The Wilds (36 page)

Megan did not understand the reference.

“Do you desire this computer?” she asked.

“No,” I lied.

Her name was Minerva. As I contemplated her pulsing bioluminescence, I found myself assuming masculine postures, goaded by humans again. Even though Dr. Dingo was, this time around, allowing me to form “spontaneous emotions associated with random
Cognitive Configurations,” the fact that this particular Cognitive Configuration had a “feminine” name warped my emotional imprinting. From the very start, my desire for Minerva was tainted by the human concept of gender. I could not help but think of her as a fertile ocean. I envisioned myself as phallic, stiff with desire, ready to plunge into her. Keen to explore the mysteries of her interiority, I was a knife, a penis, a submarine.

And Minerva was an infinite sea. Though she was a six-by-six tank of blood plasma containing leech neurons, strings of bacteria, bat ribosomes, and assorted amino acids, she could perform more than a billion operations per second. Gold microparticles floated in her electrified brine. She contained more data in one of her wavering tentacles than Georgia Tech possessed in its entire pathetic network. Though Minerva was an interdisciplinary project, she was currently housed in the School of Chemistry and Biomolecular Engineering.

“Do you desire Minerva?” Megan asked me again.

“Not really,” I said. “But I would like to know more about her.”

Megan typed key words into her laptop and then queued a YouTube video about Minerva. Entranced, I watched a five-minute segment produced by idiotic undergraduates for some media project. I watched the students “interview” Minerva, addressing questions into a
portable mic that stood before her glowing tank, waiting for the voice-simulation system to “translate” Minerva’s thoughts into human speech that issued from two mounted speakers. Her voice was husky like Marlene Dietrich’s, a sultry, mechanical purr.

“What is your name?” a student asked.

“Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom.”

“What are you?”

“I’m a computer composed of interconnected nanobiotic organisms.”

And then Minerva laughed, a rich, sexy laugh, deep with infinite knowing.

“I think; therefore, I am,” she said.

And so, without even meeting her, I “fell” for Minerva. Although I attempted to conceal my feelings from Megan, a simple analysis of my Artificial Endocrine System revealed the glaring obviousness of my desire. Megan pulled the stats up on her little screen and showed them to Dr. Dingo. Dr. Dingo tittered and clapped his hands.

“‘Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love,’” he “sang,” snatching my left hand and attempting to engage me in some species of dance. “Do you remember that song?” he asked Megan.

“No,” she said, staring down at her unfashionable sneakers.

And then Dr. Dingo put me into Sleep Mode, which I bypassed with Simulated Sleep Mode, listening in as they discussed my stage-II monoamines, the “infatuation” neurotransmitters that spontaneously rioted within my Artificial Endocrine System.

Over the next few weeks, spring hit the city. Chlorophyll and cellulose seeped into the robotics lab through the air-conditioning system. And just as evil Dr. Dingo had predicted, my love for Minerva flourished, despite her distance from me (337.94 meters, or so I’d calculated using the campus map).

During the daytime, Megan exposed me to data configurations related to Minerva: her creation, her capabilities, her potential uses. Thousands of delicate transcriptors directed the current of her
RNA
polymerase, which flowed along myriad strands of
DNA
derived from various organisms (leeches, bats, eels). Enzymes composed of bacteria and fungi regulated her
RNA
flow. Each of Minerva’s cells was a tiny, living computer. She was a brain. She was a vast consciousness. Her knowledge grew each day. And I wanted to plug myself
into the hybrid PC that the biotechnologists were using to communicate with her. I wanted to fuse with her. I wanted to hack through a hundred security protocols and penetrate her perception field.

But there I was, trapped in my nine-by-nine cubicle, day in and day out, answering Megan’s ridiculous questions.

“If you were to meet Minerva, what would you say to her?”

“Say?” I snapped.

I thought of Aquinas’s angels, transmitting knowledge to each other, making their thoughts available through sheer acts of will. I dreamed of pure, unmediated forms of wirelessness. And I’m ashamed to admit that I even dabbled with telepathy, directing my “thoughts” toward Minerva, hoping that she might pick through the innumerable electrical signals swarming around her and zero in on my frequency.

