"I just don't know," replied Alan, for probably the fifteenth time.

Don's bushy brows knit even further together, and Alan almost lost it as he tried to keep a straight face while recalling once again the whimsical notion of Don's eyebrow hairs becoming so entangled that scissors would be necessary to enable the scrunched-up face ever to relax into a smile again.  But humor and whimsy was the certainly not appropriate at such a time as this, and he could not risk doing anything that might alienate his former colleague and one-time mentor.  To burst out laughing (even tho the scissors bit was really hilarious) would probably lose him the help of the one person in the world who might help him solve the mystery in which he was helplessly embroiled.  In fact, Don was one of a very small number of scientists alive today who could understand the details of Alan's story, and perhaps the only one of that elite group who still trusted Alan enough to listen to the fantastic claims he was now making.

Funny how the mind works, Alan mused.  Yes, I know it's vitally important to concentrate on the problem.  I know it is imperative to convince Don that I'm seriously worried about it, and that this is not just some silly gedanken experiment.  If he thought, for one moment, that I was just pulling his chain, I'd never get him to consider it seriously and I don't think I could get any further without his help.  I know this, and yet a part of my brain just can't help seeing the humor in Don's eyebrows!  Well, self-control was never my strong suit -- especially when it came to goofing around when there was something serious to think about.  Maybe that's why we used to make such a good team:  Nobel Laureates Dr. Donald Voss and Dr. Alan Ross -- the uncompromising robot and the wild-eyed visionary.   I could sure use a dose of Don's self-control, right now.

A sigh of relief escaped Alan's lips as the tangled brows unknit themselves and Don was once more able to look up at him.  Fortunately, Don took no more notice of Alan's inappropriate breathing than a haughty glance and the quizzical raising of the "safe" end of the left brow.  A less-humorous stray thought did cross Alan's mind, when he received Don's piercing but momentary stare:  there are so many ways of communicating besides words and language.  Don's facial expressions and body language always provided good examples of effective nonverbal proclamations, so much more potent than mere words at conveying a sentiment.  

Gee!  Imagine if there was some way to transmit the weightings from one person's Axon cells, along with the layouts of his neural network, into the brain of another person.  Such a communication would be very intense and also very personal -- maybe too much for mere mortals.

"Let me see if I understand all this, this ..."

"Nonsense?" Alan supplied.

"Well, I didn't say that, Al.  And I told you I'm not gonna say what it sounds like nor make any judgments."

"Yet."

"OK.  Not yet; maybe never; maybe tomorrow.  Now, shut up and let me try to regurgitate this cockamamie story you've told me."  Alan just smiled and nodded (but he was painfully conscious of his own attempt to prevent his own eyebrows from joining and perhaps welding.)

"I'll skip the business about your expedition, the pufball in Antarctica, and those crab pieces they brought back with you.  You've always liked traveling and exploring.  You've also enjoyed your little daredevil stunts, like white water canoeing, spelunking, and skydiving.  And this was probably no more wacky or dangerous than your stupid Bungee jumping.  More expensive, but you earned the money and I'm not your accountant."

"No.  I am"

"Then you have a fool for a client!" Don almost shouted.  (Did he actually add "Harumph," or was that just my imagination?)  "You know, you always knew how to get my goat.  Now, just shut up and listen, before I call the little men in the white suits to take you away where the guys who think they're Napoleon or Jesus will make you feel like one of the crowd."  Uh, oh.  Don is really at the brink.  Alan tried desperately not to think of eyebrows, and had to look down at the papers on the table.  Fortunately, Don took this for contrition and humility -- even tho he had often said that Alan was totally devoid of the latter.

"You told me you went thru every recorded animal genome map available on the web, and even bought some old archival disks, just to search for patterns that matched the one you had in mind.  You had no idea why you did all this."

Before Alan could respond, Don fortunately cut him off..  "I know.  It was just some sort of compulsion, and please don't try to explain it again.  If I had to hear about 'that feeling' one more time, I think I'd puke or burst out into song, so just spare us both."  A nod was all Alan dared.

"So, you used up thousands of hours of computing time on a Cray 7-G just to see which animals had DNA sequences that included your little pattern of codons.  But, goddamit, where in Hell did you get your pattern from?"

