Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “Why don’t you live over here somewhere? Downtown? Closer to the university?”

  He screws up his face and shakes his head. “Too much clutter. Too random.”

  A waitress arrives. “Hello! I don’t know if you’re in a ragout mood, but the hacked saddle of rabbit ragout with rolled strips of rabbit flank really is wonderful, and of all our Dungeness crab preparations, my personal favorite—”

  “I’ll have steak, medium rare,” Lizzie says.

  “And which of our beef preparations do you prefer?”

  “The fillet, with the ‘sesame-skilleted cross sections of baby Spokane sweet potatoes,’ ” Lizzie says, handing her menu over. “Assuming that means fried yams. Nothing to start.”

  “Vegetarian platter,” Grinspoon says.

  “Excellent!” the waitress says. “I’ll send Mimi, our new vice sommelier, right over.”

  “None for me,” Grinspoon says to Lizzie. “Allergic to nitrites.”

  Lizzie shakes her head at the waitress, who turns to leave, then pauses and looks back thoughtfully.

  “You know,” she says, “if you’re a yam buff, you should definitely make it to YamFest 2000 over in the Beaux Arts Village this fall.”

  “Thanks. I’ll check my schedule. So,” Lizzie says to Grinspoon, “Bruce tells me you despise Microsoft and won’t work for them.”

  “I did work for them. As a contractor, years ago. But we’d get to a good alpha stage on some out-there software, and then they’d make us move on. We were just keeping the shit in the bag. And then—well, then the place became a hive. And I really don’t operate well in hives.” He lifts his water and glugs the whole glass without stopping. “So, are we going to joint-venture on bioelectronics and biomimetics?”

  “Bruce would certainly love us to. What do you think the business is, though? What’s our product?”

  Grinspoon shrugs. “I thought that’s what you were supposed to tell me. I mean, I got these two patents that the telco morons and the networkers want. And the genetic programming, that’s a patent too, Microsoft likes that, but it isn’t, you know, Quicken or Tomb Raider VI or something. But you mean the new work?” He leans forward. “AI. Real AI. Deep AI. Big-bandwidth AI R and D.”

  Artificial intelligence is not a product, Lizzie thinks. Artificial intelligence is a theory, a theology, a tenure track, sci-fi semantics, marketing bullshit. They said Speak Memory contains AI because it (sort of) understands ungrammatical slang—such as the difference between doughnut and Don’t it. They call it AI when Amazon.com predicts what book you’re going to want next. She sold Y2KRx as “AI-enhanced.” Her game designers call it AI when, in Warps, they program a Pilgrim to react differently to a player speaking twenty-first-century English than he does to seventeenth- or nineteenth-century English. AI has been defined down to a rudimentary level. Real AI, deep AI, she thinks. What am I supposed to sell?

  “Interesting,” she says with a small smile and a cock of her head. “How so? R and D leading to what, exactly?”

  “We’ll find out. That’s the journey. And AI is so much more doable with animals. Especially cats. We have a hundred billion neurons,” he says, touching his temple, “so simulating a human brain will take like ten billion lines of code. Hell, these goat rodeos sweat shit to write a hundred million lines of code.”

  “So you’re working toward, what, like, a supercomputer simulation of a cat’s brain?”

  He shakes his head quickly and mumbles an error message: “Supercomputers have shitty user interfaces and buggy compilers. I use multiple workstations, sixty-four different processors working simultaneously, and get where I need to go lots quicker. Genetic programming. It was Bruce who helped me figure out years ago how to use strings of weights as chromosomes in genetic algorithms for the Non-Hamstrung Squad-car Problem. He should actually probably co-own that patent.”

  Lizzie nods. Her understanding of genetic programming, in which software evolves on its own, changing and improving itself without human intercession, is shallow. Only now does she realize just how shallow.

  “When do you think the transhumanist moment comes?” he asks her.

  These people really are religious. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Transhumanist, machines beyond us, smarter than us. Around 2020 or 2030, they say, computers get more complex than the human brain. So the machines will be able to start figuring out stuff about the universe, about reality, that we just can’t—because we’re too stupid, because those perceptions simply require more than the hundred billion neurons we’re maxed out at. So then, maybe (this is where I’m going out on a limb, so bear with me), maybe the computers can figure out ways to explain the mysteries to us, in ways we can understand. Like parents do with children, with concepts like sex and love and loyalty. That’s the point of AI. To be ready for that time, to be able to learn from the machines.”

