Richard Powers - Bewilderment

My wife was admirable the way I was tall. But admiration barely touched what I felt. The feeling flowing through me felt like a geometric proof. I revered my wife. She was who she should be in this world, without once worrying about what that meant. I could never hope to emulate her. I just hoped she could see, from the control booth, in front of those monitors, what flooded my brain.

The run ended and my trance broke. The techs recalibrated the software by showing me the earlier images and having me count backward from ten to one. Then they rolled the dice again and gave me a second target: Grief .

As soon as the word sounded in my earbuds, my pulse spiked. Truth is, I’m profoundly superstitious—not in my head, which science has retrained, but in my limbs. I’m good at old feelings, and grief must be older than awareness itself. Way too easily, my body embraces my worst imaginings. The several minutes I’d just spent admiring my wife now turned inside out. I was back in that vivid night, now with disaster everywhere. My son’s ear infection turned septic and fatal. Puppy mill killers captured my wife and tortured her. Sleep-deprived and overworked, she drove off the icy road and lay in a ditch for hours.

What’s grief? The world stripped of something you admire. The things that swarmed me were utter, irrational nonsense. But I felt them as if, on some planet, they had really happened.

Aly jumped up and hugged me as I joined them in the booth. Oh, my poor little guy!

WE CHANGED PLACES. I sat with Currier, and Aly got into the fMRI tube. While two techs calibrated Aly with the images and music, I raised my doubts with Currier.

“Your methodology doesn’t seem especially well controlled. Won’t your results vary widely, depending…?”

“Depending on how good a method actor the subject is?” His face was cheerful, but his voice turned condescending. I really struggled with the man, and not only because Aly liked him so much.

“Exactly. Not everyone can make themselves feel emotions on command.”

“We don’t need them to. We’re looking at specific regions in the limbic system. Some of the targets’ reactions will be truer than others. Some people will really feel the emotions while others will only think about them. But the AI can extract common patterns of activity from hundreds of runs and builds up a composite, 3-D map of shared salient features. We’re testing whether averaged fingerprints of the eight core emotions are distinct enough to be recognized by trainees who are taught to match them.”

“And? How’s it looking?”

He tilted his head, like one of the birds he and my wife peeped at together. “Given pure chance and eight choices, a person would identify the target emotion correctly one in eight times. But after a few sessions of feedback, trainees can correctly name the target emotion a little more than half the time.”

“Jesus. Emotional telepathy.”

Currier raised his eyebrows. “You could say that.”

I was still skeptical. But had I been on the grants committee, I’d have funded him. The idea deserved exploration, whatever its results. An empathy machine: it could have come from one of the two thousand SF novels in my collection.

Across the room, my wife seemed even smaller inside the scanner. They gave her Vigilance . I wouldn’t even have called vigilance an emotion, let alone one of the eight core ones. But vigilance was to Alyssa what chant was to medieval nuns, so it didn’t surprise me when, three minutes into her stint with it, Currier leaned in to the monitor. “Hoo. She’s intense.”

“You have no idea.”

But maybe he did. We watched the activity swirl through Aly’s brain like an animated finger painting. Maybe she was reliving the same night that I had. Yet scores of other nights could have served her as nicely. I watched the screen, learning something. Aly sang all of life’s basic tunes in full voice, but vigilance was her national anthem. Her whole life was variations on one theme: whatever work your hands can do, do now, for there is no work for you in that place where you are going.

The patterns danced through Aly’s brain. A tech told her to breathe deeply and relax. Relax? she called from inside the tube. I’m just warming up!

Then they gave her Ecstasy . “Wait,” I told Currier. “I get Grief and she gets Ecstasy?”

The man grinned. His charm was undeniable. “I’ll have a look at the random number generator.”

Vigilance and Ecstasy lie right next to each other on Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. Vigilance shades off into Anticipation and Interest, toward the wheel’s rim. Ecstasy dials back into Joy and Serenity. In the wedge between Joy and Anticipation is Optimism. Day after day of hopeless triage used to knock Aly on her ass. I remember her weeping over clandestine video from an Iowa feedlot. She once damned humanity to hell while throwing a UN report about habitat destruction across the room. But my wife’s cells pumped out optimism. Her soul aligned toward Ecstasy like iron filings mimic a magnetic field.

I watched Aly’s brain-print of bliss on a screen in a booth alongside a man I was sure desired her. Currier stared at her unfolding pattern. “She’s perfect !” I had no idea what he was looking at, but even I could see how different this flood was from her patterns a few minutes before.

I knew my wife as well as I’ve ever known anyone. But I had no clue what memories Aly used to generate this command performance. Was I somewhere in the mix? Was her son the center of her joy? Or did other things prompt her innermost bliss? I wanted so badly to know the source of the spreading colors that it filled me with a ninth primary emotion nowhere on Plutchik’s wheel.

Currier studied her diencephalon on the monitor. He was part of a long, impressive exploration that would last for as long as society believed in science. But even if his kind did succeed at last in opening the locked room of another person’s head, we’d still never know what it felt like to inhabit that place. Wherever we went, the view would always be from here.

The two techs helped Aly from the fMRI tube. She blushed with pleasure the way she did the day the nurses put her newborn in her hands. She joined us in the booth, a little wobbly. Currier whistled. “You sure know how to drive that thing.”

My wife came and put her hands around my neck, as if my body alone might keep her small craft afloat in a large sea. We made it home still clutching at each other and paid off the babysitter. We fed our boy and tried to distract him with his favorite Star Wars Legos. Robin knew something was up and chose that moment to turn clingy. I reasoned with him.

“Your mother and I have a few things to take care of. You play quietly, and we’ll go see the sailboats, later.”

This worked long enough for Aly and me to barricade ourselves in the bedroom. She had me half undressed before I could whisper my first fierce words. “What were you thinking of, back there? I need to know!”

She ignored every sound from me but my pulse. Her ear was up to my chest and her hands everywhere below. Oh, my poor little guy. You looked like you were about to cry, in that nasty machine!

Then she towered above me, upright, alert, and huge. Lifting off, she cried out a little, like some nocturnal thing. I reached up to shush her, and the thrill doubled. It took only seconds for the knock on the door. Is everybody okay in there?

My wife, vigilant ecstatic, took all her will to keep from laughing. So okay, honey! Everybody’s so okay .

ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING IN NOVEMBER, I walked across campus to Currier’s building. It was a good long hike, but I didn’t send a heads-up. I didn’t want a paper trail. Martin seemed perplexed to see me. The closest emotion on Plutchik’s wheel was probably Apprehension.