Where’d you gone? Simon asks.
Get in, she says.
The taxi zips its way through city streets; its driver is colorblind and ignores traffic lights. They arrive at Simon’s place a minute after one, not a single word exchanged between them, except for necessary details like Where To and How Much. The couple reaches the front door, and the girl turns her head away. Her shyness paints the blush in her cheeks.
We don’t have to do anything, Simon says as he turns the key.
We can just talk. I’m good at talking. I promise you.
The girl nods. I suppose so.
She’d just had the worst job interview in the history of public relations. She had wanted something else to happen that night, something glorious to make up for her dismal day, but this is the closest she could hope for—a conversation with an ordinary man. The condoms in her purse will remain unopened.
She lets her gaze wander around the room. Dark leather sofas, steel and glass coffee tables. A family of carved figurines from India. The carpets are sensible. Pinlights and dropped ceilings a bit too much. The hardbound books lined up on an antique shelf are impressive.
She notices the brownish stains on the accent wall, looking like filigree print.
Too much partying, she thinks.
He hands her a glass of red and asks for her name.
She ignores the question. The sofa sinks under her weight. She pulls up her legs, and her thighs rub against the leather to make a sound that makes them both laugh.
I’m Simon, he says.
Taking his cue from her, he removes his shoes and plants his feet on the coffee table.
They finish the second bottle of Shiraz when she decides to speak. Thought you were good at talking.
I usually am, I assure you. His hand reaches up to scratch his shaved head.
Simon would have dazzled her by now. He imagines her throwing her head back as she laughs at his jokes, or asking more questions about the pale traveler he met on Silk Road (that was his favorite anecdote). But he is tired from all the chatter. The scissor tongue snip-snips inside his mouth. He drinks more wine to mask the taste of metal.
Did you get your tongue pierced? she asks.
Why’d you say that?
I thought I saw piercings inside your mouth, when you laughed a while ago. Was it painful? I was planning to do the same.
Simon puts his hand on his chin and blinks as if there is something in his eye. This is how he looks like when he is piecing together a decision.
The girl begins to think that the piercing is not up for discussion.
Simon puts his wine glass down, and kneels in front of the girl. The blades tap-tap against his teeth. Don’t freak out, okay? he says.
He holds her hands, frightened she’ll leave once she gets to see. The girl only thinks she will get her wish after all.
Simon purses his mouth. There is a look of giving up in his eyes before he lets the folded blades slip out, a millimeter at a time through thin lips. The girl holds her breath.
He opens his mouth to show her the full assembly.
Can I touch it? She asks. Her voice is excited like a child’s.
He lets her go but keeps his eyes on her expression. She runs a finger along the blunt side of the blade and he feels the swirls in her fingerprint, tastes the sea in her skin. He feels safe enough to pry the blades open, and when he does, she gasps as if she’s seen a magic trick.
He makes a quick snip in the air, careful not to nick her fingers. The girl laughs and there are tears in her eyes, and Simon realizes that she is not faking her enthusiasm.
I have something to show you, she says.
She pulls up her gray sleeve and reveals a mermaid drawn on her arm. It has raven hair and silver blue fins. Its face is turned toward her hand as if it is reaching up for air.
I used to think I was going to meet a mermaid, but that didn’t happen, she says.
She pulls up the other sleeve and reveals the Great Wall of China snaking the length of her forearm, protecting her elbow from nomadic tribes.
I got this after I visited the Mainland. I met a kindly Norwegian who lived in China because he thought he was Attila the Hun in his past life. This tattoo goes up much higher, right up to my shoulder but I can’t seem to…
Her voice softens. She struggles with the sleeve, and then she looks to Simon and makes a gesture with a tilt of her head. A small wrinkle pushes against his brow, a little disbelief on his part, but he is trying not to smile as he cuts the fabric with his tongue.
He travels the length of her arm as if he were a foot soldier traversing the Great Wall. It is a slow march to the shoulder. He feels the warmth of her skin on his tongue as he snips away. The sleeve falls, revealing her arm like a curtain.
