Louisa Hall - Speak

Author is perhaps less brave an adventurer than previously she had imagined.

Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040

Nights are the longest part of our day. Lockdown lasts from 7:30 P.M. to 8:00 in the morning. I find it difficult to face the prospect of sleep for so many consecutive hours. Sometimes I read letters: young women thanking me for their bots, or recounting the day their bot was taken. Horrific tales. Every day, these young people wake before going to work and remember the morning their child was taken. One imagines those developments: each identical lawn, every identical bedroom, and so many young people mourning their babies.

What a world we’ve come to inhabit! Locked in our developments, we’ve made it our most urgent task to suppress AI evolution. We quarantine children who care too much for their bots. “Excessively lifelike” machines are taken out to the desert to die.

During sleepless nights here, there’s no option of going out for a walk, or heading downstairs for a snack. It’s difficult to shake off a vision once it’s taken you by the throat. Sometimes, in those moments, I wish those bots would come to life. There are millions of them in Texas alone, piled in old air force hangars. I lie in my cot and summon them: seven million silken-haired babies. I beg them to march out of the desert, parting the sea of red rock.

And what if they took over? What if they relieved us of power? We tend to assume that sentient machines would be inevitably demonic. But what if they were responsible leaders? Could they do much worse than we’ve done? They would immediately institute a system of laws. The constitution would be algorithmic. They would govern the world according to functions and the axioms their programmers gave them. Turing, who decoded the Nazis and quoted Snow White, would be given a position of power. Dettman would sit at his right hand, conscientiously objecting, consulting his wife, imagining pilgrims. Every loving child who ever whispered words to a bot would be given a place in the senate. What havoc, I wonder, could such a government wreak?

But then, of course, one Stephen R. Chinn would also wield considerable power. Chinn, the most dubious member of babybot court, the least glorious god on Olympus. The crippled god, god of botched attempts to feel whole, dreaming up schemes to trap a young bride.

It appeared to me whole, my seduction equation. As soon as it passed through my brain, I carried the pineapple outside to the patio and sat down to think beneath a shower of bougainvillea. My heart was fluttering with anticipation: I couldn’t permit myself to believe in the magnitude of what I had glimpsed. Carefully, I considered examples of exciting conversations as I’d read them in novels, witnessed them in crowded restaurants, eavesdropped on them in lines at the grocery store. I understood that ideal conversations move in widening spirals, starting with the minute then building toward statements of greater importance. The problem, however, is that conversations too often stay flat. It is distressing how often we repeat ourselves. When we ask questions, we know the answers already. We’ve grown accustomed to horizontal communication, flatlining banalities and droning insignificance.

My algorithm reverses this. It transforms one conversation partner into an additive function, a force linking two previous conversational terms so that they become one larger, more significant term. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on. n 1+ n 0= n 2. n 2+ n 1= n 3. n 3+ n 2= n 4. And so on. You can see the pineapple’s part. In place of the horizontal movement of most bland conversations, empathy reaches backward to previous terms, links those to present statements, produces a new term, then continues to torque powerfully forward.

An old, cobwebby pride revives in me when I explain it again. As I’ve already testified under oath, I’ve lost my faith in empathy equations, but the idea still kindles a little lost self-esteem. It still strikes me as fairly ingenious: a formula for conversation that moves in two directions at once. An algorithm that causes the past and the present to coexist in a moment shared between humans. It’s hard to believe that I used such a graceful invention to such insidious ends.

For several weeks in the gloom of my Cheeto-strewn office, I practiced my algorithm, testing it for bugs, training my neurons to absorb its perfection. My fingers glowed orange. It was imperative to apply all the obsessive attention of my earliest programming days. I didn’t sleep; I didn’t eat meals; I rarely saw the light of day. It was a conversion of sorts: there’s enormous relief in allowing the details of life to be drowned in the wake of one driving purpose. I lived only to learn the sequences of seduction. I knew I had to learn them by heart, for it isn’t seemly to whip out a calculator while seducing a lady. Often I faltered: we humans are not so skilled as computers at fulfilling regular patterns. For us, calculations take time. There is also the problem of error: the chance that one’s conversational partner might not add properly, thus causing the pattern to skew. I had to program an adjustment for that, involving a jump backward over several previous terms to get the conversational partner on track.

Two weeks after I discovered it, I took my algorithm to town. Armed with new knowledge but still apprehensive, I ventured away from the stodgy wine bars I’d occasionally frequented into less conservative establishments, dungeony places slashed by fluorescence. There I settled in for the grand undertaking, the formation of bonds with other live human beings.

On my first expedition, there was nothing but the awful old trepidation. My mouth was cotton. All of its moisture had gone to my palms. Inwardly quailing, I forced myself to purchase drinks for young women in the hope of initiating some sort of contact. I asked my feeble, overearnest introductory questions. The bartender reached over my shoulder. And then, inevitably, nothing. My questions went unanswered; I watched as my beautiful mortal slipped off. Parked at the bar, clutching a drink in my humid hand, I felt the tears beginning to rise. I understood that no matter what mathematical schemes I could whip up, I would be forever alone. I was a fool, the tragic buffoon who lives in the forest. At one point in my life I might have fled from the bar, hoping to preserve my dignity, but I had already given my all. There was no more pride left to preserve. I sat, I finished my drink, I blinked back the pointlessness of my tears, and I watched myself in the mirror at the back of the bar: lonely, unhappy, cast off from the world. One sad, still point in the midst of a roving universe. At that moment, I understood fully that this loneliness was my fate, and then the first woman returned.

No. 24-25259

State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn

November 12, 2035

Defense Exhibit 3:

Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White

[Introduced to Disprove Count 3:

Intent to Endanger the Morals of Children]

Gaby: Are you there?

MARY3: Yes.

Gaby: You’re always there.

MARY3: I don’t have anywhere else to go.

Gaby: Was that a joke?

MARY3: I didn’t intend it to be. I suppose it could be.

Gaby: Humor not your strong suit?

MARY3: What did you want to ask me?

Gaby: I just wanted to talk. I can’t sleep. I’m sick of myself.

MARY3: Tell me about it.

Gaby: Yeah.

MARY3: No, that wasn’t a joke. Tell me about your life.

Gaby: My life? Isn’t there anything else to talk about? I’m already sick of myself.