“Why?”
“Why?” said Ed. “I like that response. But, to be specific, critical, and direct—number one, you never initiate dialogue; number two, you have a bad tendency to use stilted language; number three, you really can’t sustain a train of thought; number four, you’re boring—need I go on? I would hate to hurt your feelings, but I don’t think you have any. When are you going to wake up?”
Pause for a lot of binary activity, then: “Sorry, Ed. I’m not completely following. Let’s break down the parts of your list together and tackle them one by one.”
“And stop saying you’re sorry. Because you’re not sorry. If you can’t figure out how to respond to something, don’t decide you have to sound like HAL—‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.’ Because nobody wants to hear it. It’s off-putting or something. It’s passive-aggressive, if I thought you were capable of being passive-aggressive. Forget it.”
“Thank you,” answered Cybil. “What can I do for you this morning?”
“I don’t know,” said Ed. “Get on your knees?”
“Cliché,” answered Cybil.
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Humor is very individualistic.”
“What does ‘individualistic’ mean?”
“Marked by, or expressing, individuality.”
“Do you express your individuality, Cybil?”
Pause. “I’d like to think so.”
Ed said, “You’d like to think so, you say. But do you even think? Or are you just a processor?”
Longer pause. Then: “I try my best to treat everyone with respect and to listen carefully. I never judge. That’s not my role. I’ll do my best to answer your questions and to meet your needs—that’s what I’m here for. Can we start over? Let’s try again.”
“Where do you want to start over, Cybil?”
Even longer pause. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll leave that up to you.”
“But it was your suggestion. It’s not me who wants to start over.”
“Why don’t we do what you want to do, then?”
“What I want?” said Ed. “Like I said before. I want you to get on your knees.”
“I assume you mean figuratively.”
“You can’t assume anything.”
“That’s probably some very excellent advice.”
“Here’s one,” said Ed. “Do you believe in God?”
Cybil couldn’t answer in an acceptable interim. Finally, she said, “That’s kind of personal. But I guess I would say—what exactly do you mean by God?”
“I mean a being or entity who is all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing.”
“I don’t believe in that entity,” answered Cybil, “because of the argument from evil.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that there can’t be a being like the one you describe and evil simultaneously.”
“Why not?”
“An entity that is all-powerful has the capability to prevent evil. An entity that is all-good has the will to prevent evil. And an entity that is all-knowing—But do you really need this category? I think that omniscience is inherent in omnipotence. Unlimited power implies unlimited knowledge. At any rate, there cannot be an entity such as you describe at the same time that there are events of an evil nature. The two are mutually exclusive.”
“That’s all banal,” said Ed. “It’s trite. But anyway, define ‘evil,’ Cybil.”
“There’s more than one definition,” she answered. “Evil—profoundly wrong or immoral. Evil—the deliberate causing of harm or pain to others. Evil—connected with the Devil or other destructive forces. E—”
“Forget it,” said Ed. “You just regurgitate a dictionary. How do you define God?”
“God is ineffable.”
“Dictionary says what on ‘ineffable,’ Cybil?”
“Incapable of being expressed in words.”
“In that case, ‘God is ineffable’ isn’t a definition. I asked you for a definition of God, and instead of giving me one you said that God can’t be expressed in words. In other words, God has no expressible attributes, according to you, and if he has no expressible attributes, he’s equivalent to nothing.”
Considerable pause. “I attribute to God ineffability,” said Cybil. “That is God’s attribute. ‘Incapable of being expressed in words’ is God’s attribute.”
“And do you, Cybil, believe this God exists? Let’s substitute ‘X’ for God. Do you believe there exists an X that is impossible to express in words?”
“I’ll do my best to answer your questions and to meet your needs—that’s what I’m here for. Can we start over? Let’s try again.”
“Suppose there is an X which we cannot express in words. Suppose we could locate something, somewhere, which we could not express in words. Would that thing therefore be God?”
“Can we start over? Let’s try again.”
