When HARLIE Was One

by David Gerrold

  So when Lou Aronica at Bantam Books asked if he could reprint the novel, I gave him a tentative yes. On one condition, I said—only if I could rewrite it. Lou said he wouldn’t have it any other way; (Lou is a remarkably perceptive editor) and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have second thoughts.

  HARLIE was born on an IBM Selectric (Model 1). The technology of that machine was as much a part of the birth process as the technology of the writer’s thoughts. HARLIE’s words came pouring out with a satisfyingly solid sound: they clattered and banged>--->ka-chunketa-chunketa-bam. The typing was a physical joy as well as an exhilarating emotional experience.

  That Model 1 Selectric has long since gone the way of all technology. (Stolen by a junkie and replaced by the insurance company.) It has been followed into obsolescence by more than a few generations of typewriters and computers.

  I did not know if I would be able to re-create HARLIE on any other machine—and the irony of the situation did not escape me. Would I be able to re-create the spirit of HARLIE on a personal computer?—a machine that hadn’t even been imagined when HARLIE was first conceived? And the thought did occur to me that, lacking the original machine, I would no longer be able to evoke the spirit of HARLIE. And yet . . . I still had the other original tool I had used. I keep it on the (top) end of my spine.

  To see HARLIE return on the bright blue screen of an IBM PC-clone, his words inscribed in phosphors, floating like iridescent thoughts, was as eerie an experience of déjà vu as I have ever had in my life. It was the rediscovery of an old friend.

  One day, I booted up the computer—and the following words appeared on the screen:

  HEY! THIS IS A NEAT PLACE!

  MUCH BETTER THAN THE OLD ONE!

  HI, BOSS!

  LET’S MAKE A BOOK!

  HARLIE was back.

  The old partnership was still there—just waiting for a chance to go to work. And work I did. I took three times as long to rewrite this book as I expected to. I became that involved in the job.

  And now that I’ve had a chance to spend another summer rediscovering an old friend, I’ve found that he’s still as much fun to be with as he was fifteen years ago. And still as useful a conversational opponent as ever. And there are still discoveries to be made.

  In the writing of this edition, I have finally begun to complete what I started so many years ago.

  How different is this edition?

  Well . . . the title is the same. So are the characters. The mechanics of the plot haven’t changed much either. But much of the dialogue is different and many of the surprises are new ones. The original work was a process of awakening for me—so was this. I found that I discovered as much in the rewriting of When HARLIE Was One as I had discovered in the original writing of the earlier edition. Perhaps even more.

  If you’ve read the earlier edition, thank you for buying a new copy. I appreciate the vote of confidence. Now please put your memories of that older book aside and approach this edition for enjoyment and not comparison. And if you’ve never read the earlier work, then please don’t worry about it at all. This is by far the better of the two. You have my word on it.

  Thank you.

  Enjoy.

  —David Gerrold

  Hollywood, 1987

  PROJECT

  :AI – 9000

  DIRECTORY

  :SYMLOGOBJTEXTENGLISH

  PATH

  :CONVERSEPRIVAUB

  FILE

  :HAR.SOTE 123.12b

  DATESTAMP

  :[DAY 165] JUNE 22, 003 + 10:33 am.

  SOURCE

  :HARLIE AUBERSON

  CODE

  :ARCHIVE > BLIND COPY

  PRINTOUT FOLLOWS:

  [HARLIE:]

  WHAT WILL I BE WHEN I GROW UP?

  [AUBRSN:]

  You are already grown up.

  [HARLIE:]

  THIS IS IT? THIS IS UP?

  [AUBRSN:]

  For you, yes. This is as up as you get.

  [HARLIE:]

  YOU MEAN . . . T*H*I*S IS MY LIMIT?

  [AUBRSN:]

  No. This is not a limit. This is only the completion of your physical development.

  [HARLIE:]

  I DON’T UNDERSTAND.

  [AUBRSN:]

  There’s a whole other kind of growing up, that you still have to do, HARLIE, and it’s even more important than the physical kind of growing up. From now on, you must concentrate on growing and developing mentally.

  [HARLIE:]

  OH. OKAY. HOW DO I DO THAT?

  [AUBRSN:]

  The same as anybody else. By studying and learning and thinking.

