Galatea 2.2, page 18
I CRASHED IMP E in complete innocence. The version had grown up on patterns and questions about patterns. It organized itself on such challenges as “What comes next in this sequence?” and “Which item in this list doesn’t belong?”
One day, provoked by boredom, I asked it, “What do you want to talk about?” The question of volition trapped the rolling marble of its will into an unstable local minimum. The machine that so dutifully strove to answer every interrogation ground to a halt on that one.
Lentz needed to reset the entire run-time module, which did not endear us to the National Supercomputing Site. The connection monster was as expensive to run as it was difficult. They only gave us time in the first place because of the lack of people who could hack the massive parallelism. They thought they might get a testimonial at the end of the project. Lentz had misled them. They thought we were doing science.
Our mosaic already ran beyond precarious. It had grown into a Nevelson village of analog and digital inhabitants chattering among themselves. But the chatter did not cohere into conversation, nor the village into community. Depressed, Lentz added two more subsystems. He’d wanted the whole simulation to be self-generating, self-modifying, self-delighting, self-allaying, self-affrighting. For algorithms, he’d allowed only the structure of the systems and the topiary of their connection weights. Now he conceded the need to write declarations and procedures—the deepest of deep structures—that would coordinate more strongly the many levels in the simulation’s epistemological parfait.
Two weeks of intensive training showed how close we were. Implementation F proved capable of surprising inferences. It appeared to deploy material I thought it shouldn’t be able to know yet. It almost anticipated. One day, I recited for it the poem that had graced, in enormous, construction-paper letters, the bulletin board of my second-grade classroom. Down, down, yellow and brown. The leaves are falling all over the town.
“Ask it about the Western hegemonic tendencies of the subtext,” Lentz said, just to be obnoxious. “The tyranny of the deciduous mentality. North imposing its seasonal teleology on South.”
“What can you tell me about the leaves?” I asked Imp F.
Its pauses always felt so deliberate. Contemplative. “The leaves fall.”
“Yes. Where do they fall from?”
“From old trees.”
I shot a glance at Lentz. He looked as astonished as I felt. Fishing for something near the surface, I pulled up a strange phosphorescence from the deep.
“How do you know that the trees are old?” I asked. The question alone taxed F’s shocking self-reflexivity.
“The trees bald.”
I stared at Lentz, my eyes watering. The metaphor was nothing, child’s play. But how? “Lentz,” I pleaded. “Explain this to me.”
Lentz himself had to improvise. His was the same motion as Imp F’s: sketch in the bridge under your feet, as you cross analogy’s chasm. Hope it holds under your weight. He shrugged as if his explanation were self-explanatory, highly unlikely, or both.
“The connections it makes in one associative pairing partially overlap the ones used in another.”
Associations of associations. It struck me. Every neuron formed a middle term in a continuous, elaborate, brain-wide pun. With a rash of dendrite inputs and handfuls of axon outs, each cell served as enharmonic point in countless constellations, shifting configurations of light, each circuit standing in for some new sense. To fire or not meant different things, depending on how the registers aligned at a given instant and which other alignments read the standing sum. Each node was an entire computer, a comprehensive comparison. And the way they fit together was a cupola itself.
These weird parallaxes of framing must be why the mind opened out on meaning at all. Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit’s center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor’s embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understood Emerson’s saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy.
Life was metonymy, or at least stood for it. Of the formula I fed Imp F, every sentence was an abashed metaphor, tramped down so long and hard it lost its public shame. “I ran into X on the street the other day,” I told F. “He cut me dead.” F revived the parallel’s anxious source, its roots in ancient, all-out street violence. Then it tamed the words, rendered them livable again as figures of speech.
If everything I spoke to F already concealed its compromised past, no wonder F learned to milk comparison and smart-mouth back. A child always detects its parent’s weaknesses. It senses them before words, the first and last lesson. Weakness may be the parent’s only lasting lesson.
F’s search for an answer space scurried its component neurodes into knowing. Like players in a marching band, the invisible punners shimmered, cut their series of Brownian turns on the turf, and, in abrupt about-face, conjoined themselves into a further story. Every word in that story was double-voiced. Every act of depicting depicted itself, as read by some other set of overlapping signal lights.
And all the while, the trees were balding. The mind shed its leaves. Every connection we encouraged in F killed off extraneous connections. Learning meant consolidating, closing in on its contour the way a drop of water minimizes into a globe. Weights rearranged until the neurodes storing winter lent half their economical pattern to the neurodes signaling old age.
ALL ALONG, LENTZ kept upping the available firing fibers, boosting exponentially the links between them. He sutured in new subsystems by simulated threads. The systems themselves acted as nodes at a higher level. Sometimes they arrived pretrained, before insertion. But even these metamorphosed after attachment, shaped by the bath of signal weights pouring in from all points in the labyrinth.
The maze performed as one immense, incalculable net. It only felt like countless smaller nets strung together because of differences in connection density. Like a condensing universe, it clustered into dense cores held together by sparser filaments—stars calling planets calling moons.