  “Interesting,” she says. She means it. Possibly nutty, but possibly brilliant, and interesting in either case. “And I guess that’s also the point of wiring up a cat’s brain, as far as you’re concerned. To learn enough to take advantage of what—what—” She stammers, trying to avoid seeming glib or dismissive, “what the wise mommy computer will be ready to reveal to us in 2030.”

  “Exactly. Do you know,” he asks her, “how similar to our REM patterns cats’ REM patterns are? Do you have any idea?”

  Lizzie can’t abide being forced to answer a rhetorical question. Yes or no, it’s a demagogue’s trick, like when the antiabortion telemarketer asked her one evening a few weeks ago while she was filleting a red snapper, “Do you want your daughter to have an eight-and-a-half-month-old child pulled from her womb and murdered?” Or like Buchanan on the debate last night, asking the candidates, “Do your constituents want southern California and Arizona and Texas to become provinces of Mexico?” So she decides to change the subject.

  “I guess that’s maybe why the animal nuts all got so upset—”

  “There are no data to support the allegation that the micro-electrodes in the anesthetized brain stems of the cats cause any pain,” Grinspoon says in an affectless, taking-the-Fifth-Amendment voice. He stares at her.

  “I’m sure they don’t.” She shrugs. “And to be honest, I really don’t give that much of a fuck about animals being used in research. I don’t use cruelty-free cosmetics. I mean, I’m eating steak. And in fact, my father just had a pig liver transplant, so …”

  Grinspoon reanimates. “Cats’ sleeping patterns are amazingly similar to ours,” he says. “So let’s say dreams, all dreams, are just meaningless output, gibberish bullshit the brain spits out at night while it’s cleaning up its disks, organizing memory.”

  “Okay.” This she’s happy to stipulate. Lizzie has never had any luck making sense of dreams.

  “And what if we can figure out in a cat exactly which five minutes or two hours of that sleep time every night are when the essential stuff is done—the memory organizing and cleaning? And then we figure out a way to let people get only those five minutes a night they need! What have we got then?”

  Another zealot’s rhetorical question. “More chat rooms and lots of four A.M. trips to 7-Eleven?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I’d pay a lot to be able to get by on two hours of sleep a night. A lot. That’s a product.”

  Their food arrives, each dish and side dish elaborately described once again. Lizzie orders a Bombay martini.

  She makes one last stab, for Bruce’s sake. “What about, you know, the wireless communication part of your work? The cat receiving transmissions of the other cat’s thoughts about food?”

  “What about it?” Grinspoon says, using his fingers to pick up a baby zucchini by its orange flower.

  “Well, near term, couldn’t that be a product? You know … pets reading pets’ minds.” As soon as she says it, she realizes how ridiculous the idea sounds.

  “Like, so your cat can know when your dog is about to chase it?” Grinspoon says. �
��I guess. Seems stupid to me, but hey, I thought portals were a lame-o app. I’m just an engineer. You’re the blue-smoke-and-mirrors lady.” He smiles. “Bruce didn’t tell me you were such a shipper.”

  And he didn’t tell me you were a crackpot. “What do you mean, ‘shipper’?” She wonders if the phrase isn’t some anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus mispronunciation and misuse of schlepper.

  “Being into, you know, shipping product. At my last private-sector job, the company booked no sales whatsoever for eleven years,” he says as if she should be impressed. “Look, aside from the patents that we could probably squeeze some cash out of, I’m a long-term play for anybody.”

  “Long term” in computer businesses is usually a euphemism for long shot. And given the Microsoft deal, her horizon is suddenly very short term—next quarter, next month, next Tuesday.

  “I wonder if what you have in mind isn’t really too big for Fine Technologies. I have a feeling I’m not visionary enough to be your partner.” It’s not anything wrong with you, she lied when she dumped Buddy Ramo and all three subsequent boyfriends pre-George, it’s really me.

