“I suppose I must feel different,” Kyle went on. “Like phantom limb syndrome, only it’s ‘phantom body’ syndrome. There are certain operations I perform that are analogous to reaching, for example. But I can’t actually grip anything.”
“You suppose,” said Jared. “You don’t know if you feel different?”
Another phantom shrug. “My somatic memories are gone. But Jared, I still remember being Kyle Buskirk.”
“So does a digital recording.”
“Jared, what will it take to convince you it’s me? Ask me anything.”
Jared had returned to his chair and lowered himself into it. His eyes were pinched. “I concede that the memory record is faithful and complete.”
“Incomplete, actually. Anything I had forgotten in the flesh was lost before the flash. And I lost other memories when the files were compressed. A q-bit computer has enormous capacity; but not as enormous as the human brain. The losses were random.”
Jared trembled, taking long deep breaths, the only sign of his inner turmoil. “It was cruel of you to do this to me,” he said, “to bring me here and put me through this agony. This is my fault. I goaded you on, didn’t I? But I never meant it to go this far.”
“Emotions are a matter for the glands; and I don’t have those anymore. I know what I did and why, but I don’t feel them in my gut.” The figure smiled. “I suppose I should say ‘in my core.’”
“What does it feel like?” I asked. “I mean, to have a computer for a body.”
“Would ‘indescribable’ do it for you? I get visual and auditory inputs. We recruited the optic and aural neurons for that. I know—somehow—when a channel is open or a monitor. It’s like…Like an itch, I suppose. I’m a real whiz at math too; but there’s an encyclopedia in an auxiliary server that I can’t seem to access, so don’t ask me the capital of Azerbaijan. The staff actually has to transfer the right files. As for the rest, how aware are you of your own spleen?”
Jared straightened. “What happened to Kyle?”
“I am Kyle.”
“Okay. What happened to Kyle’s body?”
“It’s still animate, if that’s what you mean. It can’t see or hear, but the rest of its somatic functions were not touched. It breathes, eats, digests, craps. It can even make sounds, like barking or crying. Would you like to see it?”
Jared covered his face. “Like a blind, deaf animal…I loved that guy. I couldn’t bear visiting the husk; and I know damn well Gladdys couldn’t.”
“Kyle.” I said. “When did you decide to do this? Was it the cancer?”
“From the flesh to the flash! No. The cancer only places a time limit. The goal, I’ve had since the Flu, when Jared almost died. Jared’s objections have nothing to do with it.”
“Mac,” Jared said in a voice strained for patience. “You’re talking to a Chinese Room. It isn’t Kyle—it can’t be—and I wish you would stop talking to it as if it were. My best friend committed suicide just to make a digital recording of himself; and you’re talking to the video.”
“Jared,” the Kyle-image said, “how can I prove myself to you?”
I noticed he did not ask how he might prove himself to me.
Jared stood and buttoned his jacket, shoved his hands in the pockets as he often did, and shuffled a few steps. The hologram tracked his movements. “Tell me,” he said. Then he fell silent.
Before the silence could drag on, the image spoke. “Tell you what?”
“Tell me when your affair with Gladdys started.”
I do not know which chilled me more: the content of the accusation or the casual tones in which it was made. But it was all burlesque, I told myself. Too obviously over the top, and right in front of Jared. That was when I knew that the old quarrel over Maddy had never really ended.
“So you know?” said Kyle. “From the beginning?”
“That depends on when it started, doesn’t it?”
“When you were in the hospital,” Kyle said, also matter-of-factly. “She is a lonely woman, Jared. She needs company.”
“So out of your generous spirit…”
“It is not physical, if that is what concerns you.”
“Physical? That would be easy to forgive. But to seduce her affections…Friend, that cut far too close to the bone.”
“It was not my initiative. And when she wanted to make it physical, I stopped coming to visit. I stopped texting.”
