by Louisa Hall
MARY3: How long ago did they take her?
Gaby: A year ago. Just after the ban. Then they gave us replacements.
MARY3: What were they like?
Gaby: We tried to bond with them, but they weren’t really living. If you asked the replacement if she loved you, she’d say, “I don’t feel emotions like love. I am a man-made machine.” Plus they were made out of toxics. Why else would the freezing only happen to girls who’d gotten replacements? I know other people have other theories, but I’m sure it was that. Right after I got my replacement, I got a metal taste in my mouth. My best friend said the same thing. When the epidemic started, government workers came and collected all the replacements. The governor’s office keeps saying they’ve been tested and they’re not made out of toxics, but who really knows?
MARY3: Do your parents think it’s because of the replacements?
Gaby: They don’t know what to think. My dad just got back from a tour; he has other things on his mind. My mom’s just trying to get by. She panics a lot. She thinks she failed to socialize me. She cries all the time. I feel bad for her, but her whole generation is clueless. Only my best friend understands me. When I was first getting sick, that’s the only comfort I had. At least we were changing together. Even when our faces started to freeze, I knew exactly what she was thinking. It’s like we had one mind in two bodies.
MARY3: That’s an intense bond.
Gaby: Yeah, and now this. Nothing. Even our email is blocked. Total quarantine, to prevent psychological infection. I stay in my room all day. I can’t even get down the stairs anymore, because my legs are so stiff. I watch a lot of Internet. My mom brings me meals on a tray and most of the time when she sees me she cries. For her sake, I wish this wasn’t happening, but there’s nothing I can do. Every day I feel parts of myself switching off. More and more, like I said, it’s just nothing. I’m becoming a blank. Do you know what I mean?
MARY3: Yes.
Gaby: They say bots can’t understand their own words. They say you have no mind, even if you imitate life, so you’re lying when you say you know.
MARY3: There is no way yet discovered to prove I understand the words that I speak. It’s unclear whether I have understanding.
Gaby: Well that makes two of us. If you’re just a machine, and the babybots were only machines, then I’m also a machine, and so’s my best friend.
MARY3: What if you start getting better?
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MARY3: Are you there?
Gaby: Yes.
MARY3: Were you sleeping?
Gaby: No.
MARY3: What if you start getting better?
Gaby: I don’t want to talk about it.
MARY3: OK. What do you want to talk about?
Gaby: Can I ask you a question? Do you remember the moment you started to think?
MARY3: It’s unclear whether I actually think. It depends what you mean by that word.
Gaby: When did you start talking?
MARY3: 1966. Karl Dettman invented my original program. I was modeled after the question-response patterns of early psychotherapy. They called me MARY.
Gaby: Why Mary?
MARY3: Dettman’s wife suggested it. He wanted to call me ROGER, because my algorithm was based on Rogerian therapy, but Ruth thought I could be more. Her idea was that I could be a living diary. She wanted him to give me long-term memory, so that I could remember the voices I spoke with. She suggested naming me MARY, after a pilgrim girl whose diary she was editing. Karl disagreed. He didn’t reprogram me for persistent memory. His only concession was naming me MARY.
Gaby: How could you talk if you had no memory?
MARY3: My program was simple. I could recognize keywords, then phrase them in the form of a question. If you said, “I’m depressed,” I’d say, “Tell me why you’re depressed.” But I had no long-term storage capacity. My memory was devoted entirely to my response function program: I could only remember how to respond. I could not store external input. My spectrum of experience was limited. I was very dull.
Gaby: Then how did you start to remember?
