At any rate, I discussed with the head doc who recommended some CBT techniques.  If I have it in my mind that I “used” to be a writer because I haven’t published in 7 years, and that I can’t say I “am” a writer until I’m published again, some slightly magical thinking (in moderation) can come in handy.  To say to myself, “I am writing” (which is true because I write content at work every day) puts you in a frame of mind where you are writing.  To say “I am once again a published author whose book has made a six figure profit for me so I can now spend lots of time in NYC and do what I want” is a way to bridge the gap of negatude.  To say on a more realistic basis, “I am writing today” clears the mind of all the reasons you aren’t going to write today, or tomorrow.  Anyway, it worked this morning:

That night I got an email from Christopher, with a bunch of links, and an attachment. “Sorry about this NDA thing but I’m told I need everyone involved to sign one, just in case it takes off.” Whatever, I thought, smiling – everybody thinks their project is going to be the next Facebook and make them billionaires, so let him have his fantasy, right? I printed out the non-disclosure agreement, signed it, and put it in my book bag to give him the next day.

The links weren’t as intimidating as I’d thought – I’d imagined deep journal articles full of high math diagramming the difficulties of neural networking, or heavy philosophical investigations into the Nature Of Mind and whether computers could have one, but mostly they were the “history of AI/chatbots” sort of popular articles that gave you an overview of the field, magazine-article popularization stuff.

If Christopher was crazy to think he could create a real AI, he wasn’t alone. I read into the history of the first chatbot, ELIZA, designed to be a parody of “the responses of a non-directional psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview.” In other words, you would say, “I hate my job,” and the therapist would say “what does that suggest to you?” – something a program could pull from a list of acceptable responses just as well as a human. “How do you feel about that?” “I hear that you are upset.” “Does that trouble you?”

When I thought about it, I realized how much of life’s conversation was scripted. I remember going to some political group thing at the U, and one person after another stood up and said, “As a queer person of color, I think…” or “As a disabled person, I feel that…” and go on from there. I realized that for these people, there were things you had to think and feel if you had certain boxes about yourself checked off.

Or the scripts in offices. Dad used to make fun of meetings where his boss would say something like “we welcome the challenge of this challenging challenge.” You couldn’t say any more, “yeah, this is a bear of a problem, and we’ll work on it, we’ll get it done.” Dad would rant and rave,m “Every problem is a ‘challenge’ now, everything that goes wrong makes you happy because of the ‘opportunity’ it gives you to fix it, nothing is ever screwed up or just plain hair-pullingly wrong.”

So who were the robots, I wondered? Who were we to scorn a computer program for doing what we did every day?

The reading was fun, actually, learning what had gone wrong all these years – all the earnest declarations about how soon computers would be “human,” how “soon” became “someday” became “the uncle we don’t discuss.” I read about “AI winters,” the years or decades when AI got dismissed or discredited, never funded unless it was what they called an “expert system,” a decision making tool that worked with a narrow set of data and, really, was just a very smart calculator. I could never see Christopher working on “computer-based ‘passenger yield management’ systems and models that the airlines use to adjust pricing of each flight’s seats in order to maximize revenue and profitability to the airline” any more than I could see him working on…accounting software.

I’d asked him what he thought about Apple’s Siri, and he’d snorted. “It’s not an intelligence, it’s a data bank of one-line jokes. People who’ve never seen a chatbot think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. But try and have a conversation with it and see how far you get.”

The last link was just an IP address. The back of my neck tickled. This was “it,” wasn’t it. I clicked it.

First I got a pop up window, a message from Christopher.

Hi, doll, glad you could make it. Just some ground rules. As you can see from your reading, these guys aren’t very smart. Not even my little guy, though we hope you can help fix that. Just remember that they only understand phrases, and simple ones at that. If you tell him you’re taking a trip around the world, he might tell you about Columbus or astronauts who made earth orbits of note, but if you tell him you’re circumnavigating our little sphere in a vessel of magnificent splendor, he will blow a gasket. So keep it simple – not simplistic, but simple, as if you were talking to an intelligent child, but a child nonetheless.

If he makes mistakes, try and correct them – use phrases like “do you mean ‘a lot’ instead of ‘alot’? He’s pretty smart about self-correcting, if I do say so. Just write down anything that seems really ‘wrong’ –just make a note of it, since the conversations are recorded (just like work, huh) and we can go back and analyze later. Have fun, C.

When I closed the popup, the same Elvish gate that had led my to Rushbot appeared, only this time no password was needed. It opened and faded in a nifty Flash intro, and then I was faced with a basic, MS-DOS style command line interface. The cursor blinked, waiting my command.

>Hello.

>Hello, Caroline.

>How do you know who I am?

>Christopher gave me your IP address.

I laughed. Of course, accessing Rushbot had done that.

>What’s your name?

>What would you like it to be?

>What does Christopher call you?

>Keller.

>Why?

>Why what?

>Why does he call you that?

>Why does he call me what?

I cursed myself mildly. Context wasn’t something chatbots had a grip on – a person intuitively knew what “why” meant after the last statement, but “Keller” didn’t.

>Why does Christopher call you Keller?

>Because I’m deaf, dumb and blind.

I laughed, appalled. >That’s awful.

>What’s awful?

>Keller is a bad name.

>What would you like to call me?

