Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"Hello you," I said when she picked up. I sounded almost young. "It's me." And in the awkward microsecond, I clarified with my name.

"Oh, hi." A., nervous in relief. "What's up?"

"Checking to see if you're booking for the test."

"Ha! I'm going to whup your girl with half my synapses tied behind my back."

"What are you doing next Wednesday?" Midway in, my voice gave out. I began to tremor as if I'd just robbed a bank or fallen into an ice crevasse. "It's Shrimp Night at my favorite seafood place. The crustaceans are fair, but the conversation is good." If she was into shortness of breath, I was home free.

"Uh, sure. Why not? Wait. Hang on."

I heard her put the mouthpiece against her body. I heard her roll her eyes and shrug. I heard her ask the mate whose existence I'd been denying if they had any plans.

"It's kind of a problem," she explained on returning. "Maybe another time?"

"Another time would be great," I replied, mechanical with calm.

"She's amazing," Lentz said.

I had to think who he meant. "Now do you believe me? She's conscious. I know it."

"We don't know anything of the kind, Marcel. But we could find out."

"Don't talk with your mouth full," I told him. "Set your sandwich down between gulps. It's a societal norm." I tried to slow him. To keep him from saying what I knew he was going to say.

"I must admit, Marcel. I'm surprised by what you've been able to accomplish."

"It's not me." It was her. The subsystems talking to subsystems. Lentz's neural handiwork.

"She sure as hell seems to mimic with shocking accuracy some features of high-level cognition. It's uncanny. And a heuristic tool such as comes along once in a lifetime."

"Heuristic?"

"Stimulus to investigative discovery."

"I know what the word means, Philip." But I could not add what I meant: Is that all she means to you?

"Her architecture is such that severance could be effected with a great deal of local selectivity."

"I don't believe you said that. You want to cut into her? You want to lobotomize?"

"Easy, Marcel. We're talking about a painless operation, as far as I imagine. We could get what is unattainable in any other arena. Isolate the high-level processes by which she maps complex input and reassembles responses. Analyze them. Correlate various regional destruction with changes in—"

"You don't know it would be painless, Lentz."

He fell back against the cafeteria chair and studied me. Was I serious? Had I lost it, gone off cognition's deep end? I saw him find, in my face, the even more indicting idea that I didn't voice: that hurting Helen in any way would be wrong.

Lentz, in an instant, anticipated everything either of us might say to each other on the morality of machine vivisection. The whole topic was a wash, as insoluble as intelligence itself. He waved his hand, dismissing me as a madman. No part of her lived. To take her apart might, finally, extend some indirect service to the living. Anything else was softheaded nostalgia.

I had no leg to stand on. Lentz owned Helen, her shaped evolution, the lay of her synapses. He owned all the reasoning about her as well. I had some connection to her, by virtue of our long association. But that connection was, at most, emotional. And if Helen lived far enough to be able to feel, it just went to prove that emotions were no more than the sum of their weight vectors. And cuttable, in the name of knowing.

My strongest argument belonged more to him than it did to me. We know the world by awling it into our shape-changing cells. Knowing those cells required just as merciless tooling. To counter any part of Lentz's plan would be to contradict myself. To lose. I had just one bargain to make. And I damned myself with it willingly.

"At least give us until after the test."

"That's fine. I'm pretty much backlogged until then anyway."

I hadn't suspected how easily I could sell my weighted soul.

"Diana was right," I spit, venomous. "You are a monster."

He stared at me again. You're going to fault me for the deal you proposed? He stood up to leave, grasping his tray. "Oh, don't go getting your ass all out of joint, Marcel. I said we won't cut anything until after you run your little competition."

I tracked Diana down to her dry lab. She sat in front of a monitor, watching a subtractive visualization of the activity of cerebral columns. A color contour recording: the flashing maps of thought in real time.

"Lentz wants to brain-damage Helen. Selectively kill off neurodes. See what makes her tick."

"Of course he does," Diana said. She neither missed a beat nor took her eyes from her screen. "It wasn't that long ago that he stopped frying ants with the magnifying glass."

"Diana. Please. This is really happening."

She stopped, then. She looked up. She would have taken my hand, had she not been a single parent in a secret affair, and I a single, middle-aged man.

"I can't help you, Ricky." Her eyes glistened, slick with her impotence. "I fractionate monkey hippocampi."

Confusion wanned me like an opiate. I rolled with it, to the point of panic. "Monkeys can't talk."

"No. But if they could, you know what they would ask the lab tech."

She implored me, with a look of bewilderment. Don't press this. Helen hurt her. I destroyed her. But nothing approached the pain of her own living compromise.

I gave Helen a stack of independent readings. I did not trust my voice in conversation with her. And she needed no more lessons in cheerful deceit.

In all our dealings, Harold Plover had never been the spokesman for anything but decency. I decided to go enlist his humanity. I'd never seen him away from the Center. But I had his address, and showed up at his place late that Saturday afternoon, unannounced.

Harold met me jovially at the door. He was seconded by an even more jovial Doberman. The dog was at least half again bigger than A. The dog leaped up and knocked me over, while Harold fought to restrain it. I righted myself and the game started all over again.

"Ivan," Harold shouted at the creature, further exciting it. "Ivan! Knock it off. Time out. Haven't we talked about socially unacceptable behavior?"

"Try 'Down, boy.' Quick."

"Oh, don't be afraid of this pooch. He won the 'Most Likely to Lick a Serial Killer's Face' award from doggie obedience school."

"Doesn't this brand have one of the highest recidivism rates?"

"Breed, Maestro. Dog breeds. Dog food brands. Words are his life," he explained to Ivan.

At last Harold succeeded in hauling the disconsolate dog off me. Without asking why I'd dropped by, he hauled me into the inner sanctum. The place crawled with daughters. Daughters had been left about carelessly, everywhere. Harold introduced me to his wife, Tess. I expected something small, fast, and acid. I got an isle of amiable adulthood amid the teenage torrent.

One who must have been Mina flirted out a greeting. "Look who's here. If it isn't Orph himself."

"Orff?"

"Yeah. Orphic Rewards."

"She's gone anagram-mad," Harold whined. "It's driving us all up the bloody wall."

Another daughter came downstairs, modeling her prom dress. This might have been Trish. I wasn't betting.

Harold exploded. "Absolutely not. You're not wearing that thing in public! You look like a French whore in heat."

"Oh, Daddy!"

"Listen to the expert in French whores." Tess tousled Harold's hair. "I figured you had to be spending yourself somewhere."

"Do you believe this woman? You'd never guess to hear her, would you, that she spent six years in a convent?"

"We'll talk about it," Tess consoled the devastated kid.

"We won't talk about it," Harold shouted.

"Talking never hurts," Tess said.