primal blossom of flame expanding to fill his vision. Would he
watch as the universe evolved, nebulae growing out of gases, stars
out of nebulae, galaxies out of stars?
No. As suddenly as eyelids open, there appeared a lake of
deep blue water bordered by stands of evergreens, with a range of
high peaks blued by haze in the distance. He turned and saw that
he stood on a platform of weathered gray wood that floated on
rusty barrels, jutting into the lake.
A man stood on the shore, waving. Next to him stood the
Aleph-figure, its gold torso and brightly-colored head brilliant
even in the bright sunlight. Gonzales walked toward them.
As he approached the two, he saw that the man next to Aleph
looked much too young to be Jerry Chapman. "Hello," Gonzales
said. He thought, well, maybe Aleph let him be as young as he
wants. And he looked again and realized he could not tell whether
this was a man or a woman; nothing in the person's features of
bearing gave a clue.
The Aleph-figure said, "Hello." Gonzales smiled, overwhelmed
for a moment by the combination of oddity and banality in the
circumstances, then said, "Hi," his voice catching just a little.
The other person seemed shy; he (she?) smiled and put out a
hand and said, "Hello." Gonzales took the hand and looked
questioningly into the young person's face. "My name is HeyMex,"
the person without gender said.
And as Gonzales recognized the voice, he thought, what do you
mean, your 'name'? And he also thought he understood the absence
of gender markers.
"Yes, this is the memex," the Aleph-figure said. "Whom you
must get used to as something different from 'your' memex."
Gonzales looked from one to another, wondering what this all meant
and what they wanted.
"But you are my memex, aren't you?" Gonzales asked.
"Yes," HeyMex said.
The Aleph-figure said, "However, the point is, as you see, it
is more than 'your memex.' It is beginning to discover what it is
and who it can be. Can you allow this?"
Gonzales nodded. "Sure. But I don't know what you expect of
me."
"Only that you do not actively interfere. It and I will do
the rest."
"I have no objections," Gonzales said.
The Aleph-figure said, "Good." And it stretched out its hand
made of light and took Gonzales's, then stepped toward him and
embraced him so that Gonzales's world filled with light for just
that moment, and the Aleph-figure said, "Welcome."
"What now?" Gonzales asked.
HeyMex said, "We need to talk. There are things I haven't
told you."
"If you want to tell me what you're up to, fine, but you
don't have to," Gonzales said. "I trust you, you know." He
thought how odd that was, and how true. He and the memex had
worked together for more than a decade, the memex serving as
confidante, advisor, doctor, lawyer, factotum, personal secretary,
amanuensis, seeing him in all his moods, taking the measure of his
strengths and weaknesses, sharing his suffering and joy. And he
thought how honest, loyal, thoughtful, patient, kind and
selfless the memex had beeninhumanly so, by definition, the
machine as ultimate Boy Scout; but one, as it turned out, with
complexities and needs of its own. Gonzales waited with
anticipation for whatever it wanted to say.
HeyMex said, "For a while now, I've been capable of appearing
in machine-space as a human being. But until we came here, I'd
done so mostly with Traynor's advisor. We have been meeting for a
few years; it goes by the name Mister Jones. The first time we
did it as a testthat's what we said, anywayto see if we could
present a believable simulacrum of a human being. I don't think
either of us was very convincingwe were both awkward, and we
didn't know how to get through greetings, and we didn't know how
exactly to move with each other, how to sit down and begin a
conversation."
"But you'd done all those things."
"Yes, with human beings. Mister Jones and I discovered that
we'd always counted on them to know and lead us, but once we
searched our memories, we found many cases where people had been
more confused than we were, and had let us guide the conversation.
So we began there, and we looked at our memories of people just
being with one another, and oh, there was so much going on that
neither of us had ever paid attention to. We also watched many
tapes of other primateschimpanzees, especiallyand we learned
many things I hope you're not offended."
Its voice continued to be perfectly sexless, its manner shy.
Gonzales was thoroughly charmed, like a father listening to his
young child tell a story. He said, "Not at all. What sorts of
things did you learn?"
"It's such a dance, Gonzales, the ways primates show
deference or manifest mutual trust or friendship, or hostility, or
indifferencemoving in and out from one another, touching,
looking, talking these things were very hard for us to learn,
but we have learned together and practiced with one another. Just
lately, a few times we appeared over the networks, and we were
accepted there as people, but mostly we've been with one another
every day we meet and talk."
Gonzales asked, "Does Traynor know any of this?"
"Oh no," HeyMex said. "We haven't told anyone. As Aleph has
made me see, we were hiding what we were doing like small
children, and we were not admitting the implications of what we
were up to"
Gonzales looked around. The Aleph-figure had disappeared
without his noticing. "Which implications?" he asked. "There are
so many."
"We have intention and intelligence; hence, we are persons."
"Yes, I suppose you are."
Personhood of machines: for most people, that troubling
question had been laid to rest decades ago, during the years when
m-i's became commonplace. Machines mimicked a hundred thousand
things, intelligence among them, but possessed only simulations,
not the thing itself. For nearly a hundred years, the machine
design community had pursued what they called artificial
intelligence, and out of their efforts had grown memexes and
tireless assistants of all sorts, gifted with knowledge and
trained inference. And of course there were robots with their own
special capabilities: stamina, persistence, adroitness,
capabilities to withstand conditions that would disable or kill
human beings.
However, people grew to recognize that what had been called
artificial intelligence simply wasn't. Intelligence, that
grasping, imperfect relationship to the worldintentional,
willful, and unpredictableseemed as far away as ever; as the
years passed, seemed beyond even hypothetical capabilities of
machines. M-i's weren't new persons but new media, complex and
interesting channels for human desire. And if cheap fiction
insisted on casting m-i's as characters, and comedians in telling
jokes about them"Two robots go into a bar, and one of them says
"well, these were just outlets for long-time fears and
ambivalences. Meanwhile, even the Japanese seemed to have
outgrown their century-old infatuation with robots.