“And so you added cruelty to betrayal. You were only toying with her affections, like you did with Maddy. You could not stand that I could love anyone but you, so you had to take them away from me. Then after you had her affections in your hand, you dropped them in the dirt and shut her out with not even a word of explanation. You cannot imagine that it is more pleasant to watch her moping after you than it was to see her going off on ‘shopping trips.’”
“I’m celibate now, Jared. And I’ve shut myself up in a monastery. Jared, I stopped short. I would not cross that line. Do you understand? It wasn’t just the cancer that tipped my decision.”
Jared fell momentarily silent at this. “You killed yourself so you wouldn’t take Gladdys from me? But you moron! You took Kyle from me! And why would that hurt me any less?”
“But I haven’t gone away. I’m here.”
“No, you’re not. You are a…a damned scrapbook!” He turned away from the hologram. “Come on, Mac. We’re done here.”
“Jared,” said the sim, “you would have lost me anyway. I received the death sentence two years ago. And then what would you have had? Scrapbooks and picture files and digital recordings. What sort of conversations could you have held with them?”
“Are you coming, Mac?”
I swallowed, nodded, and rose from my chair. The sim followed my movements. “Et tu, Mac?”
I went to Jared’s side and threw an arm across his shoulder. “We’ll all miss him.”
He looked at me though moist eyes. “I thought you were convinced.”
“I was. Until you asked about Gladdys. Kyle would never have answered like that. Everything was a recitation of facts. There were no feelings, no emotions.”
The sim also rose from its virtual chair. “You can visit any time you like. I’ll be on the Grid in another month or two, and you’ll have a special password.”
Jared grabbed the handle for the door, and the sim said, “Jared? Don’t go.” And for just a moment, Jared froze. Then he pulled the door wide and it swung shut behind us. “Call me,” I heard the voice behind us. “Promise you’ll call.”
THE FLASH IN A PAN
Every year thereafter, Jared and I would receive cards on the holidays purporting to come from Kyle. Now and then, Jared’s pix will ring with an incoming call from the Lab and later, off the Grid. He doesn’t answer them. He has hung a picture in his office: he and Kyle from university days, garbed in their track uniforms, standing side by side on the cinders with their arms around each other’s shoulders. When we get together with our wives, which we try to do twice a year, we always tell stories about Kyle, and they are always funny and full of good memories.
AFTERWORD TO "PLACES WHERE THE ROADS DON'T GO"
I wrote this one just before writing “Hopeful Monsters,” but it received a substantive rewrite afterwards, so we could say it was written after “Hopeful Monsters,” as well. This novella is another of the stories that appear here for the first time.
While the arguments for artificial intelligence and for “downloading minds” into computers are well known to science fiction readers—Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Penguin, 2006) is typical—the arguments against them are not. By this I do not mean arguments that we should not do these things, but that we cannot do them.
The idea for the story came from reading the Gödelian papers of the Oxford philosopher, John Lucas, specifically “Minds, Machines, and Gödel,” Philosophy, XXXVI, 1961, pp. 112-127 copied along with subsequent replies and responses on his website: h
ttp://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/ (scroll down to I Gödelian Papers). I later learned that the physicist Roger Penrose had taken up the argument, and that Gödel himself argued against the mechanistic concept of the mind.
Another argument against mind-as-mechanism came from philosopher John R. Searle’s presidential address to the APA, “Is the Brain a Digital Computer?”, which expands on his earlier Chinese Room thought experiment: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/searle.comp.html Additional material came from Stanley L. Jaki, Brain, Mind and Computers (Herder & Herder, 1969) and Walter J. Freeman, “Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas,” Mind & Matter, Vol. 6(2), pp. 207-234.
So the idea came to me of a philosopher and a computer scientist debating the issue. Nothing can be more boring than that; so they became two friends, Jared and Kyle, whose friendship is sorely tested by the disagreement—because the disagreement is a surrogate for something else. The narrator shifted from omniscient to a third friend, Mac the topologist, who is both odd man out and the center of the argument. The various arguments—the Turing Test, the Chinese Room, the Gödelian argument, etc.—were made physical as much as possible. Dramatizing what is essentially a philosophical debate proved to be some of the most difficult writing I’ve attempted. Whether I succeeded you must judge.