  As they finish dinner and their plates are cleared (“Was there some problem with the yams?” the waitress asks, scolding Lizzie for her unfinished meal, waiting to be scolded back), Lizzie and Grinspoon talk no more of joining together, of Microsoft, or of feline telepathy. Instead, she nudges the conversation toward what seem like safer tangents. He explains in detail the genetic-programming software patent he got last year. (“I use a distributed population approach, evolving thousands of populations of programs on different processors, and then migrate the best programs from each population to a neighboring population. It’s supercomputer performance but dirt cheap. Most algorithms turn to shit when you distribute them, but mine actually improve, so you can just add more and more machines.”) She understands his explanations about as well as she would if he said them in French. She just gets by in French.

  The waitress returns. Lizzie asks for the check. “We won’t be doing a dessert this evening?” the waitress says in a happy-sad kindergarten teacher’s voice. “I can definitely recommend the pistachio-kumquat napoleon with anise hyssop ice cream and blackberry and blood-orange coulis, or if you’re in a Continental mood …”

  As they leave, and Grinspoon grabs two handfuls of Captain Bridger’s Pacific Markethouse Lounge and Grill matchbooks, the maître d’ seems absolutely unfazed, as if the boyish doofs who spend a hundred dollars apiece on dinner always haul away as many mint candies and matches as they can stuff into their jumpsuits and Dockers and parkas. Grinspoon’s car is parked a long way away (“Over by the Central Gun Exchange—across from Aveda”), and Lizzie offers to give him a lift, but he begs off.

  Now, sitting on her hotel twin bed, she feels desperately tired but not sleepy, unsure whether to get undressed or sit here awhile longer, whether to call George back or close her eyes, whether to cry or go blank. She is so beat she remembers the drive from the restaurant only sketchily, feels almost as if she rode in the Taurus rather than drove it. And the moment she stepped into the room and saw the orange light blinking in the dark by the bed, she felt pulled to the phone, too—she could never resist retrieving phone messages or opening e-mail. She played George’s message once, and at first, just for a second, she was angry that he left it, since the news wasn’t urgent, only terribly unpleasant. But she understands it’s a big fact that demands to be told sooner rather than later as a matter of … what? Protocol, logistics, hot gossip. And now she regrets the chirpy message she left for him this afternoon, when he must have been driving around God-knows-where in Queens, with the kids. Poor George. As she reconstructs her twittery excitement about the Microsoft meeting (“I actually liked them! A lot! And one of the guys even has a great name for Warps—’Real Time.’ ”), she despises herself, cannot believe she forgot that Real Time is the new name for George’s show. But it’s too late in New York to call now—one forty-five A.M.—and she’d be blubbery and incoherent. Which she could use to her advantage. But no. She pushes the REPLAY VOICE MAIL button, not for the facts, which were unambiguous the first time, and not to torture herself, but to listen to the nuances in her husband’s voice, trying to distinguish angry from grim. She has spent a lot of time lately, she realizes, as she tap-taps the volume button, scrutinizing the emotional gradations at that shadowy end of the George spectrum.

  “Hi. You know those two days of work Rafaela mysteriously missed? When I got home tonight LuLu ran outside to tell me that the reason was because her son and daughter died. There was a death squad massacre in their village in Mexico, and Rafaela says both kids were killed. I called it up on the Reuters wire. All nine victims were shot with automatic weapons, M-16s, then hacked with machetes. I asked Rafaela why she didn’t tell us; I said she could take some time off, but she doesn’t want to. I offered to fly her down there, but she said no, it’s too dangerous for her to go, and started crying. I mean really crying. So I drove her home, and then we got lost in Queens or Brooklyn because Sarah recognized the place she goes to see the Golden Gloves fights and claimed she knew how to get us to the Manhattan Bridge. She didn’t. So I don’t know. Christ. I assume you were joking about Real Time as Microsoft’s name for your game. I guess I might have found the joke funnier if Featherstone hadn’t used my like-a-talking-parrot line to me today. I had a big fight with Lucas and fired Iris this afternoon. Max brought a note home from his Science and Society teacher saying the headmaster wants to talk to us. He, Max, doesn’t know what about. I figured we can go after Sarah’s screening on Friday. I’m supposed to go on Charlie Rose tomorrow night, some whither-reality-TV roundtable. I’m wasted. We don’t need to talk tonight. In fact, don’t return this. It’s already midnight and I’ve got a seven A.M. call tomorrow at the studio. Bye.”

