by S. T. Joshi
“‘I believe the double letter “s” is meant to be the plural, not the hiss of a snake.’ I hadn’t sussed out the unfamiliar word and so had just said, ‘essss.’
“‘Sorry,’ I said, blinking rapidly to moisten my eyes. ‘Also, there’s no punctuation, which confuses me, I think.’
“‘Revision 3.8 will have punctuation, intonation, and so on. Your voice is still very stilted.’
“‘I’m still not used to it,’ I said, trying not to sound defensive. I did not want Carrie or Gene to take my place in the chair, and I knew Dr. Mason wouldn’t hesitate to make the switch if he thought they could do a better job. I had been practicing on my own, but I’d stopped sharing my lab notes and personal log with the others. They could learn my tricks after I’d mastered them and secured my place as the first revenant pilot. ‘I just need more practice.’
“There were thirty or forty seconds of silence from the observation room. I imagined Dr. Mason cogitating away on the problem. ‘Ms. Thomas and Mr. Keller are also well-versed with the current software version. We’ll need to develop a training system to get new hosts up to speed at some point, but that would be a waste of our time right now,’ he said, thinking about my fate out loud, as was his habit. Just a few moments more silence, and then, ‘Try again.’
“Thank God, I whispered to myself and sank back down into the web of biofeedback and physical monitoring devices attached to my head, chest, and right arm. I’d tensed up considerably and went through my breathing and relaxation exercises to relax my body and clear my mind.
“‘We’ll move right into the Q and A,’ Dr. Mason’s far off voice instructed through the intercom. ‘Starting with the Autobiography Query Set A.’
“I could visualize Dr. Mason and Gene sitting in the control room on the other side of that intercom. The room’s chaos must drive Dr. Mason crazy, although he’d never mentioned it. I’d posted a pic of it to Facebook and my friend Jacob had called it ‘The Cyber Cephalopod,’ which was somehow both a Cthulhu and an obscure Brady Bunch reference. The space beneath the desk was a riot of open-cased computers, data cables, power strips, and rack space for memory. It had ended up being cheaper to have a different computer for every piece of monitoring equipment, plus backups, plus the control gear, and it all added up to an even dozen. On the desktop, that flow of bits only translated into six screens, four of which were there mostly to monitor the monitoring machines that showed an aggregate of my brain activity, its different sections going from faded gray to bright blue as my neurons reacted to stimuli. The other was the Revenant Interface, the ever-changing control panel that bridged Lovecraft’s letters and my mind. It seemed like a lot, but it was like a cheap laptop compared to the eleven IBM super-computers two floors below us that housed the actual language processing skills for our Mr. Lovecraft.
“‘Ready,’ came Dr. Mason’s voice over the intercom. I opened my eyes and saw nothing but the screen, heard nothing but his voice.
“‘Tell me one of your fondest childhood memories.’
“There was a few microseconds delay, and then I had two options, one of which was an out-of-context sentence about Lovecraft’s mother that didn’t seem fond or unhappy, but the other seemed dead-on. I read aloud, ‘When I was very small, my kingdom was the lot next to my birthplace, 454 Angell Street. When I was between four and five, the coachman built me an immense summer-house all mine own. All this magnificence was my very own, to do with as I liked!’ I gave the end of the sentence a tonal goose, mimicking remembered fondness. It was certainly my voice, but it also didn’t sound anything like me. The reading was still stilted, but I had felt the rhythm of the language.
“But I didn’t have time to second-guess myself, as Dr. Mason was already asking me another question. ‘Tell me something else that makes you happy.’ I was surprised at this request, since it required a level of contextual analysis of language that would strain the limits of the software to deal with concepts rather than just looking up facts.
