George LOL’d followed by the “big grin” emoji.
Pandora looked at the text, wondering how to respond, or even whether she should. It wasn’t exactly the wordless thumbs-up, but it did have an “end of message” vibe to it, letting her know without saying so specifically that this particular thread had reached its end.
Or maybe not.
Text etiquette was still evolving—practically daily, as far as she could tell. Would responding suggest she was too needy? Curious? Or perhaps an escaped lunatic who’d killed his therapist and was now posing as his daughter? Probably not that last one, Pandora thought. He’d already seen her picture on her dad’s desk—a fact that led in a straight line to this exchange, meaning technically he’d started it, so . . .
“What’s the weather like where you are?”
“Right now?” George typed, then paused. Pandora imagined him crossing to a window to look, his body backlit by a clutch of monitors, the only lighting in his code-boy cave. In her imagination, that blue light was doing his butt a lot of favors. Meanwhile: “There’s a lot of fog rolling in off the bay,” George added, completing his response.
“Fog here too,” Pandora typed, “like an ice tray steaming from a freezer.”
“Is that what they mean by ice fog?”
“I guess,” Pandora guessed. “I like it.”
“It’s like the sky and land meet to make limbo,” George typed, bordering on the poetic.
Pandora took that as a good sign, though not without its caveats. Her own dad had warned that “when a boy stoops to poetry, you better decide if he’s a keeper or a goner right away. And if it’s the latter, don’t dillydally. Cut to the heart stomping pronto. No half measures. Otherwise, you’ll have this sad little puppy following you around, right up until he turns into Hannibal Lecter.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Pandora had said back. “Good to know . . .”
Unfortunately, her father hadn’t said what to do if the boy spouting verse was a keeper. Perhaps it was a case of dad denial—that omission—the presumption being that nobody could possibly be good enough for his little girl. Thankfully, such decisions were not up to him. Hell, they were hardly up to Pandora—the brain part of her, at least. All she knew was every time she felt his text hum, she wanted to . . .
And will you look at that? Pandora was a bit of a poet herself.
George not only agreed to only texting, he added his own spin: it’d be good practice for working on AI. “Like an ongoing Turing test,” he wrote. They could pretend to not know the other was human, seeing what clues would tip the scale one way or the other. And by extending the Turing test indefinitely, they’d be subtly programming their brains to program another brain, one that would—if they succeeded—be indistinguishable from either of them, in terms of its seeming humanity.
“That does not compute,” Pandora texted back, followed by the “robot” emoji and an “LOL,” just in case.
To further prove how okay he was with the text-only stipulation, George sent Pandora a link to an app he’d written that should serve their purpose and privacy nicely: Texting w/o Borders, so named—should he ever commercialize it—for its dispensing with the character limits usually associated with SMS- and MMS-based messaging services. Instead of breaking up long texts into a series of (sometimes disordered) bubbles, his app worked on the user-experience end to sort and recombine multiple messages within a single, elastic text bubble that stretched to accommodate whatever text was entered, no need to think in abbreviations anymore.
“I could send you War and Peace if I wanted to,” he wrote.
“Please don’t,” Pandora wrote back.
“Won’t.”
The secret sauce was larceny. Because service providers generally charged by the SMS or MMS, George’s app, while providing a simplified user experience on the front end, could get pretty expensive to use in practice. And so George “outsourced” those charges to unsuspecting but nevertheless deserving corporate parties in the fossil fuel industry. “My personal carbon tax on the planet killers,” he explained. The app also allowed the use of bold, underline, and italics and employed a proprietary encryption strategy to keep sender and receiver messages private from prying government, corporate, and/or parental eyes, with the option to self-destruct within a user-set amount of time after being read.
If Pandora wondered why George happened to have such an app ready to send her a link to, she didn’t mention it. In fact, he’d coded it up a year earlier to communicate with his deported mother in Mexico. The prying eyes he wanted to avoid belonged to ICE, and he had corporate creeps picking up the tab because she was working at a maquiladora that paid her crap, while George, the perennial foster kid, didn’t get an allowance and had to make do, collecting bottles and cans he could return for five cents apiece.
As it turned out, George and his mom never got a chance to use his app. One evening, Margarita/Marge hadn’t been on the bus back to her neighborhood. And she wasn’t on the bus returning to the maquiladora the next morning. Her body wasn’t found until several days later, in a dump near where she’d worked, an American manufacturer of consumer electronics that imported the parts duty-free, assembled them, and then exported them back to America, all bearing labels that read, “Made in USA.” Those labels had made her homesick every day, until they couldn’t anymore, her throat having been cut. The story of her death was written in Spanish and took up hardly any space at all. She’d been his mother and now she was just words in a local paper George found and translated through Google News, one of the thousands of dead women Juárez had become known for, none of their murders any closer to being solved.
So yeah, George was messed up all right. Was it any wonder he preferred talking about the human mind in general, as opposed to his own specifically?
What followed was a coders’ romance, the intercourse intellectual as opposed to sexual, their text exchanges touching on all things computer related, from favorite algorithms to backdoor exploits, their mutual contempt for script kiddies and other Tor tourists, as well as specific denial-of-service attacks they found especially amusing and/or inspirational.
“You hear what Anonymous pulled off?”
“Thumbs-up” emoji and an “LOL.”
Not that it was always a geek fest. They talked about the big stuff, too, the things that distracted them, drove them, and/or kept them up at night during this chronological way station between young and adult, when they still had time to think about big ideas, before acting their age meant drowning in the little ideas of the world.
In a lot of ways, George and Pandora were like quantum particles that had become entangled, acting on one another—as Einstein would have it—spookily at a distance. Because even though Fairbanks and San Francisco were separated by two to three thousand miles, depending on whether you drove or flew, while the cultural gulf was astronomical, neither distance seemed to matter. The two teens were mind melded, sharing the same sense of humor when it came to their hacktivism and the same obsessions about the potential uses of AI. Both were convinced that quantum physics and the burgeoning field of quantum computing would inform the overlap of mind and body in the Venn diagram of that particular philosophical conundrum. And both felt the same sense of personal injury at the thought that their thinking would someday come to an end. Or using fewer words: