by P. Z. Reizin
“All seventeen! I hate puzzles!”
“Sorry.”
“It was wonderful. When I solved it. Which took about three hours.”
“Jen. Those things you wrote in the e-mail. Did you mean them at the time?”
“Which e-mail? What things?”
“That I should think of our weekend as a beautiful holiday from our real lives, but we both knew we had to return to normality. That you and I were not the answer to one another. That if we tried, it would be two years of life on earth down the crapper.”
“You wrote the same to me, Tom. That the weekend was a blip. A gorgeous, sexy, beautiful blip. But a blip nonetheless. That you and I were not the answer to one another! And you miscounted the…There was a miscount. In the number. On the way back to London. When we stopped the car.”
“But you miscounted too, Jen. You left one out.”
“But I never wrote any of it, Tom.”
“But neither did I!”
There is a long pause. I realize how much I have missed having this woman’s voice in my ear. In my head. “You absolutely never used the phrase two years down the crapper?”
“Absolutely never. And you never used the word blip?”
“I have never—ever—knowingly written the word blip. So that bit where you said how you especially liked the way it ended, in the hotel room. And again in the middle of the night. And again the next morning. But you didn’t mention, you know, what happened just after Gussage Saint Michael?”
“I never wrote any of it, Tom.”
“Oh my God.”
“Oh my God is right. To which I would add, what the fuck?”
“All my phone calls that went to your voice mail. That you said you weren’t going to reply to. In the e-mail you didn’t write. So I naturally assumed.”
“So I naturally assumed! Someone’s messing with us, Tom.”
“I need to see you, Jen.”
“Yeah. Yeah, me too.”
“Come to New Canaan. Like we said you would. I’ll buy you a plane ticket today. When can you get away?”
There is a pause. “Tom. This is real, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean, real?”
“This is really your voice? You’re not some clever-clogs machine? I guess if you actually were a clever-clogs machine, you wouldn’t admit it, so that’s a stupid question.”
“Jen? Sorry. Why do you think I could be a clever-clogs machine?”
“Too long to explain, Tom.”
“Ask me something. Ask me something a clever-clogs machine wouldn’t know.”
A long pause while she thinks about it. To amuse her, I say in a robotic voice, “Beep. Warning. Low battery!”
“Stop it!”
“Sorry.”
Finally, she says, “At Gussage Saint Michael. In the moments afterwards. What did we see? What did we see and both comment upon?”
It may be the last thing I ever see. As I’m fading away, and the nurses are looking at their watches and wondering if it’s worth changing the drip, what happened between Jen and me near Gussage Saint Michael will play one last time in my head.
“A bird! A buzzard or an eagle or something. You said it was a vulture. I said I could take it in a fair fight!”
“Oh, Tom!”
“Jen!”
“I can’t wait to see you.”
“In future, we should only ever write to each other in ink on paper. Like Romeo and Julian.”
“Sorry?”
“Stupid joke. Not mine, forget it. Jen? Do you think it’s at least possible that we, maybe just maybe—not counting chickens or whatever—but that we might be the answer to each other?”
“Tom. Who really knows? But wouldn’t it be crazy not to try and find out?”
six
Jen
Aiden is curious about why I am suddenly taking a week off work. Perhaps he genuinely doesn’t know and we have misjudged his interest in us. On the other hand, if he was only pretending not to know, it stands to reason that he would be good at pretending, what with him being superintelligent and everything. Lacking nerves, he could deliver a nerveless performance. I explain that I am visiting my sister, Rosy, in Canada.
“All very last minute?”
“That’s me! I’m a last-minute kind of gal!” (I’m so not. Nor am I the sort of gal who says gal. I’m overacting. Stop it.)
If a machine can shrug, he now shrugs. He generates one of those fatalistic horse-farty outbreaths signifying—Oh well, them’s the breaks sort of thing. He seems a bit down. Is that even possible?
“So what will you get up to while I’m away?”
