The Emoticon Generation

by Guy Hasson

  But I think that even then I knew Melanie had an ulterior motive. Because when she sat on my knee, time skidded to a halt.

  Maybe it was something in the way she carried herself or the way she spoke. In any case, I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. And I ignored it. And with a little nudge the ball began to roll...

  ~

  We were at my house, Melanie and I. It was the last week of April, a week before my thirty-third birthday.

  We had just finished dinner. I stretched on the couch and turned on the news. Melanie muted the TV, sat on my lap, smiled at me, and—And time suddenly stopped.

  My nerves exploded. I felt each millimeter of her fingers on my neck; I felt the distribution of her weight on my leg; her smell overpowered me; I saw each crinkle, each freckle, each imperfection of her skin; and my libido skyrocketed.

  “I have a birthday gift for you,” she purred, running her fingers through my hair.

  “Really?”

  “It’s amazing!”

  “Isn’t it too early?”

  “Oh, don’t you worry. You’re going to get it next week. But,” she ran her fingers through my hair, “I need your cooperation.”

  “No problem. Tell me what it is, and I’ll help you.”

  She smiled and kissed me. “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on,” I put my hand on her knee and slowly worked my way up. “Tell me.”

  “I’ll give you a hint,” and she bit her lip as I was getting warm.

  “Fine,” I smiled.

  “Ever wonder how you would have come out if you’d been raised by different parents, or if you’d made different choices in life?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, you’re going to find out.”

  “What? How?”

  “Give me the morning before your birthday, and you’ll see,” and she kissed me to shut me up. It worked.

  ~

  On Tuesday morning Melanie took me, of all places, to the hospital.

  She rushed me through to some underground floor. I couldn’t get exactly which division it was; all I could see was a makeshift sign, saying: ‘All-Of-Me™’.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked.

  “Who knows,” she said, as she pushed me on past a few doors and into another corridor.

  We arrived at some sort of reception. “Hi,” Melanie approached the receptionist, as her friendly business self, the personality that made her so good at her job. “We’re Jake Whitford. We have an appointment at ten.”

  “Oh, yes. Doctor Majors can see you now. Second door to your right.”

  “You’re taking me to see a doctor?” I asked.

  “Second door,” Melanie grabbed my arm and hauled me into the doctor’s office, “to our right.”

  The man inside was wearing a white doctor’s coat, but he couldn’t have been more than twenty-two.

  “Ah,” he stood up as he saw us. “I’m Doctor Majors. You must be Jake Whitford,” he offered his hand.

  “Yes,” I shook it, “but—”

  “Good. Take your clothes off.”

  “What?!”

  “And wear this,” he gave me that green patient’s thing with the open back.

  “Now, hold on. I’m not doing anything until you tell me what you’re going to do to me and what this is and—!”

  “Don’t you know?” he looked at me wide-eyed. “This is the next leap in artificial—”

  Melanie held up her hand. “Don’t tell him. It’s a surprise.”

  Doctor Majors looked at Melanie, then held up his arms helplessly, as if saying ‘what can I do?’

  “But—”

  “Jake, he can’t tell you anything,” her hand was on my back. “Doctor-patient privilege.”

  “But I’m the patient,” I insisted.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Doctor Majors stood up. “I’m not a medical doctor.”

  My eyes nearly popped out of my head. “Then what the—?”

  “I’ll prepare in the next room. When you two are ready, just walk through this door.” And he tactfully disappeared.

  I looked at Melanie. “You’re not going to give me some enhancement-kind-of- surgery, are you? Because that would not constitute a birthday gift for me.”

  “Funny.” She said, and threw the robe at me. “Wear the damn robe.”

  ~

  They got me into five different tube-like contraptions, all of them resembling CT machines, and after a couple of hours, I dressed again, and we got back to the car.

  “So, now are you going to tell me what the hell that was?”

