Galatea 2.2, page 31
I stood paralyzed. Instinct instructed me to duck down until sanity condescended to flit back to the feeder. I would have, had not another uniform shouted from the hall, behind a human trail drive. “Let’s go. Move it, now.”
I told Helen I would be right back.
In the main corridor, people congregated, vocalizing. The uniforms tried to move them along, with limited success. One officer gestured back toward Lentz’s. “Is everyone out of there?”
I threw my hands up in the air. They came down clasped, against my head. “Yes,” I screamed at him. And followed in shame to the safety outside.
There a police line condensed, a bumblebee black-and-yellow plastic strip erecting a barricade from nothing. One of those two-D Euclidean imaginaries that separate the sentient body from the site of politics. The Center’s refugees clustered in chains, splitting and linking, staring back at the magnificent, emptied building as if the mystery might yield to visual inspection. Researchers clumped in conversation; even clueless outrage had to be talked out.
The police herded back the mass. They told everyone to go home until further notice. The MRI team, beyond frantic, pressed for information. Their equipment trapped inside the building included a behemoth prototype that cost more than the GNPs of half a dozen southern nations. I saw Ram at a distance. He was trying to comfort a distraught colleague whose brain bursts could have been read from across campus without an imager.
I came across Chen and Harold in the crowd. They stood picking lint off each other’s tweed jackets. “Hey, Ricko,” Harold greeted me. “Bomb scare. Somebody made a threat this morning on the radio call-in program.”
“Hey,” Chen echoed. He turned back to Harold. “Why you are not nervous?”
“Ha. I’ve done this before.”
“The Center has had bomb scare before?”
“Oh, not here. In another life.”
“Harold,” I interrupted. “She’s still in there.”
His face ticked with panic. “She can’t be. She’s—” He drew up short when he hit on whom I meant. “Oh, for God’s sake. You have her backed up somewhere, don’t you?” His irritation was audible and crushing.
“Harold. She’s not a program. She’s an architecture. She’s a multidimensional shape.”
“You run her on silicon, don’t you? Somebody downloads all those hosts to tape every week and archives them to remote sites.”
“But she doesn’t run on one machine. Her parts are spread over more boxes than I can count. She’s grown to scores of subassemblies. Each one takes care of a unique process. They talk to each other across broadband. Even if we had the connects and vectors for each component system, we’d never get her reassembled.”
Harold fell quiet. I could follow his thoughts. If the threat detonated, Helen would be the least of the Center’s tragedies. The real hostages—clues to mental illness and immunological disorders, cathedrals of supercomputer engineering, insights into complexities from market turbulence to weather—dwarfed our strange sideshow. Only respect for the hours I’d put into the training kept him from annoyance. He gave me too much credit to credit what I thought.
“Well.” He grimaced. “There seems to be no way to rescue her, then.”
“Humorous,” Chen decided. Chen was a theoretician. Chen stood to lose nothing, even if the fifty-five-million-dollar building and its irreplaceable contents collapsed in rubble.
I walked away, furious at idiocy in all its levels. My mind raced, and I gunned it. The Quad teemed with undergrads, heading for their two o’clock, indifferent to the fact that their campus flagship was about to blow.
Reflex landed me in front of English. The basement computer lab might have crawled with my colleagues. A. might have been there. I would not have known. I linked in to the Center over the coaxial backbone. I could not hear Helen’s voice to read how it sounded. But the words that came across the screen asked, “Something is happening?”
I told her what was happening, as best as I could figure it.
“Helen could die?” Helen asked. “Extraordinary.” She’d liked the story of how the novelist Huxley, on his deathbed, had been reduced to this one word.
She waited for me to say something. I could think of nothing to say. Helen had to do all the talking. “To a little infant, perhaps, birth is as painful as the other.”
“Bacon,” I said. It had not been that long.
“Francis Bacon,” she encouraged me. “What says Browne? Sir Thomas?” she quizzed. By emulation.
