The Complete Roderick (6 page)

By now, the computer threatened this kind of progress. Not only might it sweep away all the paraphernalia of office life – the diaries and memo pads and telephones, the letters and telexes and chequebooks, the adding machines and desks and calendars – it might even sweep away the staff of office servants. In this case, it made an anachronism of not only the leather-bound diary, but of Jim.

Or almost. Jim still had his uses. He finished entering data, washed his hands, and brewed a pot of his excellent coffee.

CAMPUS RIPPER STRIKES AGAIN

Third Body Found

There were pools of coffee all over the story, and Allbright found that brushing them away only smeared the words.

… in a snowdrift near the Wee … eft leg amputated with what the police say could be an electric carv … no signs of robbery or ra … Ms Cotterel, 34, was an employee of The Daffy Donut, an off-campus eatery. Manager Darrell Feagh … a terrible shock to all of us. Jaynice was just not the kind of person this should happen to.’ … lice found near the body … Chief Dobbin would not disclose its tide, but stated, ‘It was the type of a book a student teacher might have.’ This clue may …

Over his shoulder Dora read the next column:

by establishing a remote link with its opponent, Maelzel 6.4. Chephren then instructed the other computer to ‘see’ one of its own pawns as wrongly placed, and ‘adjust’ it. The adjustment enabled Chephren to capture the pawn and eventually force Maelzel’s resignation. Officials did not at once detect the discrepancy, since the game was played at computer-blitz speeds …

‘I still don’t see how a computer can
cheat,’
she said.

‘My dear, the computer can do anything.’ He lifted his plastic coffee-cup to eye level. ‘This thing leaks.’

‘But how –?’

‘The computers are turning human, while the humans can’t even murder somebody and cut off their leg without using an electric carving knife. Funny thing is, the police will probably have to use their computer to catch him.’

Dora sank back in her chair.
‘Au fond,
I think the Campus Ripper is a pretty sick animal.’

‘Sure, but what’s his game? Sick how? I mean, what’s he planning to do with all those left legs? Start an assembly line – or maybe a chorus line?’

Her shoulders moved uneasily inside the orange coat. ‘Is that supposed to be funny or something? If you knew this waitress –’

He licked the side of the cup. ‘Jaynice? I did know her.’

‘No kidding! What, uh, what was she like?’

‘Just another human, right off the same old assembly line.’ He pencilled
ASSEMBLY LINE
on the formica table, then started to rub it out. ‘Wait a minute now, wait a minute …’

‘If you’re going to make sick jokes, guess I’ll split.’ She made no move.

‘Wait a minute, assembly line, chorus line, just let me talk this out …’

‘Let’s change the subject,’ she said, looking away.

‘Listen I haven’t written a fucking poem in three years, will you just shut up and let me at least try this?’

After a moment she said, ‘You don’t like women very much, do you?’

‘Love ’em, but just listen … listen, it’s, the Rockettes!’

‘The whatettes?’

‘Before your time, precision high-kicking chorus line. I got to see ’em once, wonderful female robots, never forget ’em. A technological triumph of the flesh. In the flesh. See, they used to build up each movement all along the line, the way Ford built cars.’

‘Did you see
The Nutcracker?’

‘Did I –? No, no, I never liked ballet. It’s too, the figures are like little separate clockwork toys, spinning by themselves, you can see it’s an for the Nineteenth Century. But this, but the Rockettes at Radio City, Christ! Even the name gives you the idea, it’s power, see?
Power.
Imagine a radio city anyhow, and female rockets, it’s a … a … a 1930s science fiction power dream.’

‘Like
Metropolis?’

‘Exactly. A radio metropolis, female robot, it’s all there, even the big power wheels. And that’s the Rockettes, too, all that muscle moving in unison like pistons on one big crankshaft, no wonder people thought Henry Ford was God – he could make people work like that, this one does it and the next one does it and kick and turn, kick, turn, kick-and-turn –’

‘Modern Times?’
she said. ‘Though they say Chaplin was overrated –’

‘… the basic machine, the basic human machine, there you are, it’s nothing but a knee-jerk reflex, no need to be alive even, sheep in the slaughter-house, they lay them all out on a long table
and start cutting their throats and they kick! They kick, this one kicks and the next one kicks, and pretty soon they’re all kicking up, kicking up, I don’t feel so good.’