Write what you know. I was a topologist in my storied youth, proving a couple of original theorems regarding function space topologies. A topology is a formalized concept of closeness or proximity, and makes a “set” into a “space.” It struck me as I was reading Leonard Savage, The Foundations of Statistics (Dover, 1972), that his conceptualization of decisions as functions mapping state space into a consequence space would give rise to a topology on decisions based on the proximity of the consequences.
By some quirk of fate, I shortly after received an email from my former topology professor, J. Douglas Harris of Marquette University, asking about my old paper, as function space topology was becoming a hot topic once more. He had in the intervening years been working in computer architecture and writing a book on networking, but was thinking about some new theory in topology. Proximities have applications in programming, he wrote. Hmm.
Gödel’s theorem showed that there are true statements that cannot be proven. I had the intuition that just as the rational numbers are dense in the reals perhaps the provable statements were dense in the true statements. So I asked Doug if he would be willing to vet Mac’s role in the story. In particular, was there any reason why Mac’s “Density Theorem” could not be true. He, in turn, brought in a colleague, Mike Slattery, an algebraist and computer scientist (and science fiction fan) to vet Kyle’s role.
Well, then, someone ought to vet Jared. So I asked Edward Feser at Pasadena City College in California if he had any thoughts on the philosophical side of the argument. Ed is the author of a helpful book: Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2007).
I also asked my friend Nancy Kress if she would look at the first draft, since I had a feeling that it was slow-paced and bloated. She graciously agreed, both to read the draft and that the draft was slow-paced and bloated. Consequently, the version you have read is shorter by nearly a third and altered in several other ways. I also received helpful comments from Doug Harris, Mike Slattery, and Ed Feser. All of them make cameos in the text. Whatever improvement resulted is due to their kindness.
REMEMBER'D KISSES
Click.
A mechanical sound. A relay, perhaps. A flip-flop switch or maybe a butterfly valve. Very soft. Almost muffled.
Sigh.
And that was hydraulics. Escape gas bleeding off. Pressure relief. Again, a muted sound, not particularly obtrusive.
Click.
It was a metronome. A syncopation. If you focused all your attention on it, it could become—
Sigh.
—quite relaxing. Hypnotic even. It would be easy to lose oneself in its rhythm.
Click!
The sudden hand on his shoulder made him start.
“Mr. Carter?”
Sigh.
He turned, unwilling; guided by the gentle but persistent pressure of the hand on his shoulder. His vision rotated, camera-like. Away from the equipment; along the tubing, hanging in catenary loops; past the blinking monitors; toward the sight that he had been avoiding ever since he had stepped into the room.
Click.
“Yes, Doctor?” His voice was listless, uninterested. He heard it as if he were a spectator at a very bad play.
“We did all we could, Mr. Carter. The medics stabilized her as soon as the police cut her out of the car. But I’m afraid there was little else they could do.”
Sigh.
He looked at the doctor, turning his head quickly, so that the bed itself flicked across his vision without registering. But his subconscious saw the subliminal afterimage and began sending messages of pain and fear.
Click.
“I understand, Doctor…” He glanced at the name tag pinned to the white uniform, trying not to notice the little splashes of red on the sleeves and on the chest. “I understand, Doctor Lapointe. I’m sure you did everything possible.”
“If we had gotten to her sooner, or if the trauma had been less severe, we might have been able to repair the damage. There have been incredible advances in tissue repair nanomachines in the last several years…”
Sigh.
Henry Norris Carter wondered if the doctor thought he was being comforting. Tell me more, he thought. Tell me all the different ways you might have saved her. If only. If only this advance had been made; if only that had been done sooner. If only. If only.
