Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  “You’ll help us?” I asked Kales. “If we get stuck?”

  “Sure. But that’s not going to happen. She’ll get it in about a minute. I have three daughters—I know.”

  I took Maria by the hand and we went down to the Chairman’s office. He sat at his desk, dressed in a marvelous blue suit with a paisley tie, drinking tea and reading the old book by Trollope. I hoped I looked that good when I was his age.

  “Here we are.”

  The Chairman looked up and saw Maria.

  “Well,” he said, rising, “I knew you would try anything, Mr. Whitman, but I never expected this.” He bent down to shake Maria’s hand and introduced himself.

  “Hello, young lady.”

  “I’m here with Jack!” Maria said, holding my hand and swinging on it.

  “She’s the daughter of a friend,” I explained.

  The Chairman looked down and smiled. “She seems to have a lot of affection for you,” he said, as if he knew more about me than he would declare right now.

  We walked back to my office. Kales had pulled a chair up to the screen and put Maria in it. I turned to the Chairman.

  “I’ve been racking my brains how to get you to see that this deal needs to go through. I’ve given you the rational, quantifiable arguments. You knew them anyway. I think Morrison expected me to do this and then to give up. So that would seem to be all that I could do.”

  The Chairman settled into a chair, attentive at the novelty of my presentation. “You have been wrong about your position with me in every instance,” the Chairman said. “But that is all I will say.”

  “Well, at any rate, there’s something I want to—give is the closest word I can think of, and this is how I’m going to do it. You’ve listened to every damn thing I’ve said and you’ve argued with me over some of it, but you have listened. So I’m going to give it another shot.”

  “I hope you won’t be digging my grave for me again.”

  “No. But it came to me that what you might like to have is what you can’t have, really, which is the future. We all want that. What a thing it would be if you could experience the future, before it comes. And perhaps this way I could be persuasive.” I turned toward Maria, who was quietly not understanding. “What we have here is an average-to-bright girl aged three years and eleven months. As far as you’re concerned she was born yesterday. But the chances are that she will live to the year 2074.”

  “That’s something to think about.” The Chairman stood behind Maria, his hands folded behind his back. “I hope we’ve solved the national debt by then.”

  “Maria is not overly familiar with the uses of the computer, no more or less than most children her age, which means that she has seen it used on television and that kind of thing. She’s not some young Mozart of programming or anything, okay? Just a regular kid. Right, Maria?”

  She tugged on my hand. “Can we play the game now?”

  “It’ll be just one more minute, honey.” I turned back to the Chairman. “At Maria’s age, there is sufficient eye-hand coordination to ride a tricycle. She can say her ABC’s by heart easily and can count up to a certain number, maybe thirty. In the future, one of the widely used developmental thresholds of children will be when they are able to use a computer of a certain standardized complexity or simplicity, whatever that standard is, I don’t know. It’s immaterial here. But this will be true of all the classes. Of course, the upper-middle class and the wealthy already have computers available for their children. These kids will be the next generation of the information elite.”

  “So what are we going to see?” the Chairman asked. “There are all kinds of computer toys and programs and disks and encyclopedias and stuff available now for kids. My youngest grandchildren have all sorts of stuff.”

  “Yes, but nothing on the market is more advanced than what you’re about to see. And what you are about to see is designed for children, even though there are comparable adult possibilities. I have Maria here to make the point that if a kid almost four can grasp the essential plasticity of this technology, then—”

  “Then we have a whole new generation of users, of consumers.” The Chairman nodded, intent on speeding me up. “I think I can figure out the commercial possibilities, Mr. Whitman, assuming there are any. Bill Gates and I have discussed this, incidentally.”

  “Now, we’ve got here the best new voice synthesis software, the animation, high-resolution screen. Great sound, just about everything that’s coming along now.” I nodded at Kales and he typed a couple of commands into the computer.

  “Speak your name into that little microphone there,” Kales said to Maria, pointing to the front of the computer.

  “My name is Maria Salcines,” she said in a sweet, eager voice.

  “Good. Okay, again.”

  “My name is Maria Salcines.”

  Kales peered into his screen, hit a few keys.

  “How old are you?” said the computer in a feminine voice.

  “I am three years old and my birthday is June tenth,” Maria said.

  “Good.” The technician nodded to me. “We’re ready. It will recognize her voice and no one else’s in the room. No mouse commands, no keyboards, just talking to the machine. I’ve been working on this for seven years.”

  “How does that work?” the Chairman asked.

