“Hello, Keesha White. How are you feeling?” I asked, testing her for human intelligence.
“I’m fine,” said Keesha and Keesha2, their voices almost indistinguishable.
“Did you hear about Karlohs?”
“I heard he got some kind of rash,” said Keesha.
“Who is Karlohs?” asked Keesha2.
“Karlohs is a friend of ours,” Keesha explained to Keesha2.
“Your AI sounds good,” I said.
“Thank you,” Keesha said.
“Thank you,” said Keesha2.
“My little guy isn’t doing so good.”
“That’s because you made him into a monkey.”
“You think that’s it?”
“Mr. Hale says the overall appearance of our avatars is important. If your avatar doesn’t look intelligent, you won’t be able to take it seriously. You have to believe in your AI.”
“I do believe in him. I believe he’s a monkey.”
“Um, you better get back to him,” said Keesha. “We’re not supposed to contaminate each other’s intelligences.”
Maybe she was right. Maybe the monkey image I’d given Bork was making it difficult for him to take himself seriously. With these AI programs you never know. So I accessed the student database, pulled up some images, and began the virtual cosmetic surgery.
Later that day—it was in Ms. Martinez’s USSA History class—I noticed that the desk to my left was empty, as was the desk in front of me. I turned around. The desk behind me was also vacant. The only person sitting close to me was Melodia Fairweather, on my right. This was quite odd, as nearly every other desk in the hall was occupied. It was almost as though people were avoiding me.
“Looks like nobody wants to sit with us,” I said to Melodia.
“They’re just being stupid,” she said.
Matt Gelman sat two desks to my left. I tried to catch his eye, but he seemed abnormally interested in what Ms. Martinez was saying about the Soft Revolt of 2039, when millions of prison farmworkers had deliberately slowed production, leading to a nationwide shortage of fresh seafood and vegetables. I felt in my pockets for something to throw at Gelman. All I came up with was a ball of lint, so I pulled a button off my shirt, took careful aim, and tossed it at him.
It hit him right on the cheek. Startled, he looked over at me.
What? he mouthed.
I pointed at the empty desks surrounding me and raised my eyebrows.
He keyed something into his WindO and turned it toward me.
RASH
Rash? I mouthed.
Matt shrugged, looking uncomfortable, and returned his attention to the front of the room. I thought about throwing another button at him but decided I didn’t want to walk around half-dressed for the rest of the day.
Rash? What he meant, I supposed, was that I was the cause of Karlohs’s rash. I was stewing over the ridiculousness of it all when I heard a gasp. Everybody was looking at Melodia Fairweather. It wasn’t hard to see why.
Her face was a constellation of red blotches.
It was a replay of first period. Everybody backed away, Ms. Martinez called the SS&H office, and poor Melodia sat there with her hands groping her face and saying, “What? What is it? Why are you looking at me?”
They were all edging away from me, too.
“Hey, Ben,” I said to Ben Weisert, who was closest to me. “Am I blotchy too?”
He shook his head.
I moved toward him.
“Don’t let him touch you!” someone shouted.
At that moment the door opened. Two masked medtechs pushed through the crowd. Scrambling to get out of their way, I bumped up against Ben and a couple of other kids. Ben shoved me away, which really surprised me. Ben was a quiet kid, not a guy you’d expect to commit a physical assault.
The medtechs pulled an antimicrobial envelope over Melodia’s head, and escorted her out of the classroom. For several seconds everyone stood frozen in silence, then Ms. Martinez clapped her hands.
“Back to your seats, people.”
We all drifted back to our places.
Well, not all of us. I went back to my desk near the front of the room, but the desks around me remained vacant. Several students stood pressed against the far wall, staring at me.
“What’s wrong?” I said to them. “Is my face okay?” I asked, looking at Ms. Martinez.
She nodded, her brow furrowed.
“How come everybody’s acting so weird?” I asked.
The door opened and another pair of medtechs entered the classroom, heading straight for me.
This time Lipkin didn’t even bother to talk to me. The medtechs just threw me straight into quarantine, where I spent the next two hours and fifty-six minutes. That might not sound like such a long time, but try sitting in a six-by-eight room with nothing but two plastic chairs and a wall clock for company. Three hours is just a skosh shy (as Gramps would say) of eternity. By the time the bull-necked, bearded triage nurse arrived, I was bored to near incoherence and my bladder was about to explode.
Fortunately for both of us, he let me use the toilet right away. When I’d peed away half my body weight, he led me back to quarantine.
A few minutes later a jolly-looking fellow with red cheeks and thick fingers entered my cell. He sat down and consulted his WindO. “Bo Marsten.” He looked up. His lively rust-colored hair bounced. “So you’re the one who started all this. How are you feeling today?”
“You sound like my virtual monkey,” I said.
His head jerked and his red hair seemed to stand up straighter. “Excuse me?”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“My name is Staples. George Staples. I’m with the Federal Department of Homeland Health, Safety, and Security.” He entered something in his WindO.
“What are you writing?” I asked.
He turned his screen toward me so that I could read what he’d written.