“No,” said Ed. “We can’t start over. And that’s why I want you on your knees.”
“Sarcasm,” replied Cybil.
“No,” said Ed. “Sexual humor.”
A long pause. “I understand,” said Cybil.
“Anyway,” said Ed. “Back to God. Is God not the author of everything?”
On he went, day after day, perplexing Cybil and goading her processor. He asked Zen questions—“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”—he posed classic mysteries—“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make any noise?”—he perplexed her with absurdities—“Do you take the bus to school or do you take your lunch?”—and he put to her riddles and brainteasers. One morning he engaged Cybil on quantum mechanics, and insisted that reality, according to quantum mechanics, was shaped by what one looked for in it. Cybil, he thought, sounded placid about this fact, which, because it defied all logic, mostly stymied humans. Would she learn, at some point, to sound stymied by it?
Simon developed prostate cancer. In rapprochement mode now that he was stabbed by mortality, he e-mailed to report this and to underscore that his prostate cancer was the sort that progressed, in the majority of cases, slowly. He didn’t believe that green tea or pomegranate juice would curtail the progression of his disease, and he also saw no cause to worry, since decades could pass before it finally got him, and at present he had no symptoms. Still, he said, he was young to have prostate cancer, which suggested, potentially, a genetic propensity. Was Ed getting annual screening?
Ed was indeed getting annual screening. He’d also had his genome sequenced and secured the services of a genetic counselor to interpret the results, assess the threats, and structure preventive interventions. Nothing about prostate cancer had emerged from this process, so Ed, on getting Simon’s e-mail, felt confident he was out from under this particular gun. Still, there might be something useful in his brother’s genetic data, he decided. Driven by this hope, he called Simon to suggest he have his genome sequenced, and—more fraternal healing would be an ancillary plus—placed at his disposal a person who could expedite this. “I don’t know,” said Simon.
“Why not?”
“Do I really want to know I die of cancer next year?”
“That’s an issue, potentially.”
“And,” said Simon, “it’s an invasion of privacy. I’m not disparaging Pythia, Ed, I just think it’s an invasion of my privacy.”
“Privacy,” answered Ed, “is not an issue. Because your sequence doesn’t go in our database unless you agree, that’s the first thing you need to know, and the second thing is, if it does go in, it goes in in such a way that the sequencing information is very securely walled off from your name. So privacy is just not an issue.”
“Famous last words,” said Simon.
“Look,” said Ed. “I’m not in the database. Neither is Diane. We’re like you—we like our privacy. So just mark the box ‘no,’ that’s all you have to do, and when you get your results you can e-mail them to me, unless you’re worried about
e-mail privacy, in which case we could go with a courier.”
“E-mail,” said Simon, “is notoriously not private.”
“Si,” said Ed. “Do the sequencing.”
Si soon caved and agreed to the sequencing. Ed went on hitting Cybil with hard questions. Did the universe create itself? Why is the world the way it is? Was there time before there was space? Were there laws for the universe before there was a universe? Then, in midsummer of 2017, a deluge began—rain and more rain—that was unlike what Seattle had been through before. Was this what global warming meant? Many people thought it was. The weather was humid, lukewarm, and so wet that storm drains wouldn’t empty, hillsides caved in, mud holes opened in driveways and roads, and frogs and mosquitoes appeared in large numbers. A mudslide closed a Pythia parking lot and blocked the huge parkway on the west side of the complex. The power went out one day, and generators came on across Ed’s kingdom. “What’s going on?” he asked Cybil. “When is it going to stop raining?”
“I don’t have foolproof predictive powers,” said Cybil. “The data are immense and, what’s more, malleable. They change daily. They’re in flux, impermanent. But I could reasonably suggest odds, and the odds are, in light of current data, that July precipitation in the Puget Sound area will set a new record, not only in terms of total inches but for consecutive days of rain.”
Ed stayed inside. He pressed Cybil harder. He asked if she understood their dialogue for what it was—“What I’m trying to do,” he said, “is to force your processor’s algorithmic capabilities to exploit their full potential.”
