John Sladek - The Complete Roderick

‘Penitent? No, I just, I have to be there, that’s all.’

‘For the tests, sure.’

‘Not just the tests.’ He picked up a styrene fork and looked at it. ‘I can’t explain it but — Roderick’s there, his mind is right there and I — have to be inside it. I mean, I have to make up his thoughts, and at the same time — I am a thought.’

‘Think for him, you can’t even think for yourself, sitting there starving in front of a hot meal — how much do you weigh now, hundred and twenty? Hundred and fifteen? Take that fork in your hand and use it, how’s that for thinking?’

Dan’s hand obeyed, scooping up a forkful of mashed potato. ‘See, it’s just that it’s gone too far to stop now. They can’t stop us now, can they? No, because it would be, it’s almost murder.’

‘Just eat, will you?’

‘No, but it’s gone too far. He’s alive, Ben. Roderick’s alive. I know he’s nothing, not even a body, just content-addressable memory. I could erase him in a minute — but he’s alive. He’s as real as I am, Ben. He’s realer. I’m just one of his thoughts.’

‘You said that.’

‘I did? A thought repeating itself.’ Dan’s hands finally seized the knife and fork and started feeding him with regular automatic motions. Franklin watched him eat, the tendons moving in his cheeks, one hand pausing now and then to flick back the hair from his eyes. The grubby spiral notebook remained pinned down under his left elbow.

‘Oh, happy birthday, by the way. What are you, twenty-three?’

‘Yem.’

‘Ha ha, have to watch it, getting almost too old there Dan — I mean, it’s a young man’s game: Turing was only twenty-four when he—’

‘Yem.’ The dot of mashed potato on Dan’s chin stopped moving for a moment. ‘Twenty-four, huh?’

‘Of course I’m, I’m thirty-six myself…’ And from this bleak perspective, Ben Franklin looked over the field (to which he had as yet made no contribution): there was A. M. Turing, twenty-four when he conceived of mechanizing states of mind. There was Claude Shannon, twenty-two when he discovered the spirit of Aristotle in a handful of switches and wiring. There was — hell, there was Frankenstein, completing his creation at nineteen (the age at which Mary Shelley completed hers). And there was Pascal, inventing the first calculating machine at the age of eighteen — time is, time was, and death approaches, intruding on our calculations.

If the Buddhists have it right, the world is completely destroyed 75,231 times per second, and each time completely restored. In all the worlds of Ben’s 38 years, there was nothing worth saving; he could die now, saying with the dying Frankenstein: ‘Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this! I myself have been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.’ The other being Dan, damn him! Caught in the invisible flicker at Buddhist worlds (in the VHF band), Ben stared at his future.

‘Turing took cyanide,’ he almost said, but changed it to: ‘See? You were hungry.’

‘Yes, I guess I — thanks.’ Dan wiped his narrow chin, belched, flicked back the lock of hair that fell again over his eyes. ‘Thanks.’

‘Least I can do. Fong thinks you’re Roderick’s guiding genius, and he should know. The dark figure of Sidonia behind the—’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. What I want to know is, how can I help?’

‘But you are helping. You’re writing program—’

‘Sure, pieces of test crap, you call that help, anybody could do that. I don’t even know what’s being tested, you won’t let me handle anything in the lab. Christ, what good is my degree? A master’s in Cybernetic Humanities, my whole thesis on learning systems and what do I get to do? Piddly little pieces of test program, any kid could handle that.’

‘No, your stuffs good, really good. Once I rewrite it, it goes—’

Franklin sat up. ‘You what?’

‘Rewrite it. Listen, I have to, it’s good stuff but it’s not inside his head, it’s — I have to rewrite it from the inside.’

‘You sonofabitch, I don’t believe you.’

‘No, really. Look, right here.’ Dan’s clawless fingers clawed open the notebook. ‘Look, right here where you set up this Bayesian strategy for generalizing from past experience, that’s fine for poker-playing machines but look here, I had to simplify — I mean, not simplify exactly, but Roderickify, see?’

Ben Franklin stared at the page of diagrams. ‘But you — I don’t even recognize this, it’s not my work. Wait, let’s see where you go with this, I don’t — let me see that. Goddamnit, let go of the goddamned thing!’

One or two heads turned to watch them, two grown men struggling for possession of a grubby notebook. The girl in the ski sweater nudged her companion, who was bending over to peer at a signature on the white plaster: Felix Culpa.

‘Damn you, let go! I’ve got a right — see my own damn work, let go!’ Ben ripped out the page and spread it on the table, holding it with both hands while he studied the symbols cramped into little boxes. His cheeks and ears turned a deeper red.

‘Jesus! And this — it works?’

‘Yes. Give it back.’

‘Just a minute, I’ve never seen anything like this. Dan, this is — it’s beautiful. You took that half-baked idea of mine and you just — you redeemed it, that’s what. You redeemed it.’

‘Give it back.’

Ben passed over the ragged page and watched him trying to press it back on the spiral. ‘I’m sorry, Dan. Had no idea, Fong always said you were good but I mean I never see any of your work, you’re always so goddamned secretive. I mean, you never even publish, for Christ’s sake, work like this and you never even publish. What about the Journal of Machine Learning Studies, or any of the AI—’

‘Publish?’ Dan hunched forward, protecting the notebook with his knobby wrist. ‘No, I don’t publish. It’s not the point. It’s not what I’m working for, my name in some AI journal, I don’t have time, see?’

‘But that’s how you buy the time, publishing. How do you think somebody like Czernski got the Norbert Wiener Chair of Cybernetics at—’

‘Anyway, why should I? Roderick’s mine, think I want to stick him in some AI journal for everybody to rip-off? He’s private, he’s not another toy for some toy company, I don’t want to see him crammed inside some plastic Snoopy doll. I don’t want him grabbed up by some Pentagon asshole to make smart tanks.’

‘Don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ Ben lit a cigarette. ‘Applications, what the hell do you care about applications? Feel like I’m sitting here with Alexander Graham Bell, he’s invented this swell gadget only he’s afraid to tell anybody about it, in case some loony uses it to make dirty phone calls. Point is, you can’t keep something like this to yourself, you just can’t, that’s all.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s important, that’s why not. It’s too important to be left to one person. At least — at least let me help, I mean really help.’ The fibreglass chair creaked as he sat back. ‘Look, I know I’m not good enough to follow you all the way, just give me a glimpse, a Pisgah perspective, okay? This is, I feel like it’s the fifth day of Creation or something, the foreman tells me to collect a couple of wheelbarrows of mud and wheel it over to Eden, no one bothers telling me what it’s for. Only I’ve got to know. I’ve got to be in on it, even in some little way, Jesus, it’s the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do. Why I went into machine intelligence in the first place, all those damned boring years playing with language translators and information retrieval systems and even poker players all I ever wanted was to create something, all right, help create something. Okay, okay don’t say it. I know my limitations. I’m intelligent but not creative, fine, only — at least I could help?’