Scene 1. Thought.
Moreau is in his office late one night, Bess always had her head in his office when he was there. He is having difficulty sleeping since his foray into the jungle. However, two things calm his mind better than anything else, talking to Bess, and staring into the tiger’s eyes.
He can discuss anything with Bess, and she always enjoys his company. Bess is dispassionate in her opinions because she does not share in his work (yet) and she either cannot, or chooses not, to communicate with anyone else (so far). Her long and close association with circus and then navy people taught her a large vocabulary and a good understanding of the human psyche.
“Bess, you would make a good psychotherapist. You have helped me since our first meeting. Would you like to open a practice with me?”
Bess shakes her head and speaks her first word out loud, in a whinnie.
“Nooooo… Snort.”
And Moreau bounces up in surprise at her vocalization. She continues conversing with her thoughts.
“I just ‘like’ you. Other people I have met are really screwed up and don’t listen to anyone, especially to me. They just go on wasting their lives, making things more difficult for themselves than they need to be. But you, like to talk, and you like to listen. I like that. I think that we are similar in that way.”
“Yes, we have become pretty good in our unique communication with each other. Have you ever been able to communicate with any other person, or animal, or mineral, or vegetable?”
“Only once before, when I was young. I was raised in a circus and I met many people there. The barker had an adorable young son that would visit me in my pen and talk to me. The barker found out and beat his son terribly. So, I vowed that I would never talk to anyone ever again.”
“What about me?”
“I was lonely and I liked your smell. And I doubt your father would beat you now.”
“Through the years, I have occasionally picked up thoughts from people and animals, but none could hear me.”
…
Moreau arranged to have his female tiger become the first permanent resident of his Dungeon. The Dungeon, as Ernie named it, was the only facility that Moreau had access, that was large enough, and secure enough, to keep her. Moreau repaired the large freight elevator, then arranged for the navy to move her and her cage into The Dungeon late one night, before the laboratory was moved in.
Moreau and Ernie took turns caring for her, along with select laboratory staff personnel that had been part of the expedition and knew about the tiger. All were sworn to secrecy.
The zoo veterinarian visited regularly, to perform medical examinations and give her vaccinations.
The veterinarian carefully checked her diet plan, critical for a large animal kept in a small cage, with no sunlight. He was well paid to keep the tiger secret. And Moreau was not his only confidential client.
Moreau sits by the tiger’s cage in the evening, after feeding her, and watches her in silent fascination as she always approaches him and couches down to face him, through the bars, as the tiger at the zoo had done. Then they would stare at each other, directly in the eyes, for an hour or more, in the dark silence of the great hall, The Dungeon.
Beast to Demon.
Scene 2. Discussion.
Dr. Moreau is sitting at the head of a large conference table, surrounded by his assistants and co-workers. The staff all know that he has been given an unlimited budget for his new project because of the success of his expedition. Dr. Moreau has already made this presentation to the board of directors that have given him the go-ahead for the project. He begins.
“Our friends, The Ice Berg Gang, have done us the favor of showing us the latent demand for a product. The product is the personal, industrial, and military ‘assistant’. An entity that can follow spoken or written orders and directions and is strong enough, smart enough and dexterous enough to carry them out. The first initiative will be the automatons. I had the opportunity to see the current military versions in action during the expedition. Useful, but they are underutilized. Their advantage of being scaled to almost any size and adaptable to many, if not all, rule-based tasks, such as driving and flying, for example. The main problems are cost of production and personal acceptance. They cost too much to manufacture, and when they fail they either must be replaced or repaired at a depot. In addition, they scare people. Robots scare people, maybe because of the science fiction, murdering robot horror stories.”
“I propose that we adapt existing robots and add our own embedded intelligence to them. We are a food company. We’ll open a chain of fresh, fast food kiosks staffed entirely by automatons, but these will have assistance from deep AI, necessary to work with the public in retail. The cooks, the packers, and the cashiers, not so much, so these can be less expensive to manufacture and maintain. This project is in the ‘production planning’ stage. I have already recruited the military to be our beta testers for the fully automated mobile commissary, that will take custom orders and perform table service. They have promised the company an exclusive international distribution contract, if the tests are successful.”