“The words came a little faster this time. Dr. Mason had sped them up without telling me, and I only had one second to choose between the options Lovecraft offered. The choice seemed easy this time. ‘I love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and I don’t give a damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They’re confounded pretty, and that’s all we know and all we need to know!’ In truth I’m intensely allergic to cats, but the words poured out of my mouth before my brain could quite make sense of them. The sentiments I honestly found a little off-putting, but any discomfort was entirely subsumed by my sense of excitement at losing myself in the process of channeling the dead man’s thoughts.
“‘What about the opposite feelings. What is something that upsets you?’
“The words flashed up on the screen, and it was again an easy choice as I skimmed the options, focusing in on key words. One response was about gentlemen not eating bananas in public, which was kind of funny, but what I said instead seemed to much more directly address Dr. Mason’s question. ‘As for this flabby talk of an “Americanism” which opposes all racial discrimination—that is simply god damned bull-shit!’
“‘A controversial man, your friend Lovecraft,’ Mason commented through the intercom. I was a little mortified about what I’d just said, but also thrilled, because it so clearly wasn’t me doing the talking, it was Lovecraft. Before I could muster an excuse for the dead author’s century-old nastiness, he said, ‘Let’s continue. I’ve booked a live demonstration in Portland in seven weeks. No turning back now.’
“An hour later, I was allowed to unstrap myself from the pilot’s seat, blinking and rubbing my eyes, trying to slow my breathing. The mental exertion of keeping up with the rapid-fire questions and even more rapid decision-making about what to read had exhausted me. It was like taking the GRE with a chess clock on every question—constant mental strain. For me it felt like a chaotic, almost random-guess endeavor, and I hadn’t really been able to track the conversation between Lovecraft and Dr. Mason. I was sure it had been quite incoherent. But in fact it was anything but.
“I downloaded a copy of the session’s audio file and listened to it as I trudged my way across campus and back to my studio apartment. It’s always a little disorienting to hear one’s own voice played back, but listening to my voice parroting another’s words packed an order of magnitude more weirdness. It was like listening to a radio play performed by a twin brother I never had—it all sounded familiar and new at the same time. Moreover, it sounded like a conversation. Occasionally stilted and with a few odd pauses and off emphases, but something a naive listener would hear and think to be a real, if odd, discussion between two men, no computers involved.”
* * *
“NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT THE PORTLAND EVENT. HOW would you characterize it?”
“It was the first time everything really clicked into place.”
“Even though others have called it ‘a disaster’?”
“It depends on your perspective, I suppose.”
“Explain what you mean.”
“It was early on a Sunday morning, and the crowd inside the old Portland movie theater was smaller even than I’d predicted. I was glad Dr. Mason didn’t seem to mind, although with him it was hard to tell what he really thought. A webcam let me see the room, but none of them could see me back in the lab. Instead, a 3D model of H. P. Lovecraft’s head projected onto the screen did a rough job of mimicking my expressions. He/I blinked down at the audience with his giant, pixelated eyes. ‘Ready when you are, Dr. Mason.’
“The audience looked interested at least, even if there were only eleven of them. They seemed largely alert, a squad of thirty- and forty-something men and two women. Most of the audience had black T-shirts with some mix of Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Miskatonic University, and tentacles on them, the most common of which was for the very H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival they were all currently attending. One plump woman was dressed in a tan three-piece suit that put me in mind of a Victorian Egy
ptologist. Her pith helmet sat on the seat beside her. She had a small tablet computer in her lap, fingers poised above its virtual keyboard as she looked up at me, her expression mild and expectant.
“Dr. Mason stood behind a lectern set up in front of the screen and went through some bland thanks and introductions, explaining what the Revenant Project was all about (the name got some laughs, which I knew Dr. Mason would question me about when I got back to the University), but his jargon-laden technobabble wasn’t as clear as it might have been. Finally, though, he summed it up well: ‘The revenant’s ability to synthesize everything that Mr. Lovecraft ever wrote far exceeds the ability of even the most diligent literary scholar. The program, with its perfect recall, has all the facts at hand in a way no one has since the living subject died in 1937.’