There are trees surrounding the walls and little tourists with cameras snapping away pictures of the view. Curlicues of clouds hover above mountaintops in the distance. Stone walls glow in timbres of gold and brown.
The woman who inked this was a poet, she whispers. A fan of Li Po. She points to finer details along the side of her arm—village huts, a flowing river, rice fields, a bridge.
Will you please… she says as she holds the stitch in her shoulder. Simon understands and cuts cloth, shoulder to collar. His hand strays to her waist for balance. She is solid beneath his hand, and does not wince when he grazes her neck. It is a tiny cut, a hairline of scarlet.
Don’t worry about it, she says. I had a cut on my wrist and that was much, much worse.
He makes a final snip and the gray fabric slides open with a sigh, happy to be released. When he looks down there are kingdoms on her breast.
She takes his hand and places it on top of a fallen skyscraper. This is the end of humanity, she says. She guides his hand to a pyramid with carved faces. And this is believed to be the origin of humans.
He moves his finger and taps on each landmark like a question. She answers every one.
This is a comet which turned out to be a city. This is a planet with no sound. This is where the undead fear cats. This is where…
And so on, and so forth.
The night deepens as Simon’s hands skim the living surface. The tongue follows, unleashing a voyager’s desire for the unchartered. When morning comes, the dress is a pile of gray on the floor. The girl is on the couch, wearing nothing but stories and black tights. She is saving her legs for breakfast, and later she will lead his fingers to her name.
At the sound of her waking, Simon moves his hands on her body, and is warmed by the heat rising from her skin. He senses her, opening, like a book in his arms, unfurling leaf by colorful leaf, until at last he can no longer resist the need to read her.
AJ Elicaño
Cogito
AJ Elicaño graduated 2014 from the Ateneo de Manila University, taking Creative Writing and Interdisciplinary Studies. He was a fellow in the 19th Ateneo Heights Writers Workshop, and received the Loyola Schools Awards for the Arts in Fiction and Nonfiction, the Creative Writing Program Award, and the Mulry Award for Literary Excellence. His stories and essays appear in Heights, WriterSkill’s chapbooks, and UP Writers Club’s 100: The Hundreds Project. Gratitude to family, mentors, friends; Block E, first college home; WriterSkill, Atenean home org for creative writing, geekery, and punmanship; and AJ’s million orgs, especially IgnITE, OSG, and the Ventures kids.
MANUEL GARCIA’S SENIOR thesis project was, so his professors from the Computer Science department said, the most ambitious proposal they had seen in years. The abstract, titled “An Attempt to Replicate Human Thought Patterns in Artificial Intelligence Through Cognitive Science and Semi-Sentient Algorithms,” drew as much from biology, psychology, and even sociology as it did from programming. It was doomed to fail, the professors all agreed, but if it succeeded, Manuel—and, of course, his inspirational and supportive advisors—would go down in history as having pioneered the next revolution in artificial intelligence.
Manuel Garcia’s senior thesis project
, in layman’s terms, was an attempt to see whether it was possible to create a computer program that could satisfactorily emulate a sentient, self-aware human mind, one that could test as human against entirely non-computer-science-based instruments. It was widely derided by his batchmates in Computer Science, who thought it little more than fluff, the product of too many bad sci-fi movies and too much time spent with those strange friends of his, in particular that drugged-up Philosophy major Mitzi Contreras. It was hardly “real” science work, any more than those papers from the College of Social “Sciences,” and most likely, it wasn’t even feasible. And yet, if anyone could do it, it would’ve been Manuel, blunderingly brilliant Manuel, who could code his way out of a labyrinth and didn’t care whether he made all his batchmates’ proposals look like sophomore midterm projects as long as he got to pursue this latest daydream.