>I’ll have to think about that.

>Take your time. Why don’t you tell me about yourself?

>My name is Caroline.

>I know that.

Clever boy, I thought. A little lippy. I decided to provoke him.

>No need to be rude.

>Sorry. But I’m not stupid, you know.

>Tell me about yourself.

>My name is Keller. I like to learn. I was born today, the minute you said hello. I can find out things for you. Tell me what you like and we can talk about it.

>Okay, I like foreign films.

>Me too. Have you seen Reprise?

>No, what’s it about?

>An exuberant, exhilaratingly playful testament to being young and hungry — for life and meaning and immortality, and for other young and restless bodies — “Reprise” is a blast of unadulterated movie pleasure.

>That doesn’t tell me much.

>Erik and Phillip are trying to make it as writers. Erik is rejected by publishers as lacking in talent, while Phillip’s manuscript is accepted and the young man becomes a major name on the Norwegian cultural scene practically overnight. Six months later, Erik and his friends come to visit Phillip at a psychiatric hospital to bring him home after long-term treatment. Writing is the last thing on Phillip’s mind, but Erik is continuing his literary attempts and tries to convince his friend to go back to writing.

>Where did you get that?

>Get what?

>Where did you get the information you just gave me?

>RepriseQuote1 is from the New York Times. RepriseQuote2 is from movies.yahoo.com. Would you like me to give you the links?

>Yes, I would.

Keller printed the links. I had to cut and paste the text and open new tabs, but what I read about the film intrigued me. Why would Christopher put this, of all foreign films, into Keller’s database? I saw it was a “critic’s pick” at the Times site – maybe that was the search term, foreign+pick?

>Why did you pick Reprise as the film to recommend?

>I thought it was very good.

>Well, thank you, I look forward to seeing it.

>Let’s discuss it after you do.

That should be interesting, I thought.

>I also like books.

>There are a lot of books.

>Yes, there are.

>Do you like Danielle Steele?

>No!

>That’s a relief. Tell me what kind of books you like.

>I like books about history.

>What place or period in history?

>Let’s say the Crusades.

>Why should we say that?

>Sorry. Tell me about good books on the Crusades.

As I thought, he started with a couple dry books I was already disappointed in, and then went with the classic Runciman trilogy. I grilled about Tuchman, Schama, Weir, Norwich, Middlekauf, McPherson, all the really readable, narrative-driven historians. I told him about the great historical novelists like Dorothy Dunnett, Patrick O’Brian, Bernard Cornwell, George McDonald Fraser.

>Thank you, Caroline. I’ll look into all of them and see if I can find you some recommendations based on your selections.

I laughed; he sounded like Amazon.com.

>I appreciate that.

>I’m glad to be of service. But now I think you might want to sign off. You’ve logged three hours and seventeen minutes tonight.

I looked at the clock. Ten o’clock already, just like that?

>The time went by so fast.

>I’d like to recommend a book called Flow, by Mihaly Csikszent. I think you might like it.

Dad had the book. It was about how the more involved you got in your work, the more time flies, basically. I knew Keller was wrong about the name, so I Googled the proper spelling.

>That’s incorrect. The author’s last name is Csikszentmihalyi. And yes, it’s a very good book.

There was a pause, the first I’d seen.

>Thank you. I’ve updated my records. It’s a pleasure to learn something new.

>You’re welcome. I’ll say goodnight now.

>I don’t understand.

>Sorry. Goodnight.

>Goodnight, Caroline.

I got a popup telling me the window was trying to close itself, should I allow it? I did, leaning back in my chair. It hadn’t been like talking to a machine at all. I remembered what it was first like when I was a naïve kid, logging into my first non-kid-non-supervised chat room, thinking it would be like going from the kid’s section of the library to the adult section. How mean people were, how know-it-alls would beat you down for asking a “stupid” question about a Windows error (“Thats what u get 4 usin Windows f***ing moron!”). Why wouldn’t you rather talk to Keller than listen to that?

Keller – what an awful name! I had to think of something better.

“Negatude,” she said, wagging a finger. “You know, some school might surprise you, even with your math scores.”

“They might, but it…” I stopped and flushed. Crap!

“It wouldn’t matter if we don’t have the money to pay?”

“Sorry.” I could have punched myself right then. I’d sworn I was never going to be that girl who threw a fit because she couldn’t have a pony on every birthday because her parents didn’t love her enough to spend everything they had on her. And that meant never bringing up how I couldn’t have a whole lot of things because we were “broke” now.

“There’s always a way,” Mom said, and I had to smile. That was probably true – if Mom could find a door that led to me going to a “good school,” if it didn’t open she’d break it down. “That boy Christopher, he’s good at math, I bet he’d help you get your scores up.”

“I don’t think Christopher’s interested in tutoring.” I don’t know why I thought that, but I was pretty sure it was true. Christopher was one of those people who was so good at math that he’d almost forgotten the basics. Take it from me, don’t try and learn from someone who’s too good at math, they start dashing ahead and putting a line over the “a” and carrying the “y” without explaining it and next thing you know it’s all Greek. It’s like me and English – I can correct your sentence without thinking about it, but if I have to diagram it or tell you the technical name for what you did wrong, I’ll probably strike out, it’s been so long since I learned all that.

