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At least he could do something right.
     

Chapter 4: Waxy's Travel Lounge
    Ten minutes later Vernor arrived at the Angels' hang-out, Waxy's Travel Lounge. It was early evening and the place was beginning to fill up.
    There was a sculptured black plastic bar along the left wall. The area in front of the rear wall was occupied by a Hollowjuke, and there were booths along the right wall.
    The Hollowjuke was running, and the image of a larger-than-life couple making love occupied the rear of the room. The Hollow couple were singing a muffled duet punctuated by a yas-yas chorus from four Hollow massage robots busy hosing off the lovers.
    The booths on the right seemed to be occupied. Noises of sex came from some, and over the door of some of the others you could see the bottles of intravenous feeding set-ups, dripping mixtures of sudocoke, synthoin, vitamins, and glucose into the arms of those inside.
    There was a group of Angels near the bar and Vernor walked over. An Angel called Oily Allie was describing her latest attempt to build a flying machine. Apparently she stole pieces of machinery from the factory where she worked, and reassembled them in her own mad scientist fashion. Vernor didn't know her too well, but tended to stay out of her way, as Allie was something of a practical joker.
    As Vernor walked up, Oily Allie looked at him, shouted "Have a drink," and pitched the contents of a thermos she was holding in Vernor's direction.
    It appeared to be a boiling liquid, and Vernor dove to the floor to avoid it. Strangely, however, the steaming liquid turned into a cloud of gas before it reached Vernor. As the gas diffused, the coals on the Angels' reefers brightened, and Vernor realized that it had been liquid oxygen.
    "Man, you looked funny, scrambling around," Oily Allie said, helping Vernor up. "Let me buy you a hit of seenz." Allie punched the order into the bar robot and fed in the coins. The robot extended a tube towards Vernor and he put it in his nose, snorting up the synthetic cocaine. His adrenaline dissolved in a rush of well-being and he was finally able to return Oily Allie's grin. She was a muscular woman with dark, spiky hair, not overly clean.
    "What's happening?" Vernor asked.
    "Moto-O's been looking for you. He's over there." Allie pointed down the bar. Moto-O was sitting near a light, writing rapid precise symbols with his Rapidograph pen. Vernor thanked Allie for the seenz and walked over to Moto-O.
    "Ah, Vernor," Moto-O said, looking up. "I have new idea for mechanical mind." Both of them were interested in the problem of how one might go about making a machine which is conscious.
    The problem was challenging, since the Second Incompleteness Theorem, proved by Kurt Gödel in 1930, seems to say that no machine can be conscious, i.e. aware of its own existence. The reason is that the only way a machine can be aware of itself is to form an internal model of itself and look at the model . . . and it is impossible for any one, man or machine, to fully know himself.
    To see why this might be so, try to become completely conscious of yourself and all your thoughts. Easy, you may say, no problem. But wait, did you include the act of examining your thoughts when you made your mental inventory of what's going on in your head? And once you tack that on, will you be able to include the act of tacking it on? And that inclusion?
    The problem is that every attempt to fully map your inner landscape adds new features to it. The map has to include a picture of itself, which has to include a picture of itself, and so on forever towards the Royal Baking Powder vanishing point. No matter how fast you move your mental reference point, you're always a jump behind.
    It's easy to see that a computer would run into the same type of problems when it tries to form a mental image of itself. But how is it, you may ask, that we humans do, after all, seem to have consciousness and self-awareness? It cannot come from internal modeling,