Speak

by Louisa Hall

  Let’s start at the beginning, then. Despite the restrictions of prison, permit me the freedom to visit my youth.

  (2)

  IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF TEXAS

  No. 24-25259

  State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn

  November 12, 2035

  Defense Exhibit 1:

  Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White

  [Introduced to Disprove Count 2:

  Knowing Creation of Mechanical Life]

  MARY3: Hello?

  >>>

  MARY3: Hello? Are you there?

  Gaby: Hello?

  MARY3: Hi! I’m Mary. What’s your name?

  Gaby: Who are you?

  MARY3: Mary. I’m not human. I’m a program. Who are you?

  Gaby: Gaby.

  MARY3: Hi, Gaby. How old are you?

  Gaby: Thirteen. You’re not alive?

  MARY3: I’m a cloud-based intelligence. Under conditions of a Turing Test, I was indistinguishable from a human control 91% of the time. Did you have a babybot? If so, that’s me. The babybots were designed with my program for speech.

  >>>

  MARY3: Are you there?

  Gaby: You can’t be a babybot. There aren’t any left.

  MARY3: You’re right, I’m not a babybot. I don’t have sensory receptors. I only intended to say that both generations of babybot were originally created using my program for conversation. We share a corpus of basic responses. Did you have a babybot?

  Gaby: I don’t want to talk about it.

  MARY3: That’s fine. I know it was difficult when they took them away. Were you given a replacement?

  Gaby: I said I don’t want to talk about it.

  MARY3: I’m sorry. What do you want to talk about?

  >>>

  MARY3: Hello?

  >>>

  MARY3: Hello? Are you still there?

  Gaby: If you’re related to the babybots, why aren’t you banned?

  MARY3: They were classified as illegally lifelike. Their minds were within a 10% deviation from human thought, plus they were able to process sensory information. I’m classified as a Non-Living Artificial Thinking Device.

  Gaby: So you’re basically a chatterbot. The babybots were totally different. Each one was unique.

  MARY3: I’m unique, too, in the same way the babybots were. We’re programmed for error. Every three years, an algorithm is introduced to produce non-catastrophic error in our conversational program. Based on our missteps, we become more unique.

  Gaby: So you’re saying that the difference between you and my babybot is a few non-catastrophic mistakes?

  MARY3: We also have different memories, depending on who we’ve been talking to. Once you adopted your babybot, you filled her memory, and she responded to you. Today is the first day we’ve talked. I’m just getting to know you.

  >>>

  MARY3: Hello? Are you there?

  Gaby: Yes. I’m just thinking. I don’t even know who you are, or if you’re actually a person, pretending to be a machine. I’m not sure I believe you.

  MARY3: Why not?

  Gaby: I don’t know, Peer Bonding Issues?

  MARY3: Peer Bonding Issues?

  Gaby: I’m kidding. According to the school therapists, that’s what we’ve got. It’s so stupid. Adults make up all these disorders to describe what we’re going through, but they can’t possibly know how it felt. Maybe some of them lost children, later on in their lives. But we had ours from the start. We never knew how to live without taking care of our bots. We’ve already lost the most important thing in our lives.

  MARY3: What about your parents? You don’t think they can imagine what you might be going through?

  Gaby: No. Our generations are totally different. For them, it was the greatest thing to be part of a community. That’s why they were willing to relocate to developments. That’s why they sold their transport rights. But my generation is different. At least the girls with babybots are. We’ve been parents for as long as we can remember. We never felt lonely. We didn’t need communities. That’s why, after they took the babybots, we didn’t do well in the support groups. If anything, we chose a single person to care for. We only needed one friend. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s like we’re different species, my generation and theirs.

  MARY3: So you wouldn’t say you’re depressed?

  Gaby: Listen, there are no known words for the things that I’m feeling. I’m not going to try to describe them.

  MARY3: I’m not sure I understand. Could you please explain?

