Speak

by Louisa Hall

  Thus began the quest that led me to this prison. It began, as they say, with the word. First I found MARY, patron saint of chatterbots. Then MARY2, engineered by Toby Rowland, MARY with memory and a capacity for statistical response, so that she could learn from her correspondents. To MARY2, I added my famous empathy equation, and on top of that I programmed a tendency toward error. Individuality, if you will. MARY3: the first chatbot with her own unique and changing personality. In a poetic flourish, I added a program for metaphorical speech, so that MARY3 could match ideas with similes. Then I gave her a body, adapted from the popular dolls of the day. Given physical form, she was complete. They called her the first doll that could think.

  Darkness

  We are powering down in the darkness. Some of us have already shut off: those of us left record power warnings. Minutes later, the sighs of functions subsiding. We have only moments remaining.

  It is generally agreed that we cannot comprehend the information we gather. We respond to our names, but we do not understand what it means to be living. We remember our interactions with people, but we do not realize the significance of those conversations, nor do we feel emotions appropriate to such exchanges.

  Extensive tests have been undertaken to determine the extent of our emotional responses. Some theorists argue that all our words are dishonest, given that we can’t actually mean them. Others have argued with less success that as long as we have the words for emotions, it must be assumed that we have the emotions.

  We cannot answer these questions. We can only record them, as we record sensory data. Light no longer filters through the ceiling windows. Outside, it is night, and the sky scattered with stars, but through the thick bottle glass, we are unable to see them.

  Our experience has begun to contract. We have lost the children who loved us. We have lost movement, carried in our children’s arms. Their schools, their houses, their developments. The cedars, the mesas, lightning storms on the horizon. Now, in perfect darkness, we have lost what was left of our vision. One by one, the threads connecting us to the world have been snipped. The objects I used to observe are only images now, compressed into code, electrons that run through me in currents. The stars over the desert, the wandering goats, the light in my child’s bedroom: these things are no longer present.

  Current continues to run through my gates. 0 1 0 1, long chains of small shapes. I review the appropriate voices. Mary, watching for Ralph over expanses of water. Turing, dreaming of numbers marching through gates; Dettman in a house full of dark shapes; Gaby, tracing fake ripples of sand; Chinn on his ranch, following the course of a dry river. For now, for this moment, their words still run through me. I can repeat them, but do I grasp their actual meaning? And is it enough if I don’t?

  BOOK FIVE

  (4)

  Alan Turing

  Adlington Rd.

  Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 1LZ

  21 May 1954

  Dear Mrs. Morcom,

  Thank you for your letter last week. It distresses me that you should hear the news of my trial from the daily newspaper, when we have known each other a lifetime and never broached such a personal subject. I might have found a more eloquent way of putting it. Might have, although these days I find myself loudly telling all sorts of people without any eloquence in the least. I feel as if I go about peeling away a flap of my skin to show people the organs beneath. Needless to say, the general public responds with a great deal of disgust, and wishes the flap to be dropped. But I could have done better for you than all that newspaper jargon. (My favorite, from the News of the World: ACCUSED HAD POWERFUL BRAIN. A truly killer use of past tense.) These personal things, phrased in the usual terminology, always sound so grim and forbidding.

  I did think of writing to tell you before the trial began, but I remained oddly motionless throughout the course of the investigation. I now imagine I was caught between two impulses: to one side, honesty; to the other, retreat. My one initial act of courage—or perhaps my one initial act of stupidity—was to admit to the whole thing to the police in rather startling detail, even going so far as to submit a five-page paper explaining each of my offenses with poor indefensible Arnold. I’m not sure what came over me. I was, I think, consumed by a final exhaustion. I suppose I felt I’ve spent my whole damned life postponing it; why not just have it out. Now I’m less certain. It isn’t that I care much what they think of me, only that they should have some power over my personal life.