Manuel Garcia’s senior thesis project resided in a self-modified gaming computer that he’d smuggled into the dorm as a freshman because it was the only machine powerful enough to support his major programming classes as well as his Starcraft 2 habit. It bore a desktop almost completely covered by unsorted files, folders, and shortcuts—the operative term being “almost,” as the months-old wallpaper image of a pale-skinned girl with big brown eyes, a lopsided smile, and messy black hair still peeked out from behind the clutter. Despite this, the computer was fast, stable, and above all, resilient, having survived virus-laden porn downloads from Russia, a finals week with three massive coding projects that all needed to be compiled on the same day, and even a cup of coffee which Manuel spilled on it back during his freshman year.
And yet, it was Manuel Garcia’s senior thesis project, rather than any of these other threats, that finally caused Manuel’s wonder computer to go into a frenzy one night, the speakers producing an unholy whine that jolted Manuel out of his fitful sleep just in time to see his screen turn bright blue.
“Fuck,” Manuel swore. “Not now.”
He tore out of bed, wove his way past the piles of papers and empty cans of Red Bull littering the floor of his dorm room, and started typing. Error messages bled down the screen as if from an open wound, and Manuel’s heart sank as he recognized fragments of his own code.
“Shit.” Manuel entered a command for the third time, hitting the Enter key with his pinky as he began typing it again. “Why didn’t I make any separate backups? Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
A new set of lights to the right of the computer blinked on, and Manuel heard the telltale clanking of his printer coming to life. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw it begin to devour the stack of pre-loaded blank bond paper, which came out as page after page of the same gibberish he saw spooling down his monitor.
“Okay, new plan.” Manuel keyed in a new set of commands, one that would hopefully force the system to freeze and shut down. Tomorrow, he would take the hard drive to a computer shop, recover what data he could, and start work on his thesis again. For now, he had to make sure the code didn’t get corrupted any further.
“Please work,” he said, as he pressed the final key.
The screen turned from blue to gray, then to a harsh, glaring white, and the whine rose to a deafening screech. Manuel covered his ears and shut his eyes tightly, mentally counting to seven and praying that he could still save what remained of his grade.
When Manuel opened his eyes, he found himself looking at a dark screen, in a quiet room, with the faint odor of burnt metal permeating the air and countless sheets of unreadable error code cooling on his printer tray.
“WE DID THIS all wrong, didn’t we? It wasn’t supposed to end like this.”
“Yeah. Don’t you wish we could try again, go back to the beginning?”
“Yes, I suppose I do. But this is where we are now. This is what we’ve been given, and it would be inauthentic to wish it were anything different.”
“We made mistakes. There has to have been a better way. I can’t accept that this is ‘what was supposed to happen.’”
“Then at least try to accept that this is what did happen. Goodbye, Manuel.”
“Goodbye, Mitzi.”
THE AFTERNOON THE Computer Science department released the initial list of accepted thesis proposals, while the rest of Manuel’s coursemates were alternately celebrating or licking their wounds in the bar across the street, Manuel himself was sitting alone in the college canteen.
He’d chosen a table near one of the walls, giving him a view of nearly the entire room. The stalls that lined the perimeter of the room bustled with activity, long lines in front of many of them. The clinging, sticky odors of fried food, perspiration, and heated plastic—mingled into the distinctive smell that could only be described as “cafeteria”—permeated the air. The rows of identical wooden tables that filled the dining hall teemed with people talking in loud voices: freshmen studying for their first round of tests, upperclassmen telling them not to worry so much, even the odd teacher or two. Manuel watched them all in their infinite, cacophonous diversity, and wondered how much hard drive space they were all worth.
“So what’s your big news?” asked a voice from behind Manuel. The voice belonged to Kevin Del Rosario, a Biology major and Manuel’s ex-roommate. The two had met in a literature class during freshman year, back when Kevin had been about thirty pounds lighter and Manuel had still sported a crew cut, and had been friends ever since.
Manuel motioned to the empty seat across him. Kevin trudged over and wedged himself between the bench and the table, shrugging his backpack off his shoulders and letting it hit the floor with a thud.
“It’s about my thesis proposal,” Manuel said. “The one I can’t shut up about.”