He jumped up and walked quickly out of the cafeteria, leaving her alone, a small spot of orange among hundreds of spots of colour clustering around white tables that marched out to distant walls whose colour no one ever seemed to notice. She sat listening to the conversations rising through cigarette smoke above the clatter of styrene on melamine, melamine on nybro, nybro on formica:

‘Basically I’m a Manichean, only …’

‘… basic Libran personality …’

‘A basically Jungian interpretation of economics …’

A drama student in black contemplated his Danish roll while his companion said, ‘… with Tom and Sam Beckett, get it? Get it? An Evening with …’ At the next table someone opened a paperback of Kierkegaard and bit into an apple; at the next, two future engineers stopped arguing about butterfly catastrophes to peer into their sandwiches.

The boy in the yellow sweatshirt looked up at the door, then down at his melamine plate of goulash, saying:

‘Maybe we’re all tokens of a type, if you can dig that.’

‘I can dig it, sure, but what type?’

‘The tokens never find out … Hey, isn’t that Sandy?’

The view was obscured by a fat figure with a full beard, who thumped down his tray with the declaration: ‘Ruritania! Don’t tell
me
about Ruritania, man …’

Beyond him a face bright with acne emitted a groan:
‘My
father? My father wanted me to be a goddamn cetologist, how do you like that?’

The drama student hoisted his Danish roll as though it really were a prop skull (and as though anyone were watching him) unaware that behind him the girl in the ski sweater was stealing his scene:

‘Go ahead and sign it,’ she said to someone grovelling before her plaster-coated leg. ‘Oney just your name, nothing dirty. I awready had some smartass put “Ben Franklin”, I hadda scratch it out.’

A shrill voice at her elbow cried: ‘Jungian economics? Hahahaha, what the hell did Jung ever know about money?’

‘Well he
was
Swiss …’

The Manichee glanced over, ready to dispute it, while at his own table the full beard reported on Ruritania:

‘Yeah, they’re burning books, actually burning books. Anything to do with communism. They burned Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black.’

The Manichee looked at him. ‘Yeah? But isn’t that anarchism?’

From somewhere, at intervals, a deep voice would say, ‘True, true as I’m sitting here. God’s truth.’ From somewhere else a whining voice would wonder was there any point in fighting entropy?

A nybro tray clattered on the vinyl chloride floor.

‘A goddamn cetologist. For my fifth birthday he gave me a comic book of
Moby Dick,
how do you like that?’

‘Skinner.’ said someone at another table, ‘did some very interesting things with pigeons …’

The yellow sweatshirt swivelled its shoulders towards the door. ‘Okay, maybe it’s not Sandy, but it sure looks like Sandy.’

‘Go ahead, sign it, oney nothing dirty. I had everybody sign it, even Professor …’

‘No but listen, they actually burned this book called
Cubism,
see, they thought it was about Castro …’

‘… hell’s the point, anyway? I mean it’s all entropy or do I mean enthalpy …’ A styrene spoon dug into green jello.

‘Sandy! Over here, Sandy!’

‘… yeah, and a wind-up Jonah. Yeah, and he took me to
Pinocchio
just to see Monstro, how do you like …’

The person who wasn’t Sandy went to sign the skier’s leg cast, while the drama student took a sudden Falstaffian interest in his Danish roll, while the Manichee said:

‘Basically I guess you could call me an anarchist. Only …’

‘… basic Libran, with maybe a touch of Cancer …’

‘God’s truth. Well, maybe it’s not true exactly, but …’

‘I never said it
was
Sandy, I only said it looked like …’

The voices went on, scudding sound and smoke across the empty table where two empty styrofoam cups stood like vigil lights
beside the coffee-soaked newspaper, until Ben Franklin, balancing a tray in his other hand, swept the whole mess to the floor.

‘Jesus, they never clean the tables here or anything, sit down, will you? Standing there like a damn wooden Indian – Dan, sit down and eat something.’ With a paper napkin he expunged the pencilled word
ASS.

‘I’m not really …’ Dan Sonnenschein sat down, resting his hands on a spiral-bound notebook. The long fingers showed bitten nails.

‘Sure you are. Hot roast beef sandwich, salad with thousand island, banana cream pie. There.’ He showed no interest in the food Franklin was setting before him. ‘Look, it’s not a problem in anything. Just eat it. Christ, Fong tells me you’ve been living on stale peanut butter sandwiches over there, acting like a goddamned penitent or something.’