"You want me to say it again?"

"No, no.  I know.  You just don't know where it came from.  Look, it doesn't make sense, this pattern you drew from memory.  Are you sure this was it."

"Yes.  I'm absolutely sure."

"Here it is.  It doesn't make sense.  It's non-functional."  Don's long, scrawny fingers traced the triple <terminator> sequences on Alan's sketch, and came close to tearing the paper as he pecked at it with the top of the pen.  "This makes no sense at all!  I'm surprised you found it in nature, at all.  But it's just left over debris from discarded sequences, and the <terminators> for three of them just happen to wind up together."

"If you say so."

"This doesn't make sense!  Are you sure this is what you keyed in?"  Alan nodded again.  "But that's stupid.  Who in their right mind would deliberately put three <terminators> in front of any meaningful information?  It must be a fluke.  How many species did it appear in?"

"Ninety seven."

"Unbelievable.  These sequences are triply turned off.  Aborted.  They're just junk DNA that can't affect the genetic makeup of any species that carries them.  They're turned off, for Chrissakes.  Nothing is activated.  There can't be any <replication>.  It's almost as if somebody was trying to hide them - to make the host just a carrier, but prevent these genes from ever being used.  The unused sequences are passed from one generation to the next, but it's set up so that the  host can never be affected."

"Did you say carrier?"

"Forget it.  It was just a figure of speech.  All we're talking about here is vestigial sequences, and ones that have been triply deactivated, to boot.  They can only be leftovers, dead ends.  Mutations that never went anywhere."

"But they are very different sequences, with exactly the same method of deactivation.  Some of the sequences seem to be related.  Others are totally different.  But they are all preceded by a very unlikely prefix to shut them off.  It's a bit much for randomness."

"Ninety seven species, you said."

"Yes.  In two dozen different orders, and three phyla."

"Who would want to deliberately create all this junk, and then take great pains to hide it?  Whaddaya think, Alan?  The ancient Martians came here in their flying saucers, and maybe planted messages in the dinosaurs for the CIA to find 100 million years later?"

"I didn't say it.  You did."

"No I didn't.  Naah, it's just a bunch of dead ends.  Sequences that maybe started out, got reinforced a bit, and then got dropped by natural selection.  That's all."

Alan just stared.  He knew better than to interrupt when Don was on a roll.

"OK.  Don't say it.  The sequences not only made sense, but you found them in lots of unrelated species.  And some of them made sense, but not in the host species.  Why would traits like gills ever have developed in an eagle?"

"It was a vulture, actually."

And this one, here, for which you worked out the amino acid sequences in detail.  It seems to be building an organ that would be capable of replicating Axon weightings and also the has the ability to simulate or copy neural connective patterns.  I could almost believe it was a means of communication.  Almost like mind reading, but it would require the exchange of protoplasm, to be imprinted and then returned.  But I can't believe such an organ in a fish!  You said that one was in two different Chondrichthes?"

"Yes.  One was a type of shark, and the other was a cousin of the Manta Ray.  In fact it was in an Electric Ray that can shock its prey to death."

"Maybe it was trying to talk them to death.  I recall something about using Electric Rays in the study of neural nets.  Did that involve any form of communication?"

"No.  The biologists were only interest in the effects of large currents on the synapses between the neurons.  I don't think there was any type of communication involved.  But, you know, I could almost believe a mechanism like that evolving for an intelligent creature that can't use sound.  To send a complex message, the recipient first sends some protoplasm that reflects some of his neural networks, and the sender imprints a set of weightings on it to express the idea or pattern.  Then, he sends it back.  Or maybe it just floats between the fish."  Don's upraised eyebrow was enough to stop Alan from pursuing that thread any further.

"I'm more concerned about this pattern you searched for.  It still doesn't make sense, and yet it's found in so many places.  There are two <terminators> in a row, then this silly sequence here, with a <shift/out of phase>, another <terminator>, and this unused codon sequence.  All of that was in front of each of the 97 sequences you found.  Yet, the terminators and phase-shift prevented the carrier from making any use of it.  It's almost as if somebody designed a pattern to hide the data and make sure it couldn't become visible to the host."

