Margaret St. Clair: The Best of Margaret St. Clair

The candy-making seems to be slackening. A few more trays of Victoria brittle materialize. A pause. And now, through Jake’s sensors, I perceive a new smell. Herby, thymy, oily, sharp, and over all, the smell of the divine herb, garlic. It’s a pleasant change from all that sugary stuff.

I suppose— yes, Jake has turned its talents toward salad making. We’re getting Caesar salad, Chefs salad, Russian salad, tossed green salad, potato salad, avocado and grapefruit, Waldorf, alfalfa and mung bean sprout salads, and even an assortment of lowly coleslaws and some wilted lettuce and dandelion greens. Pickles, relishes, chow-chows, kim chee, and antipas to follow. Yet I seem to feel a sort of despair in Jake’s thoughts as it works its way back through the cuisine toward soup.

Without any perceptible pause, Jake’s food production has switched from salads to meat dishes. But there’s not nearly the abundance here that there was earlier. Sweetbreads en brochette, steak Diane, saddle of venison, broiled salmon steaks and a few others, and then everything stops. I feel a long and somehow exhausted silence. But Jake can’t really have given up. It may have run out of optimism temporarily, but I doubt it has run out of ideas.

I wish I could curl up somewhere and go to sleep.

Actually, being “dead”—being in the deep freeze—wasn’t half bad. It didn’t hurt at all, and there was no anxiety connected with it. But I think my thought processes have been a little slow ever since. It’s as if a human brain had been a little too long deprived of oxygen, without being made positively imbecile. Perhaps some of my circuits—the electrical circuits that make up my dim and ghostly personality—may have been damaged or corroded in the long wait.

One thing I really don’t understand is how Jake can be so infernally stupid. Weren’t there, among the billions and billions of personalities in its memory banks, any geniuses, heroes, poets, saints? What became of those who “left the vivid air signed with their honor”? Jake isn’t so much a case of the lowest common denominator as it is a reaching of the lowest level of the lowest. The only answer that comes to me is my former analogy of stirring up all the colors in a box of paints.

Much later: There’s an enormous sense of bustle, of intense preparation, in Jake’s thoughts. It seems to have decided to focus all its resources (which used to be coterminous with the resources of the entire planet) on one last attempt. Changes—gross physical changes—seem to be taking place in a considerable portion of the enormous computer establishment. The mounds, the mountains, the avalanches of food have been cleared away, and shapes and structures are being tried and discarded one after another kaleidoscopically. It’s very confusing. I wish I knew—really knew—what is going on.

J. seems completely absorbed in this latest attempt I think—yes, I think it’s safe to risk it. In this vast expenditure of energy, any minute drain I might make ought to go unnoticed. I’m going to “think” real sensory perceptors for myself into being.

Later: My eyes and ears have been in existence now for what seems a considerable time. And I still have no idea what’s going on. It seems there’s a parallel construction and removal taking place. But why? And of what? I’ll try to sort out for my own satisfaction what I actually perceive.

Well, then, the servo-mechanisms seem to be clearing a space about fifty kilometers long in Jake’s entrails. I had to “think” an extension of my visual system into being to make out that much. What they’re clearing out seems primarily personality storage banks. It makes me a little alarmed. What if my own cell should be among them? But the servos appear to be concentrating on the older elements.

The cleared space is linear with, as far as I can make out, a slight curvature along its length. At one end it comes up against a blank wall of undisturbed personality storage banks. The other end of the long tunnel appears to be open to the air outside (if it still is air). The diameter of this horizontal shaft is about ten kilometers. These measurements are wholly approximate, of course. The surface of the tunnel is angular and rough, which is only reasonable considering what has been removed to make it.

The construction—but I am much less sure of this than I am of the removal—seems to be external. It’s a towering pylon, without the Gothicism of most of Jake’s architecture, probably a few kilometers longer than the interior tunnel and probably a little greater in diameter, with a roughly hexagonal tip. I believe it’s being constructed out of the memory banks that the servos previously removed from J.’s interior. Admirable economy! Waste not, want not. It contrasts strongly with J.’s profligacy when it was trying to win itself by its achievements as a cook.

The pylon-shaping process is still going on. The servos are using a good deal of force to make its elements cohere. The surface of the pylon appears to be, like that of the interior tunnel, angular and rough.

So far Jake has been using pre-existing parts of itself. Now a whole group of the servos—thirty at least—has withdrawn from the others and is waiting motionless. They aren’t silent, though. A continuous series of clucking noises, some soft and some loud, is coming from them. Are they making something? Time will tell. For the nonce, they have a quality that is both brooding and broody, a sort of cross between spiders and hens.

Later: The servos finally have begun to move around and around vertically over the surface of the interior tunnel, spirally and overlappingly, while they spray something on it out of openings on their sides I didn’t notice before. It’s a pinkish, spongy material that’s soupy and drippy at first but hardens to a deep cushion in a little while. Meanwhile, the external construction seems to have stopped.

The spraying of the interior tunnel goes on and on until the whole length of the tunnel is coated with it and all its roughnesses and angularities are erased.

The group of servos has moved on to the outside. Here, because of the gravity, it’s taking them considerably longer. But they seem to be spraying the exterior pylon with the same pinkish, fast -setting gunk they used on the inside.

Around and around and around, around and around and around. At last there comes a pause. The servos slip down the pylon and cluster around the opening of the horizontal internal tunnel. Another pause. Then a series of mighty creaks and groans begins, the shriek of metal on metal, a noise of unpliancy. It is coming, I think, from the towering, recently sprayed shaft.

The noises get louder and more grating. They’re concentrated at the base of the shaft. The smooth octahedral top of the pylon is moving. It’s bending lower and lower. It appears to be descending toward—Toward the external opening of the tunnel. Oh, God. For a moment I feel as disgusted with myself as I chronically am with humanity. How could I have been so stupid? For it’s plain that what Jake is trying to do now has been in the cards from the beginning, from the moment it conceived its idiotic passion for itself. The towering pinkish pylon, the long horizontal pink tunnel, for Jake’s last desperate attempts to consummate its love. Jake is going to try to diddle itself.

The servos have moved out of the way. The heavy pinkish shaft is almost horizontal now. It broaches the opening of the long, long tunnel. The tunnel seems to dilate the shaft enters it.

The pylon is moving rather slowly. But at last it reaches the end of the tunnel and crunches against the plastic-coated memory banks. Slowly it withdraws, almost to the opening of the tunnel. It comes back again, a little more rapidly. Soon all this part of the computer establishment is vibrating with the blows. How long will it go on?