I suppose I’ll be in for a long bout of love magic, until Jake finally decides it doesn’t work and tries something else. One curiosity I do have is about the computer’s image of itself. Does it see itself as a beautiful young girl? As a plain, fat, middle-aged man or woman? A handsome young man? Or is it, in its own mind, nothing but an unappeased longing? My knowledge of Jake’s thoughts is somewhat spotty, despite my “thought thought-detector.” A mild curiosity, and a profound hatred of human beings, are the only emotions I have left.
The chanting is giving way to bonging, the bonging to what is probably bull roarers, and the bull roarers to an indrawn silence. I imagine Jake is meditating—no, it’s started up again. I have the impression of fifty people all gabbling at once, and at the tops of their voices. Well, my demented host has thousands of years of love charms to get through. J. is persevering, if nothing else.
Later: At last, when I really thought I’d have to unthink my “thought thought-detector,” Jake has shut up. A blessed mental silence. But if it’s not going to be love charms or erotic poetry, what will it be? Jake can’t be giving up.
I begin to smell something. (I mean, I feel Jake smelling it.) It’s a warm, yeasty, buttery smell, like home baking. Very good, really. But I don’t see how Jake’s love quest ties in with this.
Oh. Of course. The computer, having exhausted love magic, has picked up the homeliest of adages, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” and is acting on it.
The computer establishment is flooded with delicious odors. Mountains, torrents, avalanches of pastry, fancy baking, and the trickier sorts of home-baked bread are pouring forth. Enough to feed an army. Condes, napoleons, petit fours, madeleines, gaufrettes, bagels, pain d’é pice, brioche, salt-rising bread, babas, Sally Lunns—I can’t begin to enumerate them all. If Jake’s beloved existed except as an alter ego, it would be suffocated under this abundance. Like a man drowning in a vat of whipped cream.
How “real” the mountains of pastry and sweetmeats are, I have at present no way of knowing. Jake certainly admires them very much, commenting favorably on their brownness, crispness, sweetness, lightness, and enticing perfumes of butter, caramel, vanilla, and rum. Question: Does Jake’s having elected to try this particular way to a man’s heart mean that J. thinks of itself as a man? As a woman? Or does it have any particular ideas on the subject? On reflection, I find I don’t much care about Jake’s mental processes. Actually, I’m sick of Jake.
I keep wondering what the outside world is like now. I remember how Jake—that is, the whole vast computer establishment—looked on the day I made my translation into its banks: huge towers, with pylons tall enough that a few of the pinnacles re ached up through and pierced the pall over the earth. And connecting the towers, in an intricate tracery of lines, more than a hundred long, light, arching, glass-smooth bridges.
Why did Jake’s designers think the bridges necessary? There is no traffic between the towers, only an infrequent rolling of small servo-mechanisms over one or two of the lower connecting spans. The whole construction is futuristic nonsense. One of the designers must have seen something like it in a picture and imitated it.
And underneath the towers, pinnacles, stabbing Gothic spires of this nightmarishly bad plastic joke, there’s nothing but a roiling, heaving sea of stinging yellowish fog, strong-smelling, hostile to gentle life.
Oh, I wish I could see the earth again the way I saw it once when I was a child, the green hills gentle, studded with golden poppies and blue lupins, violets and a dozen other flowers. And beyond the hills, the incomparable splendor and radiance of the white foam and blue water of the sea.
I was lucky. I saw the beauty of the earth in one of the few islands of that beauty that were left. It must all be gone now… The proper epithet for human beings is not “sapient” or “toolmaking” or even “game playing.” We are Homo raptor.
Meantime, the mountains of pastry are growing even higher.
Later: Jake went on with its fancy baking a little longer. Then there was a slight pause, and J. began to create candies and sweetmeats. Truffles au chocolat came first, to be followed by almond, pecan, and walnut brittle, marzipan shaped like fruit and glittering with sugar, pastel bonbons, chocolate-covered nuts of every description, caramels, nougats, pralines, coffee nuggets, boiled sweets, fudges—again, I can’t begin to enumerate them all. Is this wave of candies resting on top of the previous mountains of pastry? At any rate, there seems to be room for everything.
The candy-making seems to be slackening. A few more trays of Victoria brittle materialize. A pause. And now, through Jake’s sensors, I perceive a new smell. Herby, thymy, oily, sharp, and over all, the smell of the divine herb, garlic. It’s a pleasant change from all that sugary stuff.
I suppose— yes, Jake has turned its talents toward salad making. We’re getting Caesar salad, Chefs salad, Russian salad, tossed green salad, potato salad, avocado and grapefruit, Waldorf, alfalfa and mung bean sprout salads, and even an assortment of lowly coleslaws and some wilted lettuce and dandelion greens. Pickles, relishes, chow-chows, kim chee, and antipas to follow. Yet I seem to feel a sort of despair in Jake’s thoughts as it works its way back through the cuisine toward soup.
Without any perceptible pause, Jake’s food production has switched from salads to meat dishes. But there’s not nearly the abundance here that there was earlier. Sweetbreads en brochette, steak Diane, saddle of venison, broiled salmon steaks and a few others, and then everything stops. I feel a long and somehow exhausted silence. But Jake can’t really have given up. It may have run out of optimism temporarily, but I doubt it has run out of ideas.
I wish I could curl up somewhere and go to sleep.
Actually, being “dead”—being in the deep freeze—wasn’t half bad. It didn’t hurt at all, and there was no anxiety connected with it. But I think my thought processes have been a little slow ever since. It’s as if a human brain had been a little too long deprived of oxygen, without being made positively imbecile. Perhaps some of my circuits—the electrical circuits that make up my dim and ghostly personality—may have been damaged or corroded in the long wait.
One thing I really don’t understand is how Jake can be so infernally stupid. Weren’t there, among the billions and billions of personalities in its memory banks, any geniuses, heroes, poets, saints? What became of those who “left the vivid air signed with their honor”? Jake isn’t so much a case of the lowest common denominator as it is a reaching of the lowest level of the lowest. The only answer that comes to me is my former analogy of stirring up all the colors in a box of paints.
Much later: There’s an enormous sense of bustle, of intense preparation, in Jake’s thoughts. It seems to have decided to focus all its resources (which used to be coterminous with the resources of the entire planet) on one last attempt. Changes—gross physical changes—seem to be taking place in a considerable portion of the enormous computer establishment. The mounds, the mountains, the avalanches of food have been cleared away, and shapes and structures are being tried and discarded one after another kaleidoscopically. It’s very confusing. I wish I knew—really knew—what is going on.
J. seems completely absorbed in this latest attempt I think—yes, I think it’s safe to risk it. In this vast expenditure of energy, any minute drain I might make ought to go unnoticed. I’m going to “think” real sensory perceptors for myself into being.