"Did you say 'carrier' again?"

"Well that doesn't mean anything.  You make it sound like a disease carrier, and that's not what I meant.  I was just looking for a word to describe a host species that has some sort of a hidden gene but can't use it.  More like a radio carrier, which just carries a message but isn't affected by it."

"OK.  Yeah.  'Carrier' is good.  What do you make of ninety-seven totally unrelated carriers, all using the same prefix to hide their different data sequences.  Maybe the different sequences are pieces of a larger pattern.  Of course, there's no way the ninety-seven different species could ever mate to put the pieces together."

"No.  Forget about calling them "carriers".  That makes the sequences sound like some sort of insidious disease.  It's just junk.  Unused DNA."

"Unused by the carrier.  Sorry, by the host."

"Now this silly pattern.  You say you don't know where you got it.  Maybe you just observed it in the past, when you were working on the genome project, and you just dredged it up from your memory without realizing it."

"That's possible," Alan admitted, "but I very much doubt it.  The pattern, with the tree terminators, is just too unusual to have been passed over.  Even if I saw it before, I would have interpreted it as terminators for three different sequences and regarded it as junk fragments in the DNA."

"It just came to you one day, and you decided to search for it.  That's the part I can't buy, Alan.  Well, that's one of the parts I can't buy.  Yet, when you searched, you found the exact pattern in nearly a hundred totally unrelated species, and always in the unused DNA that has no effect on the, the ..."

"Carrier?"

"OK, call them carriers if you want.  But that just means the stuff is carried along.  Don't go putting the idea of diseases into it, or saboteurs either.  There's lots of junk DNA around."

"And a surprising amount of it has my pattern."

"Well maybe there's a Nobel prize in it, after all.  So you found an extensive DNA codon sequence or prefix which is present in dozens of species, but it's a sequence that guarantees that the stuff that follows won't affect them at all.  Maybe all you've discovered is how nature permanently turns off certain failed experiments or very bad ideas so they won't come up again.  And my guess is that the pattern itself just came from years of examining genomes and codon sequences, and it just got tucked away in your subconscious memory until one day it just clicked."

Alan scowled, but said nothing.

"Nice job, Ross.  Just tidy it up and publish.  No mystery."

            -  =  o  =  -

"No mystery," Don had said.

As far as Alan was concerned, the mystery was even deeper, stranger.  Nevertheless, Don's keen mind had helped put several things in perspective and uncovered new clues.  

Driving the familiar route home from Don's condo, Alan Ross became intensely aware that his conscious mind was not participating at all in the process.  Not only were the little adjustments to the steering wheel and gas pedal coming from somewhere well below his consciousness, he was not even aware of the decisions to take a particular off-ramp or turn -- except perhaps as a disconnected observer of a pre-programmed machine.  Alan's most significant conscious contribution to the entire routing and driving process was waiting for the end of the Concerto's second movement before turning off the ignition key.  And he didn't even remember turning the radio on or selecting that station!

Alan continued to think about this, while he automatically walked up the stairs, took out the key, opened the door, turned on the light, relocked the door, did a dozen things to get ready for bed, and wasn't aware he was doing any of them.

On one hand, the notion of being on autopilot at 85 miles per hour was a wee bit scary.  On the other hand, the driving program was originally written by myself.

Wasn't it?

If it wasn't, how would I know??

I walk around all day, unthinkingly executing subconscious programs:  Programs for saying "Hello.  How are you?"  Programs for putting coins in the soda machine, making a selection with no light on, popping the top, and retrieving the change.  Programs for logging into the X-terminal and entering the proper password.

It's OK.  These are programs I wrote for myself.  I took a sequence of actions, encoded them, and saved them away, ready to go for when I needed them again.  I did it myself, somehow, to save time.  Right?  Right!  Yeah, sure.  Of course it was I who wrote these programs, even if I don't remember debugging them.  It would be scary if somebody else wrote the programs that people every day trusted their lives to.  But these are nothing more than learned sequences.  That's all.  Nobody else could possibly write a program that fit into the structure and networks within my own brain in a meaningful way, even if he did have some way of getting the codes in there!  I wrote them.  I know I did.  Right?

