The Brain-Men Project and the Birth of the Fourth Men

The Brain-Men Project was a centuries-long attempt to make intelligence the defining human faculty by redesigning the body around the brain. Its first successful result, the pioneer of the Fourth Men, emerged only after political division, repeated experiments, and a striking fusion of living tissue with mechanical and chemical systems. The project’s achievement was also a challenge to the governing ideal that human nature had to develop as a whole: its supporters sought an organism devoted to thought, while their opponents feared the social and aesthetic consequences of narrowing humanity to a single faculty.

A contested ideal of human improvement

The project began with an argument about what human beings should become. Its advocates regarded intelligent coordination, exercised through brain and hand, as humanity’s most distinctive capacity. Since machines had surpassed the hand in many tasks, they reasoned, organic functions that machinery could perform should be transferred to it. Human vitality could then be concentrated on building and using the brain. Their aim was not merely a more intelligent person, but an organism freed from what they considered the evolutionary remnants of other functions. They imagined that such a being might eventually investigate immortality and be entrusted with human affairs.

This vision competed with another proposed future: breeding sensitive communicants who could receive guidance from a world beyond. The two programs expressed different accounts of human advancement, one directed toward specialized intellect and the other toward communication with the unseen. The governing caste opposed the brain-centered plan, arguing that development of one faculty at the expense of the rest would create an inharmonious being. Their stated case rested on the principle that human nature should be developed as a whole, though fear of losing political authority may also have influenced them. Most of the community sided with the opponents. A small group within the governing class nevertheless resolved to pursue the brain project secretly.

Secrecy, division, and methods

The researchers began their work in a remote part of the planet. Their later effort to win public approval did not unite society; instead, it divided it into rival parties. Intermittent religious warfare continued for centuries. Eventually, the supporters of the brain project and the supporters of the communicants settled in separate regions, where each could pursue its own purpose with little cultural exchange. Each movement developed into a nation held together by religious belief and a crusading sense of mission. The project thus reshaped society before it achieved its biological objective: an argument about the future of the human organism became a durable political and religious separation.

The researchers combined four approaches: selective breeding, alteration of hereditary factors in laboratory-grown germ cells, manipulation of the fertilized ovum in the laboratory, and intervention in the developing body. Early attempts produced many unsuccessful outcomes, and the account passes over them. Several thousand years after the earliest experiments, the researchers selected a human ovum, fertilized it in the laboratory, and extensively reorganized its development. They inhibited growth of the body and lower brain structures while stimulating the cerebral hemispheres. The result was a brain twelve feet across, with most of the body reduced to a vestige beneath it. The arms and hands alone were allowed to reach natural size; they were fixed at the shoulders into the masonry of the creature’s building so that they could manipulate objects.

The failed prototype

The first engineered brain was sustained by a purpose-built complex that joined organic processes to machinery. An electrically driven pump served as its heart, while a chemical plant supplied materials to the blood and removed waste. A room of oxidizing tubes and an electric fan took the place of lungs, and the fan also drove artificial speech organs. The speech system translated signals from the brain’s natural nerve fibres into sounds. Its sensory equipment likewise combined biological and artificial elements: the eyes could connect with optical instruments, the ears with resonators or minute biological rhythms, and chemical senses could distinguish compounds and elements. Pressure, warmth, and cold were detected through the fingers. The researchers had intended to eliminate sensory pain, but did not succeed.

The organism lived for four years. Its second year brought severe pain and signs of mental disturbance; despite the care of its foster-parents, its condition worsened and it died. The account attributes the failure to the weight of its brain and problems in regulating the chemistry of its blood. Its brief life established a limit the researchers could not overcome simply by enlarging the cerebral hemispheres: the body and its support systems still had to sustain the mind they had engineered. Attempts to repeat the experiment continued for another four hundred years before the first true individual of the Fourth Men was produced.

The first successful Fourth Man

The successful pioneer followed the same broad design but depended on more efficient mechanical and chemical systems. His makers expected that careful adjustment of growth and decay might make him immortal. They also changed how his brain developed. Instead of forming as ordinary hemispheres, its cells were guided into compartments in a circular, ferro-concrete brain turret about forty feet in diameter. Partitions radiated from a central space, and the structure contained tiers of small cupboards into which the growing brain spread. Glass, metal, and vulcanite tubes carried blood and chemicals; electric radiators maintained warmth, while instruments reported physical changes throughout the elaborate system.

The new organism’s intellectual development was slow by ordinary measures. Eight years after its inception, the brain had filled its room and attained the mentality of a newborn infant. His foster-parents waited until almost the end of his fifth decade before he reached the level of a bright adolescent. Yet within the next decade he learned everything the Third Men could teach him and recognized that much of their accumulated wisdom was folly. His hands were exceptionally capable, but he used them chiefly in the service of curiosity and scientific investigation. A state department oversaw his upbringing, and an army of learned attendants answered his questions and assisted his experiments. Once he surpassed them, they became, in practice, clerks and assistants; hundreds were dispatched across the planet to find information and specimens, sometimes without understanding the purpose of their errands.

The project’s outcome therefore differed from a simple triumph of intelligence over the body. The first successful Fourth Man was an unprecedented union of brain, specialized hands, engineered growth, and life-support machinery; his creation depended on all of them working together. At the same time, the long delay before his maturity and the dependence of his attendants on a mind they could no longer match exposed the project’s costs and asymmetries. The researchers had sought to concentrate human vitality in intellect. What they produced was a new kind of person whose curiosity could outstrip the knowledge of the society that had made him, and whose existence had already transformed that society through conflict.