick switched on one of the displays. It showed a strange creature with a flat oval body, six feet by three, standing on four camel’s legs. There were eight fixed eyes around its circumference, and two more at the ends of yard-long tentacles growing from its front. Two long remarkably humanoid arms were held folded at its sides. There was a strange slit above each wrist. In front of it stood Heinrich Copernick, writing on a blackboard. But it was the Heinrich Copernick of a year ago, with crippled legs and a bent back. The man and the LDU were moving at blinding speed, and uttering high-pitched squeaks.

  Copernick adjusted a dial on the panel and a digital readout changed from 12.5 MHz to 250 KHz. The screen slowed down to normal speed and conversations became intelligible.

  “… so the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides,” the image said. “Oh. Hello, boss.”

  “Hi. How is it going?” Copernick said.

  “On schedule. Say, you’re looking good. When are you going to reprogram my body to match yours?” the simulation said.

  “Mine isn’t finished yet. But if you want to update yours anyway, feel free. My current medical section is on bubble deck eighty-one.”

  “Thanks. I will.”

  “That classroom,” Mona said. “It looks so familiar.”

  “Boss, do you have someone else there with you?” The simulation was startled. This was unprecedented!

  “Yes.” Copernick motioned Mona into the camera’s field of view.

  “Mona! My God, girl! It’s good to see you in the flesh.”

  “Has Heinrich been talking about me?” Mona said.

  “Of course not, silly. I mean he has, but I was referring to before,” the simulation said.

  Mona looked confused.

  “You mean he hasn’t told you… Well, uh, I have work to do. See you both later.”

  “Later.” Copernick quickly switched off the display and reset the system clock.

  “Told me what?” Mona demanded.

  “I’ll explain later.”

  “No. Now.”

  “Mona, please.”

  “It just isn’t fair! You were nice and loving all my life and then one day I have an operation and you get cold and icy, and you ship me off to that finishing school without even a kiss good-bye…” Mona began to sob.

  “There were things that a girl should know that I couldn’t teach you.” Copernick was awkward as he put his arms around her.

  “And you almost never wrote.” Mona sobbed.

  “You know how busy I’ve been.”

  “And now I get home and you waste all this time on technical stuff and you haven’t even kissed me.”

  Copernick kissed her. “Better?”

  “Not much of a kiss. Not like when we were on the lake or all the times we made love or—”

  “The lake?” Copernick was confused for a moment. Then daylight dawned in the swamp. The simulation had been making love to its student!

  “Heinrich, what’s happened to you? I mean, have you changed your mind the way you changed your body? Don’t you love me any more?” Mona was crying in earnest.

  “I love you, Mona.”

  “You do?”

  “I love you very much. And I want you to marry me.”

  “You do?” Mona held him tightly. Her tear-streaked face smiled.

  “Yes, I do. And we can get married as soon as you like,” Copernick said. Right after I have a little talk with that damned simulation!

  “Oh, Heinrich, I’d given up hoping that you’d want me.”

  “Of course I want you. That’s why I made you.”

  Chapter Three

  SEPTEMBER 30, 1999

  CUSTOMARY MORALITY has us ask, “Is what I am doing in accordance with a previously established set of rules?”

  A more rational ethic would have us ask, “Is what I am doing in the best interests of all humanity, including myself?”

  As civilization becomes increasingly complex, the likelihood of any ancient rule book’s being appropriate becomes increasingly small.

  —Heinrich Copernick

  From his lab notebook

  Martin Guibedo found Burt Scra
tchon and Patricia Cambridge waiting for him at the tree house.

  “Well, you finally made it,” Scratchon said. “We were beginning to think that you had lost your nerve.”

  “What nerves? The only scary thing was the E train. It broke down twice on the way over here,” Guibedo said.

  “The subway at this hour?” Patricia said. “But they’re so dangerous after dark!”

  “There is a couple of things good about weighing three hundred pounds, Patty. One is that most people don’t bother you,” Guibedo said. “So what do you think of Laurel, who I give to Burty here?”

  “It’s lovely, Dr. Guibedo. And it’s so huge!” Patricia said.

  “It might make a decent warehouse, if you could get a forklift through the front door,” Scratchon said.

  “Don’t do that, Burty. The carpets couldn’t take the weight. Anyway, we’re going to have plenty of warehouses pretty soon.”

  “Do you mean that you are working on a tree-house warehouse, Dr. Guibedo?” Patricia asked.

  “No. I just mean that a lot of warehouses are used up for storing things like lumber and food. With my tree houses, we’re not going to do that much any more, so we’re gong to have more warehouses than we need.” Guibedo sat down on one of the oversized chairs in the tree house’s living room.

  “My God!” Scratchon said. “You mean that you’re deliberately wrecking the economy?”

  “What wrecking? I’m just saying that we’re going to have extra, so we don’t have to build any more for a while.”

  Scratchon was about to erupt, so Patricia cut in. “Dr. Guibedo, you were going to explain about the care and feeding of tree houses to us.”

  “Sure. There isn’t really that much to tell, Patty. The tree house is six months old now, so it can mostly take care of itself.”

  “Dr. Guibedo, I just can’t get over how fast they grow.”

  “Nothing to it, Patty. Do the arithmetic. On an acre of land you have falling seventeen million calories of solar power every minute. A pound of my wood takes three thousand calories to make, and my tree houses are about ten percent efficient. So if a tree house isn’t doing anything else but making wood, you have maybe five hundred pounds of wood per acre per minute.”