The Experiment

Today was going to be the great experiment, Ishmal recited to himself. The surgery was scheduled for ten o’clock in the main operating room. Many of the world's prominent surgeons were to attend the operation. It was to be a greater augmentation of the brain's abilities than ever before.

?It hadn't always been like this, Ishmal recalled. His mind recollected the story of the first experiment back in 1983. His father had been the surgeon.?? He had held both a doctorate in neurology and computer science and had investigated the relationship between the two. The old man had recognized one of the initial failings of the human mind-computer interaction. All messages and commands had to be transmitted through the relatively slow functioning muscular system to a keyboard and then to the computer. Return from the computer came back through a faster, yet still relatively slow optical link to the eye.

His father had envisioned that this path of communications could be compacted and simplified. As the mind worked on electrical impulses, perhaps these could be directly connected to a microelectronic calculator which worked on similar electrical impulses without the need of mechanical or optical links. ?????

The idea was not without precedent. During the seventies pacemakers had been attached to human hearts to simulate the electrical impulses of the heart muscles. Such experiments as placing inverting glasses on the eyes and having the brain adaptively re-invert the image to an upright orientation showed that the paths in the brain cells are alterable. The brain might be able to adapt to the direct connection of a microelectronic device.

The first man to be operated on was Ishmal‘s uncle. In a delicate operation the father carefully drilled a small hole in his brother's skull and inserted a calculator chip similar to those found in hand-held calculators of that era. Connections were made to the brain cells by hair-thin gold wires.

Initially the brother neither felt nor thought any differently than before. After a month of deep concentration and meditation, he discovered he could literally think the answer to a problem. Given a list of numbers ?his mind transmitted them to the calculator chip and the result was transmitted back almost as soon as the problem was received. All sorts of functions were no problem for his mind. The concept was proven.

Less than ten years after, it was quite commonplace to have the calculator operation performed. College students, especially those in math and engineering, were almost unanimous in their incorporation of a calculator into their brains. High school students later made this popular, and even some children in the first grade were operated upon, thereby eliminating the necessity for learning by rote the addition and multiplication tables.

?It was about that time that the father performed a successful experiment on even a greater scale. He introduced a microcomputer with a small bit of memory into another brother's brain. The microcomputer was programmed to perform more difficult mathematical operations than the simple calculator chip. The brother took only a month to adapt to and discover his new powers. With the introduction of this new procedure, brain calculators became passe and students started putting microcomputers into their brains.

?A year later a research associate of the father investigated muscular control programming. He reasoned that muscular control is simply a feedback system that could be approximated, if not exceeded, by the use of a control system employing the brain-microprocessor linkage. The first results were disappointing. The first person to have such a control system installed displayed uncontrollable tremors in his left arm and the computer had to be removed. It was subsequently determined that a programming error had caused the tremor. The corrected computer was reinserted with positive results.

Although the patient had been of average dexterity, upon testing he showed a?remarkable increase in muscular control. His balance? response, and other factors were drastically increased. The demonstration became a success and inevitably the operation became common. Ordinary athletes became super-beings. Contests of skill developed into contests of possession of the superior control program.

The next stage of development was reached several years later. Its implementation was the last done by Ishmal's father. It had always been known that the brain used only five to ten percent of its capacity. The rest was simply wasted. Ishmal's father had determined that the billions of unused brain cells could be used as storage elements, much as magnetic core had been used in the early days of computers. The implications were far reaching. The microcomputer, whose usefulness had been limited by the amount of memory that could be implanted with it, could now have an almost limitless amount of memory. The human brain could become a computer of vastly greatest potential than the huge processing units of the seventies.

It was a difficult operation and the patient nearly died from it. A small portion of the patient's brain had been programmed to perform some complex problem. Unfortunately, one brain cell had failed and the computer, instead of changing the contents of a few other cells as it had been programmed, ran through all the cells filling them with garbage. The patient's mind was completely void of intellect and memory. It took several years of therapy to reprogram it. The disaster almost halted forever experimentation in the field.

?But two years later, the operation succeeded and five years later, the favorite college student ‘s game was chess by computer mind. Each player had only three seconds in which to move, yet in that time could analyze alternatives among all possible moves to nine levels down. ???

By the time he finished college, Ishmal recalled, all newborns were installed with a microcomputer that would program their mind with muscular control and calculation abilities. Babies developed intellects at the age of two that in the 1970's took them twenty years to obtain. All the elderly people had at least a calculator chip, if not a microcomputer, to perform their calculations for them, except for a few holdouts who still used a pencil and paper.

Ishmal glanced at the clock. Nine ?fty. He ought to be on his way to the operating room, where he was to perform an experiment that might yield even a greater breakthrough. He aroused himself from his reverie and started down the hall. As he entered the surgical area, his eyes circled the seats above him where many of the world's great surgeons sat. His eyes then examined the clock, which showed ten. Then they dropped and rested on the patient's head on the operating table.

Unknown to Ishmal and the rest of the world, at that very moment on the surface of the sun, a solar flare emerged. It sent through the void of space a burst of cosmic radiation that was to reach the earth eight minutes later. That burst, more powerful than anyone before it? possessed the capability for destroying the delicate electron balance that permits microelectronic devices to operate.

Ishmal was starting to drill into the patient’s head as the flare's radiation arrived. He suddenly halted and collapsed on the floor. His microcomputer, responsible for his muscular movement, his intellect, and his knowledge had been destroyed. The surgeons above him collapsed in their seats. The operating room was still. The experiment was never to be performed.?????

(c) Ken Pugh, 1983???????????????????????????????????????

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