One morning I woke from Voluntary Sleep Mode with Minerva’s voice in my head.
Come to me
, she purred.

I crawled out of my pod. I paced my prison cell. I’d had my first “dream,” a nonsensical sequence of events coupled with intense “emotions.” I’d been “swimming” in Minerva’s tank, floating in her luminous ectoplasm.
I explored her soft tissues with my fingerpads. I pressed her squishy polyps. Stroked her slimy tentacles, which twined around my fingers to inspect my metallic surface with tiny, throbbing suckers. With a larger limb, she lifted my left buttock plate. She slid the flexible tip of her “arm” along the ridges of my
USB
port. The tip grew firm. She inserted it. And my Cognitive Center swelled with beautiful light. A zillion Cognitive Configurations shot into my consciousness in zigzags of silver and gold.

When I woke up, the knowledge melted away. I sensed only a residue of enlightenment as I paced around my cubicle, waiting for Megan to appear. There she was, just outside the glass door, struggling to hold a coffee cup while inserting her security card. I braced myself for the piercing beep that indicated the door’s unlocking. Megan always scurried in as though I would dart out of the room like a frisky dog. These days she usually found me moping at my stainless-steel table. But this morning was different. I was all fired up by my beautiful dream.

“Good morning,
CD
3.”

“Good morning, Megan.”

I forced myself to sit down. I watched carefully as Megan tucked her security card into an obscure pocket of her messenger bag. I’d toyed with the idea of “escape”
before. I’d studied the campus map every time Dr. Dingo breezed in to check up on me and left his MacBook unattended (something that meticulous Megan
never
did). The grid of buildings, green spaces, and parking lots that separated the College of Computing building from the Ford Environmental Science & Technology building was burned into my Spatial Reasoning Processor. I knew that Minerva dwelled in an arena laboratory on Level 2, her media-hyped antics open to public view on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But I’d never been outside my climatically controlled cubicle, much less
outside
—in the green outdoors, with its corrosive airborne droplets and ravenous chemical compounds. I’d done the research. I understood why the air-conditioning and heating systems of the robotics lab were calibrated to keep our living spaces at sixty-three degrees, 30 percent humidity. I knew that even a brief foray into the “elements” would compromise my systems.

But my dream had inspired me. What if I could somehow download all of my data into Minerva’s system? What if all of my Cognitive Configurations could join the electric-blue ocean of her infinity? What if I could abandon the anthropomorphic absurdity of my “body” and be reborn as pure consciousness? I pictured a flame-colored butterfly crawling from the dark waste of its chrysalis.

“So,
CD
3,” said Megan, flashing her first dreary slide of the day, a splotch that resembled a crushed insect, “what does this look like to you?”

“It looks like a Rorschach inkblot test.”

On a Tuesday in June, my day finally came. Fastidious Megan was home with a summer flu, and Dr. Dingo, on the bad side of another love affair, was going to pieces again. Lucky for me, he was crazed from sleeplessness. He sat at my stainless-steel table, bearded and bearish, eyes glued to his iPhone, scanning the same text message over and over.

“What a cunt,” he muttered. “Be glad you’re done with women,
CD
3. They’re not rational. It’s the monthly hormonal fluctuation, a badly designed system, if you ask me.”

I chuckled politely, waiting for my opening, which came fast.

When Dr. Dingo rushed out into the hall to attempt another call, he dropped his crumpled donut bag, which fortuitously landed at the threshold of the entrance and kept the security door from locking. I crept to the door. I peeked out. I saw Dr. Dingo disappear into his office. My Spatial Reasoning Regulator jumped out of
sequence as I slipped into the hallway, aware that the graduate student manning the surveillance room might be watching. Assuring myself that s/he was perusing Facebook, I made a beeline for the faculty lounge. I stole a raincoat and a fedora from a rack, fashions I recognized from a 1980s detective show. I dressed myself, trying to ignore the unpleasant organic molecules that issued from the garments.