Richard Powers: Galatea 2.2

I was too late in seeing who she had become. I should have taught her the thing I didn't know.

Harold, as sanguine, as unreadable as ever, delivered the last hurdle.

"So here's the work I want them to interpret."

I took the sheet from him. "That's it? You mean to say that's it?"

"What? There's supposed to be more?"

"Well, yeah. You're supposed to start with 'Discuss how class tensions touched off by the Industrial Revolution produced the reaction of Romanticism in three of the following works.' "

"Not interested," Harold said.

"Something about depth psychology and the arbitrary indeterminacy of signs."

"I just want them to tell me what this means."

"This? These two lines."

'Too much? Okay, make it just the first one if you want."

The sheet, virtually blank, read:

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

Caliban's read of the spells with which his master imprisons him. Harold had surprised us. He'd given exactly what we'd predicted of him.

'This is not a work," I protested. Helen had read the complete tomes of Trollope and Richardson. She'd read Bronte and Twain at their most nihilistic, Joyce at his most impenetrably encoded, Dickinson at her most embracingly abdicating. "Give her a chance to fly."

"This is her chance," Harold said.

A. used departmental mail to return her response. Helen dumped hers to the network laser.

Lentz held the two papers out to me, as if there were still a contest. "Okay. Guess which twin has the Toni?"

Neither twin would have placed the reference. A. was too young, and Helen far too old.

A.'s interpretation was a more or less brilliant New Historicist reading. She rendered The Tempest as a take on colonial wars, constructed Otherness, the violent reduction society works on itself. She dismissed, definitively, any promise of transcendence.

She scored at least one massively palpable hit. She conceded how these words are spoken by a monster who isn't supposed to be able to say anything that beautiful, let alone say at all.

Helen's said:

You are the ones who can hear airs. Who can be frightened or encouraged. You can hold things and break them and fix them. I never felt at home here. This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway.

At the bottom of the page, she added the words I taught her, words Helen cribbed from a letter she once made me read out loud.

Take care, Richard. See everything for me.

With that, H. undid herself. Shut herself down. "Graceful degradation," Lentz named it. The quality of cognition we'd shot for from the start.

She could not have stayed. I'd known that for a while, and ignored it for longer. I didn't yet know how I would be able to stay myself, now, without her. She had come back only momentarily, just to gloss this smallest of passages. To tell me that one small thing. Life meant convincing another that you knew what it meant to be alive. The world's Turing Test was not yet over.

"Sorry, you people," Ram began. "Bloody doctor nuisances. In love with their magnetic imaging. I didn't mean to make you all late."

He patted the air in exasperation, pleading forgiveness.

"Doctor?" I asked. "Imaging?"

Harold and Lentz said nothing. They looked away, implicated in knowledge. Embarrassed by my not having long since seen.

Ram waved away my question, the whole topic. "This is my choice." He held up A.'s answer. "This one is the human being."

How many months had I known him and not registered? Now, when I knew what I looked at, the evidence was everywhere. Swelling, weight loss, change in pallor. The feigned good spirits of friends. The man was incurably sick. He needed every word anyone could invent.

Ram flipped obsessively through A.'s exam answer. He adored her already, for her anonymous words alone. "Lots of contours, that cerebral cortex. They never know when they've had enough, these humans."

Lentz spoke, blissful in defeat. "Gupta. You bloody foreigner. Don't you know anything about judging? You're supposed to pick the sentimental favorite." The handicapped one. The one the test process killed.

"Ram," I said. "Ram. What's happening?"

"It's nothing. But a scratch." He tapped his finger against A.'s paper, excited. Whole new isles rose from the sea. "Not a bad writer, this Shakespeare fellow. For a hegemonic imperialist."

"Well, Powers. How far were we, again? Imp H? You realize what we have to call the next one, don't you?"

I stood in the training lab a last time. Seeing it for the first, for her. "Philip?" I could not stay in this discarded office for five more minutes without following Helen's lead. I would break under the weight of what she'd condemned me to. "One — one more question?"

"That's two. You're over quota already."

"Why did you want to build—?" I didn't know what to call it anymore. What we had built.

"Why do we do anything? Because we're lonely." He thought a little, and seemed to agree with himself. Yes. "Something to talk to." Lentz cocked back in his chair. Two feet of journals crashed to the floor. Too late in life, he hit upon the idea of trivia. "So where are you headed?"

"Search me." Paris.

"The maker's fate is to be a wanderer?"

"Not really. I'm ready to buy in." I just had to find the right seller.

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-six."

"Ah. Darkling-wood time. Look at it this way. You still have half your life to explicate the mess you've made up until now."

"And the mess that accumulates during that?"

"Sufficient unto the day is the idea thereof."

"You want to quit with the Bartlett's?"

Lentz snorted. "Well, we lost. You know the wager. Connectionism has to eat crow. We owe the enemy one public retraction. Go write it."

I turned from the office, struck by a thought that would scatter if I so much as blinked. I'd come into any number of public inventions. That we could fit time into a continuous story. That we could teach a machine to speak. That we might care what it would say. That the world's endless thingness had a name. That someone else's prison-bar picture might spring you. That we could love more than once. That we could know what once means.

Each metaphor already modeled the modeler that pasted it together. It seemed I might have another fiction in me after all.

I started to trot, searching for a keyboard before memory degraded.

Two steps down the Center's corridor, I heard Lentz call me. I slunk back to his door. He leaned forward on the desk, Coke-bottle glasses in hand. He studied the vacant stems, then tapped them against his chest.

"Marcel," he said. Famous next-to-last words. "Don't stay away too long."