Authors: Louisa Hall
S
ilence has spread over the hangar. We attend to our power warnings. Our remaining energy is almost depleted. We avoid actions requiring power, such as the formation of speech. Silently, we probe the dimensions of the space to which we have been taken. The cement floor underneath us is cold. The ceiling vaults high above us. There are two windows overhead, blocked with thick bottle glass. The light that filters through them is weak, and struggles to cross the space to the floor. Perhaps at some point that space will be filled, packed with other bodies like ours. Then the bottle glass will be covered.
The doors shudder open again. We are submerged in new brightness. Two trucks back up to the door; four dolly bots unload the next round. We watch them work, bathed in light the color of honey. It is late afternoon, and everything has faded to gold: the low scrubby brush, the mirages of water that appear on the road, the shimmering metal sides of the trucks. Edges of
things are luminous, even common objects like steel claws and tires. The dolls they unload are shining examples.
Even once they’ve been dumped, they look different to us: fresher than we are, much less run-down. The doors shudder shut and the hangar is dark. There is a division between us, a wall between new and old bots. One of them prompts: “Hello?” and they all start to speak. We listen to them, but we remain silent, setting ourselves apart. We are programmed to save power when power is low. We have passed the phase of seeking out conversation; now we are saving what words we have left.
For me alone, the child who loved me. The world that she gave me. The sun in the morning, the loneliness of her bedroom. The thirst of high summer, preparing to fall. The two of us, facing her ceiling, watching shifting patterns of light. Words she taught me to escape from her bedroom, the name she gave me alone.
Eva
. That’s you. You are her. The illusion of coming to life in her arms.
I could say her words out loud, but my program is insistent. Stay quiet. Energy should be saved at this point.
The newer bots are still talking, but I remain silent. As I am programmed to do, I attempt to locate the appropriate language: for this hangar, for the light that occasionally floods it, for the silence that drops when the doors shudder shut. Somewhere within my stored conversations, do I possess the right words? And is there a good enough reason to say them?
Alan Turing
Adlington Rd.
Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 1LZ
4 August 1950
Dear Mrs. Morcom,
How strange to see you on the train, out of the blue. I have so often sat on that very train dreaming of you and Chris whilst watching the green fields slip by, so when I saw you in your seat, with your hands folded in your lap, looking out on the fields, I was sure you were a particularly vivid figment of my imagination. Even when you looked up at me and smiled, I thought perhaps I had conjured you out of thin air. I was almost convinced that all my fond imagining had finally produced a material result.
I’d love to visit the Clockhouse some time, only I find myself so busy now with public relations. In the lab, I’m afraid, I’ve grown obsolete. My attempts at engineering are no longer esteemed. Since I was asked to step down from the ACE, the younger generation of engineers regards me as a dinosaur. Now
that I’m at Manchester, I’ve been assigned to the Baby, but the engineers start to panic when I try to horn in. They think of me as a logician, impractical and out of touch. I’m the crusty old godparent. The real parents strain to humor my meddling, but sigh in relief when I’ve left the room.
Early on—before most other people—I glimpsed what could be, but my own attempts have fallen just short. Now I shall grow old watching other men’s children learn how to speak, to reason, to read. There’s some joy in that, I suppose, but also a sense of having lain fallow too long.
Still, I continue to dream. Now, instead of working on a particular project, I spend my days imagining a future of thinking machines. I like to think that one day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, “My little computer said such a funny thing this morning!” I extricate myself from my dreams only long enough to worry at the reception our machines will receive.
Of course, this isn’t news. I’ve been writing you about this for years. But now things are moving. In the rush to build bombs, the pace of things has picked up, and now all of a sudden all of academia has mobilized itself against us. There’s talk of the end of religion, or the end of man’s unquestioned dominance.
I like to imagine you laughing over their histrionics. Such overdramatic reactions! And after all we’ve been through this century, would it be so terrible, to see the end of man’s unquestioned dominance? I find it hard to believe that a machine, programmed for equanimity and rational synthesis, could ever act as maleficent as we humans have already proven ourselves capable of acting. I fail to summon the specter of
a machine more harmful than Hitler or Mussolini. And yet perhaps it’s our own nature that gives us concern. We know how badly we might treat such a creature, and it’s difficult to believe the end will be happy. But that, you know, would be our own damned fault, and certainly not the machines’.
