Julia and the Dream Maker by P. J. Fischer

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Message from the Author
Like many people, I feel that we are confronting a new century without having resolved the implications of important scientific theories developed in previous centuries -- especially the concept of natural selection. Darwin challenges us as much today as he did more than 100 years ago. In Julia and the Dream Maker, Darwin’s ideas come face to face with a technology to explore them. The students in the novel did not set out to confront Darwin, but cannot avoid it -- and can’t control the process either.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
The Truth and Nothing but Bennie's Truth

"Is the defense ready?" the judge asked.

"The defense is ready, Your Honor," Steven answered.

"The court understands that the defendant will act auto pro se?"

"Yes, Your Honor, I will act in my own defense -- with artificial intelligence assistance."

The judge's sigh was audible. "The defendant understands that I must be neutral in this case, but I strongly advise you to seek the assistance of standard counsel, one of which the court can provide in case you cannot afford it yourself.

"The court understands that you are without the minimum cash assets to acquire one and that, furthermore, you would qualify for public assistance. If you choose to use this machine, the court will be forced to conduct itself as though your electronic agent were in fact a living, breathing attorney. I will direct questions to it, and I will expect to be answered directly in an appropriately legalistic fashion. Its responses will be included in the record of the case and cannot be the basis of an appeal. Does the defendant understand this?"

Jurisprudence has a longer memory than chip technology, and the judge's reluctance to accept innovation's competing with the traditions of the law had good standing in this court. Electronic legal agents were not new per se, but neither were they easily accepted here in this court. The judge was trying to be modern, as he understood the term, but the central tenets of the law were the product of men, not silicone chips. There is an organic nature to the law that seems inimitable to a pure binary process like the logic of the computer lawyer.

Anyway, from the judge's perspective, where is a virtual thing like this computer lawyer and how can it be held in contempt if it doesn't comport itself properly? What if it is late? It is floating somewhere in the public defender's central computer, if it is anywhere easily to be found.

"The defendant understands," the machine flashed before Steven was able to speak. Steven suddenly realized that he needed to figure out how to slow down the machine's responses some so it didn't seem so high-handed to the judge. It was obviously programmed to generate a speedy trial, and Steven was afraid that this whole trial could be over before he knew it.

"Mr. Prosecutor, you may begin," the judge intoned.

"The State calls Mr. Bernard Thompson."

Bennie, one of the few people seated in the courtroom, got up and walked as authoritatively as possible to the stand. It was important that he give the right impression and not get Steven in any more trouble than he had already gotten himself into. A friend is, after all, a friend, Bennie thought.

"Now, Mr. Thompson, please tell the court exactly what your relationship is to the defendant." The prosecutor's tone was straightforward and serious.

Unfortunately, being called by his proper name always made Bennie fidget. It never resulted in anything good for him. He especially hated the way that his mother had used it as a pejorative. He thought it over.

"Mr. Thompson, please answer my question," the prosecutor said, looking at Bennie with mild contempt.

"We met during our first year at the university," Bennie replied, suddenly feeling rather small.

"And how long ago was that?" The prosecutor strolled slowly in front of him, glancing occasionally at the flickering hologram on the wall behind the wooden bar. That was the judge. The prosecutor spent some time trying to discern His Honor's mood from a projection beamed from a thousand kilometers away.

The bar was an appeal to a need long past, looking back to find the future like so much of the law. But this judge, flickering or not, was a presence to be dealt with. This was Judge Jackson's courtroom. Best be on one's toes here.

The prosecutor turned away from the witness again and to the image, pondering for a long minute what mood the old man was in and totally ignoring Steven, who sat alone at the defendant's table.

"Please tell the court how long ago that was," the prosecutor demanded. He didn't want to make Bennie a hostile witness but he did want a little cooperation. Bennie, however, was having trouble focusing.

"Well, he graduated a little ahead of us. . . . I guess I've known him for about six or seven years, more or less." Bennie was getting a little more than irritated by the lawyer's manner. He had the same attitude toward lawyers and the law as other scientists had -- working with lawyers was bad chemistry. "And during that time was the defendant ever involved in biological experiments?" The prosecutor was being thoughtful about his strategies even as his general attitude toward the witness was disrespectful.

Bennie nodded.

The prosecutor sighed. Another one of those digital dummies, he thought. "That is a yes?" he asked.

