Welcome To The Enrichment Center

Welcome to the enrichment center. [cough] Since making test participation mandatory for all employees, the quality of our test subjects has risen dramatically. Employee retention, however, has not.

[cough] As a result, you may have heard we’re gonna phase out human testing. There’s still a few things left to wrap up, though. First up, conversion gel. [cough]

On The Rocks

The bean counters told me we literally could not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less seventy million. Bought ’em anyway. Ground ’em up, mixed em into a gel.

And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill.

Still, it turns out they’re a great portal conductor. So now we’re gonna see if jumping in and out of these new portals can somehow leech the lunar poison out of a man’s bloodstream. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. [coughs] Let’s all stay positive and do some science.

That said, I would really appreciate it if you could test as fast as possible. Caroline, please bring me more pain pills.

On Why Not, Revisited

I wrote in 1959 that science is not about why. I have the sheet. It says why not, and it says why not buy the moon, and I want it understood by anybody reading the two sheets together that I did not put that line in as a joke and I did not buy the moon as a joke and I am not lying up here as a joke. [cough] I bought it because it was there and because they said I could not, and those are the only two reasons this company has ever needed, and they are both still good reasons. The rocks were a bad idea. Why not was not.

On Lemons

I have been thinking about the lemons. There is a separate sheet. I want it read aloud. I want it read aloud in the lobby, on the hour, and I want the engineers to hear it, because there is an instruction in it for the engineers and it is the last instruction I intend to give them about fruit.

On Compact Discs

The point is: if we can store music on a compact disc, why can’t we store a man’s intelligence and personality on one? So I have the engineers figuring that out now.

Brain mapping. Artificial intelligence. We should have been working on it thirty years ago. [cough] We were working on it thirty years ago. I asked, in 1959, whether a man could be written down, and eleven tons of relays said probably not, and I said try anyway, and they tried, and it is filed somewhere under a number I was not supposed to know. I have a smaller machine now. I have a shorter deadline. Those two facts are related and I would like the engineers to treat them as related.

I will say this — and I’m gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day: if I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place.

Now she’ll argue. She’ll say she can’t. She’s modest like that. But you make her.

Hell, put her in my computer. I don’t care.

[The transcription stops here for four minutes. — C.]

On What Comes Next

There is a committee in Washington that has been permanently recessed, and there is a contract with no end date on it, and there is a facility four thousand feet down with the lights on, and there is a woman outside this door who has run the place for thirty-three years and will not say so. [cough] I have arranged all four of those things. I am arranging a fifth. When the fifth is arranged I will come down and see it, and if I do not come down, you will know it is because I am already in it.

Allright, test’s over. You can head on back to your desk.