“I know. I watched, and I tried to hold you.”
“Don't do that. Get me on my side. Stay behind me and watch out for flailing arms. Get a pillow under my head if you can. Keep me away from things I could injure myself on.” I looked her square in the eye. “I want to emphasize this. Just
try
to do all those things. If I'm getting too violent, it's better you stand off to the side. Better for both of us. If I knock you out, you won't be able to help me if I start strangling on vomit.”
I kept looking at her eyes. She must have read my mind, because she smiled slightly.
“Sorry, Yank. I am not freaked out. I mean, like, it's totally gross, you know, and it barfs me out to the max, you couldâ”
“âgag me with a spoon, I know. Okay, right, I know I was dumb. And that's about it. I might bite my tongue or the inside of my cheek. Don't worry about it. There is one more thing.”
She waited and I wondered how much to tell her. There wasn't a lot she could do, but if I died on her I didn't want her to feel it was her fault.
“Sometimes I have to go to the hospital. Sometimes one seizure will follow another. If that keeps up for too long, I won't breathe, and my brain will die of oxygen starvation.”
“That only takes about five minutes,” she said, alarmed.
“I know. It's only a problem if I start having them frequently, so we could plan for it if I do. But if I don't come out of one, start having another right on the heels of the first, or if you can't detect any breathing for three or four minutes, you'd better call an ambulance.”
“Three or four minutes? You'd be dead before they got here.”
“It's that or live in a hospital. I don't like hospitals.”
“Neither do I.”
Â
The next day she took me for a ride in her Ferrari. I was nervous about it, wondering if she was going to do crazy things. If anything, she was too slow. People behind her kept honking. I could tell she hadn't been driving long from the exaggerated attention she put into every movement.
“A Ferrari is wasted on me, I'm afraid,” she confessed at one point. “I never drive it faster than fifty-five.”
We went to an interior decorator in Beverly Hills and she bought a low-watt gooseneck lamp at an outrageous price.
Â
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I had a hard time getting to sleep that night. I suppose I was afraid of having another seizure, though Lisa's new lamp wasn't going to set it off.
Funny about seizures. When I first started having them, everyone called them fits. Then, gradually, it was seizures, until fits began to sound dirty.
I guess it's a sign of growing old, when the language changes on you.
There were rafts of new words. A lot of them were for things that didn't even exist when I was growing up. Like software. I always visualized a limp wrench.
“What got you interested in computers, Lisa?” I asked her.
She didn't move. Her concentration when sitting at the machine was pretty damn good. I rolled onto my back and tried to sleep.
“It's where the power is, Yank.” I looked up. She had turned to face me.
“Did you pick it all up since you got to America?”
“I had a head start. I didn't tell you about my Captain, did I?”
“I don't think you did.”
“He was strange. I knew that. I was about fourteen. He was an American, and he took an interest in me. He got me a nice apartment in Saigon. And he put me in school.”
She was studying me, looking for a reaction. I didn't give her one.
“He was surely a pedophile, and probably had homosexual tendencies, since I looked so much like a skinny little boy.”
Again the wait. This time she smiled.
“He was good to me. I learned to read well. From there on, anything is possible.”
“I didn't actually ask you about your Captain. I asked why you got interested in computers.”
“That's right. You did.”
“Is it just a living?”
“It started that way. It's the future, Victor.”
“God knows I've read that enough times.”
“It's true. It's already here. It's power, if you know how to use it. You've seen what Kluge was able to do. You can make money with one of these things. I don't mean earn it, I mean
make
it, like if you had a printing press. Remember Osborne mentioned that Kluge's house didn't exist? Did you think what that means?”
“That he wiped it out of the memory banks.”
“That was the first step. But the lot exists in the county plat books, wouldn't you think? I mean, this country hasn't
entirely
given up paper.”
“So the county really does have a record of that house.”
“No. That page was torn out of the records.”
“I don't get it. Kluge never left the house.”
“Oldest way in the world, friend. Kluge looked through the LAPD files until he found a guy known as Sammy. He sent him a cashier's check for a thousand dollars, along with a letter saying he could earn twice that if he'd go to the Hall of Records and do something. Sammy didn't bite, and neither did McGee, or Molly Unger. But Little Billy Phipps did, and he got a check just like the letter said, and he and Kluge had a wonderful business relationship for many years. Little Billy drives a new Cadillac now, and hasn't the faintest notion who Kluge was or where he lived. It didn't matter to Kluge how much he spent. He just pulled it out of thin air.”
I thought that over for a while. I guess it's true that with enough money you can do just about anything, and Kluge had all the money in the world.
“Did you tell Osborne about Little Billy?”
“I erased that disk, just like I erased your seven hundred thousand. You never know when you might need somebody like Little Billy.”
“You're not afraid of getting into trouble over it?”
“Life is risk, Victor. I'm keeping the best stuff for myself. Not because I intend to use it, but because if I ever needed it badly and didn't have it, I'd feel like such a fool.”
She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, which made them practically disappear.
“Tell me something, Yank. Kluge picked you out of all your neighbors because you'd been a Boy Scout for thirty years. How do you react to what I'm doing?”
“You're cheerfully amoral, and you're a survivor, and you're basically decent. And I pity anybody who gets in your way.”
She grinned, stretched, and stood up.
“âCheerfully amoral,' I like that.” She sat beside me, making a great sloshing in the bed. “You want to be amoral again?”
“In a little bit.” She started rubbing my chest. “So you got into computers because they were the wave of the future. Don't you ever worry about them . . . I don't know, I guess it sounds corny . . . Do you think they'll take over?”
