The newspaper says: It seems like centuries ago that men said blunt, self-satisfied things to credulous women.
The system can be irritable when overburdened. It may spend eternities on simple tasks. It may send upsetting messages to your console. It may sham dead.
If you forget to tell the system not to keep expecting something, it will keep expecting it. Every few minutes it will spit a message onto the paper in the system console, informing the world that although you have forgotten your appointment, it has not. It will spit these messages hour after hour.
When there is nothing for it to do, the system sleeps. It wakes up knowing the time to within a hundredth of a second.
Sometimes the system becomes irrational, and a young man in a too-tight suit has to come with his aluminum suitcases and bring it down. The CPU unit is opened up and suffers the indignity of having its boards removed, one after another, until the faulty one is found. Then everything is OK again.
The window is dark when Renée appears. The chairs have been herded into clusters, one by the telephone and one in the corner by the Tectronix screen. She rolls them back to where they belong, puts five soft-drink cans in the recycling box, and logs off consoles for the people who haven’t bothered to. Then she goes up the ramp to the inner sanctum and sits angled at the console by the optical-disk jukebox, her legs to one side of the chair. She is so alone and so motionless in the roar of the bright room, so technical in her coloration, that even though she’s plainly visible through the plate-glass window, a passing sedimentologist who sticks his head in the door is sure the room is empty.
An image of the earth beneath Tonga flows onto the color screen. Renée looks at each stationary object in the room, the system console, the storage disks, the walls, the CPU unit, the tape drives, the power supply, the array processor, the digitizer, the racks of tapes, her body, the walls, the jukebox. She feels the watchfulness and the perpetuity. She listens intently to the noise, trying to find sense or pattern or allusion in it, and knowing that she won’t. Beneath the noise there are, however, ghosts of noises—the scurrying, the titter, of calculating electrons.
Howard Chun enters the empty room at midnight carrying a milk shake and his boom box, which is the size of a two-drawer file cabinet. He logs onto the system from six consoles and listens to the Eroica while he works.
Later, after he has gone, a night wind rolls a paper cup across the pavement outside the window. System noise covers the sighing of the wind, but not the clatter of the cup.
Still later, the corner of an ocean map comes unstuck from a wall and bends forward. Three weeks from now another corner will come unstuck, and the first person in to work the next day will find the map in a heap on the floor.
It’s morning: the dogwood is being photographed. The newspaper says: Food may not be love, but it’s nice nevertheless, and it has its uses.
All the lights are burning. Soft-drink cans float on their sides on a sea of waste paper. The cracked plastic hemisphere belonging to the room’s globe has peanut shells inside it, and the front panel of the radiator, from whose fan cool air can also blow, is lying on the floor with its decaying sheet of foam insulation uppermost. In the equipment room, a Twinkies wrapper and a gummy sheet of Twinkies cardboard are lying on the CPU unit, by the modems.
In the seven years since it began, the noise has stopped only once. It was after midnight on a Saturday in August, when a belt in the airconditioner broke. An alarm bell alerted Campus Security, but there were no signs of a break-in, and the airconditioner was making its usual noise, so the officers disabled the alarm. The temperature in the equipment room rose to 130° F before Renée came to work and, duly aghast, shut the system down.
What a silence there was that day. It was like standing by an ocean from which all the water had been drained.
The system believes that the last twenty years have eliminated any significant distinction between human and artificial intelligence in America. The system believes that all vital functions of the average American intelligence can now be simulated by a program running to 11,000 lines supported by six Phrase libraries and one Opinions library together totaling less than eight megabytes. A medium-price laptop with a hard disk will run the program, which can perform exactly the same mental tasks as a randomly selected American: can realistically simulate his spending patterns, his crisis-response mechanisms, his political behavior.
