Thirteen Ways to Water

by Bruce Holland Rogers

  “How do you know I’m not some incredibly talented actor who’s wearing undetectable makeup and who studied Jackson Bierley’s every move for years in order to be this convincing?” Undetectably, unless you were looking for it, Bierley’s pupils dilated a bit, and the effect was to broadcast warmth and openness. We had seen the real Bierley do that in recorded addresses. “I guess you have to make up your own mind.”

  Then he blinked. He smiled. Jackson Bierley didn’t intend to make a fool of anyone, not even a rude reporter.

  “What does Bierley’s family think of all this?” asked someone else.

  “You could ask them. I can tell you that they cooperated—they were among those interviewed by TOS. They have me back to an extent. I’ll be here to meet those great-great grandchildren I so longed to greet one day. Unfortunately…” and suddenly he looked sad. “Unfortunately, those kids will know Bierley, but Bierley won’t know them. Only much more research can hold out the promise that one day, a construct like me really will be self-aware, will remember, will be the man or woman whose life he or she extends into eternity.”

  He didn’t mention the licensing fee his family was charging us for the exclusive use of his image, any more than Bierley himself would have mentioned it.

  “Are the Bierleys funding this project?”

  “I know a billion sounds like a lot of money, but when it’s divided up among as many heirs as I have…” He paused, letting the laughter die. “No. They are not. This project is more expensive than you can imagine. In the long run, it’s going to take moon-shot money to get eternity up and running.”

  “And where’s that money going to come from, now that your federal funds have been cut off?”

  “Well, I can’t really say much about that. But I’ll tell you that it will be much easier for me to learn Japanese or Malay as a construct than it would have been for the real Jackson Bierley.” He smiled, but there was a brief tremor to the smile, and it didn’t take a genius to see that Jackson Bierley, personality construct or not, was one American who didn’t want to hand yet another technological advantage across the Pacific.

  “In these times, it’s understandable that the American taxpayer wants his money spent on hiring police,” Bierley went on. “Why think about eternal life when you’re worried about getting home from work alive? It’s too bad that both can’t be a priority. Of course, with the appropriate hardware attached, a machine like TOS could be one hell of a security system—a very smart guard who never sleeps.” As if a TOS system could one day be in everyone’s home.

  Richardson and I stepped to the podium then, and for once I was happy to have no public speaking skills. The Bierley construct jumped in with damage control whenever I was about to say something I shouldn’t. He made jokes when Richardson dryly admitted that in all honesty, the construct was closer to a collaborative oil painting than it was to the real Jackson Bierley. Of the three of us up on the platform, the one who seemed warmest, funniest, most human, was the one inside the video screen.

  After the conference, we got calls from the Secretary of Commerce, the Speaker of the House, and both the Majority and Minority Leaders in the Senate. Even though they were falling all over themselves to offer support for funding, Richardson and I knew we could still screw it up, so we mostly listened in while the Bierley construct handled the calls.

  It was Richardson who had pulled our fat out of the fire, but even I was caught up in the illusion. I felt grateful to Bierley.

  Once we’d restored our funding, I expected things to return to normal. I thought Richardson would be eager to get back to work, but he wouldn’t schedule meetings with me. Day after day, he hid out in his office to tie up what he said were “loose ends.”

  I tried to be patient, but finally I’d had enough.

  “It’s time you talked to me,” I said as I jerked open his office door. I stormed up to his desk. “You’ve been stalling for two weeks. This project is supposed to be a collaboration!”

  Without looking up from his phone screen, he said, “Come in,” which was supposed to be funny.

  “Richardson,” I told him, not caring who he might be talking to, “you were brilliant. You pulled off a coup. Great! Now let’s get back to work. I can sit in my office and dream up augmentations for TOS all day, but it doesn’t mean squat if I’m not getting your feedback.”

  “Have a seat.”

  “I’d prefer to stand, damn it. We’re funded. We’re ready to go. Let’s get something done!”

