By an ingenious method of semantic compaction, Lentz honed a representation scheme that let F weave multiple, growing schémas simultaneously over every additional datum.
"Voilà, Marcel. My mathematics says this is the most powerful learning algorithm that'll run in finite time. We can scale F up into a considerable combinatorial mass of common sense without triggering exponential explosion."
But more connections and leaner learning were not enough. We needed one last hardware wrinkle. We needed to promote our F one more letter, to F+1. To grow, to go, to give, to get, to G.
Giving in to a limited, rule-based control structure freed Lentz to recurve G's layers, turning them back in on themselves. This let G fashion and invoke working miniatures of itself. The line between hardware and software blurred when it achieved full induction. G could traverse more levels than it had layers of parallel architecture. It built its own layers, in emulation of emulation, each allowing a new level of abstract depiction.
G's many subsimulations, their associative matrices, the scratchpad mock-ups they made of themselves, now prompted themselves with synthetic input. Dynamic data structures combed their own fact sets, feeding into each other. They called each other recursively, spontaneously discovering relations hidden in acquired material. They reviewed the residue of experience, pulling notions out of memory's buffers and dressing them up as new tests. They began to train themselves, on hypotheticals of their own devising.
In short, version G could converse among parts of its own net. That net had grown so complex in its positing that it could not gauge the consequences of any one of its hypothetical worlds without rebuilding that whole world and running it in ideational embryo.
Imp G, in other words, could dream.
C. needed to find out. That simple. How Dutch was she? No way of knowing, short of going. How American? She had worried the place she lived for too long, tugging at cuffs that no longer ran much past her elbows.
"It's not you, Beau. It's me." She was not happy here. This continent. She never adjusted to the land of her birth. A quarter century, and she couldn't make a go of it. Perhaps it was time to head to the unknown home.
There was a place lodged somewhere inside her. It sprang up through earliest training. Its streets grew peopled on long-repeated stories. The grandfather policeman. The thirty-two aunts and uncles and their adventures in reversible time. The hundred-plus chorus of first cousins dying, birthing, marrying, and being born, pouring out of the parish register. Butchers, bakers, and historymakers scaling the family beanstalk that had burst from the ground on a few magic seeds.
But alongside this phantom of childhood prompting lay the real village, E. C., almost alone of people, could put myth to the test. She might step over the stile. She could move to the place. Go live in the source of memory laid down for her in advance. One plane ride, and she'd close forever the lifelong gap that had held her at arm's length from her own interior.
"I'm not going without you, Beau."
But in fact, C. was already gone. Love — or perhaps mere loyalty — required that she extend emigration to me. Wish, though, was another matter. Without knowing, I'd become part of the problem. C. needed to flee a whole complex of associations. She fled promotion, career, the renewable lease, English, the sorrow of retail, U., North American early mass Alzheimer's, a faked national past, that history's triple-packaging, evenings at the Taylors, all the two-part singing, our first shot at real friends, the memory of paper Christmas trees taped to the wall, our old five-year plan, the obligating gift of my first book, that story's success, my overwrought care for her, my hope, me.
I couldn't tell what she wanted. There were as many things she ran from as toward. I knew only that if I left with her — as I would have, in a second — the place she arrived in would never be hers.
Still, C. needed to cut a deal. Sometimes at night, just before departure, she launched herself into frightened feedback, scared witless by the decision she'd reached. Each time, it took more to assure her. And only a reassurance as simple as the one we fed each other could have slipped past our combined better judgment.
Our deal was as simple as the choke of love. She would move in with her parents. She'd look for a place. Find work. Assimilate. Learn how things were done. When she belonged, after she felt right, she'd send for me. And I'd come, leaving behind everything but notebooks, tax records, a few changes of clothes, my work-in-progress, and the all but obsolete guitar.
Even that much safety net had to be fatal. Maybe I knew as much, even as C. boarded her bargain flight to Luxembourg. Reaching for a rung that isn't there requires a tumbler's leap of faith. Grip must surrender to total emptiness. Any hedge spells midair disaster.
We wrote absurdly — three times a week. The edges of our paragraphs vanished, slit off in opening the sealed aerogram flaps. The pennies we saved over first class we squandered uncountable times over in transatlantic calls. We learned to time the satellite uplink delays. Speak, pause, listen to response, pause, speak again, as if the simplest exchange of "do you still love me?" s required incalculable recursive computation.
C.'s communiqués grew from shaky to guardedly confident. She loved her work, temporary typing jobs three notches below the work she'd done in U. She found a one-bedroom nest, perfect for us. She learned the strange new rules of the game, the different ways even the simplest task got transacted. She went to school, swapping her fluent dialect for standard Dutch. She kept her Chicago-accented Limburgs alive at birthdays and anniversaries, one every other day. This, at the hour when dialect itself was dying.
She built her letters into stories for me. I was the foreign family now, listening in to the further repository of E.'s triumphs and tragedies. I thought she would reach the village and not recognize a soul. Instead, she fell in with the imaginary tale's cast as if she had grown up with them. Which she had. To my astonishment, C. learned that her mother, the tale-teller, had spun out some recognizable variant of truth all those years.
Either that or C., now that she had the window bed, wasn't about to let me down by telling me the view was all brick wall. Her accounts spilled continuous color. The inseparable auntie sisters, at seventy, falling out over the one's new boyfriend. The Roman coin discovered in an uncle's plowed bean patch. The death of a cousin, crushed on the highway by a monstrous roll of paper that had broken free from the truck ahead of his. The nephew's accordion renditions of this week's pop idol, the Dutch Diana Ross. Kermis and Carnaval excursions, hilarious binges on green herring and cherry beer.
You make what you think might be a vase for the blooms you are carrying. You tell the stories you need to tell to keep the story tellable.
I gave her everything I could in return. My every predication attempted assurance. Of course you need to do this. It's right. Long overdue. I'm behind you. Anything. Every avowal must have been a small death for C.
My letters were slight things, heavy on romance and style. Thick with linguistic cleverness. For want of a better gambit, I played for sentiment and laughs. "Dear sweet. Words cannot say. Love, R." Every other sentence bore some reference to our private taal, one of the library of catchphrases we'd built up to shorthand our hearts and their shared enterprise. But the pages I sent her were light on stuff. Had I served her more meat, she might never have left home.
When C. took off, nothing remained to keep me from my new profession's chief occupational hazard. I joked about it, writing to her, but it was true. I now spent eight to twelve hours at a pop in the horizontal. I lay in bed, a keyboard across my lap, drawing on principal. Shooting the inheritance. Creating a world from memory.