“We all labor against our own cure.”
“Never mind.” She often said Never mind when I think she meant Don’t worry. “Death will cure all the diseases.” She meant that I, too, could pass the exam. If I put my mind to it.
In the end, the day belonged to those who stuck with the status quo. By evening, the Center’s bomb scare had never happened. Time’s hoax-to-explosion ratio increased infinitesimally.
The perpetrator was a junior professor in philosophy with a book out on Austin and Wittgenstein who, for reasons that now seemed obvious, had just been denied tenure. The police snagged the “Short-Fuse Philosopher” when he called the radio station back to elaborate.
Booked and jailed, he stuck by this second call, a linguistic equivocation that he seemed to hope would keep him from a decade in prison. He claimed his threat was never more than a moral subjunctive. The Center was draining the university dry, reducing the humanities to an obsolete, embarrassing museum piece. He’d made his point, he said. If there were any justice, there would have been a bomb. He’d proclaimed no more than hypothetical detonation, for which he expected no more than a hypothetical sentence.
“SHE’S CONSCIOUS,” I accused Lentz, the instant he unpacked.
He mugged. “Welcome back to you, too, Marcel. Pronouncements, still? Sure she’s conscious. At least as conscious as a majority of the state legislature.”
“I’m serious.” I told him about the bomb evacuation. About tapping in to Helen from the remote link while she was trapped in the building. “She asked me if something was happening. She figured out what was going on. She knew what it spelled for her.”
Lentz jerked his neck back, unable to decide whether to delight in my ingenuousness or to decimate it. “Are we back to Implementation C?” The one where the humans combined to sucker me. “Weizenbaum’s ELIZA? The Rogerian psychologist simulator? ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine, thanks.’ ‘Let’s talk about why you think you are fine.’ Powers, you’re like the student who stumbled onto a terminal where the program was running and thought—”
“No comparison.”
I remembered the story. The student thinks he’s on a Teletype, talking to a human. He converses, growing frustrated at the program’s metagames. Finally, he dials the phone and gets the human he thinks he’s been typing to. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” “What do you mean, what the hell do I think I’m doing?”
“No comparison. Don’t insult me, Lentz. I know what she said.”
“Rick. She associates. She matches patterns. She makes ordered pairs. That’s not consciousness. Trust me. I built her.”
“And I trained her.” Lentz just stared at me, until I snapped. “Since you are all-knowing about matters mechanical, perhaps you can tell me how you came to be such a patronizing little shit.”
By way of answer, he stood up. I saw us fighting, and wondered how I might even the odds enough so that beating him to a bloody pulp would have more than just clinical interest.
Lentz walked over to Helen’s console and flipped on the microphone. She burbled, as she always did, at the promise of renewed communication.
“How do you feel, little girl?”
“I don’t feel little girl.”
He faced me. “Gibberish. She doesn’t even get the transformation right.”
“You’re kidding me. You don’t see …? She means all sorts of things by that. She could—”
“All the meanings are yours.” He returned to the mike. “Were you frightened?”
“What you is the were for?”
“Damn it, Helen. We’re giving you quality time here. Please tell me: what hell that mean?”
“It’s obvious,” I answered for her. “She wants to know which Helen you are asking. Which one in time.”
“Oh. You mean: ‘When?’ But let’s not take points off for style. You realize that a conscious entity just coming through the fright of her life would know which ‘you’ I was talking about.”
“It wasn’t a big deal to her. She didn’t make any special—”
“Please, Marcel. I’m asking her. Were you frightened yesterday, Helen?”
“Frightened out of fear.”
“What’s that from, Powers?”
“Antony and Cleopatra.”
“When did you train her with it?”
“Two days ago.”
“This is worse than key-word chaining. She’s neither aware nor, at the moment, even cognitive. You’ve been supplying all the anthro, my friend.”
“I’m not your friend. I thought you were an advocate. I thought you believed in the capability of nets.”
“I am. I do.”