  He looked up at last and said, “I’m not a careerist, Maas. I’m not motivated by impressing anyone.”

  “And I am?” I sat down, tried to catch his eye. “I want to get to work for my own reasons, all right? The Bierley construct is incredible. Now what can we do next?”

  “What indeed?”

  “Yes,” said the voice of Jackson Bierley. “I’m going to be a pretty hard trick to top, especially once you’ve got me in 3-D.” The phone screen was at an acute angle and hard for me to see, but now I noticed the silver hair.

  “Is that it?” I said. “You spend your day on the phone, chatting with the construct?”

  Richardson said, “Bye, Jackson,” and disconnected. “The construct is interesting. This is a useful tool we’ve invented.”

  “It is,” I agreed. “It’s something we can build on.”

  “It’s something lots of people can build on.” He folded the phone screen down. “A week ago I got a call from a Hollywood agent. He wanted to talk to me about some ideas. Constructs for dead singers—they could not only do new recordings, but grant interviews. Dead actor constructs. TOS-generated films scripted by dead writers and directed by Hitchcock or Huston or Spielberg or any other dead director you’d care to name. TOS is getting so good at imaging, you’d never need to build a set or hire a vid crew.”

  “Is that what you’ve spent all this time on?”

  “Of course not. It’s a good idea from the agent’s perspective—as he sees it, he’d represent all of the virtual talent and practically own Hollywood. But it sounds to me like a waste of resources.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m just pointing out that everybody who hears about what TOS can do will see it in terms of meeting his or her own needs. The agent sees dead stars. You see a stepping stone to immortality. I see a tool for making my own inquiries.”

  “What inquiries?”

  “We’ve had that discussion.” He pointed at his wall. “They’ve always had a better handle on it than we have.”

  I looked where he was pointing, but just saw the usual time-lapse satellite image of weather systems crossing the globe. Then I realized that something was different. The display wasn’t of the western hemisphere, but of the eastern.

  Richardson picked up the statue on his desk. “Shiva,” he said. “This arc of flames that surrounds him is life and death. Flames for life. Spaces between the flames for death. The one and the zero. Reincarnation.”

  For once it was my turn to be the skeptic. “You find that consoling? An afterlife that can’t be verified? It’s superstition, Richardson.”

  “It’s religion,” he said, “and I don’t have any more faith than you do that I’ll be reborn after I die. Maybe I don’t disbelieve it as much as you do. Since it can’t be falsified, it’s not subject to any scientific test. But as a metaphor, I find it fascinating.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Maas, what if you really knew death? What if you and death were intimate?”

  “I still don’t follow you.”

  “You’re so interested in synthetic consciousness. What about synthesized death? If you knew more about death, Maas, would you still have this unreasoning fear of it?”

  I snapped, “What do you mean, ‘unreasoning’?”

  “Forget it. I guess it’s not your cup of tea. Why don’t you think about this instead: Could a TOS construct replace you?”

  “Replace me?”

  “The way we replaced
Bierley. The Bierley construct works for us every bit as well as the original did. So what about you? If I built a Maas construct, could it work on augmenting TOS as well as you do? It could sound like you, it could interact with other people convincingly, but could it think like you, design like you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I doubt it. A construct mimics social impressions. The pattern of thought that produces the behavior in the construct isn’t sequenced quite like the thought in our heads. But you know that. Hell, what are you asking me for? You’re the information expert.”

  “Well, if the behavior is the same, if the behavior is the production of good ideas, then maybe all we’d have to do is teach the machine to go through the motions that produce that behavior. We’d get the construct to act out whatever it is that you do when you’re producing a good idea. Maybe it would kick out quality results as a sort of by-product.”

  I chewed my lip. “I don’t think so.”

  “Works with Bierley.”

  “That’s social skills. Not the same.”