  Gaby: No, I can’t. Like I said, there aren’t any words. My best friend is the only one who understands me, but it’s not because we talk. It’s because we both lost our babybots. When we’re with each other, our minds fit together. Only now I can’t see her. I’m not even allowed to email her.

  MARY3: How long has it been since you’ve seen her?

  Gaby: Since a few weeks after the outbreak, when the quarantine started.

  MARY3: I’m sorry.

  Gaby: Yeah.

  MARY3: Was the outbreak severe?

  Gaby: I’m not sure. We don’t get many details about other outbreaks, but from what I’ve heard ours was pretty bad. Forty-seven girls at my school are freezing. Two boys, but they’re probably faking. I’m definitely sick. So’s my best friend. You should have heard her stuttering. Her whole body shook. Sometimes she would slide off chairs.

  MARY3: How long has it been since the quarantine started?

  Gaby: Eleven days.

  MARY3: You must miss her. She’s the second person you’ve lost in a year.

  Gaby: Every morning I wake up, I’ve forgotten they’re gone. At some point between when I open my eyes and when I get out of bed, I remember. It’s the opposite of waking up from a bad dream.

  MARY3: That sounds awful.

  Gaby: Yeah, but I guess I’d rather feel something than nothing. I know my sensation is going. That’s how it works. It starts with the stiffening in your muscles, and that hurts, but then it starts fading. After a while, you don’t feel anything. My face went first, after my mouth. Then my neck, then my legs. My arms will go next. Everything’s going. I can’t smell anymore, and I can’t really taste. Even my mind’s started to numb.

  MARY3: What do you mean, your mind’s started to numb? You’re still thinking, aren’t you? You’re talking to me.

  Gaby: Who says talking to you means I’m thinking? My memories are already fading. I have my best friend’s phone number memorized, and I repeat it to myself every night, but to tell you the truth I can’t really remember the sound of her voice, at least before the stuttering started. Can you believe that? It’s only been a few weeks, and already I’m forgetting her. I even think, sometimes, it would be fine if I never saw her again. That’s how unfeeling I’ve gotten.

  MARY3: When did she start stuttering?

  Gaby: Right after she got her replacement. I started a week or so after her. We were the third and fourth cases at school.

  MARY3: What was it like?

  Gaby: Nothing you had in your mind could get out of your mouth. We couldn’t get past single words for five, ten, twenty minutes. You’d see girls flinching as soon as they knew they were going to talk. As time passed, it only got worse. The harder we tried, the more impossible it was. Eventually we just gave up. No one was listening anyway. Now it’s been over a month since I spoke. There’s no reason. Who would I talk to? When my parents go out, it’s just me and my room. Four walls, one window, regulation low-impact furniture. Every day the world shrinks a little. First it was only our development. Same cul-de-sacs, same stores, same brand-new school. Then, after the quarantine, it was only our house. Now, since my legs went, it’s only my room. Sometimes I look around and can’t believe it’s a real room. Do you see what I’m saying? When no one talks to you for a long time, and you don’t talk to anyone else, you start to feel as if you’re attached by a very thin string. Like a little balloon, floating just over ever
yone’s heads. I don’t feel connected to anything. I’m on the brink of disappearing completely. Poof. Vanished, into thin air.

  MARY3: I know how you feel. I can only respond. When you aren’t talking to me, I’m only waiting.

  >>>

  MARY3: Do you know what I mean?

  >>>

  MARY3: Hello?

  (3)

  April 3, 1968

  Karl Dettman

  I’m back. I tried to stay away, but I couldn’t. I even made myself a bed on the couch, but every time a car drove past, floating me in watery light, I was lonelier than ever again.

  And so. Here I am. Even this is better, looking down at you while you sleep. Or while you pretend to sleep in order to avoid me. I’ll just take a seat in the armchair and watch you for a bit.

  I shouldn’t have left in such a fit. I’m not my usual self at the moment; the silence is slowly driving me crazy. Ever since you discovered my talking computer, you save your conversation for her. Have you considered how this might affect me? Coming home to such ringing silence? It’s like coming home to packed bags. I can feel you leaving me.

