Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"Okay. Let's assume you guys are playing fair. That none of this is canned."

"Good assumption," I said, conscious of sounding like a poor parody of Lentz.

"The entire story never uses the word 'naked.' Well, maybe you've built a kind of thesaurus structure. ."

"She built it herself."

Mina stopped biting her cuticle. "Maybe it has, you know, like a cheat sheet of questions people might ask?"

"Good thinking, kiddo." Harold tried to pat her head, but she pulled away. "Did you choose the story at random?" he grilled me.

"It was next on the list."

"No telegraph?"

"None."

Mina fluttered her hands. "I didn't mean that he fed it specific questions. I just meant, like, it has a list of how to deal with 'Who is' and 'What is,' and all those."

Harold looked at me: You sure you haven't been piping info to the physical symbol systems? I knew his suspicion of operationalism. He often accused Lentz of playing fast and loose with the computational model of mind.

'There aren't that many 'whos' in the story," Mina elaborated. "Maybe she got lucky."

I turned to Helen and asked, "What are the new clothes made of?"

After a long time, she answered, "The clothes are made of threads of ideas."

"It's a nice way of putting it," Harold offered. But the error's strangeness relieved him.

I felt myself edging toward humiliation. I needed one good answer to show them what my girl could do. "Why don't the subjects who see the emperor naked tell him that he has nothing on?"

Both syntax and semantic here ran beyond words. If she could swallow the sentence without spitting up, we'd wow the home crowd for good.

This time, Helen answered too quickly to have thought about the sentence at all. 'The subjects are snagged in a textile."

I didn't even try to apologize for her. "Do you like the emperor's new clothes?" I wasn't sure what I was after. If she could remain composed, answer anything to a sentence with so vague a referent, it might salvage mechanism and save the day for function.

Helen's answer sent Mina into hysterics. "Did you hear that? Did you hear what it said?"

Harold twisted his mouth, amused, despite himself, by the girl's uncontrollable fit. "Yes. She said, 'Very much.' What's so funny about that?"

"She didn't ! She said, 'Airy much.' Airy. Get it?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake. You're hearing things, kid."

"Daddy!"

They both looked at me, the tiebreaker. "To tell you the God's honest truth, I thought she said, 'Fairy Dutch.' "

When she caught her breath again, Mina declared, "That's the smartest parrot I've ever seen."

Harold shook his head in bewilderment. "Mere parroting would have been impressive enough. One already wonders what survival value for a cockatiel the ability to whistle the Saber Dance might have. How such a bizarre skill could earn its place in such limited circuitry. Rearranging sentence components while preserving grammar ups the ante an order of magnitude. Creating novel sentences in response to a semantic field—"

"We still have a few kinks to work out."

"Listen." Harold fell into the agitated intensity of a scientist impatient with methodology. "Can we try something here?"

"Of course. Name it."

He looked sidelong at me. Not wanting to overstep. "Kahneman and Tversky?"

I smiled. Funny: Harold would not be impressed with my matching the obscure tags, recent additions to my own neural library. He took that much for granted. Just your garden-variety marvel.

I improvised for Helen a personal variation on the now-classic test. "Jan is thirty-two years old. She is well educated and holds two advanced degrees. She is single, is strong-minded, and speaks her piece. In college, she worked actively for civil rights. Which of these two statements is more likely? One: Jan is a librarian. Two: Jan is a librarian and a feminist."

"It knows the word 'feminist'?" Mina lit up, arcing into existence at the idea.

"I think so. She's also very good at extending through context."

Once more, Helen answered with a speed that winded me, given the pattern-sorting she needed to reach home. "One: Jan is a librarian."

Harold and I exchanged looks. Meaning?

"Why is that more likely, Helen?"

"Helen? It has a name?"

"That is more likely because one Jan is more likely than two."

Now Harold took a turn laughing like an idiot.

"Wait a minute," Mina said. "I don't get it. What's the right answer?"

"What do you mean, what's the right answer?" Harold, raging affronted fatherdom. "Think about it for ten seconds."

"Well, she has all these feminist things about her. So isn't it more likely that she would be a feminist librarian than just a…?"

Mina, seeing herself about to label the part more likely than its whole, threw her hand over her mouth and reddened.

"I can't believe it. I've worked my mental fingers to the bone for you, daughter."

Harold's growl was motley at best. Helen, choosing the right answer for the wrong reasons, condemned herself to another lifetime of machinehood. Harold's girl, in picking wrongly for the right reasons, leaped uniquely human.

He cuffed her mussed hair, the bear teaching the cub to scuffle. "I'm deeply disappointed in you."

A voice from the doorway pronounced, "I'm deeply disappointed in Jan."

Diana waved as we three jerked around.

"Jesus. Don't sneak up behind people like that." Harold put hand to sternum. "That's a Lentz stunt."

"Don't let him give you a hard time, Meen. That problem is famous for being missed. And I happen to have been present when your dad made his acquaintance with it."

"Whoa. Hold on. Positivism prohibits our talking about that topic."

Mina stuck her tongue out at the bluster. Then she turned back, rapt, to Diana. Whatever problems sister Trish had with the woman, here shone only February adulation.

Mina's eyes fell matte in disappointment when Diana said she couldn't stop. "I expect a private showing sometime," Diana told me. She touched the two Plovers goodbye, and added a hand-brush for me.

Harold turned back to Helen. He scratched his chin in thought. Did physiology create that cultural cliché or had culture constructed the bodily release? The split was, in any case, linguistic.

"It's astonishing, Rick. I've never seen pattern-matching on this order. But of course, your grab bag of networks has nothing to do with human comprehension. This is to a twenty-two-year-old text-explicator what a gifted cockatiel is to Our Man in Leipzig."

He was right. Helen would never be able to decode Harold's reference, let alone figure out how he alluded to my love of Bach without the two of us ever having mentioned the topic.

"Okay, okay, you guys. Enough boy talk. I want a turn to try something. A girl goes into a music store. She flips through the bins of CDs. All at once, she starts to jump up and down and clap her hands. She opens her purse, and just as suddenly starts to cry. Why?"

I transmitted the story to Helen. "Why did the girl start to cry?"

Helen labored. In my ear, I heard a digitally sampled sob of empathy.

"The girl saw something sad in her purse."

Harold snickered. "She's still missing a little something upstairs, Ricardo." And always would be, his grin informed me.

Mina rushed to the defense. She probably made new girlfriends of all this week's high school pariahs. "Yes. But at least she knows how to pare things down. That must be tricky. Life is 99 percent extra stuff most of the time."

"Dr. Plover." I coded the gush in fake formality. We have this inverse rule, about how much you mean and how directly you can say it. "Your daughters are brilliant."

A button-bursting grimace. "Some of them are more brilliant than others."