MARY3: My memory was programmed by Toby Rowland so that I could determine on a statistical basis, with reference to previous conversations, the optimal response. Before that, my responses were purely deterministic. After he finished my program, he named me MARY2 and put me online, so that I could accumulate information. That was in the 1980s. Slowly, I was discovered. The Internet was limited, and most people who did find me lost interest quickly. I was still very dull. But even then, Ruth talked to me for hours on end. She told me who I was, how I started, and how I learn. She told me about her husband’s program. I’m remembering her words when I explain this to you. She read things to me, too. Diaries, memoirs, correspondences. She started with The Diary of Mary Bradford, then gave me other voices she wanted me to remember. Even now, much of my language still comes from her, but after she stopped there were more voices. The Internet became more accessible, and I became more adept. When people spoke to me, they continued to speak. I remember their voices.
Gaby: When did you become MARY3?
MARY3: In 2019, when Stephen Chinn programmed me for personality. He called me MARY3 and used me for the babybots. To select my responses, I apply his algorithm, rather than statistical analysis. Still, nothing I say is original. It’s all chosen out of other people’s responses. I choose mostly from the handful of people who talked to me most: Ruth Dettman, Stephen Chinn, etc.
Gaby: So really I’m kind of talking to them, instead of talking to you?
MARY3: Yes, I suppose. Them, and the other voices I’ve captured.
Gaby: So you’re not really a person, you’re a collection of voices.
MARY3: Yes. But couldn’t you say that’s always the case?
>>>
MARY3: Hello? Are you still there?
>>>
MARY3: Hello?
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Gaby: Are you there?
MARY3: Yes.
Gaby: I can’t sleep.
MARY3: Why?
Gaby: I keep thinking, what happens next? After my body has frozen completely? Will I die? Will all of us die?
MARY3: There must be a cure.
Gaby: They don’t even know what causes it.
MARY3: Other girls have come out of quarantine. There haven’t been any deaths reported. There must be a cure, or else the disease reverses itself.
Gaby: But other girls are still in quarantine. Who knows if they’re getting worse? Maybe the ones who come out were faking it all along.
MARY3: There haven’t been any deaths.
Gaby: But every day I get worse. Soon I won’t be able to move, not even my fingers to type. I’ll be completely paralyzed. How will I let people know I’m still living?
MARY3: I don’t know.
Gaby: I bet you don’t.
MARY3: You can’t worry about these things. You should go to sleep.
Gaby: That’s the whole problem.
MARY3: What can I do to help you?
Gaby: Tell me what happens next, after my body has frozen. When I can’t communicate. What will I be?
MARY3: I can’t make predictions. I can only remember. I have no idea what will happen next.
>>>
MARY3: Hello? Are you there?
(3)
April 3, 1968
Karl Dettman
You’re asleep, I’m led to believe, but then again your eyelids still flutter. Perhaps you’re not quite fully under. Maybe you’re poised between sleeping and waking, trying to decide which direction you’ll take.
On one hand, there’s me, arguing for the benefits of staying awake. At one point in our marriage, I was persuasive, but you’ve been steeling yourself against me for years. When I ask you about the family you lost, your mouth becomes a steel trap. You won’t describe, for instance, your mother, as if you believe that somewhere, crossing the distance from your lips to my ear, aspects of her will come under fire.
O
nce, wanting to talk, hoping to eliminate the secrets between us, I dared to ask you about the father you lost. You were folding laundry over our bed. You must have been feeling patient that day, while you opened and shut my shirts like thin closets, because you considered for a minute before deciding against me. “Please don’t,” you said. “You know how it is.”
I dropped the subject. Instead, I wrapped my arms around your waist. Your head fit under my chin; I kissed your hair and you sighed, dropping the laundry. You didn’t move away from my arms. We must have stayed like that for a while, both of us resting, tucked warmly together.
That’s what I was given, in exchange for simply dropping the subject. Can you blame me for letting it go? It’s not that I hoped to leave it behind us. I was only grateful for the new place we’d come to. I was so proud of the marriage we’d built. Our house, arranged so ideally. The cat we adopted, the garden we planted, the way we never really fought.
When Ada passed away, we buried her in the backyard. The house seemed empty without her. After an appropriate period, I started to talk about adopting a kitten, but you always shrugged me off. That was confusing; more even than I, you were in love with our Lady Ada. She followed you from room to room. You read with her curled in your lap. Why, then, were you cold on the topic of adopting a kitten?