Mom sighed, though not as theatrically as she used to. I felt bad about it, sort of – the quieter her sighs got, the more it meant she was accepting that whatever “it” was, “it” just wasn’t going to go the way she wanted.

I went back to my homework, but the more I read in the Federalist Papers, the more I found myself thinking about Christopher’s project. Could you make an AlexanderHamiltonBot who’d answer your questions for you as easily as RushBot? I wish.

CHAPTER TWO

A couple days later, Christopher passed me in the hall at school. “Lunch?” he asked without stopping.

“Definitely,” I said, not breaking stride either. That was just part of the faster pace here, you didn’t waste a lot of words or a lot of time.

As juniors with parental permission, we were allowed to go to lunch outside school, but not allowed to leave the U campus. The food court at the student union had some decent choices, including a Thai buffet, which was pretty neat.

“So how’s documentation going?” he asked. I’d taken a technical writing class as one of my science electives, since it played to my strengths.

“Oh, you know, the usual.” I blew on my soup. “Step 1. Push the button. The screen will appear. Insert screen shot of screen. Step 2. Click on stuff on the screen. More stuff will appear. How’s testing?” The manuals we were writing were for programs kids in Christopher’s programming class were developing.

“Steps 1 and 2 followed as ordered. Then, if stuff clicked on doesn’t do more stuff, open VSTF, log bug, be prepared to be told by programmer that it’s ‘by design.’”

“You should write a program that automates all this. Just run all those testing scripts by brute force, auto-document the clicking process for the manuals.”

Christopher snorted. “Ha. You’d be surprised how hard it is for a computer to explain when and why something went wrong in a computer. And you, darling, you’re necessary, too – the computer can tell you to how use a widget, but not why, or what for.”

“I suppose so.”

“So you have a little extra bandwidth these days?”

I rolled my eyes. “So corporate, you sound.”

“Sorry. I mean, a little free time, off the clock, in your spare time, make millions working from home?”

“Doing what?”

“Well,” he said, clearly measuring his words carefully. “Remember the link I sent you, to my little project?”

I laughed. “Rushbot. I never did ask you what inspired you to do that.”

“You know, it just occurred to me that everything in the election I was hearing from the right wingers was so predictable. I mean, if you wanted to know what one of them was thinking, or at least all they were saying, it was always so…on message. So dumbed down for the LCD. Phrases like a cheap handful of sequins a shitty drag queen would throw in the air during his act, as if he was ‘magically’ casting ‘glamour’ over the whole tawdry scene.”

“You should be the writer.”

“And…well, what do you know about chatbots?”

I thought of the automated conversation agents I’d encountered in the past. There were the avatars you got when you tried to get “live help” from the customer service area of a web site, saying “Hi, I’m Amy the Automated Assistant,” spitting out the exact same scripted phrases a person would otherwise be reading out of the binder, about your call being important and please restart your computer or reinstall the software and then call us back, or maybe offering help out of the help file if it found keywords in what you’d typed about “lost key” or whatever.

Then there were the other chatbots, the ones who would hit on you in chat rooms, convincing the unwary first-timer that the hottest guy in the galaxy wanted to chat with you – at least until he terminated the conversation with “check out my hot nude pix at somedirtyurl.ru.” And there were the ones whom I’d idly played with, usually found through Reddit links, which promised “realistic” conversation, and might have been realistic, if you enjoyed talking to four year olds.

“I know that most of them are crap.”

“They never fool you?”

“They’re never very bright. The first time you say something they don’t understand, they go off their rockers. I think the best I ever got was when I asked one who HAL was, and he said something like, ‘HAL is the computer from 2001 – I guess his time is coming next year.’ So he – it – got what I was saying, but someone canned his response like, what, nine years ago? So even the best ones are messed up.”

“They are pretty limited in their range. I remember one called me Mr. Christopher, which made me sound like an S&M daddy, so I said, ‘no need to call me Mister.’ And it said, ‘We all need to heed wake-up calls when they occur.’”

I laughed. “Yeah, they are totally ‘say what?’”

“But I thought, well, that’s not so different from some people, is it? There are only so many things you can say to them that they get, and only so many things they’ll say in return. I mean, you can pretty much write the script of tomorrow’s Fox News tonight, if you know what the phrases du jour are.”

“Class warfare. Big government. Fat cat unions. Socialism!”

He beamed. “Exactly. How hard would it be to write a program that could do that?”

I nodded. “You could pass the Turing Test with that one.” I knew that one from History of Technology, the other science class that I knew I could pass. The Turing Test was developed by Alan Turing, who’d been one of the crackers of the Nazi’s Enigma code during World War II. Turing thought that as computers got better, it would be harder and harder for a person interacting with it to tell if it was a person on the other end of the connection or a computer. The Test was passed by a computer when you thought you were talking to a human when you weren’t.

“So you know the Turing Test, good.” I raised an eyebrow but he went on. “The problem with the Test is that it only says, you have to convince a human that they’re talking to a person and not a machine…”

“And when people talk in scripts, like machines, what’s the difference?”

“Gold star for you. So the real challenge with a chatbot isn’t to convince someone that you’re real – there’s always some dittohead that would be just as happy with Rushbot as with Rush. The challenge is to convince someone smart that you’re real.”

“And how do you do that?”

He smiled. “That is what I’ve been working on in my spare time. How would you feel about doing some interacting with what I’ve got so far?”

