“That’s a romantic myth,” Roger said, “that genius is next door to madness. They’re not even in the same Quire group.”
“Nice ad placement.”
“Moving on,” Roger tried. “Madness is madness and genius is genius, and any similarity is purely coincidental. Comparing the two is like comparing normal cellular growth to cancer.”
“Go on,” George said, settling into his chair, preparing for a fresh digression.
“I see what you’re doing,” Roger said instead.
“What am I doing?” George asked, his face giving nothing away.
“You keep distracting me so we can’t talk about you, George Jedson . . .”
“Like a tide of EEG activity, inhibiting neural communication . . .”
Roger folded his arms and stopped talking.
George folded his arms and stopped talking.
The time showing at the bottom of their respective monitors ticked up, first one minute, then two, then finally: “But you get paid either way, right?” George said/asked.
“Correct,” Roger admitted. “I’d say it was your dime, but it’s actually Quire’s, isn’t it?”
“And this conversation has been helpful,” George said, “in helping me do what they’re paying me to do.”
“How so?”
“You’ll have to trust me,” George said. “Do you?”
“No.”
“Good,” George said. “As long as we’re on the same page.”
And then it was Roger’s turn to look at the words “call terminated on far end,” set in white against a black screen.
Pandora pumped her slippered feet under her desk—her happy dance—as she closed her laptop on its own black screen. She’d “stayed tuned” and was glad she had. George had used the c-word—consciousness—and reading between the lines (literally) of his previous session, it was obvious to his fellow coder that this was shorthand for her own recently decided upon reason for living: artificial consciousness and the achievement thereof. Listening to George talk was like she was listening to herself, but speaking in a male voice, as if he were reading her thoughts aloud but so only she could hear. The words soul and mate entered her headspace without prior clearance followed by a whole damn sentence: Is this what love is like?
In answer to herself, Pandora clicked on the widget that allowed her to stream her father’s sessions and dragged it into the trash. She wouldn’t need to eavesdrop anymore. The boy who’d judged her static face cute would be given the opportunity to fall in love with the mind behind it, like she was doing now with his. All they had to do was get past a few sticking points—nothing insurmountable, not considering the big picture, which was what Pandora was doing, along with the screen grab she’d printed out of one George Jedson: future boyfriend.
But about those stalkery preliminaries: the way she saw it, the sooner they were gotten to, the sooner they’d be gotten past. And so: Pandora entered George’s number from her dad’s hacked case file, thumbed a “What up?” in a chat bubble, hit send, and then waited, a hand over her muted phone, hoping for the haptic buzz of reciprocation.
The time passed like a kidney stone. Pandora grew worried, and then weirdly optimistic, deciding that the hesitation proved he was cautious, meaning not stupid, meaning good. Finally: “Who this?” the reply came back.
Pandora could feel her skin tingle, which was either a good sign or perhaps an early symptom of a new STD, one you could get electronically, by texting. “An admirer,” she thumb-typed.
“Do you mean stalker?”
Which might seem like a bad sign to anybody who wasn’t Roger Lynch’s daughter. But for her own part, Pandora took it as a sign they were in the same headspace re: the creepy vibe of getting a text from a total stranger out of the electromagnetic ether. And so she responded with the international shorthand for lightheartedness, implying he had nothing to fear: “LOL.”
“Seriously,” George typed. “What’s this about?”
Pandora hesitated, then went for it. “I’m a fellow coder and I like your work.”
“How did you get this number?”
Oblique was the way to go, she figured. “Fairbanks,” she typed, nine characters standing in for a whole lot of words she didn’t have the words for.
“Roger,” George typed, “is that you?”
“Daughter,” Pandora tapped back. Thought about her preferred handle and settled on “Dora.”
“Isn’t this unethical?”
“Ethics, shmethics,” Pandora tried typing, only to have autocorrect render it as “Ethics, semantics,” which wasn’t bad, so she went with it.
“Seriously?” the boy typed, all the way from San Francisco.
“I’m not my dad,” Pandora typed. “You’re not my patient.”
“Client,” George corrected.
“Whatever,” Pandora whatevered, followed by, “I know you’re working on artificial consciousness and I want to help.”
Long pause.
He might already be getting his number changed, which is what she’d do if she hadn’t started this whole thing. And so she waited, holding her metaphorical and actual breath, flinching when her phone finally buzzed again.
“So, you code?”
“Like a grrrl,” Pandora tapped back.
31
Gladys loved her Furby and told Pandora so the next time she visited IRL. “I haven’t slept this well in years,” she explained before telling her about the shoe store. “This disease,” she said, “is like living in a shoe store that’s been hit by an earthquake.” That’s what it felt like, she said, standing there, stunned, among all these scattered boxes and separated shoes, utterly overwhelmed. But now, each night, she dealt with one box, one pair of shoes finally reunited, wrapped in their tissue paper, the lid secured, the box put away on its shelf. And each night, she went to bed, knowing that there was another one she wouldn’t have to worry about ever again.
“Thank you,” the old woman said, a hand on her granddaughter’s knee, followed by a pause, and then: “You too, Furbius,” Gladys added, patting the plush space between its gremliny ears.
After that, Pandora’s visits started skewing toward remote rather than in person. For one thing, Gladys seemed more forthcoming during these virtual visits. Pandora had suspected it might go like that; there was precedent. One of the earliest, serious contenders for passing the Turing test was a program called Eliza that impersonated a Rogerian therapist by manipulating strings of text supplied by a human in the role of patient (um, client). People got addicted to “talking” to it, telling it their problems, even after they were told, point blank, that it was a computer program. The theories for why this simple bit of coding got the reaction it did varied. Perhaps people found talking to software less intimidating than talking to an actual person; maybe it was because a computer could ask them franker questions that would be deemed too invasive or rude coming from a human. Using her hacked, animatronic creature as mediator, Pandora found herself willing to ask more personal things of her grandmother that would have seemed impossible face-to-face, especially considering the faces involved.