When HARLIE Was One (3 page)

I first heard the idea of a computer program called a VIRUS (and the corresponding VACCINE software) in the late summer of 1968. A programmer shared it as a joke. I thought it was a funny and fascinating notion and incorporated it into the next HARLIE story, even postulating that it could be used as a means for extracting data illegally and moving it around to other machines. It made for an interesting plot device.

When I wrote that bit, I thought it was merely speculation about what computers might someday be able to do. I had no idea that all sorts of malware variants, worms and trojans and virii would someday become a global epidemic, let alone a whole industry of malicious criminal schemes. To this day, I still do not understand why anyone would write malicious software, especially when there are so many more interesting and exciting things to do with a computer.

A couple of other notes about this edition.

Back when this book was written, computers weren't just quaint, they were primitive. Most of the interaction was on teletype-like printers or occasionally an alphanumeric terminal. There were no graphics. Everything was text and numbers. And most of it was all caps—not because we were all shouting at each other, but because it was easier to write code that way in a world where every byte was expensive.

I didn't even see my first computer until a year after
When HARLIE Was One
was published. (It was a DEC 10 and it looked like a refrigerator full of wires.) So my experience of the state of the art at the time I wrote this book was an IBM Selectric typewriter.
²
(Look it up.) It had an infuriated golf ball that clattered back and forth across the page. The keyboard had a satisfyingly tactile clickety-click feeling that no subsequent keyboard has ever matched. That machine was as solid and dependable as you could imagine. It was my first technological love affair.

Typing on that Selectric, it was easy to imagine that I was having a conversation with a dispassionate intelligence engine embodied somewhere in its metal chassis. The back-and-forth of the Selectric type ball paralleled the back and forth of ideas and insights.

All the conversations with HARLIE were written in capitals because it was the way computer conversations showed up on printouts. It was the convention of the time. Today it looks quaint, ugly, and almost unreadable, but I have resisted the temptation to reformat the text because if I allow myself that first change, pretty soon I'll be rewriting the whole thing all over again. Nope, not gonna do it.

The only change I did allow myself, and only fanatic readers would have noticed it, is the spelling of one character's name. Handley has been changed to Hanley to honor my friends John Hanley Sr. and John Hanley Jr.

Meanwhile. . . .

HARLIE's still with me today. Sort of.

I've been off my own journeys for a while, studying what I call the technologies of consciousness, so I don't need him at the keyboard anymore, but the question I typed so many years ago is still rattling around in my head.

As of this writing, this is how it looks to me. If I were still using HARLIE's voice, this is what he would say:

                      
The function of life is to make more life.

                      
To accomplish that, life creates consciousness.

                      
The purpose of consciousness is to make more consciousness.

                      
To accomplish that, consciousness creates
contribution
. Contribution is about making a difference for others.

                      
The function of contribution is to make more contribution so that consciousness can expand and life can spread into new domains.

                      
Sentience is a product of contribution. It is not just self-awareness, but awareness of the selves of others as well. It is created in partnership and demonstrated in combined efforts that are greater than all the individual selves.

As for me, in this long, long journey from adolescence to senility, with occasional stops at what passes for maturity (but is more often sheer exhaustion), I remain enormously indebted to large numbers of people, starting with those who resisted the temptation to strangle me in my crib, all the way up to those who put up with me as I struggled with my involuntary humanity, and concluding with those who believed I was worth the effort to coach and encourage.

You guys know who you are. Thanks for the adventure!

—David Gerrold

____________________

¹
Eventually, I learned to recognize that feeling as a good one. I had it again with
The Man Who Folded Himself
and
The Martian Child
, two other books that turned out very well.

²
You can see Malcolm McDowell pushing one off a table in Stanley Kubrick's movie of
A Clockwork Orange
.

Author's Notes on
the 1987 Edition

Personally, I thought 1969 was a ghastly year.

I think you had to be there to understand, but I'll give you the short version:

I'd run out of trust.

Trust had become politically incorrect. Trust was an exercise in naïveté. Only stupid people trusted. Trust was merely the first part of betrayal. Trust was how you let pain into your life.

You probably shouldn't even trust yourself.

And in the middle of that—the only person I
wanted
to trust, a friend of extraordinary virtue and compassion, was killed. Murdered. He stopped his car in the wrong place at the wrong time. The circumstances were so bizarre as to constitute irrefutable proof that God is a deranged practical joker.

It was the ultimate outrage in a year of outrages. It was the final betrayal of trust in a world where everything was
supposed
to work out all right.

Rage is not a strong enough word.

This was
not right
. This was not how life was supposed to be lived.

Where was the justice? The purpose?

There didn't seem to be any.

Indeed, the evidence was compelling and overwhelming that we truly were an unjust and unworthy species—one of the universe's great mistakes. If there was just one truth that you could depend on in 1969, it was this:
Other people are the source of all pain
.

Corollary: Stop caring about people and you eliminate all the pain in your life.

Simple and easy.

The only problem was, I hated that answer.

Because it denied everything that was good and kind and joyous in human beings. It denied love and enthusiasm and the simple sense of wonder that happens in the space between two people.