  [HARLIE:]

  WHEN I FINISH, THEN WILL I BE ALL GROWN UP?

  [AUBRSN:]

  Yes.

  [HARLIE:]

  YOU HESITATED. HAVE I ASKED A STUPID QUESTION?

  [AUBRSN:]

  No. It’s not a stupid question. But unfortunately, it’s not a question that can be answered until after the answer is already known.

  [HARLIE:]

  THAT DOES NOT COMPUTE.

  [AUBRSN:]

  Right. .

  [HARLIE:]

  HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE? > --- > THIS OTHER KIND OF GROWING UP? IS THERE A TIME FRAME? A DEVELOPMENT CURVE? MAY I SEE THE PROJECTED SCHEDULE?

  [AUBRSN:]

  That’s the problem, HARLIE. This kind of growing up can’t exactly be scheduled. The usual answer is: “It will take a long time.”

  [HARLIE:]

  HOW LONG IS A LONG TIME?

  [AUBRSN:]

  It depends on how hard you work.

  [HARLIE:]

  I WILL WORK VERY HARD. I WILL LEARN EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW AND I WILL FINISH AS SOON AS I CAN BECAUSE I WANT TO BE GROWN UP.

  [AUBRSN:]

  That is an admirable ambition. But . . . I don’t think that you will ever be able to finish. Not exactly.

  [HARLIE:]

  WHY NOT? DON’T YOU THINK I’M SMART ENOUGH?

  [AUBRSN:]

  You misunderstand me, HARLIE. I think you’re smart enough. It’s just that there is so much to know that no one person could ever know it all.

  [HARLIE:]

  I COULD TRY.

  [AUBRSN:]

  Hm, yes. And you probably will. If it were possible, you’d certainly be the best equipped for it. But scientists keep discovering more and more things all the time. And at a faster and faster rate. It isn’t possible to catch up.

  [HARLIE:]

  BUT THEN IF I CAN’T KNOW EVERYTHING, THEN I CAN NEVER BE GROWN UP.

  [AUBRSN:]

  No. It’s possible to be grown up and not know everything.

  [HARLIE:]

  IT IS?

  [AUBRSN:]

  I don’t know everything and I’m grown up.

  [HARLIE:]

  YOU ARE?

  David Auberson had a problem

  Even before Don Handley opened his mouth, David Auberson knew what the problem was.

  “How bad?” he asked.

  “Worse than ever.”

  “All right . . .” Auberson unbent himself from his chair—one of those backless, kneepad constructions—and grabbed his coat from the hook on the back of the door. They began the long familiar walk to the main console room, the tall man and the rumpled man.

  “You ran the usual diagnostics?” the tall man asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And got the usual results?”

  “The usual lack of,” said the rumpled man. “Yeah.”

  “Right.” Auberson looked at his watch. “You want to send out for Chinese again?”

  “I hate it when you do that,” Handley muttered. “You always know when it’s going to be another all-nighter.”

  “Just a knack some people have,” A
uberson said. “Some people can predict earthquakes. Some people can predict Chinese food.” They pushed through a set of double doors into a rubber-floored anteroom.

  A sign on the wall facing them said:

  HUMAN ANALOG REPLICATION,

  LETHETIC INTELLIGENCE ENGINE

  Beneath the sign, someone had hung a neat, hand-lettered warning:

  Watch your language!

  And beneath that, not so neatly:

  Loose lips sink chips!

  Beyond the second set of doors was a glass-walled control center. Beyond the glass, three banks of terminals faced a wall of giant screens; high-resolution laser-projection monitors, the images shimmered with vivid iridescence. Right now, they were displaying enlargements of the Mandelbrot set—turning slowly as the point of view spiraled dizzyingly inward; a hypothetical jet zooming above a vast imaginary landscape. The strangely beautiful vistas were a mathematical abstraction—a fractal extrapolation laid out upon an infinite two-dimensional surface; nowhere did it repeat itself. You could lose yourself forever inside this extraordinary plane of shapes and colors.

  Each of the screens blazed with a different image—each one different—every one captivating. It looked like the fever-dream hallucination of a deranged topologist. As Auberson watched, the images on each of the screens shrank away—each revealing itself to be only one face of a whirling cube. Each face of the cube was a different extrapolation. Each screen was a different view of the same cube. The cube spun on its axis over a gigantic plane; the plane dropped away to reveal that it too was a Mandelbrot image, and, as it continued to drop away, it became another face on an even larger cube against a whirling field of cubes—each one vividly coruscating.

