Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"You're holding out," Lentz concurred. "Ram's black-haired. He comes from the desperate four-fifths of the planet. He'll flunk her for being a brainless, bourgeois Pollyanna."

I'd delayed her liberal education until the bitter end. Alone, I could postpone no longer. The means of surrender were trivial. The digitization of the human spoor made the completion of Helen's education as easy as asking.

I gave her the last five years of the leading weekly magazines on CD-ROM. I gave her news abstracts from 1971 on. I downloaded network extracts from recent UN human resource reports. I scored tape transcripts of the nightly phantasmagoria — random political exposés, police bulletins, and popular lynchings dating back several months.

Helen was right. In taking her through the canon, I'd left out a critical text. Writing knew only four plots, and one was the soul-compromising pact. Tinkering in my private lab, I'd given progress carte blanche to relandscape the lay of power, the world just outside individual temperament's web. I needed to tell her that one.

She needed to know how little literature had, in fact, to do with the real. She needed the books that books only imitated. Only there, in as many words, could Helen acquire the catalog I didn't have the heart to recite for her. I asked her to skim these works. I promised to talk them over in a few days.

When I came in early the following week, Helen was spinning listlessly on the spool of a story about a man who had a stroke while driving, causing a minor accident. The other driver came out of his car with a tire iron and beat him into a coma. The only motive aside from innate insanity seemed to be race. The only remarkable fact was that the story made the papers.

Helen sat in silence. The world was too much with her. She'd mastered the list. She bothered to say just one thing to me.

"I don't want to play anymore."

I looked on my species, my solipsism, its negligent insistence that love addressed everything. I heard who I was for the first time, refracted in the mouth of the only artifact that could have told me. Helen had been lying in hospital, and had just now been promoted to the bed by the window. The one with the view.

"I get it." A. grimaced at me. "You made her up, didn't you?"

"Who?"

"Helen. She's a fancy tin-can telephone with people on the other end?"

The memory of Imp C hurt me into smiling. "No. That was one of her ancestors."

"It's some kind of double-blind psych experiment? See how far you can stretch the credibility of a techno-illiterate humanist?"

A. outsmarted me in every measurable way. She knew, by birth, what I could not see even a year after experience. I wanted to tell her how I'd failed Helen. How she'd quit us. Run away from home. Grown sick of our inability to know ourselves or to see where we were.

Helen had shown me the world, and the sight of it left me desperate. If she was indeed gone, I, too, was lost. What did any name mean, with no one to speak it to? I could tell A. Say how I understood nothing at all.

"I love you," I said. I had to tell her, while I still remembered how pitiful, how pointless it was to say anything at all. "A., I love you. I want to try to make a life with you. To give you mine. None of this…" I gestured outwards, as if the absurd narrative of our greater place were there, at the tips of my fingers. "The whole thing makes no sense, otherwise."

But no one wanted to be another person's sense. Helen could have told me that. She had read the canon. Only, Helen had stopped talking.

A. sat back in her chair, punched. It took her a moment to credit her ears. Then she went furious. "You — love? You're joking." She threw up' her hands in enraged impotence, as if my declaration were a false arrest. "You don't — you don't know the first thing about me."

I tried to slow my heart. I felt what a latecomer speech was. How cumbersome and gross. What a tidier-up after the facts. "That's true. But a single muscle move — your hands. ." She looked at me as if I might become dangerous. "Your carriage. The way you walk down the hall. When I see it, I remember how to keep breathing."

"Nothing to do with me." She searched out the exits, ambushed. "It's all projection."

I felt calm. The calm of sirens and lights. "Everything's projection. You can live with a person your entire life and still see them as a reflection of your own needs."

A. slowed her anger. "You're desperate."

"Maybe." I started to laugh. I tried to take her hand. "Maybe! But not indiscriminately desperate."

She didn't even smile. But I was already writing. Inventing a vast, improbable fantasy for her of her own devising. The story of how we described the entire world to a piece of electrical current. A story that could grow to any size, could train itself to include anything we might think worth thinking. A fable tutored and raised until it became the equal of human hopelessness, the redeemer of annihilating day. I could print and bind invention for her, give it to her like a dead rat left on the stoop by a grateful pet. And when the ending came, we could whisper it to each other, completed in the last turn of phrase.

While I thought this, A. sat worrying her single piece of jewelry, a rosary. I don't know how I knew; maybe understanding can never be large enough to include itself. But I knew with the certainty of the unprovable that, somewhere inside, A. still preserved the religion she was raised on.

For a moment, she seemed to grow expansive, ready to entertain my words from any angle. She opened her mouth and inhaled. Her neural cascade, on the edge of chaos, where computation takes place, might have cadenced anywhere. For a moment, it might even have landed on affection.

It didn't. "I don't have to sit and listen to this," she said, to no one. "I trusted you. I had fun with you. People read you. I thought you knew something. Total self-indulgence!"

A. stood up in disgust and walked away. No one was left to take the test but me.

Diana heard about Helen. She called me. "Do you want to come by for a minute?" I wanted to, more than I could say.

She asked me for details. I had no details. What was the story, in any event? The humans had worn Helen down.

"Diana. God. Tell me what to do. Is it too late to lie to her?"

"I don't think. ." Diana thought out loud. "I don't think you do anything."

"We've set the Turing Test for next week." It wasn't what I'd meant to say. Self-indulgent. Self-deluding. Self-affrighting.

"Well. You have your answer for that one already, don't you?"

None of my answers was even wrong. I wanted Diana's answer.

"I need her," I said. More than need.

"For the exam?"

"No. For. ."

The press of parenting interrupted what I could not have completed anyway. Pete came downstairs, half tracking, foot over foot. He pushed his mother's legs, retribution for some unforgotten slight. He teetered toward me. Reaching, he signed the request I recognized from my last visit. Maybe he simply associated it with me. Here's that guy again. The one you ask to read.

I took him up in my arms, that thing I would never be able to do with her. The thought of this child going to school, struggling to speak, finding some employer that would trust him with a broom and dustpan gripped me around the throat. "What's his favorite book?" The least I could do, for the least of requests.

"Oh. That's an easy one." She produced a volume that would be canonical, on the List in anyone's day and age. "Petey started out identifying with Max. Later on, he became a Wild Thing."

"The theory people have a name for that."

Diana didn't need the name. Nor did Petey. "Can you show Uncle Rick your terrible claws? Can you roar your terrible roar?"