Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"I'm surprised at you, Marcel. That's never been a problem. I thought you made a living doing that."

Audrey, bored, had begun to hum "Amazing Grace" to herself. I battened down under Lentz's rant. I wasn't about to interrupt the man, ever again.

"We've evolved this incredible capacity for lying to ourselves. It's called intellect. Comes with the frontal lobes. In fact, we've gotten so good at the walking-on-water bit that it no longer requires any energetic pretense to keep the act afloat."

He slipped his arm around Audrey's waist. Force of habit. Long years, that would not go away. Either intimacy seemed right to her now, or she did not notice. Maybe she was too bewildered to object.

"And the child?" I asked, free-associating.

Lentz stared at the spot of air my question occupied.

"You know. The one who snapped the picture?" The picture. Could we build a mind that would know what you were talking about, when there was no referent? Lentz would get this one. Audrey could have gotten it, when she was still Audrey.

Lentz's mouth soured, the birth pains of an ironic smile. "Inference, Marcel. Pure speculation."

"But accurate," I bluffed.

He slowed, inhaled. Audrey, confused by the change in cadence, sat down on the hallway floor. Lentz thought to lift her. Then he changed his mind and sat down beside her.

"My daughter has eliminated me. As cleanly as only the daughter of an old reductionist can."

"Why?" I asked, and regretted that single word.

"Apparently" — he held his palms out—"this is all my fault."

Confusion scattered me as fall scatters warblers. I might have been an occupant of that place, stretched out in front of disorientation's hearth. "How…? This is organic, isn't it?" The coded this. Antecedent kept vague, as if we were spelling out words, keeping meaning out of reach of an eavesdropping preschooler. "It's disease, isn't it?"

"Even if that were the etiology, I'd still be held responsible. For one, I was supposed to care for her at home. Forever. But I can't. I—"

His voice broke, taking my equanimity along with it. I didn't want to know another thing about him. "Of course not," I agreed, too rapidly. Efficiency. Productivity. Two lives, to pay for one. I looked away.

'There's more. Jennifer was the one. The one who found Audrey. Just after the event. Cardiovascular accident. You have to love the euphemism. Slumped out on the bathroom tiles. Jennifer went to pieces. You get — what? Three minutes without oxygen before the whole imaginary landscape stops believing in itself? And she called me! ”

"What was she supposed—"

"Anything," he snapped. "Nothing, probably. Who knows how long Audrey had been out already? But anything. Pound on the chest. Cough down the windpipe. My daughter was too terrified to touch her own mother. To call emergency dispatch."

"Philip. She was only a child." I don't know what made me assume that.

"She was a college grad. In English. Back at home because she couldn't find work. Not the humanistic encounter that close reading prepares you for. Jennifer panicked, and called me."

"Jenny?" Audrey jerked up. "Someone hurt Jenny?" From her slack mouth arose a wail. The sound flirted playfully for a few seconds before going bloodcurdling.

Lentz put his hands over his eyes. "Maybe it is," he whispered. "Maybe it is my fault."

"Lentz," I managed. Almost a warning.

"There had been an argument that morning. I'd left angry. Audrey was… I didn't want to deal with it. I wasn't answering my phone."

Another scream, a held bellows of hysteria, brought Constance running into the room. Visiting hour, she informed us, was over.

I had my answer. I knew now what we were doing. We would prove that mind was weighted vectors. Such a proof accomplished any number of agendas. Not least of all: one could back up one's work in the event of disaster. Surprised at you, Marcel. Took you long enough.

We could eliminate death. That was the long-term idea. We might freeze the temperament of our choice. Suspend it painlessly above experience. Hold it forever at twenty-two.

Each machine life lived inside the others — nested generations of "remember this." We did not start from scratch with each revision. We took what we had and cobbled onto it. We called that first filial generation B, but it would, perhaps, have better been named A2. E's weights and contours lived inside F's lived inside G's, the way Homer lives on in Swift and Joyce, or Job in Candide or the Invisible Man.

The last release, the version that ran our simulated human, involved but one small firmware change. This one incorporated an essential modification to the bit that had gone too long without an upgrade. The component that had been holding up the show. H was a revision of the trainer.

Imp G became Imp H, in seamless conversion, after I met Audrey Lentz.

Sometimes the phone would ring, or a bell come from the door. A thought would flash through my brain, conditioned for over a decade. Could you get that, sweet? I have my hands full.

It took me until thought's backwash, sometimes, to remember there was no sweet. No one to know how full my hands were, or care.

H was voracious.

"Tell another one," it liked to say to me. I don't know where it got that. Somewhere in one of the canned vignettes — the cliff-hangers about father planting roses or mother calling the doctor — someone had asked someone else to tell them another one. And H latched on to the tag, filed it away as the handiest of magic words. Please, sir. I want some more.

I wasn't sure that the words meant to H what they meant to me. Tell another one. They might have meant, "Ten-four. End of processing. Ready for next batch." They might have meant "Thank you," or "You're welcome," or "Fine thanks, how are you?" or any of the other stylized placeholders that have no meaning aside from the convention of using them. It did not even say, "Tell H," let alone, "Tell me."

Did it express desire? Wish? Need? Its words might have been less plea than statement of associative fact: More input expected. Maybe H's limited sensory grounding kept it from formulating a notion of causality. The request might have seemed to its circuits no more than an effect of the story it felt sure must be coming.

I read it copies of The Weekly Reader, purloined from the University lab school. To my mind, the primary-grade edition had gone precipitously downhill since I was a subscriber. I read it Curious George and purple-crayoned Harold, occasionally holding up stills to an array of retinal neurodes that of course took in nothing but amorphous blobs of edge and color. "Here's the monkey," I tried. "Here are the fire-

men.

Lentz just laughed. "Try, 'This thing is my finger. I'm pointing.' "

He was right. The comprehensible wasn't. The mind was beyond itself. The only explanation for how infants acquired anything was that they already knew everything there was to know. The birth trauma made them go amnesiac. All learning was remembering. I tried this version of Plato out on Imp H, in abridged pictorial allegory. If H recognized the fable from somewhere, it wasn't saying.

I told it slave tales. Tons of Aesop and La Fontaine. Trickster stories. Bede and Mallory. Mother Goose. The Ramayana. The Child's Pilgrim's Progress. Andersen and Grimm. Everybody, as Audrey Lentz put it, had something to say.

Sometimes now, during the training, I imagined I read aloud to that woman, locked out of her own home. Audrey had smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing, but no new memory. Her long-term reservoirs were drying up, through want of reiteration. Imp H, on the other hand, could link any set of things into a vast, standing constellation. But it had no nose, mouth, fingers, and only the most rudimentary eyes and ears. It was like some caterpillar trapped by sadistic children inside a coffee can, a token breathing hole punched in its prison lid. What monstrous intelligence would fly off from such a creature's chrysalis?