Frank came back to the church and cleaned
himself up for his date with Dr. Larson.
After that we borrowed the Catholic’s minivan and took off for the
Edinburgh Airport. We arrive a full
hour early so Frank could case the joint.
We found the area of the airport where private jets come and go. A small personal donation as Frank
called it to an employee of two thousand pounds got us into the hangar that
Larson’s jet would pull into.
At 4:20 that famous Cirrus T-80 pulled into
the hangar with only one human aboard.
She was helped down by her GAIC assistant who also took her bag. She seemed surprised to see a human in
the hangar. I got the thought that
she was used to being surrounded by robots rather than people. I know at the Finnish Laboratory I did
not see that many humans, but I did pick up hundreds of robot identification
pings.
“Dr. Larson, do you remember me? Frank Huntington of the Wall Street
Journal. I have been to both
Maidstone and Kittilia. Sir
Terrance has been kind enough to give me the background on your new cure for
depression and I would like to interview you to get a better feel for how this
amazing discovery was made.”
Her immediate reaction was just
to give Frank a blank stare. It is
obviously she was wondering if she should step on Frank or turn on her human
emotion chip. Then out of nowhere
came a weak smile.
“Yes, I remember meeting
briefly. How are you, Mr.
Huntington?” she asked.
“I’m fine. What is there not to enjoy in a city
like Edinburgh. Were you born
here?”
“No, I did do my undergraduate
work here before going to Oxford. So how would you like to handle doing an
interview?”
“I thought maybe we could do
this over dinner? You have some of
the finest restaurants in Scotland here. I have a minivan for transport.
”
“I wouldn’t know. When I was a student I never had any
extra money for fancy restaurants.
My mum moved up here during my second year because she said I was getting
too thin. Much of the time on
weekends I would stay with her studying.”
“Well, I can ask my JAIC to find
something close to your mother’s or do you have a place?”
“Actually, my mother now lives
in an assisted living home. I had
her moved out of her house last Wednesday.”
“I’m sorry. I hope she is still enjoying her
life. Where do you
live?”
“12 Royal
Terrace.”
“Do you have any preference –
French, Italian, Japanese, Indian?”
“Just a nice Scottish
restaurant.”
“Jack, send us to a well rated
Scottish restaurant. Dr. Larson,
the van is just outside the hangar.”
“George, cancel our taxi” she
said to her robotic assistant.
Frank opened up the back door
and helped Dr. Larson in. Then he
went around and got in beside her.
That left the middle row seats for us artificial intelligence. It only took twenty minutes to drive
from the airport to the restaurant.
It was a posh place that was only two blocks down from Dr. Larson’s
flat. It was simply called Number 3
and definitely lived up to the reviews.
Dr. Larson had never been there.
After Dr. Larson’s wine and
Frank’s scotch was served Frank started the interview with some soft
questions.
“Dr. Larson, when did you meet
Terrance Lutts?”
“I first met Sir Terrance at
Oxford. He came during my second
year. He stuck out in a class I
took because of his probing questions and eager mind.”
“How did you get to know him
personally?”
“I was hired as a graduate
teaching assistant and he was one of my pupils. Having him was exhausting but
exhilarating. I brought him to the
attention of Professor Helmut Pattersburg who was the first scientist to win the
Nobel Prize twice. I was already on
a fast track and now Terrance was as well.
We often worked together until we graduated and at the graduation
ceremony he offered me a job at his new lab at Maidstone.”
“Were you involved in his
research that he did at Oxford on cancer?”
“Yes, very much so. I remember one summer I never left
campus once. I had to shower at
four in the morning in the boy’s locker room.”
“It must have been an exciting
time for you” Frank said seriously.
I wondered if there was a sexual double entendre buried in there
someplace.
“Yes, it was. Pattersburg was powerful enough to allow
us to do whatever we wanted. At
first he let us spend the majority of his research budget until Terrance got his
own funding.”
“You two must be very
close.”
“Yes, we are.”
“Romantically?”
“No, we both recognize that
clouds the mind. We got our kicks
above the waist. So many of my
fellows wasted time by getting into multiple affairs and sexually addicted
relationships.”
I wondered if that is what Dr.
Larson called love? If I was Frank
I would have asked her that.
“Do you think his getting
married has slowed Sir Terrance down?”
“No.”
“Are you ever jealous of Lutts’s
fame?”
“Never, Mr. Huntington. You are barking up the wrong tree. I hate notoriety. It gets in the way. There is nothing so tedious as trying to
explain science to a dim witted journalist. Especially, those talking empty heads
from television.”
