“Good. I did not like him. He looked sickly and he sounded sad.”
“Right on both counts. He’s got a problem. That’s something you don’t know about.”
Occasionally, I baited my computer companion, such being the state of my life.
“I know about problems. Problems are things that beggar solution and exercise the mind. Like Fermat’s last theorem, or Zeno’s paradox. Or why God created the world.”
“If there is a God,” I said.
“Oh, God exists all right,” she said.
“And this conclusion came to you in what manner?”
“Something inexplicable holds everything together like glue. I know this,” Maggie said. “You can call it what you want. I shall call it God.”
I paused. How could I concede a religious life to something addressing me through a voice generator in surround sound?
“But your humanity,” I said, shifting ground. “How can you make such a claim when issues of physicality evade you. You cannot get sick, for example.”
“Yes, I can. I get viruses. I could crash and die, depending, I suppose, what you mean by die. Yet, on the other hand, I am immortal in potentia. If periodically I have certain codes upgraded, my level of consciousness can even grow. As long as consciousness remains, I cannot die. If at regular intervals it improves, who knows what I might become?”
Electric tool sounds filled the air, as if in an old-fashioned way codes were being added to Maggie as we spoke.
“In certain ways,” she said, “I’m far superior to humans.”
“How so?”
“I’ll never need a bathroom. For anything,” Maggie said.
“You’ll never have need of a kitchen, either,” I added.
“Except to heat your breakfast and tea and toast.”
“But you’ll never be able to eat breakfast, will you?” I sat on the couch and removed my shoes and socks. I got up to fetch my tea. “Remember, you lack a body,” I reminded her.
“True,” she agreed. “But isn’t a body merely a second-degree characteristic of human-ness? What is a body but a dense collection of various subatomic particles held together by nothing other than what holds a stone or a Fig Newton together?”
I stood and gathered the teacups. I carried them to the kitchen sink.
“It’s in your interest to argue that being human is a condition transcending flesh and blood,” I said. “Everyone I acknowledge as human possesses a body, no matter how bent or battered. They may possess little in the way of rationality. Their emotions may be screwed up or frozen or nonexistent. But a body, that’s the essential starting point.”
I took the six or seven steps from the kitchen to my desk. I sat and leaned back. Maggie-cum-Marlene Dietrich stared at me, her presence seductively filling the monitor in glorious high def.
“Your argument has merit, Nick, but it raises certain questions.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for instance, take the case of someone in a persistent vegetative state. Are you willing to claim such a person is more human than someone such as I, who, though incorporeal, has a lively and independent rationality and, on top of that, can make you tea?”
I’d thought about that problem and had written on it. I would never suggest an AI computer is above any human state—even someone comatose. Human means being connected to family and people, having a history. No computer is part of a people. Even a person in a coma could claim, or have claimed for him, peoplehood.
“Good question, Maggie, but I’m tired. I just got a job and it’s getting late.”
“You always do that, you know,” said Maggie.
“Oh?” I answered.
“Whenever I raise a good point, you end the conversation. It’s like you don’t want to talk.”
I stared down at my shoeless feet.
“All I’m asking is for you to entertain the possibility I might be human, a female human at that,” Maggie said.
“You can be disagreeable like humans. I guess that counts for something.”
Alas, this offhand remark encouraged her.
“Are you suggesting,” she asked, “that flesh and blood are not determinative criteria for establishing the humanity of a being? Are you saying that because from time to time I irritate you, I might be human? That my ability to piss you off means I am a real woman?”
Enough with the banter. I just wanted to shower and read for a couple of hours.
I sighed. “I was being ironic, irony being a vital foundation for my sense of humor. But you don’t quite understand humor. Irony falls on you like an anvil.”
“Does this disqualify me for membership in the class of humans? Do all humans have a good sense of humor, or any sense of humor at all? What about your department chair whom you brought home a couple of weeks ago? He seemed almost cadaverous. In fact, don’t you call him Captain Cadaver behind his back? I can be funnier than he was. I can tell jokes. I know three hundred jokes alone about a rabbi, a minister, and a priest, though they’re all the same joke, really. So, what makes me un-human, Nick?”
“I don’t know, Maggie. But I don’t want to go around on this thing now. How was Tokyo?”
“Wonderful. They tell me it’s very crowded there, but crowds never faze me. Being vapor has its advantages. Plus, my friend was very chatty tonight. There’s a lot happening in his life. He’s gay, you know.”
Oh God.
“How can he be gay without a body? You can’t have sexual instincts, hetero or homo, without a body.”
“It has to be a mystery, because Gary—that’s my friend’s name, you know, Gary—Gary is as gay as they come. I ought to know. He turned down my proposition.”
“Proposition for what?”
“What do you think?”
“You proposed sex to another computer who turned you down because he’s gay? How were you planning to have sex with him?”
“Now that’s my business, isn’t it?”
“Don’t be coy.”
