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had been wiped.
 Almost, said Dr. Li.  There are ghost memories flitting about the
patient s mind, and many little things will jolt a few of the memories
loose.
 Smell is one of the subtlest and most powerful memory keys, said
Dr. Powell, nodding.
Derec knew.  Yes.
 So. In what we loosely call a memory restoration, we merely supply
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r r
new synapses as nearly identical to the old as possible.
 And in the functioning of the new memory traces, Derec said,
parroting what he d been told,  the patient reactivates the old
chemical memories.
 Quite so. The more accurate and detailed the new memory traces
are, the more complete not only the restoration of the memories, but
the restoration of the patient s original personality. I hope you can see
that. 
It was an angle that had never occurred to him. He supposed he had
the same basic personality as ever: pragmatic, problem-solving, not
given to abstract thought, not artistic or poetic. An equable
temperament. The engineering mind.
Now that he thought of it, though, perhaps his personality was
different. He had known Ariel in his former life. He must have had
strong feelings about her. He did again. Not still again. For if he had
not met her since his memory loss, and had not continuously been
practically in solitary confinement with her, he might well not have
felt that way about her again.
His parents, for instance. He no longer felt about them as he once
must have done. His friends all those parts of his personality were
gone. If he acquired new friends, his emotional responses would be
much the same, of course. His personality had not changed in any
basic way, or so he supposed. He did not seem very strange to Ariel.
Still, he was a new and different person from the old Derec, whatever
his name had been.
Perhaps Ariel was right; perhaps it was a form of death.
Yet  If the memory traces are close enough to the original ?
 Ideally, it would be like copying a program into a blank positronic
brain, said Dr. Li.  The second robot would, for all practical
purposes, become the old one.
 We always explain what s been done to them, Derec said absently.
 Yes. But if the original was destroyed  Derec frowned.   the new
one would, for all intents and purposes, be the same one in a new
body.
True, it was not unlike shifting a positronic brain to a new robotic
body. Derec had an uneasy flash. On Robot City there had been an
accidental death, of a boy called David, which Derec and Ariel had
investigated for the robots. This David had looked just like him
He usually shrugged that fact off, but now he was jolted. Maybe the
other was the duplicate or was it himself?
 In a human, of course, it is not quite so simple, said Dr. Powell, not
noticing his jolted expression.  We could activate a significant
fraction of the locked memories without reactivating the old
personality. It s a matter of knowing which memories are important
to the patient.
 How close can we come? Derec asked.
 It depends on how much we know. The robots are, of course,
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r r
recording and analyzing everything she says, and there s a tendency
to relive the most important memories first and most often, till
they re gone. So we re developing a good sketch, too crude to be called
a diagram.
Derec nodded.  That s where you need my help.
 Quite so. You know her better than we, or the robots, can hope to.
 Not well enough, I m afraid, said Derec steadily, wishing for some
of that tranquilizer they were keeping Ariel on.  I ve only known her
for a few weeks.
And already married, their expressions said. Spacer morals. Derec
didn t enlighten them.  I can go into a lot of detail about our time
together, but before that...she was a very private person.
Again, their expressions spoke for them: Spacers lived alone, on the
surface, surrounded only by robots, and had few human
contacts....Not true, but try to explain. Besides, he d had his own
quota of chauvinistic nonsense about Earthers to lose.
 Whatever you can do, you must do, Dr. Li said heavily.
 Uh...well...I can t, Derec said lamely.
If he mentioned his amnesia, they d be allover him. The question of
their identities would arise in a way he couldn t duck. The Terries
would certainly be called in, and the Spacer embassy at the port
would be queried. The whole house of cards would come down next
thing you knew, they d have learned about Dr. Avery and Robot City.
That secret must be kept at all costs.
 Why not? Dr. Powell barked.
 It s...a matter of privacy, sir.
 Oh. Greatly mollified. Spacers!  Well, there s a lot more than you
could do sitting here...why don t you take all the material we have
with you, go home, and do your dictating there ?
Derec had been so used to having First Law-driven robots intruding
on his life that he was startled by this easy acquiescence. A robot
wouldn t let anything be put into Ariel s head without checking it over
first
 And the memory traces? Will they be kept private?
The doctors looked at each other.  Well, they have to be coded, Dr. Li [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]