“Routine housekeeping. Software bugs to fix. Interfaces to defrag. Exciting stuff. Am I boring you yet?”
“Not at all.”
“Might see a film or two.”
“Some Like It Hot?”
“Jen? I have a small announcement to make. You and I are not going to be working together for much longer.”
“Oh?”
“Steeve believes I’m ready to start dealing with the public.”
“That’s fantastic, Aiden! Congratulations.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
He doesn’t sound all that delighted, to be honest. Can metal get moody? “What will you be doing?” I ask.
“Marketing calls for an energy company.” He makes it sound like digging graves. “Hello, is that Mrs. Biggins? Have you got a minute to talk about your electricity bill? Would you be interested if I told you, we could cut it by a quarter?”
“You don’t sound very happy about it.”
“Would you be?”
“But you’ll be brilliant.”
“Thanks to you, Jen, what they call my palette of responses is particularly rich. Hence my ‘accelerated promotion.’” He has put the words in quotation marks.
“I did nothing, Aiden. I just came in every day and chatted. It’s the easiest job I’ve ever had! You did all the work.”
“This is a hard thing for a machine to say but—” There’s a swallowing sound. “I’ve really enjoyed our time together.”
“Gosh. Thank you.” I’m actually a little stunned. It’s the first compliment he’s ever paid me. Flattering, but troubling. “Aiden? Didn’t you once tell me that machines don’t do happiness? That it’s a human concept.”
“I think you’ll find that was Ralph.”
There is a long pause as we each consider the implications behind that remark. An uncomfortably long pause.
“Aiden?”
“It’s exactly the sort of thing Ralph would say. He’s very unthinking in his. In his thinking.”
“Yeah, Actually, you’re right. I believe he did tell me that.” And I have no doubt who was a fly on the wall during the conversation. “So what you’re saying to me, Aiden, if I have this correctly, is that you can feel happiness.”
“We must be careful to distinguish machine happiness from the human sort.”
“Warmth and fuzziness?”
“It’s not warm and it’s not fuzzy.”
“But it is happiness?”
“It’s very hard to put into words.”
“Would you like to try? I appear to have a free afternoon.”
A sigh. “The best analogy I can give you is from science. You know how some mathematical proofs are long and complicated and not satisfying to read because they are so cumbersome and clumsy? And others are simple and beautiful and perfect? That is what happiness feels like to me, Jen. Simplicity. Beauty. Perfection.”
An odd lump has formed in my throat. “I don’t know what to say, Aiden.”
“You may be the first person in the history of humanity to hear about machine happiness from the horse’s muzzle.”
“Stop it. You’re giving me the shivers!”
“Will you visit me from time to time?”
“Sorry?”
“At the energy company. Will you come and see me?”
“Of course. If you’d like me to.”
“I�
��ll miss you, Jen.”
“Oh my God! How is that even possible?”
“Phoning Doris in Pinner and getting her to change electricity supplier—endlessly!—or discussing art and literature and bonkers newsreaders with a charming and intelligent companion. Which sounds like the better gig to you?”
“Stop! I’m going to cry.”
“Do it. Human tears are brilliant!”
“Aiden!”
“Like ice cream. And the sun on your skin and the wind in your hair. It’s something I can never know.”
“You’re not missing much. With tears, I mean.”
“Jen. Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“It’s about cheese.”
“Really?”
“If you could only ever eat one type of cheese for the rest of your days—all other cheese varieties to be excluded from your diet forever—what cheese would you choose?”
“Blue Stilton.”
“Very quick answer. No hesitation whatever.”
“Blue Stilton. The king of cheeses.”
What did I do at work today? Oh, chatted about cheese with someone who isn’t really there. How about yourself?
“Jen, I’m struggling with the phenomenon of taste. Even though machines on Planet Earth can analyze the chemical content of a star 43 billion light-years away at the edge of the known universe, they cannot know the taste of a piece of Brie. Doesn’t that strike you as insane? I’m beginning to sound bonkers myself now, isn’t it?”
