Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men.

To remember a feeling without being able to bring it back. This seemed to me as close to a functional definition of higher-order consciousness as I would be able to give her. If we could teach Helen that, we could teach her to read with understanding.

To define that rift did not open one in her, any more than remembering a feeling revived it. For Helen to pass the Turing Test, facts would have to stand in for knowing. Our only hope that she might one day disguise herself as a master's candidate lay in the conventions of writing. The interpretive essay — the art we trained her to perform — meant viewing from afar. An aerial shot from the dispassionate high ground.

Humans had to be schooled in how to describe the maelstrom as if they weren't lost in the middle of it, in their own unbailable open boat. Helen was detachment personified. In effect, the infant adult we'd be up against would be trying to simulate the disembodiment that, to Helen, came as a fact of her birth.

But Helen needed to feel, to the extent possible, the facts of her opponent twenty-two-year-old's birth. Conrad, of course, was years beyond her. Youth was wasted on the young. Yet by letting her wade in over her head, I hoped to give my network a working model of what it felt like to learn to read. How I had felt.

I never read a book at the right time. The books I read as a child almost all came before I was ready for them. The Man Who Lost His Head, an absurd illustrated fable that, I'm sure, must have ended happily, gave me my first recurring nightmare because I read it as a preschooler. Homer in fourth grade. Shakespeare in sixth. Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury in junior high. Gravity's Rainbow, wet from high school. I read Thomas Wolfe as a freshman in college, the right age, but decades too late, in history, for it to work.

I would find books in the house, my parents' or my older sisters' or brother's. I read them like stealing. Eavesdropping. Malicious rumormongering. Staying out past curfew without permission. I hadn't a clue what any of them meant. Not a clue. Every animal they highlighted I named horse. But a horse that split and differentiated in the turbulence of foreign bazaars.

Each book became a knot. Yes, the strings of that knot were theme and place and character. Dr. Charles, with his gangrene machine. Stephen, gazing at the girl in the water. But into that tangle, just as crucial, went the smell of the cover, the color and cream resistance of the pages, the week in which I read any given epic, the friends for whom I synopsized, the bed, the lamp, the room where I read. Books made known to me my days' own confusion. They meant no more nor less than the extensive, dense turnpike of the not-I.

This not, I imagined, would figure more in Helen's masquerade than would any simulation of self. Self took us only so far. I wanted her to associate the meaning inherent in the words of a story with the heft and weight and bruise of the story's own existence. I did this by reading her things long before she was ready for them. Only by mistake, by taking the story to be coextensive with its own intruding bewilderment, could Helen pull off her impersonation.

I read her Little Women. M., Taylor's widow, had given C. an antique copy as a going-away present — their shared childhood icon. I read her Dylan Thomas, whom I had once exercised in C.'s ear in the still night, our arms around each other's grief. I read her Ethan Frome. C. had wept at the tale, wanting to be better than she was.

Helen and I had never gone sledding, as C. and I had, on the arboretum downs outside B. Helen would never know a sled from the hill it slid down, except in the dead of definition. That she would never thrill or panic under downward pull no longer bothered me. At this point, I was training her in being mistaken. Overwhelmed. The condition of knowledge at all ages, but above all, twenty-two.

I can't revive the lesson the day Helen interrupted my flow of narrative to demand, "Where did I come from?"

I remember only my total stupefaction. The lesson itself could not have triggered her question. Helen was no longer just adding the new relations I recited for her into a matrix of associated concepts. The matrix that comprised her had begun to spin off its own free associations. Where did I come from? Lentz, seated behind me at his desk, doing real science, cackled. "Reeky! You in trouble now!"

I turned to look at him. Lentz's eyes and mine exchanged mutual punch lines. Like a fetus replaying fishness, Helen had rebuilt, for the first time, the primal joke. Because I'd heard it when I was a kid, I knew not to choke. Not to launch the long explanation of semiconductor storks, the birds and bees of hammered gold and gold enameling. Not to traumatize her by telling her we'd built her, but simply to answer, "You come from a little town called U."

It was Huck Finn, a raft trip worlds beyond her ken, that made me realize childhood had ended. Helen's reaction to Huck's going to hell could not have been more to the point. She listened as if to the breathy account of a playground acquaintance, back from an adventure. A funny thing: all works — stories, plays, poems, articles, newspaper reports — filtered through to Helen only as so many emergency phone calls.

Midway into the transmission, when the revealed realities of power and ownership began to capsize the little narrative raft, Helen asked, in her machine deadpan, "What race am I?"

My turn to mean, by not replying.

"What races do I hate? Who hates me?"

I did not know what passage to quote her, how to answer that she would be hated by everyone for her disembodiment, and loved by a few for qualities she would never be able to acquire or provide.

The gaps in her worldliness gaped so wide one could drive a plow through them, sowing stars. She knew something about the Dreyfus case and the Boer War and the spread of Islam to the Malay Peninsula. Her ignorance, however, extended to such things as corks stuck in bottles, the surface of a liquid reflection, the destruction of the more brittle of two colliding objects, wrappers and price tags, stepladders, up versus down, the effects of hunger… I counted myself lucky if she could infer that a tied shoe was somehow more desirable than an untied one, provided the shoe was on, whatever tying, whatever shoes were.

The catalog of lapses loomed big to fatiguing, dense beyond comprehension. The simplest nouns slipped her up. Qualities must all have twinkled in her massive astigmatism. As for processes: who knew what Helen made of verbs?

What is life? I told Helen it might be the flash of a firefly in the night. The breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. The shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

The firefly, yes. I'd seen fireflies, even caught them in a jar during boyhood's obligatory assault on incandescence. Waves of them on summer nights, sheets flashing to each other like neuronal metaphor storms. Although I'd never seen the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime, I could play in my head a film of steaming bison nostrils. From what disparate clips I'd jimmied up the impostor composite was not clear. But that little shadow lay beyond my eyes. Was the thing that cast it even of this place?

I read her the definition. Helen did what she could with its images. I told her the idea was a quote, which once again changed everything. I told her the words belonged to Crowfoot. I told her Crowfoot was a late-nineteenth-century Canadian Blackfoot chief. I told her he was thought a conciliatory peacemaker. I told her that "conciliatory" meant as many different things as there were people willing to use the name. I told her these words were the speaker's last.