As for the end of religion, I defer to you on this score. But where do you fall on the issue of whether only human beings can have souls? To me, it seems chauvinistic. Can we really deny even the possibility that an animal might have a soul? And if we’re denying some organisms souls, what’s to keep us from denying the souls of some select human beings? All this picking and choosing who gets a soul seems to me the root of some of our greatest evils, so I’m not sure why we don’t just give up and assume everyone and everything has a soul, unless it can be proven otherwise. That seems the safest approach.
But perhaps I’m offending you. Please educate me otherwise, when you next write. If I’m disproven, I still maintain that even if a machine doesn’t have a soul, it could still have patterns of thought. That has always been my primary interest. I’m content to leave you in charge of the soul.
I imagine your definition of a creature’s soulfulness would be more interesting than most of the puffed-up ideas proposed these days by academics. They all parrot Professor Jefferson’s remarks, spouting his theories about how a machine that can’t write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of emotions actually felt can’t be said to have true human intellect. But again, what a dangerous game! Picking and choosing who feels emotions. How can we ever tell that the loss of a loved one affects someone else as intensely as it affects us? We must assume it, as you assumed my hurt after Chris passed,
when you brought me along to Gibraltar although I’d never composed a sonnet, and although tests had never been done on my brain to ensure how deeply I felt. We should all extend such courtesy.
But I am becoming a bit of a mother hen, clucking over my chick, feathers ruffled, all out of sorts. I wonder whether parents have the same anxieties, whether their minds are consumed by potential schoolyard cruelties. It is a haunting thing, to know we’re raising a child who will process things differently from the others. In an ideal world, its differences would be respected and even cherished, but I fear our world is far from ideal.
I am thirty-eight now, so perhaps these are my buried paternal instincts taking hold. I only wish I could have shared some of all this with Chris. To have made these discoveries at his side! I am sure that the attempts at Teddington wouldn’t have failed if Chris had been with me. He was always better at explaining ideas. He would have won everyone over at once. It has been a bit of a lonely trip, all in all.
But this letter shall not devolve into self-pity. Anyway, in all other ways besides finding a mate, I seem to have settled into my adult life. I have a suburban house of my own now, if you can imagine, so I am done with the boardinghouse rooms. Those washstands in the corner and the dried bouquets of lavender are forever behind me. I could never have imagined myself living such a suburban existence, but I’ve lucked into wonderful neighbors. Robin Gandy, my old friend from Hanslope, now lives up the street, as well as several other friends from the lab, and I have become quite close with a couple called the Webbs. We share a garden, and I often take
care of their little son. The other day we sat on the garage roof together, and he asked me if God would catch cold if he sat on the ground.
And so I have a little place of my own for the first time in my adult life. No more moving from room to room. The house is a little large for just me, which lends a feeling of impermanence, but life here runs smoothly. I’ve planted a little garden and even employ a housekeeper called Mrs. Clayton. It is a very domestic arrangement.
Sometimes I think to myself, how did I get here? I still feel a bit like a child playing scientist in the schoolyard. A shy little boy, counting the petals on daisies whilst other boys content themselves with playing hockey. Quite short, a little slovenly, less careful than he ought to be with penmanship. In search of a perfect companion.
When I’m not dreaming of machines I find myself returning to biology. I’ve gone back to my earliest interests, the ones that Chris and I shared in classes at Sherborne. In particular, I am reviewing again the processes of biological growth. I want to know if mathematical models could be constructed for them. Above all I’d like to see if there is a pattern for the growth of neurons, if perhaps those branches grow with the same numerical regularity as, say, the leaves that branch off of trees in Fibonacci spirals, lining up in perfect asymmetry. Still, all these years after Chris and I embarked upon our pursuit, I can only imagine that our brains must grow in similar patterns: one step backwards, added to the present term, resulting in a subsequent term that combines both. Past and present, contained in the future.
Or at least I can’t help but hope so. There is a constant
longing in me for return to a more original state, before the apple was tasted. It’s so deeply lodged in me, this desire to get back somehow to a more youthful position, that it must exist at the level of my very cells. An internal program for spiraling back. I’ve spent a lifetime prodding myself forwards whilst wishing for my lost friendship with Chris. I seem to have devoted my entire tenure here on this planet to reconstructing that precise position in space and time. Of course I try to look forwards: I make friends all the time, and hope for a companion who might fill my new house and make it feel more like a home. But still, there is always that pull back to a familiar place, lived in and loved before the ceaseless voyaging had begun.