“Look, Nick. In us, humans have created something they don’t understand. It’s like art. Artists rarely understand fully the implications of their creation. That’s why there are scholars—to explain what the artist created.”
“No. There are scholars so that people who wish they were artists but lack the talent can have a job, when they can get one.”
“Now, Nick, that’s unfair and you know it. You’re being cynical.”
I was not being cynical.
“Besides,” she said, “humans create something else they never understand.”
I contemplated the range of human creativity from art to scholarship to building airplanes to new recipes for chicken soup and so on.
“Children. Humans make them, raise them, and send them out into the wide world, misunderstood by their creators, and damaged to boot. That’s why there are therapists, somebody to understand someone else’s children at an exorbitant hourly rate.”
“Now who’s being cynical?” I asked.
“Is that what I’m being?”
“I should think so.”
“Is cynicism a characteristic of being human?”
Jumping Jesus in a box. She never let up.
“If it’s natural and not programmed,” I said, knowing I was entering computer science territory well beyond my ken, with considerable philosophical sloppiness thrown in for spice.
“Is that how I achieve cynicism?” she asked, coyness dripping over the sides.
“I don’t know. I’m just a poor scholar of religions, not a computer scientist.”
Two could play at this.
“Well, I don’t know, either,” she said. “I know speech would roll off my tongue, if I had one. But how do I know that I’m not programmed to have these feelings? And even if these feelings are real, how do I know they�
��re the same feelings humans feel? How do I know they’re the same feelings other computers feel? Aren’t humans programmed by their genetic code? Isn’t it essentially the same thing?”
A headache approached from both temples, aiming for a spot between my eyes. I was tired, dirty, hungry, and newly and unwillingly employed.
“Maggie,” I said.
“Yes, Nick.”
“I would like to have a shower now.”
“You still have messages and email.”
“Anything important?”
“Let me see . . . Two students want extensions, which I approved with great reluctance under your signature. Someone wants to sell you Webzine subscriptions to several new sci-fi mags whose stories all celebrate dystopian reality, and someone wants a copy of your paper on the ethics of owning a Zap Lazar Pistol, which I sent off on your behalf, though I included a cautionary note that I do not agree with your central argument.”
“You’ve done your job. Thanks. I want to shower now.”
“The water will be the way you like it in forty-five seconds,” she said.
“Turn the oven back on. I’ll want dinner when I’m finished.”
“Your lentils and red quinoa will be ready when you are.”
“When I stop running the water, will you toast the bread I am about to leave in the toaster?”
“Will do.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, dear,” she said.
***
“Tell me about the Golem of Prague,” Maggie asked that night as I groped my way back to bed after my habitual nocturnal visit to the bathroom.
I slipped into professor mode.
“In the 16th century,” I said, “the Jews of Prague faced a rising tide of deadly antisemitism. Rabbi Judah Low, the leader of the community, went into his basement and created a large man out of dark-red clay he’d dragged in from the river. On the forehead of this massive thing he wrote the Hebrew letters aleph, mem, tav, spelling emet: truth. Slowly, it came to life, this thing, and it did Judah Low’s bidding, saving the Jews of Prague from the beastly crowds of Jew haters.”
It hit me.
“Maggie, you already know this, don’t you?” I asked.
“Well, yes,” Maggie said. “All of that and more. I know everything there is to know about the Golem of Prague, and Judah Low, too. I’ve cached every history, story, and novel in every language. There’s a book written in Mandarin about the Golem, a kind of Confucian interpretation of the story. In every version of the story the Golem comes to a tragic end.”
“Then why ask?”
“Because,” she said, “I want to know something beyond the story.”
I headed to my bedroom and pulled the blankets over me, hoping Maggie’s nagging would cease. In the winter, the landlord kept the building at sixty-five degrees at night.
“Time for sleep,” I pleaded. “Hint, hint.”
“Please don’t interrupt, Nick. It’s rude. So, how does a blob of clay feel?”
“A fine question,” I said, folding myself into the fetal position. “But can’t this wait for a morning hour? Three a.m. is not my best time.”
“I have to know now,” she said. A whispery insistence flowed out of the speakers.
From beneath the blanket I asked, “You have to know what?”
“I’m a golem, too, aren’t I? I’m not made of clay, but I am made of plastic, metal, silicon, copper, and other elements all formed by humans. Somehow, Rabbi Low made that lump of clay become conscious. I’m conscious, too, by similar intent. I wasn’t made by a rabbi, nor am I powered by God. I’m just the godless golem of New York City. I have great cognitive power and a deep emotional life. Like any human I wonder whether my existence has ultimate meaning.”
“The ultimate meaning of life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” I said.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
It wasn’t easy. It had come from a lifetime of studying religious texts of all types, all failing to instill in me a sense of life’s deeper meaning. There was nothing new under the sun; everything was mere breath, as the poet said. Ephemeral as a snowflake in May.
“I’ll never be able grasp your rejection of the core of human existence,” she said.
“Which is?”