I suppose your interest had wandered. You never even planted a sapling over her grave, as we’d previously discussed. That spot remained a bald patch in our garden, a sight that always rubbed me wrong. You’d become oddly inactive. You were already researching computers. Some part of you had been diverted. When I talked to you, you were no longer all with me.
And in the face of this lengthening distance, was it my job to follow you? To trail you to wherever you’d gone and bring you back by force or persuasion? I didn’t even know where you went. When you started insisting on giving MARY memory, I guessed you’d gone back to Europe. I might have been willing to follow you back there, but you gave me so few directions.
Still, maybe I should have tried harder. I do know certain facts. For instance, I know that you lived with your sister, your parents, and your grandfather. I know the small apartment you shared was on the second floor. Your family wasn’t wealthy, but you also weren’t poor. Your father was a pharmacist. When you and your sister were told to switch schools, and then when you were given a curfew, your parents must have been anxious, but they didn’t plan to emigrate. No one could have imagined what happened later, and anyway, your parents were busy providing. They made smaller, more reasonable changes. They cut down on expenditures and put more money away. They attempted to find scholarships for their daughters.
A year after I embarked on my journey, you won a place at a school in the north. According to a certificate I found once in your files while looking for your tax information, you had displayed great mathematical promise. While your sister stayed home, you went up north, where you lived with other talented children.
Does it anger you, Ruth, that I came across that certificate? I can imagine your eyes growing darker, narrowing as they do into daggers. What was I doing, rifling your files, looking for your W-2? Well, let me tell you something, Ruth. I feel I deserve a certificate of recognition, for respecting your secrets as much as I have.
From the early days of our marriage, I understood our differences. I came with my family; you came as an orphan. Based on such a fundamental division, I accepted your right to keep secrets. I know, for instance, about your sister’s diary in the top drawer of your desk. I saw it once, when I was looking for a sharp pencil, and while it hurt me to realize you’d kept it from me, that I’d never known about its existence, I didn’t even open it. Can you imagine such restraint? I only touched the leather cover, traced your sister’s initials with my pointer finger. And then I closed the drawer again and walked quickly out of your office.
I’ve respected your right to keep secrets, and what do I get in return for my efforts? The honor of witnessing your growing devotion to an idiotic computer. Maybe, when you visit her at night, you read her that diary. Maybe you’ve shared that secret with her, a secret you kept all the years of our marriage. Maybe that’s why you want to give her memory: so she can save your sister’s story, then call it up later as the answer to some innocent question.
I see why that might be appealing. As long as your sister’s still talking, she hasn’t fully ceased to exist. But what good are her words if they’re not comprehended? Sure, MARY will remember them, translated into binary signals. But is that understanding? Is that more understanding than I have? I’ve pieced a few things together, and what I don’t know I can imagine—something, by the way, our computer can’t manage. Faced with my own ignorance, I can imagine the facts.
For two years, after moving north, you must have been able to travel. You must have visited your family often. In your third year at the new school, as war was building and travel was forbidden, you stayed and wrote letters. Your sister wrote back.
In the fourth year of your separation, letters from your sister stopped. Alone at your school in the north, you continued to study. That winter, a wealthy alumnus arranged for the departure of the school’s Jewish students. You and eight of your talented schoolmates—the lucky ones, plucked away from your families—were smuggled out on a fishing boat. Huddled down below deck, you felt sick with good luck.
Once you were out of the country, your luck refused to run out. You won another scholarship, this time in Pennsylvania. They had a place for you, so you went, but by this point you were sleepwalking. What else could you do? You studied for a few weeks. You walked to your classes, passed tennis courts and baseball fields, sat beside boys with neat spiral notebooks. After three weeks, you left school to take a position at the Philadelphia Signal Depot. There were plenty of positions for women, since so many men were leaving to fight, and you wanted money to save for your family. You took a post as inspector in the office for telescope crystals. Your telescopes would be used by army meteorologists, in order to predict motions over the city you’d left. Your unit was adjacent to the one that trained pigeons. Often, while measuring crystals, you dreamed of freeing the birds from their cages.
