"It's running already? Before I give it input?"
"It's running constantly. It makes its own input now."
"You mean, it can anticipate new material. You're trying to tell me it's thinking."
Lentz shrugged. He held his palm out to the microphone.
"Good morning," I said.
"Good morning," the voice-synthesizing hardware replied.
"How are you this morning?"
"Fine, thank you. You?"
I killed the mike. I turned to Lentz, quivering. "Where did it get that 'You'? Not 'And how are you?' We didn't even teach B the long form. How on earth did this one jump to the casual?"
"I don't know. It got it somewhere. From examining B."
"Are you pleased with yourself?"
"We all do what we can, Marcel."
"Shh. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the box."
Imp C paused a moment, then came back with, "What do you mean?" It seemed a stock enough answer. When in doubt, put the ball in the other guy's court.
"I mean, you must be happy to be so bright." Toss it a curve. See if it could handle the colloquial.
"Many things are so bright without being happy."
Impressive, even grammatical, although a bit clumsy. Still and all, it sounded to me more like hollow syllogism than philosophy.
"For instance?" Would it recognize the form as a question?
"For instance: light."
Imp C, I concluded, was whistling past the graveyard. Still, I decided to play fair. To give it as much benefit of doubt as I had to give anyone. I was middle-aged, and had myself only recently learned that no one hears what anyone else says.
"Do you think it's harder for smart people to be happy?"
Imp C thought for a minute. "Harder than what?"
I laughed out loud. Perfect. Perfect. The thing was an idiot savant.
"Jesus, Marcel," Lentz shouted. "Watch the input levels. You'll blow its eardrums out, cackling like that."
"Harder than if they weren't so smart," I explained to Imp C.
"Are you so smart while you are still being happy?"
Wonky idiom, even for an electronic DP. And little more than evasive maneuvers, again. Yet evasion, too, was a form of intelligence.
Then I let myself hear the machine's reply. It floored me. I was more than a blank irritant to C. I, too, was a token to manipulate. I had weight. I was part of Imp C's real-world calculus.
"I don't know. How can I tell if I am happy or not?"
"Ask yourself if you are not happy."
"Lentz," I said. "This is incredible. I can't—"
"It's fast, isn't it? I came up with a couple of quick-index algorithms. Idea caches, you might say. But I never expected we'd get this level of performance out of the new system."
"My God. It's not the performance, Lentz. It's — the performance."
"Yes," he agreed. The thing silenced even him.
"Look what it's doing. Telling me to ask myself. How can it do that? Think what it has to figure, just to stay in the ballpark. It knows 'happy.' It knows that 'happy' is a good thing. It knows 'happy' is something people are or aren't. It knows that I'm a person. It knows about questions, and that questions are something you 'ask.' It knows how to turn an interrogative into a statement, and scour a statement to see which questions might fit. Okay. Maybe it doesn't know, doesn't really understand all the things it conjures up by asking. ."
All the things that made my voice catch to try to explicate.
"But it does understand enough to see that I'm not going to know anything, even about myself, except by putting myself the question."
"That's a lot," Lentz conceded.
"It's everything. Where did it…?" But I'd lost patience with asking the human. I needed to interrogate the source.
"You make me happy," I told Imp C. I waited, sick, to see what it would say.
"Then I'm happy, too, Rick."
Too much, even for a willing victim. Over the line. My credibility snapped, as it should have, long before.
"Hold it. How did you know my name?" B never did. We gave it any number of proper names, but never our own.
At the crucial question, of course, C went silent. That, more than anything, gave the show away. A machine might have gone on innocently covering itself, even after the game was lost.
I wheeled on Lentz, not bothering to muffle the mike. "All right, klootzak. What the hell's going on?"
Lentz's eyes were watering. Unable to hold back any longer, he spit his dentures across the office. He whooped like a howler monkey. He tried to catch his breath, but each attempt left him more hysterical than the last. "I'm sorry, Marcel. You were — you were so. ."
A shamefaced Diana Hartrick appeared in the doorframe. The truth finally hit.
"You?" My disbelief was worse than any accusation. "You let him set me up? You helped him?"
"It was a joke?" she wavered.
"To humiliate me? That's funny?"
"Oh, grow up, Marcel. Nothing's humiliating except this over-reaction of yours."
"You grow up, Engineer." My tone stopped us all dead. It startled me as much as it did them. "So this is human intelligence. This is what we're trying so hard to model."
I'd been an idiot. Two seconds of reflection should have told me that C couldn't have commanded even a fraction of the material it spewed out. A babe in the woods would have seen through this. Trish Plover would have been, like, really. I myself would never have bitten, had I still been a child. Yet I'd believed. I'd wanted to.
Lentz tried to collect himself. But the minute he caught Diana's eye, he lost it all over again. Diana followed suit, helpless. Her snickers rasped somewhere in her throat.
"I'm sorry. It sounded funny at the time."
"Not without clinical interest," Lentz inserted. "Reverse Turing Test. See if the human can pass itself off as the black box. Don't you want to know the mechanics?"
"The mechanics? It's a goddamn tin-can telephone. Lady at the other end of the string, trying to sound like a clunky New Age self-help guide."
" 'Many things are so bright without being happy,' " Lentz mimicked. Then he gagged on another round of phlegm.
I stood up, shaking my head.
"Don't leave, Marcel. We really do have a new simulation up and running in there. A good one."
Diana's turn to snort.
"Lentz," I said softly, "I'll never trust you again."
"Don't need your trust. I just need you to train Imp C."
I stopped, waiting to hear what I was going to say. "Imp D."
The two colleagues, divided on every issue except novelists' gullibility, broke into relieved tittering.
The sound set me off again. "You bastards. So how does this little stunt of yours make you feel?"
"Fine, thank you." Diana smiled. "You?"
I had nothing to say. And I said it.
"Oh, Rick. Admit it. You loved the act while it lasted."
I looked at her. Somewhere in her couple hundred eye muscles was the awful suggestion that talking to me made her happy.
"Barring that," Lentz intruded, "admit that you bought the whole shebang."
I giggled. I couldn't help myself. "Yep," I said. "Totally suckered." Alive. Admit it. 'That's me."
Diana's apology came in the form of a lunch invitation. It shamed me. She'd made the last overture, and I'd never gotten back to her. Not that I singled her out. I wasn't getting back to anyone. I bought an answering machine, and cowered behind it, screening calls. Then I stashed even that, turning the ringer off for long stretches. The hermit thing became easier with practice. I even thought about writing about it, until I remembered I already had.