...

There's something in my toothpaste.

I stop, squint at it. Glasses, I reach for…

…oh yes, there you are…

Yes, I can see you now, a bubble, there in my toothpaste.

What are you doing there, where you've no place to be? Darn it, how often do you find a bubble in your toothpaste?

I feel the fabric of the universe unravel just a little bit more.

If you can find a bubble in your toothpaste, then anything could happen. Right?

Darn it.

…

There is only Chaos.

John is on the space station.

There is only Chaos.

Mr Tracy is in New York on business.

Only Chaos.

Tin-Tin and her father are visiting relatives in Malaysia.

… Chaos…

I come to a decision and lock myself in my laboratory for the duration. It's the prudent strategy.

They say that I'm like a brother to them. But I don't know what being like a brother means. I don't have any experience of being a brother let alone being like a brother. Do you see my dilemma?

They talk a lot. Noisily. And throw things at one another. And hug. Am I supposed to talk noisily and throw things and hug? I try to imagine the look on Scott's face, or on Virgil's, if I were to try to hug them.

So I'm like a brother. But not…a brother.

Just too darn complicated.

Safest here in my laboratory.

I'm not sure how long I've been here.

Footsteps come and footsteps go.

Knocking.

Voices.

I ignore them.

Eventually a grunting, and a scraping, and the door opens.

Virgil.

"For heaven's sakes, Brains, we were beginning to think you'd died in here. Do you know how long it's taken us to find a spare key to this place?"

I look at my watch. "It's only six o'clock, Virgil."

"It's six o'clock on Wednesday evening. You've been in here since yesterday morning. I bet you haven't eaten, have you?"

A growling in the pit of my stomach confirms his hypothesis. "Perhaps not, Virgil."

"That does it!"

He takes my arm.

I protest; he ignores.

The kitchen. I am forced…to sit.

One after another I am greeted by the rest of The Four.

"Hey, Brains."

"Hey, Brains."

"Hey, Brains."

I mumble a greeting in return. They mean well, I do believe they mean well.

Virgil makes a lunge for a cooking pot, splashes in oil with huge, unnecessary gestures. There are a range of snacks set out on the table and I eye up the potato chips hungrily.

I reach out a hand but am beaten to the dish by Alan. I sigh. Withdraw my hand.

Rule of brotherhood: People who are like brothers come lower in the pecking order than youngest brothers.

He draws out a chip, munches it. I wonder if I can get my hand back to the dish before Alan can react. He continues to stare insolently at me, daring me to challenge him.

"You've been avoiding us, Brains," Gordon states.

Gordon makes life so complicated.

"Chaos," I mumble.

I wish John was here. John is The Manageable Tracy. The others have Rules that I do not comprehend.

"There's no such thing as chaos." Scott tosses a peanut high up into the air. He tilts back his head effortlessly, catches it in his mouth, and chews.

Fascinating! How distracting. I cannot tear my eyes away as he does it again. I realise he expects me to say something.

"That simply isn't true, Scott. If you read…"

He leans across to me, elbow on the table, and eyes me up. I back away, trying not to shudder. He's too close. Even from a distance he's an intimidating man. All military bravado and codes of honor.

"I've read systems theory, thanks, Brains. There's no such thing as chaos. There's just complexity. If we could identify and map all the variables we could make perfect predictions."

The idea of chaos offends him. He thinks in binary. One-zero. On-off.

"Bubbles," I note.

"I beg your pardon?"

"In toothpaste. Why are there bubbles in toothpaste?"

"Er – you've got me there, Brains."

"Chaos," I say emphatically.

"No. Just a lack of understanding of the finer points of toothpaste manufacture."

One-zero.

On-off, off-on.

Yes-no.

Black-white.

It's how he does those lightning calculations in his head. He thinks in binary.

He can live in his neat, orderly world for so long. But it's Chaos out there. The more he denies it, the more likely it is that he will lose his balance and plunge into the Heart of Chaos and it will gobble him up like a mythical beast of darkness.

I consider this for a moment.

I have no desire to see him consumed. Although it would certainly stop him flying my beautiful plane like a demented lunatic. I hear her crying out to me each time he strains her engines or pulls some maneuver I never envisaged for her. A picture forms in my mind. I see him falling into Chaos and being devoured by some Pterosaur of the Night. Then I picture the same thing happening to Gordon…then Alan…

But it won't happen to me. I can keep them at bay, the Harpies at the door, because I can outsmart them. I know about Chaos.

Gordon seems puzzled. "Why are we talking about toothpaste?"

Scott grins. "Beats me, bro'. Just go with the flow where ol' Brains is concerned. There's some pearl in there somewhere, right, Hiram?"

"What have you been working on all this time?" Alan asks curiously.

It's the moment I have been waiting for.

I draw myself up. "After supper I'll show you," I respond.

There is a sizzle as meat hits hot oil.

My stomach grumbles again.

…

I type instructions. Braman unfurls, stands. The action inelegant as yet, but the motion noiseless.

