She’d caught her grandmother in a lie about an unhealthy addiction she’d developed for a hard, coffee-flavored candy called Nips. Gladys had begun eating the things by the box. And even though Pandora had been assured that it wasn’t uncommon for the elderly to develop a sweet tooth later in life, still she worried. Not unlike a meth addiction, Gladys’s sweet tooth had begun to take a toll on her actual teeth—a full set of which she still possessed after ninety-plus years, their enamel in her case having proved far more durable than cortical tissue. The old girl had taken pride in her choppers, flossing obsessively, even now, when the act had become less a decision and more muscle memory. But her teeth were decidedly at risk if she kept sucking down Nips like this. And so Pandora decided to say something: “Gram, seriously,” she said, “I brought you a whole box yesterday.”
Gladys looked at her expectantly, awaiting a re-up on her fix.
“Are you telling me you finished it already?”
Gladys shrugged.
Pandora checked out the box on the nightstand. Empty.
“Jesus, Gram,” her granddaughter said, exasperated. “You can forget about needing dentures. You’re going to need a new pancreas if you keep this up.”
“The nurses steal them,” Gladys bluffed.
And so Pandora went to her grandmother’s wastebasket, which was filled with the little cellophane wrappers the candy came in. She presented the evidence to her grandmother. “Well?”
Gladys folded her bird arms in her pink nightgown and frowned. “Happy, Nancy Drew?” she asked.
And the delivery—the timing—hit Pandora smack in the solar plexus, doubling her over with laughter. The old girl was still there, underneath the gunk. Gladys Lynch née Kowalski, the smartass grandmother of Pandora, the Tigris and Euphrates of the younger woman’s charming ways, showing she still had it, as affirmed and attested to by her only granddaughter thusly:
“Gram,” Pandora wheezed, “you still got it.”
“Can you write that down,” Gladys asked, meaning the location of the “it” she still had, “in case I forget?”
And so Pandora did. Removing a scrap of paper from her pocket and a pen, she wrote in all caps: “IT.”
She handed it to Gladys, who tucked it into a pocket in her nightgown before breathing what seemed to be a sincere sigh of relief. “Thank you,” she said, again apparently sincere. “That’s a load off my mind,” she added, patting the wrong pocket of her nightgown.
37
There was another reason George had gone along so easily with Pandora’s text-only rule: he wasn’t actually complying with it. He had her number—both figuratively and literally—and it wasn’t a big deal to turn on her phone’s camera, NSA-style, which frankly any hacker, post-Snowden, should have expected. The hard part was not letting on what he knew about her, not texting questions about whether anything was wrong when her face was being especially expressive about something unrelated to the subject matter of the texts they were exchanging. He had to abandon a voice-recognition app he’d been using to transcribe his end of their exchanges because the immediacy of what came out of his mouth and into the text bubble was an invitation to say things like “Don’t cry” if it looked like she was about to. He needed those extra seconds for his thoughts to reach his fingertips to avoid slips, Freudian or otherwise.
The thing was, George liked Pandora’s face: the bigness of her smile when she managed one, un-self-conscious because she didn’t know he was watching. He found her face, for all its guileless animation, lovely—if not lovely because of its guileless animation. He lived in the land of secret projects and code names, of lips that zipped when he got too close to a table rounded by busy hunched heads, so the openness of her face was a breath of fresh air. A face like that could cure the world’s problems, he thought, imagining what it would be like if people couldn’t hide behind masks and avatars, if they wore their hearts not so much on their sleeves but a bit higher up. Plus, Pandora liked him unlike others in his life, and that made all the difference when it came to talking to—correction: texting with—her.
He’d tried confessing his deception once, albeit obliquely. “You know the expression ‘You’ve made my day’?” he typed.
“Yes?”
“Well, you do that pretty much every time we have one of these—what should we call them? Not a tête-à-tête.”
“A meeting of minds?” Pandora suggested.
“I’ll bet you were smiling when you wrote that,” he typed, daring himself to hit send, and then did.
“How’d you know?” she wrote back.
But then he let the opportunity for confession slip by. “Great minds,” he typed, followed by the “laughing tears” emoji.
Great minds, met, tend to brainstorm, and that’s precisely what Pandora and George proceeded to do, beginning with George’s theory about how the nervous system went from being an immediate reaction machine to something that retained memories to inform thought and, yes, consciousness. “You know the expression ‘painful memories’?” he asked.
“Yes,” Pandora typed. “Those are what my dad calls a steady income.”
“Well, I think pain was originally a proxy for memory. Its persistence was for our earliest ancestors what memory is for us: a reminder. I think memory cells evolved from the cells activated by pain, those nerve cells desperately signaling for us to take our hand out of the fire. Those nerves evolved, rewiring themselves into retaining a memory of the pain well after the damaged skin was healed. Immediate pain was like short-term memory, while the memory of pain became long-term storage that prevented us from having to relearn the same painful lessons after the original wounds stopped hurting.”
“So what’s the takeaway?” Pandora wrote back.
“I think our AI needs to be able to feel pain,” George wrote.
“I won’t tell it you suggested that,” Pandora wrote back, “once it becomes sentient and, you know, all powerful.”
Another time, it was the ability to have and feel emotions that were the key to bringing an AI to a human level of consciousness.
“This world is a fire hose of data coming at us,” he typed. “How are we supposed to make sense of it all? How do we prioritize and rank what’s important to pay attention to versus what we can ignore to preserve our bandwidth?”
“I’m guessing the answer isn’t flipping a quarter,” Pandora wrote back.
“Emotions,” George typed, “are nature’s Google.”
“How so?”
“Google uses click-through statistics as a way to rank search results,” George typed. “For people, memory search optimization is achieved by the emotional residue associated with the memories being searched. The strongest emotional associations cause those memories to rank highest.”
Pandora couldn’t not think about Gladys, whom she’d told George about, and how her grandmother’s condition had set her down the path to meeting him. “I think that’s why she remembers WWII stuff better than what happened yesterday,” she texted back. “That’s when her emotions were supercharged. Which is nice, I guess.”