“The Egyptologist-looking woman raised her hand and asked, ‘So is it a computer program or an avatar for a person?’
“‘It’s both,’ he replied, voice flat and short in a way most people would take offense at if they didn’t know him. ‘The head is obviously an avatar and Mr. Jannowitz is the user. But the program tells him what to say, which answers to give to your questions.’
“‘If the program answers the questions, what is the user there for? Just to read the answers with human inflections?’ she asked, typing one-handed on her tablet while looking at me on the screen.
“‘Good question. The inflections are a piece of it, but more important is to choose context. The Revenant software can guess at context and meaning based on its analysis of the grammar and syntax. It then presents the operator with options, and the user chooses the right context.’
“‘So is Mr. Jannowitz choosing which answers to give? Or is the Lovecraft program?’ she asked. It looked like she’d typed everything Dr. Mason had said. I wondered if she was a court reporter by day or something.
“‘Both of them together. It’s a kind of symbiosis. The words are all Mr. Lovecraft’s. The user provides contextual decisions without choosing the content. I must emphasize that it all happens very fast. The user doesn’t have the time to edit or choose—he’s there to react and input the kind of data that voice-to-text and grammar software is bad at figuring out. Although it’s learning, getting better all the time.’ He waited for her to finish typing what he’d said, a delay of just a second or two. Everyone was watching either me or her or looking back and forth. ‘Shall we get started?’
“She nodded and there were affirmative murmurs from the rest of the small audience. Dr. Mason asked, ‘Who has a question for Mr. Lovecraft?’ A light went on in the lower left corner of my display, indicating that my microphone was now live.
“‘What was your first story published in Weird Tales?’ someone from the crowd asked. I couldn’t tell who over the webcam, couldn’t even hear the question very well, but Dr. Mason repeated it in a clear voice that Lovecraft’s voice-to-text analysis translated perfectly. Two answers presented themselves; one said, ‘1) My first amateur publication…,’ the other said, ‘2) My first story in Weird…’ I tapped the ‘2’ button on the keypad and giant white Times New Roman letters filled the screen, appearing one word at a time.
“‘My first publication in Weird Tales was “Dagon,” in October, 1923.’ Weeks of practice made my voice sound informed and maybe a little haughty, and Dr. Mason’s voice synthesizer was doing the rest, adding in a very light Providence accent with just the barest hint of affected English accent to class things up. Lovecraft kept going, though, adding context to the simple detail. ‘I like Weird Tales very much,’ we said. ‘Most of the stories, of course, are more or less commercial—or should I say conventional?—in technique, but they all have an enjoyable angle.’
“‘Does your critique of Weird Tales apply to your own early stories, like “Dagon” and “Erich Zann” as well?’ came an unasked for follow-up from the same person.
“‘Of my products, my favorites are “The Colour out of Space” and “The Music of Erich Zann.” It is now clear to me that any actual literary merit I have is confined to tales of dream-life, strange shadow, and cosmic “outsideness,” notwithstanding a keen interest in many other departments of life and a professional practice of general prose and verse revision. Why this is so, I have not the least idea.’
“The crowd seemed to perk up on the other side of the camera, chuckling at Lovecraft’s self-assessment. Later I’d look at some of the Twitter posts from someone in the audience, and he used words like ‘amazing’ and ‘super-cool.’ More questions came, and we answered easy inquiries as to my birthday and family and my favorite books. The question about how old I was befuddled me, but Lovecraft had no problem, and I found myself accurately claiming to be over a hundred years of age. Asked about the wonderful new world of the Internet, I said, ‘I can’t get interested in it—it doesn’t even bore me enough to take my mind off other boredoms,’ which drew another good laugh. I wasn’t sure how Lovecraft had come up with that response, but we all knew it was perfect.