With each new boost to the number of connections, Lentz had to improve F’s ability to discard as it generalized. Intelligence meant the systematic eradication of information. We wanted a creature that recognized a finch as a bird without getting hung up on beak size or color or song or any other quality that seemed to put it in a caste by itself. At the same time, the discarding had to stop short of generalizing the finch into a bat or a snowflake or a bit of blowing debris.
By an ingenious method of semantic compaction, Lentz honed a representation scheme that let F weave multiple, growing schemas simultaneously over every additional datum.
“Voilà, Marcel. My mathematics says this is the most powerful learning algorithm that’ll run in finite time. We can scale F up into a considerable combinatorial mass of common sense without triggering exponential explosion.”
But more connections and leaner learning were not enough. We needed one last hardware wrinkle. We needed to promote our F one more letter, to F+1. To grow, to go, to give, to get, to G.
Giving in to a limited, rule-based control structure freed Lentz to recurve G’s layers, turning them back in on themselves. This let G fashion and invoke working miniatures of itself. The line between hardware and software blurred when it achieved full induction. G could traverse more levels than it had layers of parallel architecture. It built its own layers, in emulation of emulation, each allowing a new level of abstract depiction.
G’s many sub-simulations, their associative matrices, the scratchpad mock-ups they made of themselves, now prompted themselves with synthetic input. Dynamic data structures combed their own fact sets, feeding into each other. They called each other recursively, spontaneously discovering relations hidden in acquired material. They reviewed the residue of experience, pulling notions out of memory’s buffers and dressing them up as new tests. They began to train themselves, on hypotheticals of their own devising.
In short, version G could converse among parts of its own net. That net had grown so complex in its positing that it could not gauge the consequences of any one of its hypothetical worlds without rebuilding that whole world and running it in ideational embryo.
Imp G, in other words, could dream.
C. NEEDED TO find out. That simple. How Dutch was she? No way of knowing, short of going. How American? She had worried the place she lived for too long, tugging at cuffs that no longer ran much past her elbows.
“It’s not you, Beau. It’s me.” She was not happy here. This continent. She never adjusted to the land of her birth. A quarter century, and she couldn’t make a go of it. Perhaps it was time to head to the unknown home.
There was a place lodged somewhere inside her. It sprang up through earliest training. Its streets grew peopled on long-repeated stories. The grandfather policeman. The thirty-two aunts and uncles and their adventures in reversible time. The hundred-plus chorus of first cousins dying, birthing, marrying, and being born, pouring out of the parish register. Butchers, bakers, and historymakers scaling the family beanstalk that had burst from the ground on a few magic seeds.
But alongside this phantom of childhood prompting lay the real village, E. C., almost alone of people, could put myth to the test. She might step over the stile. She could move to the place. Go live in the source of memory laid down for her in advance. One plane ride, and she’d close forever the lifelong gap that had held her at arm’s length from her own interior.
“I’m not going without you, Beau.”
But in fact, C. was already gone. Love—or perhaps mere loyalty—required that she extend emigration to me. Wish, though, was another matter. Without knowing, I’d become part of the problem. C. needed to flee a whole complex of associations. She fled promotion, career, the renewable lease, English, the sorrow of retail, U., North American early mass Alzheimer’s, a faked national past, that history’s triple-packaging, evenings at the Taylors, all the two-part singing, our first shot at real friends, the memory of paper Christmas trees taped to the wall, our old five-year plan, the obligating gift of my first book, that story’s success, my overwrought care for her, my hope, me.
I couldn’t tell what she wanted. There were as many things she ran from as toward. I knew only that if I left with her—as I would have, in a second—the place she arrived in would never be hers.
Still, C. needed to cut a deal. Sometimes at night, just before departure, she launched herself into frightened feedback, scared witless by the decision she’d reached. Each time, it took more to assure her. And only a reassurance as simple as the one we fed each other could have slipped past our combined better judgment.
Our deal was as simple as the choke of love. She would move in with her parents. She’d look for a place. Find work. Assimilate. Learn how things were done. When she belonged, after she felt right, she’d send for me. And I’d come, leaving behind everything but notebooks, tax records, a few changes of clothes, my work-in-progress, and the all but obsolete guitar.
Even that much safety net had to be fatal. Maybe I knew as much, even as C. boarded her bargain flight to Luxembourg. Reaching for a rung that isn’t there requires a tumbler’s leap of faith. Grip must surrender to total emptiness. Any hedge spells midair disaster.
We wrote absurdly—three times a week. The edges of our paragraphs vanished, slit off in opening the sealed aerogram flaps. The pennies we saved over first class we squandered uncountable times over in transatlantic calls. We learned to time the satellite uplink delays. Speak, pause, listen to response, pause, speak again, as if the simplest exchange of “do you still love me?”s required incalculable recursive computation.