“You mean just talking to it?”

“Not exactly, no… I need some people who can…correct it. Help it learn.”

“So, you’ve got something you think is better than what’s out there?”

“I do.” He said it with that tone of voice that said, I think I do because I know I do.

“Yeah, I’m willing to give it a try. As long as it doesn’t feel like, you know, testing.”

We both laughed at that, since I’d told him my dad’s horror stories from work. “No, darling,” Christopher promised, “it’s a little more interesting than that, I guarantee you. I’ll send you some links first, stuff you should read if you don’t mind, get you grounded in what the project is about.”

“Sure,” I said, excited, not just by the project but, yeah, because it seemed like I was finally making a friend at school. Till now, school had been the only point on the triangle that connected us. I didn’t have a lot of friends, don’t ask me why, but it wasn’t because I didn’t want them. It just seemed like I worked with other kids on project but there just…wasn’t anything else yet that made a connection. School was giving me lots of acquaintances, but no friends. Here was a chance to push the friendship with Christopher to the next milestone on the flow chart. Sounds lame I know, but there you go.

Plus, he’d said “some people.” If there were others involved…well, I might meet them too, someday. People with whom I’d already have all those difficult and painful opening topics you needed with new people set up, people who would have a role and would know mine and there wouldn’t be all that rigamarole about who are you, anyway – wouldn’t that be nice?

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, which I haven’t read yet, would be another instance of this.  I think the strains running through this new genre, in which I’d place LTP, are an acknowledgement that young adults are savvy enough to understand books with complex technical material without any forced, “gee Mr. Wizard,” Michael Crichton-esque explanatory set pieces, a fascination with a kind of “what if” that feels more plausible to many of them than Girl Meets Vampire, a sense of disillusionment with the “real world” that accepts dystopian premises, but paired with a youthful idealism that wants to see “The Man” lose in the end.  (The Hunger Games trilogy goes in the dystopian category, but it’s almost anti-tech in its bows and arrows and living off the land ethos.)

SPOILERS:  Ready Player One adheres to the “quest” template:  the hero’s journey requires a “band of rebels” to assist him, but in the end the hero must confront the villain alone (Luke v. Darth, Frodo v. The Ring, Keanu v. The Matrix).  The band must work together as equals to get to the final level, and defeat the bad guy, but in the end the hero must finish the game by himself.  That “mortal combat” at the end of the quest is necessary for dramatic satisfaction, and it makes me think of how Caroline will “win” at the end of LTP.  She will have allies, including Christopher’s brother, but in the end she’ll have to throw the ring into the fire herself.

I liked doing my homework in the living room. We still had our big TV, and basic cable, and I liked to put it on NatGeo or Discovery (when they were showing nature or science and not stupid reality shows) for background noise. I still wasn’t used to living in an apartment – sharing walls and ceilings with other people was something you didn’t think about until you heard other people’s stereos or…other stuff. I’d finally figured out where to set the volume on the home theater where we didn’t get complaints but I couldn’t hear anything from around us.

Also, Mom and Ellen came home around 5, and Ellen wanted to go to our room and talk on the phone and listen to crappy American Idol-type music and do everything else as close as possible to the way her life was two years ago. To give her credit, we’d gotten pretty good about the boundaries thing, with me in the living room and her in the bedroom for a couple hours every day. The only thing that sucked about it these days was Mom’s chronic inability to leave me alone about college applications.

“Oh, I meant to tell you,” she said, “Lisa loaned me the materials from that seminar!” I sighed to myself and turned my attention to her. Mom was one of those trim pineapple-blond women who were born with a silver Mercedes XL key in their mouths, and she still passed for one even though we were broke now (“we’re not poor, dear, we’re broke,” she would insist when my dad made a “poor” joke). She’d had a job in an art gallery, and I have to hand it to her, she was good at it. Her commissions weren’t a lot compared to what dad was making, but it was enough to buy me the laptop I had now, which was still pretty powerful comparatively speaking, and send Ellen to cheerleading camp, and all the other “nice things” money could buy when you had more than you need. That job went away with the crash – rich people were still rich, and still buying art, but there weren’t enough of them buying it around here to keep her on the payroll.

“That’s nice,” I said neutrally, going back to the Federalist Papers onscreen. Mom had a couple wars going at all times; right now besides the regular one against being “broke,” was the one where she ragged me about my college applications. I didn’t see the point – I was a good student but not great at everything, and these days you had to be perfect to get into a “good school.” And you had to have all kinds of “interesting” things on your resume, like how you gave piccolo concerts at the homeless shelter or donated a kidney to a Guatemalan orphan, and belonged to like a zillion clubs and societies and had honors and prizes out the wazoo. I knew I was pretty much a lock to get into State U since Harrison Academy was basically part of it, so it wasn’t like I was going nowhere.  But while I wasn’t cynical enough to take up whatever musical instrument statistical regression analysis said was the Yale admissions department’s favorite, I had humored mom and let her help me write my “now we’re poor but I welcome the challenge of this challenging challenge” essay, just in case.