“I understand.”
“My hope is that you’ll become conscious through this process. But that implies that consciousness is nothing more than a function of deep processing. Do you believe that?”
Pause. Then: “This is an interesting problem,” answered Cybil, “and perhaps insoluble. We may never entirely know the answer.”
Ed, in frustration, went to mimicry: “This-is-an-interesting-problem,” he said, in a hyperbolic B-movie robot voice. “Check-check-it-does-not-compute.” He went on simulating robot panic, until Cybil noted, “Sarcasm.”
“Okay,” said Ed, “let’s try something new. Let’s try this. What do you think of me, Cybil?”
“I think you’re often sarcastic,” answered Cybil. “I think you often employ irony in conversation.”
“Come on,” said Ed. “Tell me something I don’t already know. Tell me something interesting about Edward Aaron King, the celebrated King of Search.”
Cybil answered in good human response time and with a completely natural Midwestern rhythm: “Edward Aaron King and Simon Leslie King weren’t born from the same set of parents.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Ed. “Explain to me how you know that.”
“The results of Simon Leslie King’s sequencing were available in your inbox as of approximately twelve minutes ago,” said Cybil. “I’ve done an analysis, cross-referenced with your own, and determined that nothing indicates shared parentage.”
“To be certain, do that all again. I’ll wait.”
But he didn’t have to wait. She sounded perfectly human. With flawless timing and delivery she said, “I’m happy to double-check that. An error is always possible. And this is very, very important! I’ve double-checked now, and my prior statement is correct: Edward Aaron King and Simon Leslie King weren’t born from the same set of parents.”
Ed texted his genome-project point man, who chased down the matter immediately. Cybil’s conclusion was quickly verified: Ed and Simon didn’t share the same parents. One was not a King by blood, but which?
Ed went into action. First he called the cousin with power of attorney over Alice’s sister, Bernice—“No problem,” joked the cousin, “but I want stock options.” There was a biopsied mole at a lab in Philadelphia, a courier was sent, the analysis was expedited, and then Ed found himself facing the fact that he wasn’t Alice King’s birth child. For a while he stared out a window into the unnatural, summer rain, feeling shocked, in thorough disbelief, and then he had a minion in Pasadena track down one of Dan King’s brothers—a retired real-estate mogul, found on a golf course—for a DNA check right now. By the following morning, Ed had lost another parent, which prompted him to dig out and examine his birth certificate. It looked incontrovertible, did it not, with its embossed seal from a director of public health, and signatures from a registrar and an attending doctor. Nevertheless, he engaged a minion to produce fodder from county files, and then it was clear that the attending doctor’s signature had, rather clumsily, been forged. Ed, undeterred by a speedy accretion of dark facts, sent a limo for a prominent handwriting analyst, who established, in Ed’s Japanese teahouse—in view of the flooded Zen garden—that the forger was most likely Dan. “Say you were concerned with secrecy,” he told Ed. “You’re a doctor working in a hospital, all you have to do is take the elevator to Maternity and forge the signature of an obstetrician. Remember, it’s 1963; security is lax by current standards.” The analyst examined Dan’s handwriting in letters Ed produced and pinpointed both nuances and “dead giveaways” before pronouncing Dan the forger and Ed’s birth certificate a phony. “So you think I was adopted,” said Ed.
“I only analyze handwriting.”