  “It’s going to take them four or five hours to finish everything. I’ll come back here, collect your gift, and we’re going to meet at your place for dinner. That’s when you’ll get your gift.”

  “Come on!”

  “Trust me. You’ll love this.” And she flashed her smile.

  And I got into the car, and drove away.

  ~

  At work, I had my AI Surfers search the Net for anything that had the name ‘All-Of-Me’. They found nothing. I then personally looked up the hospital’s website, looking for that service. I found nothing. Curiouser and curiouser. But I wouldn’t let it drive me crazy; I couldn’t let Melanie win. I could wait till the evening.

  ~

  Melanie was already at my apartment.

  “Hey there, birthday-boy. You are about to travel,” and she made a Vanna-White gesture, “into you.”

  ~

  Melanie led me to my study. She sat on the swivel chair by my computer, and I sat on the small couch near the door. She swung the chair so that she faced me.

  “Let me give a you little history. A couple of months ago I got a call from some people who want my PR firm to represent their company.”

  “All-Of-Me.”

  “Yes.”

  “They came to you?”

  “They’re almost ready to go public. I’m going to put on their public face.”

  “Which is why there’s no mention of them anywhere yet.”

  “Some private backers have heard of them, they get some government funding in AI research. But, mostly, they kept it quiet. They didn’t want competition.

  “So...you know how, if you have enough money, you can get your brain ‘downloaded’ or ‘copied’ into a massive supercomputer, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, it’s really expensive, and it requires the fastest computers and a lot of memory. But the people in All-of-Me said, let’s change the way we look at things. If we can put the human brain in a computer, then it’s not a brain anymore, it’s an equation. So let’s take all the thoughts and memory and stuff – the variables – and mesh all those little numbers into one, big number. And we’ll do it in such a way that every big number represents exactly one state of your mind, see?

  “So each unique state-of-mind gets one, unique number. And each unique number represents a specific state-of-mind that includes all your unique memories and thoughts at the time. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “So now the equation deals only with two numbers instead of a billion of them. Why two? Because one is your current state-of-mind, and the other is everything that’s going into you: sight, smell, that sort of thing. That makes computing the next instant of your brain much less work for the computer, and much faster.”

  “So they can do the human brain faster, is that what you’re saying?”

  “See, but that’s not it,” she came in closer and there were stars in her eyes, “that’s not the magic! She leaned back. “The point is that in doing that they separated your brain from your experiences. The equation – the brain – is on your hard-drive. But you can type in any state-of-mind you want!”

  I felt my hair stand all over my body, but the concept was still just beyond my grasp.

  “You can put in,” Melanie continued, “any number you feel like. And each different number gives you different memories, a different age, a different history, different thou
ghts, different experiences. You can explore you in this.

  “Ever wonder how you’d be if you’d been born under other circumstances, if you’d made different choices in life? This is your chance.”

  My world began to spin. “I’m not sure anyone would want to know so much—”

  “That’s not all, Jake,” she chugged forward. “They proved mathematically – they proved this – that every number can only be arrived at from exactly one previous number. That means you can’t ever get to the same, exact state-of-mind from two different ‘histories’ or ‘situations’ and you can’t – ever – get to the same state-of-mind twice. Even if you feel ‘I’ve been here before’ or ‘I’ve had this exact emotion before’ – you didn’t. It’s always slightly different!

  “And that leads you to another great thing! Think about it: although every state-of-mind you have can lead to millions or billions of different states-of-mind – every state-of-mind originated from only one possible state-of-mind! Every number came from exactly one, earlier number. So if you know one number – you can deduce – through sheer math! – the number that came before it, and the one before it, and before it. The computer can trace back your life!

  “Jake,” she looked at me as if it was the greatest thing ever. “You can go into your own past! Or you can just make up a number, and find a different Jake who had a different life, and go into his past. In fact, because they know what you’re seeing with your eyes and your ears – you can see and hear what he’s seeing right on your computer screen!