“But just as a sleight of hand.”
“The bet was, we could build a distributed net whose text interpretation reasonably mimicked an arrested human’s. All we contracted to was product. We didn’t promise to duplicate anything under the hood.”
“A kind of black-box forgery, you mean.”
Lentz just shrugged. “That’s operationalism. The Turing Test. Can you pass off your simulation as functionally equivalent to the thing you’re simulating?”
“There’s an error lurking in there somewhere.”
“Explain yourself, Marcel.”
I flung my hand out toward Helen’s console. “Full ‘functional equivalence’ would mean consciousness. If you simulate everything completely, then you’ve modeled the whole shape and breath of the living package. How does the black box behave when operations challenge themselves? When function looks under its own hood?”
Lentz grimaced. “Elan vital, Marcel. Mysticism.”
“A behavior is not just its implementation. Function also has to include …” But I didn’t know what else to call what function had to include. I felt slightly out of control. That mundane contradiction in terms. “How would we know, then, whether a perfect copy …? When does an imitation become the real thing?”
Lentz scrunched up, bothered. “What’s the real thing? What would it take to simulate awareness? Awareness is the original black box. Stop and think of the put-up job that high-order consciousness itself works on us. ‘Everything’s under control. Everything’s handled—unanimous, seam-free.’ The brain is already a sleight of hand, a massive, operationalist shell game. It designs and runs Turing Tests on its own constructs every time it ratifies a sensation or reifies an idea. Experience is a Turing Test—phenomena passing themselves off as perception’s functional equivalents. Live or Memorex? Even that question is a simulation we fall for every second of our waking lives.”
“Irks care the crop-full bird?” Helen burst in. “Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?”
Lentz almost spit in mid-clause. “Marcel. I have to grant you. She does have a disconcerting ability to pull appropriate quotes.”
“Lentz! Listen to her. You think those are just quotes to her?” I felt myself getting hysterical. “What if they’re real? What if she means something by them?”
“What if my grandmother had had testicles?”
“She’d be your grandfather,” Helen reassured him.
I stared at Lentz’s face, where a stain of dismay spread over the icy deep.
CHILDREN WERE OUT of the question. They always had been. And now more than ever.
“C. We’ve talked about this. There are a billion and a half too many of us already. How can we two be parents? We don’t even know what we’re doing or where we want to live.”
She flashed me a look. She knew what she was doing. She knew where she wanted to live.
“Which is it?” she mouthed.
“Which is what?”
“Which is your reason? The billion and a half too many? Or the two of us?”
For years—forever—my reason had been C.’s. She’d seemed set, pleased with what we had. I’d always thought the choice was mutual. Now I saw it had all been me. C. had drawn the whole curve of her adult life out of deference and fear. Three months from graduation, she came up empty-handed. There was nothing left to be afraid of.
“Why didn’t we ever get married?” she wanted to know.
“I thought that was all right with you.”
“What does that mean, Rick?”
“I promised you my life, in privacy. It’s easy to break a public contract. You just go to court. You can’t break a private promise.” And leave, with nothing, the one you promised all.
“How come we never signed the contract, too? What could it have hurt? I wanted everyone to think you were proud of me.”
“Oh, C. Proud? I love you. Who is going to know that if we don’t?”
“What were you holding back, Ricky?”
“Nothing. You have everything.”
She challenged me with silence. If that’s true, then ask me. Ask me now.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t even say why I couldn’t. I always insisted I could make C. happy. But all that insisting left her more convinced of her unworthiness. Even if a public pact had worked, she’d always have resented being deeded someone else’s happiness.
I meant to stay with C. forever, in precariousness. I knew no other way to continue that scrapbook we had started, seat-of-the-pants style, a decade before. My refusal to marry her was a last-ditch effort to live improvised love. It was my holding back. My failing her. My departure.
Gold Bug appeared in the States. Half a world away was not far enough for safety. When I finished my double thwarted love story, I thought that judgment was irrelevant. But life begins and ends in judgment. C. and I kept still and hoped for reprieve.
