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He mugged. "Welcome back to you, too, Marcel. Pronouncements, still? Sure she's conscious. At least as conscious as a majority of the state legislature."

"I'm serious." I told him about the bomb evacuation. About tapping in to Helen from the remote link while she was trapped in the building. "She asked me if something was happening. She figured out what was going on. She knew what it spelled for her."

Lentz jerked his neck back, unable to decide whether to delight in my ingenuousness or to decimate it. "Are we back to Implementation C?" The one where the humans combined to sucker me. "Weizenbaum's ELIZA? The Rogerian psychologist simulator? 'How are you?' 'Fine, thanks.' 'Let's talk about why you think you are fine.' Powers, you're like the student who stumbled onto a terminal where the program was running and thought—"

"No comparison."

I remembered the story. The student thinks he's on a Teletype, talking to a human. He converses, growing frustrated at the program's metagames. Finally, he dials the phone and gets the human he thinks he's been typing to. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" "What do you mean, what the hell do I think I'm doing?"

"No comparison. Don't insult me, Lentz. I know what she said."

"Rick. She associates. She matches patterns. She makes ordered pairs. That's not consciousness. Trust me. I built her."

"And I trained her." Lentz just stared at me, until I snapped. "Since you are all-knowing about matters mechanical, perhaps you can tell me how you came to be such a patronizing little shit."

By way of answer, he stood up. I saw us fighting, and wondered how I might even the odds enough so that beating him to a bloody pulp would have more than just clinical interest.

Lentz walked over to Helen's console and flipped on the microphone. She burbled, as she always did, at the promise of renewed communication.

"How do you feel, little girl?"

"I don't feel little girl."

He faced me. "Gibberish. She doesn't even get the transformation right."

"You're kidding me. You don't see…? She means all sorts of things by that. She could—"

"All the meanings are yours." He returned to the mike. "Were you frightened?"

"What you is the were for?"

"Damn it, Helen. We're giving you quality time here. Please tell me: what hell that mean?"

"It's obvious," I answered for her. "She wants to know which Helen you are asking. Which one in time."

"Oh. You mean: 'When?' But let's not take points off for style. You realize that a conscious entity just coming through the fright of her life would know which 'you' I was talking about."

"It wasn't a big deal to her. She didn't make any special—"

"Please, Marcel. I'm asking her. Were you frightened yesterday, Helen?"

"Frightened out of fear."

"What's that from, Powers?"

"Antony and Cleopatra."

"When did you train her with it?"

"Two days ago."

"This is worse than key-word chaining. She's neither aware nor, at the moment, even cognitive. You've been supplying all the anthro, my friend."

"I'm not your friend. I thought you were an advocate. I thought you believed in the capability of nets."

"I am. I do."

"But just as a sleight of hand."

"The bet was, we could build a distributed net whose text interpretation reasonably mimicked an arrested human's. All we contracted to was product. We didn't promise to duplicate anything under the hood."

"A kind of black-box forgery, you mean."

Lentz just shrugged. 'That's operationalism. The Turing Test. Can you pass off your simulation as functionally equivalent to the thing you're simulating?"

'There's an error lurking in there somewhere."

"Explain yourself, Marcel."

I flung my hand out toward Helen's console. "Full 'functional equivalence' would mean consciousness. If you simulate everything completely, then you've modeled the whole shape and breath of the living package. How does the black box behave when operations challenge themselves? When function looks under its own hood?"

Lentz grimaced. "Elan vital, Marcel. Mysticism."

"A behavior is not just its implementation. Function also has to include. ." But I didn't know what else to call what function had to include. I felt slightly out of control. That mundane contradiction in terms. "How would we know, then, whether a perfect copy…? When does an imitation become the real thing?"

Lentz scrunched up, bothered. "What's the real thing? What would it take to simulate awareness? Awareness is the original black box. Stop and think of the put-up job that high-order consciousness itself works on us. 'Everything's under control. Everything's handled— unanimous, seam-free.' The brain is already a sleight of hand, a massive, operationalist shell game. It designs and runs Turing Tests on its own constructs every time it ratifies a sensation or reifies an idea. Experience is a Turing Test — phenomena passing themselves off as perception's functional equivalents. Live or Memorex? Even that question is a simulation we fall for every second of our waking lives."

"Irks care the crop-full bird?" Helen burst in. "Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"

Lentz almost spit in mid-clause. "Marcel. I have to grant you. She does have a disconcerting ability to pull appropriate quotes."

"Lentz! Listen to her. You think those are just quotes to her?" I felt myself getting hysterical. "What if they're real? What if she means something by them?"

"What if my grandmother had had testicles?"

"She'd be your grandfather," Helen reassured him.

I stared at Lentz's face, where a stain of dismay spread over the icy deep.

Children were out of the question. They always had been. And now more than ever.

"C. We've talked about this. There are a billion and a half too many of us already. How can we two be parents? We don't even know what we're doing or where we want to live."

She flashed me a look. She knew what she was doing. She knew where she wanted to live.

"Which is it?" she mouthed.

"Which is what?"

"Which is your reason? The billion and a half too many? Or the two of us?"

For years — forever — my reason had been C.'s. She'd seemed set, pleased with what we had. I'd always thought the choice was mutual. Now I saw it had all been me. C. had drawn the whole curve of her adult life out of deference and fear. Three months from graduation, she came up empty-handed. There was nothing left to be afraid of.

"Why didn't we ever get married?" she wanted to know.

"I thought that was all right with you."

"What does that mean, Rick?"

"I promised you my life, in privacy. It's easy to break a public contract. You just go to court. You can't break a private promise." And leave, with nothing, the one you promised all.

"How come we never signed the contract, too? What could it have hurt? I wanted everyone to think you were proud of me."

"Oh, C. Proud? I love you. Who is going to know that if we don't?"

"What were you holding back, Ricky?"

"Nothing. You have everything."

She challenged me with silence. If that's true, then ask me. Ask me now.

I couldn't. I couldn't even say why I couldn't. I always insisted I could make C. happy. But all that insisting left her more convinced of her unworthiness. Even if a public pact had worked, she'd always have resented being deeded someone else's happiness.

I meant to stay with C. forever, in precariousness. I knew no other way to continue that scrapbook we had started, seat-of-the-pants style, a decade before. My refusal to marry her was a last-ditch effort to live improvised love. It was my holding back. My failing her. My departure.

Gold Bug appeared in the States. Half a world away was not far enough for safety. When I finished my double thwarted love story, I thought that judgment was irrelevant. But life begins and ends in judgment. C. and I kept still and hoped for reprieve.