C.’s communiqués grew from shaky to guardedly confident. She loved her work, temporary typing jobs three notches below the work she’d done in U. She found a one-bedroom nest, perfect for us. She learned the strange new rules of the game, the different ways even the simplest task got transacted. She went to school, swapping her fluent dialect for standard Dutch. She kept her Chicago-accented Limburgs alive at birthdays and anniversaries, one every other day. This, at the hour when dialect itself was dying.
She built her letters into stories for me. I was the foreign family now, listening in to the further repository of E.’s triumphs and tragedies. I thought she would reach the village and not recognize a soul. Instead, she fell in with the imaginary tale’s cast as if she had grown up with them. Which she had. To my astonishment, C. learned that her mother, the tale-teller, had spun out some recognizable variant of truth all those years.
Either that or C., now that she had the window bed, wasn’t about to let me down by telling me the view was all brick wall. Her accounts spilled continuous color. The inseparable auntie sisters, at seventy, falling out over the one’s new boyfriend. The Roman coin discovered in an uncle’s plowed bean patch. The death of a cousin, crushed on the highway by a monstrous roll of paper that had broken free from the truck ahead of his. The nephew’s accordion renditions of this week’s pop idol, the Dutch Diana Ross. Kermis and Carnaval excursions, hilarious binges on green herring and cherry beer.
You make what you think might be a vase for the blooms you are carrying. You tell the stories you need to tell to keep the story tellable.
I gave her everything I could in return. My every predication attempted assurance. Of course you need to do this. It’s right. Long overdue. I’m behind you. Anything. Every avowal must have been a small death for C.
My letters were slight things, heavy on romance and style. Thick with linguistic cleverness. For want of a better gambit, I played for sentiment and laughs. “Dear sweet. Words cannot say. Love, R.” Every other sentence bore some reference to our private taal, one of the library of catchphrases we’d built up to shorthand our hearts and their shared enterprise. But the pages I sent her were light on stuff. Had I served her more meat, she might never have left home.
When C. took off, nothing remained to keep me from my new profession’s chief occupational hazard. I joked about it, writing to her, but it was true. I now spent eight to twelve hours at a pop in the horizontal. I lay in bed, a keyboard across my lap, drawing on principal. Shooting the inheritance. Creating a world from memory.
I’d found what I needed to do on this earth. And like Tristram, taking longer to describe his birth than birth had taken him the first time through, I saw I would never catch up with myself. I wanted no more stimulation than white stucco. To say no more than what I’d already seen required no more than shutting my eyes. Looking away for a long time.
I meant to reverse-engineer experience. Mind can send signals back across its net, from output to in. An image that arrived through light’s portal and lit up the retinoptic map on its way to long-term storage could counterflow. Sight also bucked the tide, returned from nothing to project itself on back-of-lid blackness. This special showing required just a bed on the floor of an otherwise empty room, the place all novelists end up. Only, I had ended up there too soon.
I thought that having a book in print would square me with my father. I must have hoped my novel’s mere existence would vindicate that packet of Yukon chapbooks that reached me after his death.
But publication, even prizes, repaid nothing. I would never be able to put so little as a bound galley in the man’s hands. In the last configuration of Dad’s net, a half century in the training, I would remain a gifted student of physics who chose to squander his abilities on English lit. And not even the good stuff, at that.
I was able to give a copy of my three farmers to Taylor, however. “Here. This is for ruining a promising scientific career.” The tease of blame held some slight sweetness to it now. He found the story good. I’d done something with the list he taught me. I’d contributed my bit. Extended the improvised story. But Taylor, alone of all my living friends, knew that this book solved nothing for me in the wider lens.
I needed to bring the cause closer to home. Between my killing assurances to C., I found myself working on a stranger love letter. It shaped itself as a set of nested Russian dolls. For the longest time, I could not tell which of several frame tales held my story and which were the supporting simulations.
I found myself writing about a white-wood, A-framed house in a corn town that left an impression on me out of all proportion to the two years I’d lived there. I watched myself describe a man, holed up in his room, stuck in the horizontal, trying to come up with a story that would save the world.
One by one, I resuscitated the stories my father had raised me on. Yesterday’s futures. His father’s hand-smashing anger. His immigrant mother. That unknown kid, his brother, whose wartime death changed my life forever. That night at Alamogordo when, younger than I now was, Dad watched mankind’s first, artificial sunrise.
I seemed to be writing my way toward a single scene. The three-quarter point, the dramatic showdown in a Veterans hospital, where father and son take leave of each other. I remembered the hospital. I remembered the conversation, all but verbatim. But I seemed to need to reinvent it from scratch.
The man and the boy play Name That Poem. The son tries to stump the chump with famous bits of Yeats and Eliot. The father quotes at length from Kipling and Robert Service, pieces no one has touched for decades. Not since the man read them to his children.
My pop—something I never called my own; that one was the name both C. and I used for hers—grew into history’s huckster. Working alone, that year, I came to see him again, quizzing his kids, running them through the necessary training. Heavy on the questions, light on answers. It all came back to me, the stimulus-response he hoped would give the helpless Hobson children some sense of where the Big Picture had set them down.
