Spark: A Novel (23 page)

The next morning, I arrived at the café and ordered a bottle of water. This time Jafar appeared at 8:48. The bodyguard kept his hands in his pockets until Jafar got into the car.

As I counted out the money for my bill, I saw Nalini and Sanjay pass through the archway and stroll down the sidewalk. Nalini carried a toy sailboat under her arm while her son walked with a five-foot-long bamboo pole that had a metal hook on one end.

Limping with the silver-handled cane, I followed them up the street and through the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens. It had rained the night before and the gravel pathway was dotted with little puddles of rainwater. Every time Sanjay encountered a puddle, the boy would stop for an instant and then hop over this obstacle.

I dislike parks with hills and rocks and raggedy trees. But the Luxembourg Gardens had been arranged in an orderly, symmetrical pattern. There were straight paths, clipped hedges, and planting beds edged in stone. Here and there, the park designers had placed marble statues of gods and goddesses gazing off into the distance.

The center of the park was a large, octagonal-shaped pool near the Luxembourg Palace. On this cold morning, only a few children were trying to sail toy boats on its bright green surface. Moving slowly, as if both mother and son were performing a ceremony,
Nalini placed the boat in the pool and Sanjay gave his vessel a push with the bamboo pole. I felt as if the entire world was frozen at that moment. The palace, the pool, the boat, and the dead man standing beneath a leafless tree had become a memory fixed in time. Then my Shell breathed in and the rusty gears of the clock squeaked and shuddered and began moving again.

A gust of wind ruffled the surface of the pool. The sails of the toy boats billowed out and Sanjay’s boat began to cut through the waves. Both Nalini and Sanjay were transformed by this event. Smiling and chattering to each other in Hindi, they circled the pool. Just before the boat was about to crash on the other side, the little boy stopped it with the pole and sent it off in another direction.

I watched them play with the boat for ten minutes or so, and then I sat down on a park chair and switched on my computer. When I checked my e-mail, I found a message sent by someone working for the Special Services Section.

I glanced up from the computer. The wind had died and now the sailboat was becalmed in the middle of its circular ocean. Nalini and Sanjay sat down on a bench and waited for something to happen.

When I left Marian Hospital, Dr. Tollner gave me a piece of paper that listed the three most important aspects of my outpatient treatment:

The drugs I had swallowed at the hospital made my Spark feel frozen and restrained—like a bright yellow tennis ball captive in a block of ice. Because my Spark couldn’t move, my Shell was slow and apathetic.

So I threw all the pills down a storm drain and, in a small way, probably lessened the depression and anxiety of the fish swimming in the Hudson River. Within a week or two my Spark began to rise and fall within me like a fragment of dust in a beam of sunlight. Without the drugs, I could think faster and react to events around me.

Getting rid of my therapist was another easy decision. Emma Rutherford was a slender young woman with large glasses who met patients at a clinic on East Twelfth Street. Like Dr. Rose, she tried to prove that I was alive by telling me,
Cogito, ergo sum.
But that statement had lost its power. Since returning to the city, I had gone on the Internet and found out that both therapists didn’t understand what Descartes was trying to say. Like many people they assumed that:

But Descartes was a clever philosopher. He knew that the act of thinking proves only the existence of some form of consciousness.

I tried to explain this to Dr. Rutherford as she took notes on her computer.

“But you couldn’t think if you were dead, Mr. Davis. Our thoughts are created within our brains. And dead people don’t have functional brains.”

“Perhaps we’re characters in a dream. We could be in the mind of an old man living in Maine. He’s sleeping alone in an iron bed with frost on the windows and two dogs snoring on the floor. In a few minutes, the dreamer is going to wake up and go to the bathroom. And then we’ll vanish.”

Dr. Rutherford took off her glasses and began to clean them with a tissue. “I don’t think an elderly person in Maine would create someone like
me,
” she said. “This isn’t a dream, Mr. Davis. There aren’t any elves and unicorns wandering around New York City.”

“We could be a real-time simulation controlled by game theory software,” I said. “You’re a computer program that thinks you’re a psychologist.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“And I’m a program that thinks I’m dead.”

Dr. Rutherford glanced up from her computer. “You have Cotard’s syndrome, Mr. Davis. I realize that your delusions may seem very real to you, but it’s just your mind coming up with a logical reason for your inability to feel emotions. I dealt with autistic children during my residency, and you show certain similarities. But right now we’re sitting in this office, having a conversation. All evidence indicates that you’re alive.”

“That’s
your
evidence,” I said. “
My
evidence leads to a different conclusion.”