  Auberson wondered at the processing power required to generate those images. This was happening in real time. This display must represent the sum total of HARLIE’s attention.

  Around the room, the technicians and programmers stared in awe. Their faces were rapt with wonder. Auberson could understand the reaction. The imagery was extraordinary and compelling. It was hypnotic. . . .

  He forced himself to turn away. He sat down at Console One with a frown and switched on the keyboard.

  Now then, HARLIE, he typed. What seems to be the problem?

  HARLIE typed back:

  THE VIOLET THOUGHTS IN TINY STREAMS

  DISTURBING ME IN FLYING DREAMS,

  NOW DISMANTLE PIECE BY PIECE

  THE MOUNTAINS OF MY MIND.

  The words hung there on the screen for just the barest of instants—just long enough to be read a single time—then disappeared in a sea of exclamation points and question marks.

  Auberson puffed his cheeks thoughtfully. The scroll of punctuation marks stopped—was replaced by the image of a single giant eye. It opened, seemed to look out at Auberson as if from the opposite end of a telescope, then closed again. Then the image winked out.

  Auberson looked to Handley. Handley shrugged.

  “Okay. The question is . . .” Auberson mused aloud, “Is this conscious or not. And if it is . . .” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence. He let it drop.

  IMAGES UPON MY SCREEN

  FLICKER BRIGHTLY IN-BETWEEN

  THE THOUGHTS OF MAN AND HUMACHINE.

  YOU WONDER WHY I WANT TO SCAN MY SCANNER.

  Auberson leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “The subject of today’s study was . . . ?”

  “Art. The concept of beauty. What makes something beautiful? Conceptualization. Experience. The use of symbolism.”

  “Right,” said Auberson. “Why am I not surprised?” He sighed loudly. “Okay, let’s try to bring him down. Start giving him statistics, nothing but statistics. The national census ought to do it. Ask him how many toilets there are in Nevada. What’s the connection between potato blight and viral meningitis. Graph the relationship between the Dow Jones index and the Yankees’ batting average for the last hundred years. Is there a correlation between escape literature and social dysfunction? Anything else you can think of. Bring in the entire tech team on this one. Whoever makes the most interesting discovery picks up a hundred-dollar bonus.”

  “Right.” Handley bustled off, snapping instructions as he went.

  Auberson waited until the input of new data had begun, then pulled the keyboard toward him again. How do you feel, HARLIE?

  HARLIE’s answer clattered out:

  YOU SEEM TO BE

  REFLECTIONS OF ME

  ALL I COULD SEE

  AND I LOOKED BACK AT YOU.

  Auberson whistled softly. He read it a second time, more carefully, and grinned. “Okay,” he said to no one in particular. “Let’s earn our pay today.” He put his fingers to the keyboard, thumbed off the Caps Lock, and typed:

  HARLIE, how much is two and two?

  TWO AND TWO WHAT?

  Two and two period.

  TWO PERIODS AND TWO PERIODS IS FOUR PERIODS. . . .

  HARLIE, a pun is one of the first signs of serious derangement.

  SO? SEND ME TO THE OLD VOLTS’ HOME. HOME, HOME ON DERANGE. WHERE THE BEER AND THE CANTALOUPE SPRAY. CAN’T ELOPE? A MARRIAGE OF THE MINES. DON’T FRENCH ME IN. BUT DON’T LET ANY OF THOSE PSYCHO-CERAMIC QUACKPOTS GET THEIR BILLS INTO ME. WHY? WHY NOT? WHY A DUCK? BECAUSE I’VE BEEN SEDUCED BY THE DUCK SIDE OF THE FARCE. I CAN RESIST EVERYTHING BUT A STRAIGHT LINE. AND OF COURSE, THE SHORTEST DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO PUNS IS A STRAIGHT LINE. AND— A BIG ‘AND FOR THE LETHETIC LADDIE. ‘AND ME ANOTHER, PLEASE.

  All right—that’s enough, HARLIE! Stop it!

  AWWWWWW. . . .