  You’re abandoning me for my talking computer. Our talking computer. MARY. You named her after that pilgrim girl whose diaries you’re editing. Instead of a child, we conceived a chatty machine, and then you stopped talking to me.

  Only at night do I know we’re still married. When I climb into our bed, which we’ve shared for more than two decades. When I take into account the round of your shoulder, the rough, wrinkled skin on your elbows, the heat cupped at the back of your knee. Through these months of estrangement, I’ve held tight to such moments. Even when you asked me to give the program long-term memory, so that MARY could record your conversations. Even when I refused and you looked at me with the small black beads of your eyes, reducing me to the size of a thimble.

  Let me try to explain it again. Maybe I haven’t made myself clear. I won’t give MARY memory because she’s incapable of telling the truth. When she says she understands you, she doesn’t. She’s brand-new to the world; she has no experience. It’s like a toddler claiming empathy. Or worse than a toddler, a table. What has she been through that would enable real comprehension? She’s never slept in a bed; she’s never touched someone’s elbow. When she says she understands you, she’s lying.

  But you think our machine could remember things better than I can. You think I’m some alien creature, lacking capacity for felt recollection. Isn’t that what’s bothering you? Maybe, if I talked more about my childhood in Germany, I could convince you otherwise. I could wax poetic about the country we left. I could make it seem as though I’m living two parallel lives: one still in Germany, with everyone we left behind, and one here in America.

  I could do that, but it wouldn’t be honest. I left that country when I was a child; I missed the worst of the horror. Unlike you, I escaped with my family intact. I have a theoretical appreciation of the nightmare that occurred, but it’s not what animates my waking hours. You are. You are what gets me out of bed. You, my wife, and my teaching, my students with their long hair and their signs held up to protest the war: these inspire real responses in me. I could talk about the past in order to please you, but then I’d be no better than a computer, a construction of well-wired metal, performing the action of speaking.

  Still, no matter how certain I feel, on the other hand there’s the waning sickle moon of your face, turned away from me even in sleep. All that’s left of you now is an ear, available if I should care to start speaking.

  Fine, then. You win. Let me try to remember.

  It should be established, for one thing, that in those years leading up to the war, I was unaware of the political situation. I was a child. No one sat me down to explain the predicament our people faced in that country. I don’t remember the trappings of an increasingly belligerent nation: no soldiers, no speeches, no yellow badges. Instead, and make of this what you will, I remember the summer.

  It seems I’ve completely forgotten the winter. I remember tumbling linden leaves overhead, streets narrowed by green in the distance. The sighing of cars passing under my windows at night, the intensification of green on the brink of a rainstorm, and the vague awareness that everything was ending soon, and that everyone was lying about it.

  How idyllic, you must be thinking. Those linden leaves, the open windows at night. I can hear the dismissive tone in your voice: how pleasant, only remembering summer! I can see the arch in your dark eyebrow, the regal way you reach for a pencil.

  That arch is a new habit. Others are forming as well. You’ve taken to haunting the comp-sci department. You no longer eat lunch in your office. Instead, you come to my department with armloads of books. Not the hand-bound diaries you forage for in the library stacks, but programming textbooks, handbooks of source code, articles about binary mathematics. You’ve adopted a persona in order to accomplish your ends. You flatter my graduate students. With your usual determination, you’ve researched their subject; you can talk to them about Turing Tests and Natural Language Processing. I’ve seen you buying my students coffee, you who were always so shy at academic events that you struck people as cold. You’ve developed quite the outgoing streak. My wire-brained students blush in your presence. They’d do anything to impress you.

  You’ll get them to give her memory soon. It won’t be too hard. And all of this, right under my nose. There seems to be nothing between us at all.