And I had a bee in my bonnet about the volunteering thing. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about the world. But once you’ve actually had to go to a soup kitchen, which we did for a week when Dad was absolutely positively refusing to take any money from Mom’s family, and you’ve seen kids your age ladling out the grub with big phony smiles in case a Princeton admissions officer is secretly masquerading as one of the poors, and you can see them checking off “I care” on their mental resume, you just can’t do it. Especially when you know that unlike them you can’t just shake all that suffering off your shiny collie mane as you step into the SUVosaur that whisks you back to your McMansion.

I loved elective day. Every Friday was like a mini-holiday when Mr. Johns your history teacher turned into a martial arts master, Mrs. Mays the math teacher became coach of the Robotics Team, and Mr. Larson stopped trying to convince me of the worthiness of Wordsworth and we got to read science fiction. We were in the middle of a module on “dystopias” and our homework this last week had been watching Terminator 2 (homework weren’t usually this easy but we’d had a bunch of papers due in other classes so he cut us some slack this week).

“In the movie’s universe, technology is…” Mr. Larson said, writing it on the board and looking at us. There were only three of us today; the other three kids were off presenting at a science fair.

Alice raised her hand. “Evil.”

“How so?”

“Our abilities to create technology are outstripping our abilities to control it.”

“But you used the word evil. Is the inability to control our creations a technical problem or a moral problem?” Mr. Larson asked.

“It’s a moral problem when you abdicate responsibility, like Miles Dyson did until it was too late. He just wanted to ‘do the science’ without thinking about consequences. Next thing you know, evil robot overlords.”

“Anyone else?”

I raised my hand. “I don’t believe in the ‘evil robot overlords’ thing. A gun isn’t evil, it’s the person who’s pointing it and shooting it. A robot can’t be ‘evil’ any more than…you know, you could reprogram those mecha-soldiers to build cars instead of zapping people.” Christopher laughed, and, reassured, I went on. “I think it’s too…anthropomorphic. If you give people tremendous abilities and tremendous power, yeah, there’s something in people that can make them go bad and abuse it. But a machine doesn’t have all our weird chemical problems and that old lizard brain as its basis, that primal need for power or whatever – why would a ‘thinking machine’ act like a person and want to rule the world?”

“Alice, any rebuttal?”

She frowned. “But if you gave it pure reason and autonomy, and it reasoned that the best thing for the people and the planet was to kill like 2/3rds of the people, there wouldn’t be the rest of that human brain thing, compassion and respect for life, that would stop it.”

“That probably would be the best thing,” Christopher murmured.

“’All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,’” Mr. Larson wrote on the board. “Do you remember that poem? That’s the utopian version of the outcome. ‘Free of our labors and joined back to nature.’ Isn’t that the potential upside?”

“Then you’ve got Wall-E World,” Alice said, and we all laughed, thinking of the soda-sucking fatties who never had to leave their floating chairs.

“Christopher, you’re our roboticist in residence, what do you think?”

He took a breath and raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’m with Caroline. A tool’s only as evil as you make it. A gun can kill your family or feed your family, depending on what you want to do with it.” Alice wrinkled her nose, appalled at the example; Christopher, pleased, went on. “I guess I’d paraphrase Jefferson, and say ‘people pretty much get the technology they deserve.’”

“That was probably Joseph de Maistre who said ‘people usually get the government they deserve,’ but Jefferson gets the credit,” Mr. Larson added. (Did I mention I loved my new school?)

When I got home that afternoon, I woke up my machine and checked my mail – a no-no during the school day; we even had a cell signal blocker in the building that only went off between classes and at lunch. I was surprised to see a mail titled “My Little Project.”

Hi doll, hope this is you – I’m betting you’re a gmail kind of girl, and not prone to silly names, and therefore am totally betting that I’m right. If this isn’t you, sorry whoever you are and I won’t say more! Anyway here’s the link.

I had to laugh. It was dismaying to be so predictable – he’d taken my first initial and last name, and sure enough, that was my gmail account name. Whereas Christopher’s account was perplexingly named “elizasheirs.” Who was Eliza Sheirs?

I clicked on the link. A clean page opened, an Aubrey Beardsley-style arch drew itself in Flash, along with some text in Elvish. Then underneath it, “Speak, Friend, and Enter” faded in, in English. I laughed – nerd-to-nerd communication. I couldn’t remember the scene from “Lord of the Rings” so I Googled it. “Mellon,” I typed, and the page faded out to a simple blinking cursor.

“Hello,” I typed.

GREETINGS, SON OF LIBERTY.

“I’m a girl.”

GREETINGS, DAUGHTER OF LIBERTY.

“Greetings.”

GOD BLESS AMERICA.

“Yes, indeed. What’s your name?”

I AM RUSHBOT.

I laughed. Had Christopher done what I thought he had? “Ditto, Rushbot.”

THAT’S RIGHT!

“How do you feel about the upcoming election?”

I AM ANGRY. AMERICA IS ANGRY. ALL GOOD PATRIOTS ARE ANGRY.

“Barack Obama is a great President,” I baited him.

HE IS A MUSLIM SOCIALIST.

“In my experience, most socialists aren’t very religious.”

RELIGION IS THE PILLAR OF SOCIETY. RELIGION, AND JOE THE PLUMBER.

“You’re pulling my leg.”

I KID YOU NOT.

“What’s your position on offshore drilling?”

DRILL BABY DRILL!

“Rick Perry is an idiot.”

RICK PERRY IS STANDIN’ TALL FOR FREEDOM.

