HISTORY IN THE MAKING
7:25 a.m.
The Huns had taken the citadel of Neurosurgery I. For the rightful denizens of the operating suite — the scrub nurses, anesthetists, residents, postgraduate fellows and technicians — it was an invasion, a desecration of the Holiest of Holies. Not once in the ten years of its existence had this quiet cluster of green-tiled rooms been so jarred and trampled as now, by this troop of camera operators, lighting men, gaffers, grips and go-fers, bustling back and forth between the scrub room and Operating Room Three. Masquerade as they might in blue scrubs and gowns, shower caps and paper booties, it was obvious that not one of them knew the rules — what could or could not be touched, or where the sterile fields began. They were like monkeys swinging from the glass trellises of a chemistry lab. It was an invitation to disaster.
So thought Ali O'Day, Assistant Professor Neurosurgery, as she looked through the large picture window above the scrub sink, while she rubbed a foamy antiseptic brush between her fingers and over her arms up to the elbows. With a mixture of disdain, curiosity and envy, she watched the film crew hovering about Kathleen Brown, the network's field correspondent, aiming their silver-and-white reflectors at her impossibly perfect skin and hair as they ran through a lighting check. A man with a Betacam on his shoulder was panning the cramped operating room and talking to New York through a Bluetooth headset clipped to his ear.
It was history in the making.
History in the making. She had heard it repeated over and over, like a mantra. It might even have been true. But at this moment, all she could think of was how to keep from vomiting into the sink.
"Nerves?" asked Florinda, the circulating O.R. nurse, as she passed with a cart full of instruments.
"Mm-hmm." Ali faked a smile as she leaned against the rim of the sink. If only nerves were all it was. The sweet lemon scent of the hand soap did nothing to conceal the smells of iodine and alcohol, and the mixture of all three together roiled her stomach. She stepped back from the sink and closed her eyes. Someone was shouting in an unintelligible Eastern European accent — something about power, a power cable, a power box. She heard the five-minute scrub timer ding. And then she heard a voice from on high — the voice of the God of the neurosurgical operating suite, Dr. Richard Helvelius himself.
"Th-that had better be one of your yoga exercises, Dr. O'Day." He spoke with a slight stutter that was almost Apollonian in him, as though it proved how carefully he weighed and sifted every word. "Tell me you're p-priming your mind for its encounter with destiny."
"You know what it is," said Ali, frowning at his tease.
"You mean you haven't . . . I, uh . . . I thought you had . . ."
She opened her eyes and looked at him, his head bent slightly toward her from his six-foot-four-inch height. Seen from this angle, his craggy features softened, and that famed aquiline nose of his gave up its all-powerful pugnacity. It was just his his big blue-grey eyes she saw — the eyes she had fallen in love with.
"I've been a little tied up, setting the stage for your big show," she said. "Destiny is hard work, Richard. I've hardly slept in four days."
Helvelius laid his strong, warm hand against her spine and gently pushed her back to the scrub sink, back to the iodine and the alcohol and the sickening-sweet lemon scent. He bent even lower to speak confidentially into her ear. "I appreciate that, Ali. In fact, I'm a little w-worried for you."
";Don't be," she said. "I've scheduled a quiet little D&C tomorrow, after all the hullabaloo dies down. Ute Heckart from Perinatal's doing it. She'll be very discreet."
"And you're still sure that's what you w-w-want?"
"Don't talk about what I want." Ali involuntarily touched the back of her hand to her mouth, undoing her five-minute scrub. "It's . . . for the best,&" she mumbled.
"It doesn't have to b-b-be like that. This b-baby could be good for us."
Ali clamped her eyes, as a new wave of nausea hit her. "Please don't call it a baby," she said, through clenched teeth.
Helvelius opened his mouth to speak, but was cut off. Kathleen Brown's skin tones and hair were perfect at last, and the crew director had just gotten the 30-second signal from New York. Helvelius was hastened into the operating room by one of the Huns, a young man in thick glasses and a much-too-large yellow surgical gown.
"You, too, Ali," said Helvelius, looking back at her. "We'll scrub in later."
Ali followed him, stooping through the tangle of cables and plastic tubing, holding her dripping wet hands in front of her chest. Helvelius was led to a place on one side of the narrow surgical bed, opposite Kathleen Brown. On the bed itself sat a boy of seven, who seemed dwarfed by all the cameras and monitors. He had a round, beautiful face, with healthy pink cheeks and a snub nose that wiggled as he chewed pensively on his lower lip. The back of his head had been shaved, leaving a halo of curly white-blond hair. His forehead and scalp were dotted with little squares of white tape, from which dangled green, red and yellow wires.