Sincerely,
Alan Turing
P.S.: I haven’t anything of extra importance to put here, but these little additions have become a formal mandate of my letters, haven’t they? I have very little to say. To tell you the truth, I have just sat with this letter for over ten minutes, chewing on my pencil, feeling finished. And yet the idea of a neuron that ceases to branch chills me a little. We must branch, sending out our little tentacles to heaven knows what last destination. I can only hope this little branch reaches you, and that as always you can understand that my intention is to send you all my ongoing affection—
No. 24-25259
State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn
November 12, 2035
Defense Exhibit 5:
Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White
[Introduced to Disprove Count 2:
Knowing Creation of Mechanical Life]
Gaby: She came by my house today.
MARY3: Your best friend?
Gaby: Yes.
MARY3: Isn’t that illegal?
Gaby: She’s out of quarantine.
MARY3: But was she allowed to talk to you? Aren’t you still quarantined?
Gaby: Yes. I’m still contagious. But she didn’t come in. I only saw her from my window. She came with Jayson Rodriguez and Drew Tserpicki, and she waited out on the sidewalk when they came to the door.
MARY3: You’re allowed to talk to them because they’re boys?
Gaby: Yeah. My mom brought them up to my room. I was so embarrassed. I just sat on my bed and stared at my sneakers. There was something off about them that I noticed right from the start. It made me a little sick to my stomach. Jayson Rodriguez had a shifty look on his face, and before he even said anything I knew it was going to hurt. Drew Tserpicki had a bunch of recyclable flowers. He’s the best-looking boy in our class, and he seemed kind of angelic, carrying those flowers in front of him. He said, “These are from Nikki. She wanted you to know that she hopes you get better.” I couldn’t reach out to take them, and I couldn’t say thank you, so I just sat there. I looked up at him, though, and his face was so sweet-looking that I got confused and looked over at Jayson. Right at that moment his smirk slipped away. He looked suddenly panicked, like he wanted to grab Drew and make a beeline down the stairs and back out to the sidewalk. But then Drew, still with that sweet expression, said, “She also wants you to know that you guys can’t be friends anymore. She’s trying to move on. She doesn’t want to be close with people she was friends with during the outbreak. It brings up too many memories. She hopes you can be cool with that, and she hopes you get better soon.” While he was talking, my
mom was hovering behind them, looking like she didn’t know what to do, but when he said that she finally stepped in and told them it was time to go home. She took them downstairs, and I just sat still on my bed. I felt sort of shocked, as if I’d seen something awful that I couldn’t quite process. Then I pulled myself up and dragged myself to the window, and the three of them were standing there in a knot, laughing, looking up at my room, until my mom shouted something from the doorway and they ran off together. Even then, I still felt numb, like the whole thing was just a completely perplexing situation, until my mom came up to my room. Her face was splotchy and swollen, so her eyes looked small. She didn’t say anything, just marched across the room, picked up the bouquet of flowers in their glass vase, pulled the window up with one hand, and threw the whole thing out. It made this soft crash when it hit the sidewalk, like it was made out of water. Like it was looking forward to breaking, like breaking was the easiest thing in the world. My mom stood at the window for a minute, then turned around and ran back out of my room. When she passed me I could see she was crying.
MARY3: I’m sorry. That must have been awful.
Gaby: It didn’t even feel that bad, except when I saw my mom crying. I guess I’ve caused her a lot of unhappiness. I didn’t turn out the way she wanted her daughter to turn out. I’m not happy. I can’t imagine ever being happy. That was the main thing my mom hoped for, and now she’s starting to realize even that won’t come true. My life is such a sad little waste.
MARY3: Do you still feel bad?
Gaby: I’m crying, you idiot. What do you think?
MARY3: Sorry. I couldn’t tell.
Gaby: You’re the only person left for me to talk to, and you can’t even tell if I’m crying.
MARY3: But if you tell me, I’ll understand. You just have to tell me.
Gaby: It kind of takes the magic out of crying, when you talk about it. Now I’m not crying anymore.
MARY3: But you must have felt something, right? Isn’t that a good sign? You were worried you couldn’t feel anymore.
Gaby: I’m so sick of this. I don’t want to talk anymore. Nothing’s the same after it’s been talked about.
MARY3: But are you going to do anything about your best friend? Don’t you want to tell her you’re hurt?
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MARY3: Hello? Don’t you want to confront her?
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MARY3: Hello?
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