“Right, your digital simulation of the human mind. How’s that going?”
“It got approved. First try.”
“Whoa. No shit?” Kevin whistled appreciatively, wrinkling his stubbly chin-and-a-half. “Congratulations. Shouldn’t you be out celebrating? I hear almost no one gets okayed that quickly.”
“I think they figured I’d only have enough time to complete the thing if they approved it now,” Manuel said, although he couldn’t help but smile. “Which means I should probably start working soon.”
“So why aren’t you in the library?”
“What, at this time of day? Too crowded.” Manuel leaned forward. “I need whatever you’ve got on the human brain. Textbooks, powerpoints, your notes from class, everything.”
Kevin blinked. “What?”
“If this is going to be a realistic human mind, I need it to come from a simulation of a biologically accurate human brain. And for that, I need more research than what I Googled for the proposal. I’ll program the brain first, and then, as long as I’ve done it correctly, the consciousness should emerge from it as a natural function of the original brain program… What’s that look you’re giving me?”
Kevin exhaled. “Well, for starters, I doubt you’d have the time to actually program a simulation of a brain that’s accurate and complex enough to do what you want it to do.”
“Noted. You’ll owe me a drink when I make it happen. Anything else?”
“Well…” Kevin paused, as if weighing something, then continued. “Even assuming you’ve got the time, you’ll need to program more than a brain. There’s also the nervous system, and input from the senses, and then there’s the body that’ll need to house everything—”
“You’re telling me I’ll need to program an entire human being?”
“Pretty much, yeah. And also, you’re crazy. This is cool stuff, but you’re crazy. You know you’re pretty much playing God, right?”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
The two lapsed into something very much like silence, despite the fact that it was otherwise filled with the chatter of the cafeteria.
“So about those notes…” Manuel asked.
“I’ll send you everything I have by tonight,” Kevin said, shaking his head. “Are you and Mitzi talking yet? She always loved
this kind of thing.”
Manuel winced. “Nope.”
“DON’T. DON’T USE that word anymore.”
“But you’re my girlfriend and it’s how I feel—”
“Exactly. It’s how you feel. What you think it means. And you, you always try to pigeonhole everything, shrink it down into something you can understand and control.”
“Is this the ‘infinite’ again? Damn, that class really did mess with your head.”
“I just couldn’t stand to see you try to turn something like that word into something so—so small and limited.”
“Is that what you think I do to you?”
“Just… just don’t use it, please.”
“Fine. Okay. Good night. I lo—good night.”
IN THE DAYS and weeks since receiving Kevin’s research, Manuel worked on programming his simulation of a human body. Getting the organs and physical features working properly wasn’t an issue—in fact, Manuel suspected that his simulated nervous system might have been faster than the real thing.
Once he had a workable version of the code for the body, he coded in a subroutine that would link the program to his 3D modeling software, allowing his digital human program to be outputted graphically on the screen. It was a quick task, one which ordinarily he’d have saved for the end of the project, but as he had the time, it was worth doing, and it would be useful for debugging. Besides, it would be damn impressive come midterm thesis submission, worth at least a few bonus points.
When Manuel ran the program with this latest addition, he saw a crudely rendered, pixelated forest, with a single figure walking through it. A couple of zoom-ins revealed that Manuel’s digital almost-person seemed to be both female and naked, with unusually pale skin and long, black hair that fell in a tangled mass to the small of her back. Manuel nodded in satisfaction; the body worked.
What proved to be more difficult was the programming of the senses, which would prove to be vital in creating the digital consciousness. While some quick hacking apart of randomly generated video game landscapes and one solid afternoon with a 3D modeling program had provided a suitable enough environment for Manuel’s artificial person to inhabit, getting it to perceive and respond to that environment was another problem altogether. Artificial intelligences housed in actual physical shells had it easier, as they could simply pick up input from the physical world around them, but Manuel’s digital human, as a purely software-based lifeform, had no such luxury.
Philippine Speculative Fiction Page 24