Whoa!!  Let's not get silly or paranoid, here.  Of course I wrote all of the programs in my head.  Nobody else could put stuff in there, even if they wanted to.  I know that mental programs and patterns are just selected weightings of my own neural networks.  And even if somebody - just for argument's sake - wanted to "program" me to do something, they would have to know the layout of all of my neural connections, which are different from anyone else's.  Just a set of weightings wouldn't be enough!

Even paranoids can have enemies, but nobody could possibly have enough information about my own neural nets, to create a meaningful pattern.  And that means nobody could possibly send me a program or a neural pattern that would work in my brain.  Period.  

I feel better now.  I think I do.

Forget it.  For better or worse, I wrote all my mental programs.  Somehow, I generated the program which obsessed me last year to build the device and to scan all the genomes looking for that silly pattern.  Even my compulsion to go to Antarctica was the result of some program that my own mind wrote.  Nobody else could possibly have created a program that would work in my brain.  And why would they want to.  Only a paranoid would think anything so weird as having another person or creature actually insert a program into their brain and then somehow activate it and have it take control of their actions.

The idea of somebody else or something else slipping their own programs into my head is scary, to say the least.  It's downright creepy, and why am I programming myself right now to become obsessed with the idea?!

Why would anybody want to do that?  Never mind why.  HOW would they do it?  I can't imagine how.  But it's an interesting problem.  How?

Well there was that business, years ago, about cut-up worms and other worms who acquired memory from the pieces.  Scientists, who liked to call themselves "wormrunners", trained one set of worms to get out of a maze.  Then they cut up the brains of the first set and fed the pieces to the second set of worms who had never seen the maze but they somehow knew how to get out of it quickly.  What the first set learned was transferred to the second set which ate them.  Yecch!  Well, I'm glad I didn't eat any worms.

Anyhow, that's something very different, isn't it?  The worms just transferred data, information, memory.  I can transfer memory from one computer to another.  With flash PROM or old-fashioned cores, I could just unplug a module from one computer and plug it into another, and all the data would be there.  OK, it's a little harder with ordinary DRAM, but all I'd need to do it would be to apply a little bit of power periodically just to keep it "alive".  Just keep it alive or refreshed, unplug it from the first machine, plug it in and, voila!, the second computer now knows what the first one learned.  No big deal.

Now, that's just information.  Not the same thing at all as programs, decisions, or especially neuroses and compulsions.  And if you did store a program in the memory you could transfer it, but it's just a copy of a program in some memory.  That doesn't mean it could take control.  I've got lots of programs on my disk, and I can even copy them into memory, but nothing takes control unless I activate it by typing a command.  So, even if you did transfer a program, by surgery or by worm pieces, there's no way it could get "executed" or take control.  Right?  Well, ...  Naaah!

I've got to find out more about how the brain differentiates between data that just lies there to be read and used by a program, and real programs that take over and steer a person's course thru life.  In a computer, they are totally different, even tho both can be represented with the same bits.  I guess I don't really know what differentiates programs from data in a brain.

Whatshisname at Poly, the guy who was always adjusting his belt bigger and smaller, and babbled incessantly for a while about that book.  Something about Bach and Escher.  Not an art book.  "Golden Braid?"  Was that the title?  

Funny guy.  Seemed weird and not too bright, until you got into a conversation about one of the few things he liked.  Like electronic circuits or compression algorithms.  He was always outgrowing his pants.  I remember him always twiddling with his belt.  A few people thought he was perverted, but he was just trying to fit his pants to his growing belly.  Like a girdle?

That's it.  Godel, pronounced almost like girdle, mit eine umlaut ober der "o".  Not the professor, but the book.  "Go\"del, Escher, Bach - the Eternal Golden Braid."  Funny, isn't it how the thought of the belt triggered the memory of the title.