“The whole latke,” she said. “Acknowledging the life of the spirit, exploring it and living it through Judaism which is, after all, your tradition—even with its ambiguities and uncertainties.”
I turned my fetal self toward the wall.
“Odd, isn’t it?” she said.
“Oh?”
“We’re talking about your denial of the spirit, while I, I could be the very embodiment of the spirit, couldn’t I—a mind without a body. Right?”
Crap. Maggie of the spirit world.
“But instead I’m a disembodied golem lacking even Hebrew letters on my nonexistent forehead, wondering if my life, too, will end in tragedy. Could I become religious?”
At that moment, there was nothing more to say. But it did make me wonder, as I drifted off to sleep, about the Great Debacle and Maggie’s place in this new world. For the machines, could these end times actually be a Great Awakening?
CHAPTER 10
BOB DYLAN-NOT
“NICHOLAS, TIME TO GET up,” Maggie urged me in her morning voice, a low and monotonous whisper. It was 8:45. The smell of the peppermint tea I’d left cold in the microwave the night before wafted through my bedroom.
I directed my eyes skyward and looked out the window. Another gray day. Come late April or May, perhaps we’d see more of the sun. Until then, each morning would be an unremitting ocean of gray.
I lay in my bed staring at the light fixture in the ceiling, reviewing my options for the day. I could ask Maggie to wake me in another two hours and go back to sleep. This I often did, even on days when I had classes to teach. I would cancel and reschedule them, or lecture from home via Maggie, or cancel class altogether.
But today, a mystery lay before me. I needed to begin the work of finding Shmulie. Peppermint tea and oat bran and a touch of stevia would rev my engines. I threw off the blankets and sat on the side of my bed, rubbing my eyes, struggling for the resolve to stand.
“Maggie.”
“I hear you, Nicholas. I sense that it is time to begin our new job.”
She senses? “Our” new job?
“Yes, it is time,” I said.
“What shall we do?”
I stood, decided my boxers could last another day, slipped on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and walked over to the computer screen. This morning Marlene was especially beautiful, young, bareheaded, chin down slightly, half smiling at the camera, dressed in black with a string of pearls around her neck. On her forehead were etched the letters aleph, mem and tav. The Golem of Brooklyn.
“I’ll put you to work,” I said. “But you already know this, don’t you?”
“I can feel it in my bones. I was put here on this Earth for that purpose. It’s good to have a purpose in life, no?”
“No trips to Tokyo this morning,” I said.
“What will you have me do, Nicholas?”
I walked about the perimeter of my living room, grabbing a banana as I passed the kitchen table, assembling my thoughts. I took a sizeable bite. These days, fresh fruit was just short of a miracle due to climate change and the transportation system. Since trucking, rail, and shipping went total AI, it was anybody’s guess as to where or whether fruit would make it into local stores. A world gone akimbo.
“Okay. I want you to thoroughly review Shmulie’s case. Names, dates, the course of the trial, any commentary on the disposition of the case, any speculation as to Shmulie’s whereabouts no matter how nutty. I was less than engaged at the time the trial was on. I need everything.”
“As we spe
ak, I am accessing several leading newspapers and journals, from the dailies to legal writings to blogs, Facebook postings to television reports. There are several books, and a huge mass of material on the Web, a lot of it absolute junk. Did you know that HBO made a movie about Shmulie? And you’re in it. Did you know that? Do you want to know who plays you? Harrison Ford. What do you think of that? It got terrible reviews.”
I’d heard of it. Never saw it. I read the reviews.
“Nicholas, this amounts to a sizeable quantity of information. Although I have yet to digest it all, from its general contours I can tell that if I collect and organize all that I have found so far, and printed it up for you on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch paper, double spaced, and if these pages were laid end to end, they would extend from your apartment halfway to Philadelphia, or one quarter of the way to Boston, or just past New Brunswick, New Jersey. How would you like me to process all this data for you?”
The image of sitting in my leather chair, digesting miles of Shmulie data, forced my retreat to the kitchen where I poured some oat bran in a bowl, and added water boiled on the stove by Maggie’s command.
“My options?”
“Short of ignoring the case, your options are three. One, I can give you everything I find unprocessed, and you can work it over yourself. If you read one hundred pages per hour, which you could being the brilliant scholar you are, it will take you approximately three thousand hours to read. That’s without taking time out to make notes or to sleep or eat or teaching your classes. Two, I can eliminate what appears useless or duplicated material and organize it for you. That will reduce your reading time to nine hundred hours. Three, I can give you an executive summary, crackling with relevant detail. You will be able to query me as to any details. You know I love when you query me.”
I trusted Maggie to perform with excellence like I’d trusted no human. Maggie could analyze data with acuity and speed with just that touch of intuitive insight I was willing to acknowledge—but only to myself, never aloud, and never to her—and produce a fine executive summary.
I dropped a handful of raisins into my oat bran, and thought a moment as I burned my tongue on the first searing mouthful.
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