"It isn't. In both cases, the 'thing' will need to know some thing about everything there is to know."
"You're too subtle for me, Engineer. Tell me how our knowledge of the opposition is going to help us, then."
"Plover is a harmless, sentimental slob. Ram will do anything in his power to avoid conflict. We just have to train a network whose essay answers will shatter their stale sensibilities, stop time, and banish their sense of loneliness."
"Oh. Well, if that's all. ."
"Marcel, you're such a bloody coward. What are you so afraid of?"
"I'm afraid of wasting a year of my life."
"As opposed to…?"
"I'm afraid of becoming a laughingstock, of pursuing some phantom that everyone else in your entire science considers—"
" 'Laughingstock.' What a wonderful word." He dug the keyboard out from the pile of papers he'd stacked on it. He addressed the workstation. "Do you suppose that's like 'rolling stock'? 'Summer stock'? 'Gunstock'? Take stock'? 'Wanderstock'?"
I flinched. "That's wandelstok. And I asked you not to do that. 'Walking stick' will do fine."
"Come, now. When was the last time you heard anyone use a 'walking stick'?"
He logged on to a remote host, called a program, and keyed a few parameters into it. Sifting through a tangle of equipment, he retrieved a microphone and turned it on. "Laughingstock, laughingstock," he repeated several times into the mike.
After a few seconds — digital eternity — a matte, sexless affect responded, "Their behavior made them the laughingstock of the. ." I couldn't make out the last word. It must have been "community."
"Oh," I heard myself saying. "Oh! We're not starting from zero, are we?"
"No. Not exactly zero."
He shut down the mike and straightened himself, as much as his body could straighten. He took off those bulletproof-glass spectacles. His face sat revealed in its full saurian severity. Removing the mask seemed to leave him expansive.
"Sometimes building a general-case model is easier than solving a specific-case problem. Also, because we're not constrained to be scientific, work can go as fast as we want. And don't forget our trump card. We don't have to correspond with how the brain does things. That's what's holding up the show in real science. All we have to be is 'as intelligent as,' by any route we care to choose."
"What do you types even mean by that, anyway? 'Intelligent'?"
"Bingo. Marcel, I knew you were my boy."
"Are you tired of real science? Is this just an extended vacation for you, Engineer? Or do you have something else in the works?"
It was as if he didn't even hear me. "Here is your reading assignment for next week. No skimming! If I wanted a liability for a research assistant, I would have hired a Keluga." He handed me another stack of conference papers and journal reprints.
"I thought I was the literature consultant," I whined.
"You are. And this is the literature you'll be consulting. By the way, Marcel. About your wasting a year. You told us you weren't up to anything."
"I've just finished a manuscript."
"And?"
"I'm already toying with a new one," I lied. Lying constructively was my job description, after all.
"Are you? What's it about? Or are you one of those artists who can't whisper the letter their title starts with without jinxing the end product?"
"Well, I have this idea." In fact, I had several hundred, none of which compelled me. Ideas insinuated themselves into my good graces, begging to be saved from the void. But I, the rescue squad, seemed to be off duty.
"Yes, good. Ideas are good. 'A very good place to start,' " he sang. His voice was clear, a startling tenor.
I ignored him. It was getting easier to. "An overworked industrialist takes a vacation to — Chester, England. He is touring the city walls, the half-timbered arcades, when he's hit up for change by a street person. He pretends to be an uncomprehending German sightseer. The panhandler doesn't buy it, starts harassing him. The industrialist explodes. The beggar retaliates with some vague threat. Three months later, at a conference in Cairo, the industrialist is accosted by a vagrant who—"
"Who says, 'Remember the guy in Chester?' Introducing a whole international cartel of homeless who appear outside the restaurant windows wherever this man travels. Very nice. A moral little ghost tale. Kiplingesque. Marcel, you're better off working for me."
"Don't knock Kipling. Kipling is a great writer. Some of my best friends are Kipling scholars."
"Is he on the List?"
I shook my head. No accounting for taste.
"Let me see that damn thing. Did you bring it?"
He had asked me to. I always did as asked. Lentz took the sheaf from me and began leafing through it. He made no comment until page 4, nineteenth-century British. "Hm. Mary Shelley. This could be more interesting than we've bargained for."
I thought to tell him about my disembodied opening line. But I did not much feel like holding my slight hostage up to Lentz's ridicule. The train, after all, was no more than a vehicle. What Taylor would have called it, in the freshman seminar that made me forsake measurement for words. The train meant nothing in itself; it simply carried the story out of the terminal.
My train did not even reach past the border checkpoint into page 2. The invitation to picture this could run no further than halfway down the first right-hand side. If the line were memory rather than invention, an exhaustive search of paper space — all middle-right opening pages in every known secondhand bookshop on earth— would turn it up.
Picture these words. The letters tunnel astonishingly across the page. They form themselves into an extended consist of cars just pulling out. The cars hold together by invisible coupling-gaps. When a boy, I counted these spaces as they clicked along on the tracks of type, under my mother's breath.
Counting the gaps was also counting the words. Machines performed the task effortlessly, born to it. Could they count ideas as well? Could they be made to sort thoughts, assemble them into a supple, southbound express?
I read the homework Lentz assigned me. An article on hippocampal association that Diana Hartrick co-authored grabbed my imagination. Every sentence, every word I'd ever stored had changed the physical structure of my brain. Even reading this article deformed the cell map of the mind the piece described, the map that took the piece in.
At bottom, at synapse level, I was far more fluid than I'd ever suspected. As fluid as the sum of things that had happened to me, all things retained or apparently lost. Every input to my associative sieve changed the way I sieved the next input.
To mimic the life we were after, Lentz and I would have to build a machine that changed with every datum about life that we fed it. Could a device — a mere vehicle — survive the changes we'd have to inflict upon it?
It struck me. To train our circus animal in Faulkner or Thomas Gray, we would first have to exhilarate it with the terror of words. The circuits we laid down would have to include the image of the circuit itself before memory overhauled it. The net would have to remember what it would be again, one day, when forgetting set in for good.
Before I'd even scratched the homework pile, I was a changed person. The writer who had signed on to the reckless bet was dead. Lentz, Hartrick, Plover, Gupta, Chen — each clinging to the local trap of temperament — C., Taylor, all my lost family and friends, all the books on the List, all the works I would now never write stood waving goodbye from beneath my departing compartment window.
It seemed forever since I had set out on an open ticket. Forever since I had traced, in mental route, the trip that would not be mine to retrace much longer.