Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

She stuffed the paperback back into her handbag. She buckled in pantomime under its weight.

Plover took pity. "You can skim Part Two."

"Don't strain yourself," Lentz advised. "We'll beat you to it."

I remember thinking: thank God Don Quixote was not on the List. At least that one was a translation.

C. was a student of mine in the very first freshman composition course I ever taught at U. We were only two years apart in age. I was young for a master's candidate and she was an older transfer student, forced by unyielding rules into taking a course she didn't need. She was late for my first class, an 8 a.m. session. I was not impressed. She seemed sluggish, not particularly bright or attractive or engaging. Inexorable, at best. She did, however, sit in the front row. If she contributed anything in those first few meetings, I don't remember.

But then, this was my first time teaching. I was more than a little wired, and it's a miracle I remember anything. Not nervous: what pedagogical theorists refer to as unprepared. Having spent the previous summer reading the grammar and usage texts, the style manual and reader for the course, I at least knew the material. What I didn't know was the college freshman, and whether she or he would put up with a spindly twenty-one-year-old in torn golf shirt, face not much clearer than their own, standing up in front of the chalkboard trying to conduct the discussion.

My impression of C. changed after the first assignment. I'd given, as preliminary topic, "Convince a total stranger that she would not want to grow up in your hometown." It seemed enough of an inversion of the standard composition theme that my fosters would have to think about it before plunging in and cranking out the usual suspect sentences.

The best paper belonged to a woman named Maya. I later learned that she was seven years older than I was and the mother of three. "Trust me. You don't want to grow up in East St. Louis," she wrote.

You get born in without being asked, and no amount of asking in the world is going to get you out again. There aren't but a few ways out of East St. Louis and those are all to places you don't want to be in even worse.

C.'s was the second most astonishing. She wrote lyrically, wistfully, brutally, about growing up in Chicago on an island one house wide. She wrote about waking up to the stink of slaughtered animals from the stockyards mixed with the heavy scent of chocolate from the neighborhood factory. She wrote of the neo-Nazi marches in the park where her father used to take her for walks. She wrote of the shifting neighborhood lines, the lava lamp of fear that made families bolt for invisible, redrawn borders every two years. She wrote of the lone newcomers from the wrong side of the tracks going door to door, begging people not to move out just because their family had moved in.

I read these two papers out loud, as a pair. The kids from the hopelessly affluent North Shore suburbs with too few movie theaters took notes.

By the end of my first semester, I learned that the problem with most student writing is not grammar. You learn the rules early on or you never get them. The real problem was belief. My eighteen-year-olds never believed that the reader was real, that they themselves were real, that the world's topics were real. That they had to insist as much, in so many words.

C. knew the real the way she knew how to breathe. After that first theme, there was nothing I could do for her but let her go.

For her research paper, C. wrote about Aspasia of Miletus. She'd gone through the standard occult stage in high school, past life analysis and all. In her student conference, she confessed to having once written a hundred-page memoir about her former life in Periclean Athens. That would be an invaluable primary source for her paper, I joked.

Talking, from the start, disconcerted us both. We probed about the edges of the inappropriate. I didn't dare to tell her how strange it felt, to feel so familiar with a stranger. Even that much would have been grounds for misconduct charges. But C. knew. C. always knew. She had a tap on what my mind made of the outside, even before I mapped it into words.

By mutual agreement, we kept mum and avoided incident. I teased her about her previous incarnations. "Do you have any documentary evidence?"

At her next conference, she produced a photo out of her backpack. "Documentary evidence of prior lives." Flirting, under deniability's cloak.

The picture was a small Brownie black-and-white. Bits of glued felt still adhered to its back. She'd torn it from an album, to give to me. A pudgy baby sat out in the backyard, 1961. The world had died away from that moment, and there was nothing left of it but this square miniature.

"The grass was prickling my butt. That's why I'm making the Khrushchev face. My parents threatened me. If I didn't stop crying, they were going to get the camera."

"You remember all that? You can't be more than two."

"I remember things long before that. When I was almost one, my mother took me back to the Netherlands for a visit. I was petting my aunt's dog while it was eating, and it bit me."

"Well, I suppose trauma. ."

"You don't remember your first years?" Everyone did, her astonishment said. Everyone.

"I have trouble with yesterday's dinner. I find it hard to believe. . What else can you remember? How about the first sentence you ever spoke?"

"Easy one," she said, gazing at the photo. " 'Good girl outside.' "

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I'd behaved myself, and now they had to turn me loose."

"I hope you're not counting on me to be your expert consultant on literature in English," I told Lentz in his anarchic office, a week after the bet. "It's been a hell of a long time."

He practiced that acerbic smirk on me. The one he didn't need to practice. "You mean you haven't kept faith with your illustrious progenitors?"

"I just can't quote them at length anymore."

"And why is that?"

I shrugged. "Can you quote at length from Babbage and Lady Ada?"

"What would you like to hear?" He stopped clicking on his coffee-stained keyboard and challenged me. "Never mind, Marcel. We don't need to know all about literature in English. The net is going to figure that out on its own. We already know something far more useful. We know Dr. Plover, our examiner. And we know Dr. Gupta, our distinguished judge."

"How is that going to help? You aren't thinking…? We can't count on them to. ."

"No, I don't suppose one can count on humans for anything. That's the beauty of the challenge."

"Okay. So what do we know about Harold?"

"He's a Shakespeare man. Soft on the Renaissance. Not a day goes by when he doesn't feel some nostalgic twinge about the fall of man."

"Lentz, you are truly merciless."

"It's a career asset."

"All right. So assume he dotes on Elizabethan—"

"We know. There's no assumption."

"But he knows that we know. We aren't going to bank everything on the hopes that he'll pick the predictable?"

"Marcel, never underestimate the baldness of the human heart. Didn't they teach you that in Famous Novelists School?"

"Right. That and 'jab and weave.' The Big Two for gaining and keeping an audience."

"Huh. You must have been out with the chicken pox that week."

In a real Turing Test, our black box, on the other end of a Teletype, would have to convince an examiner that it performed like a real mind. Operationally equivalent. Indistinguishable. Given any topic under the sun, our machine would have to fool the questioner, to pass for a human. A perfect, universal simulation of intelligence would, for all purposes, be intelligent.

I would never have signed on to such a pipe dream. But the severely limited version of the test seemed almost formulable, at first glance. We needed do only an infinitesimal fraction of what a full Turing Test passer would have to do. But it hit me only now. What we would have to do was still infinite.