  “You doubt the machine intelligence is sufficiently sophisticated, right?” Richardson said. “You’re investing all this hope in TOS as a repository of consciousness, but you’re not sure that we can even begin to synthesize creative thinking.

  “Bierley makes for some interesting speculation,” he went on. “Don’t you think so? The original is dead. Jackson Bierley, in that sense, is complete. What we’re left with is our memories of him. That’s what we keep revising. And isn’t that always true?

  “My father died fifteen years ago,” he said, “and I still feel as though my relationship with him changes from year to year. A life is like a novel that burns as you read it. You read the last page, and it’s complete. You think about it, then, reflect on the parts that puzzle you. You feel some loss because there aren’t any pages left to turn. You can remember only so many of the pages. That’s what the construct is good for—remembering pages.”

  He smiled. “And here’s the metaphysics: While you’re trying to remember the book that’s gone, maybe the author is writing a new one.”

  He put the statue of Shiva down on his desk. “Give me some more time, Maas. I’m not sitting on my hands, I promise you that. I’m working on my perspective.”

  “Your perspective.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  I exhaled sharply. “I’ve been thinking about your suggestion that we tie building security into TOS. I could do that. And I guess I could work on getting rid of the hurricanes once and for all. But that’s not just a hardware problem.”

  “All right. I’ll give you an hour a day on that. Okay?”

  I didn’t tell him what I really thought. If I thoroughly pissed him off, who knew how long it would take for us to get back to our real work? I said, “Get your perspective straight in a week.”

  In a week, he was gone.

  One of the research assistants, somewhat timidly, brought me the news. She had been watching CNN Four and saw a bombing story across town, and she was certain that she had seen Philip Richardson among the dead.

  She followed me into my office, where I switched on the TV. CNN Four recycles its splatter stories every twenty minutes, so we didn’t have long to wait.

  The bomb had gone off in a subway station. Did Richardson ride the subway? I realized I didn’t know where the man lived or how he got back and forth from work.

  The station would have channeled the energy up through its blast vents—everything in the city was designed or redesigned these days with bombs in mind. But that saved structures, not people. Images of the station platform showed a tangle of twisted bodies. The color, as in all bomb-blast scenes, seemed wrong; the concussion turns the victims’ skin slightly blue.

  The camera panned across arms and legs, the faces turned toward the camera and away.

  “Three terrorist groups, Under Deconstruction, Aftershock, and The Last Wave, have all claimed responsibility for the bombing,” said the news reader.

  There, at the end of the pan, was Philip Richardson, discolored like the rest. At the end of the story, I ran back the television’s memory cache and replayed the images. I froze the one that showed Richardson.

  “Get out,” I told the research assistant. “Please.”

  I called the police.

  “Are you family?” asked the desk sergeant when I told her what I wanted. “We can’t make a verification like that until the next of kin have been notified.”

  “His goddam face was just on the goddam TV!”

  “Rules are rules,” she said. “Hang on.” Her gaze shifted from the phone to another monitor as she keyed in the query. “No problem, anyway. This is cleared to go out. And, yeah, sorry. The list of fatalities includes your friend.”

  I broke the connection.

  “He was no friend of mine.”

  Deserter.

  AT FIRST I DISMISSED the thought of making a Richardson personality construct. It wasn’t the personality I needed, but the mind. Substance, not surface.

  But how different were they, really?

  Maybe, Richardson had said, all we’d have to do is teach the machine to go through the motions. Maybe it would kick out results as a by-product.

  I went to the I/O room where the hologram generator—Richardson’s idea—had been installed. I called up Bierley.

  “Hello, Maas,” he said.

  “Hi, Jackson.”

  “First names?” Bierley arched an eyebrow. “That’s a first for you.” Except for distortion flecks that were like a fine dust floating around him, Bierley was convincingly present.

  “Well,” I said, “let’s be pals.”

  His laugh was ironic and embracing at the same time. “All right,” he said. “Let’s.”

  “Jackson, what’s the product of 52,689 and 31,476?”