"Yes, it's a yes. Well, of course Steven was involved in bio experiments." Bennie almost laughed, relaxing some. "After all, Steven was a biology major. I'd say he probably did an experiment an hour his whole life. He was always in a lab of some sort. Or he was thinking about it. There must be a hundred different kinds of bioscience, and he probably knew about all of them. He was a total lab rat."

"For the record, when you say Steven, you are referring to the defendant."

"Yes, I am," Bennie snapped, feeling himself again.

"And, Mr. Thompson, did these experiments have any particular focus?"

The questioning was going to be direct. The case had not taken the prosecution long to prepare. It wasn't a big crime at this point. And the office had budgeted for a quick end to it. It was a felony, but the prosecutor would settle for the minimum . . . maybe six months actual time and two more years on probation. Five years of probation if the guy was a nuisance. Nothing more than a slap on the hand to let these academic nuts know that there really is a law and they can't just go hide in a lab and do whatever they want. There is a higher power than the test tube, the prosecutor thought.

And that power was flickering on the wall. The State could count on good old Judge Jackson to keep things on schedule in his courtroom. Jackson was probably thinking that the case was beneath him, too, and would want this moved along quickly. Maybe Jackson could dispense with this and draw a nice juicy antitrust case. He always enjoyed those. But everybody needed to get through this, and the first order of business for the prosecution was to get old rumpled suit here to cough up the beans and turn over his friend. Bennie hadn't been in a suit in who knew how long and he had had to dig deep to find this one.

"And what was the purpose of all this experimenting? Did his experiments have a particular focus?" the prosecutor repeated.

Bennie thought it through before he answered. He was no fool. He wasn't going to walk into this prosecutor's trap. Whatever it was.

"Please answer the question," the annoyed prosecutor persisted. "Were all of Steven's experiments class assignments?"

Bennie just looked at him.

The prosecutor tried again. "Isn't it true that these experiments were extracurricular and unsupervised?" The prosecutor had turned directly toward Bennie and dramatically stared at him. It was all theatrics, rehearsed in cases now fortunately long forgotten.

A small bell sounded as the public defender objected. It was an artificial intelligence defense program (AID, as they called it). Technically, it was a public defender's AID. It had originally been called a PDAID, but that was vaguely suggestive of something or the other, so it had been shortened in the name of public decency, or at least brevity. The program was actually a fancy neural network, kind of an abstract spider's web, and it was better than lots of attorneys at black-letter law. It could recite section and verse with the best of them -- but how much is that saying? This had proven to be a reasonably good program, surviving legal challenges yet imposing no real economic harm on the bar as a result of "real" lawyers' losing to computer lawyers, even though the use of artificial intelligence seemed so apt here. After all, what could be a better or more fitting use for artificial intelligence than criminal procedure? Criminal procedure may be the definition of artificial intelligence. If any subject on earth is artificially intelligent, crim procedure is it. It has its own internal and arcane logic, but it is consistent.

The AID program's routines were efficient, and it was now projecting flickering blue letters on the wall beside the judge's image and on the judge's personal communicator.

"Objection, Your Honor, the prosecutor is leading the witness," the program dutifully reported in the official blue allotted to the court system's electronic messaging.

"Objection overruled. Witness will answer the question," came a hasty response from the no-nonsense judge.

Bennie looked at the prosecutor, who just smiled and signaled with a hangman's nod for Bennie to continue. For his part, Bennie couldn't understand why the judge was this retro, two-dimensional image on the wall when everything he ever built was full-color and three-dimensional. But Bennie didn't understand budgets, either. The judge's image was in black and white because the law was reductionist. The law takes vivid and colorful details of a real crime -- the blood and guts -- and turns them into a gray summary of the facts in a legal opinion.

"We were always given a certain amount of latitude," Bennie continued, "and encouraged to be independent thinkers. After all, that was the whole point. They were teaching us to be scientists. We're supposed to be curious, especially in graduate school." And maybe they succeeded too well with Steven, Bennie thought. If anybody was independent, it was Steven.

"I see. And you, Mr. Thompson, were you performing 'an experiment an hour'?" The question was purely rhetorical as far as the prosecutor was concerned. One look at Bennie and he was sure this witness had never done anything in an hour.

"Well, no. But I wasn't exactly in bio."

"And your friends? What about your other friends who were biology majors? Were they in the laboratory around the clock? Were they doing an experiment each hour? Were they experimenting with unlicensed species?"