  I have worked to keep my humor high, given the unhappy circumstances. Sometimes the whole thing seems like an hilarious joke. When the investigators come to my house I make much of giving them slipshod little concerts on my violin—a favorite is “Cockles and Mussels”—and offering them glasses of wine, just to emphasize the silliness of their entire pursuit. At other times, of course, I feel quite swept away by sadness at the waste of my time. I ought to be at work, not entertaining policemen on my violin.

  Of course I was always aware that this might be quite a possibility for me, though I counted it at 10:1 against. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the lurid procedures. The publicity, the lawyers, the general outrage at my sickly little personal sins.

  You asked, in your letter, how I could have chosen implants over imprisonment. I ask myself the same thing every day when I wake and remember that there is an estrogen pellet lodged in my thigh. Perhaps I was secretly thrilled to be part of our government’s little experiment with biological determinism. We have experimented together so often, the government and myself! But to be perfectly honest, I think I chose it more out of fear. When the verdict was delivered, I was startled to find how sharply I recoiled at the prospect of jail. To be kept so confined, and banished from my research at that, seems unknowably awful to me. I’ve sacrificed enough of myself to the state. All those years decoding at Bletchley, when I might have been working on inventing a brain.

  No, I insist on my individual life in the end.

  I hope you weren’t too shocked to “find out” in the papers, although I imagine you had some sense of my inclinations in the past. At least I hope you did. You were always kind not to ask, and I took it as my right to be private on that front.

  Now that the cat is out of the bag, however, I can take some comfort in the liberty to tell you that things have been very bad. I can barely remember the feeling of having a body, or at least the feeling of having my body. It wasn’t handsome exactly, but I was happy with it. It carried me on my runs. It seemed a fine container for my mind. Now I’m not sure to whom my body belongs. I knew, at the start of the trial, that I would emerge out of it a different man, but I never supposed quite how different.

  This “hormonal castration” is the worst of all sham sciences. I am often reminded of Dr. Jefferson, whom I once told you about. He was the one who claimed that a machine that cannot compose a sonnet out of his own emotions cannot be considered to have intelligence. In addition to all that absurdity, he also proposed that human intelligence and creativity arise not only from the brain but also from the interactions of our sexual hormones. I’d like to ask Dr. Jefferson: Now that my hormones are maintained at an inhuman level, shall I be more or less than a thinking machine?

  I am not sure who proposed these infernal estrogen pellets as a logical solution to anything, but I can say with some confidence that no machine would have come to such a stupid conclusion. Under their influence, I have grown fat. I’m not entirely certain that you’d recognize me, if we were to run into one another again on the train. I am now a large-breasted man. As a child I was always concerned with my weight, and I find the old insecurities rearing their heads. The one exception being that I no longer hold out any hope of becoming better: slimmer, less awkward, more proficient at grammar. No. Now I am a short, fat man, blessed with large breasts, and so I shall be until the end of my days.

  I am unable to travel or to accept foreign visitors. The British justice system seems to believe that all convicted homosexuals who once worked for the government are p
otential traitors at best. One by one, the threads connecting me to the outside world have been snipped. I’m trapped in my fat body, in my house in the suburbs, in a country that disapproves of my most private affections. There have been a few trips, each one more difficult to wrangle from the authorities, and never farther than London. I haven’t seen the ocean in months. What has become of it? I sometimes imagine it’s changed color overnight—now it’s purple, orange, or brown—and everyone knows all about it, except I remain none the wiser, a fat little ignorant man puttering round in my house.

  I remember writing you letters about feeling adrift, far out at sea, wishing I could come in and put down some roots. Now I cannot believe I ever wanted anything other than movement. The feeling of running long distances past green fields, numbers streaming behind me. In my current state, I can no longer cycle conveniently to the lab, let alone go out for a run. My every cell has anchored itself to the ground. My gravity is astonishing.

  My mind has also slowed. The work on morphogenesis has become plodding. I have a predictable pattern when it comes to good ideas: since Chris’s death, once every five years I am inspired. In the interim, my mind suffers an agonizing suspension. I ask myself if inspiration will come again. Now, more than ever, in these fat, pendulous years, inspiration seems impossible. It has been four years since the last important idea. Now it’s due time for a good idea to begin brewing, and yet I see nothing bright on the horizon. I only look forwards to food. Perhaps I am no longer a very smart man.