"What do you call it?"

"Bio-mechanical Robotics and Auto-Modularizing Artificial Networks."

Gordon contemplates. "Braaaa–man," he says. "I like it, Brains."

An image flashes into my mind. Mary-Lou Perkins.

The horror!

Alan giggles – there's no other word for it – "I'm a panties man, myself."

I feel heat in my face. "That's BrAman, Gordon, BrAman. Like ray."

"B-b-braman?" Gordon repeats, innocently.

Did I stutter? I do sometimes. I don't hear it anymore.

Scott scowls and kicks Gordon hard enough to cause him to yelp.

It's another Rule of Brotherhood. I know this one. Brothers are allowed to mock one another's intelligence but not their afflictions. You see? I know what some of the Rules are. I just can't figure out why they are Rules.

Virgil's impressed, I can see. After John, he is the most sensible of the Tracy brothers, almost Manageable himself at times. "What can this thing do, Hiram?"

"Well it's more a case of what Braman will be able to do, Virgil. His neural nets are not yet fully trained up. He's virtually a tabula rasa. Like a new-born baby."

Alan has a look on his face which I know has Meaning, but I am unsure what it signifies. "A six-foot baby. Is this thing safe?"

"Oh, absolutely, Alan. There are production rules in place. He has some basic motor command function, so I can make him stand and walk but he cannot yet decide for himself where he walks. But his action networks will soon allow him to learn to choose where he goes."

Gordon jumps in. "My room is strictly off-limits. Make sure you program that in, Brains."

Scott shakes his head. He understands a little better. "He isn't going to be programming anything in. This thing is going to learn by doing. You want it to stay out of your room, baby bro', you're going to have to show it the door."

"That's it, exactly, Scott," I say encouragingly.

He really can be quite bright sometimes.

He turns back to me. "You said modularized networks?"

"I expect sensory networks, motor functions, language and higher level functions - problem solving, decision-making, and the like - all to emerge from the training regime."

"How long?" I can see that he is considering the potential.

"I don't know. The initial oral language capabilities will be slow. John has made a start on that."

"Johnny's seen this thing already?"

"He helped me develop the learning algorithms for the neural nets, Scott. And he's been teaching Braman single word utterances."

"I don't understand," Virgil says, frowning. "If you want this thing to speak, why don't you just program words into it?"

"Doesn't work like that, Virj," Scott interjects. "Babies don't come with a ready-made vocabulary. If you want it to develop like a human you have to give it the capacity to learn on its own, not a store of ready-made knowledge."

"Exactly," I continue. "Though once Braman gets to the stage where he can be taught written symbols he should be a good deal faster to develop than a human infant. I would expect him to reach the functional equivalent of adulthood within a year or two. But the constraints on learning are likely to be dictated by the speed of modularization. It isn't an exact science."

"Meaning?"

"The neural nets were not designed to be functionally specialized, Scott. There were slight differentials in the learning algorithms – some units were slightly biased towards processing rapid temporal inputs, others towards parallel inputs, or slower signals. I'm expecting that latent modularity will emerge from the initial differences in the training parameters."

"What did that mean in English?" Gordon asks helplessly.

Scott swings around to him. "It means that you and Alan need to stay the heck away from it. It needs teaching, like a kid. And garbage in, garbage out, right, Brains?"

"Indeed." I may not leave him to the mercies of the Creatures of Chaos after all.

Gordon looks at Alan. "Have we just been insulted?"

Virgil looks at Braman. "I still don't quite get it. Is it a toy? Or is there some point to it? I mean, could it be used as a remote for rescues?"

Scott cuts in. I recognize excitement. "Where is the repository for the nets? In the machine itself?"

"Yes…but the network weights are backed up every few minutes by the central server."

He looks at me, a full understanding in his eyes.

"Not a remote, Virgil. This thing is a substitute. It may be able to go in where we can't – and make decisions based on experience. And if it's destroyed Hiram can simply download the trained nets into another robot."

Virgil sits up at that. "Are you trying to put us out of a job, Brains?"

"It's highly unlikely that Braman will ever become a substitute for a human operative, Virgil. There's just too much we don't know about the human brain. I doubt that his motor function will ever be as fine-grained as ours, for example. But there might be a role for him in situations that are simply too dangerous for a human to tackle."

I cannot quite read the expression on Scott's face. "Is there any chance this thing could become sentient, Hiram?" he asks quietly.

"I don't know, Scott," I admit. "Braman will be intelligent, certainly. But no-one has yet constructed a fully realized artificial being. It's possible that consciousness may emerge as a property of the system."

His eyes narrow a little. I am unsure what this signifies. Perhaps the idea of artificial consciousness troubles him.

"Did you say John's been teaching it to speak?" Alan queries.

"That's right, Alan. But Braman doesn't have any powers of conversation yet. He can only form single syllable words."

"Well, let's hear it."

I type the command that will enable the primitive linguistic nets to function.