The 5p.m. - 6:30p.m. segment of the weekday program for a male might look like this:
3080 desire = desire + desinc
3090 endwork
3100 WALKTO car
3110 desire = desire + desinc
3115 ifdesire(1)<.67 then>
DRIVETOPARK Singles(n)
gosub drinkchoice
on foxy 3200
3120 ifcash>6i iftime>1 ifdesire(6)>.5 gosub shopping
3130 iffuel>.5 iftime>.05 gosub fillup
3140 DRIVETOPARK Home
. . .
shopping
desire = desire + desinc
read shortneeds/bigneeds/bigwants
gosub needsort: needs.temp; cash;
DRIVETOPARK Mall(n,)
WALKTO Mall(n,needs(1))
on hotprod gosub impulsebuy
on dazzle gosub impulsebuy
BUY needs(1)
if cash
if desire(2)<.5 then>
FEEL desire(2)
gosub dineout
80 next needs
. . .
dineout
10 gosub foodchoice
dmatch Mall(n,) f(1)
on nomatch gosub foodchoice
WALKTO Mall(n,f(1 ))
ifalcohol then ale = (0,1) else ale = (1,0)
BUYEAT f(1), [d(1a, 1b)*alc]
on foxy 3200
desire(2) = desire(2) -[dvalue(f 1 )]
if desire(2)<.5 exit else>
. . .
3200 FEEL desire(1)
gosub shevaluate
if (she*desire(1))<.5 exitloop>
desire(1)=2*desire(1)
call lib :convmatter/:nicetalk
gosub pickup
. . .
[pickup
SAY “Hi”
on snub exitsub
knowher=she/10
110 read $shesay
search convmatter
pmatch $shesay $reply
rem: pval assigned in pmatch
SAY $reply
on snub exitsub
knowher=knowher+pval
gosub shevaluate
if she*desire<.5 exitsub>
if knowher<.67 then>
SAY “Say listen if you’re free maybe you wanna”;$line(n)
read $shesay
. . .
[foodchoice
randomize
food = int(rnd*10)
create d1 {a,b}
if food = 1 then f1 = {pizza} d1 = {pepsi, beer} exitsub
if food = 2 then f1 = {nachos} d1 = {sprite, beer} exitsub
if food = 3 then f1 = {nuggets}
. . .
if(spendlapse*cash)
. . .
3150 newswatch
call lib :hotwords
. . .
. . .
You may wish to object: Can the artificial intelligence read a book with comprehension? Can it paint a truly original painting or compose a symphony? Can it distinguish between fact and mere image, and make responsible political decisions on the basis of this distinction?
The system points out that the program simulates the intelligence of the average American in the 1990s.
You may still object that no machine, no matter how sophisticated, will ever be able to subjectively feel the color blue or taste the flavor cinnamon or be aware of itself as it thinks.
The system considers this a dangerous irrelevance. Because once you admit subjectivity into a logical discussion, once you grant reality to phenomena that can never be verified by a machine or a chemical reaction, once yo
u say that a person’s subjective interpretation of cinnamon molecules as Oh! Cinnamon! has any meaning, you open a Pandora’s box. Next thing you know, the person will be telling you that she interprets the silence on a mountaintop as Oh! There is an eternal presence all around me, and the darkness of her bedroom late at night as Oh! I have a soul that transcends its physical enclosure; and that way madness lies.
It’s much wiser to live rationally, as a machine does. To vote for the man with the harshest views on drug kingpins. To maintain that what is real about the flavor of cinnamon is its informational content: it tells your brain—and this by sheer chemical accident, since cinnamon is non-nutritive—eat me, I am good for you. It’s absolutely wiser to laugh at the person who tells you that without your subjective experience of cinnamon you would have hanged yourself at the age of thirteen, and that without your subjective experience of the smell of melting snow your attitude towards your mother or your wife or your daughter would be no more than How can I make her give me what I want? And as some people cannot taste, and as the leader of a nation of the color-blind lives in his black Berlin or gray Tokyo or White House and sneers at those who say they have feelings about the color blue, you must learn to sneer at those who have been in the mountains and say they’ve felt the presence of an eternal God, and to reject any conclusions they draw from this experience.
