Robert Wilson - The Divide

Except that he did not sweep. And “superhuman” didn’t mean what it should. And he was not even especially gentle.

And worse—unless Dr. Kyriakides could do something about it—he might be dying, or at the very least losing himself … leaving me, Susan thought childishly; voyaging off, like her father, wherever people go when they leave their sullen, grieving families abandoned by the graveside.

But these were hospital thoughts. Susan walked down the corridor to a vending-machine cafeteria and bought herself a cup of coffee, hoping to shake the mood. Machine coffee in a styrofoam cup, cloyingly sweet and hot enough to raise blisters. She liked it.

When she got back to the waiting room Dr. Collingwood was there. He was a bear-shaped man, but not really large; he was only just as tall as Susan and the effect, as he turned to face her, was of some stern but basically amiable big animal. “This is Susan?” he asked.

Dr. Kyriakides nodded.

Collingwood said, “We have John in a room upstairs while we wait for time on the scanner. He asked for you to come up.”

Susan was a little flattered, a little frightened. She followed Collingwood to the elevators and up two floors, then down an identical corridor to a small room in which John was sitting in his hospital gown.

Collingwood closed the door and left them alone.

John motioned to a chair. Susan sat with her hands primly in her lap.

He said, “You look more nervous than I am.”

“Are you nervous?”

“Not about the PET scan. Apprehensive about the results, obviously. Hospitals frighten you?”

“Yes.” She didn’t explain why.

He said, “I brought this.”

He reached into a day bag beside his chair and lifted out a portable chess set in a folding wooden box. “We have some time to kill while they warm up the machinery. If you don’t mind, I thought I’d like a game.”

She smiled. “You’ll win.”

“But that’s not why I play.” He sounded almost sheepish. “I like the patterns. It’s like a dance. I like to watch it unfold. Is it all right?”

“Of course,” Susan said.

He cleared away a stack of magazines from the courtesy table and set up the game. Susan opened with her king’s pawn; John replied in kind. It was a gentle opening, a Giuco Piano, the so-called Quiet Game.

She studied the board. He said, “You think I’ve been avoiding you.”

She was startled out of her thoughts. “Well, I—”

“Because I have been. Not avoiding you personally. It’s just that I didn’t want to face the questions.”

She could only echo, “Questions?”

“The questions you never asked because you were afraid of what I might say. Questions about what I am. About what it’s like, being what I am.”

Susan felt herself blushing. What kind of monster are you? —it was true; the question had never been far away, had it?

She moved a knight, mainly to conceal her nervousness.

“I thought we should talk about it now,” John said. “If you want to.”

“I’ve thought about it,” she admitted. “I’ve tried to imagine it.”

“Did Max ever talk about me—about his work, in any detail?”

“I was never even allowed to see his lab animals. Nothing beyond the cellular level. Not much theory.”

“Part of the problem is that we don’t have an adequate vocabulary. People talk about ‘intelligence’ as if it consisted of certain discrete acts—solving problems, acquiring knowledge and storing it. Most of the standard tests reflect that. But it’s really a superstition. When you talk about intelligence what you’re dealing with is human consciousness, which is not simple or schematic. I think even Max knows better now.”

He advanced his queen’s knight pawn. Susan gazed at the board abstractly; she couldn’t concentrate on the game.

He said, “There’s an evolutionary question about intelligence, what it’s for and how it arose. There’s a theory that intelligence evolved along with the upright posture, and for a similar reason. Among other things, Susan, a neuron is a clock—a timing device. But a single neuron has a widely variable firing time—it’s a clock but not a very good one.” He brought out his king’s knight. “Two neurons are a little better, because the errors begin to average out. Three neurons are better still, and so on. And clocks are good for operations involving timing. For instance, a dog: a dog is fairly good at catching things. But a dog couldn’t throw a rock at a moving target even if the dog were anatomically equipped to do so. Taking aim at a moving target makes demands on the neural clock the dog just can’t meet. Even the primates: you can’t train an ape to throw a baseball with any accuracy. Making an accurate baseball pitch means solving a complex differential equation, and doing it on the molecular level. It takes neurons.”

Susan marched her king’s bishop down the ranks.

“If the theory is correct,” John said, “then we evolved all this neocortical tissue so that we could stand on our hind legs and throw stones. Consciousness—intelligence—was the unforeseen side effect. Because the very calculation, the act of estimating speed and distance, of picking up the stone and taking aim, it exiles you from time. You understand, Susan? ‘If the antelope is there, and I aim over there ’—it implies I and thou, self and other, birth and mortality. Makes you human. Not just I am but I was and I will be. Fruit of the tree of knowledge. It makes you the animal that stands just a little bit outside of time.”

His own bishop came rolling out. It was as if his hands were playing chess for him while he spoke. Susan responded with a reflexive pawn move, awed by this outrush of words.

“When Max was doing his work, of course, no one thought of intelligence this way. It was all much more linear: brains were calculating machines and we had better calculators than the apes. And there was no theoretical cap on it—you might imagine building a better brain the way the cybernetics people were upgrading Univac. Building a better human being. I think what Max imagined was a kind of ultimate Socialist Man, rational and benevolent.” John advanced his queen’s pawn a square, smiling to himself. “It didn’t occur to him that he might be creating the more perfect baseball player. Or that a man with more cortical tissue might have more terrifying dreams. Or that ‘intelligence’ is a kind of exile from temporal experience—that he might be engineering a creature more wholly alienated than anything that had walked the earth before. Lost in time. Your queen’s pawn.”

“What?” Susan was startled.

“You’re thinking of moving your queen’s pawn. Not a bad move, actually.”

“It’s that obvious?”

“There are only so many reasonable moves available—and you’re a reasonable player. But cautious, sometimes timid. That rules out a few things. Also, it’s not hard to tell what part of the board you’re focused on. And there are clues when you’re about to move. You lean forward a little. You clench your right hand. Yes, it’s that obvious.”

“I don’t like the idea of being so—transparent.”

“No one does.”

She hesitated, then pushed the pawn anyway. He continued, “This is by way of a warning.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You see, I know why you’re here. Here in this room, here with me. You’re here because you have the unusual perversion of falling in love with amiable monsters. And that’s what you mistook me for.”

This is the kind of monster I am, he was saying: a genuine one, and not amiable at all.

She should have answered with something polite and distancing (to reassure him); or she should have stood up and walked out (because he was right). She did neither. She was feeling reckless and disoriented; she obeyed a momentary impulse and stared back at him. “What about you? You don’t feel anything? You’re so g-goddamn aloof! That’s why you told me your life story that day in Kensington Market? That’s why you came back from your island?” She clenched her fists under the table. “Tell the truth: do you at least l-like me?”