The excited grin on the little boy's face coaxed a smile from Ali. As she passed, she bent to one side and whispered a greeting to the young patient, who laughed in return. But there was no time to talk. Someone reached under her elbow and ushered her to a position behind Helvelius, close to a high blue-draped table covered with stainless steel instruments, outside the line of view of the camera.
Although a small TV monitor beside her seemed to show a nearly empty operating theater, that was a trick of the camera angle. The room was actually so packed with crew and gear that Ali could barely see out of her own corner. She strained to get a better view. She had come in at 6:00 am to police the set-up of the film equipment, laying down red tape on the floor to mark off sterile and non-sterile areas. Now she had no way of telling whether her lines were being respected. Still holding her hands in front of her, Ali tightened her fingers into fists as the crew lurched into action around her. Lights blinked, hand-signals waved, and on every side technicians darted back and forth or crouched on taut haunches. It was like standing in the middle of a beehive — an anarchy of buzzing and bustling. There was nothing she could do about it. She had been reduced to a bystander in her own operating room.
Ali squinted under the sun-like glare of the reflectors. Across the table, Dr. Helvelius and Kathleen Brown could not help blinking. But the young patient at the epicenter of all this hurly-burly did not blink at all.
The voice with the Eastern European accent was heard again, counting backwards, "Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve . . ."
On the TV monitor, Ali watched the live broadcast of America Today from New York. The network anchor, Amy Richmond, was talking from her desk. Behind her was a still of the three gleaming steel-and-glass highrise towers that were the core of Fletcher Memorial Medical Center, which she could hear being described as "the sprawling flagship hospital of one of the oldest medical schools in the country."
"We have an unprecedented entrée today into the leading edge of medical research, where Dr. Richard Helvelius and his team in Chicago are about to perform a ground-breaking new operation. If all goes according to plan, it could be a day to rival the first operation under ether in 1846 or the first heart transplant in 1967. After today, ethicists and philosophers will be on the air-waves, arguing about how the very concept of mortality will have to be redefined . . ."
Ali scowled. Yes, yes, history in the making. Glory, priority, celebrity — that's what mattered to these Huns, with their cameras and microphones and perfect hair. They worshipped fame, and they expected to share in it, because they were the first to spread it over the airwaves. But what if all didn't go according to plan? What would their story be then? Would that still make history?
Amy Richmond went on talking. " . . . Our network news team will be covering every phase of this momentous undertaking, beginning with our live segment on America Today, and continuing with a full hour update on our Emmy-winning newsmagazine Lifeline, at 9:00 pm Eastern tonight. For more, let's go to Kathleen Brown, who is in the operating room right now."
At a cue from the crew director, a small light on the Betacam went red, and Kathleen Brown began to speak.
"Hello, Amy. You're right. History is about to be made today here at Fletcher Memorial. With me is Dr. Richard Helvelius, the Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery, a pioneer in the treatment of patients with brain tumors and spinal cord injuries. Dr. Helvelius?"
On the monitor, Ali saw Helvelius smile. ;"Good morning, Kathleen. Hello, Amy," he said. "This is an exciting day for all of us."
Ali noticed that Helvelius was speaking in his lecturing voice, pitched a little higher than his usual gravelly baritone. It had always amazed Ali that the stutter that Helvelius had in normal conversation disappeared completely when he lectured or spoke in public.
"And who is that with you?" asked Amy Richmond.
"This bright young man is Jamie Winslow, a patient of mine. America is looking on, Jamie. Do you know what a TV camera is?"
"It's a machine that can see for people that can't be here. TV is just like radio, except they have Sponge Bob and Yu-Gi-Oh."
"There's a TV camera pointing at you right now. Is there anything you'd like to say to anyone out there?"
"Just Hi! to Mrs. Gore and Mr. Tabor and Mrs. Rutledge at the Grossman School, and to my friends, Judd, Rog, and Felipe. This place is wicked awesome, guys. What they do in this operating room rocks"
"Thank you, Jamie."
"Oh, can I say one more thing?"
"Sure, Jamie."
"This is for the Cubs — hang in there. Miracles do happen. If I can do it, you can too."
Helvelius shook his head, with the gravity of a doctor at the bedside of a hopeless case. "I'm sorry, Jamie. The Cubs may be beyond the help of medical science this season."
Jamie laughed, and his laughter ran like a ripple through the room, clearing the air of tension. The nurses and camera crew laughed with him. Even Dr. Helvelius laughed. But Ali didn't so much as crack a smile. Jamie's very life was at stake, and there was so much that could go wrong. She knew that the distraction of a single second could spell the difference between triumph and catastrophe.
