But I didn’t really buy the screen for work. It was a treat for myself. Jeffrey wasn’t allowed to touch it. (He had his own playroom and his own computer, a high-spec but more or less conventional PC, on which he played his war games and fooled around in his chat-rooms.) My screen didn’t look like a computer at all. It was more like a huge canvass nearly two metres square, filling up a large part of a wall. I didn’t even have a desk in there, only a little side table next to my chair where I laid the specs and the gloves when I wasn’t using them.
Both gloves and specs were wireless. The gloves were silk. The specs had the lightest of frames. When I put them on a rich 3D image filled the room and I was surrounded by a galaxy of possibilities which I could touch or summon at will. If I wanted to search the web or read mail or watch a movie, I would just speak or beckon and options would come rushing towards me. If I wanted to write, I could dictate and the words appeared – or, if I preferred it, I could move my fingers and a virtual keyboard would appear beneath them. And I had games there too, not so much games with scores and enemies to defeat – I’ve never much liked those – but intricate 3D worlds which I could explore and play in.
I spent a lot of time with those games. Just how much time was a guilty secret that I tried to keep even from Jeffrey, and certainly from my friends and acquaintances in the art world. People like Rudy Slakoff despised computer fantasies as the very worse kind of cosy, safe escapism and the very opposite of what art is supposed to offer. With my head I agreed, but in my heart I loved those games too much to stop.
(I had one called Night Street which I especially loved, full of shadowy figures, remote pools of electric light… I could spend hours in there. I loved the sense of lurking danger.)
Anyway, tonight I was going to go for total immersion. But first I checked my mail, enjoying a recently installed conceit whereby each message was contained in a little virtual envelope which I could touch and open with my hands and let drop – when it would turn into a butterfly and flutter away.
There was one from my mother, to be read later.
Another was from Harry, my opposite number at the Manhattan branch of the gallery. He had a ‘sensational new piece’ by Jody Tranter. Reflexively I opened the attachment. The piece was a body lying on a bench, covered except for its torso by white cloth. Its belly had been opened by a deep incision right through the muscle wall – and into this gash was pressed the lens of an enormous microscope, itself nearly the size of a human being. It was as if the instrument was peering inside of its own accord.
Powerful, I agreed. But I could reply to Harry another time.
And then there was another message from a friend of mine called Terence. Well, I say a friend. He is an occasional client of the gallery who once got me drunk and persuaded me to go to bed with him: a sort of occupational hazard of sucking up to potential buyers, I persuaded myself at the time, being new to the business and anxious to get on, but there was something slightly repulsive about the man and he was at least twice my age. Afterwards I dreaded meeting him for a while, fearing that he was going to expect more, but I needn’t have worried. He had ticked me off his list and wanted nothing else from me apart from the right to introduce me to others, with a special, knowing inflection, as ‘a very dear friend’.
So he wasn’t really a friend and actually it wasn’t really much of a message either, just an attachment and a note that said: ‘Have a look at this.’
It was a big file. It took almost three minutes to download, and then I was left with a modest icon hovering in front of me labelled ‘Personal Assistant’.
When I opened it a pretty young woman appeared in front of me and I thought at first that she was Terence’s latest ‘very dear friend’. But a caption appeared in a box in front of her:
‘In spite of appearances this is a computer-generated graphic.
‘You may alter the gender and appearance of your personal assistant to suit your own requirements.
‘Just ask!’
“Hi,” she said, smiling, “my name’s Ellie, or it is at the moment anyway.”
I didn’t reply.
‘You can of course change Ellie’s name now, or at any point in the future,’ said a new message in the box in front of her. ‘Just ask.’
“What I am,” she told me, “is one of a new generation of virtual p.a.’s which at the moment you can only obtain as a gift from a friend. If it’s okay with you, I’ll take a few minutes to explain very briefly what I’m all about.”
The animation was impressive. You could really believe that you were watching a real flesh and blood young woman.
“The sort of tasks I can do,” she said, in a bright, private-school accent, “are sorting your files, drafting documents, managing your diary, answering your phone, setting up meetings, responding to mail messages, running domestic systems such as heating and lighting, undertaking web and telephone searches. I won’t bore you with all the details now but I really am as good a p.a. as you can get, virtual or otherwise, even if I say it myself. For one thing I’ve been designed to be very high-initiative. That means that I can make decisions – and that I don’t make the usual dumb mistakes.”
She laughed.
“I don’t promise never to make mistakes, mind you, but they won’t be dumb ones. I also have very sophisticated voice-tone and facial recognition features so I will learn very quickly to read your mood and to respond accordingly. And because I am part of a large family of virtual p.a.’s dispersed through the net, I can, with your permission, maintain contact with others and learn from their experience as well as my own, effectively increasing my capacity by many hundreds of times. Apart from that, again with your permission, I am capable of identifying my own information and learning needs and can search the web routinely on my own behalf as well as on yours. That will allow me to get much smarter much quicker, and give you a really outstanding service. But even without any back-up I’m still as good as you get. I should add that in blind trials I pass the Turing Test in more than 99% of cases.”
The box appeared in front of her again, this time with some options:
‘The Turing Test: its history and significance,’ it offered.
‘Details of the blind trials.
‘Hear more details about capacity.
‘Adjust the settings of your virtual p.a.’
“Let’s… let’s have a look at these settings,” I said.
“Yes, fine,” she said, “most people seem to want to start with that.”
“How many other people have you met then?”
“Me personally, none. I am a new free-standing p.a. and I’m already different from any of my predecessors as a result of interacting with you. But of course I am a copy of a p.a. used by your friend Terence Silverman, which in turn was copied from another p.a. used by a friend of his – and so on – so of course I have all that previous experience to draw on.”
“Yes, I see.”
A question occurred to me.
“Does Terence know you’ve been copied to me?” I asked.