Lentz had speculated about that strange doubling in one of his more controversial articles. Memory was a parasite, he proposed. It opportunistically used perception's circuitry for its playback theater.
And I have that whole parasite intact. Nothing required to bring it forth but numbness. True, the specifics of that moment have grown stylized. Artist's conceptions. I can check nothing. C. kept the book, the one where we pasted the paper trail of our shared existence. The documents are all elsewhere, trashed, or transferred to a stranger's long-term storage.
I came to him depressed.
"It's mind-fogging," I told him. "Incomprehensible. I've been reading. We don't have an agnostic's prayer in hell, do we? One hundred billion neurons. That's twenty for each person on earth. How many trillion synaptic connections? And all arranged with anatomical precision into who knows how many tangled subsystems. ."
"Sixty-three," Lentz supplied. He was leaning back in his office chair again, reclined, as on the night I first saw him. I couldn't tell if he was being snide or if he'd finally flipped.
"And even the most trivial of the subsystems solves problems so far past our ability to compute it makes my limbic system spin. We'd need an exponential number of exponents just to number the firings on the way to a self-reflective thought. If we scale our toy up even a little bit bigger than it is now, the thing will grind to a standstill. Responding intelligently to 'Good afternoon' would take it a lifetime."
"Well, we could always tell Plover and Hartrick that Teacher's Pet needs a slight extension to get its paper in. Say, no later than the next Ice Age."
Lentz pulled up a subroutine on his terminal and began to massage it. He was a hyperactive child, happiest when several things happened at once.
"Even if we could keep track of the wiring. ." my voice cracked. "Even if we could get all our tin-can telephones spaghettied up to the same switchboard: there still wouldn't be enough processing power in this part of the galaxy to synchronize their firing."
Lentz chuckled. "That's too exaggerate."
It was eerie. His cruel imitation was tone-perfect. Chen, to the letter. The vicious ear alone would be tough to duplicate on the most advanced of machines.
"Come on, Marcel. Buck up. It's not so tough. What saves us is that we don't have to do everything. No motion, no vision, no smell or sensation, no pain, no reflex response, no process control… If you knew what it took to reach out and grasp an object, to pick up a glass, you'd be completely incapable of doing it,"
"If all we had to do was pick things up. We're trying to get something to understand."
"Marcel, I've never seen you like this. Remarkable. What happened to the cold fish we've come to know and love?" He spoke askance now, more intent on the screen than on me. The hypnotic, half-attentive intensity of someone pretending concentration. "Listen. I've been trying to explain this to you. In some fundamental way, it's easier to do high-level stuff than low-. It takes fewer neurons to link 'walk,' 'through,' and 'doorway' into some associated cluster than it takes for you to carry out the words."
"Maybe so. But think how many clusters—"
"You're overwhelmed because you're still thinking like Plover. You still think we have to lay out the rules and specify all the computations ourselves. That would be incomprehensibly complex. But we're not going to write out those calculations. We're going to feed the already languaged world to Imp B and let it take the bits apart and reassemble them."
"Yeah, yeah. You've done that lecture. But, Engineer. The size! Think of what we'd have to tell it before anything made sense. We're talking an index magnitudes bigger than the universe it points to."
"The universe will be its own index. The isomorphic contour map, the way the data get packed together."
"What does that mean? Okay. Suppose we read it the line 'He clasps the crag with crooked hands'. ."
"Oh no. Not him. Anybody but him."
"Then we have to tell it about mountains, silhouettes, eagles, aeries. The difference between clasping and gripping and grasping and gasping. The difference between crags and cliffs and chasms. Wings, flight. The fact that eagles don't have hands. The fact that the poem is not really about an eagle. We'll have to teach it isolation, loneliness. ."
"It'll know all about those. It'll grow into knowledge you won't even need to spell out. Knowledge will be a by-product of the shape its weight-landscape takes, from bending to the spoken world's shape."
". . how a metaphor works. How nineteenth-century England worked. How Romanticism didn't work. All about imperialism, pathetic projection, trochees. ."
Lentz started laughing. At least that meant he heard me. "Yes, there's a certain density out there it will have to become comfortable with. Give it time. How did you acquire that density? Half a meg, half a meg, half a meg onward."
"Me? I don't know what the bloody poem means. I wouldn't analyze that thing again if my life depended on it."
"That's my point. We humans are winging it, improvising. Input pattern x sets off associative matrix y, which bears only the slightest relevance to the stimulus and is often worthless. Conscious intelligence is smoke and mirrors. Almost free-associative. Nobody really responds to anyone else, per se. We all spout our canned and thumb-nailed scripts, with the barest minimum of polite segues. Granted, we're remarkably fast at indexing and retrieval. But comprehension and appropriate response are often more on the order of buckshot."
"I'm beginning to see. You're not elevating the machine. You're debasing us. Took me long enough."
"Don't be too hard on yourself, Marcel," Lentz cooed. "Much of intelligence isn't really that bright."
"I can't believe this. You're serious, aren't you?"
"Massively parallel pattern matching. We only pretend to be syllogistic creatures. In fact, we identify a few constraints, then spin the block endlessly until it drops in the hole. Have you read an undergraduate paper lately? You should see what I have to deal with in the intro sequences alone. And the stuff I teach requires no real world knowledge at all! You know the old 'Show your work for partial credit'? It's when they show their work that I want to give even the ones who solve the problem sets a zero."
"Are you exempting yourself from this critique of intelligence?"
"Not really. This conclusion stared me in the face for thirty years before I saw it."
"All right. Let's say you're right."
"Let's do."
"It doesn't change the facts. In order to produce a remotely plausible association matrix for six measly Tennyson lines, our candidate will need a file cabinet two global hemispheres wide."
My objections were starting to bore Lentz. He stood up. It always frightened me when the man assumed the vertical. He began fiddling with the jumpers on the new neurodal processor board prior to fitting it into the expansion chassis. I thought of those brain surgeons who stimulate conscious patients' cortexes and what synesthesias the probe elicits.
"That's a pretty figure of speech, Marcel. And doubtless it's the sign of some nominal intelligence on your part. But have you read your own school papers lately? Give me Middlemarch, I'll spin you off a few amorphous generalities, all qualified and deniable."
"What do you know about that book?" I asked, too quickly. It was Taylor's book, the one he'd given his scholarly life to. The one I'd written on, analyzed for him. The novel where I'd discovered novels. The mere title in Lentz's mouth sounded creepy, as if I'd been spied on.
Of course he ignored me. Lentz ignored all direct challenges. Only the shrewdest or most slow-witted of machines could hit upon that conversational tactic.