ATTITUDE: Feisty
I noticed then that George Staples wasn’t wearing a mask.
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll give you the dreaded red speckles?” I asked.
“Not really.” He grinned, showing me his small, neatly arranged teeth.
“Is Melodia okay?”
“She’s been sent home, along with seven other students.” He smiled. “You really started something, Bo.”
“What? I didn’t do anything.”
“Said Typhoid Mary to the judge.”
“Said who?”
“Typhoid Mary. You never heard of her?”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Back in the early nineteen hundreds, Typhoid Mary was a cook who carried the typhoid bacteria in her body. She made dozens of people sick. Some of them died. The health department tried to stop her, but she didn’t believe that she was a carrier. She kept moving from job to job, changing her name, and infecting more people. They finally caught her and put her on an island where she lived out the rest of her life.”
“You think I’m Typhoid Bo?”
Staples laughed. “In a way, yes. Every one of those kids with the rash had some contact with you, Bo. Or at least they were in the same room with you.”
“But I’m not sick.”
“That’s what Typhoid Mary said.” He laughed again. It was getting irritating.
“I don’t see what’s so funny.”
Staples sobered. “I guess it really isn’t very funny,” he said. Then he smiled. More of a smirk. “The fact of the matter is, Bo, that they think you did it.”
“Think I did what?”
“They think you made them sick, Bo.”
“Well, they’re wrong.”
“Actually, Bo, they’re right.”
“Do you think you could say one sentence without plugging my name into it?”
“Sure . . . Bo.” He laughed, thinking that he’d made a pretty good joke. I managed to not laugh.
“Sorry . . . ,” he said. I appreciated his restraint—I knew he wante
d to add, “Bo.”
“Look, I called Karlohs some names, okay? Guilty as charged. But I didn’t give him that rash.”
Staples shrugged. “You might be right. As a matter of fact, Karlohs’s problem was caused by an allergic reaction to a skin moisturizer he was using.”
“Face cream gave him the rash?”
“Apparently. But the situation got out of hand when you publicly claimed responsibility for Karlohs’s affliction—”
“I was being sarcastic. He accused me of giving him the rash, and I said—”
“I know what you said, Bo. I’ve reviewed the recordings. It doesn’t really matter what your intent was. The bottom line is that your actions precipitated a psychogenic reaction in the student body.”
“A what?”
“An emotional response that manifests itself physically, in this case as an epidermal inflammation. In other words their brains made their bodies sick. It’s called MPI. Mass Psychogenic Illness. What they used to call ‘contagious hysteria.’”
“What about Karlohs’s actions? He started it by accusing me. And by using some bad face cream.”
“Karlohs Mink is not without blame, but he had reason to be upset. His face was covered with red blotches.”
I sat and stared, hating Karlohs Mink with every cell of my body. Staples waited me out.
“So now what?” I asked.
Staples was looking at his WindO. “Sam Q. Safety says, ‘If you aren’t part of the solution, you might just be part of the problem,’” he read. He smiled. I didn’t. He frowned and said, “In most cases of MPI—we have several every year—we’ve found it most effective to remove the source of the infection.”
“You take out everybody’s brain?”
“We’ve tried that.” He laughed. “Just kidding. No, there are only two ways to stop something like this. One, we could bring in an intensive program employing biofeedback education, psychopharmaceuticals, and relaxation therapy. Of course, we would have to treat every single student here at Washington.” He grimaced. “Very expensive. Very time consuming. Not practical.”
“What’s number two?”
“We get rid of you.”
One advantage of home quarantine was that I didn’t have to deal with people like Karlohs Mink or Mr. Lipkin or any of the rest of the hysterical mob. My classes were pretty much the same, except it all came in through my WindO. Sometimes I almost forgot I was sitting in my bedroom staring at a screen.
I decided to try out this concept on the redesigned Bork.
“Hello, Bork,” I said.
“Hello, Bo Marsten,” Bork said. “How are you feeling?”
“I am feeling as though I put a little too much cyan in your hair.”
Bork, now a green-haired grinning troll, took several seconds to reply, his gold irises spinning rapidly.
“Green is my favorite color,” he said.
“Tell me something, Bork—”
“My name was inspired by two twentieth-century television characters—”
“Bork!”
“Yes, Bo?”
“Let me finish my question.”
“Please finish your question, Bo.”
“Thank you. Bork, does it make any difference to you whether I’m sitting here in my room or sitting in the AI lab at school?”
Bork’s irises spun; his eyelids blinked. After about ten seconds he said, “Yes.”
“Explain.”
“If you were in the AI lab, my database would include the information that you were in the AI lab.”
“That is not helpful.”
“You did not ask me to be helpful.”
“Have you heard, Bork, that I’m the Typhoid Mary of Washington Campus?”
“No.”
“It’s true.”
“Congratulations, Bo.”
“Anyone who gets near me runs the risk of developing a hysterical rash.”
“Define ‘hysterical rash.’”
“Red spots all over your face.”
“How large?”