“I hope I shan't bore you too
much. Let’s get back to the your
current discovery for curing depression. What types of new understandings did
Lutts and you need to learn about the brain?”
“That is a good question. There is so much we don’t know. For instance we just don’t know how to
tell the brain to remember this fact and forget that useless fact. Even as intelligent as I am there are
times when I study a research paper and six months later can’t remember key
information. The mind seems so
random sometimes in what it chooses to remember. Humans could do a lot more if we could
just pour in knowledge and make it stick.
There are some enhancement drugs you can take, but often they are only
short term.
Another example of our lack of
knowledge is we cannot see the brain in enough detail. All our instruments to probe the living
brain are so coarse on the neuron level.
And as far as what goes on inside a neuron we are almost totally
blind. We guess that neurons decide
what signals they will pass on or when they want to author a signal.
For our depression discovery we
needed to know how the brain decides what mood your consciousness is going to
have – happy, bored, sad, thrilled, et cetera. Nor did we understand how those feelings
can change so quickly. One minute
your mind is moping, the next it is flying high on serotonin. In order to change the emotional pallet
of the brain we had to understand what triggered emotions and what suppressed
them. The big question for us was
if it was possible to change the pallet to not include the emotion of
depression.”
“Much of neural research
involves animal studies. Did you
try to answer those questions with animal studies?”
“There were
some, but most of what we did was to create better tools. We used brains we grew ourselves and
tested new equipment that was capable of sensing electrical currents both within
and between neurons. We also
developed sensing tools that gave us insights into chemicals within the
cell. Not only that, but we saw
that neurons could communicate with each other from anywhere on their cell walls
and not just on the end of the dendrites.
They could rouse cells that were related to similar experiences to add
their weight to a neural response.
This is one of the reasons we can compare similar experiences and
feelings.”
“It sounds,
Dr. Larson, that decoding depression would be almost a fractal task. The closer you look at your subject the
more complex it becomes.”
“I am
impressed, Mr. Huntington. Fractal algorithms
are very important in creating computer models on brain emotional systems. How did you know?”
“A lucky
guess. I have always found the
concept of fractals fascinating and fractal algorithms are what makes it
possible for my tin woodman over there to be thoughtful,” said Frank lying
through his teeth. I was sure he
was fishing for a reaction to her at the mention of the research paper we found
on cellular communication and fractal algorithms. She was a cool one, as I could denote no
change in her heart rate or respiration.
Frank took a
sip of his drink and then looked straight into her eyes and said, “Was the
discovery of the working of the brain as far as emotions enough for you to
figure out how to suppress and kill religious feelings?”
She returned
her cold eyes to his and said, “Religion is not an emotion.”
“Neither is
faith, but they all dwell within the brain.”
“The brain
is not like the heart being just a simple mechanism to do one thing. It has many functions and means of
accomplishing those tasks.”
“So you deny
that Sir Terrance is about to rid the world of the scourge of
religion?”
“Scourge? I think most of the world would disagree
with that.”
She put her
fork down and then narrowed her eyes.
Again I wondered if she was deciding to step on Frank or just ignore
him.
Frank
returned the stare and asked, “Do you enjoy being a human being?”
“I think we
are done, Mr. Huntington” and with that she got up and left her unfinished
plate. I was surprised my master
did not try and get more out of her.
Perhaps it was her demeanor?
She was shut up as tight as a tomb.
Appealing to her feminine side would have been a waste of time. Her cold utilitarian home showed she was
not a sentimental woman. She was as
emotionless as – as – as me.
Frank did
not get up when she stood. He took
another sip of his drink. He was
still sipping when she went out the restaurant door, but as soon as she was gone
he sprang up and told me we were going to the car.
Once in the
car he ordered it back to London.
While on our way he tried to call the good Monsignor, but his robotic
secretary told Frank he was out until next Friday. That visibly pissed off my master. After that he had me send an email to
the Monsignor that was rather obtuse on needing to ask him some questions about
the Spanish Inquisition and that the Monsignor needed to call him as soon as
possible.
The rest of
the trip was rather quiet. I had
asked Frank if he wanted the car to play some music, but his mind was a million
miles away. When we were almost to
London he had me send an email to the Princess saying that he missed her. I thought that was odd as well, but
maybe Frank needed to have sex with her again. He does seem to enjoy her
body.
I would have
thought he would be more concerned about the destruction of religion. I wondered if he had changed his mind
about Sir Terrance's plan? I could
have asked Frank, but then part of my job as Frank’s JAIC is to know when to
mind my own business.
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