We got what we hoped. The book won a slice of attention. Those who still read read with a promiscuous hunger that would try anything once. Readers persisted in searching for a desperate, eleventh-hour fix. It might take any form at all, even this long, molecular strangeness.
C. and I flinched for weeks, coiled, waiting to be hit. The blow, when it fell, was a clap on the back. We sat dazed at the breakfast table, passing back and forth the glossy weekly with a readership even here, in our little ex-coal-mining town, where English was exotic novelty.
“That’s not you, is it?” My first public photo made C. laugh bitterly. “I wouldn’t recognize you without the caption.”
“It’s a haircut double,” I tried, too hard. “Another reclusive writer with the same name, trying to pass himself off as Dutch. But note the palm trees in the background.”
“You’ve made it, Beau. You’ve arrived.”
I heard it in C.’s voice. My success killed her last chance. Somehow we’d lost our story.
“Nothing’s changed, C. It’s still the same book. I’ll write the next one the same way. For the same reasons.” To extend the parallax you give me and help refract sense from everything we come across.
She looked away, no longer believing or satisfied by belief.
I grew gentle. C. never could endure gentleness. She might have survived yelling. She might have been able to live with me, had I fought fair and shown anger.
“Buddy. Sweetheart. What do you want? Just tell me what you want.”
But the only thing she’d ever wanted was the thing I took away by doing for her.
We fell. C. became skittish. She buried herself in schoolwork, her final translation project. She’d sit for meals, but do no more than nibble, chafe, and make polite conversation. Sometimes she grew giddy, hilarious. Her generosity screamed for help. She showered me in attentions and gifts—dried banana mixes, a pair of field glasses to spy on frescoed church vaults, books she knew I coveted but would never buy for myself.
Her hours became erratic; I never knew when I would see her or who she would be when I did. One night, she failed to come home at all. From the balcony where I always watched her get off the bus, I clocked the empty coaches each half hour until they stopped running. After midnight, as I prepared to phone the police, she called. She was all right; she’d explain when she got in.
That night was a night such as everyone spends at least once in life. C. walked in around midmorning. We couldn’t look at each other.
“I’d better pop you some corn,” I told her. Always one of her favorites.
“Ricky. Don’t. Don’t be nice to me. I can’t bear it.”
I popped her some corn. Not to outhurt her. To have something to do with my hands. I brought the bowl to where she sat. She would not look up, say a word, or eat.
“C. Beau. Say something. What’s happening?”
C. froze, the classic small mammal in the headlights. Only: I was the headlights. It took me ten years, but at last I learned it. That comfort she showed me on the Quad—the internal calm I loved and built my own on—was dread. Paralysis. Her crumpled, engaging smile had never been more than sheer terror.
She said nothing. The more I needed to hear, the harder she bolted. My need gagged her, and her silence made me desperate.
“It’s somebody else,” she sneered. “That’s what I’m supposed to say, right?”
“Is it somebody else?”
“I don’t know.”
“Suppose it were somebody else.”
“P. At the Institute.”
“Your teacher? The one that makes the Dutch girls cry?”
But that sadistic skill was mine alone. And C., in tears, chose her nationality.
LOVE BECAME FIERCE after that. Sex, stripped of all ends, went ballistic. Our shy, awkward, ten-year delectation turned to sick and lovely heroin, worth any degradation to suck up. Doomed pleasure injected us with rushes neither of us knew we could feel. Caresses, each the last, burned in their care, and bites that began as tender mnemonics left bruises lasting weeks.
Our last abandoned love act delivered the violence we were after. That night, in the dark, in our blushing bed, we sexed each other like alley strays, grilling each other’s skins with nails, teeth, anything that would hook. We choked on those forbidden little cries that stoke lust by flattering it. We told desire that everything else was a lie. That we were not us until mindless in itch, incapable of any more than the odd feral syllable.
