The Emoticon Generation

by Guy Hasson

  Matt saw him as he came in, and walked up to him.

  “You want to go now?”

  “If you’re not too busy.”

  “No problem.” Matt signaled the others to continue, and led Tony to the screening room.

  On the way, Tony said, “So how many frames did you get out of it?”

  “Two hundred,” Matt turned a corner. “And surprisingly, the equation didn’t collapse. I mean, there’s no doubt the brain doesn’t work that fast. We did physical experiments on people. Our perception has limits. But you put two-hundredth of a second into the equation, and it gives us an image.”

  “What did you see?”

  “If you run the ten seconds at twenty-four frames a second, it just looks like the same thing, only much slower. So I guess it gave us in-betweens. I mean, this just proves to me how good the equation is – that it makes sense even at this level.”

  They went into the screening room. Tony sat in the second out of ten rows. Matt stayed at the last row to operate the digital controls.

  “I’ll turn it on,” Matt said. He turned off the lights, and turned it on.

  It was just the same in slow motion. There were no sounds this slow, but Tony sat riveted. Watching each of his breaths in slow motion, watching every expression on his own face.

  It was over after forty seconds.

  “I want to see it again,” Tony said.

  Wordlessly, Matt pressed a couple of buttons, and started it again. After the third time, Tony got up suddenly, and squinted at the big screen. “Freeze it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Look!” he pointed at the frozen picture. “You can see her reflection in my eyes.” Something he could never have seen on a small TV screen. “See it?”

  Tony got up and looked closer. “Yes,” he said with wonder.

  “Play it again,” Tony said. “From the beginning.”

  And when Matt played it again, Tony’s face was almost glued to the screen, as he stared at his dead fiancé’s last seconds as reflected from his eyes. He could see her face, and the wall behind her.

  And when it was over, Tony said, “Play it again.”

  And then, “Again.”

  And “Again.”

  And in the middle of the seventh time, Tony, now seated back in the second row, suddenly raised his hand. “Freeze it!”

  The picture froze on his command, Tony’s face on the screen filled with consternation.

  “Matt,” Tony stood up and turned to face him. “I thought everything we did was digital?”

  “Of course it is, what do you mean?”

  “Everything I’m seeing now, it’s all supposed to be digital. It’s not film, right?”

  “Of course not. The mind was computed by a computer, the pictures you see were drawn by a computer and now you’re seeing it using a computer.”

  “Well, I thought I just saw a scratch on the – I mean, I saw it before, it’s just that I remembered that it’s not supposed to happen.”

  “A scratch?”

  “Go back ten seconds. Play it again.”

  Matt easily ordered the computer to do that.

  “Freeze!” Tony yelled suddenly. “See? It was there again! Next to me, next to the chair! It looked like a scratch on the film!”

  Tony’s brows furrowed. “It did look like that.”

  “Is it a bug in the programming? Is it the program or is it because we got too deep?”

  “I don’t know. Hold on.” He rewound it a few seconds, moved it forward in slow-motion, then, as the counter in the corner showed that they getting closer, he manually played it frame by frame. At this slow a pace, moving slowly from one two hundredth of a second to another, it seemed like there was no movement at all. And suddenly – from one frame to the next – a woman appeared on the screen.

  “What the –” Tony rose slowly, staring at the screen.

  The woman was small and round, and seemed to be in her mid-fifties. She was standing behind Tony’s chair, her hand holding its back. She was staring at the ‘camera’ – at the dying Tony’s eyes – with pity, as if she’d been there all along.

  “Hold on,” Matt moved the computer another frame forward. The woman was gone. “Holy ...” he whispered.

  “Is this a joke?”

  Matt moved a couple of frames forward – but the woman was gone. He moved back a few frames, and just for one frame, on a single frame, the woman stood there, as if she was part of the events, as if she’d been one of the visitors.

  “Are you playing a joke on me?”

  “Of course not. Why? Do you know who that is?”

  “Know who she is? Matt, that’s Tony’s mother.”

  “Tony’s mother?” Matt whispered, putting his hand on his whiskers, looking at the woman, staring so intently at her daughter. “Was she there? Did we somehow miss her when we first computed the –”

  “‘Was she there?’” Tony had to lean on the chairs. “Matt, Tony’s mother has been dead for ten years.”

  Matt looked at Tony, then at the picture. “I’ll recompute,” he said.

  He gathered his things, took a last look at Tony’s mother standing there frozen, then turned off the screen.

  “This’ll take a few hours,” he told Tony. “Get something to eat, then come down to the lab.”

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  They took the elevator four floors down, past Psychology, past Human Research, past Neurology, back to Computers and Matt’s lab.

  Matt sat at the computers, and performed all the computations from the top by himself. Tony sat there in silence. The rest of the technicians worked wordlessly around them, giving them a wide radius.

  “Okay,” Matt said after five hours. The lab was empty now. Everyone had gone home. “I started from scratch and performed all the computations myself. No chance of error now.”

  He played it again on the small screen on his desk.

  “Here we go,” Matt said as the time counter at the side of the screen showed that the right frame was approaching.