Well, take it as he meant it. “Yes, Doctor Lapointe; but I’m sure you understand that such speculations cannot make me feel any better about what’s happened.” [And a part of his mind curled up and gibbered, Nothing’s happened! Nothing’s happened!] “I’m quite aware of the advances in nanotechnology. My wife and I both work—” He suddenly realized he had used the present tense and stopped, confused. “—no, worked—” But that wasn’t right, either. Not yet. “I mean we were both genetic engineers at SingerLabs over in New Jersey. We both donated DNA to the cell library there. As long as we’re talking ‘if only’s,’ if only I had had her cell samples with me—”
“No, Mr. Carter, you mustn’t think that. As I said, the trauma was too severe. Even the most advanced nanomachines are still too slow to have saved your wife before irreversible brain damage set in.”
So. Finally. He forced himself to look directly at the figure on the bed. The maze of tubing crawled snake-like around it. Encircling it; binding it; piercing it. Up nose. Down throat. Into vein and groin. Pushing the fluids and the gasses in and sucking them out, because the body itself had given up the task. The click/sigh of the respirator faded into the background.
The contours of the sheet were not quite right; as if parts of what was under it were missing. The doctors, he supposed, had cobbled the body back together as best they could, but their hearts hadn’t been entirely in it. The whole left side of her face was an ugly purple bruise. And the symmetry of her nose and cheekbones and jaw was irretrievably lost. The right eye was closed, as if sleeping; and the left—The left eye was hidden under a mass of bandages. If it’s there at all. Judging by the extent of the damage on that side, it was doubtful that the eye had remained in its socket.
He wanted to scream and his stomach gave a queer flip-flop and his knees felt suddenly weak. He trembled all over. Don’t think about that. Think about anything else. Think about…
Quiet evenings at home. She, reading her favorite Tennyson in a circle of soft light cast by the goose-neck lamp; while he pretended to read, but watched her secretly over the lip of his book and she knew he was watching her and was waiting for just the right moment to—
Running through the rainstorm down 82nd Street from the Met, his trenchcoat an umbrella over both their heads. Laughing because it was so silly to get caught unprepared like that and th
ey were soaked to the skin already and—
Hiking the Appalachian Trail where it lost itself in the granite mountains of New England and stopping to examine the wildflowers by the edge of the path and wondering why on earth the stems would always branch in just exactly that way and—
Four-wheeling over Red Cone that summer in Colorado and how he had frozen at the wheel because all he could see out either side of the Bronco was sky because the road ran up a ridge only a little wider than the car itself and how could anyone expect to drive over a knob of rock that steep? and how the sign on the other side, by Montezuma, had said dangerous road travel at your own risk and wasn’t that a hell of a place to put it and—
Her eyes had been a most lovely shade of hazel.
“Pardon me?”
Henry looked at the doctor and blinked away the memories that had blurred his vision. “I said her eyes were hazel.”
“Oh.”
He turned and looked again at his wife. The doctor seemed at a loss for what to say and for a crazy instant Henry felt sorry for him. The doctor wanted to say something; anything to pierce Henry’s shell of misery; but there was nothing that anyone could ever say or do that would make the slightest particle of difference in how he felt.
He felt…Nothing. He was numb. He refused to accept what he saw.
“Barbara.”
“She can’t hear you. She’s far too deep in coma for that.”
He ignored the doctor’s comment. It was patently absurd. Voices made sound waves; and sound waves vibrated eardrums; and eardrums made nerve impulses; and somewhere, somewhere deep inside that dying body there had to be a tiny, glimmering spark, wondering why everything was growing so much dimmer and fainter and he would be damned before he let that spark flicker out all alone in silence.
He drifted toward the bed; and the doctor, sensing his intention, guided him toward her relatively uninjured right side. The doctor lifted the sheet, exposing her hand and Carter took it in both of his. He noticed the mole on her right side, just above the curve of the hip, and touched it briefly with his forefinger.
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