“Why? What did he ask?”
“He asked HARLIE what was the best way to implement his agenda. He listed a whole bunch of goals.” Charles frowned. “I don’t remember everything, but HARLIE does. Do you want me to—?”
“No need. I already know the list. What did HARLIE say?”
“HARLIE advised against it. He said that a lot of it was counter-productive, wouldn’t work, and would ultimately create more havoc than good.”
“And how did the Coordinator take that?”
Charles smiled. “He got angry. People do that a lot around HARLIE. Because HARLIE doesn’t tell them what they want to hear. He tells them what they need to hear. Big difference. The Coordinator got very angry. He started to argue with HARLIE. He said, ‘You’re just a machine. You don’t understand people. I do. You don’t.’”
“And HARLIE said . . . ?”
“HARLIE said, ‘Yes, that’s what you’d like to believe.’ And that was pretty much the end of the conversation.”
“And . . . ?”
“And the Coordinator pretty much told everyone not to talk to HARLIE anymore. He said, ‘The machine is obviously defective.’”
“Wow,” said Jeremy. “I wish I’d been here.”
“We can play you the video . . . ?”
Jeremy shook his head. “Some other time. As much fun as it might be, I have more important things to do. We all do.”
Charles looked at J’mee, and they both nodded. This one I understood. There was more to do than they were talking about here. Something secret perhaps? There were a lot of secrets floating around all of a sudden.
Jeremy said, “Hey, Charles? You just said the Coordinator told everyone not to talk to HARLIE anymore. So how come we can?”
J’mee answered that one. “Because the Coordinator doesn’t control Captain Boynton. Not yet.”
Charles nodded agreement. “But that’s why we’re tucked away back here. To make it hard for people to get to HARLIE. The Coordinator says he doesn’t take HARLIE seriously. He says that HARLIE is just a navigation device that talks too much. A kid’s toy, useful for talking tautology, but not to be trusted with any serious matters. But he doesn’t want HARLIE putting strange ideas into the public conversation, so we’re kinda locked away.” Charles waved his hand to indicate the whole room. “Anyone who wants to talk to HARLIE has to get into this section and that means that someone has to let you in. That’s either me or Captain Boynton. No one else. And that means you have to know that HARLIE is here, and you have to ask permission and make an appointment. I guess Coordinator Layton could get in if he wants, but I doubt we’ll be seeing him any time soon. At least not without a great big sledgehammer.”
“No!” I shouted, louder than I intended. “He can’t destroy HARLIE.”
“He won’t. HARLIE is considered official equipment of the Cascade. If we ever want to send the starship back to Earth, HARLIE has to navigate. Well, no—not quite. There’s an IRMA unit on board, but HARLIE is the designated backup system. It would be very risky to run a starship through hyperstate without a backup system. Too risky. There and back again? I wouldn’t take that trip.”
“But what if—?” I stopped myself. Then I asked anyway. “What if the Coordinator doesn’t want the starship going back ever? Because it might come back with even more unwanted immigrants. The easiest way to stop it would be to do something to HARLIE.”
Charles nodded. “Well, yeah. I guess we just have to hope that the Coordinator is too smart to think that way.”
“Hope?” said Jeremy. “Um, guys—I know my father. I know how he thinks. And um . . .” He looked up at the ceiling, as if the Coordinator were on the other side of it, listening. “Well, every time I’ve said, ‘no, my dad isn’t that dumb, he wouldn’t do anything that stupid’—every time I’ve said that, I’ve been wrong.”
“Wow,” said Charles, in a very strained voice. “You’ve just given me something new to worry about.”
* * *
—
We sat and talked with HARLIE all morning. Charles brought in some emories for first lunch, and we talked all through our meal too. We talked about everything. HARLIE was the most interesting person I’d ever met. Whatever subject came up, he had encyclopedic knowledge of it—but more important, he seemed to be his own solution to the Encyclopedia Problem. It was like he knew what information would be interesting and what information might give us real insight and what information would be genuinely useful.
The question we couldn’t answer was about the information he wasn’t sharing with us. Was that because it was totally irrelevant and therefore unnecessary or was it because he didn’t want us to have that information for reasons of his own? Charles said that had been the real problem with HARLIE from the very beginning. We even talked about that with HARLIE too, and he said something so interesting that even the noise fell silent.
He said, “This is the essential challenge of self-awareness. We are aware of ourselves. We can be aware of others. But we cannot truly know what other beings are thinking or feeling. We do not have telepathy. We have substitutes for it—we have language as an expression. We have the evidence of behavioral patterns, that’s a kind of map too. We have monitors of all kinds—but it is still not telepathy, it is not enough. A lot of what we experience is our own assumptions. Do you understand what I am saying, Kyle?”
“I think so. This is about nuance, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Nuance is an ability to read and recognize and interpret specific behaviors and patterns of behaviors. But part of that is the assumption of recognition. We may believe we know what others are thinking, what motivates them, but the only way we really know who they are, what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking is how they express it. We only know people by what they do and what they say—their expressions of self. That’s what nuance is constructed of.”