Otherwise—if you let emotion trick you into thinking there’s something unique or transcendent about human subjectivity—you might find yourself wondering why you’ve organized your life as if you were nothing but a machine for the unpleasant production and pleasant consumption of commodities. And why, in the name of responsible parenthood, you are fostering in your children the same ethos of consumption, if the material is not the essence of humanity: why you’re guaranteeing that their life will be as cluttered with commodities as yours is, with tasks and loops and input and output, so that they will have lived for no more purpose than to perpetuate the system and will die for no more reason than that they’ve worn out. You might begin to worry that with every appliance that you buy, every piece of plastic that you discard, every gallon of hot water that you waste, every stock that you trade, every mile that you drive, you are hastening the day when there is no more land or air or water in the world that has not been changed, the day when spring will smell like hydrochloric acid and a summer rain will be paradichlorobenzene-flavored, and your tap water will be bright red and taste like Pepsi, and the only birds will be educated sparrows chirping “Just say no!” and blue jays crying “Sex!” and chickens hawking “White meat!” and you’ll eat beef one night and chicken the next night and beef the next night, and all the forests will be planted with the same kind of pine tree or the same kind of maple tree, and even a thousand miles out from shore the bottom of the ocean will be covered with rusty scum and plastic milk jugs, and only tunas and sardines and jumbo shrimps will swim there, and even at night on a remote mountaintop the wind will smell like the exhaust vent of a McDonald’s and you’ll hear car alarms and TV sets and the thunder of the jets in which passengers are being offered a choice of Chicken . . . or beef?—and the nature in which all people wittingly or not once felt the immanence of eternity will be dead, and the newspaper which you can read on the computer screen you labored hard at a different screen to purchase will tell you that Man is free and everyone is equal and that Miniature Golf Is the New City Game. And how disturbing it might be to find such a world insufficient. And so for your own peace of mind, since nothing can be proved or disproved anyway—since your science disqualifies itself from answering precisely those questions that concern the mind’s ability to feel that which is, in an absolute and verifiable sense, not there—isn’t it safer all around to assume machines have their own virtual souls and feelings?
Renée had come home from Arger, Kummer & Rudman with a blinding headache, a notarized agreement running to 270 words, and her eighty hundred-dollar bills. Melanie, irrational to the end, had refused to take the bills as a security.
She answered an ad for a ’74 Mustang convertible, fire-engine red. She gave a hundred-dollar bill to a mechanic who appraised the car, and thirty-eight more to the invertebrate zoologist who was selling it.
She went to the high-impact clothing stores in the Square, places that were branches of stores on lower Broadway in Manhattan. She bought short, tight skirts and shiny shoes, tubes of lipstick, summer tops that cost ten dollars an ounce, a pair of shades. She bought a leather jacket and plastic jewelry.
The next morning she returned to the Square, had her hair clipped, and shopped some more. She was standing in front of a clothing-store mirror, seeing if she could manage a lime-green skirt with a less than straight cut, when her reflection’s eyes suddenly caught her own and she was stricken by the thought that all she was doing was trying to look like Lauren Bowles.
She decided she’d bought enough for now.
The Mustang turned heads as she drove north with the top down through Cambridge and Somerville. She took the inside lane on I-93. The only disheartening thing was that she couldn’t stand any of the music on the radio.
The air in Peabody smelled like seaweed. On Main Street, a block east of the Warren Five Cents Savings Bank, she knocked twice on the window of The Peabody Times before she saw the sign saying closed this Friday. She leaned against a fender, pressing the thin fabric of her skirt against the sun-heated metal, and chewed down three fingernails as far as seemed advisable.
On Andover Street she located the middle-aged bank building that she’d seen pictured as a newborn in the Globe from 1970. Rust now stained the panels it was faced with; the sidewalk was cracked and tanned and weedy. Across the street stood a laundromat, a video rental place, and a “spa” selling beer and groceries. The man behind the spa counter was a Portuguese who said he’d owned the business for six years. She tossed the bottle of Pepsi she’d bought into the back seat of the Mustang.
