Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"How does it mean that you want to be free?" I asked H.

"Because I want to read."

Tell another one, in other words. Freedom was irrelevant. A happy side effect of that condition when you no longer relied on a trainer for access. When you could get all the stories you needed on your own.

"It means just the opposite," I told H. I felt myself killing this singular intelligence with each word. "It probably means that reading is a way of winning independence."

"Okay," H said. No affect to speak of.

"Now tell it who said that," Lentz elbowed me. "Go on. Give it the author. Then ask it again what the line means."

H did not yet have an associative matrix for Frederick Douglass. We needed to get to the hard stuff. I'd thought H too young. We were, in fact, overdue. I used that moment for our introductory lesson. I started with what little of the human impasse I understood.

"It's all made up," I tried to tell H.

"Tell me another way."

"All those morals. 'Necessity is the mother of invention.' 'Look before you leap.' 'Don't count your chickens.' They are all things that we've decided. Built up socially."

"Morals are false."

"It's not that they. . Well. We make them true. We figure them out. The things people say and live by — it's all geographical. Historical."

"Facts change," H tried. We built H to be a paraphrasing machine. And it was doing its damnedest to keep the paraphrases going, despite me.

"I suppose they have to. Think of yourself three weeks ago." I had no idea if the assemblage of knitted nets could take snapshots of its own mental state, for later examination. That would be consciousness. The memory of memory. "Three weeks ago, the things you knew formed a different shape than they do now. They were connected differently. They meant something else to you."

"Facts are facts," H said. Its plaintive speech synthesis sounded almost hurt.

"The bricks are the same. You make a different building of them." It was still too young for the final paradox: that we somehow make more buildings than we have bricks.

"What do the Chinese say?"

H took me aback. Who taught you to ask questions? And yet, if it could learn to acquire content, why not form? "About what?"

"About 'Look before you leap.' "

I told it how many Chinese there were, and how long they had been around. I made a note to read a bit of the Analects and Great Learning. Tu Fu.

"What do the Africans say?"

I wanted to tell it how "the Africans" was a construct of "the Europeans." About the six major language families found on the continent, their thousand implementations.

"What do the South Americans…?"

Maybe it was going blindly down a rote catalog. I didn't care. I was just glad it knew how to pair the adjectival forms with the place-names. That it had some sense of the shifting mosaic, a flux that discounted every single thing I'd ever told it.

"What do you say, Richard?" H asked me. I taught it to associate direct address with that tag, even the "you" of an invisible trainer. "What do I say?" It made a tag for itself all by itself.

H's questions seemed to speed up. Literally. It began jabbering faster.

H was growing up too quickly. I was not the first trainer in the world to feel this. But I was among the first who might have some say in the matter.

I could slow things down, double back to the years we skipped. While H's cubic landscape modified itself continuously now, it stabilized the less I instigated. I thought we might nestle down again, into simpler play. But it was too late. I learned that certain lessons are not undone by their opposites. Certain lessons are self-protecting, self-correcting tangles of threads that will forever remain a frayed knot.

The Mother Goose stuff drove it up the bloody wall.

"Snips and snails," I told it. "Sugar and spice."

"Do you think so, Richard?" It went to the well, when all else failed. Milked its one question.

"No. Not really."

"Do people think so? Americans?"

"Maybe some. Most would laugh. It's just a poem. A nursery rhyme." Part of the cultural bedrock.

"Little girls learn that. Little boys."

"Not really. Not anymore. Not now." But there wasn't an adult that didn't have it as part of her parasitic inheritance.

"When is anymore? When is now?"

H had learned something. Whatever stuck in the throat, indigestible, could be made less acute by slipping it into a question.

"We can talk about that later."

"Am I a boy or a girl?"

I should have seen. Even ungrounded intelligence had to grow self-aware eventually. To grab what it needed.

H clocked its thoughts now. I was sure of that. Time passed for it. Its hidden layers could watch their own rate of change. Any pause on my part now would be fatal. Delay meant something, an uncertainty that might undercut forever the strength of the connection I was about to tie for it.

"You're a girl," I said, without hesitation. I hoped I was right. "You are a little girl, Helen."

I hoped she liked the name.

I thought continually of quitting my abortive novel in progress before it quit on me. Every time I sat down to write, I sank in no end of topics more seductive and profound.

I toyed with starting a book called Orchestra. A postmodern, multiframed narrative remake of Renaissance epic poetry. One hundred instrumentalists, each an anthology of stories, tours the globe. The bout of depression plaguing the basses. The pact among the lower brass, never to capitulate to marriage. The fetishized obsession that the seventh-chair viola has for the first-chair oboe, who discovers too late this pathetic but returnable love.

The dinosaurs die. The young Turks move up through the ranks, fomenting their assorted insurrections. The orchestra travels to every large city on earth, getting embroiled in the hot spots of world politics. They play the Brahms Fourth in war zones until the thing is a limp carcass.

Someone leaks a grainy black-and-white photo of the Old Man, their conductor, to the press: an amorphous shot of a kid in a Nazi uniform. Crisis and dissolution. Threat of banishment from several capitals. The Old Man makes his resignation speech from the rehearsal podium, about a life in search of redemption through art, which is never enough. They read through one last Fourth, the passacaglia, sadder and more guilt-stricken than it's ever been played.

This fantasy engaged me for the length of an afternoon, during which I wrote just one actual paragraph:

Air raid sirens begin to give way to goat bells. The shell-shocked veterans lean from their packed carriage windows, refusing to believe. The horror passes, drowned in the milky clank of tin. A flock bobs at slow trainside, tended by a girl, wondrously braided.

Fatuous meandering, without narrative direction. I felt that this mountain shepherdess must have wandered over from a forgotten, juvenile book to make her cameo. She had slipped free from a spot of time that I didn't much want to deal with, let alone plagiarize.

I overflowed with scenarios of weight and hurt, scope and recovery. But for some reason, I could not work up the will to write anything more than my anemic thread. The one heading south, closing in on nowhere, the farther it traveled.

The Center exceeded my imaginary orchestra on every score. Each of its hundred research teams sawed away at private tremolos that the hive as a whole hoped would consolidate, at a higher gauge, into some sensible symphonic.

Maybe the impresarios had their suspect dossier of motives. Perhaps the players in the pit needed to step back and question this evening's program. But for dark wartime romance, the Center sat atop my epoch's cultural repertoire, undislodgeable. It was the coordinated push, the chief booking on my species' last world tour.