The group waits, expectantly.

Gordon puts his head on one side. "Shouldn't it light up or something?"

"He needs input, Gordon," I explain.

"Say something, Braman," Virgil prompts.

"John…Dad…" Braman says in response. "Book…pen…"

Virgil looks at the rest of the group. "Anyone else think Johnny needs to get out more?"

"Me," Gordon agrees, and leans forward, eager. "I can think of some much more impressive one-syllable words. Listen up, Braman…"

"Don't you dare," Scott threatens emphatically, and even Gordon knows better than to push his luck.

"Dare," Braman echoes.

"Aw, heck," Virgil says. "It was bad enough playing copycat with the Terrible Two when they were small. Now we have to do it with a machine?"

"That's how he will learn, Virgil," I tell him. "The more he interacts with humans, the faster he will do that."

"That," Braman echoes.

"Very good, Braman."

"Does it understand praise?" Virgil asks.

"I don't know. Does an infant? The semantic networks are developing alongside the syntactical ones."

Gordon groans. "Oh, here we go again. English, please, Brains."

I don't know what he means. I am not aware that I am speaking in a foreign tongue. Languages are not actually my forte.

"Can it see?" Scott asks. "I mean…not like a camera – you know what I mean."

"You mean, can Braman make sense of visual inputs?"

"Yes."

"The sensory and visual perception networks are developing, along with everything else."

He grabs a book from the desk. "Hey, Braman. Say book."

Braman obliges.

He holds up his coffee. "Say mug."

"Mug".

He holds up the book again. "What's this, Braman?"

"Mug".

He looks disappointed. "Guess it's got a way to go."

Virgil grins. "Kinda reminds me of teaching Alan to speak. I guess this could be a lot of fun, after all."

Alan scowls. "I know the difference between a mug and a book, thanks, big fella."

"You kept calling every horse you saw 'dog' for months," Virgil informs him. "No-one could convince you otherwise."

Rule of Brotherhood: At every opportunity younger brothers should be embarrassed by older brothers' when you were a kid stories. Those who are like a brother cannot suffer quite the same indignities but only because there is no fund of when you were a kid stories to draw upon. Later incidents, however, can make suitable substitutes for when you were a kid stories:

"Do you remember when Brains fell down the stairs and …"

"Hey, do you remember the time that Brains thought that…"

"This reminds me of …."

They satisfy their curiosity a while longer before abandoning me to my laboratory. As they leave, Scott hangs back by the door.

"Good job, Hiram." He hesitates. He actually seems rather shy. "Do you mind…I mean, would it be okay if I get involved in the training?" He grins. "Long time since I taught a kid to talk. Virj looks kinda interested in the whole thing too."

"Well, I suppose…..I guess that would be okay, Scott."

"Thanks. I'll look forward to it. But seriously, keep that thing under lock and key. I saw the look in Gordon's eye. He can see all sorts of possibilities for practical jokes here. If you don't want him to test its ability to swim, or teach it to steal from the rest of us, keep him away from it."

Rule of Brotherhood: Older brothers believe their own abilities to predict the actions of younger brothers to hold psychic properties.

I turn back to my work for a while before something flashes into my head. I remember. Of course – I have agreed to contact John at this juncture. I open a channel to the space station.

"Hey, Brains," he says amicably.

"Uh, hello, John." I try to think of a suitable pleasantry. "How is space?" I have noticed that conversations – even those with John - go a lot better when one asks a question one has no interest in receiving an answer to.

"Big and empty." He grins. "How did the show go?"

"Just as planned, John, just as planned."

"Thank goodness for that. I was beginning to go stir crazy talking to that thing. I thought Scott would take the bait. He's a real sucker for anything resembling a baby."

John and I have so much to do, and baby talk seems like a very poor use of our valuable time. Scott and Virgil, on the other hand, seem ideally suited to the task.

"Virgil, too, John. And Scott himself suggested keeping Gordon and Alan away from Braman."

"Even better. That means he'll make sure it happens. That's the trick with Scott, Hiram – just make him think it was his idea. Well, I think we can safely leave the pair of them to do the basic hack work for us. I'm sure Tin-Tin will just love to get involved, too. You and I can pick the whole thing up again at the next stage of development."

I sign off and sit back in my chair.

I feel weary now. Perhaps it is safe to leave the laboratory for a while, just for a little sleep.

But first, there is something I must try.

I pull out a fistful of hastily pocketed peanuts.

Aim.

Throw.

Miss.

Try again.

Aim.

Throw.

Darn. This isn't as easy as it looks.

Aim.

Throw.

I move my head like lightning, ignore my cricked neck.

I catch one. For a split-second this is splendid, delightful.

It goes straight down my throat.

I start to choke.

I cough and splutter for a few minutes, then dry my eyes on my sleeve.

"So much for nuts!" I wheeze crossly.

"Nuts," says Braman, obligingly.

I give up and head up to my bedroom.

Now, I wonder where I left my toothbrush?

…