  “My net worth?”

  “No. Don’t kid. What’s the product?”

  “What were those numbers again?”

  “You’re shading me, Jackson. You can’t have forgotten.”

  About then, the Small Craft Advisory light came on, but I ignored it. Chaotic disturbances hardly ever built to hurricane force anymore. Sure enough, the light went out soon after it had come on.

  “What’s this about?” Bierley asked me.

  “Did you calculate the product on the way to deciding how you’d respond to the question? Or did you jump straight to an analysis of what Bierley would say?”

  “I did neither,” Bierley said. Which was true. There wasn’t an “I” there, except as a grammatical convention. “Don’t confuse me with your machine, Dr. Maas. You’re the scientist. You know what I’m talking about.” He brushed the lapel of his jacket. “I’m an elegant illusion.”

  “Would you give me some investment advice, Jackson?”

  The hologram smiled. “My forte was always building companies,” he said, “not trading stocks. Best advice that I could give you about stocks is some I got at my daddy’s knee. He said you don’t go marrying some gal just because another fool loves her.”

  I smiled, and then I wondered if Bierley’s father had actually said that. If it sounded good, that’s what would matter to the construct. But that’s just what would have mattered to the real Bierley, too.

  That is, what had mattered to the real Bierley and what mattered now to the construct was that the story have its effect. He had made me smile, made me think that Bierley the billionaire was just a regular guy.

  What if a Richardson construct could work the same way? The effect that Richardson had produced, the one I wanted to duplicate, was an effect on me. I wanted to stretch my thinking. What if that depended more on the emotional state he generated in me than on his actual ideas?

  No, I thought. That was ridiculous.

  What decided me was the phone call.

  “Are you Maas?” the woman said. Her hair was long and black, but disarrayed. Her eyes were red-rimmed. On her face was the blankness that comes after too many days
of anger or grief or worry, when the muscles can’t hold the form of feeling any longer, but the feeling persists. “I’m Phillips,” I thought she said. That is, I thought she was saying her name was Phillips. But she was only pausing to search for the next word.

  “I’m Philip’s…widow,” she said.

  I hadn’t known Richardson was married. I wasn’t the only one he had deserted.

  “Yes,” I said, and then again, more gently: “Yes, Mrs. Richardson. I’m Dr. Maas.” An infant wailed in the background, and Mrs. Richardson seemed not to have noticed. “I’m Elliot Maas.”

  “Do you know where he is?” she asked.

  Was she really asking what I thought she was? I opened, then closed my mouth. What would I tell her? He’s dead, Mrs. Richardson. Death is not a location. Where is he? He isn’t anywhere. Mrs. Richardson, he is not. Mrs. Richardson, your husband doesn’t exist. Where he used to be, there is nothing. Mrs. Richardson…

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not being very clear.” She put her hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. “The ashes, Dr. Maas. Have the ashes been delivered to you?”

  I stared stupidly at the screen.

  “The coroner’s office says they had the ashes delivered to me, but they didn’t. I thought perhaps they had made a mistake and sent them to Philip’s work address.” She opened her eyes. “Did the coroner’s office make a delivery?” In the background, the infant cried more lustily.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I could check, I suppose.”

  “They used to…” Her mouth trembled, and she pursed her lips. Her eyes glistened. “They used to let you make your own arrangements,” she said. “But they don’t do that anymore because there are so many bombs and so many…I never saw him. I never got to say goodbye and now they can’t even find his ashes.”

  “I’ll make inquiries.”

  “His mother’s been here, trying to help out, but she…” Richardson’s wife blinked, as if waking. “Oh, God. The baby. I’m so sorry.”

  The phone went black, then the screen showed the Ameritech logo and the dial tone began to drone.

  I made sure that the ashes hadn’t been delivered to us, and I called the coroner’s office where they swore that the ashes had been processed and delivered to Richardson’s home address days earlier. They had a computer record of it.