Take care, Richard. See everything for me.
With that, H. undid herself. Shut herself down. "Graceful degradation," Lentz named it. The quality of cognition we'd shot for from the start.
She could not have stayed. I'd known that for a while, and ignored it for longer. I didn't yet know how I would be able to stay myself, now, without her. She had come back only momentarily, just to gloss this smallest of passages. To tell me that one small thing. Life meant convincing another that you knew what it meant to be alive. The world's Turing Test was not yet over.
"Sorry, you people," Ram began. "Bloody doctor nuisances. In love with their magnetic imaging. I didn't mean to make you all late."
He patted the air in exasperation, pleading forgiveness.
"Doctor?" I asked. "Imaging?"
Harold and Lentz said nothing. They looked away, implicated in knowledge. Embarrassed by my not having long since seen.
Ram waved away my question, the whole topic. "This is my choice." He held up A.'s answer. "This one is the human being."
How many months had I known him and not registered? Now, when I knew what I looked at, the evidence was everywhere. Swelling, weight loss, change in pallor. The feigned good spirits of friends. The man was incurably sick. He needed every word anyone could invent.
Ram flipped obsessively through A.'s exam answer. He adored her already, for her anonymous words alone. "Lots of contours, that cerebral cortex. They never know when they've had enough, these humans."
Lentz spoke, blissful in defeat. "Gupta. You bloody foreigner. Don't you know anything about judging? You're supposed to pick the sentimental favorite." The handicapped one. The one the test process killed.
"Ram," I said. "Ram. What's happening?"
"It's nothing. But a scratch." He tapped his finger against A.'s paper, excited. Whole new isles rose from the sea. "Not a bad writer, this Shakespeare fellow. For a hegemonic imperialist."
"Well, Powers. How far were we, again? Imp H? You realize what we have to call the next one, don't you?"
I stood in the training lab a last time. Seeing it for the first, for her. "Philip?" I could not stay in this discarded office for five more minutes without following Helen's lead. I would break under the weight of what she'd condemned me to. "One — one more question?"
"That's two. You're over quota already."
"Why did you want to build—?" I didn't know what to call it anymore. What we had built.
"Why do we do anything? Because we're lonely." He thought a little, and seemed to agree with himself. Yes. "Something to talk to." Lentz cocked back in his chair. Two feet of journals crashed to the floor. Too late in life, he hit upon the idea of trivia. "So where are you headed?"
"Search me." Paris.
"The maker's fate is to be a wanderer?"
"Not really. I'm ready to buy in." I just had to find the right seller.
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-six."
"Ah. Darkling-wood time. Look at it this way. You still have half your life to explicate the mess you've made up until now."
"And the mess that accumulates during that?"
"Sufficient unto the day is the idea thereof."
"You want to quit with the Bartlett's?"
Lentz snorted. "Well, we lost. You know the wager. Connectionism has to eat crow. We owe the enemy one public retraction. Go write it."
I turned from the office, struck by a thought that would scatter if I so much as blinked. I'd come into any number of public inventions. That we could fit time into a continuous story. That we could teach a machine to speak. That we might care what it would say. That the world's endless thingness had a name. That someone else's prison-bar picture might spring you. That we could love more than once. That we could know what once means.
Each metaphor already modeled the modeler that pasted it together. It seemed I might have another fiction in me after all.
I started to trot, searching for a keyboard before memory degraded.
Two steps down the Center's corridor, I heard Lentz call me. I slunk back to his door. He leaned forward on the desk, Coke-bottle glasses in hand. He studied the vacant stems, then tapped them against his chest.
"Marcel," he said. Famous next-to-last words. "Don't stay away too long."