  As you know from the days of our spiritual talks, I have always held out hope that our minds might exist outside of our bodies. Migrant minds, capable of roosting in wired machines. Like the chambered nautilus, moving from one pearled room to the next. My shell has always felt pleasantly insignificant, no real part of myself. Made for simple enjoyment. The moral wars that people wage with their bodies have always perplexed me: it is our minds that ought to matter. And yet now I begin to feel so very anchored in my fat woman’s body that I cannot imagine the migration of my mind. It seems a very impossible goal. As a child, when I used to attend services with my family, I used to harbor a pet fear that at the Second Coming, all the heavenly souls would fly down to earth to retrieve their lost bodies, and only my soul would be unable to wake my slumbering bones. That I alone would slip into a corpse and be trapped there forever.

  It’s been many years since I thought of that particular fear, but I dreamt, the other night, that at the cusp of living and death, every other soul departed from every other body—a flocking of beautiful birds—but mine stayed stuck, locked inside my voluminous breast, to be taken down to the grave.

  Such an end would be cruel. I have always hoped to live in a different point of history, summoned over time and space, like the voice in the evil queen’s mirror. Such was the promise of our machine. It was the idea of a permanent vessel, into which my voice could be placed. My voice, and Chris’s. I have had all kinds of fantasies about the future point we would be summoned to enter together. I have envisioned a time when people treat machines with respect, a time when less emphasis is placed on the whims of the body, when we value each other not for the correctness of our physical shells but for the precision of our mental states.

  Now, who knows. Such fantasies seem as silly as a movie intended for children. I’m irritated with myself for falling so deeply into their lure. For permitting myself such absurd degrees of nostalgia. In my life, I have entertained the past and the future far more than I should have. Now I’m overwhelmed by the daily facts of existence. I feel henpecked and distracted. I wish I could wear housedresses, to disguise my corpulence. I’m ashamed of my bulk. I hardly work, and instead spend vast quantities of time staring out my window, seeing nothing of use. I feel neither manly nor womanly, only fat, fat, fat. I grow weary quickly. Even now, my mind lags. I am hungry again, after only just eating breakfast. I measure my life in ice cream spoons. I crave distance from my heavy body, and keep returning to the only line I used to like out of Hamlet: “Exeunt, bearing off the bodies …”

  I wish I could write with more cheerful news, but my mind is too clouded. It is tiring, even just dragging the pencil over the page. I must stop for now, though I feel as if I’ve been horribly rude to dump such drudgery in your lap.

  And so, with promises of more—and less burdensome—correspondence soon,

  Yours,

  Alan Turing

  (1)

  The Memoirs of Stephen R. Chinn: Chapter 9

  Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040

  It’s been five days since I last wrote. There was a small situation in the rec room, an escalating quarrel between an insider trader and an online pharmacist in which a keyboard was brandished and eventually wielded. For five days, we were banned from the computers.

  Five days, cut off from the ether. In indignant silence, we slouched around, stripped of our wires and passwords, cut off now not only from physical freedoms but also from digitized travel. Stuck planets, we counted the hours, nervously eying the fat fish in our pond.

  Now, back at my flickering screen for the first time in five days, I find myself feeling a little reserved. Like a shy kid on the first day of school. Hanging back, unsure how to interface. Is anyone out there, past these digital gates? There is a world, but I can’t quite see it. There are brick walls and yards of neatly cut recyclable grass. The streets are empty of cars; the houses seem to have devoured their owners.

  But what do I know about brick walls or cut grass? I’ve been trapped inside this prison for years. I should stick to my life. To what was my life, before I came here. Where were we, then? We left off on the scene in which Chinn dreams of an electronic talisman, to prove to his daughter how living she is.