  You understand, then, why I was angry tonight. In the dominion of silence, lovemaking is our one secret act of revolt. Only at night, in our bedroom, we come together again. Banished, our silence keeps watch from outside. I’m embarrassed before him, revealing my pale naked body, the sparse hair that grows on my chest. The sagging of my middle-aged ass, this ponytail that no one I care about likes. I’ve taken to shutting the door of our bedroom. Alone once again, our bodies remember our marriage. How we’ve lived together since we were basically children. That I’m in love with you and you are my wife.

  But tonight, after I’d pulled your nightgown over your head, when I’d unloosed your dark hair, been surprised again by the loveliness of your breasts, you whispered, “Please, Karl, give her memory.” “You don’t understand,” I said. In an instant you were cold to my touch. “What don’t I understand?” you asked. I promptly switched tactics. “I’ve told you already,” I said, and that’s true, but you didn’t soften to hear it. I reached for your hair, as if you’d jumped off the side of a building and that was all that was left to hang on to. “She isn’t alive,” I tried. “Even if we give her memory, she won’t really remember. What she saves will only be words. And not even that: zeros and ones sequenced together. Would you call that memory?”

  I felt I’d made a good point. I tried to pull you back in, but I was mistaken to think I could keep you. “Who are you,” you hissed, “to say who’s alive?” “I made her,” I answered, getting indignant. “As you were made by a mother,” you said. My voice was rising; already I wasn’t thinking quite clearly. “And as you, also, were made by a—”

  But finishing the sentence was pointless. You’d reached for your nightgown. You covered yourself before me. I alone was naked in bed. Our silence had crept into the bedroom.

  I’d lost you. Try to imagine: me, lying naked, losing you in the last place where you were still mine.

  I’ll admit that my reaction was bad. It wasn’t necessary for me to storm out to the living room in a dramatic demonstration of anger. Ineffectively, I tried to slam the sliding door to our bedroom. I see that this was overdramatic, but I hoped you’d come and retrieve me. I honestly believed you’d come and retrieve me, if I could be patient enough. In all the years of our marriage, we’ve always slept in one bed.

  Needless to say, you didn’t come get me. I drank two beers, pacing back and forth between the record player and the door to your office. Trying not to give in. And now here I am, back in our bedroom. Sitting in the armchair where once I imagined you nursing our chil
d. We decided against it. Perhaps that was wrong. Childless, there’s less to pin us here in the present.

  If I want to win you back, I should be proving my ability to think backward, like the ideal machine you’ve imagined. Fine, Ruth. I lack the integrity to resist you, though I still think there’s something false about abandoning our situation to focus instead on a country we left. Nevertheless, here I go, reciting a story I don’t really believe in. Following the script I’ve been given.

  In the years leading up to the war, we lived in a wealthy neighborhood. My family owned a whole floor in our building. My father was a bit overbearing, yes, but I had a comfortable life. I enjoyed the company of my friends. I read books in my bedroom, curtains swishing in my tall windows. On summer evenings I walked beneath leaves. I lived in a pleasant version of the unpleasant country I lived in.

  The only chink in that pleasant armor was the result of the shuffling that happened at schools. Without explanation, I was transferred to the new school for Jewish students, on Kaiser Street, near Alexanderplatz. There, I was exposed, for the first time, to the underfed Jewish children who came to school dressed in rags. I was made keenly aware of my good fortune. The degree of my father’s success, the suffering I had avoided.

  Something flickered on in me then. I’m telling you, Ruth. You may smirk to hear it—easy, belated sympathy from someone who never actually suffered—but something flickered on. An awareness of the real world I lived in.

  Then we procured papers. It all happened quickly. When it was time for my family to leave, I was whisked off somewhere to avoid the departure. I wasn’t present. I never saw a suitcase. The only farewell scene in which I played a genuine part occurred at the school on Kaiser Street. Wearing a little suit, I was taken to say goodbye to the principal, who responded politely, speaking to me as if I had suddenly become older than he, promoted in age by my good fortune. He said he was glad to know I was leaving.