“The next question, from a thin, lanky man with long red hair tied back in a ponytail, threw me for a total loop. ‘Are you alive?’ he asked. Lovecraft offered me the option of giving his date of death, but it suggested that a more erudite response was the preferred reply, and so I went with it. ‘My body died in 1937, but wandering energy always has a detectable form. If it doesn’t take the form of waves or electron-streams, it becomes matter itself; and the absence of matter or any other detectable energy-form indicates not the presence of spirit, but the absence of anything whatever.’ The audience ate it up, and someone even clapped a few times.
“As we answered fast, the questions came faster, an unconscious agreement amongst everyone in the room to try and push Lovecraft to his limits. I scarcely had time to register the questions as they came in, and the display presented such obvious choices that, with many questions, I found myself finished saying it before I knew exactly what had happened.
“The Egyptologist was the one to finally ask what I’m sure many in the room were dying to, but were too polite or shy to give voice to themselves. ‘Many people have called you a racist,’ she said. ‘Would you agree?’
“I picked the slightly more circumspect answer from the choices Lovecraft offered me and said, ‘Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved,’ which even seemed to make sense in the moment. But there was more to Lovecraft’s response, and I had no choice but to continue. ‘The problem of race and culture is by no means as simple as is assumed either by the Nazis or by the rabble-catering equalitarian columnists of the Jew-York papers.’
“The room went silent, except for the tapping of fingers on mobile devices and some squirming in seats. The Egyptologist pressed on, asking, ‘So you don’t agree with the civil rights movement’s achievements since your death?’
“Lovecraft’s databases didn’t include any history at all since his death, except some details about the technology that made him work. None of the options were good, so I chose the one that didn’t mention both ‘niggers’ and ‘rat-faced Jews,’ and went with the ignorant but superficially thoughtful-sounding, ‘Now the trickiest catch in the negro problem is the fact that it is really twofold. The black is vastly inferior. There can be no question of this among contemporary and unsentimental biologists… But it is also a fact that there would be a very grave and very legitimate problem even if the negro were the white man’s equal.’
“I expected Dr. Mason to say something, or maybe try and steer the conversation in another direction, but he let it ride. The Egyptologist followed up with another question, this time about Jews. Someone else followed up with a query about miscegenation, followed closely by another about the people living in New York. Every answer appalled me, but they came fast and natural. The audience knew their Lovecraft, of course, and thus they knew just what to ask about to elicit the most shocking responses. The more they failed to trip me up, the more racist things th
ey got Lovecraft to say, the more enthusiastic they became.
“One fellow in the back, clearly trolling for controversy, asked us which were worse, blacks or Jews. I think he must have known what Lovecraft’s answer would be. Certainly Lovecraft only gave me one option, which I dutifully voiced. ‘With the negro the fight is wholly biological, whilst with the Jew it is mainly spiritual; but the principle is the same.’
“The film festival’s organizer seized that moment to cut things off, nine minutes early according to my clock. I can’t imagine he liked this kind of talk at his festival, even if it was full of horror films, but he was quite abrupt about it. He thanked Dr. Mason, who in turn thanked the audience, and everyone applauded politely. My connection was cut, and I sank back into my chair, dripping with sweat and breathing hard. I found the sudden deviation from the schedule quite ungentlemanly and wondered where simple civility had disappeared to.”
* * *
“WHAT WAS DR. MASON’S REACTION TO THE EVENT?”
“He couldn’t have been happier. It’s hard to tell with him of course, but he seemed pleased. For him, all that mattered was that Lovecraft gave the right answers, even if the content of them was objectionable. He returned to the lab full of energy and we dug right in, implementing the next set of features and improvements.”
“And what was your assessment?”
“I was thrilled too, at least at first. I’d never experienced anything like that. The words were just there for me, and they were always such well-formed and composed sentences! All I had to do was choose. I was spending all day either testing code or serving as Lovecraft’s medium. It was a week before I saw online what people were saying. That was when I saw a blog post claiming Dr. Mason was a terrible racist, which was of course ridiculous. He’s African-American, for God’s sake!”
“Is that when you first started breaking laboratory protocol?”