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“In parallel, we will develop other kinds of ‘assistants’ that are sure to have much greater acceptance for personal care assistance and household assistance.”
“This project is in the ‘research and feasibility’ stage.”
Scene 3. Idea.
Dr. Moreau is finally at his home in the evening, spending time with his daughter.
“It is bedtime. Would you like me to read you a story?”
“Yes, this one.”
Susie hands her father a large illustrated children’s book, an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows.
Dr. Moreau begins to read from the book, but mostly to examine the illustrations of the anthropomorphic animal characters.
People love humanoid animal characters like this, and always have.
…
Dr. Moreau stops at the library on his drive home from work, early this evening, as it is Ernie’s turn to feed the tiger (and clean her cage, as the vet was adamant about keeping her cage clean). Moreau wanders the stacks, then settles in on books depicting animal and human anatomy in as much detail as he could find. He also selected several children’s books featuring anthropomorphic animals based on the quality of the artwork, and not necessarily on the quality of the stories.
I wonder if Susie will like these, she is like Bess, she doesn’t care what I read, as long as I read it to her.
Now that I think about it, my wife was an art student before she turned to science, and she still draws for pleasure, and she also illustrates all of her science papers, I’ll ask her for help, too.
I wonder if she will like working with me.
Scene 4. Inspiration.
Dr. Moreau experiments with computer-aided drawing programs at work, eliciting help from the same young programmer-gamer in his group, Barney. Barney is the one that was teaching the ‘space slime’ how to play, Tetris. Moreau asks him for help evaluating popular CGI animation tools, especially those that can automatically generate the series of images that morph from one shape into another.
Moreau and his helper select a CGI generation tool to try out. The helper shows him how to scan from photographs, diagrams from books, and physical, three-dimensional, objects. The software application he selects appears to be infinitely scalable, necessary to preserve the fine detail in the sequence of image frames. He and his young assistant succeeded in morphing of the three-dimensional image of a femur bone, of a rat, into a femur bone image of another species, different in size and shape, a goat for example.
Ah, to be young again, when nothing is impossible.
They continue to work together in creating an animation library. They use an AI to gather all available pictures, then morph every bone and tooth in a matrix of ten placental species from one to another. The process is repeated for tendons, muscles and eventually, for organs.
A paleontologist long ago noted the physical similarity between all the placental mammals.
Scene 5. Research.
Dr. Moreau finally begins the real work of examining DNA libraries.
Through the years, government and university researchers have painstakingly built extensive DNA libraries for a large variety of plants and animals, starting with the most simple life forms but now complete for humans and all known vertebrates. Occasionally, the database will identify the variations that occur in a normal and abnormal population.
Publicly funded researchers are obligated to release all of their data, after their initial scientific findings are released, becoming widely available for more human and animal research. But Moreau is especially interested in reproduction and development. He is interested in sample breadth for each wild animal species, especially that of the placental mammal predators.
It is time to ask the AI for help, first in formulating the problem, then laying out a plan of investigation. This process is likely to take several iterations. Of course, the difficulty with using AI is phrasing the request. Once again, he asks his young programmer, Barney, for help. And Barney is good at working with AI resources, apparently because AI is used frequently in games. Barney offers this advice.
“One of the secrets to getting an AI to offer a useful or even correct answer is to ask ten questions, then rank the answers by how close the answers are to the answer you want. Then ask again, this time with three questions.”
One factor not discussed is to specify how long you are willing to wait for an answer, for complex issues on big data, it can take days or weeks to get a good answer from a conventional computer. However, from what Moreau has seen, breakthroughs in biological and quantum computers have resulted in speeding up classical data searches and analysis considerably, from months to days, and sometimes, to hours.
Finally, the moment of truth has come.
“What in the structure of mouse DNA has to change to make a mouse embryo develop into the form of a man?”
End of Chapter 6.