“You had a motorcycle accident, correct? You’re recovering from a severe brain injury. I could contact Marian Hospital and they might send me your X-rays.”

“I had a Transformation, and now I know what’s real.”

I left the clinic that afternoon and never returned. Now that I didn’t have to go downtown to see Dr. Rutherford, I could remain inside my apartment. Although my face appeared in framed photographs hanging on the wall of the bedroom, I felt no connection to these images or the softball trophies on the living room mantelpiece or the clothes hanging in the closet. They were objects—nothing more.

I made one major purchase during this period of time: a new phone with the software for a Shadow. I spent many hours listening to different combinations of age, accent, and personality until I finally created Laura.

The rest of my possessions gradually disappeared. Every morning I threw a personal object into the trash can—a pair of jeans, a cashmere sweater, love letters from a girlfriend, a college diploma.
After I had cleaned out the drawers and closets, I got rid of most of my furniture. Dr. Rutherford was right about one thing; I didn’t see any elves and unicorns on Second Avenue. But New York was a magical city if you wanted to lose things. All I had to do was leave a throw rug or a kitchen chair on the sidewalk and, in an hour or so, it was gone.

The only things that wouldn’t vanish were the bills in the mailbox and the calls on my answering machine. A portion of my hospital bill was covered by medical insurance and I was being sued for the rest. I hadn’t paid my rent for three months and my landlord had taped an eviction notice on my door. If I didn’t obtain money, I might be forced onto the street.

The ID card in my wallet confirmed that I was an employee for InterFace and that the company’s offices were on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street. I remembered that the receptionist was an older woman named Patty Canales who sat at a front desk, munched on barbecue potato chips, and talked to her sister on the phone. But when I showed up at the building one morning, I discovered that Miss Canales had been replaced by a nubot that was designed to look like a muscular blond man in his twenties. He smiled at me when I stepped out of the elevator.

“Welcome to InterFace. I’m Kevin. How may I help you?”

“Are you a machine?”

“Yes, sir. And I’m using the voice-recognition software developed by our design team. Our slogan is: ‘At InterFace, we listen.’ ”

“I used to work here, Kevin. I need to talk to someone about my job.”

I placed my employee ID on the bot’s desk and Kevin scanned the barcode with his eyes. “Please sit down, Mr. Davis. A member of our staff will speak to you in a few minutes.”

I sat on the couch and a few minutes later the phone on the end table rang. When I picked up the handset, I heard a woman’s voice. “Hello, Mr. Davis. This is Miss Colby from Human and Technical Resources. Do you have an appointment?”

“No. I used to work here, then I had a motorcycle accident and—”

“I know what happened. We’ve tried to contact you. Please walk through the green door and follow your image to my office.”

When I entered the hallway, I saw an image of myself on a series of wall screens. A woman’s voice said, “This way, Mr. Davis.”

Then—“Turn right, Mr. Davis.”

Then—“You’re going to Room 1192, Mr. Davis.”

And finally—“You’ve arrived at your destination. At InterFace, we listen.”

I entered a private office and found a young woman sitting behind a desk. Miss Colby had a helmet hairstyle that framed her cheekbones and eyes. There were no papers on her desk—only a keyboard and a small monitor screen that couldn’t be seen by the person facing her. On the shelf behind her, she had placed three framed photographs of cats—including one of a black-and-white kitten dressed up as a Christmas elf.

“Please sit down, Mr. Davis. I need to bring up your file.”

She typed my ID number and stared at the computer screen. Although she appeared to be breathing and her eyelids blinked, I began to wonder if she was a machine.

Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped design the first modern computing machine, had also invented the Turing Test—a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior. The test was modeled after a Cambridge University party game in which a man and woman were sent to separate rooms and people were given twenty questions to figure out their identities. In Turing’s test, the machine and a human being were placed in separate rooms and a judge asked them questions. If the judge couldn’t tell the difference between a computer and a human, then the machine passed the test.

It used to be much easier to detect a robot. I was sure that Kevin, the new receptionist, was programmed to tell the truth. But some nubots with reactive intelligence acted more like humans. They had the power to lie and pretend to be stupid. If you asked
these robots for the twenty-digit value of pi, they had the option of saying, “How would I know? I’m not very good with math.…”

Miss Colby looked up from the monitor and smiled. Her lips were closed and I couldn’t see if she had a tongue.

“Mr. Davis, everyone here at InterFace was saddened to hear about your motorcycle accident. A member of our staff attempted to contact you on several occasions, but you didn’t respond. It’s been almost five months since we’ve heard from you. During that time, there have been significant changes in company policy.”