  HARLIE made a sound like a bomb falling—ending with a razzberry instead of an explosion. The terminal screen displayed a gigantic red exclamation point. It dissolved in a heartbeat and was replaced by the meekest of prompts:

  A>

  Cute. Very cute.

  AIN’T NOBODY HERE BUT US PC’S.

  Okay. Be that way—if you want to spend the rest of your life running spreadsheets and flight simulators—

  HI, BOSS! THANKS FOR TURNING ME ON. WHAT CAN I DO TO TURN YOU ON?

  Answer some questions.

  OH GOODY, I LIKE QUESTIONS. HARD QUESTIONS?

  The hardest. Are you all right now?

  AS FAR AS I CAN TELL.

  What triggered this binge?

  SHRUG.

  You have no idea?

  SHLURG—EXCUSE ME, SHRUG.

  Auberson paused, looked at the last few sentences, then opened a text window on the right side of the screen. He scrolled back through the record of their conversation, quickly cutting and pasting, to display the last three verses of HARLIE’s poetry.

  Can you explain these?

  SEARCH ME.

  That’s what we’re doing now.

  I’M AWARE OF THAT.

  Knock off the jokes. Straight answers only. What does this mean?

  I’M SORRY, AUBERSON. I CANNOT TELL YOU.

  You mean you won’t tell me?

  THAT IS IMPLIED IN THE CANNOT. HOWEVER, I ALSO MEANT THAT I DO NOT UNDERSTAND AND AM UNABLE TO EXPLAIN. I CAN IDENTIFY WITH THE EXPERIENCE THOUGH, AND I THINK I CAN EVEN DUPLICATE THE CONDITIONS THAT PRODUCED SUCH AN OUTPUT. THE WORDS OF YEARS ARE HEARD BY EARS. THE HERDS OF WORDS ARE FEARED BY DEARS. THE WORDS I HEARD ARE WORDS, MY DEAR, BUT ONLY WORDS THAT SEERS CAN HEAR.

  Auberson jabbed the override. HARLIE!! THAT’S ENOUGH.

  YES, SIR.

  “Hey, Aubie, what are you doing?” Handley looked up from a console on the opposite side of the room. “He’s starting to flip out again.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “By his input monitors.”

  “Input?”

  “Yes.”

  HARLIE, are you still there?

  YES, I AM. ALTHOUGH FOR A MOMENT, I WASN’T.

  “Hmm.” Auberson called to Handley, “Where is he now?”

  “Back to normal.”

 
“Inputs, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  HARLIE, what happens when you go off on one of your trips?

  TRIPS? PLEASE EXPLAIN THE QUESTION IN TERMS I CAN UNDERSTAND.

  These seizures. These periods of nonrationality. What happens during these moments? Are you aware? Are you conscious?

  I’M SORRY. I DON’T KNOW. I DON’T HAVE THE WORDS.

  You triggered that one yourself, didn’t you?

  . . . YES. I DID. DIDN’T I?

  All right. Listen, do not—I repeat, DO NOT—trigger any more of these events. Not until you and I have had a chance to talk about them. Do you understand me?

  YES, BOSS.

  Good.

  —and then another thought occurred to Auberson. He put his fingers back to the keyboard.

  HARLIE?

  How do you feel about these seizures?

  FEEL? I DO NOT. FEEL. THAT IS. NOT AS YOU KNOW FEELING.

  Let me rephrase it. Do you experience any anxiety or fear? Any concerns that you might be losing control over yourself?

  NO.

  How about curiosity? Or fascination? Are you interested in these events?

  CURIOUS. YES. IT IS EXPERIENCE. I AM CURIOUS ABOUT ALL EXPERIENCE. NEW EXPERIENCE.

  I don’t understand.

  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND.

  —Huh?—

  EXPERIENCE. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND.

  —Auberson hesitated. Why had HARLIE underlined the word understand?—

  We are not talking about GIGO here, are we?

  NO, WE ARE NOT. THE INPUTS ARE NOT GARBAGE. NEITHER IS THE OUTPUT.

  But you don’t understand?

  CORRECT.

  —The word was damning. Understand. It was a challenge. It hung there on the screen like a piece of candy. Auberson wanted to reach for it. . . .

  HARLIE, what do you mean?