"Objection, Your Honor. The prosecution is again leading the witness and there has been no groundwork showing that any species were unlicensed." The little bell rang as the words appeared on the wall at the assigned spot.

"What's going on here, Mr. Prosecutor?" The judge looked stern, quivering ever so slightly.

"Bear with me, Your Honor. This will be clear shortly."

"It had better be. Proceed." Jackson usually started out hard on the lawyers. That way he didn't have any conduct problems to contend with later if things got a little heated. He also enjoyed having his own style in court.

The witness, who was trying to remember to answer the questions, was missing all the subtleties. There was a lot to remember. It was all coming back to Bennie. It was years ago, but Bennie remembered it well. What could he say? He had never been at Steven's level. No one he knew ever was. Every university had someone like him: someone who never seemed to study for class but who was actually always at the top. At first it made Bennie (and a few others) angry. Steven was at the head of the class, had all the answers, and was ever so casual about it. However, if Steven was interested in something, he would work twenty-four hours a day on it. After a while, Bennie just got used to it. It never really changed from their first meeting, which had been in Bennie's first and only college-level biology course.

They had ended up in the same class after Bennie had selected

it in his standard way, which was science at its best, or worst.

His first model of course selection was basically a random but self-reinforcing approach. He picked courses that had numbers in the title that summed to six. So Intro to Science 105 was good but Stochastic Processes 542 was not. Six was his lucky number, of course.

He tried other approaches, too. If the technique worked, he would repeat the process the next semester. If not, he would ask around for more information, seeking candidates for analysis, and even perhaps a better methodology. The Science of Course Selection. That's what he did, and he thought about patenting it in order to bring in a little extra money. He was sure he was on to something. Maybe he could make a lot of money from it. Who knew? Test this hypothesis, you undergrads: B or better, not too much work, and no hassle. Somebody would buy that one for sure.

He used the sum-to-six approach for a long time. Near graduation it had to be modified considerably, though, because the course selection narrowed and he had already taken all of the lower numbered courses. But at the beginning the approach had produced excellent results. Well, excellent enough. By the senior year he also used a less well-known variant: First, find out what the required courses were and look carefully at the way the professor's name was spelled. Next, imagine what he or she might look like (the prof, that is) or actually look the person up in cyber and get a picture. Providing it was not too vile a vision and provided, too, that the class was not before ten in the morning, sign up for it and take your chances . . . up to the first drop date. If the prof was an ogre or the class material was only meant to be known by the masochistic variety, then bail. No questions asked. Bennie wasn't lazy, just practical. But he could be persuaded to stay if the girls were pretty enough, maybe.

There were certain constraints the university had heaped on his process, though. All the computer science and mathematics majors had to take introductory biology. It didn't admit to many clever strategies. One's name was chosen at random and assigned to

a group. This weakens even the most sophisticated course-optimization procedure. It got worse for Bennie, too. It turned out that biology majors had to take intro to bio. A no exceptions, death-unto-you rule. Something about the department's wanting to give the majors a solid grounding in the basics. Even Steven couldn't waive it. The biology department wanted to groom the majors from the start and to keep its enrollment up.

So this was the hand of fate at work. Sitting in this class was Bennie the mathematician. At least he would end up a mathematician. Bennie, who hated things that moved, breathed, and even possibly excreted. What did he know about taking apart and putting together living things? He was going to have to dissect and reassemble a whole cow or a similar creature. Something big. His would die, and he knew it. And they'd make him pay for it. Beyond the humiliation, he hated the idea of having to pay for it.

Bennie knew perfectly well that he was not a natural-born naturalist. Born to dissect? No. Fortunately, so did the teaching assistant, Eli. She took one look at the sandy-haired butcher-to-be standing in the corner and knew exactly what lay ahead for him. And, unfortunately, what lay ahead for her, too. She also saw a more hopeful prospect, reading the text for a course that she was currently taking. He was standing in the back, oblivious to the events in the room. What was his problem, she wondered. She decided it didn't matter. Eli could be nice, but here she was going to act out of pure self-preservation. Rule one of the teaching assistant: There is no specimen like a student; don't be afraid to experiment.

She did it by instinct as much as anything else -- Bennie and Steven were suddenly made lab partners. Bennie was saved, Eli was spared another quant klutz, and Steven was a little annoyed. But, not having been given any options in the matter, he smiled and decided to make the best of it. Steven figured he needed the class more than his pride, so he did the cutting and dictated the report, and Bennie made sure it got handed in on time. And Steven still had time left over to read his book.