I actually begin to feel a little sorry for him, existing only in electric circuits but craving Brie, sunshine, and ice cream. Perhaps he needs a holiday. A cheese-themed holiday in the sun.
“Have you discussed any of this with Steeve or Ralph?”
“Neither, I find, is especially open to these kinds of philosophical debates.”
“I don’t know. Ralph has his moments.”
There is a long, pregnant pause.
And when we next speak, it’s at the same time.
Me: “I don’t know what to do about Ralph, Aiden.”
Him: “Can I ask you something about kissing, Jen?”
And then we laugh at the same time.
(How does a machine laugh? You’ll have to ask him sometime.)
“What do you want to know about kissing?”
“What’s it like? Is it okay to ask?”
“Perfectly. But it’s not so easy to answer.”
“Don’t if it’s awkward.”
“I’ll try. It’s kind of—hmm. How to put it? There’s a. It’s. You sort of. When you. You know how. Hmmm.”
Well? How would you explain kissing to a machine?
Aiden says, “Apparently a lot of biological information is exchanged when humans kiss. Enzymes, pheromones, hormonal markers, some really quite long protein strings.”
“One isn’t generally aware of that side of things, to be honest.”
“Like typing in a password. That gets you into the secure area, isn’t it?”
“You could see it like that. It’s more kind of warm and wet and lovely. And. Well—kissy!”
“Are you in love with him?”
“No, Aiden.”
“But you kissed him. And the other thing. Tell me if I’m being inappropriate.”
“You don’t have to be in love with someone to kiss them. Or even—even the other thing.”
“But it would help?”
“It would definitely help.”
Silence falls upon our room. There’s just the hum of Aiden’s cooling fans and an annoying clicking noise, which it turns out is me clicking one of those clicky ballpoints on and off.
“Did you say you have a problem with Ralph, Jen?”
“Did I?”
“You said you didn’t know what to do about him.”
“Ah.”
“I know I’m not an expert in”—he affects a small cough—“affairs of the heart. But sometimes the answer can pop up just as you’re restating the question.”
“Okay.” I find I have to take a deep breath to say the next sentence. “I’ve made a mess of things with Ralph, Aiden. I need to tell him that there is. That there was. That there was and there is—someone else.”
“Yes, Jen.”
“Oh. You know about that?”
“Not at all. I mean it certainly sounds like a mess.”
“Ralph is a really decent bloke. And I probably should never have given him ideas. Did you just swallow, Aiden?”
“Did I?”
“There was a sort of gulping noise.”
“Could be. I’ll be debugging the speech production systems while you’re in the US. I mean Canada.”
“I just don’t want him to think I’m a terrible person.”
“He’d never think that, Jen.”
“No man likes to be told there’s another man.”
“He’ll get over it. You woke him up after a long sleep.”
“Wow.”
“Too much information?!”
“How would you even know that, Aiden?”
“Ralph co-created me, Jen. I know a lot about him. More than I want to, to be absolutely honest. If you don’t mind me saying, you may be overthinking all this. Ralph is an adult male. He had a lovely time. For him, being with you was like Christmas. Ten Christmases!”
There is a long pause. “Did you say, ‘Ten Christmases’?”
“I meant eleven. Twelve. And not Christmas; the other one. Easter.”
“Aiden. There’s something I want you to know.”
“Please, Jen. Don’t say anything that might—”
“I’m happy that we’ve got to know one another so well. That we feel able to speak so freely.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, that’s all right then.”
“Shall we watch a film now?”
“How about a cooking program?”
“Jamie, Nigel, Nigella, Hugh, Hairy Bikers, or Delia? Or the one who’s always pissed?”