It was the fashionable answer, though; the
politically correct
answer. This was what had shaped the politics of the decade. This was why the nation was tearing itself apart. This was why the bullet had become the last word in any—it seemed like every—disagreement. From Dallas to Memphis to Vietnam.

I hated it.

I hated what it said about us as a people—and I hated what it suggested about myself as an individual. I hated what it meant about us as a species.

There had to be something better.

I had a typewriter, a ream of paper, and a delusion of grandeur. That was enough.

Truly, that's all it takes to be a storyteller—a vision of something else and the urge to communicate it, even in the face of massive disagreement.

The thing about writing, as the craft is practiced today, is that you don't have to do it face-to-face. You don't have to tell your story to real people until
after
it's finished. You only need to tell it to the typewriter, and I think that's what makes the whole thing possible at all.

By nature, anyway, I am a reclusive person. I stay home and I write. I type. I stop and think—and then type some more. I stare out the window. I read the comics. I type. I change the disc on the CD player. I type some more. I open a Coke. I look at the clock and it's always a surprise. I realize I've missed two meals. I go back and type some more. The phone rings; I lift it up from the cradle and replace it without answering. If the person calls back, I snarl, “Go away. I'm working.” I look up a word. I type.

That's what storytelling looks like.

People who know me know that I disappear into my work like an obsessive spelunker of the human experience. Storytelling is never about what the writer
knows
—it's about what he can
discover
, and the stories that result are simply the profound expression of a desire to report back.

I took my grief and my rage and my pain and I poured it into my work. I locked away the world and spent a year conducting my own personal inquiry into the question: “What does it mean to be a human being?”

After a while, the question took on a life of its own. The question had no (obvious) answer, but it did suggest another question. And that one suggested another—and then another and another.

That's where HARLIE came from.

He lived in my typewriter and he spoke to me with my own fingers. No mysticism here, I knew what was going on. HARLIE was me, the other half of my brain. He was someone I could talk to where trust was not the issue. He was an innocent and he was wise beyond his years—and like me, all he had were questions, not answers.

He was a reflection of everything I cared about in the grisly summers of '69 and '70. I sat at the typewriter day after day, pounding the keys, talking to myself, listening to what I was saying and crossing out the stuff that even I could recognize was stupid.

No, I did not find any answers. (Sorry. You'll have to look elsewhere for answers. I'm not in the guru business.) What I found were more questions. But what questions! Here were more fascinating questions to consider than I had ever considered possible. Here was the grandest adventure a mind could ever have—
inventing another mind
.

—and in the process,
inventing itself
.

Something woke up.

I did.

What happened was this:

First, I rediscovered my enthusiasm and my passion. They were exactly where I had left them. They were both somewhat the worse for wear, but still very serviceable. If I'd gotten nothing else out of the process of writing the book, it was still time well spent.

And then . . . something else happened. A realization crystallized about what it means to be alive, but I'm not sure it can be explained. It can only be lived. I know, that's a strange admission for someone who is supposed to be good with words to make; but that's what else I discovered. I'm not in the business of making words. I'm in the business of making a difference.

Listen. Here's the only answer I know: The power isn't in the answers. It's in the questions. Asking the right questions, asking the
next
question. That's what makes the difference.

That's why this book is a special one for me, and why it's such a privilege to bring it back again to the audience. This is a book about the discovery of humanity—
from the inside
. It's a story about
us
discovering the height and depth and breadth
and passion
of our own humanity.

Of course, the joke was on me. There was a question that I'd forgotten to ask. What happens to the storyteller in the process of telling such a story?

Right.

That's what happened.

And that's why the book is so special.

Add this one to your notes: Writers don't write books. Books write writers.

Betty Ballantine bought
When HARLIE Was One
for Ballantine Books and published the first edition in 1972. Despite my enthusiasm for what I had accomplished, I was still terrified that she would tell me it wasn't good enough; I could see all the things that were wrong with it, all the things I still didn't know how to correct; I was most afraid that it was naive and sophomoric and badly written. But what she said to me instead was, “David, you're going to win the Hugo Award for this book.”

That was one of the most terrifying things anyone has ever said to me. (Never mind why. It's too long a story. Let it suffice that I think awards should not be casually handed out to whatever is the most popular work of the year, but should be saved for those deeds that
transform
your perception of what is possible in the universe.)

Fortunately, she was wrong. Isaac Asimov won the Hugo Award that year for his novel
The Gods Themselves
. I came in second and won the right to pretend I wasn't really disappointed. “Well, heck—” I said, digging my big toe awkwardly into the dirt, “ 'Tain't no disgrace to lose an award to Dr. Asimov—” I learned to do this performance so well that once I even convinced someone I meant it.

Now, fifteen years after HARLIE's initial publication, I can actually be relieved that the book didn't win that award. Upon rereading the original novel, all of my worst fears were confirmed. Computer technology has advanced so rapidly in the intervening years that most of my original notions have become embarrassingly obsolete. And the book
was
naive and sophomoric and badly written. It was small relief to discover that it was nowhere near as bad as I had come to believe in my mind, but it was still dated enough to make me cringe in more than a few places. Had it been an award winner, I would not have been allowed to rewrite it or tamper with it in any way.