Our silent communion is interrupted when someone above me says, “Cecilia tells me you’re in Minsky lab.”
“Yeah,” I say through a mouthful of cheese and give the intruder a hostile look. “What of it?”
He stares down at me through his thick glasses, his face expressing sincere concern. “So do you think AI is really possible?”
I swallow my cheese, and don’t enjoy it anymore. “It depends on how you define AI. It probably isn’t going to be cute or sexy if that’s what you’re asking.”
He frowns and takes a step back. My mom always tells me that I’m too abrupt; she gave up on the honey and vinegar analogy some years ago, ever since I asked why would I want to catch flies in the first place. I knew, of course, what she meant.
“I’m just being curious,” he says, frowning. “You don’t have to be… like that.” He of course means to say “such a bitch,” but to his credit doesn’t.
I shrug and scope the board for more stray cheese bits. “You don’t have to ask inane questions. You asked Cecilia what I did so you could talk to me, but you don’t really care. So don’t expect a thoughtful well-reasoned answer while making small talk.”
“Nothing wrong with small talk.”
“Of course not. Just try not to trivialize shit other people care about.”
At this point, I expect him to make an exit, but he just shakes his head. “Would asking you about your hat also qualify as trivializing?”
“Depends on why you ask.”
He heaves an exaggerated sigh, and it is almost drowned by the first twangs of the garage band guitar. He wrinkles his nose. “I ask because it’s an interesting hat, and I want to talk to you, and I want to talk to you because all you do is glower and eat cheese, and stare daggers and wear weird hats with a really pretty dress.”
Funny, and I thought I was being friendly. “Fair enough.”
“Do you hate this music as much as I do?”
“More.”
“Want to get coffee?”
I shake my head. “I really don’t want to hang out. It’s nothing personal, it’s just I’m not looking for more friends.” It’s better that way; at least so early on he has a chance of believing me. After a few conversations people usually assume that this is just a posture, that I really do want friends and am merely shy. But this is not the case: besides the Brazilian neuroscientists, I don’t want anyone.
He sighs again. “Tell me about your hat then.”
Iconography is a tricky business. So there’s a hat and a star, but how do you explain the depth of its meaning, the sheer cultural weight to a stranger, a foreigner who had never heard of Chapaev, has a very vague notion of the Red Cavalry, and overall perceived the epithet “red” as somewhat derogatory. He just sees a tin star and cannot smell the steppes and the galloping horses, the aroma of their sweat mixing with the sun and dust and wormwood in the air. The light carts the horses are dragging behind them, the backward-facing machine guns, the ringing of hooves. Tarragon and salt and summer, victory and heroism and the heart-aching infatuation with this imagined history, so much more beautiful and clear and taut than the real one, the icons instead of dirt and fleas and lice, the famine, the death. How do you explain something like that? This is why I’ve given up trying to be friends with the Americans. So instead I befriend Brazilians and other foreigners, and find some measure of cold comfort in the fact that we share the impossibility of proper communication, united in our isolation. At least, Cecilia and Veronica have each other.
And now I have the guy who attached himself to me at the party, and the party is over and I’m still struggling to explain. We’re standing outside, in front of the brownstone where Cecilia and Veronica live, and there’re no lights in their windows. And it is hopeless, hopeless, and I hear my voice give out and feel my eyelids grow hot, and I feel like crying from the futility. “I have to go,” I say.
“Wait—”
But already I flee, my heels striking the convex cobbles, and curse myself for even trying. Communication is only possible with a quick ta-ta-ta of the mounted machine gun, of the ta-ta-ta of feet striking in unison over the tamped down soil, the beating of the heart, the slow bleeding out of Hainuwele buried alive and danced over to death. With the rapid drumming of my running heels, short and stout, made for such running-drumming across the old part of the city, where streets are lined with cobbles and wind up and down invisible hills. And this is all I want to say to this guy as he recedes invisibly behind me, my only message. Let him think what he will.
And yet, the seed is planted. It wasn’t anything that he said or I said or the two of us stumbled over, some secretly discovered meaning. Rather, the thought crystallized from the entire muddled day, and as I fall asleep that night, I think of things I could do. Should do. Fuck the cockroaches and their stupid sensors, fuck the Turing and his tests. The lab complex certainly has enough shit lying around, and certainly it’ll be all right for me to do a little side project. Building a hero of the revolution will be a better use of my time, not to mention, tons more interesting than the cockroaches.
In the morning, I stop by the store-gallery where I found my star. It is still closed, but I lift the doormat, as if hoping to find a spare key a thoughtful relative may or may not have left for me, and instead I find a small silver fish dangling on a long small gauge chain. I take it with me. Fish means water, and surely there was fish in the Ural River and the ocean surrounding Indonesia.
At work, I am greeted by the familiar skittering of electronic cockroaches who all live in my office. Instead of making me want to slice my wrists as usual, they make me giddy instead. I sit at my desk without moving and watch their flat round bodies cautiously crawl from under the radiators and filing cabinets, and resume their usual blind wanderings around my desk; they will do it until I move. I sit still and plot in my head how to make a hero of the revolution.
In many ways, electronic Chapaev would have to be the opposite of my cockroaches: I even make a list of qualities, but the primary among them is that he would not skitter but remain steadfast, he would be afraid of neither light nor movement. He would not remain in my office but rather would explore widely and wildly, possibly all the way to Indonesia. He would not locomote using tiny wheels, he would have actual limbs and eyes and possibly a mustache. He would enjoy shooting a machine gun and would like horses; perhaps express some interest in riding them. He would be good at war but not bloodthirsty, sociable and easygoing but not obnoxious, and he would be charismatic like a good piece of iconography ought to be.
Achieving this would probably be more difficult than imagining—this is why we’ve been doing cockroaches for as long as I remember instead of anything interesting. But I have my hat with a star and a silver fish on a chain, and an entire network of computers that think they are neurons or something like it. How difficult can it be? I sit at my console and play with parameters—not quite devising a Turing test but trying to calibrate hypothetical responses. The console buckles at first but soon enough cooperates, and lines of code line up across the screen like obedient soldiers.
I spend weeks writing code, by the skin of my intuition’s teeth and by the mysterious mercies of silver fishes and other gifts from the Indonesian gallery. Every time I go, there is something new and mysterious waiting for me—some marbles, some carvings, a few pins. I collect them even if there was no obvious use for them just yet.