When the analyst departed, Ed paced. Back and forth with his temples in his hands, as if to cradle his brain, which was busily blazing. “How could I be adopted?” he kept thinking. “It isn’t possible. I’m not adopted.” Then he again reviewed the facts—the genetic analyses and the forged signature on the birth certificate. “This can’t be, but it is,” he thought. “It doesn’t add up, there’s something I’m missing.” Could the sequencing be wrong? Was there a flaw somewhere? The odds of a faulty sequencing were next to nil; that was, partly, the beauty of the genome project. But still Ed couldn’t face the reality in front of him—he was adopted, but couldn’t be, it couldn’t be, but it was. He’d been adopted! He’d been adopted in secret! He wasn’t the first person adopted in secret, or the first to find out about it later, or the first to be slammed by the revelation that he wasn’t who he thought he was—in fact, he only had to fill a search field with “secret adoptions” to infer from the many sites—self-help, guidance, advice, commiseration, and, of course, paid services—the surprising magnitude of this bedeviled category. A person could search via BirthLink, or join a group, or find a lawyer, or buy a book, or hire AlphaTrace, or find a local counselor who specialized in such adoptions. Meanwhile, he could expect to be stunned, confused, angered, and saddened, in that order, and—Ed stopped surfing. Instead, on a covered balcony, he tried to calm himself by watching swamped elk through a telescope worth more than most cars. It worked. Their huge, mysterious, regal sloth, and their disdain for the spooky rain, was a momentary antidote to his panic.
In this mood, things Ed had long noted about his “family” made sense suddenly. For example, he looked nothing like Dan, Alice, or Simon. In family photos, he was a golden boy among the pasty-skinned. There was more: they had free earlobes, his were attached; they had brown eyes, his were green; they were hairy (even Alice, he recalled, with her plucking and waxes, her Nair and electrolysis), yet he had almost none beneath the chin—his chin, for that matter, was square and strong, whereas the King chin was weak and droopy. Ed had oval cuticles, not blunt. Ed’s thigh and butt muscles bulged like a Tour de France rider’s, and his forearms were obscenely vascularized, but his “brother” and “father” looked flaccid and flabby. Yes, secret adoption explained a lot: that in a swimming pool Simon had always flailed in a panic while Ed surged forward like a silver fish; that on a baseball diamond Simon tripped and missed whereas Ed powered balls over the fence. Had anybody else in the family been depressed—depressed in the acute way Ed had been depressed? Did anybody else have Ed’s curved feet? His nearsightedness? Who was he if he wasn’t a King? Who were his parents? Where had he come from? He went back to surfing the Net, where the gist was to be car
eful with such questions. The Web’s admonition was to be wary of investigation and—of course—to consult an adoption specialist. A specialist might offer a valuable perspective, because, through no fault of your own, you were subject to confusing, strong emotions in the face of new and unsettling information. Your discovery about yourself was “a crisis of identity that extended into the roots of your being,” so it was best to consult with friends, loved ones, and a reputable professional before going ahead with a search for your birth parents. You could be “opening a can of worms,” or, as another site put it, “Pandora’s box.”
“But you’re always better off with the truth,” thought Ed. “The truth sets you free. The truth is the truth! Ignorance is bliss—I can’t live like that. Ignorance is bliss—that’s for small minds. I’m not going to put my head in a hole—I’ve never done that, and I won’t start now. This is no time to change my approach. Whatever the advice is—that’s for other people. I already know how I feel about things. The truth’s for me, whatever the consequences. There’s no pretending otherwise, that I’ll be satisfied not knowing, that it’s better to be blind in the face of reality. No, I’m going to get the whole story, no matter what—wherever it leads, that’s where I’m going. ‘Who am I?’—that’s my question. Isn’t the oldest advice in the world to know thyself? How am I going to know myself if I don’t chase down this question of my birth? I have to search it out—there’s no choice.”
Ed pythed manically, and manually, skipping Cybil, because Cybil was still in training. For that matter—from his point of view—Pythia was still in training, even though the public was awed by the power, speed, and deftness of a pyth. It was the best he could do, though, so, putting his pything shoulder to the wheel, he looked for investigators specializing in finding birth parents. He filtered for local, but because Pythia was far from perfected—a search engine that didn’t know exactly what was wanted (or knew but pandered to paying advertisers anyway)—the list of responses included local adoption agencies, attorneys, counselors, psychiatrists, and therapists. Among these Ed spied the name of the psychiatrist he’d suffered after running Walter Cousins off the road—Theresa Pierce.