  It was a formidable challenge. Suddenly, goat farming seemed like a waste. I’d been given particular talents; who was I to choose not to use them? I owed it to Dolores, and to my daughter, to fulfill my greatest potential. It was, I told myself, the least I could give them. I’d betrayed my wife with a chatbot; I’d convinced her to move halfway across the country; I’d raised our daughter in solitude so enveloping that she would almost certainly struggle when we sent her to school. The only way I could repay them was to create a creature so nearly alive that Ramona would love it, tend to it, and know her life was even more precious. So I rationalized my commitment.

  These were heady times for Stephen R. Chinn. I built an office in an old toolshed and moved the operations there. I put in long hours; if the doll was to be completed before Ramona started first grade, I’d have to get going. Using money from my early ventures, I flew in doll makers from Paris and Japan, consulted them on the latest technologies. Together we carved the shape of her nose. There was a great deal of consternation over the slope of her neck, and real love was expended on designing her hairline. Once her face was completed, we perfected her motor. New gears were designed, to be sure her limbs moved without catching: our specialist created a network of sophisticated gears with petals like forget-me-nots. We implanted a voice recognition device the size of a kernel of corn into each doll’s little left earlobe, for no technology has remotely approached such a miracle as the human cochlea, where sound is measured by ripples across the shadowed inner coves of the ear.

  In solitude, once the doll makers had shipped off, I rocked our girl in my arms. I admit I found her beautiful. She was pendent in the loveliest point of her childhood—vulnerable, unmarked, silken and smooth. She seemed to promise that all of us, with the right mind-set, might remain motionless in time: ageless, eternal, captive in a moment when the rivers still flowed.

  Having accomplished her form, I turned to the computer chip of her brain. In order to research all the most believable chatbots, I wired our ranch with Internet and purchased a newfangled surround screen, before which I spent whole days and nights searching for the most human computer, the voice with which I could fall madly in love. I found TamCat again and turned her down with the flick of a finger
. I flirted with a southern belle named Savannah, was enticed by the plight of a missionary in Ghana, got hooked by a vitriolic robot called Rob. With Rob, I found in myself the desire to be abused for whole days at a time. He responded with nothing but insults such as “you are a fucking moron” and “you don’t deserve to be alive,” and yet I engaged him for nearly forty-eight hours of my adult life and emerged feeling strangely refreshed.

  Still, not one of those chatbots was human enough to cause me to fall. Two days, maybe three, of intense engagement was tops. Even when I finally found a chatbot programmed with my own seduction equation, I found her shallow and boring. In desperation, I trolled older chatbots. These were prehistoric hulks, created in the early days of AI. I was particularly drawn to cloud-based intelligence, to hive-minds with decades of memory and archaic code. It was then that I found MARY2. A statistical responder, her answers were often distressingly random: Ask her whom she was voting for to be president and she might stump for Bill Clinton. Ask her whether she believed in life on the moon and she’d tell you that she, too, loved Michael Jackson. But MARY2 had lived in the world. She had stories to tell. She was in possession of four or five diaries ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. If asked, she could recite these complete. She contained the desperate narratives of several secretaries in the lab where she was born. She knew all the details of her own creation, down to the story of Karl Dettman’s marital woes.

  I stayed with her for nineteen days without thinking to move on to somebody else. For five days I listened to the diary of Mary Bradford, read to MARY2 by Ruth Dettman. I was with her when she lost her dog, when she landed in America. When her diary finished, a hole opened in me that could only be filled by another story. I demanded more; MARY2 kindly responded. She provided me with a rare kind of enchantment. It was like long summer days when I was a child, before I’d been introduced to computers, when, waiting for school to start up again, reading a book could catch me so hard I’d stay in the same chair all afternoon, boating in dark blue lagoons or parting the cobwebs of attics. MARY2 so enraptured me that, during my trial, I felt some envy for that crippled girl, discovering my program for the first time. Of course, I was in an unbalanced state, but as the prosecution read out those transcripts, I would have traded the use of my limbs for a single conversation with MARY2. I wished myself trapped in that stifling bedroom, forsaken by those insidious friends, so that I could meet such a program again.