  “Whoa!” They both drew back at the same instant. It still looked like a scratch. Matt rewound and played it frame by frame. The image was the same: Tony’s mother standing behind Tony, hands gripping the back of his chair.

  Matt leaned back and took a deep breath.

  “So it’s not there because of a mistake or a joke?”

  “No.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “I don’t know. The computer solved the equation for a millisecond that didn’t exist. I expected, you know, that when the equation broke, it’ll give us gibberish, flat lines, colors, something like that. But ... What you have here is a picture of something coherent, of a real person. And yet something that didn’t happen.”

  “Why are we seeing her mother?”

  “The equation is taken from her brain, after all. This image of her mother is clearly an image in her brain, a memory or something. And when there’s nothing that makes sense ... This happens.”

  “Suddenly, out of nowhere?”

  Matt looked at the screen for a long time, and finally said, “It has to be.”

  The two talked for a while. Eventually, Tony left, the videocassette in his hand. Matt stayed behind, saying he’ll check a few more things, and that he’ll go home in five minutes or so.

  It was now twenty days before the wedding.

  ~

  The first thing Tony did the next morning was drop by the lab. Matt was drinking coffee near the fridge.

  “Are you wearing the same clothes you did yesterday?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t go home last night. Worked on this all night. I had to find out what this is.”

  “Yeah? Found something?”

  “Yup. I have the explanation,” he said calmly.

  Tony’s heart skipped a beat.

  “Want to see?”

  “Of course.”

  He put down the coffee and led Tony to the computer at his station.


  “The first thing I did,” Matt said, as they stood over the small monitor in Matt’s part of the lab, “was to go over the whole thing frame by frame to see if there were any other such ‘glitches’ that we’ve missed.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There were two more. The first one you spotted was two-point-five-five seconds into the vid. The next one was two-point-five-three seconds after that, and the third was two-point-four-five seconds after it. Here are the three frames.” He pressed ‘ENTER’, and three images appeared. “See? Exactly the same. Tony’s mother, standing over you, gripping the chair. The pattern’s the same, too. One frame is normal. The next frame, she’s there as if she’s always been there. The next frame, she’s gone, and everything’s normal again.

  “Except ... That the three images of her ...” he put them on the screen next to each other, “are not identical.”

  “What?” Tony tried to look closer.

  “They’re very similar, but look at the fingers in her right hand.” He pointed. “There’s a progression, from the first one to the third one. It’s almost unnoticeable, but you can still see it. In the first one, she’s holding the back of the chair tightly with all her fingers. But in the third one, she’s only holding it tightly with two fingers.” Matt looked at Tony and said slowly, “She’s letting go of the back of the chair.” He then leaned forward, and whispered, “There’s motion!”

  Tony looked at the three images on the screen, his face impassive. “Yes,” he finally nodded. “There is motion.”

  “So I had two options. Either there’s motion in jumps, every two or three seconds you get another frame in the movie. Or maybe there’s motion in each of them, and they’re independent.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at the first frame. It looks to us as if she wasn’t there, then suddenly she was. But there’s no reason for us to assume that there was nothing before or that she appeared just there, out of nowhere. She may have walked into the room, for example.”

  “Walked into the room?”

  “It’s possible. The frame before it is 2.545 seconds. The frame with her mother is 2.55 seconds, which is 1/200th of a second later. There are a whole lot of numbers inbetween. Who’s to say she doesn’t exist there? Who’s to say she didn’t move there? Who’s to say we can’t see how she appeared or how she disappeared before the next frame?”

  “So I dug even deeper. I punched in even smaller numbers, and made a ‘movie’ of what happened inbetween those three frames. And, uh, look at this. We’re working now with each frame being five-thousandth of a second. Watch. I’ll run it for you at twenty-four frames a second.”

  The first frame was without her, and although the numbers at the bottom of the screen changed, to indicate that frames were moving forward, it seemed as if they were watching a still picture.

  “After the first one thousandth of a second, she’s suddenly there,” Matt said. And, as if on cue, Tony’s mother was suddenly standing behind the chair.

  “Watch,” Matt said.

  While everything else in the hospital room was frozen in time, Tony’s mother seemed to breathe in real time. She let go of the chair, approached her daughter’s face – growing bigger in the frame. She bent down, and kissed her daughter on the cheek. She then straightened, turned around, and walked back to stand behind the chair. She gripped the handle. And then she vanished.

  Matt pressed a key, and the image froze on the screen. He then looked up at Tony.

  “Holy shit,” Tony whispered.

  Matt nodded. “I know how you feel.”

  Tony leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a long time. Matt sat on the table in front of him.

  “I want to make this very clear, Tony. What you saw is not real. What you saw can’t possibly be true. There is no way – no way in hell – that Tony saw what we just saw. We can’t see at that level. Reality is not like that. What we just saw, it’s the equation that represents her mind trying to make sense under circumstances that can’t possibly exist. So it’s pulling things out of her subconscious ... Out of her memories, her dreams, her nightmares, her ego, her id, her whatever – I don’t really know. But these are just random images that the equation pulled out.”

