I did watch Marilyn on the Late, Late one night. And I thought those thoughts; and so I spent the next week preparing an application to a foundation for money; and when the grant came through, I took a sabbatical and began turning myself into a mathematical model. It isn't really that hard. Kookie, yes. But not hard.
I don't want to explain what programs like Fortran and simscript and sir are, so I will only say what we all say: They are languages by which people can communicate with machines. Sort of. I had to learn to speak Fortran well enough to tell the machine all about myself. It took five graduate students and ten months to write the program that made that possible, but that's not much. It took more than that to teach a computer to shoot pool. After that, it was just a matter of storing myself in the machine.
That's the part that Schmuel told me was kookie. Like everybody with enough seniority in my department, I have a remote-access computer console in my—well, I called it my "playroom." I did have a party there, once, right after I bought the house, when I still thought I was going to get married. Schmuel caught me one night walking in the door and down the stairs and found me methodically typing out my medical history from the ages of four to fourteen. "Jerk," he said, "what makes you think you deserve to be embalmed in a 7094?"
I said, "Make some coffee and leave me alone till I finish. Listen. Can I use your program on the sequelae of mumps?"
"Paranoid psychosis," he said. "It comes on about the age of forty-two." But he coded the console for me and thus gave me access to his programs. I finished and said:
"Thanks for the program, but you make rotten coffee."
"You make rotten jokes. You really think it's going to be you in that program. Admit!"
By then, I had most of the basic physiological and environmental stuff on the tapes and I was feeling good. "What's me?" I asked. "If it talks like me, and thinks like me, and remembers what I remember, and does what I would do—who is it? President Eisenhower?"
"Eisenhower was years ago, jerk," he said.
"Turing's question, Schmuel," I said. "If I'm in one room with a teletype. And the computer's in another room with a teletype, programmed to model me. And you're in a third room, connected to both teletypes, and you have a conversation with both of us, and you can't tell which is me and which is the machine—then how do you describe the difference? Is there a difference?"
He said, "The difference, Josiah, is I can touch you. And smell you. If I was crazy enough I could kiss you. You. Not the model."
"You could," I said, "if you were a model, too, and were in the machine with me." And I joked with him (Look! It solves the population problem, put everybody in the machine. And, suppose I get cancer. Flesh-me dies. Mathematical-model-me just rewrites its program), but he was really worried. He really did think I was going crazy, but I perceived that his reasons were not because of the nature of the problem but because of what he fancied was my own attitude toward it, and I made up my mind to be careful of what I said to Schmuel.
So I went on playing Turing's game, trying to make the computer's responses indistinguishable from my own. I instructed it in what a toothache felt like and what I remembered of sex. I taught it memory links between people and phone numbers, and all the state capitals I had won a prize for knowing when I was ten. I trained it to spell "rhythm" wrong, as I had always misspelled it, and to say "place" instead of "put" in conversation, as I have always done because of the slight speech impediment that carried over from my adolescence. I played that game; and by God, I won it.
But I don't know for sure what I lost in exchange.
I know I lost something.
I began by losing parts of my memory. When my cousin Alvin from Cleveland phoned me on my birthday, I couldn't remember who he was for a minute. (The week before, I had told the computer all about my summers with Alvin's family, including the afternoon when we both lost our virginity to the same girl, under the bridge by my uncle's farm.) I had to write down Schmuel's phone number, and my secretary's, and carry them around in my pocket.
As the work progressed, I lost more. I looked up at the sky one night and saw three bright stars in a line overhead. It scared me, because I didn't know what they were until I got home and took out my sky charts. Yet Orion was my first and easiest constellation. And when I looked at the telescope I had made, I could not remember how I had figured the mirror.
Schmuel kept warning me about overwork. I really was working a lot, 15 hours a day and more. But it didn't feel like overwork. It felt as though I were losing pieces of myself. I was not merely teaching the computer to be me but putting pieces of me into the computer. I hated that, and it shook me enough to make me take the whole of Christmas week off. I went to Miami.
But when I got back to work, I couldn't remember how to touch-type on the console any more and was reduced to pecking out information for the computer a letter at a time. I felt as though I were moving from one place to another in installments, and not enough of me had arrived yet to be a quorum, but what was still waiting to go had important parts missing. And yet I continued to pour myself into the magnetic memory cores: the He I told my draft board in 1946, the limerick I made up about my first wife after the divorce, what Margaret wrote when she told me she wouldn't marry me.
There was plenty of room in the storage banks for all of it. The computer could hold all my brain had held, especially with the program my five graduate students and I had written. I had been worried about that, at first.
But in the event I did not run out of room. What I ran out of was myself. I remember feeling sort of opaque and stunned and empty; and that is all I remember until now.
Whenever "now" is.
I had another friend once, and he cracked up while working on telemetry studies for one of the Mariner programs. I remember going to see him in the hospital, and him telling me, in his slow, unworried, coked-up voice, what they had done for him. Or to him. Electroshock. Hydrotherapy.
What worries me is that that is at least a reasonable work-ing hypothesis to describe what is happening to me now.
I remember, or think I remember, a sharp electric jolt. I feel, or think I feel, a chilling flow around me.
What does it mean? I wish I were sure. I'm willing to concede that it might mean that overwork did me in and now I, too, am at Restful Retreat, being studied by the psychiatrists and changed by the nurses' aides. Willing to concede it? Dear God, I pray for it. I pray that that electricity was just shock therapy and not something else. I pray that the flow I feel is water sluicing around my sodden sheets and not a flux of electrons in transistor modules. I don't fear the thought of being insane; I fear the alternative.
I do not believe the alternative. But I fear it all the same. I can't believe that all that's left of me — my id, my ucs, my me — is nothing but a mathematical model stored inside the banks of the 7094. But if I am! If I am, dear God, what will happen when—and how can I wait until—somebody turns me on?
What to Do Until the Analyst Comes
The thing I would like you to note about this story is that, although it is about a sort of tripping, it was written quite a while before the hippies and the beats made dropping out a national conversational topic.
I just sent my secretary out for a container of coffee and she brought me back a lemon Coke.
I can't even really blame her. Who in all the world do I have to blame, except myself? Hazel was a good secretary to me for 15 years, fine at typing, terrific at brushing off people I didn't want to see, and the queen of them all at pumping office gossip out of the ladies' lounge. She's a little fuzzy-brained most of the time now, sure. But after all!