My mind has also slowed. The work on morphogenesis has become plodding. I have a predictable pattern when it comes to good ideas: since Chris’s death, once every five years I am inspired. In the interim, my mind suffers an agonizing suspension. I ask myself if inspiration will come again. Now, more than ever, in these fat, pendulous years, inspiration seems impossible. It has been four years since the last important idea. Now it’s due time for a good idea to begin brewing, and yet I see nothing bright on the horizon. I only look forwards to food. Perhaps I am no longer a very smart man.
As you know from the days of our spiritual talks, I have always held out hope that our minds might exist outside of our bodies. Migrant minds, capable of roosting in wired machines. Like the chambered nautilus, moving from one pearled room to the next. My shell has always felt pleasantly insignificant, no real part of myself. Made for simple enjoyment. The moral wars that people wage with their bodies have always perplexed me: it is our minds that ought to matter. And yet now I begin to feel so very anchored in my fat woman’s body that I cannot imagine the migration of my mind. It seems a very impossible goal. As a child, when I used to attend services with my family, I used to harbor a pet fear that at the Second Coming, all the heavenly souls would fly down to earth to retrieve their lost bodies, and only my soul would be unable to wake my slumbering bones. That I alone would slip into a corpse and be trapped there forever.
It’s been many years since I thought of that particular fear, but I dreamt, the other night, that at the cusp of living and death, every other soul departed from every other body — a flocking of beautiful birds — but mine stayed stuck, locked inside my voluminous breast, to be taken down to the grave.
Such an end would be cruel. I have always hoped to live in a different point of history, summoned over time and space, like the voice in the evil queen’s mirror. Such was the promise of our machine. It was the idea of a permanent vessel, into which my voice could be placed. My voice, and Chris’s. I have had all kinds of fantasies about the future point we would be summoned to enter together. I have envisioned a time when people treat machines with respect, a time when less emphasis is placed on the whims of the body, when we value each other not for the correctness of our physical shells but for the precision of our mental states.
Now, who knows. Such fantasies seem as silly as a movie intended for children. I’m irritated with myself for falling so deeply into their lure. For permitting myself such absurd degrees of nostalgia. In my life, I have entertained the past and the future far more than I should have. Now I’m overwhelmed by the daily facts of existence. I feel henpecked and distracted. I wish I could wear housedresses, to disguise my corpulence. I’m ashamed of my bulk. I hardly work, and instead spend vast quantities of time staring out my window, seeing nothing of use. I feel neither manly nor womanly, only fat, fat, fat. I grow weary quickly. Even now, my mind lags. I am hungry again, after only just eating breakfast. I measure my life in ice cream spoons. I crave distance from my heavy body, and keep returning to the only line I used to like out of Hamlet: “Exeunt, bearing off the bodies. .”
I wish I could write with more cheerful news, but my mind is too clouded. It is tiring, even just dragging the pencil over the page. I must stop for now, though I feel as if I’ve been horribly rude to dump such drudgery in your lap.
And so, with promises of more — and less burdensome — correspondence soon,
Yours,
Alan Turing
(1) The Memoirs of Stephen R. Chinn: Chapter 9
Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040
It’s been five days since I last wrote. There was a small situation in the rec room, an escalating quarrel between an insider trader and an online pharmacist in which a keyboard was brandished and eventually wielded. For five days, we were banned from the computers.
Five days, cut off from the ether. In indignant silence, we slouched around, stripped of our wires and passwords, cut off now not only from physical freedoms but also from digitized travel. Stuck planets, we counted the hours, nervously eying the fat fish in our pond.
Now, back at my flickering screen for the first time in five days, I find myself feeling a little reserved. Like a shy kid on the first day of school. Hanging back, unsure how to interface. Is anyone out there, past these digital gates? There is a world, but I can’t quite see it. There are brick walls and yards of neatly cut recyclable grass. The streets are empty of cars; the houses seem to have devoured their owners.
But what do I know about brick walls or cut grass? I’ve been trapped inside this prison for years. I should stick to my life. To what was my life, before I came here. Where were we, then? We left off on the scene in which Chinn dreams of an electronic talisman, to prove to his daughter how living she is.
It was a formidable challenge. Suddenly, goat farming seemed like a waste. I’d been given particular talents; who was I to choose not to use them? I owed it to Dolores, and to my daughter, to fulfill my greatest potential. It was, I told myself, the least I could give them. I’d betrayed my wife with a chatbot; I’d convinced her to move halfway across the country; I’d raised our daughter in solitude so enveloping that she would almost certainly struggle when we sent her to school. The only way I could repay them was to create a creature so nearly alive that Ramona would love it, tend to it, and know her life was even more precious. So I rationalized my commitment.
These were heady times for Stephen R. Chinn. I built an office in an old toolshed and moved the operations there. I put in long hours; if the doll was to be completed before Ramona started first grade, I’d have to get going. Using money from my early ventures, I flew in doll makers from Paris and Japan, consulted them on the latest technologies. Together we carved the shape of her nose. There was a great deal of consternation over the slope of her neck, and real love was expended on designing her hairline. Once her face was completed, we perfected her motor. New gears were designed, to be sure her limbs moved without catching: our specialist created a network of sophisticated gears with petals like forget-me-nots. We implanted a voice recognition device the size of a kernel of corn into each doll’s little left earlobe, for no technology has remotely approached such a miracle as the human cochlea, where sound is measured by ripples across the shadowed inner coves of the ear.
In solitude, once the doll makers had shipped off, I rocked our girl in my arms. I admit I found her beautiful. She was pendent in the loveliest point of her childhood — vulnerable, unmarked, silken and smooth. She seemed to promise that all of us, with the right mind-set, might remain motionless in time: ageless, eternal, captive in a moment when the rivers still flowed.
Having accomplished her form, I turned to the computer chip of her brain. In order to research all the most believable chatbots, I wired our ranch with Internet and purchased a newfangled surround screen, before which I spent whole days and nights searching for the most human computer, the voice with which I could fall madly in love. I found TamCat again and turned her down with the flick of a finger. I flirted with a southern belle named Savannah, was enticed by the plight of a missionary in Ghana, got hooked by a vitriolic robot called Rob. With Rob, I found in myself the desire to be abused for whole days at a time. He responded with nothing but insults such as “you are a fucking moron” and “you don’t deserve to be alive,” and yet I engaged him for nearly forty-eight hours of my adult life and emerged feeling strangely refreshed.