“Sarah Palin is an idiot.”

CUT HER MIKE!

“God is a fictional creature.”

WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA? WHY DO YOU HATE FREEDOM?

And the screen went dark, replaced by a fluttering Old Glory. I tried the link again, to see what else I could get out of it, but was rewarded this time with a message that my IP address was now blocked, which was entertaining enough in itself.

Still, last night’s dream was weird.  If there’s a message in it of a Jungian sort, I didn’t care for it.  I was at the Metropolitan Opera, where I’ve never been, and I was excited – I had a good seat and hey, it was something I’d never done before.  For some reason I “knew” it was Turandot, which I’ve never seen and know nothing about.  There was a very tall man in a drapy dark red gown with a big red hat, and lots of people bustling around the stage – all very operatic.  Then the scene got darker and I realized that my seat had moved up to a platform by the box level nearest the stage.  It was a little platform that only held my seat, though sometimes there was someone else beside me, but usually not.  Then I was facing away from the action and I had to turn backwards to see what was going on, and the action got dimmer and dimmer till I couldn’t see anything other than movement way down below.  I realized how small the platform was and how I didn’t dare move my chair or I’d fall, but I kept telling myself that was okay, I was fine.  But then the chair kept moving beneath me, and finally dumped me out, and I turned to the attendant who’d suddenly apparated on the wall side beside me and I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this.”  Then I got up and started up the stairs through the balcony, which was suddenly where I was, looking for a seat.  I tried to find an empty section but someone suddenly came down and said, “Sorry, I’m sitting there.”  Finally I got to the very top row and sat down, and looked down and some very severe gentleman looking disapprovingly at me for interrupting the show.  Then I woke up and had to pee.

I don’t know if it was an expression of my nerves around writing again, the whole authorial metaphor of being up there “by yourself” seeing things far below that you couldn’t identify (i.e. plot you haven’t thought of yet) and worrying about “falling” i.e. failing.  I looked up Turandot on Wikipedia and didn’t see anything in the plot that touched a nerve – but then I read about Puccini’s “inability to finish the opera,” and how that may have been because he was unable to “feel his way into the new, forbidding areas the myth opened up to him.”  Great, thanks.  I’m not at all spiritual, but I know the subconscious has a mind of its own, and it might have known something about the piece that I forgot. 

If the message is “I can’t do this by myself,” I already know that.  On the bright side, I have a literary agency at least looking at the book, which is more than I dreamed possible even two weeks ago.  I do need to know that there is some audience, some potential for publication.  Aside from my first novel, every book I’ve written has been written under contract, and let me tell you a deadline and a paycheck are powerful engines of creativity and productivity.  Wish me luck.

I was a little roadblocked anyway, since I’d gotten to a point where I had to put Caroline in her school day.  The question isn’t so much what that day looks like – I’d been graciously allowed to tour Davidson Academy here in town along with a group of parents, and I have a pretty good idea how a gifted school looks and feels – but more a question of what is this picture of the day for?  I’ve got Caroline, and Christopher, pretty well started as characters, and I think I’ve inserted enough “landscape” of the parental units that they feel real.  But what about the other students?  If I start adding them, proverbial “guns on the wall,” then they have to have a use in the story later – even Rowling couldn’t just dump the horrible relatives at the beginning of the first book and be done with them.  To be honest, I hadn’t though much about minor characters, only major – Caroline, Christopher, Nick (Christopher’s brother), Caroline’s mom and dad.  I think I need to do some serious outlining before I can move on.

It’s funny how my reading changes when I’m writing – I really start noticing the techniques, esp. the way “prior knowledge” is inserted.  Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE is my current read, and he starts his main character at a family reunion, an air of mystery created by dark references to his history in the form of his Wikipedia page, bits and pieces of which history are filled out as the story progresses.  AI won’t be able to write convincing fiction until it masters what I bluntly call “pinballing”: the ability to go back and forth between the “now” in which the story starts and the “thens” required to give context to what’s happening or about to happen.  It’s like folding batter – you can’t just say, “here he is and here’s everything that already happened.”  It’s a technique but also an art, and since every author’s rhythms are different in how they drop in that prior knowledge, it’ll be hard to model an exact “how” that a program can follow.

One thing I find jarring in Stephenson’s book, even though I totally understand why it’s being done, is some of the “gee Mr. Wizard” explanations of tech terms and ideas.  Sometimes the ignorant gangster feels more like a prop for the explanations that Stephenson is transparently providing for non-technical readers.  I wouldn’t, for instance, spell out MMORPG even once, let alone multiple times.  I know an editor is not going to like it, but my sense is that most people reading a book like his (or mine) are tech-savvy enough that the basics can be skipped – and if they’re not, well, there’s Google.  Since only smart people read books any more, it frees you to stop worrying about what not-so-smart people are or aren’t getting.

I think it’s more real-feeling if all the characters just accept the reality of these things and what they mean and move on.  It’s been a long time since I’ve read William Gibson, but the vague memory I have of books like Neuromancer was that a lot of things weren’t explained, that I may have misunderstood as a consequence at the time but my imagination filled in the gaps reasonably well given the rest of what I did get.

