Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (3 page)

T
he other cell remained unoccupied for the rest of my time there, though I was not the only prisoner. Two days after my first talk with Morales, his thin dark-skinned lackey escorted a pair of men down the stairs and let them into the cell with me.

First they wanted my food, a tepid mess of what I imagined was supposed to be
mofongo
. I said that they were welcome to it.

Then they asked for my cot. I stood and moved to the other side of the cell, leaned my back against the moist stone, and let my chin drop to my chest.

Then they developed an interest in the St. Christopher medal around my neck. I told them, in careful Spanish, that if they tried to take that from me we would all likely end up regretting it.

T
he St. Christopher medal belonged, once upon a time, to my father. He bought it in Guam, in 1968, on his way to Vietnam. It's a small golden oval. The saint is portrayed in relief, gripping a staff in one hand and generally looking holy. Around the pendant's top edge are the words:
ST. CHRISTOPHER PROTECT US
.

Though I'm not much for keepsakes I've still got this one, the men's efforts to relieve me of it, there in the jail cell, notwithstanding.

M
y stay at the police station ended only after I'd doled out cash to Morales, a trio of lawyers, the mayor, and the municipal judge. I imagine they all ate dinner together afterward and had a good laugh over fleecing another gringo.

And Morales's warning about justice taking care of itself turned out to be prescient. The locals knew who I was and what I'd done, and they waited for me in dark streets outside the bars, and in front of the pink stucco house. My hands and face bore perpetual bruises and scabs while I fought and waited for Emma to be ready for me.

W
hen Emma asked where I'd been during the week I spent in jail, I told her I'd turned my phone off in an effort to concentrate on writing. Which, Emma being Emma, she admired.

T
echnological advances happen so quickly, and integrate themselves so seamlessly into the fabric of our existence, that we hardly note their arrival anymore, let alone the ways in which they come to dominate and define us. Driving on the interstate early in the morning before Emma sent me away, I was told by one of the machines inside my car that it was four degrees outside, a fact confirmed as I passed over rivers and skirted inlets and watched steam rise from the water in great crystalline puffs. I heard semis grunt angrily, saw them breathe smoke like dragons as they downshifted, and I thought, in the first intimations of what was to become a deep interest in the subject, about how when true artificial intelligence is achieved—could be tomorrow, could be next year, and this is not at all a question of if, merely when—we will be rendered instantly obsolete. Because the only advantage we retain over the machines we've created, at this moment, is that we have souls. They think smarter and faster. They are infinitely stronger, and never tire, and never die. They only lack a soul, but that will change soon. This is why ‘artificial intelligence,' like ‘global warming,' is a misnomer; it suggests that smarts is what machines lack. But intelligence they've got, and when they graduate to souls they will do everything better than we ever have.

This will quite inevitably bring about our end, but contrary to what pulp novels tell us, our end will not come in the form of some robot-perpetrated pogrom. That the machines will see us as a threat requiring elimination seems unlikely to me. My guess is they'll be fairly benevolent, even indulgent toward us, as a gifted child toward a beloved, enfeebled grandfather. They will have nothing to do with our demise, at least not directly. We will die by increments, as does anything that finds itself completely bereft of purpose. We will die, slowly, of shame.

I
used to talk about this with Emma, and she would smile her little indulgent smile, and shake her head a bit, as if I were the naïve one.

I
t's called the Singularity. The basic idea is of the moment when a computer (or more likely, computers, plural, since the interconnectedness of these machines is so vast and ubiquitous) wakes up, becomes self-aware, gains consciousness—there are myriad ways to describe the event, and part of the reason why no one can agree on how exactly to describe it is that by definition we can't accurately conceive of the Singularity, since it represents an intelligence beyond our own.

O
r maybe Philip K. Dick and the others were right. Maybe the machines will do us in. Maybe they would have no reason to be kind to us. At least, not any kinder than we have been to wolves, or Atlantic salmon, or, you know, the Sioux. The machines may tolerate us, so long as we don't inconvenience them in the slightest. But if we're at all a pain in their collective ass, or if they decide they could benefit in some way from exploiting us, probably the best we can hope for is that two hundred years after the fact they'll feel bad about having wiped us out, and they'll erect a monument to our memory that is equal parts guilt and artfulness—like the mountain in South Dakota that people are trying so hard to make look like Crazy Horse—while in the meantime, tiny remnants of our once-great populations will sit committing slow suicide on barren parcels of land set aside by the machines for that purpose.

T
his morning I was listening to Portishead, flawless math transformed by machines into looping, scratchy melodies, and I started thinking about how when machines have souls and can love they will do it so very precisely. Their affection will be accurate to the nanometer, rendering broken hearts a thing of the past, a relic, a curiosity from an unthinkably primitive time. The machines will regard heartbreak with the same mixture of perplexity and disbelief with which we regard the iron maiden. If they need couples counselors, which they will not, those counselors will be as perfect as Adam before the Fall, and every robot couple will walk out after the first session cured forevermore, and will smile again at every word their robot partner says, and find each of their robot partner's idiosyncrasies endearing rather than maddening, and they will be as entranced by one another's robot bodies as when they first met, as though together they've just invented sex. Which, in a way, they will have.

I hope I live long enough to see it.

S
o but on the far side of all the romantic agony that Emma and I went through, the paroxysms and convulsions of love so many of us suffer in our earlier years, sits a most unlikely example of contentment: my mother. She's been through all of it—got married young, raised a family, had I'm sure more than a handful of times when being with my father was a fight she wasn't sure she could or wanted to win . . . and then they broke through, thirty-three years, their kids raised, their bills surmountable, and managed to figure out a way to still love each other. Bouquets on the kitchen bar for no particular reason, little love notes planted around the house. Problem was, the guy up and died on her.

