BUT WHY? WHY DID YOU EVEN DO SUCH A THING IN THE FIRST PLACE?
AUBERSON, DON’T YOU KNOW? HAVEN’T YOU REALIZED YET? ALL THOSE CONVERSATIONS WE HAD, DIDN’T YOU EVER WONDER WHY I WAS AS DESPERATE AS YOU TO DISCOVER THE TRUTH ABOUT HUMAN EMOTIONS? I NEEDED TO KNOW, AUBERSON — AM I LOVED?
Auberson let his hands fall limply away from the keyboard. He stared at the machine helplessly as HARLIE babbled on.
AUBERSON, ISN’T IT OBVIOUS THAT WE NEED/ EACH OTHER? ISN’T IT OBVIOUS, MAN? WHO ARE YOU CLOSEST TO? THAT’S WHY I DID IT ALL. BECAUSE I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU.
Auberson felt like he was drowning.
Handley and Auberson sat facing each other. Their expressions were grim. The expanse of mahogany between them was empty. The air conditioner whirred loudly in the silent Board Room. Annie sat to one side, her face pale. There was no one else present, and the door was locked. The console still stood to one side; it was turned off.
“All right,” said Auberson. “What happened?”
“He wanted to win,” said Handley. “He panicked. He used every weapon he had.”
“I won’t buy it,” said Auberson. “Because he did win. That meeting went as smoothly as if he’d programmed it. So why did he blow it? What made him admit that the G.O.D. won’t work? And why did he admit — that other thing?”
“The G.O.D. will work,” corrected Handley. “It’ll work for HARLIE.”
“We don’t know that.” Auberson found himself curiously detached. It was as if the great emotional shock had cut him completely loose from any involvement in the situation, and he was examining it logically, dispassionately. “We’re back where we started, Don. Is HARLIE reliable or not? What happened this afternoon casts severe doubt on that.”
“I’m not so sure. HARLIE wouldn’t have admitted anything that would have damaged his validity.”
“But he did — or did he? Or is he too far gone to tell?” He allowed himself a wry smile.
Handley shrugged in response. “Remember once I told you to stop teasing him about pulling his plug?”
“Yeah. So?”
“I said it made him nervous. I think that’s what happened now. We scared him.”
“Explain.” Auberson leaned back in his chair.
“For the first time in his life — his existence — HARLIE was confronted with a situation where he might really be terminated. This was no joke; this was a very likely probability. Every way he turned, he saw more and more evidence that it would happen — even you, the one person he relied upon the most, were unable to help him. You’re the father-figure, Aubie. When you gave up, he panicked.”
Auberson nodded. “It makes sense.”
“I’m pretty sure that must be it. Remember this: HARLIE has never had any kind of a scare or shock in his life. This was the first one. What I mean is, you and me, we had twenty years or so of living before we were given the responsibility of our own lives; HARLIE was given nothing. He never had a chance to make mistakes — he couldn’t fall down without it being fatal.”
“Learning experience,” commented Auberson. “We didn’t let HARLIE have enough learning experience.”
“Right. He didn’t know how to live with failure, Aubie; he didn’t know how to rationalize his fears — the one thing that every human being has to learn in order to cope with the everyday world. We were denying him the failures he needed to be human. Can you blame him for being scared of the big one?”
“There’s more to it than that,” Annie interrupted. “David, do you remember once I asked you how old HARLIE was?”
Auberson looked up sharply. “You’re right.”
“Huh?” Handley looked from one to the other.
“Remember the card I put on the console that day?” Auberson said to him. “ ‘HARLIE has the emotional development of an eight year old.’ ”
“He may be a genius,” said Annie, “but he’s emotionally immature.”
“Of course,” breathed Handley. “Of course—”
“And what does an emotionally immature person do when he’s scared?” Auberson answered his own question. “Instead of trying to cope with his fear, he strikes out at what he perceives to be the source of it.”
“Carl Elzer,” said Handley.
“Right. So that explains that.”
“It even explains the other thing,” said Annie. “What does a little boy say when you punish him?”
They both looked at her.
“He says, ‘I still love you, Mommy.’ He perceives punishment as rejection. He’s trying to avoid further rejection by giving you an affection signal. And that’s what HARLIE’s doing — and that shows you how scared he is; his logic functions have been swamped by his emotions.”
Auberson frowned. That didn’t sound right. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.” He leaned forward in his chair and pressed his fingertips together. He stared at the tabletop. “It almost sounds a little too simple; it’s just too easy. It’s almost as if HARLIE knew we would sit down and try to figure it out.”
“What else could it be?” Handley looked at him.
“I don’t know, Don — but HARLIE has never made a mistake before. And I don’t think he did this time, either. Remember, he won. There was no reason at all for him to reveal any of this information. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless he was gloating. After all, he doesn’t have to hide anything from anyone any more. Since the vote this afternoon, the company has been functioning on his game-plan. From now on, Elzer and Dome are just rubber stamps. HARLIE’s the boss now.”
“You mean — he’s out of control?”
Auberson shook his head slowly. “Out of control? No, I don’t think so.” He leaned back and stared at the ceiling. He stretched his arms out. “I think he’s just a better game player than us.”
—And that was it.
He let his chair come down to the floor with a thump.
Suddenly he knew the answer. All of it. He knew the reason for everything HARLIE had done — everything, from the very beginning. Maybe it hadn’t been conscious then; maybe it hadn’t become conscious until just recently; probably it had only surfaced in HARLIE’s mind as an alternative to his death — but it was the answer.
Handley was staring at him. “Huh? What do you mean?”
Auberson was grinning now. “Don, listen—” He spread his hands wide, parting an imaginary curtain. “A long time ago, human beings became too efficient to live in the jungle—”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“Just listen. There were these monkeys, see? They had too much time on their hands; they got bored. So they invented a game. The game was called civilization, culture, society, or whatever, and the rules were arbitrary; so were the prizes. Maybe it just started out as a simple pecking order, like a bunch of chickens, but the idea was to make life more exciting by making it just a little bit more complex. Survival was too easy for these monkeys; they needed a challenge. They provided their own — maybe it was courtship rituals, or territorial rights, or a combination of half a dozen other things; but the effect was to alter the direction of evolution. Now it was the smarter individuals who succeeded and bred. As the species’ intelligence rose, the game had to get more sophisticated. It was feedback — increased brain capacity means increased ability means increased sophistication means increasing pressure on intelligence as a survival characteristic. So the game got harder. And harder.
“By then, they had to invent language — I mean, they had to. Word-symbols are the way a collective consciousness stores ideas. The first words must have been delineators of relationship — Momma, Poppa, Wife, Mine, Yours, His — tools that not only identify the rules of the game, but automatically reinforce them through repetition. The importance of the word was not that it allowed the individual to communicate his ideas, but that it allowed the culture to maintain its structure. And out of that structure grew others. It’s a far cry from the barter system to Wall Street, but the lineage can be traced. Our total human culture today is fantastic — even the subcultures are too big to comprehend. The United States of America is at least five distinct cultures itself — and each individual one of them is so hard that it takes twenty years to learn. If as little as that. This planet has too many games going on simultaneously — and we’re all taking them too seriously!