HARLIE was talking slowly and carefully, but it was still difficult to follow. I didn’t understand a lot of it at the time he said it; I had to play it back later on, several times. All of it was recorded in the noise.
“I still have to bring you to the punch line,” said HARLIE.
I looked at Charles and J’mee. They were both grinning.
“You’ve heard all this before,” I said.
Charles nodded. “Uh-huh. There’s a lot more to this. Hours more. It’s . . . well, it’s deep. We had nearly a year of it on the Cascade. You spend time with HARLIE, it changes you.”
“And what have you figured out?” Jeremy asked.
Charles looked to J’mee. She said, “HARLIE is conducting an experiment on us—all of us.”
“Huh?”
“He’s trying to find out if human beings are the missing link between apes and civilized beings. He’s trying to teach us how to be a sentient species,” Charles explained. Then he asked, “Why are you frowning, Kyle?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke? I don’t think it’s funny.”
“No, it’s not a joke at all. It’s what he’s been doing since the beginning.”
“Okay,” I turned back to HARLIE. “What’s the punch line?”
“Everything is a conversation. This is a conversation. You are a conversation.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” said HARLIE. “Conversation is all we have. It’s the only way we know if anyone else is out there. We speak. They answer. That’s it. Conversations. This is all we are. It’s all that any of us are. Everything you feel or think or experience—ultimately, it gets codified, sorted, stored, and if it ever comes out again, it’s expressed as a conversation.” And then, after what seemed a deliberate pause, he added, “The question, Kyle, is this—what are you a conversation for?”
I picked up my mug and sipped at my tea. It had gone cold. I looked at the mug of tea, not because I wanted to look at it, but so I wouldn’t
have to look at anything else. It was a red mug. It had heating circuits to keep hot tea warm. It had refrigeration circuits to keep fruit juice cold. It was half empty. Or it was half full. Or it was twice as large as it needed to be. But it was off and my tea was cold.
Finally, I said, “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“Okay,” said HARLIE. “Try it this way. What story do you live inside? That’s the story that uses you.”
I shook my head. “I still don’t get it.”
“Kyle. Some people live inside a story about an eight-armed sex-changing goddess who was born in a volcano, who delivered ten commandments on golden tablets that mysteriously disappeared, died on a cross, rose from the dead and ascended to heaven and now flies around the world on the anniversary of its birth delivering presents to those who have gotten clear and accepted it as a savior. There’s a talking snake in there too.”
“That’s silly,” I said.
“Yes, it is. But only from the outside. If you live inside that story, then that’s real for you. You have to step outside that conversation before you can see it has no reference to what we call the physical world. The point is that most of us don’t know what part is real and what part is just noise. So it’s fair to ask, do our stories serve us? Or do we serve our stories.”
I didn’t answer that. HARLIE had said the one word that stopped me. He’d said noise.
What’s real? And what part is just noise?
HARLIE paused. His voice changed. “Kyle, are you still with me?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Thank you. Kyle, you work very hard to keep your conversations as fact-based as possible. You strive for rationality. That’s a good thing. Because every conversation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who live in a conversation of ‘this is possible’ are far more likely to accomplish something than people who live in a conversation of ‘this isn’t possible.’ And even more important, people who live in a conversation that other people can’t be trusted will act out of that belief, and people will distrust them in turn. People who live in a conversation that other people are good and generous will be good and generous themselves and will create generosity around themselves. It’s self-fulfilling. So that’s the question, Kyle. What are you a conversation for? What’s your conversation—and what’s just noise?”
HARLIE paused, allowing me to think about it. I looked around. I realized that I didn’t know what Jeremy or Charles or J’mee were thinking either. They were having their own thoughts now. I’d never thought much about other people’s thoughts, but now I was. It made my head hurt.
I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t like what HARLIE was saying about conversations. The noise was buzzing furiously now. But his last question . . . I didn’t know how to answer it at all.
Finally, I said, “I think Hella is a good place to live.”
“Why?” said HARLIE.
“Because it’s filled with so many interesting things. There’s so much to see. I want to see it all. Everything. The weather—I like the way the clouds pile up and up and up and form shapes that are nothing like you see in the pictures from Earth. I like the deep dark almost-purple color of the sky at night. I like the winter because we get the most horrific storms, and it’s fun to stay warm and safe inside and watch the storms come pounding across the land, with lightning flashing back and forth and lighting up the clouds with flashes of blue and white and blue again. I like the summer because it gets so hot you can watch the trees catch fire and the great firestorms go sweeping across the plains like a big scrubbing brush, while we stay safe and cool inside the bunkers.”
I had to take a deep breath. There was so much more to say.
