Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

H discriminated. It implemented constrained searches. I baited it with gems of miscue. "The woman loved lies buried in the past. The words loved lies buried in thought's underground." H backtracked recursively over possible sentence shapes until it found one that best matched the shape of coherence.

"Brothers and sisters have I none," I lied to H one day. For pedagogical purposes. "But that man's father is my father's son. Who is that man?"

The riddle tested all sorts of things. Familial relations. Demonstrative adjectives. Archaic inversion. The generational genitive. The subtle syllogistic miscue of that irrelevant "but." No kid H's intellectual age could have gotten it. But then, Imp H did not know to make choo-choo noises at the appropriate places in The little Engine That Could. An idiot savant, it grew up all out of kilter. Earth had never before witnessed such a combination of inappropriate and dangerous growth rates.

H got the riddle in a flash. "Your son," it informed me. That man is your son. It knew to make the near-miraculous pronominal leap. Where I had said "my," it speculated back to "you" and "your." And for what might it make the bigger reversing leap, returning my "you" with its own miraculous "I"?

H's paraphrases of my simple feeder texts were crude but increasingly specific. H's knowledge wasn't rule-based. We could not even begin to estimate how many syntactic "facts" it had acquired. But in the knowledges H had inherited from its predecessors' trainings lay tens of thousands of parsing and translation insights.

How to index, access, and arrange those inferences remained the problem. But H was learning. Organizing itself in upheavals.

For wringing out sense from the insensate, H's unfailing simple-mindedness was a great asset. "The missionary was prepared to serve" produced hilarious, cross-cultural alternatives. We tried the famous "Time flies like an arrow," and got a reading that Kuno's Harvard protocircuitry missed back in 1963.

Lentz loved to torture Imp H. He spent hours inventing hideous diagramming tasks such as, "Help set implied precedents in sentences with ambiguous parts." A simple story like 'The trainer talked to the machine in the office with a terminal" could keep H paraphrasing all evening.

English was a chocolaty mess, it began to dawn on me. I wondered how native speakers could summon the presence of mind to think. Readiness was context, and context was all. And the more context H amassed, the more it accepted the shattered visage of English at face value.

"Could we invent a synthetic language?" I asked Lentz. "Something unlike any formal symbol system ever implemented? I don't know. Shape-based. Picto-tonal. Raise baby humans on it?" Sculpt an unprecedented brain?

He laughed, ready to write the grant proposal for solving the impossible chicken-egg problem. "It would still be the human brain, inventing the symbolic."

The most difficult part of the training — for me, if not for H — was teaching it that life required you to stop after the first reasonably adequate interpretation.

"The boy stood on the burning deck," I challenged H. "What does that mean?"

"A deck of cards flames," it said.

"He would not be standing on it," I told H.

"He stamps out the fire."

"No," I pulled rank. Simple but firm.

"The deck is of a house or of a boat," H suggested.

"Which one?"

"A house," H decided.

"Why a house and not a boat?"

"Boats go in water, and water puts out fires."

I couldn't argue with that.

"Why is he just standing there?" Lentz wanted to know. A reasonable question.

"All right. Tell me what this means: Forewarned is forearmed." The boulder rolled around in the landscape, sculpting, until it settled to rest. Then H slid that landscape against its spatial encyclopedia of available spaces until it fit at least fuzzily enough to make a maybe.

"Advance notice is as bad as being hit." "When bad techs happen to good cultures," Lentz said. "When bad cultures happen to good machines," I insisted. I wanted that net to come of age so much it hurt. I got what 1 wanted. And it hurt worse.

"A bird, dying of thirst, discovered a pitcher," I told H. Who knows? It might have been true once. "But when the bird put his beak into the pitcher, he couldn't reach far enough to get the water. He pitched a pebble into the pitcher. Then he pitched another pebble into the pitcher, and another, and another. The water rose within reach, displaced by the pebbles. In this way, the bird quenched his thirst and survived."

H knew something about birds and beaks, about pebbles and pitchers and openings and water. It even, in theory, knew a little something about fluid displacement. I'd once read Imp F the story of a damp Archimedes running naked through Syracuse shouting "Eureka!"

This much was already a universe, an infinity of knowledge. That H could arrange these endlessly fluid symbols into a single coherence pushed the bounds of credibility. "What is the moral of the fable?" I demanded. It knew about fables. It had heard no end of morals.

"Better to throw stones than to die of thirst," H pronounced laconically.

"You're not from around these parts, are you?" Lentz muttered from across the office lab.

I'm not sure whether he meant H or me. Even when I gave H half a dozen proverbs from which to choose, it picked "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched." Nor could I explain to it why "Necessity is the mother of invention" was any better a fit.

"A bat flew past a cage where a bird was singing. 'Why are you singing at this hour?' the bat asked. 'I only sing at night,' the bird answered. 'I once sang during the daytime, and that is how the hunter caught me and put me in this cage.' 'If you had thought that while you were free,' the bat said, 'it might have done you some good.' "

With this account, I taught H several irregular verbs as well as the indispensable lesson that precaution is worthless after the fact. H could not understand this point until understanding itself rendered the warning worthless.

While I rewove H on fable, Lentz busied himself with browsing our copy of the Master's Comps List for his own edification. He liked to sit behind his desk, stretched out as I had seen him that first night, chuckling at Austen or Dickens. Sometimes he'd spurt out his favorites. "Classic! ' "There are strings," said Mr. Tappertit, "in the human heart that had better not be vibrated." ' Try it out, Marcel. Just try it."

All he wanted was to be put off. One evening, though, he refused even that patronage. He collared a sentence from the List and brought it over to me. "Here we go, Marcel. A brief one. A piece of cake."

I read the citation he'd penciled on his scrap of paper. "Oh, Philip. A little mercy, please?" The request saddened me inexplicably. I guess I imagined that, having seen his woman in the attic, I'd no longer be the object of his aggression. Now I saw that his aggression would always bless whoever was nearest, whatever they knew or didn't.

Lentz pleaded like a little child. "Just tell it once. Don't be a killjoy, Marcel. What connections can we possibly hurt? It's the simplest sentence in the world."

I sighed, unable to oppose his setup any longer. I spoke the quote into the digitizing microphone. "Once you learn to read you will be forever free." I gave H a moment to list-process the idea and compose itself. Then I asked, "What do you think that means?"

H thought for an ungodly length of time. Perhaps the prescription meant nothing at all.

"It means I want to be free."

Lentz and I exchanged looks. It chilled us both, to hear that pronoun, volunteered without prompting, express its incredible conclusion.

We humans studied each other. I searched Lentz's face for a response that might unfold this syllogism without killing it. What rare conjunction of axon weights laid claim to the vector of volition? What association could it have for "want"?