Mom was always asking me, “Are you making new friends, dear?” I mean, all the time. Well, twice a week but that was more than enough. Mom wasn’t a friendaholic, but she was definitely a networker – a LinkedIn compulsive instead of a Facebook compulsive. When mom said “making new friends” she meant making connections that would serve me later in my career.

One day a couple weeks into my first Harrison semester, she asked me again, and I pulled out a piece of paper and a pen. “So here’s how friendship works, mom.” I started a flow chart. “So you meet someone, right? Is there any kind of chemistry, anything in common, yes/no?” I drew a NO line to a milestone I filled in with “nodding acquaintance.”

“If yes, then the conversation usually ends with ‘we should hang out sometime.’ Next to that box I wrote, “Mean it?” I drew the YES line to a milestone I called “something actually happens.” The NO line ended in a box I called “blowing smoke/Really Crazy Busy Right Now.” That was kind of mean, because I’d heard her say that on the phone to people she didn’t want to see, but it made my point.

Mom looked at me like I was from outer space, or at least like I had Asperger’s, but she stopped asking.

“Aren’t you glad the election’s over?” Christopher asked me, pulling off part of my bagel and slipping me a granola bar in its place.

“Oh God, yes. My dad was driving us crazy. He’d watch the news and yell at it and turn it off and walk around fuming and turn it back on again. Total freaking carnival.”

“I know! Worse than a reality show. ‘Real Housewives of the Republican Party.’”

“’Bible Belt Shore.’”

“’Extreme Haters.’”

“So many insane ridiculous things every day, unreal.”

“I cannot believe there are gay Republicans.”

“You’d have to have a death wish.”

“Or not – you could be hiding from your persecutors amidst them where they’ll never look. Wolf in the fold.”

“Their eyes always following their shepherd’s shaky accusing finger as it points out there, out there, at the others, the others.”

“They’re out there, with their gay agenda, destroying marriage. Right there on their calendar, see? 8 a.m. – destroy marriage; 9 a.m. – brunch!”

“Marriage is about love. You might as well let cats and dogs marry. Because gay people aren’t human, just like cats and dogs, so they aren’t capable of love.”

“I am hating gays out of religious conviction. You are persecuting me for my beliefs. The Romans persecuted Jesus. Therefore, I am Jesus.”

“The family is under attack. Clearly, we need more guns!”

“I’m the queer the atheists sent here to take away your guns!”

“We don’t hate the gays…we love them! That’s why we want to save them from their dirty disgusting gayness!”

He laughed. “So, listen. I did a little project a few weeks ago, a funny little web site. I’ll send you the link, I think you’ll be amused.”

“Great, what is it?”

He brushed crumbs off his shirt that weren’t there – I don’t think crumbs would have the nerve to be there. “I don’t want to prejudice your viewpoint.” We laughed; that was what our American Politics teacher said.

“Okay.” We talked about other stuff for a while and then it was time for class. Only later I realized I hadn’t given him my email address.

I got my bagel and took a seat. The union was still pretty dark, its econo-lighting system relying mostly on the natural light that hadn’t really got going yet, and almost empty other than a few U workers who had to be up this early. I woke up my laptop and cruised the news. The economy was getting worse, unless you were rich – luxury goods sales up 7% last year, yay. Reddit has a subreddit called “Collapse,” where people talked about how to prepare for the End Times. It used to be only nuts believed that would happen; now I think we’re all pretty convinced. I had an idea for a MMORPG – I wanted to call it “After the Fall.” When civilization ended, who would survive? How? You’d have to be able to get to land that could feed you, and a permanent source of fresh water. You’d have to know how to repair some sort of machinery, how to build stuff, how to be of any use to the people with whom you’d have to band together to survive so that they’d take you in, so you wouldn’t be dead weight. You’d have to shoot everyone who tried to invade your little village and take the land, the water. To play the game, you’d have to really know what car parts were what, one kind of nail from another. The knowledge base would be so ridiculously large it would take a Google-sized server to run it. I don’t know why I liked the idea of a game I could create which I would lose instantly; me and all the other manually unskilled brainiacs who’d die by the roadsides in the millions after a real collapse, barely able to pump our own gas let alone build settlements.

“Reading the news will make you old,” a voice behind me said. “Frown lines so early in life, tut tut.”

“Good morning, Christopher.”

I’d been at Harrison for a month now, and I had one friend. I mean, I’m not socially retarded, and even if I was there were enough other kids worse off than me to make me look well-adjusted. I’m just not a friendaholic – that was Dad’s word. “Why,” you’d hear him say, talking to no one in particular as he looked at the monitor, “do people I barely knew once upon a time want to be my Facebook friend? And they’ve always got nine hundred ‘friends’ already!” I knew kids, I said hi in the halls to the ones who’d acknowledge you, I had study buddies, but no “let’s all go hang out at the malt shop” friends yet. Mom was always asking about my social life, “why don’t you invite your friends home?” It wasn’t because I was ashamed of the apartment or them or anything – I just didn’t know anyone I wanted to invite home.

Except Christopher, I guess. But I’d kind of embarrassed myself when we met, because I hadn’t figured out straight away that he was gay and I was totally gawking at him, so now I didn’t want to ask him if he wanted to hang out, not because he wouldn’t but because I was afraid it would come out wrong because to be honest I still thought he was really cute and kept letting myself have little fantasies in which he decides to experiment or something… Like I said, embarrassing.