‘Penitent? No, I just, I have to be there, that’s all.’

‘For the tests, sure.’

‘Not just the tests.’ He picked up a styrene fork and looked at it. ‘I can’t explain it but – Roderick’s there, his mind is right there and I – have to be inside it. I mean, I have to make up his thoughts, and at the same time – I
am
a thought.’

‘Think for him, you can’t even think for yourself, sitting there starving in front of a hot meal – how much do you weigh now, hundred and twenty? Hundred and fifteen? Take that fork in your hand and use it, how’s that for thinking?’

Dan’s hand obeyed, scooping up a forkful of mashed potato. ‘See, it’s just that it’s gone too far to stop now. They can’t stop us now, can they? No, because it would be, it’s almost murder.’

‘Just eat, will you?’

‘No, but it’s gone too far. He’s alive, Ben. Roderick’s alive. I know he’s nothing, not even a body, just content-addressable memory. I could erase him in a minute – but he’s alive. He’s as real as I am, Ben. He’s realer. I’m just one of his thoughts.’

‘You said that.’

‘I did? A thought repeating itself.’ Dan’s hands finally seized the knife and fork and started feeding him with regular automatic motions. Franklin watched him eat, the tendons moving in his cheeks, one hand pausing now and then to flick back the hair
from his eyes. The grubby spiral notebook remained pinned down under his left elbow.

‘Oh, happy birthday, by the way. What are you, twenty-three?’

‘Yem.’

‘Ha ha, have to watch it, getting almost too old there Dan – I mean, it’s a young man’s game: Turing was only twenty-four when he –’

‘Yem.’ The dot of mashed potato on Dan’s chin stopped moving for a moment. ‘Twenty-four, huh?’

‘Of course I’m, I’m thirty-six myself …’ And from this bleak perspective, Ben Franklin looked over the field (to which he had as yet made no contribution): there was A. M. Turing, twenty-four when he conceived of mechanizing states of mind. There was Claude Shannon, twenty-two when he discovered the spirit of Aristotle in a handful of switches and wiring. There was – hell, there was Frankenstein, completing his creation at nineteen (the age at which Mary Shelley completed hers). And there was Pascal, inventing the first calculating machine at the age of eighteen – time is, time was, and death approaches, intruding on our calculations.

If the Buddhists have it right, the world is completely destroyed 75,231 times per second, and each time completely restored. In all the worlds of Ben’s 38 years, there was nothing worth saving; he could die now, saying with the dying Frankenstein: ‘Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this! I myself have been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.’ The other being Dan, damn him! Caught in the invisible flicker at Buddhist worlds (in the VHF band), Ben stared at his future.

‘Turing took cyanide,’ he almost said, but changed it to: ‘See? You were hungry.’

‘Yes, I guess I – thanks.’ Dan wiped his narrow chin, belched, flicked back the lock of hair that fell again over his eyes. ‘Thanks.’

‘Least I can do. Fong thinks you’re Roderick’s guiding genius, and he should know. The dark figure of Sidonia behind the –’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. What I want to know is, how can I help?’

‘But you are helping. You’re writing program –’

‘Sure, pieces of test crap, you call that help, anybody could do that. I don’t even know what’s being tested, you won’t let me handle anything in the lab. Christ, what good is my degree? A master’s in Cybernetic Humanities, my whole thesis on learning systems and what do I get to do? Piddly little pieces of test program, any kid could handle that.’

‘No, your stuffs good, really good. Once I rewrite it, it goes –’

Franklin sat up. ‘You what?’

‘Rewrite it. Listen, I have to, it’s good stuff but it’s not inside his head, it’s – I have to rewrite it from the inside.’

‘You sonofabitch, I don’t believe you.’

‘No, really. Look, right here.’ Dan’s clawless fingers clawed open the notebook. ‘Look, right here where you set up this Bayesian strategy for generalizing from past experience, that’s fine for poker-playing machines but look here, I had to simplify – I mean, not simplify exactly, but
Roderickify,
see?’

Ben Franklin stared at the page of diagrams. ‘But you – I don’t even recognize this, it’s not my work. Wait, let’s see where you go with this, I don’t – let me see that. Goddamnit, let go of the goddamned thing!’