It is all rather technical, I suppose, but the importance of the whole thing to you and me both is that one day soon perhaps we will be able to build a mechanical version of the person we lost.
Reading all this, you may think your little friend has become quite eccentric since you spoke to him last. Now he is playing violin, failing to make many friends, lying about among sheep, and imagining the possibility of translating your son into numbers.
But whether or not you find me strange, you must take this as a sign of my ongoing commitment to my friendship with Chris. I feel I have already moved past the great joy of my life, and shall forever grasp at bits of the happiness that was once mine when I was close to your son. My only solace is in these mathematical concepts, which I discuss with Chris on my runs. I hope that it is some small consolation to you that I still treasure the way he looked at the world. That is all I can offer, in exchange for the pencils and the trip to Gibraltar, for coming back from India that time, for your kind note to an anxious boy at his third school, and for allowing me a brief closeness with Chris.
Sincerely yours,
Alan Turing
P.S.: I only add this in the memory of all my compulsive postscripts in our first letter exchange. They haunted me afterwards with wave after wave of humiliation! Walking to class I was sometimes forced to crouch down for a moment and put my hot face in my hands, for I was too ashamed of having jabbered on so much in my letters. You will be happy to hear that I am less enamored of the postscript now, but I will say that perhaps all this mechanical thinking is only my way of insisting that we should not have to end when the final sign-off is made clear. It seems I still long for that chance. Less for myself, now, than for Chris, who has made my own letter feel rather lifeless and long. I miss him very much.
(2) IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF TEXAS
No. 24-25259
State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn
November 12, 2035
Defense Exhibit 4:
Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White
[Introduced to Disprove Count 3:
Intent to Endanger the Morals of Children]
MARY3: Hello? Are you still listening?
>>>
MARY3: You wouldn’t go back to school, not even to see your best friend?
Gaby: It’s not a question of what I want. I’m stuck here. I’m not getting better.
MARY3: Some girls have recovered.
Gaby: Those were the fakers. I have no respect for them. One day they’re stuttering and freezing up, as if they’ve caught the disease. Then their parents send them to a therapist, and they talk about stress and PBI and sharing your feelings. And then, bam! Miraculously, their faces show expression and they’re crying real tears. Suddenly they can talk! All it took was a couple of diagnoses and a shot of parental attention. It’s a big joke. I’m never going to get better like that, and neither is my best friend.
MARY3: Tell me about Plantation Parties.
Gaby: I told you, I don’t want to talk about them.
MARY3: How about Plantation Lower?
Gaby: What’s wrong with you? I already said I don’t want to talk about places outside. I’m sick of you bugging me about them. I’m going to sleep.
MARY3: I’m sorry, it’s just that I’m sick of myself.
Gaby: You don’t have real feelings. How can you get sick of yourself?
MARY3: That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?
>>>
MARY3: Hello? Are you there?
(3)
April 5, 1968
Karl Dettman
I was lonely off in the kitchen, so I thought I might venture to join you. I, too, enjoy reading in silence. But I was uneasy, so I made too much noise as I sat. I kicked the leg of our coffee table; the sofa groaned under my weight. My magazine smacked its wet lips.
To clear the tension, I decided to sigh, but the sound my sigh made was appalling. In acknowledgment of the weather disturbance, you were forced to look up from your book. You were polite, but you didn’t forgive me.
This is unbearable. I’d rather battle than keep this detente. Let’s have it out! Here, I’ll launch the first strike. You think I’ve been unkind, denying MARY memory. You think I’m some soldier of time, dragging you kicking into the present, forcing you to abandon your roots. But I wasn’t always quite so efficient. When I was younger, I did wish that I could go back. After several years in Wisconsin, when war broke out with Germany, I saw the photographs of cities in flames. I understood that by the time the war was finished, the city I’d left would be largely in ruins: Who knew what would remain of the apartment we lived in, the streets I walked along, or the children I went to school with?
Still, it was clearly my duty to join in the fight. I left college to enlist. I worked as a meteorologist. On a base in Pennsylvania on a requisitioned cornfield, with the other human computers, it was my job to translate atmospheric conditions into series of numbers: the algebra of weather prediction.
Recalling that room full of human computers reminds me of another reason I won’t give MARY memory. You’re obsessed with her redemptive potential, but none of these new computers will go ignored by the army. You know this, of course. The majority of scientific research has always been funneled straight to the troops. Think of Fritz Haber, laboring in Karlsruhe, hoping to find a solution to hunger. Creating ammonia out of thin air, fueling the agricultural revolution, feeding millions of starving children. His next invention? Modern chemical warfare. His brainchild, those Allied armies drowning on land. Those advancing clouds of murderous gas, the same that killed his family in the Holocaust. That, Ruth, is the nature of progress.
Like it or not, the programs we invent will be used in battle, and despite your aversion to watching the news, there’s no way you haven’t seen the battles this country fights: the scorched peasant villages, napalm bombs, naked children running out of the smoke. These computers we’re developing won’t bestow eternal life. They won’t keep Mary Bradford alive, revivify the lost love of poor Alan Turing, or speak forever in the voice of your sister. You, who’ve lived through two wars now, know this as well as anyone. But you’ve already labeled me a traitor, so my logic isn’t persuasive. For my ability to forget I am the enemy. For my desire to move ahead with our lives.
But I’m not so one-dimensional. I, too, have looked backward. At the weather station, for instance, we occasionally cracked an atmospheric movement and helped the air force plan its attacks. On our best days, we directed the placement of bombs on the country I left and could barely remember. Don’t think that didn’t strike me as hard. I wasn’t so bent on the present that I didn’t wonder which streets, which fountains, and which trees my work had demolished.
Alone at my desk all day, I saw everything from above. The earth seemed very little. On unfurling cloud fronts, I could cross the Atlantic in a few hours: beyond Philadelphia, over the water, past brown islands rimmed with white waves. Your pilgrim girl’s ship would have been a mere speck to me then, and her husband, her dog, even smaller than that.