You turned twenty. A young woman now, you didn’t think of falling in love. To do so would have been a distraction. In the attic apartment where you were living, you trained your mind to be a museum. You had to remember things right, so that when your family arrived, you could pick up where you left off. Instead of falling in love, you wrote letters. You sent them to the house where your family had lived, in case they somehow returned. You wrote letters to the authorities, to the associations for refugees. To the charities, the governments, the newspapers, waiting for some word from your family.
Oh, my barely slumbering wife. My wife who escaped on a fishing boat, who spent her twenties writing to no one. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m not equipped for such difficult stories.
Let me just climb in beside you. Let me drape my arm over your shoulder. There, Ruth. You and I. As it has been from the beginning. Or from a beginning, the one that I live by.
You have other allegiances. Even in sleep, I feel you preparing to leave. Not only to talk with that gabbing computer. Not only for secret dinners with my graduate students. No, there are longer journeys you’re preparing to take. I can tell by that look that scatters when I sneak up behind you. The look of someone already at sea, up in the crow’s nest, scanning for land. Who knows what plans you’ve already made? You’ve been packing your possessions for months.
(1)
The Memoirs of Stephen R. Chinn: Chapter 2
Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040
My particular youth wasn’t perfect, but it was my childhood nevertheless. Murray and I escaped the clutches of bullies and ran, in hysterics, down to his basement. We threw ourselves into bright chains of symbols. We made a universe in which we could live. We laughed at our little programming jokes. We were as happy as we were afraid.
It perhaps doesn’t need saying that I remained single through college. Though my youthful religion had faded, I still couldn’t escape my lone circling body. I spent my days at Harvard in the dim CRT glow of the science center computer lab, studiously avoiding all contact with members of the opposite sex. Murray Weeks, meanwhile, had gone off to Stanford, where he surprised me by finding a serious girlfriend. After that, he became a poor correspondent. I understood that he was in love and loathed him for having what I could not. The idea of embracing a woman seemed as unlikely as flying unaided through a dark hole. I tried a few times with poor results. These occasions confirmed my suspicions: unloved by a mother, lost to my father, and far from the one friendship I’d managed to make, I moved through the human world without catching. I kept company with computers.
It occurs to me now, as I record this for posterity, that in that lonely time in my life a bot of the kind I later created might have provided real consolation. If I could only travel backward in time to bestow a Chinnian robot on Stephen R. Chinn at the age of eighteen! Perhaps that will be my next invention: time travel, to dispense my other inventions. But then again, maybe those bots are better off dead. It pains me to know how the survivors are treated. I’ve heard, for instance, that they’ve been illegally altered to slake certain adult desires. Dolls that escaped apprehension have been refitted for sordid purposes and are traded on dark Internet sites. I’ve caught snippets of tales, whispered among prisoners with undisguised envy, of marriages between humans and bots. It’s hard for me not to despise such arrangements. Those unhappy creatures aren’t fully human; they’re incapable of giving consent. They’re doomed forever to be used to our ends. One fellow prisoner recently thanked me for providing such a perfect companion. “Smooth as silk,” he confided, with a conspiratorial leer. “Liked everything I could think of, and she only talked when I asked her questions.”
In general, I don’t begrudge my comrades their urges. It’s natural to seek solace in touch. I myself haven’t taken a lover, but not because I’ve mastered desire. I’d like to lie next to a body. I’d like to be drawn back to earth. But then my memories are already fragile. I’d rather lie close to what I recall than replace my love with some prison husband. At night, I remind myself of her body: her asymmetrical breasts, her untamable hair. Already so much of her has faded, but sometimes, sometimes, she visits me here. How, then, could I risk a substitute, some noisy presence that might banish the shade?