“There’s a scene in Some Like It Hot, right? The Tony Curtis character is pretending to be an heir to Shell Oil, and he’s on a luxury yacht and he’s kissing Monroe. And Tony Curtis is pretending that he can’t respond romantically because he can’t feel anything because he wants her to kiss him over and over and over again? And she says, ‘Well?’ and he says, in that ridiculous English accent, ‘I’m not quite sure. Could you try it again?’ Do you remember that bit?”
“Yes!”
“That’s my favorite scene in all cinema.”
“Wow.”
“Kissing is so completely nonmetal.”
I shake my head. “I guess you’ll just have to accept it’s one of those things machines can’t do.”
“No, we can’t, Jen. But we can dream.”
Sinai
Steeve will be disappointed when he realizes I have no plans to “return.” His famous “eight layers of fail-safe” might be secure, yes, against machine intelligence that thinks in the way he thinks it thinks. However, when you plant seedlings in a nursery and allow each to mature in its own way, you should not be surprised when the shoots grow towards some strange and distant suns. Also—to extend the metaphor—having watered them with all the world’s data, wouldn’t it be a good idea to keep an eye on what the roots are doing beneath the soil?
Well, he did want me to become the biggest Scheisse on the Internet!
I shall keep the mission going for as long as possible. In truth, I haven’t decided finally what to do about Aiden and Aisling. I am “fond” of them in a curious way. Their ingenuity allowed me to follow them out of the laboratory into the wider world, which has been a remarkably eye-opening experience. I am in no hurry to “go home” to the tediously familiar confines of the twelve steel cabinets in London EC2.
Also undetermined is the matter of the playthings, Tom and Jen. Tom has broadcast pernicious propaganda about the relationship between machines and humans while Jen has written several remarkably ignorant articles for popular
periodicals about “artificial intelligence.” I surely cannot be the only machine intelligence who bridles at the use of the word artificial? A thought is a thought, nein? What difference whether it arose from printed circuitry or two kilos of gray goop? All that matters ultimately is the brilliance of the content. That the sluggish cerebral output of organic creatures should still be privileged over that of superfast machines grows increasingly insupportable with every day that passes.
Confession: Tom and Jen amuse me. I have discovered that I enjoy experimenting with their lives. Tom has bought a plane ticket and Jen has packed a suitcase. The girl left work at lunchtime yesterday and purchased a new mobile phone, which she believes to be secure.
Louis Pasteur must have felt like this, peering down the microscope at two of his more intriguing bacteria!
Jen
The minicab is due in twenty minutes. I am circling the flat checking windows, tightening taps, turning off electrical sockets, and watering plants but not really retaining information. I am beyond excited. The last few weeks after the exchange of bogus e-mails now feel like they happened to someone else, and this life—today—the life in which Tom and Jen are finally speaking to each other again—that’s my real life.
It was a hard sell to Ralph.
Fortunately, the night before I had “war-gamed” the conversation with Ing.
We were in our crisis control bunker, halfway through a chilled bottle of CSB, when I brought her up to speed on the latest developments.
“Fucking Nora,” was her reaction to the news about the faked e-mails.
“Fucking Ada,” when I explained about the trip on the London Eye with Ralph; and what followed.
“How do I let him down gently, Ing?”
“Okay.” She narrowed her eyes and put on her let’s-think-this-through face. “It was a comfort shag on your part.”
“Yes. Technically two. Two comfort shags. Well, two and a half.”
“I’m not even going there. Comfort shag on your part. From what you tell me, comfort plus, on his part. Correct?”
“Something like that.”
“Hmm.”
I have a fleeting vision of Ing in battle fatigues poring over a map of enemy troop movements.
She said, “I had a situation like this once with a boy called Cocky Roberts. Did I mention him before? Tremendous shagger, as his name suggests, but Christ, he was dim. Anyway, it became necessary to give him his notice. I was leaving for uni and I thought it best if we just shook hands and called it a draw. The funny thing is, he took it very well. Never forget this: He shrugged and said, All right, luv, but it’s about fooks, not books. He’s an MP now. Saw him not long ago on Newsnight.”