  “Do you get this? Do you get how big this is?”

  “I—I don’t know, Melanie. This is... It’s too... I don’t know.”

  “It’s okay,” she put her hand on my knee and squeezed. “I know this is a lot for a first time. Let’s have a demonstration. Okay?”

  I thought for a minute, then whispered, intrigued, despite my fear, “Okay.”

  She turned the screen on, the program was already running. It was asking for a number.

  “See, the thing is, instead of writing numbers, they had the computer understand things in base forty-or-fifty-something. Which means we can use any letter or number or anything on the keyboard. So you can just type in a word, and a word is a number, too. Also, they did something called a ‘transformation’ so that, for the state-of-mind you had when they checked you, you can choose what word you want it to be. I chose it for you.”

  And she typed, ‘I_AM_AN_IDIOT’, and looked at me.

  “Funny,” I said.

  “Ready?”

  I took a deep breath. “Yah.”

  She pressed ‘ENTER’.

  My face was suddenly on the screen. There was no background, but it seemed to be lying down. Suddenly his eyes opened, and he seemed to sit up. “Hi,” Melanie said.

  “Melanie?” it said, its eyes crinkling, its forehead bending. “Where’d the hospital go? Why do you look like that? What—”

  Melanie pressed a key and the image froze.”

  ‘F1’ is ‘freeze’,” she told me. “See there?” She pointed at my PersoCam, sitting on top of the screen. “He could see me and hear me through your ’Cam, and you can talk to the different you’s if you want, like I just did. Now, look. If I press this, then the number of your current state-of-mind shows up at the bottom of the screen. I can ‘save’ the number, just like I can save a game and return to it whenever I want to. But I don’t want to. That’s not interesting now.

  “Now, I’ll press ‘F2’, and we can go back in time as far as we want to. Let’s choose five minutes.” She typed it in. The image instantly changed. I seemed to be lying down again. “Now, we’re still on ‘Freeze’. I don’t want to see your face now. I want to see what you were seeing.” She pressed ‘F3’, and the image changed again. Then she pressed ‘F1’ – ‘unfreeze’ – and the image came to life. It was like being inside the CT again.

  “Oh my god!” I whispered.

  “Okay,” she froze the picture. “I see you’re beginning to get the hang of this. Now, that was around 10:30 this morning, right? Let’s go further back in time. Let’s say twenty-two hours ago? I was still at your place, right?”

  I couldn’t say anything.

  “Right.” She tapped a few keys, explaining everything she did, and fed in the data: 22 hours back in time. I took another deep breath.

  Suddenly I saw my bed. My feet were at the end of the line of vision. Covers. Movement. Soft light. Melanie was getting out of bed. The image followed her.

  My breath caught. Melanie beside me had the same reaction. We both remembered this.

  “Now you remember, tomorrow at eight, I’m picking you up,” the Melanie on the screen said. And although I remembered every movement I saw, I could not tear myself away.

  “Yah,” I could hear my voice from the computer. The Melanie on the screen began to put on her clothes.

  After a minute Melanie pressed ‘pause’. “Hmm... Is that what you look at when I get dressed?”

  “Melanie...”

  “Do you understand, now, Jake? Do you understand how amazing this is? You can go back and remember what it was like when you were twenty. When you were fourteen. You can see everything as you saw it then, as you heard it. This,” and she looked right into my eyes, “is my birthday gift to you. The perfect album.”

  I hugged her with all my strength and almost cried, “Thanks.”

  “Now,” she got up. “I’m going to the other room, to give you some time alone with your new toy. Okay?”

  “Yah.”

  When she got to the door, she looked back and winked, “Have fun playing with yourself.”

  “Funny.”

  ~

  I couldn’t move.

  My gratefulness vanished the second Melanie left the room. I turned around and faced the screen, with its question (how far back, in years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds) and the little cursor blinking, and it struck me how impossible the question was.

