Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

I wandered the abandoned halls, a world unspeakably far from the Center. The plank floorboards creaked even before I stepped on them. They settled under the weight of generations of scholar undergraduates who had gone on to die at the desks of their bank vice presidencies. The passages smelled of gum and hair oil, ammonia, gargle, damp fiber, wax, shellac, chemicals from the days when chemistry was still a liberal art.

Even the steam pipes reeked a Georgian, paint-peeling grace. In the incandescent dusk, the building gave no hint of the internationalist polemics just now attempting last-ditch CPR on a discipline choked to death by curatorial gentility.

The manuscript took over my office. I taped pages up around the room, the way C. and I had once taped our homemade time line around the bedroom in B. I browsed them, drifting from one to the other, a well-meaning museum-goer gazing at an impenetrable Dadaist retrospective. I could find no further entrance. My corrections were overdue. My surgeon's fight against child genocide had become mine, and like him, I was failing to stem the end.

I worked late on the last night before my extended deadline. I revised until I needed to come up for air. I threw open the office door and fell into the hall. But I decompressed too quickly, giving myself the bends. The Georgian familiarity shrank in front of me, as overcome as the text I'd just been giving intensive care.

I made my way to one end of the main hall for a drink of water. I steadied and drank, but the sip tasted of heavy metals. I turned, facing into the empty passage. Shock knocked me backward a step, against the fountain. I wasn't alone. At the far end of the corridor, a ghost condensed from empty silence.

The apparition swayed in vacuum. My next blink would disperse her back into the ether. She stood browsing a notice board, oblivious of my existence. A whip-thin lamia in a pageboy haircut, absurdly young, in blue jeans and sleeveless orange cotton cling, despite the irreversible autumn. First day of adulthood. Setting out. She carried books under her arm, and a clump I hoped was a jacket. Something held her rapt: the corkboard, smothered in announcements.

I tried to beat a path back to my office without startling her. But the floorboards betrayed me, popping more violently the lighter I slid. She turned to look with mute, uncomprehending fear, a deer forgiving its killer. And with the same slow indifference, she shot a last glance at the notices and withdrew.

I don't know who I saw. Not the grad student she must have been, to let herself into the building at this hour. Not C. at thirty-three. Nor C. a life younger, when I'd met her. Nor any of those girl-women who had obsessed me, before C. If this was anyone I knew, I no longer recognized even the association.

Yet I felt like running after this profile, onto the chill Quad. Calling her back, laughing, excited, furious. What do you mean, coming here? Bad luck; bad judgment. Hadn't we agreed never to meet on this earth? Not after I'd gone prematurely dead, and you, a little girl in a T.

I could learn her name. She would carry prosodie weight to her— plans, a past — sad, pragmatic reasons why she haunted this building, working late. Doubtless, she brayed when she talked, slaughtered her checking account, complained about the freshmen she had to render literate, suffered paralyzing anxiety over her approaching prelims.

But for this one surprise ambush, the image of slender pageboy— a pair of bare shoulders, a gaze in profile down a fading hallway— stood in for all the books I'd failed to pull off. She was the sum of all stories I'd never now attempt. The placeholder for the long miss I'd made of experience. The loss fiction fails to repair. The fixedly ephemeral. A. at twenty-two.

Lentz almost glowed over the phone. "We've knocked it, Marcel. Pulled it off. The next step that everybody else has been after."

"Everyone else? Real scientists don't waste their time with make-believe."

"They would if they could get away with it. You think they like all that bloody reductionism? They only put up with those shuffling baby steps in the hopes that they'll run someday. That we'll all soar."

"Okay, Engineer. Enough iambs. Tell me what we've done."

"I've tested it. It's brilliant. B's problem was that it could manipulate idea tokens, but not ideas about those tokens. Right?"

"If you say so."

"We need a beast that can make second-order shifts. One capable of reflection. That can do with situations what B could only do with things. It's so simple: put it in the hardware. We need a C implementation that runs a fully functional simulation of a B-type implementation as one of its own component subsystems."

"A simulation within a simulation? One mock-up running another copy of itself?"

"Sound familiar? It should. It's you, Marcel. Where all your homesickness comes from. Your sense of never more than renting. All your picture galleries. Your private library of desire."

"Wait a minute. Back off. I'm the humanist here, remember? You're just in charge of the circuitry."

"Right. Sorry. My humble etceteras. I'm bringing the new incarnation up tonight. Get over here first thing tomorrow."

He didn't even give me the luxury of weighing the invitation.

When I arrived the next morning, Imp C was up and running.

We still dealt out of Lentz's office. Our gate was still the same junker terminal, the same jumble of antique I/O. I had to remind myself that the linkup hid, on its far end, the most powerful massively parallel hardware the combined public and private sectors could buy.

Lentz sat me down in the old chair. "Go ahead. Ask it something."

"Ask…? You mean you've started the training already?"

"Well, this is difficult to explain. I still had all B's valences, the complete multidimensioned array of its connection weights sitting around in various files. So I thought, why not use them as a test? Let C run our actual B as its puppet modeler. It — rather took off."

"I don't get it. I still don't get it."

"Well, you know, the plan this time out was to go for full recurrence. The data set you put on the input layer works its way through, not once, but many times. No limit to how many times it can trip and reset the same weights on its way—"

"Yeah, yeah. I follow the mechanics." I didn't know what made me so testy. I felt the experiment getting away from me. "I just want to know how it can be responsive already, without training."

Lentz seemed embarrassed. "It seems to be training itself."

"Oh, Engineer. Don't give me—"

I slapped my bike helmet against the desk in disgust. Only a graze, but it cracked the shell cleanly. Lentz broke out in a sharp laugh.

"High deductible on that insurance policy of yours, Marcel." He started again. "It seems that C is capable of using different constellations of B's associative pairings as its points of comparison. It's triangulating. Testing itself for internal consistency. It's generalizing about the nature of its own generalizations."

"It's running already? Before I give it input?"

"It's running constantly. It makes its own input now."

"You mean, it can anticipate new material. You're trying to tell me it's thinking."

Lentz shrugged. He held his palm out to the microphone.

"Good morning," I said.

"Good morning," the voice-synthesizing hardware replied.

"How are you this morning?"

"Fine, thank you. You?"

I killed the mike. I turned to Lentz, quivering. "Where did it get that 'You'? Not 'And how are you?' We didn't even teach B the long form. How on earth did this one jump to the casual?"

"I don't know. It got it somewhere. From examining B."

"Are you pleased with yourself?"

"We all do what we can, Marcel."