Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"It's a long story."

Lentz cackled. "Don't press the man, Keluga. He's told every paper in the country that he doesn't like to talk about himself. About this list, Powers. You think you can find a copy somewhere?"

"Oh, the departmental files have scores of them."

Lentz looked about the table, his neck flared in challenge. "Anyone object to using this list as a test domain?"

Plover looked pissed. Hartrick hung her head. Ram began fidgeting in distress. Chen, who'd said nothing since I sat down, smiled uncertainly, at sea. Keluga was relishing the squabble, the way a kid might delight in seeing his parents drunk.

"Test of what?" I asked, as politely as possible.

"We're going to teach a machine how to read your list."

The words floored me. "You can do that?"

Plover scowled at Hartrick. "I thought you said you were going to bring back reinforcements."

Hartrick showed her palms, helpless. The token humanist had let them down.

Lentz inspected his nails. "As you see, what we can and cannot do is a matter of some difference of opinion."

Chen came to life. "It's to exaggerate," he said. Or perhaps, "That's too exaggerated." His English was impressionistic at best. "We do not have text analysis yet. We are working, but we do not have. Simple sentence group, yes. Metaphor, complex syntax: far from. Decades!"

He attached his attention to the technical edge of Lentz's bombshell. But I doubted Chen followed the charged subtext that the others were pitched in. I'd just started to pick up on what was at stake myself. And I'd passed the reading exam years ago.

"Chen, Chen. One of the quickest intellects in formal symbol-system heuristics." Lentz blessed him, fingers bent. "And still a step behind."

"Philip," Diana warned. She would pounce, if pushed. Tenure or no tenure. "Hyun? How long have you been in the country?"

"Four years." He paused to consider the implication. "About a piece in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience I tell you anything. No problem. What you want to know? But the first page of a big-print, supermarket, paperbacked love story? Forget it!"

We all laughed, each for our own reasons. After four years in the Netherlands, I would have been reduced to tears of frustration by such a conversation.

Ram was first to turn laughter into speech. "I am constantly getting complimented on my English by people who don't realize it is my first language."

"Would you sit this Master's Comp thing?" Plover asked him.

"Don't be kidding me. I mean, who is this Milton fellow to me, anyway?"

A moment of deflation all around suggested that Lentz's fantasy had been vanquished. He'd been caught in an undergraduate indulgence and forced to own up.

Plover sighed. "Well, Philip, I'm afraid it's back to real science with you." He raised his glass in a closing toast, and sipped.

"On the contrary. We're going to build a device that will be able to comment on any text on Marcel's six-page list."

"Oh, for God's sake!" Plover spit. "I've had it. The man's just provoking us."

Diana laid a hand on his shoulder to calm him. "And doing a fair job."

"We shouldn't even humor him."

"Youngsters." Lentz's wave included Keluga and me. Generous with the term. "Children, I give you radical skepticism at its finest."

"All right, then. Okay." Plover's tone rose. He pushed up his sleeves and loosened his collar. "Put your money where your mouth is."

Chen coughed a sharp monosyllable. It might have been a laugh. "Interesting phrase. Could your machine—?"

"Harold. We will do this thing, and do it with existing hardware, in no longer than — Marcel, how long are we to be graced with your fair presence?"

I looked at my watch. "What time is it now?" Nobody laughed. It must have been my timing.

I said that I had about ten months before I'd need to fabricate a real life. Lentz looked concerned. "It will be a rush job, but never mind. In ten months we'll have a neural net that can interpret any passage on the Master's list. Harold's choice. And its commentary will be at least as smooth as that of a twenty-two-year-old human."

Plover erupted. "Philip! You can't mean this. What about your work?"

"I've worked enough for one lifetime. Besides, wouldn't this have some professional interest, if we can carry it off?"

Plover glanced around the table. A last appeal. He hooked my eyes. His looked infinitely sad, afraid of forgetting what they were alarmed about. Say something, they urged. This is absurd.

"How are you going to evaluate?" I asked. Just crediting the proposal knocked Plover down another peg.

Lentz hunched his lip. "Standard Turing Test. Double-blind. Black-box both respondents. Give them each x hours to type out an answer."

"With Richard here as the guest literary judge?" Diana asked as if, for all the disappointment I had caused them, I might still be the last hope of the good.

Lentz coughed in mid-swig. "Not on your life. Powers here is going to be my research assistant. Who did you think I meant by 'we'?"

"We thought you were using the royal plural, Philip," Plover said. "Like you usually do."

Lentz condescended to address me. "You in? Or did you have something better to do?"

The world had enough novels. Certain writers were best paid to keep their fields out of production.

"Ten months? No. I wasn't doing much of anything." I spoke the words and betrayed my genus.

Plover, pushed to exasperation, cut bait. "All right, you two. Throw your lives away. I can't stop you." Harold, I decided, had at least one teenaged child.

Hartrick refused to capitulate. "Ram will judge," she said. Ram looked nonplussed. "He's as close to a disinterested, objective third party as we're going to get."

"I tell you, I don't know this Milton chap from Adam."

"That's your qualification. We'll name the human opposition when time comes. Meanwhile, what are the stakes?"

Lentz grew thoughtful. The vexatious child, called to account. "If we win, Harold has to give up his non-computational emergent Berkeley Zen bullshit."

The table sucked in its collective breath. Plover just snickered. "If you win, we'll all be getting pink slips. The whole thing is just too witless. Kindergarten. Mechanistic make-believe. I don't know what you're up to, Lentz. But you're gonna get me to bite. I'll bet the farm."

"And if you lose?" Diana enunciated, through a thin grin. She meant to extract casuistry's penalty in advance.

"If we lose, we'll give you a public retraction. A full apology, in print. The signed disgrace of your choice."

"Harold! Did you hear that? We finally have the man where we want him. Philip, you must be slipping."

"It's a trick," Keluga pronounced.

Lentz shook his head. "No trick."

"Of course it's a trick," Plover told the future's assembled jury. "But it just might be a trick worth paying to see."

"Too exaggerated," Chen said. He shook his head and smiled. He seemed not to realize that the deal had already been struck.

Diana pulled out her Portable Cervantes and read aloud the random sentence that fell under her bookmark. An illustration of the futility that this abrasive man and I were about to embark on. I can't remember the sentence. Out of context, I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

"Harold," she said. "If this huckster is right. ." She elbowed Lentz in the ribs. I didn't think he would brook being touched by another human, but he did. "If we're really at the point where we can formalize. ."

Plover raised an eyebrow. "Yes?"

"If they get their creature to read, do I still have to slog through this?"

Plover cast his head back, dignified in affront. "Yes. Of course."

"All of it?"

"If you want to remain friends."