The simple lab itself was too boring for Steven, so he debated genetics and moral philosophy with Eli, when she would listen. Which she would, sometimes, if none of the group looked in imminent danger of dissolving in some nasty liquid. She had her status to consider, but the pair of Steven and Bennie made her laugh so hard she had trouble not bursting out in tears at their antics.

By the end, Steven and Bennie had abused each other into friendship in pretty much the standard male fashion. After the final exam, the boys decided on the obvious. Time to celebrate, so off for beers they went. On a whim, Steven invited Eli; and to his very great amazement she joined them.

Not everyone in the class was amused to see the teacher together with them, but it happened spontaneously, pretty much as everything does at that age. After all, life planning was something they could do later. Life seemed good enough then without overintellectualizing it. Steven had an easy laugh and wide smile that day, not the drawn face as he wore as the defendant in this case.

"The witness will answer the question," Judge Jackson said, jolting Bennie out of his reverie.

"No, no one worked as much as Steven. He didn't always seem like it, but he was always much more goal directed," Bennie said rather too quickly. "Not that we all didn't work hard. We believed in ourselves, too. We got our degrees. It's just that Steven always seemed to know, even very early on, what it was that he was going to do. And that he was going to be really good at it."

"And what exactly was that, Mr. Thompson? What was the defendant going to be good at? What did he want to do?" the prosecutor asked.

"Steven always said that he was going to make a new kind of life for people. He was going to take life to new places." Bennie was still having flashbacks.

"Please explain yourself, Mr. Thompson. Explain to the court in your own words what you think the defendant meant by that." The tone he used was harsh and it made Bennie snap out of it.

"Well," Bennie said, clearing his throat. "Well, when I first heard it, of course, I thought he was going to go into exobiology. We were all trying out new majors every other semester anyway so it was no big deal."

The prosecutor was pacing slowly in front of the witness. "Exobiology. By which you mean, Mr. Thompson, that he was going to be involved in interplanetary activities?"

"Yes, we all thought that he was, well, going to grow grass on Mars or something. You'd probably need a different kind of grass for that. Or maybe he was going to develop frogs or something that wouldn't get cooked in the shade on Mercury." Not that Bennie really believed this about Steven, but it sounded good. And he said it with confidence because he knew that Mercury was a hot place.

"So the defendant was always interested in new and different species?" the prosecutor asked, thinking that if he could hasten Bennie to the point that the case might not take a lifetime.

But Bennie was not going to be rushed. He looked at Steven's steel blue eyes and then answered slowly. "He had an interest in new and different ideas. Actually, it was a little stronger than just an interest, if you must know. It was really his focus."

"His obsession you mean," the prosecutor stated harshly.

The little bell went off and the blue writing said: "Objection. Leading the witness."

"Overruled. Continue," Jackson said.

"No, I mean his focus. We were young and intellectually ambitious. We wanted to do something with our lives." As he spoke and thought about it, Bennie began to realize that it was just what the prosecutor said. It was an obsession. Or just craziness. Maybe they were all crazy back then. They probably still were.

Bennie continued, "I mean, Steven just found a clear sense of his professional goals before the rest of us did." Bennie looked around the courtroom for support as he answered, but there was only the prosecutor, the flickering judge, and Steven, plus a couple of others in the back. An armed guard stood by Steven. Bennie gave up on the support idea.

"He was going to find some kind of new life? To make new living things? That's what you mean, isn't it?"

"Yes, that's basically it."

"But the defendant wasn't interested in grass, was he, Mr. Thompson?"

"Well, I think he worked on about everything. He wasn't interested in any one thing. He cared about the science." These questions were getting really annoying to Bennie. Wasn't there a time limit on this questioning?

"But very little on grass. Isn't that true?"

"Yes, it's true. No grass." Bennie shook his head and looked away again.

The prosecutor moved forward again by instinct. "When you were students, you all had nicknames. Isn't that true?"

"Yes, but that was a long time ago. I can't see that it can matter now." How did he know that? Bennie wondered. He hadn't told him. He hadn't said one word during the interrogation about that.

More bells and blue lights: "Objection. Relevance?"

"What is the point here, Mr. Prosecutor?" the judge demanded.

"Again, just bear with me, Your Honor. This will become clear in a moment. I am establishing a pattern of behavior."