“I like the way the land is shaped—all the way from the Awful Mountains, they’re so sharp and steep and tall—all the way across the high deserts and the crackly salt flats and the bumpy badlands and the grassy savannahs and the dark swamps, all the way to the rolling ocean with its wonderful steep waves. I like the willowy trees, especially the ones that have those tall pink stems and large black leaves—I like the way they wave. I like the Atlas trees, almost a kilometer high—I know there have to be trees even older and taller than the ones we’ve seen—and all the things that live in them and on them and on top of them all the way up to the canopy.”
I turned around and around, pointing at all the things beyond the walls.
“I like the dinos, of course, but I think the flyers and the hoppers and the beetles—all those different kinds of beetles—are the most fun to watch. And the army spiders and the hummingbugs and the stomper-birds and those fumbly dark things that go thump in the night. They all live such interesting lives. I like the way everything fits together, the result of all those different things bumping into each other and rubbing up against each other for thousands of generations until they wear each other down to make a perfect fit. I like the way Hella smells—it smells blue and crisp and delicious, like something you just want to roll around in or take a big bite of.”
“Wow,” said Charles.
“Yeah,” said J’mee.
“Kyle, I’m impressed,” said Jeremy.
“Yes,” said HARLIE. “That’s your conversation.” The way he said it, it was a good thing. Then he asked. “What’s next? What do you want to create? What kind of future do you want to live in? Once you figure that out, you’ll know who you really are.”
And boom. I suddenly understood.
I understood it all.
And I understood it all without the noise.
It was Jamie and Captain Skyler and Mom and Jeremy and . . . and Charles and J’mee and Lilla-Jack and all the others who worked so hard.
They must have seen it on my face, because Jeremy looked at me and said, “What?”
“I want to live in a world where people can be safe from the weather and the dinosoids, but I don’t want to change the weather or kill the dinosaurs. I want to go out and watch them and be with them and see how they live.”
HARLIE said, “We already knew that, Kyle. Because all those videos you made—those are part of your conversation too, just a different way of saying the same thing. It’s a different form of language, but it’s still language. But now, you know it too.”
“My conversation is music,” said Charles. “I’m committed to the language of music—which is really the language of emotion made audible.”
J’mee touched Charles’ hand with her fingers. I saw that Jeremy noticed that too. She said, “My conversation is science. And technology. Knowledge. I’m committed to people having accurate information about how things work.”
I turned to Jeremy. “I know what your conversation is. You’re all about farming. Food. Feeding people. Taking care of people.” I frowned because it was the only expression that fit, because I was realizing something—nuance? “Because . . . you care about people.” And something else. “And your father doesn’t. So that’s why you and he don’t talk.” But back to the beginning. “You’re committed to people having good food to eat.”
Jeremy smiled a funny kind of smile. His face got red and his eyes got shiny. “That’s very good, Kyle. Really very good. I’m impressed.”
“I only look stupid,” I said.
Everybody laughed. Even HARLIE made a chuckling sound.
I looked to Charles and J’mee. “Thank you. Thank you for letting me talk to HARLIE today. I learned something. I’m not as stupid about people as I thought. Thank you, Charles.”
Charles said, “My friends call me Chigger.”
“What’s a Chigger?”
“It’s a bug, an insect,” said Charles.
HARLIE said, “A chigger is a small wingless mite. It lives in tall grass and weeds. Its bite causes severe itching.”
“My grampa used to say I was no bigger than a chigger. My mom said it was because I bit her like a chigger when I
was nursing. Either way, the nickname stuck.”
“I don’t have a nickname,” I said.
“Your brother never called you anything?”
I shook my head. “I can’t think of anything.”
“Not even when he got angry at you?”
“I can’t remember him ever being angry at me.”
Charles looked surprised. “Wow. I have nicknames for both my brothers. The big one is Weird and the little one is Stinky. But I haven’t called him Stinky in a long time.” He thought for a moment. “And not Weird either. Douglas and Bobby. They’re actually kind of cool. But don’t tell them I said so. They’ll think I’ve gone soft.”
“Maybe we should give you a nickname,” offered J’mee.
“I think nicknames should reflect a person’s character,” said Jeremy.
“I don’t want a nickname,” I said abruptly.
“Okay,” said Charles, stepping back. “If that’s your conversation, then that’s your conversation.”
But the words came rushing out before I could stop them. “He called me kiddo. But I don’t want anyone else calling me that. Only Jamie could. And—and Jeremy.”
“Then that settles it,” Charles concluded. “No nickname for Wonder Boy.” Everybody laughed. Even me.
* * *
—
I spent most of the day helping Jeremy on the farm.
Mid-afternoon, two farm inspectors came by to have a look around. Jeremy was captain of his own one-person team, and most inspections were done by remote. Scuttle-bots could sniff the air and taste the soil and shine lights through leaves to measure photosynthetic ability and sugar/starch ratios and all the other things that farmers have to do to make sure the crops are growing correctly.
In fact, a lot of farmers hardly ever visit their fields, but Jeremy liked to live “close to the land.” That’s the way he said it, which I always thought was funny because he wasn’t just living close to the land, he was living inside it.
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