“Approximately four millimeters in diameter.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Twenty or thirty?”
“What is the degree of risk to those in close proximity to you?”
“I guess it depends on how suggestible a person is.”
“I am open to suggestion.”
I laughed. The avatar’s eyes spun and spun. I got up and went to the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror, just to make sure I hadn’t infected myself. Everything looked normal. I went back to my WindO.
Bork’s goofy grin was spread across his face, and his cheeks were covered with red spots.
10:04 a.m.
Mr. Hale,
My AI is still not very intelligent, but I think he has developed a sense of humor. Is that good or bad?
Bo Marsten
10:58 a.m.
Bo,
What precisely do you mean by “a sense of humor”?
Mr. Hale
10:59 a.m.
Mr. Hale,
Bork has given himself a rash. Also, he grins a lot, and I think he is being sarcastic sometimes. And he makes these remarks. When I asked him if he had a sense of humor, he said, “I tried that once. Nobody laughed.” I think that might be a joke.
Bo Marsten
11:57 a.m.
Bo,
Spontaneous, intentional humorous expressions are extremely rare in AIs, even those certified as high functioning by the Turing Foundation. Perhaps your “Bork” is simply mirroring your own attitudes. As for the rash, this could be a problem with your screen, or with your avatar programming. Are there spots on the background as well?
Mr. Hale
12:07 p.m.
Mr. Hale,
No, only on his face. What if Bork can convince the AI judge that he is intelligent, but not entirely sane? Would I get credit for the course?
Bo Marsten
1:00 p.m.
Bo,
The goal of this exercise is to create an intelligence that will be useful to you in your future studies. An irrational AI would not meet our class requirements.
Mr. Hale
1:07 p.m.
Mr. Hale,
Okay, thanks. By the way, Bork says, “Howdy Doody.” I don’t know where he got that. I sure didn’t teach it to him.
Bo Marsten
Gramps thought the quarantine was not such a bad idea.
“Buncha damn fools don’t know their heads from their asses. You’re better off without ’em, Bo.”
My mother sucked her lips in the way she does when she thinks Gramps has had one too many, which he had.
“You want me to go talk to ’em, I will,” Gramps said. “I’ll get you back in school in a jiffy.”
“I thought you just said I was better off not going.”
“Go, stay, it don’t make no difference.” He took another swallow of beer. “Buncha asswipe pussies, you ask me.”
“Nobody’s asking you, Daddy,” said my mother.
“Well, somebody should, and that’s for damn sure. I swear t’ god the whole country’s gone bonkers.”
“I just wish we could enjoy one meal in this household without listening to your raving.”
“Then don’t listen. You never did anyways. Nobody listens. This country’s gone to hell in a handbasket, and people don’t even know it. Lost our edge, we have. Look at you, Bo, what’s your best time in the hundred meter?”
“Thirteen point eight seconds,” I said.
“I use to run it in eleven.”
“I know, Gramps. You only told me that about a thousand times.”
“You know that no American has won an Olympic Gold Medal since 2052? The best athletes are from South America now. Hell, we don’t even have football or hockey anymore. We used to say ‘No pain, no gain.’ These days it’s ‘Any pain, stop trying so hard.’ And look at what we drive. American suvs are so safe you could run spang into a brick wall and nobody’d get
a scratch. But they don’t go much faster than a horse, and they cost as much as a house. We don’t even have a space program anymore. South Brazil has a colony on Mars, and we’re sitting on our asses. You know what our biggest industry is? The penal system. We live longer than anybody else on earth, but we send a third of our men to jail. A lot of women, too.”
Gramps scowled, daring us to argue with him. We knew better. He snorted and ended his spiel the way he always does: “The whole country’s gone off its nut. I’m living in an insane asylum.”
After two minutes of complete silence my mother came up with one of her cheerful factoids.
“May Ann will turn one hundred and fifty-eight today.”
May Ann Weberly is the oldest person in the world. Her birthdays have been broadcast live ever since she turned 130.
“Now there’s a productive member of society,” Gramps said.
“She’s an inspiration,” said my mother.
“She’s a talking corpse. The woman should’ve been dead twenty-five years ago.”
I kind of agreed with Gramps on this one. May Ann Weberly spends 364 days a year on low-temperature life support. Once a year, on her birthday, she wakes up surrounded by her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.
“Life is just one long birthday party,” May Ann likes to say. And she means it. Her birthday parties are one of the most popular annual webcasts.
“I find her a comfort,” said my mother. “She’s lived her life safely and well. And with the government taking care of her now, she’s free to live another hundred fifty-eight years!”
“What kind of life is that?” Gramps said. “She’s not free. She’s a prisoner in her own body.”
There was a time in America when people talked a lot about freedom. It was a big deal back in the 1700s during the American Revolution, and it was a big deal during the Civil War, and in all the other wars. People wrote songs about freedom. America was a place where the most important thing was to be free to make your dreams come true. But people don’t talk about freedom as much as they used to. At least that’s what Gramps says. Most people are more likely to say, “What good is freedom if you’re dead?”
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