Under cover of daylight, I returned to pinch his name off the office door. Philip Lentz: a name as Palladian as the man was misshapen. The Center's promotional brochure said he explored cognitive economies through the use of neural networks. The pamphlet withheld even the foggiest idea of what this might mean.
For years, back before I saw the photograph that led to my retirement from software, I'd made a living by writing code. But a neural net, I learned in browsing the web, resembled nothing I'd ever programmed in my coding days. Neural networkers no longer wrote out procedures or specified machine behaviors. They dispensed with comprehensive flowcharts and instructions. Rather, they used a mass of separate processors to simulate connected brain cells. They taught communities of these independent, decision-making units how to modify their own connections. Then they stepped back and watched their synthetic neurons sort and associate external stimuli.
Each of these neurodes connected to several others, perhaps even to all other neurodes in the net. When one fired, it sent a signal down along its variously weighted links. A receiving neurode added this signal's weight to its other continuous inputs. It tested the composite signal, sometimes with fuzzy logic, against a shifting threshold. Fire or not? Surprises emerged with scaling up the switchboard.
Nowhere did the programmer determine the outcome. She wrote no algorithm. The decisions of these simulated cells arose from their own internal and continuously changing states.
Each decision to fire sent a new signal rippling through the electronic net. More: firings looped back into the net, resetting the signal weights and firing thresholds. The tide of firings bound the whole chaotically together. By strengthening or weakening its own synapses, the tangle of junctions could remember. At grosser levels, the net mimicked and — who knew? — perhaps reenacted associative learning.
Neural networkers grouped their squads of faked-up cells together in layers. An input layer fronted on the boundless outdoors. Across the connective brambles, an opposite squad formed the door where the ghost in the machine got out. Between these, the tool kit of simulated thought. In the so-called hidden layers lay all the knotted space where the net, and networkers like Lentz, associated.
The field went by the nickname of connectionism. Piqued, I subscribed to the web's discussion group on the subject. Reading made good counterpoint to my final rewrite. It was also a great day-waster and delaying tactic. Studying postponed the time when I'd no longer have any rewrite to counterpoint.
Now, whenever I logged on to the system, a new round of notes on the topic greeted me from all quarters. Several of my fellow visitors at the Center took part, firing messages back and forth to intercontinental colleagues. But unless this Lentz signed on with a pseudonym, he seemed to cut a wide side step around the citizens band. "
I followed the exchange. The regulars took on personalities. The Danish renegade. The Berkeley genius provocateur. Slow and Steady, respected co-authors, in constant battle with their archrival, Flash-in-the-Pan. Some speculated. Others graciously deflated. I saw myself as a character in this endless professional convention: the Literary Lurker. Novice symposium dabbler, who no one knew was there. But even lurking left a signature.
I learned that networks were not even programmed, in so many words. They were trained. Repeated inputs and parental feedback created an association and burned it in. Reading that fact tripped an association in me. The man had been sitting in his office after midnight, playing the same five minutes of Mozart again and again to an otherwise empty building. To a bank of machines.
This Lentz, I reasoned, had a neural network buried in that mountain of equipment. One that he was training to recognize beauty. One that would tell him, after repeated listenings, how that simple reed breathing made and unmade the shifting signal weights that triggered souls.
Some days later, the beak thrust itself into my office without knocking. Dr. Lentz stood upright even more precariously than he reclined. Even standing still, he listed like a marionette on a catamaran, my office door handle his rudder. Again the summer suit, the last scientist not giving congressional evidence to wear one. His skin had the pallor of a sixties educational TV host. He looked as if he'd taken self-tanning cream orally.
"Reclusive novelist living in the Netherlands?" His voice held more accusation than question. An allusion to a photo caption that had run in a major news weekly. I'd been captured in front of a stand of palms imported into the Sonora. The text beneath gave my life in thumbnail, now wrong on all three counts.
I launched my screen saver, to blot the incriminating text on my tube. He might have read it, even from his angle. Those eyes seemed set out on stalks.
"Yep. That's me."
"Yep? This is 'dazzlingly brilliant'? So tell me. What is it about the Dutch, anyway?"
"Excuse me?"
"They hang around your writing like dung beetles around a cholera ward. At least a cameo appearance in every book you've written. I mean: fifteen million tulip-sucking, clog-carving water wizards. So what? That's less than the population of greater New York."
He'd done his homework. And wanted me to know.
"Search me," I countered. "Accident. Pure coincidence."
"Nonsense. Fiction doesn't permit accident. And what little coincidence it does put up with is far from pure. Why don't you write about real countries? The whole global community is out there, chain-dragging on its own economic exhaust pipe. It's North against South, you know. Haves versus have-nots. How about a swing through the tropics? The lands of the 6 percent population growths and the two-hundred-dollar-a-year incomes?"
I gestured toward the hard disk on my desk where my latest sat, all but finished. "There's a bit in the new one. ."
He waved me off. "Doubtless the Dutch are in attendance as well."
Two words, right at the end. The little Frank girl's Dear Kitty. He gloated. I looked away.
"You and your precious bourgeois queendoms. Why should I care? Why should I pay twenty-five dollars—"
"Only thirteen in paperback." The joke fell flat. At that point I would have given him the complete works at cost, to get him out of my office.
"Twenty-five dollars to read about a negligible nation whose unit of currency sounds like something you'd use to pay the tinker or cobbler."
"Well, they did rule the world once."
"For what — twenty years? The Golden Age." He paced in place. The eye-darting edginess started to get on my nerves. I shoved the spare chair at him. He sat, smirking.
"The great middlemen, your Dutchmen. Bought and sold all races, colors, and creeds. Tell me. How does it feel to live in a country that peaked three centuries ago?"
"I haven't a clue." I hadn't yet decided how it felt to grow up in a country that peaked three years before I tried to bail out.
I didn't relish the idea of an insult match with a stranger. Besides, I'd already reached the same conclusion he had, this cognitive economist who had no more than browsed my novels, standing in front of the fiction "P" s at the University bookstore. He was right. It was time to give the Dutch a rest. After my latest, I planned to put them down for the count. But then, my plan for the next time out was to pack in everything. Not just the exotic bits, the color travelogue. I meant to retire my whole mother tongue.
In the meantime, I figured I might at least bait this scientist. I wasn't doing anything else that afternoon anyway. Nothing but writing.
"They've had more than their share of world-class painters and composers, for a negligible country."