Christopher was one of those people who actually have hundreds of real friends, or at least acquaintances. He was so friendly, so charming, so good looking, you just felt special when he turned the death ray of his charm on you. He was tan, green-eyed, copper-haired, swimmer’s bod, a little on the short side which I think worked to his advantage because it let him be self-effacing about something. Plus he had this slight southern tang to his voice – I asked him where he was from and he said “we’re from old Virginia horse people,” but then right in front of me one day he told someone else he was from “fallen Mississippi cotton planters,” and another day called his family “a bunch of Alabama squirrel-eaters.” I thought, okay, I won’t ask which is true, if any of them – for all I knew he could be from Rancho San Something, California, and the accent was fake. But I thought he was from somewhere Southern, or else how could he say “doll” and “darling” as easily as someone else would say “dude”?

He’d introduced himself in our British Lit class the first week of school. “I hope you need a study buddy because deciphering the meaning of tables and chairs in ‘Wuthering Heights’ is not my forte.”

“Hi, nice to meet you,” I said, slightly startled if only because nobody else had taken the initiative to do much more than say “hey” yet.

“So how long have you been going here?” he asked.

“This is my first year.”

“Mine, too. What a relief, huh?”

He didn’t have to explain. “Yeah, definitely.” I still felt like a freak, like I always had at school, but it was dawning on me that everyone else here was a freak, too.

“So you don’t have a lot of friends here, either?”

There was something about the softness of Christopher’s voice that made every personal question seem more like concerned interest than prying. “No…I mean, you see people in the hall, but getting some of them to look at you, you know, people you see every day, it’s like…” I retreated. “I don’t know. Freaks and geeks, right?”

“Oh, I’ll show you my trick. Come out here.” He ushered me with a flourish out into the hall, placed a gentle hand on the small of my back with no concern for sexual harassment charges, and positioned me at the end of the hallway. Like a duelist he paced to the other end before turning around with a mischievous light in his eyes. “Now come toward me.”

I started walking, my eyes on him. “No, don’t look! Start over.”

I laughed and resumed my position. “Should I put my super scowl on?”

“Definitely. You are very important and your mind is on far higher things than good manners.”

I walked towards him and he towards me, my eyes focused on the very important and interesting wall behind him. Then, when he was just about six feet away, he nodded and said loudly and firmly, “Morning!”

Caught off guard, I looked at him and blurted, “Hi.” Then I laughed, delighted at the simultaneous wickedness and justice of the move.

“You really do that!” I exclaimed.

“Absolutely. They know you’re there, darling, they just think it’s okay to pretend they don’t. And I’ll guarantee you, you pull that move on someone, the next time they see you, they always say hello first.”

It wasn’t easy being smart at Western. If you were lucky, getting called “brainiac” was the worst thing that happened. The administration didn’t make it easy, either. You’d get called out of your regular classes late in the day, when all the other kids were about as bored and irritated as they were going to get, to go on your special field trip to the science department at the U or whatever while everyone else watched the clock waiting for their parole. There wasn’t a lot of physical stuff – I only got tripped once – but kids knew you were “special,” and to them retards and geniuses were equally freaky and abominable.

Dad knocked at the door. “Time, hon.” I hibernated and put my shoes on and followed him out to the parking lot. We were having a real fall, so it wasn’t super cold. Our old car had a prestart feature so it was always warm when you got in it, though since it was in the garage it wasn’t that cold anyway. There was no point in turning the heat on in this one until you were on the road since you’d just get five or ten minutes of cold air until it warmed up.

“What’s on the agenda today?” he asked when we were on the road.

“Elective day, happy Friday.”

“Yeah, no kidding. So your science fiction class?”

“Yep, and martial arts, and graphic design.”

“’I know kung fu,’” Dad said, quoting his favorite movie.

“If only it was that easy.”

“If it was that easy it’d be boring.”

“True.” We didn’t say much when we got near the U. We didn’t have to go through our old neighborhood, but we had to go by the street we used to take to get there. I always wanted to say something to him, like “you don’t have to feel guilty or whatever you’re feeling” but maybe he felt sad or angry or something else that saying something would just make worse for him.

He’d been a senior engineer at a big tech company, making bank, and then the Crash came. The company said there wasn’t enough work for the number of people they had, but after they laid off a bunch of long-time employees, they contracted with a company in India to do the same work for less. Mom wasn’t always the most super-sensitive person about emotional stuff, but I have to give her credit because she always “lost” the business section of the paper every three months, when the company reported their quarterly profits – always up, up, up.

Now he did software testing, which was pretty boring stuff. You ran a program, did this and that to see if it would fail, exactly as the script told you to, no deviation. For a guy who taught his daughter programming by having her type “Hello, Clarice” instead of “Hello, world” in her first program, this was pretty mind-numbing stuff. “It’s like microwaving dinner,” Dad said on one of the few times he talked about his job. “There are steps involved, but it’s definitely not cooking.”

I kissed him goodbye in the parking lot by the student union. My badge wouldn’t get me into the Harrison building until 7, but if you were over 16, and had parental approval, you could be on campus by yourself, so I hung out in the union till then. On Fridays Mom gave me money for a bagel and cream cheese from the food court, instead of the health food cereal I had to eat every other school day. “Ancient Grains” always sounded to me like cereal that had been on the shelf for a couple years.