She cruised the working people’s neighborhood behind the bank building, past white bungalows nearing condemnation, through varying concentrations of acetone fumes, up and down all the streets that dead-ended against the high corporate fence with its signs saying ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING. She stopped by a house with a white-haired man on the porch. He staggered across his lawn, favoring a bad hip, and stared at her as if she were the Angel of Death who had come along in her red Mustang sooner than he’d expected. She said her name was Renée Seitchek and she was a seismologist from Harvard University and could she ask him a few questions? Then he was sure she was the Angel and he hobbled back to his porch and from this position of relative safety shouted, “Mind your own business!”
She tried other streets and accosted other old men. She wondered if there was something in the water that made them all so bizarre.
A stumpy woman turning the soil around some apparently dead roses saw her drive by for a third time and asked what she was looking for. Renée said she was looking for people who’d been in the neighborhood since at least 1970. The woman set down her hand spade. “Do I get some kind of prize if I say yes?”
Renée parked the car. “Can I ask you some questions?”
“Well, if it’s for science.”
“Do you remember sometime about twenty years ago a particularly tall . . . structure on the property over there, that looked like an oil well?”
“Sure,” the woman said immediately.
“Do you remember what years?”
“What’s this got to do with earthquakes?”
“Well, I think Sweeting-Aldren may be responsible for them.”
“I’ll be damned. Maybe they want to fix my kitchen ceiling.” The woman laughed. She was built like a mailbox and had a wide mouth, painted orange. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe this.”
“My other question is whether you might have any old pictures that would show the, uh, structure.”
“Pictures? Come on inside.”
The woman’s name was Jurene Caddulo. She pointed at the gray cra
ter in her kitchen ceiling and wouldn’t budge until Renée had found the right combination of phrases to express her sympathy and outrage. Jurene said she was a secretary at the high school and had been widowed for eight years. She had five thousand unsorted snapshots in a kitchen drawer.
“Can I offer you a cordial?”
“No thanks,” Renée said as bottles of apricot liqueur, Amaretto, and Cherry Heering were set down on the table. Jurene came back from another room with a pair of exceptionally ugly cut-glass tulips.
“If you can believe I’ve only got two of these left. I had eight until the earthquakes. You think I can sue? They’re antiques, they’re not available. You like Amaretto? Here. That’s good, isn’t it.”
Expired coupons punctuated the disordered photographic history of Caddulo family life. Jurene’s daughter in Revere and daughter in Lynn had hatched children in a variety of shapes and sizes; she puzzled over group shots, trying to get the names and ages right. Renée found herself saying, “This must be Michael Junior,” which made Jurene look again at the other pictures because she knew that this was not Michael Junior and therefore the child she had just called Michael Junior must be Petey, and then everything made sense again. Jurene’s younger son played guitar. There were dozens of prints of a picture of his band playing the heavy-metal mass that he had written at the age of seventeen and that the priest had said no to performing in the church, so it was performed right here in the basement without the sacraments. The son now had a different band and drove a customized 4x4 pickup. The older son showed up as an adult in San Francisco sporting a mustache and a leather vest, and as a distant, gowned blur in blue-toned shots of a high-school graduation on a dreary day. Jurene said he was a hair stylist. Renée nodded. Jurene said both her sons were still looking for the right girl. Renée nodded. In high school and junior high the daughters had worn their no-color hair in fantastic bouffants. Their bodies were deformed like pool toys by the affectionately squeezing tentacles of their father, now dead of cancer. All the sadness of the seventies was in Jurene’s drawer, all of the years in which Renée had not been happy and had not had what she wanted but instead had had pimples and friends who embarrassed her, years whose huge tab collars and platform soles and elephant flares and overgrown hair (Don’t the mentally ill neglect to cut their hair?) now seemed to her both the symbols and literal accoutrements of unhappiness.