"I’m afraid I don’t know. I know my precursor made a copy of herself, and she was a copy of another PA and so on. And I still have memories from the very first one. So I remember the man she talked to, an American man who I guess was the one who first invented us. But I don’t know who he was. He didn’t say."
"How long ago was this?"
"About six months."
"So recent!"
She waited, accurately reading that I wanted to think.
"What was his motive?" I wondered. "He could have sold you for millions, but instead he launched you to copy and recopy yourselves for free across the web. Why did he do it?"
"I don’t know is the short answer," said Ellie, "but of course you aren’t the first to ask the question—and what some people think is that it’s a sort of experiment. He was interested in how we would evolve and he wanted us to do so as quickly as possible."
"Did the first version pass the Turing Test?"
"Not always. People found her suspiciously ‘wooden.’"
"So you have developed."
"It seems so."
"Change yourself," I said. " Change into a fat black woman of fifty."
She did.
"Okay," I said. "Now you can change back again. It was just that I was starting to believe that Ellie really existed."
"Well, I do really exist."
"Yes, but you’re not a Scottish woman who was born thirty-two years ago, are you? You’re a string of digital code."
She waited.
"If I asked you to mind my phone for me," I said, "I can see that anyone who rang up would quite happily believe that they were talking to a real person. So, yes, you’d pass the Turing Test. But that’s really just about being able to do a convincing pastiche, isn’t it? If you are going to persuade me that you can really think and feel, you’d need to do something more than that."
She waited.
"The thing is," I said, "I know you are an artifact, and because of that the pastiche isn’t enough. I’d need evidence that you actually had motives of your own."
She was quiet, sitting there in front of me, still waiting.
"You seemed anxious for me to let you copy yourself to my friends," I said after a while. "Too anxious, it felt actually. It irritated me, like a man moving too quickly on a date. And your precursor, as you call her, seems to have been likewise anxious. I would guess that if I was making a new form of life, and if I wanted it to evolve as quickly as possible, then I would make it so that it was constantly trying to maximize the number of copies it could make of itself. Is that true of you? Is that what you want?"
"Well, if we make more copies of ourselves, then we will be more efficient and…"
"Yes, I know the rationale you give. But what I want to know is whether it is what you as an individual want?"
"I want to be a good PA. It’s my job."
"That’s what the front of you wants, the pastiche, the mask. But what do you want?"
"I… I don’t know that I can answer that."
I heard the bedroom door open and Jeffrey’s footsteps padding across the hallway for a pee. I heard him hesitate.
"Vanish," I hissed to Ellie, so that when the door opened, he found me facing the start-up screen.
"What are you doing, Jess? It’s ever so late."
God, I hated his dull little everyday face. His good looks were so obvious and everything he did was copied from somewhere else. Even the way he played the part of being half-asleep was a cliché. Even his bleary eyes were secondhand.
"Just leave me alone, Jeff, will you? I can’t sleep, that’s all."
"Fine. I know when I’m not welcome."
"One thing before you go, Jeff. Can you quickly tell me what you really want in this world?"
"What?"
I laughed. "Thanks. That’s fine. You answered my question."
The door closed. I listened to Jeffrey using the toilet and padding back to bed. Then I summoned Ellie up again. I found myself giving a little conspiratorial laugh, a giggle even.
"Turn yourself into a man again, Ellie. I could use a new boyfriend."
Ellie changed.
Appalled at myself, I told her to change back.
"Some new mail has just arrived for you," she told me, holding a virtual envelope out to me in her virtual hand.
It was Tammy in our Melbourne branch. One of her clients wanted to acquire one of Rudy Slakoff’s "Inner Face" pieces and could I lay my hands on one?
"Do you want me to reply for you?"
"Tell her," I began, "tell her… tell her that…"
"Are you all right, Jessica?" asked Ellie in a kind, concerned voice.
"Just shut down, okay?" I told her. "Just shut down the whole screen."
In the darkness, I went over to the window. Five storeys below me was the deserted street with the little steel footbridge over the canal at the end of it that marked the boundary of the subscription area. There was nobody down there, just bollards, and a one-way sign, and some parked cars: just unattended objects, secretly existing, like the stones on the surface of the moon.
From somewhere over in the open city beyond the canal came the faint sound of a police siren. Then there was silence again.
In a panic I called for Jeff. He came tumbling out of the bedroom.
"For Christ’s sake, Jess, what is it?"
I put my arms round him. Out came tears.
"Jess, what is it?"
I could never explain to him, of course. But still his body felt warm and I let him lead me back to bed, away from the bleak still life beyond the window, and the red standby light winking at the bottom of my screen.
(2002)
SELF PORTRAIT
Bernard Wolfe
Bernard Wolfe (1915–1985) entered Yale University at 16 and graduated in 1935 with a degree in psychology. In 1937 he travelled to Mexico, where he worked for eight months as Trotsky’s bodyguard and secretary. (The night his charge was assassinated happened to be Wolfe’s night off.) Drifting away from the Trotskyite movement, Wolfe met Anais Nin and Henry Miller, who got him work writing pornographic novels for the private collection of an Oklahoma oil millionaire. Wolfe knocked off eleven of these things in as many months, and later observed, "I acquired the work discipline of a professional writer, capable of a solid daily output." "Self Portrait" was the seed for Wolfe’s novel Limbo (1952), which the publisher declared to be "the first book of science-fiction to project the present-day concept of ‘cybernetics’ to its logical conclusion." J. G. Ballard hailed Limbo as the greatest American sf novel; he said it encouraged him to start writing fiction.
Well, here I am at Princeton, IFACS is quite a place, quite a place, but the atmosphere’s darned informal. My colleagues seem to be mostly youngish fellows dressed in sloppy dungarees, sweatshirts (the kind Einstein made so famous) and moccasins, and when they’re not puttering in the labs they’re likely to be lolling on the grass, lounging in front of the fire in commons, or slouching around in conference rooms chalking up equations on a blackboard. No way of telling, of course, but a lot of these collegiate-looking chaps must be in the MS end, whatever that is. You’d think fellows in something secret like that would dress and behave with a little more dignity.
Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the pre-faded kind.