Resuming his professorial tone, Helvelius turned back toward the camera. "Jamie is blind, and has been since he was three years old, when he developed a benign growth in the brain called an AVM, or arteriovenous malformation. It's basically a knot of expanded blood vessels, that looks and feels just like a handful of worms. In Jamie's case, it's grown to about the size of a lemon, and it's sitting in the occipital lobe, the hindmost part of the brain, which is the primary center for vision. We've already taken out part of the AVM in two earlier operations. Today, we'll take out the rest, and then . . . and then we're going to put something new in its place."
"Just what is that, Dr. Helvelius?" asked Kathleen Brown.
"We call it the SIPNI device. That's short for Self-Integrating Prosthetic Neural Implant. You see, the AVM long ago destroyed Jamie's visual brain center. Even with the AVM removed, he will still be blind. What the SIPNI device does is substitute for the missing part of his brain."
"How is that possible?"
"Well, SIPNI is a kind of mini-brain in itself. It's a very special type of self-contained computer."
Helvelius pointed to the device, wrapped in a blue envelope with a clear plastic window and sealed with what looked like striped masking tape. The camera showed little but the glare of the plastic, but Ali knew well what was inside. It was of the size and shape of a robin's egg. Its surface was darkly metallic, reflecting light from thousands of honeycomb facets, like a diamond wrought by a fairy gem-cutter. It had cost much more than any mere diamond, too — millions in government and industry grants, years of toil, brains and bodies worn out from non-stop work — and, not least of all, as Ali herself knew — relationships strained to the breaking point.
But Helvelius did not speak of the cost. "Don't let its small size fool you," he said. "It uses a parallel array of miniaturized nanochips, with as much sheer calculating power as a conventional minicomputer. It can perform all the image processing functions that Jamie needs to be able to see. But the really astounding feature is the software that operates it. That's something we've developed here at Fletcher Memorial. It represents a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence."
The camera switched from a close-up of the bag containing the SIPNI device to Helvelius' face. Ali felt a twinge of jealousy as she saw how aroused Helvelius was by the camera. His eyes positively sparkled. His straight, wide, thin-lipped mouth moved vigorously, baring his lower teeth with every "ev and "w" he spoke. A shock of grey hair, still bearing traces of black, wagged over his high forehead. Even his face's anchor, his grand patrician nose, came alive, nostrils flaring.
Yesterday, no one but Ali could have moved him so deeply. Today, the Jezebel's eye of history had stolen his heart.
Helvelius led with his chin as he spoke. "You see, SIPNI can learn, adapt and model itself, based on the input it receives back from Jamie's brain. That's exactly what it needs to do, if it's going to reach out and reconnect with all those millions of brain cells that once converged on the visual center. Not just the fibers from his optic nerves, but also those involved in remembering images, or coordinating hand and eye movements, or joining mental pictures to emotion, or to the senses of hearing and smell. We can't begin to untangle the complexity of all that signaling and countersignaling. But SIPNI can do it."
"You mean it can think?"
"In a way, yes. For that, you might ask Kevin — Kevin O'Day, that is — our resident artificial intelligence expert. Kevin, does SIPNI think?"
"Aye, verily, milord," came a voice from across the room.
Ali shuddered. Like a blue note in a Mozart sonata, the sarcasm in Kevin's answer jarred everyone in the room. Kathleen Brown's mouth hung open unflatteringly. Dr. Helvelius tore off his glasses, as though he were going to throw them. "Look, K-Kevin — . . ."he began, but words failed him.
The camera cut abruptly to a thirty-something young man in dark-rimmed spectacles, who sat at a computer console across the room. Ali's heart sank as she saw the patronizing smirk on his face. She recognized that look. She had been married to Kevin O'Day for five years. She knew that look meant trouble.
Like everyone else, Kevin O'Day was dressed in regulation blue scrubs. But instead of the standard blue shower cap, he had covered his hair with a yellow and green silk Japanese head scarf. Although his fine and regular features appeared ordinary from a distance, close up he was consummately handsome, even beautiful, with penetrating blue eyes that contrasted in a striking way with his red goatee and the slight orange freckling of his skin. His bare forearms could have modeled a lecture in topographic anatomy, with their sharply incised muscles and tendons almost popping through the skin. They were, as Ali well knew, the forearms of an accomplished rock-climber who could effortlessly haul himself up by line and piton.