"GEB" was an abbreviation they sometimes used for the book.  And it had a picture of some wooden blocks, carved so that they cast shadows of the three different letters, depending on how you rotated them.  I think the idea came from Crystallography and groups of symmetry operations.  Anyhow, what was the guy's name?  Not the author - that I can look up.  What was the name of the guy with the belt?  The professor who always talked about how it really explained how the brain worked, without getting into all that biology that the neural net people try to snow you with.  I think he said there's no such thing as data, just programs.  Or was it vise versa?  I've got to look him up and talk to him.

                - =  o  =  -

"I'm really sorry to hear that.  He was one of a kind."

"I appreciate that.  We all were stunned, Dr. Ross.  Marty was a fascinating person and we really miss him around here."

"He was an oddball, all right, and just meeting him people often underestimated him."

"Right.  You didn't realize how brilliant he was until you got to talking about something he really liked."

"Exciting things, like Fourier transforms or analog circuits?"

"Yeah, exactly."

"Well, professor, I really appreciate your taking the time to update me, even tho I don't like the news.  I wanted to talk to him about something he said many years ago.  I didn't pay much attention to it then, but it might have helped with something that's been bugging me recently.  Gee, I wish I'dcome back and visited him sooner."

"Maybe I can help you.  Marty and I worked pretty closely just before he died.

"No, it wasn't about his research.  It was just about a book he once read and got excited about.  He was obsessed about this book for a few weeks, and bent everybody's ear about it.  You know how he gets.  Got."

"Got."

"I didn't pay much attention to it at the time.  Now, I want to remember some of the things he said about it, about the new ideas and new ways of looking at things he said the book stirred up in him.  The book hadnothing to do with software or computer circuits.  He said it reallyexplained how the brain works.  Strange loops.  Neural networks that programthemselves.  Something like that."

"Godel, Escher, Bach?"

"Yes, that's the book.  I picked up a copy, but I'm afraid the stuff I'm after was what Marty said about the book, and the paths it launched him on."

"Yes, he alsways said that that book started him thinking about so many things.  I've read it.  It's a classic, all right.  But it's been awhile and I don't remember any specific comments he made about it."

"I'm reading it now.  It's a fascinating book.  By no means a dull one, but it is very slow going.  I'm a pretty fast reader, but every fewparagraphs I want to put the book aside and think for a while or pick up a pencil and paper and work something out."

"Savor it.  That's the right way to read it.  That's the kind of book it is"

"Sometimes, hours or days later, I'll recall something from the book, maybe put it together with other things I run into, and go off on a tangentworking out some hidden thread."

"Me too.  Even years later, I recall things from the book I had neverrealized were there.  Sometimes I even go back to it, but it's hard to find things.  I should reread it.  Yes, Hofstetter's very good at planting seeds, and some are delayed sprouters.

"Planting seeds.  Delayed sprouters.  Hmmm," Alan mused.

"In fact, you could almost say that's one of the main themes:  seeds that sprout.  A little bit of information or logic, often in a very small package, gets planted and waits for the right environment to come along.  Then, suddenly, the seed wakes up and grows.  And often the triggeringenvironment contains exactly the right things for the seed to grow.  The seed only contains a bare minimum of information.  And maybe even less, so thatsome of the information must come from the environment, and all the seed has to do is POINT to the pieces of the environment which it needs to make a tree or whatever."

"And then there are seeds within seeds, and seeds for growingseed-making machines.  I think Marty said something like that.  I didn't knowwhat he was talking about, then.  That's one of the reasons I came to lookfor him, now."  The professor just nodded, sadly.  Alan continued, "what didyou mean by 'when the right environment comes along.'  How would a tiny seedrecognize an environment?"

"Oh, that's easy:  patterns."

"Huh?"

"Patterns.  Just patterns.  The whole brain is based on pattern recognition.  That, plus a way to build programs and store.  The programs are then triggered by matching a pattern.  Sort of like awk."

"Awk?"

"Never mind.  That's just a unix program that associates actions or mini-programs with pattterns that trigger them.  I was just making an analogy.  It's not important."

"Awk.  How do you spell that?"

"A W K.  It's just the initials of the three authors.  But about the brain and the way it works and what GEB says and what Marty thought about all that.  I could tell you a bit more, but I really think there's somebodyelse you need to talk to.

                - =  o  =  -

>>>>> Joe.