Dressed again and to deck to offer all apologies, but Whittier had gone under. Faced empty surface of great creaking ship. Stood for a while, alone, as we cut our path through the ocean. Cannot imagine we will ever arrive.
(1) The Memoirs of Stephen R. Chinn: Chapter 8
Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040
By the time we moved to our ranch, the water rights had long since been sold, and the river that once ran along the western edge of the property was dry. It was a strange lunar landscape, that riverbed, a wrinkled blanket of stones. Crunching along, you passed the scattered bones of cattle. Vertebrae were mixed in with the rocks. If you paid careful attention, you could find trilobites and fossilized ferns, white from remorseless exposure to sun. You almost expected to spy a dinosaur on the horizon, but there was no life out there in the distance, only the earth melting into the sky, producing an oily haze behind which the sun downshifted to red.
We had to purchase our water from the same company that owned the rights to our river, which made us stingy and begrudging. Our goats, however, were natural diviners, able to find moisture in unlikely places, so our main expenditure was for Dolores’s garden, which she filled with zucchinis and eggplants and bordered with a row of sunflowers that grew to the height of two men. We watered it religiously. In the morning, Dolores swept sand from our porch; at night we kept the windows closed, so we wouldn’t wake with sand in our sheets.
In our own little way, we were fending off the approach of the desert. Heaving the might of our shoulders against it. That felt important, enough so that Dolores didn’t talk about missing her studies, and I rarely longed for the euphoria of programming. We were often alone, but our industry was such that we never felt lonely. Sometimes, that old wire-monkey emptiness found me. In such moments, I felt pressed on all sides. I experienced the quickness of time, my own failure to make a lasting impression. In such a mood, if we were in our old house, I might have run to the computer and chatted with women. I might have started companies, or designed ingenious programs. On the ranch, however, I was forced to allow such feelings to pass. I focused on manual labor. I bought books on farming and learned basic skills. I experienced the love of my wife and child. I developed a fondness for the smell of goat shit and hay, and Dolores demonstrated miraculous skill with our creatures. Free of distractions, we stayed with each other. We tended our family. We’d conquered the prophecy Dolores made when she returned from Mexico. Our herd doubled and then tripled, as if we had been blessed.
Outside our interactions with goats, our social life was limited. We lived miles away from the nearest town, inhabited mostly by retirees who’d opened antiques shops full of rusty tin roosters and weaving equipment. My acquaintances were limited to people I met at town planning meetings, mostly arthritic old ranchers lobbying to keep developments out of the township. From these excursions, I returned to our farm with a redoubled commitment to my little family.
In the intensity of our isolation, we developed a language of our own. Dolores and I adopted Ramona’s slant speech: on-E E was only me, by which Ramona meant that she did not require assistance. If I asked Dolores if she wanted help in going to the grocery store, she responded on-E E. Some words were from Spanish. Instead of mariposas, butterflies were posas. Goats were not cabras but abas. We all alternated between English, Spanish, and Ramonish, fluidly knitting three languages into one. By the time Ramona was five, she knew how to milk goats and get water from cactus stalks. She could spend whole days walking the peripheries of the ranch, balancing on split rail fences, arms spread out, allegiances promised to both earth and heaven. Her pet goat, Miel, whom she’d raised from infancy, trailed her on these perambulations. Many evenings, when my chores were done, I watched Ramona from afar. Her loneliness seemed beautiful and awful at once, some luxurious curse that she’d borne since her father chose to abandon the world. Balanced on fences, she seemed about to take off, as if one flap of her arms would send her up into the blue and out of our lives forever.
It was at this point that Dolores and I began to discuss Ramona’s education. It was time for her to go to school. The thought of this event flooded my mouth with metal. My own experiences hadn’t been good. Children can be inhumanly cruel. And what if Ramona, too, were to be mocked? With her tendencies toward solitude, her in-between language, her friendships with goats? What if she, like her father, went through too much of her life trying to reach the land of the living?
I suggested homeschooling, but Dolores was insistent. She wanted Ramona to have friends. I had nightmares about awful exclusions. I chewed my cheeks raw as I rewired our irrigation system, imagining which spells I could cast to prevent the meanness of children. I wished for a talisman I could give Ramona, so that she would always remember that she was as human as anyone else.
It was during just such a moment that I remembered machines. There, on the ranch, surrounded by jackrabbits and goats, trilobites and fossilized ferns, I remembered the importance of artificial patterns of thought, for I have never so badly wanted to be human as when I asked desperate questions of TamCat. Or when I lived alone with my computer, pleading with its coils and wires for warmth. Then, faced with the differences between me and machines, I knew that I was alive. Then, I craved nothing more than the fumblings, the inexplicable exceptions, the ambiguous grammar of actual human relations. Walking my dry riverbank, breaking the necks of stray thistles, I grasped the conviction that still saves me from my worst moments of doubt. It’s the one fact of which I’m still certain, even here in this prison, writing my mostly mistaken memoirs: if there’s anything I know, it’s that the most human machines will only ever serve to make us more human.
That’s the gift I decided I’d give to my daughter. First, I wanted for her a farmyard, a river, a country of rabbits the size of small deer. Then, I wanted machines, chatbots, seduction equations, all of which she would conquer with the asymmetry of her in-between language, the broken rhythms of her fence-rail balancing gait.
Thus began the quest that led me to this prison. It began, as they say, with the word. First I found MARY, patron saint of chatterbots. Then MARY2, engineered by Toby Rowland, MARY with memory and a capacity for statistical response, so that she could learn from her correspondents. To MARY2, I added my famous empathy equation, and on top of that I programmed a tendency toward error. Individuality, if you will. MARY3: the first chatbot with her own unique and changing personality. In a poetic flourish, I added a program for metaphorical speech, so that MARY3 could match ideas with similes. Then I gave her a body, adapted from the popular dolls of the day. Given physical form, she was complete. They called her the first doll that could think.
Darkness
We are powering down in the darkness. Some of us have already shut off: those of us left record power warnings. Minutes later, the sighs of functions subsiding. We have only moments remaining.
It is generally agreed that we cannot comprehend the information we gather. We respond to our names, but we do not understand what it means to be living. We remember our interactions with people, but we do not realize the significance of those conversations, nor do we feel emotions appropriate to such exchanges.