  Time passed. And I began thinking about how this thing had a better memory of me than I did. And I thought that there are some things a person shouldn’t know, like that his brain is on a computer in front of him.

  I didn’t want this gift. I didn’t want to access it. I didn’t want to touch it.

  But I couldn’t just leave it.

  At least for appearance’s sake; Melanie must have spent a fortune on this! I had to type something!

  I looked at my watch. Nine p.m. No need to change the time.

  Fighting every instinct I had, I typed in an arbitrary number: 5 years, 0 months, 0 days, 0 minutes, 0 seconds. Who knows what I must have done then.

  I shut my eyes, pressed ‘ENTER’, and opened them.

  “Thanks, mom.” My voice. In my living room. The TV was turned on, though muted. Some news program. At the corner of the computer screen, I could see a piece of the phone. I was on the phone.

  “And really all the very, very best.” My mother’s voice, as it sounds on the phone.

  “Sure, mom,” my voice. “Put dad on.” My breath caught. My real breath. Dad’s been dead for two-and-a-half years!

  “Just a minute,” her voice, again. Then I heard some faint rustling. I could hear me exhale. I changed another channel. Oh! Where did that show disappear to? I hadn’t seen it since!

  How can this All-of-Me give such detail? Do I really remember that much? Ah – but these images aren’t pulled out of my memory, they’re pulled out of ‘me’. I am who and what I am now, because every second of my life has led me here. So if there had been different images on the TV, I guess that means I’d’ve turned out slightly different – perhaps not noticeably, but at least with a different number.

  “Jake?” my father’s voice. Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Oh, my god!

  “Yah,” my voice right back at him, as I switched another channel.

  “Happy birthday, son.” And for a minute, I froze. How did he know it was my birthday? He’s dead, this was years ag—Oh, right. This was exactly fiv
e years ago. It’s my birthday today; it was my birthday then.

  “Thanks, dad.” It was like he was wishing me happy birthday from the grave.

  Long silence.

  “Thanks, dad.”

  “Yeah, sure, you know.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “No. Bye.”

  “Okay. Bye, dad.”

  I pressed ‘F1’, and looked at the frozen screen.

  Oh, boy.

  Okay.

  What now? Even as I asked myself what I should do, my fingers were already clicking away: 15 years, 0 months, 0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes. My birthday. 15 years ago – my eighteenth birthday. My hand hovered above the ‘ENTER’ key. My spine tingled.

  I should stop—No, I should—I know what I should do—I should—I should go someplace I know well, I should find safe ground—I should—I should—I—I pressed ‘ENTER’. Almost immediately, I froze the picture. I needed time to take it in.

  Nighttime. Outside. Stars. And that face in front of me, oh god, I can’t believe it, I haven’t seen her since... since... since my eighteenth birthday. Oh, my god. Has it happened yet? Are we after it or before it? And look at that face – that face I fell in love with. Just as it is etched in my memory. Just as clear as I saw it then.

  I pressed ‘F1’ again, and the picture came to life.

  “It’s my birthday,” my squeaky, awkward 18-year-old voice was saying. Touching her shoulder. “Don’t you want to be with me for my birthday?” Could I ever have been that stupid?

  “Jake, I really didn’t want to see you today. I had other things to do. You’re the one who wanted to see me.”

  “But you’re here. Let’s make the best of it.” Did I really talk in clichés back then? On the screen, I put my hand on her cheek, trying to build up to a kiss.

  She took my hand, and put it back. “I didn’t want to do this today. But you’re forcing me.”

  “To do what?”

  She looked down, then straight at me, into my eyes. Into my eyes today. “I don’t want to see you again.”

  Her image on the screen actually wobbled, became wavy in a drunken sort of way, then, after a long silence. “What? Why?”

  Watching, today, I put my own hands to my head. I knew what was coming. Tears were already forming in my eyes.