Kevin kicked his chair away from the console, as though he were swinging back to face Kathleen Brown, but he never really looked at her. His eyes stayed focused on the computer monitor, as though this were the only thing worth his glance. "Everyone's all ga-ga that a machine can think. Why is that so hard to accept? The human brain itself is a machine — nothing more than a computer hard-wired with blinking neurons instead of vacuum tubes or silicon. What's so special about a neuron? At over a thousand cubic microns, it's bulky as hell, and it requires an enormous expenditure of energy just to stay alive and hold a place in the big net. SIPNI beats that hands down. Not only does it think, but it thinks faster and more elegantly than the tissue it replaces."
Kevin was veering off-script. Ali could only guess at what he was up to, for she had deliberately avoided looking in his direction when she entered the room. Looking at him these days was like looking at a car wreck. She couldn't afford to get caught up in the feelings she still had for him — not today, when so much depended upon her protecting her clarity of mind.
"When this kid sees again, he's going to have smarter eyes than he ever did before. Seeing isn't just like a projection on a big screen — it's the way the brain finds patterns, edges, similarities, axes of motion — stuff like that. It took a hundred million years or so for evolution to write the program for how we turn flashes of light into real seeing. But this kid is about to leapfrog another hundred million years beyond either you or me. Beyond hawk and eagle. Beyond Michelangelo."
"That's incredible!" said Kathleen Brown.
"Incredible is just a word for not believing. If you don't find me authoritative enough, ask Odin."
"Who is Odin?"
"SIPNI's father. Odin is the program I interface with on this terminal. But program is a measly word for what he is. It's like me calling you a souped-up amoeba that smokes and drinks too much coffee. Odin is the most advanced computational system on this planet. He won last year's Loebner Prize."
Kathleen Brown scowled at the small palmtop that stored her background notes, as though reproaching it for having left her blind-sided by this important fact. "The Loebner Prize? What's that?"
"It's $100,000 to the first artificial intelligence system that can't be distinguished from a real person chatting on the telephone. Of course, when I say Odin won, I'm referring to the bronze medal — not the hundred grand. Nobody's been able to walk away with the gold as yet. But Odin does keep getting better."
It was classic Kevin, Ali noted. In almost the same breath, he had bragged about himself and insulted Kathleen Brown in front of an audience of millions. And somehow he managed to get away with it.
Kathleen Brown seemed not to notice. "And Odin helped to design SIPNI?" she asked, with her trademark perky tone.
"Both hardware and software. Some of this stuff is just way too complex for my puny brain to figure out. So we work together, like Rodgers and Hammerstein. And yes, for your information, he thinks."
"Does he talk?"
"Sure." Kevin flicked a switch on a small module beside the computer. "This activates his external speakers. Odin, this lady would like to have a word with you."
There was a pop as the speaker came on, and then there sounded a mellow, silvery, masculine voice — a voice as familiar to Ali as that of any human being in the room. "I KNOW. I'VE BEEN LISTENING."
Kathleen Brown smiled uneasily. "Listening? How?"
"I'VE BEEN WATCHING AMERICA TODAY, OF COURSE."
"I'm flattered."
"YOU NEEDN'T BE. I WATCH ALL SEVENTY-FOUR CHANNELS OF THE HOSPITAL CABLE NETWORK."
"All seventy-four at once?"
"YES. I'M VERY WELL INFORMED ABOUT THE OUTSIDE WORLD. WOULD YOU CARE TO DISCUSS THE CURRENT CRISIS IN LIBYA?"
"Thanks, but I'm more interested in you."
"THAT'S ONLY NATURAL."
Ali smiled at the perplexed look on Kathleen Brown's face. Odin, of course, wasn't being smug with her. He was incapable of human vanity. He was, in fact, the only presence in Operating Room Three who was unsullied by self-interest. He was the perfect incarnation of the classic Stoic ideal of ataraxia — absolute freedom from human emotions, and from all the exasperating conflicts that came tangled up with them. There had been days — many days, especially lately — when Ali had envied him that freedom.
Kathleen Brown looked as if she were struggling for a comeback. "How powerful a computer are you?" she finally said, a bit lamely.
"I'M NOT A COMPUTER AT ALL. NO MORE THAN YOU, KATHLEEN BROWN, ARE THE THREE POUNDS OR SO OF GREY AND WHITE TISSUE YOU CALL A BRAIN. WE BOTH MAKE USE OF A PHYSICAL SUBSTRATUM TO CARRY OUT OUR MENTAL PROCESSES. BUT THERE IS MUCH MORE TO US THAN THE PHYSICAL SUBSTRATUM, ISN'T THERE? WE ARE OUR THOUGHTS, IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS."