  Years ago, when George produced a piece for the news about the kids who use scanners to eavesdrop on strangers’ phone calls, he told Lizzie that most of the conversations they pick up are recordings of conversations—the eavesdroppees remotely retrieving their voice-mail and phone-machine messages. Which surprised and depressed her then. And it does again now, as she sits alone in a perfectly tidy hotel room in the dark, unbuttoning her shirt like an automaton low on batteries, trying not to think of Rafaela’s murdered family. At least George thought she was joking about Real Time. Let him think that.

  25

  She won’t mind coming here once a month. It’s pretty pleasant downtown, in the morning, when the sky is blue. In Seattle it’s sixty-two and sunny, and Lizzie sits alone on a swivel stool at an outdoor counter eating a scrambled egg sandwich on focaccia. The blue-and-yellow hand-painted sign says THE GOURMET GREASY SPOON (UNCOMPLICATED FINE FOOD 6 TO 6 DAILY). She hasn’t smoked a cigarette in four days. She sips her perfect, Equal-sweetened double espresso as Der Rosenkavalier blasts over tiny loudspeakers, which makes Lizzie think of the line Richard Strauss uttered shortly before he died, which Mike Zimbalist used as the epigraph of his vanity press memoir: “I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer!” Celebrity Name-Droppers I Have Known is what she nicknamed the book, and now it takes her a second to recall the actual title: Hubris, Humility, Heroes, Whores: An Insider’s Loving Exposé of Hollywood. She can’t remember if there was a fifth h-word in there—humbug?—or not.

  She’s just hung up with Alexi, who told her that two reporters called, from The Village Voice and the Observer, not about her father, but about the employee lawsuits.

  “Lawsuits? Plural?” Lizzie asked.

  “I know. I don’t know,” Alexi said. “I told them to call Katherine at the law firm. Also, FYI, Bruce is clearly working out some … issues.”

  “What do you mean? He’s cranky?”

  “Seriously. And he’s wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt.” She doesn’t know if her chief technology officer owns two or ten identical gray suits, white button-down shirts, and striped blue ties. But except for the time he came tieless to t
he Christmas-Hanukkah-Kwanzaa-Ramadan-Solstice party, no one at Fine Technologies has ever seen him dressed any other way. “And he said to me, ‘If this is just going to be a widget factory, Alexi, it’s time for me to radically rethink.’ I was like, ‘What?’ And he was like, ‘Lizzie blew off my friend in Seattle last night.’ Do you want to talk to him?”

  She already has, at dawn. Bruce called her, in a snit. She has never seen him snitty, not remotely. And he refused to be mollified, even when she said that maybe, with the Microsoft money, they could fund some of Grinspoon’s work after all.

  She’s waiting for a call back from Microsoft, and puts the phone down on her New York Times. There is a story about the Cancún bombing and the UN Resolution, with a reference to “the increasingly violent human rights abuses by groups believed to be associated with Mexico’s ruling government party”—an oblique reference, Lizzie presumes, to the massacre of her baby-sitter’s family. (Should she clip the article for Rafaela?) The national edition of the Times always disappoints and disconcerts Lizzie a little. It’s too spiffy and concise and bland, like her friend Jill, the left-wing campaign manager who went on Prozac and had her jowls surgically removed and became an image consultant and event planner. What the Times editors cut out for readers in Seattle and San Francisco and St. Paul—the Metro section, the stories about deaf subway token-booth clerks, voodoo-scented murder-suicides on Avenue D, Holocaust survivors picketing Philip Johnson tributes—are her favorite parts of the paper.

  The phone beeps. One of the reasons she chose this place for breakfast is that it’s outside, and she is expecting calls. As soon as she woke up, she left a message at Microsoft to let them know that Real Time would not work as a name for the game; that they were right, Buster Grinspoon is hard-core, too much trouble, and she’s definitely not teaming up with him; and to reconfirm her meeting in Redmond at nine-thirty this morning.