“Everybody thinks that until they start to use them,” she said. “You've got to realize just how stupid they are. Without programming they are good for nothing, literally. Now, what I do believe is that the people who
run
the computers will take over. They already have. That's why I study them.”
“I guess that's not what I meant. Maybe I can't say it right.”
She frowned. “Kluge was looking into something. He'd been eavesdropping in artificial intelligence labs and reading a lot of neurological research. I think he was trying to find a common thread.”
“Between human brains and computers?”
“Not quite. He was thinking of computers and neurons. Brain cells.” She pointed to her computer. “That thing, or any other computer, is light-years away from being a human brain. It can't generalize, or infer, or categorize, or invent. With good programming it can appear to do some of those things, but it's an illusion.
“There's an old speculation about what would happen if we finally built a computer with as many transistors as the human brain has neurons. Would there be a self-awareness? I think that's baloney. A transistor isn't a neuron, and a quintillion of them aren't any better than a dozen.
“So Klugeâwho seems to have felt the same wayâstarted looking into the possible similarities between a neuron and an eight-bit computer. That's why he had all that consumer junk sitting around his house, those Trash-80's and Atari's and TI's and Sinclair's, for chrissake. He was used to
much
more powerful instruments. He ate up the home units like candy.”
“What did he find out?”
“Nothing, it looks like. An eight-bit unit is more complex than a neuron, and no computer is in the same galaxy as an organic brain. But see, the words get tricky. I said an Atari is more complex than a neuron, but it's hard to really compare them. It's like comparing a direction with a distance, or a color with a mass. The units are different. Except for one similarity.”
“What's that?”
“The connections. Again, it's different, but the concept of networking is the same. A neuron is connected to a lot of others. There are trillions of them, and the way messages pulse through them determines what we are and what we think and what we remember. And with that computer I can reach a million others. It's bigger than the human brain, really, because the information in that network is more than all humanity could cope with in a million years. It reaches from Pioneer Ten, out beyond the orbit of Pluto, right into every living room that has a telephone in it. With that computer you can tap tons of data that has been collected but nobody's even had the time to look at.
“That's what Kluge was interested in. The old âcritical mass computer' idea, the computer that becomes aware, but with a new angle. Maybe it wouldn't be the size of the computer, but the
number
of computers. There used to be thousands of them. Now there's millions. They're putting them in cars. In wristwatches. Every home has several, from the simple timer on a microwave oven up to a video game or home terminal. Kluge was trying to find out if critical mass could be reached that way.”
“What did he think?”
“I don't know. He was just getting started.” She glanced down at me. “But you know what, Yank? I think you've reached critical mass while I wasn't looking.”
“I think you're right.” I reached for her.
Â
Lisa like to cuddle. I didn't, at first, after fifty years of sleeping alone. But I got to like it pretty quickly.
That's what we were doing when we resumed the conversation we had been having. We just lay in each other's arms and talked about things. Nobody had mentioned love yet, but I knew I loved her. I didn't know what to do about it, but I would think of something.
“Critical mass,” I said. She nuzzled my neck and yawned.
“What about it?”
“What would it be like? It seems like it would be such a vast intelligence. So quick, so omniscient. God-like.”
“Could be.”
“Wouldn't it . . . run our lives? I guess I'm asking the same questions I started off with. Would it take over?”
She thought about it for a long time.
“I wonder if there would be anything to take over. I mean, why should it care? How could we figure what its concerns would be? Would it want to be worshipped, for instance? I doubt it. Would it want to ârationalize all human behavior, to eliminate all emotions,' as I'm sure some sci-fi film computer must have told some damsel in distress in the fifties.
“You can use a word like awareness, but what does it mean? An amoeba must be aware. Plants probably are. There may be a level of awareness in a neuron. Even in an integrated circuit chip. We don't even know what our own awareness really is. We've never been able to shine a light on it, dissect it, figure out where it comes from or where it goes when we're dead. To apply human values to a thing like this hypothetical computer-net consciousness would be pretty stupid. But I don't see how it could interact with human awareness at all. It might not even notice us, any more than we notice cells in our bodies, or neutrinos passing through us, or the vibrations of the atoms in the air around us.”
So she had to explain what a neutrino was. One thing I always provided her with was an ignorant audience. And after that, I pretty much forgot about our mythical hypercomputer.
Â
“What about your Captain?” I asked, much later.
“Do you really want to know, Yank?” she mumbled sleepily.
“I'm not afraid to know.”
She sat up and reached for her cigarettes. I had come to know she sometimes smoked them in times of stress. She had told me she smoked after making love, but that first time had been the only time. The lighter flared in the dark. I heard her exhale.
“My Major, actually. He got a promotion. Do you want to know his name?”
“Lisa, I don't want to know any of it if you don't want to tell it. But if you do, what I want to know is did he stand by you.”
“He didn't marry me, if that's what you mean. When he knew he had to go, he said he would, but I talked him out of it. Maybe it was the most noble thing I ever did. Maybe it was the most stupid.
“It's no accident I look Japanese. My grandmother was raped in '42 by a Jap soldier of the occupation. She was Chinese, living in Hanoi. My mother was born there. They went south after Dien Bien Phu. My grandmother died. My mother had it hard. Being Chinese was tough enough, but being half-Chinese and half-Japanese was worse. My father was half-French and half-Annamese. Another bad combination. I never knew him. But I'm sort of a capsule history of Vietnam.”
The end of her cigarette glowed brighter once more.