Page 5 - Effable Encounters

Jack-in-the-Box
(Fantastic Transactions 1, 1990)

This was Jack Faber’s big chance to get ahead at Megatronics. A
dozen other engineers around the country were working on the same
problem, without success. Jack had not produced much in his brief
tenure as assistant researcher in the artificial intelligence laboratory;
he knew his days were numbered unless he came up with something
soon. Working late had worn his reserves of energy and patience
down to a dangerously low level, and that, oddly enough, led to a
breakthrough: normal inhibitions inhibited by exhaustion, his mind
came up with the answer one morning while he was microwaving
breakfast.
“Eureka!” he shouted. His parrot blinked. Jack quickly
scribbled the solution on the back of a take-out menu and completed
his off-to-work routine humming happily. Once at the office, he kept
to himself all day, procuring bits of electronic equipment and clicking
away on his computer terminal. He would tell no one about his
discovery until he had it all down on paper and safely on record. Too
many unscrupulous types in the lab, ready to steal their neighbor’s
inventions and take all the credit. No; this would be his own personal
triumph: proof of independent thought by a mind existing only
within the printed circuitry of a super-computer.
He spent most of the afternoon testing his reticular algorithms on
simulated rat and pig brains. The trick was getting the contents of an
actual living mind transferred into the vast storage disks of
Megatronics; once accomplished, the linear storage of data and
interconnections would be reconstructed into the multipath
indeterminate network of synapses originally discovered in the
organism by means of the Faber Equations. Or so Jack thought.
After loading in the mammalian brain contents, he was able only to
interrogate the resulting electronic mind for simple bodily states and
functions. But that was insufficient to indicate self-awareness: he had
to map a human mind into the machine in order to prove his case.
Quitting time came and went. Jack’s workaholic habits were neither
noted nor notable within the corporate culture; if paperwork
consumed the better part of a scientist’s better hours, then he was

4