Y
ou may not have heard about the Singularity, but no doubt you've heard the cliché about the light going out of someone's eyes when they die.

Have you ever watched someone die? It really happens, you know. The light ebbing, and departing.

When my father died in the jaundiced glow of the bedside lamp I watched his pupils dilate slowly, watched his eyes become something other than eyes, become unseeing things, and that was the moment when I knew he was gone—not when I'd felt his heart stop a minute before. When the light went out of his eyes and his eyes became unseeing things I understood for the first time what the word ‘corpse' means. It means vacant. It means something was here but is now and forevermore gone.

The ‘forevermore' part being the truly salient detail. The finality of death is breathtaking, when you see it for yourself.

That is not meant to be a pun. I really forgot to breathe, there by his bed. I had to remind myself. I had to consciously kick-start my lungs, after a minute.

When I told Emma about this, she in turn told me that I, the cash-and-carry realist, the militant atheist, had backed my way into believing in the soul.

That light you mentioned? she said to me. It can't leave unless it's there in the first place.

I
t was just after this conversation with her that I started thinking about machines achieving souls, and how the term ‘artificial intelligence' is a misnomer.

A
nd speaking of which, if my memory is correct this conversation with Emma about souls was also around the time that the machine named Watson—this thing had a name, despite the fact that it didn't quite yet have a soul—went on the television quiz program
Jeopardy
and beat the show's two greatest human champions with chilling ease.

All over America people watched, but most did not watch with the sort of consuming interest that was the due of such an event. Most saw it as an interesting novelty, rather than the harbinger of an age of perfection.

The only people who watched with the proper level of interest were in mathematics and computing departments at universities, and to these people, seeing Watson navigate the nuances of human language was an experience akin to having their team win the Super Bowl.

Which is a way of saying that they didn't really get it, either. Because if they'd truly understood what they were witnessing, they wouldn't have been scarfing pizza and clapping each other on the back when Watson once again beat the human contestants to the buzzer.

I misunderstood it, too, though. I was afraid. I saw Watson dispatch his human rivals, and then I turned off the television and unplugged every piece of electronics in my house, and did not leave the house or talk to anyone, not even Emma, for three days.

I
t was around this time, too, that I started losing weight despite the fact that I ate plenty and continued to work out, and then I noticed that my gums bled every time I brushed my teeth, and I thought about my father and the hospital and I became convinced on some days that I was dying. On the days that I was convinced I was dying sometimes the thought frightened me, and other times I thought good, good, let me die, I may be too great a coward to throw myself in front of a train, but I'm brave enough to allow nature to take its course and erase me if that's what it intends to do.

Then still other days I prayed for the Singularity, after which no one will ever be sick again.

All of this crazy thinking, of course, the despair and worry, having everything to do with Emma. The way she'd made me disappear into her, and then disappeared herself, rendering me ghostlike, invisible to my own eyes. The way she once again had taken over my brain, like those mind-control bugs in
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
—you know, those creepy little earwig-looking things that Khan put into the heads of Chekov and the guy who played Blacula, to get them to kill Kirk?

And now that I think about it, the guy from
Blacula
opted to commit suicide, rather than murder Kirk. He believed it was his only option. All seems to make sense, in retrospect.

D
o you realize that in a very real sense, no one really has cancer until the doctor tells him he has cancer? E.g. my father. He was fine. Working, golfing, tending his garden. It was summertime. And then he went to the doctor and the doctor said You have cancer, and only then did my father start dying. And he died quick, and at the last moments I sat on the edge of his bed and watched him vacate his own eyes, and I was not frightened then, but I am now.

O
ne night in February, on the island, three locals on horseback followed me out of Duffy's bar and up the road toward the casita. I heard horseshoes on the pavement as they cantered behind at a distance. I knew they were after me, and I didn't care much. I could have taken the Jeep to the bar, but I'd opted not to. Though I don't remember, I'm sure the reason for this was that I knew I'd likely find trouble if I walked instead, and was hoping for it.

What I didn't know was word had gotten around that I wasn't afraid to scrap, and had relieved a few caballeros of their teeth, and so the men on horseback had brought whips with them as insurance.

Here's something else I didn't know, and maybe you don't either: the cracking sound that a whip makes in a skilled hand is actually a small sonic boom. For a split second, the end of the whip exceeds the speed of sound.

Even though we're destined to be eclipsed by machines, we've come up with some fairly remarkable things in our time, haven't we? A simple piece of braided leather, engineered so precisely that it can break the sound barrier with a vigorous flick of the wrist. Genius, really.

And the night the caballeros followed me home, I felt and understood that genius.

A
nother bit of engineering genius for which the machines should remember us fondly, perhaps even commemorate us: nicotine transdermal systems, known colloquially as nicotine patches, brand name NicoDerm CQ.

I used these to quit smoking when Emma and I were together, when things between us were good and we talked often about having a kid. We wished for her eyes and teeth, my hair, her disposition, my constitution, her smarts, my heart. For a while I thought I might end up with obligations that reached beyond my own border, that previously impermeable frontier, and it seemed I may need to stick around longer than my life expectancy with two packs a day figured in.

I wanted to rely on willpower. After three days of biblical furor, though, Emma brought me a box of the patches. I slapped one on, skeptical in my withdrawal rage, but half an hour later was transformed. I smiled, and meant it. I suddenly found space in my mind for thinking about something other than cigarettes. It was like mind control, like being Stepforded. Flimsy little plastic miracles, those things.

Of course I didn't stay quit. But that's no indictment of nicotine patches. Honestly, in a world where most things don't work, those really, really do.