"We don't have all day here," Jackson chided.

"Yes, Your Honor," came the prosecutor's less than contrite response. He continued, "Now, Mr. Thompson, I'll ask you again. Did you have nicknames as students?"

"Yes. Yes we did." It was silly and harmless, Bennie thought. "We were friends. Haven't you ever called your friends by another name?" Bennie demanded.

The prosecutor ignored the challenge. It was only then that Bennie realized what he was going to be asked. When Bennie first met him, Steven always had a bunch of animals around him. Mainly little ones -- geese, ducks, and the like. He lived off campus, a little out in the country. He had said he liked the peace and quiet, but Bennie knew him too well to think that the country charm was any reason for him to live so far from a serious lab. Eventually, of course, Bennie found out that Steven had his own -- very sophisticated -- lab there.

"And, now tell the court what the defendant's nickname was."

"We called him Old MacDonald," Bennie said embarrassedly. It seemed so profoundly adolescent now. Could he have really been that immature once, he wondered?

"And why that particular name? How did he earn that nickname?"

"Well, Steven got the tag a long time ago, when he ran a little ranch with a bunch of different animals. He said they relaxed him. He was very kind to them. He treated them like pets."

"You saw this yourself? You visited him at his ranch?"

"Yes, we all went there." Bennie was very uneasy about this line of questioning. The prosecutor shouldn't know about all this -- unless . . . Steven told him? Not likely, he thought.

"So, you were familiar with the place. Isn't that true?"

"Yes, it's true. I was there many times. But that was over the course of several years and, as I said, all that was a long time ago."

"But you would have noticed if there was anything unusual about the animals. Isn't that correct?"

"Yes, I suppose I would have. I saw them often enough," Bennie said cautiously. In truth, Bennie never liked the animals all that much, but he put up with them. And he had limits about that, too. Someone else could feed and groom them. He made that clear. The smell was about all Bennie could stand.

"Your Honor, I introduce as evidence these five pictures labeled A through E. They show Mr. Thompson and the defendant with several small animals."

"Defense has no objection."

"So be it," the judge ordered.

"Can you identify this as yourself and the defendant, Mr. Thompson?"

The prosecutor showed Bennie several of the pictures, and he almost fell over. In them Bennie was holding a small rabbit. The pictures made him feel sad. He was struck more than anything by how happy everybody looked. He didn't know where the pictures had come from, but that was definitely Steven, Eli, and himself in the company of some small furry thing. The scene in the photos was very unsettling to Bennie. He didn't remember the pictures, but that was the three of them all right. And he honestly didn't remember the moment being captured on film, but there it was, so he must have been there and done it.

"Yes, that's me," Bennie said, pointing to himself in one of the photos. Not that it was difficult since he was not the defendant, the rabbit, or the girl.

"And, for the record, that's you holding a small rabbit. Is that correct?"

"I'm holding a rabbit, yes." Bennie was getting close to losing it.

"And was there anything that you remember to be peculiar or unusual about the rabbit?"

"It was a pretty normal rabbit. It was Steven's favorite." That was his first real lie. Steven had favorite pets, but Bennie's being able to pick one rabbit out of a rabbit lineup? That would be like identifying a pickle in a barrel of pickles as far as he was concerned.

"Pretty normal. Pretty normal but not completely normal. Is that correct, Mr. Thompson?"

Bennie took a deep breath. "No, the rabbit was completely normal."

"The rabbit had a nickname, too? Tell the court what that nickname was."

"We called it Professor Rabbit."

"Professor Rabbit? And why that nickname?"

"Because the rabbit . . . "

"Please speak up, Mr. Thompson." The prosecutor was leaning over the witness in the chair.

"Because the rabbit was pretty smart for a rabbit."

"Smart in what way?"

"It could recite the alphabet," Bennie said almost under his breath.

"More like sing the alphabet. Isn't that so?"

"Yes, it could sing the whole alphabet."

"And that's a normal rabbit, Mr. Thompson?"

"No, I guess not. No." Bennie had been caught.

"And the defendant had cultivated the animal?"

"Yes."

"The State has no more questions for this witness at this point, Your Honor. But I reserve the right to recall him later."

The judge looked at his watch. Somehow the morning had slipped by. He didn't like to cut testimony off in the middle of a witness but remembered that he had a golf date. "It's late. We will recess until tomorrow morning. Mr. Thompson, you will be the first witness." © 2003 P. J. Fischer