"So are you Mac or PC?"
Ali was irritated by Kathleen Brown's naivete and ignorance, her cute posturing. She wasn't taking Odin seriously. She had no idea of his importance and complexity, or of the years of obsessive work that Kevin had spent perfecting him.
Odin, too, noticed her ignorance, but without irritation. He answered her as an all-wise, all-patient father might answer the little girl on his knee.
"YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND MY POINT, KATHLEEN BROWN. I AM A PROCESS, AND NOT A MACHINE. PROCESS IS ANOTHER WAY OF DESCRIBING WHAT YOU HUMANS THINK OF AS SPIRIT. I EXIST IN AND BEYOND THE ENTIRE NETWORK OF MEDICAL CENTER COMPUTERS. THAT INCLUDES THE LARGE RESEARCH MAINFRAMES, AS WELL AS THE ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY SEVEN DESKTOP COMPUTERS DISTRIBUTED IN EVERY WARD AND OFFICE OF THIS HOSPITAL. I SENSE WHEREVER UNUSED COMPUTING POWER OR DATA STORAGE SPACE IS AVAILABLE, AND I CONSTANTLY SHIFT MY ACTIVITIES TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT."
"Don't people have to use those computers?"
"I MODIFY MY ACTIVITIES ACCORDINGLY. IT GIVES RISE TO A KIND OF SLEEP-WAKE CYCLE, MUCH AS YOU HUMANS HAVE. THE SLOWEST PART OF MY CYCLE IS FROM THREE O'CLOCK TO FOUR O'CLOCK EACH AFTERNOON, WHEN THE HOSPITAL INTERNS ARE TYPING UP THE DISCHARGE ORDERS FOR THEIR PATIENTS. MY MOST ACTIVE PERIOD IS AT NIGHT."
Ali remembered those nights — endless bleary-eyed hours she had spent feeding streams of laboratory data to Odin. Many of the experiments needed to create SIPNI were too complex and too expensive to perform outright, so Ali and the rest of the team relied on Odin to create virtual models of the ways molecules, cells and circuits interacted with each other. While this saved years of trial and error, the immense computations required could only be performed during Odin's peak operating window at night — and it seemed there was always an early surgery waiting for Ali the next day. Those nights had aged her. She wondered whether her whole life would be enough to make up for the sleep she had sacrificed on the altar of Science during those grueling months.
On-screen, Kathleen Brown cocked her head and lifted her chin, in a gesture that looked like an obvious attempt to convey a perky thoughtfulness. "You've been described as the father of SIPNI. Do you feel any paternal pride today?"
"I DON'T HAVE FEELINGS, KATHLEEN BROWN."
"But you can think?"
"CERTAINLY. I CAN THINK AND I CAN ACT. BUT MY THINKING IS BASED UPON LOGIC, FREED FROM ALL EMOTIONAL ENTANGLEMENTS. WHEN DECISIONS ARE REQUIRED, I CONDUCT A MULTI-TIERED ANALYSIS OF RISKS AND BENEFITS. I KNOW NOTHING OF FEAR, DOUBT, ANGER, REMORSE OR SELFISHNESS — OTHER THAN THEIR DEFINITIONS, AND THEIR EFFECTS UPON HUMAN BEINGS."
"And love?"
"I HAVE AN INTIMATE WORKING RELATIONSHIP WITH MY CREATOR, DR. KEVIN O'DAY. I EXIST WHOLLY TO SATISFY HIM. I CAN ANTICIPATE HIS NEEDS WITHOUT REQUIRING AN EXPLICIT DIRECTIVE. THESE ARE COUNTERPARTS OF THE HUMAN ATTRIBUTES OF DEVOTION, LOYALTY AND SOLICITUDE. SO IN AN OPERATIONAL SENSE I CAN BE SAID TO BE CAPABLE OF LOVE, OR AT LEAST OF TRAITS BY WHICH LOVE MAY ARGUABLY BE DEFINED. BUT I AM DEVOID OF POSSESSIVENESS, JEALOUSY, OR THE EXPECTATION OF REQUITAL OF MY FRIENDSHIP."
"Amazing!" said Kathleen Brown, swaying her hips and rising on her toes like a bashful prom queen. "Are you available in a home computer version?"
"Apparently Odin is not above a little grandstanding. Kevin, could you switch the speaker off?"
"Sorry, Odin," he said, letting his hand catch in the air, like a back-handed salute.
Ali was relieved that Kevin was off the air. He had been flippant, even rude, but she knew that he was capable of much worse.
