Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,130

Never the same brain twice. You can take a snapshot of the connectome at the moment of death—which is what we have done here in the case of DB—but that bears the same relationship to a real brain as a freeze-frame does to a movie. In a real brain, every single time a neuron fires, the brain rewires itself a little bit in response to that event. Frequently used connections get strengthened. Neglected ones atrophy. Neurons get repurposed. Things get remembered—or forgotten. And none of that is happening in my simulation.”

“Why not?” Solly asked. He knew the answer perfectly well but was still acting as devil’s advocate. Also, helping to shield her a bit from Enoch’s weird and transgressive line of questioning.

“Well, first of all, because I didn’t feel like I was ready. I had to get it running first. To see what happened. Whether it would work at all. Secondly, because it’s more expensive—it would consume more memory, more processing power, and I was afraid of running out.”

“The algorithms you are using have the self-modification capability built in,” Enoch pointed out. “Unless you went to the trouble of ripping it out.”

“No, I didn’t rip it out. I just turned it off. Suppressed it for now.”

“I don’t think anyone here is arguing with that decision,” Solly said, with a sort of quizzical glance at Enoch. “You’re right that you had to simply get it running first—to see what would happen. And no one will blame you for being conservative with your expenditure of resources.”

Enoch said: “But it’s hardly surprising, is it, that you’re seeing repetitive, cyclic behavior. That it’s stuck in some kind of loop.”

“Freeze-framed,” Sophia said.

“Can I see it?” Solly asked. “Can you log on for me? I’m just curious to see what this all looks like. You’ve piqued my curiosity.”

“Absolutely. It’s a pretty simple old-school interface. Can we use that?” She indicated an empty space on the wall of his office and slipped her glasses on.

“That’s what it’s there for,” Solly said. He got up, went over to his desk, and found a wearable rig half-buried in clutter. By the time he had put it on and booted it up, Sophia had placed a virtual screen on his wall and was logging in to her Hole in the Wall account. This was disconcertingly old-school, looking like a circa-1995 web page, enlivened with a background photo of the eponymous coulee. Meanwhile, in another window, she was booting up the program she’d been using to plot and analyze the burn-rate data. The first thing that came up was a graph, looking generally similar to the one she’d just drawn on the paper, but with more noise and complexity. The sawtooth wave pattern was clearly discernible.

“Can you give me a plot of the integral of this?” Solly asked. “The balance in the account versus time?”

“Sure.” Sophia typed in a command, fixed an error, did a bit of tidying up, and produced a new plot. This one was a ramp, starting at a high value back in February and declining to a lower one today. Sometimes it declined steeply, other times it leveled off, following a pattern that tallied with the burn-rate graph.

“That’s all I needed to see,” Solly said. “In four months, you have burned through about three-quarters of the funds you were given by your Mysterious Benefactor as a Christmas—or Hanukkah—present.” He glanced toward Enoch. “You have a week remaining before you absolutely need to turn your thesis in. If you keep the simulation running as is, you’ll finish out that week with a lot of unspent money in the account. But you won’t see anything new during that week.”

“Agreed. It’s stuck.”

“So, my recommendation is that you turn on the self-modification capability,” Solly said.

That silenced Sophia for a few moments. She hadn’t seen it coming. It was the kind of thing Enoch might have suggested. Not Solly.

“Look, I’m dying to,” Sophia admitted, after she’d got her equilibrium back. “But it’s kind of—I don’t know—nonscientific, right? I don’t understand this yet. Now I’m going to go ahead and make it infinitely more complicated.”

“Science begins with gathering data,” Solly said. “All scientists wish that the data were better. Don’t let that stop you.”

“I don’t want to come off as presumptuous.”

“As an undergraduate in your last week,” Solly said, “this is the last time in your life you’ll be able to get away with being presumptuous. I recommend you make the most of it.”

Those guys are up to something. The awareness came to