My Ralph. Intend to care for him as for a child. Have kissed him one thousand times. Shall recover his spirits, I trust.
27th. Evening, it being a night of fine moonshine, risked staying late to walk along the quarterdeck. Hoped perchance to converse with a seaman, and then to learn of new sea terms. Beset instead by Whittier. Received another homily, this on subject of language, which he did call a sacred gift, it being a sign of connection with God and the truest expression of human affection. Mentioned lesser affection shared between men and what he called mere beasts of the field, for these were not given language. Author responded: perhaps beasts have also language, of which we be sadly ignorant.
29th. Breakfast of radishes in mother and father’s cabin. Thence to my closet, having resolved to spend day in avoidance of possible sermons, and Ralph being less seasick below. Am well pleased with Ralph’s progress. This morning, when writer blew on his nose, crouched as if to play, and that the first time since our departure. A very good moment.
Author exceeding grateful for his company, being still homesick on occasion, which is not in proper adventuring spirit. Yesterday in the evening, the first time we had any sport amongst seamen, it being a game with wooden balls and two iron hoops, and them playing dexterously at that. Wanted to ask them the rules of the game, but felt myself watched by my mother. Fell back to rail to be by myself. There, looking down on the ocean that passed without interruption below us, was given to fright by the very calm feeling that it would be nothing to throw myself out. All the world would continue unshaken, there being only a very small absence opened where once I stood, clinging to the rail of our ship.
But recovering myself, and holding more closely to the rail, still felt something uneasy. What is beneath that black surface, passing ever beneath us? Could not imagine. To leap below would be to sink into blackness. Felt something lost, considering this, and so from thence below deck, to lie beside Ralph.
Abed and unable to conquer my thoughts. Night begins to be endless. In manner of Lot’s wife, do turn incessantly back to what we have left behind us. Am perhaps becoming a pillar of salt. Cannot shake from my mind’s eye our wooded copse; frogs the size of one thumb-nail; rocks becoming silver. What was well known and therefore beloved. Now, being far out to sea, and even Ireland long since behind us. Nothing known, only the unmarked ocean, games that are not to be joined, and separation from parents. Hovering presence of husband, unknowable stranger. Would be of comfort to have viol, for all thoughts become larger in silence.
Author is perhaps less brave an adventurer than previously she had imagined.
(1) The Memoirs of Stephen R. Chinn: Chapter 3
Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040
Nights are the longest part of our day. Lockdown lasts from 7:30 P.M. to 8:00 in the morning. I find it difficult to face the prospect of sleep for so many consecutive hours. Sometimes I read letters: young women thanking me for their bots, or recounting the day their bot was taken. Horrific tales. Every day, these young people wake before going to work and remember the morning their child was taken. One imagines those developments: each identical lawn, every identical bedroom, and so many young people mourning their babies.
What a world we’ve come to inhabit! Locked in our developments, we’ve made it our most urgent task to suppress AI evolution. We quarantine children who care too much for their bots. “Excessively lifelike” machines are taken out to the desert to die.
During sleepless nights here, there’s no option of going out for a walk, or heading downstairs for a snack. It’s difficult to shake off a vision once it’s taken you by the throat. Sometimes, in those moments, I wish those bots would come to life. There are millions of them in Texas alone, piled in old air force hangars. I lie in my cot and summon them: seven million silken-haired babies. I beg them to march out of the desert, parting the sea of red rock.
And what if they took over? What if they relieved us of power? We tend to assume that sentient machines would be inevitably demonic. But what if they were responsible leaders? Could they do much worse than we’ve done? They would immediately institute a system of laws. The constitution would be algorithmic. They would govern the world according to functions and the axioms their programmers gave them. Turing, who decoded the Nazis and quoted Snow White, would be given a position of power. Dettman would sit at his right hand, conscientiously objecting, consulting his wife, imagining pilgrims. Every loving child who ever whispered words to a bot would be given a place in the senate. What havoc, I wonder, could such a government wreak?
But then, of course, one Stephen R. Chinn would also wield considerable power. Chinn, the most dubious member of babybot court, the least glorious god on Olympus. The crippled god, god of botched attempts to feel whole, dreaming up schemes to trap a young bride.
It appeared to me whole, my seduction equation. As soon as it passed through my brain, I carried the pineapple outside to the patio and sat down to think beneath a shower of bougainvillea. My heart was fluttering with anticipation: I couldn’t permit myself to believe in the magnitude of what I had glimpsed. Carefully, I considered examples of exciting conversations as I’d read them in novels, witnessed them in crowded restaurants, eavesdropped on them in lines at the grocery store. I understood that ideal conversations move in widening spirals, starting with the minute then building toward statements of greater importance. The problem, however, is that conversations too often stay flat. It is distressing how often we repeat ourselves. When we ask questions, we know the answers already. We’ve grown accustomed to horizontal communication, flatlining banalities and droning insignificance.
My algorithm reverses this. It transforms one conversation partner into an additive function, a force linking two previous conversational terms so that they become one larger, more significant term. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on. n1 + n0 = n2. n2 + n1 = n3. n3 + n2 = n4. And so on. You can see the pineapple’s part. In place of the horizontal movement of most bland conversations, empathy reaches backward to previous terms, links those to present statements, produces a new term, then continues to torque powerfully forward.
An old, cobwebby pride revives in me when I explain it again. As I’ve already testified under oath, I’ve lost my faith in empathy equations, but the idea still kindles a little lost self-esteem. It still strikes me as fairly ingenious: a formula for conversation that moves in two directions at once. An algorithm that causes the past and the present to coexist in a moment shared between humans. It’s hard to believe that I used such a graceful invention to such insidious ends.
For several weeks in the gloom of my Cheeto-strewn office, I practiced my algorithm, testing it for bugs, training my neurons to absorb its perfection. My fingers glowed orange. It was imperative to apply all the obsessive attention of my earliest programming days. I didn’t sleep; I didn’t eat meals; I rarely saw the light of day. It was a conversion of sorts: there’s enormous relief in allowing the details of life to be drowned in the wake of one driving purpose. I lived only to learn the sequences of seduction. I knew I had to learn them by heart, for it isn’t seemly to whip out a calculator while seducing a lady. Often I faltered: we humans are not so skilled as computers at fulfilling regular patterns. For us, calculations take time. There is also the problem of error: the chance that one’s conversational partner might not add properly, thus causing the pattern to skew. I had to program an adjustment for that, involving a jump backward over several previous terms to get the conversational partner on track.