  “Random images? Random images?! Tony’s last ten seconds, and we see her dead mother giving her a last kiss, welcoming her to the next world?”

  “No, no, Tony, you’re putting in your interpretation. That’s not what you saw.”

  “Really? You want to turn that thing on again and tell me that’s not what I saw?”

  “Tony, all you saw is Tony’s mother kissing her. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s something the equation filled in. There was a blank; it got filled. It’s just the equation.”

  “That movement makes too much sense to seem random.”

  “The equation assumes reality is continuous. And so movement is continuous.”

  Tony thought for a long time, his mouth puckered. Finally, he said, “What’s in the other two times?”

  “The same thing. Slight variations between each time, as if she did three ‘takes’ for the same scene in a movie or something. Nothing new.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not exactly the same because different numbers fed into the equation give you the same pattern but not the exact same numbers. It’s simple math.”

  “Everything is explained in the equation?”

  “It has to be. There’s no other explanation.”

  “But the equation represents the human brain.”

  “Yes.”

  “But then something, somewhere inside our brain can see things that are –”

  “Don’t even go there.”

  “Where should I go?”

  “Nowhere. It’s jarring, I admit. Even to an atheist like myself. But I checked it out. This is just an equation coping with something it wasn’t meant to cope with. Reality is finite. You slow it down too much, it’ll break down. Numbers are infinite. You break them down forever and they’ll still behave the same.

  “The equation has to give us an image, so it gives us an image. It only has Tony’s brain to work with, so it gives us images that come from Tony’s brain. It is programmed to assume continuity, so it gives us continuous images – it gives us motion. These are random images and nothing more.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I have an explanation,” he shrugged. “It doesn’t have to do with big things like god or the light we see when we die or ghosts which only dead people see. There’s nothing supernatural about it. This is just math. Simple, plain math. I have the truth. My world works again. So I’ve had a long day, and I’m going home, taking a bath, and taking a long, calm sleep.” He took his jacket. “And, besides, my equation works. Good night.”

  “Yeah.... Thanks for all your efforts.”

  Matt shut the see-through door on Tony, and made his way through the maze of corridors that constituted Eternity Plus. He climbed the stairs, went out the front doors, and into the parking lot. He stood over his car, pulled out the keys, when he heard someone yell: “Matt!”

  He looked up. Tony had just come through the doors. Matt took a deep breath and waited for Tony to come over.

  “Tony, I, really, my mind is frazzled. Any more questions can wait till I’ve had a few hours’ sleep.”

  “No, no problem. Go home, sleep, come back tomorrow. But when you come back ...”

  “What?”

  “I was thinking. We only looked at three spots with a resolution of five thousand frames a second. Who’s to say that if we don’t look at the whole thing with 1/10,000th of a second, we won’t find something else? Who’s to say we can’t dig even deeper, to go for 50,000 frames a second, or 100,000? We might see more images.”

  “Uh ... Sure, we might. But why would we want to just pull random images out of her mind? You know it doesn’t mean anything, right?”
r />   “Because ... I mean ...”

  “What?”

  “Matt ... It’s all I have of her.”

  And Matt felt the same way he’d felt during the funeral. He nodded to Tony, indicating he’d do it, then got as quickly as he could into his car and drove off.

  The wedding was nineteen days away.

  ~

  The next day, Matt broke down the last ten seconds of Tony’s life even further. The two of them spent the day watching it in slow motion, looking for a frame that had something more in it. Tony watched it, afraid to blink, afraid he’d miss the single frame that would lead to another set of images.

  But at the end of the day, there was nothing other than what they had already seen.

  The next day, Matt broke reality into even smaller pieces. And as time on the screen slowed down, they found two places, one near the beginning, one near the end, both giving them an image of a small boy walking next to the wall on the far side of the room. Tony identified the boy from Tony’s photo albums. It was Tony’s brother, the way he’d looked twenty years ago.

  Tony’s brother walked from the left side of the frame and slowly exited on the right, his left hand always touching the wall. He never looked aside. But a millionth of a second later, he came in again on the left side and repeated the same action, moving from left to right. His steps were different this time.

  Breaking it down further gave them another image compounding this one. Tony’s father, as he had been twenty years ago, was leaning on the far wall, staring into the air. Her brother was still there, walking as he did before, now in extreme slow motion. Their father (in what appeared to be real time) sees him approaching, straightens up, and moves forward, allowing him to pass.

  Matt called this spot a ‘Strange Attractor’, which meant that there are numbers in math around which a lot of things happen.

  But then the Strange Attractor seemed to dry up. There was nothing more underneath. The movement itself, existing only between milliseconds, turned slower and slower the more they broke it down, but there was nothing, nothing more to see between those numbers

  They returned to search the whole ten seconds again, and Matt broke them down further.

  And suddenly, after a day, there was an explosion of images. Her mother, her father, her friends, past, present, everyone she knew, everyone she had to know – the equation seemed to pull them all out of her brain. It was as if, under certain magnification, if they looked at numbers smaller than ten millionth of a second, the ‘dead space’, the air itself, teemed with life. It was a quantum-sea of images popping into reality then, less than ten millionth of a second later, disappearing as if they’ve never been.