  “Well, basically, the computer electronically chops her words into slices of time that are ten milliseconds long. Then it analyzes the frequencies of each slice and matches it against a data base of normal speech sounds. This technology will be everywhere in five years, incidentally. It’s going to change the way we do a lot of things.” He hit a key and Maria’s screen went dark. A few numbers flitted on and off, program-loading information regarding memory and various disk drives. Then a cartoon village appeared, England in the 1600s, home of my ancestors almost four hundred years ago. A little boy in knickers and a cap walked along the lane, stopped, and waved at Maria.

  “Hello,” the boy said.

  “Hi!” Maria answered spontaneously.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Maria Salcines.”

  “Where do you live, Maria?”

  “I live in Brooklyn,” she said happily, ready to play.

  “Brooklyn, New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never been there.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you want to know my name?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Christopher.” He pulled a hammer from his back pocket. “I want to build something.” He pulled out a toolbox that rattled with tools. “I need your help.”

  “Why?” said Maria.

  “Because I need you to tell me what to build.”

  She looked at me. “Anything,” I said to Maria. “Tell him whatever you want to build.”

  “A boat!”

  “Okay,” Christopher said. “A boat it is. A boat you shall have.”

  On the screen the boy walked down to the harbor, his little shoes clip-clopping on the cobblestones, taking several right and left turns and down narrow lanes. He passed a cobbler in his shop, the walls piled high with old-fashioned shoes. The cobbler, an old fat man, looked out of the screen and said, “Hi, Maria.”

  “Hi.” She turned to me. “I like it.”

  “Do you like my shoes?” the cobbler said.

  “Yes.”

  “Touch the ones you like most.”

  Maria leaned forward and touched an old pair of boots on the screen. A whiskery mouse with a red cap on popped out of the shoe and scampered away. Then the boots themselves popped up in the air and leapt onto the cobblestone street, where they danced a moment in a frenzy of loud bolero music, and flew back into the cobbler’s shelves.

  “C’mon, Maria,” Christopher said.

  The boy arrived at the village harbor. There was a sailing boat lurching against the ropes.

  “Maria, do you like this boat?” Christopher asked.

  “No!”

 
; “Why?”

  “I want a new boat. A big boat.”

  “What kind?”

  “A ocean boat.”

  Christopher gave a little shrug. “No problem, Maria.”

  The creaky old galleon grew in length and height while its mast shriveled and smokestacks and decks grew. The wooden boards of the hull strained and popped off, landing on the deck in a bundle of neat lumber.

  “The program is making a transition between images, while a subprogram is deciding how to integrate the old image into the scene, deciding what to do with the lumber, for example,” Kales said. “We’ve got all kinds of different possibilities in this program, so many that there’s almost an infinite number of story lines to take. I’ve never seen what this is doing now, for example.”

  Christopher had taken his toolbox and used the old lumber from the galleon and quickly hammered together a neat gangplank that led to the lowest deck of the ocean liner.

  “Do you like it, Maria?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s look at a plan of this boat.”

  He magically withdrew a large scroll of paper from his pocket and examined it and then turned it around. It was an engineer’s diagram of the ship, from three perspectives, and it grew larger so that the whole screen was filled with it, each part labeled precisely. Maria leaned forward and impulsively touched the engine room. Instantly the screen filled with bright footage of an ocean liner engine room, where men in nautical uniform stood in front of dials and gauges, working. The giant turbines throbbed noisily.

  “That’s real,” the Chairman said.

  Maria touched the screen again and we went back to the ship’s diagram. She touched the ship’s galley and instantly the screen showed a long gleaming row of stainless steel counters, where men in high white hats pushed an immense kettle of soup across the shiny floor. On the far wall were rows of spoons. Someone walked by with a pushcart of desserts. The soup splashed and then the cartoon Christopher stuck his head out and said, “Maria, let’s get going, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Now we were back to the dock, with Christopher wiping his face with a handkerchief.

  “I want some dogs on the boat!” Maria said impulsively.

  The screen froze for a moment, the computer humming beneath the table, then the screen filled with a selection of color photographs of about twenty different breeds of dogs.

  “That was not a smooth transition,” Kales interrupted. “Christopher should have introduced the dogs. It was a bit abrupt.”

  Meanwhile Maria had picked two dogs to come onto her boat, a small poodle and a spaniel. These two appeared in cartoon form on the gangplank of the boat, smiling as dogs do, wagging their tails. A crew of sailors and a captain appeared at the top of the gangplank and welcomed them aboard. The captain looked at his watch.

  “We depart in two minutes,” he said in a deep and kindly voice.

  “I want Mickey Mouse, too,” Maria said.

  Christopher turned. “You want Mickey Mouse? Hmmm.”

  “The program is stalling now.” Kales said. “It’s seeing if it recognizes what Mickey Mouse is and then if it can match the word to an image. I don’t know if we’ll have that, since that’s a Disney trademark. It depends on what’s been scanned—”

  “Hello, boys and girls,” said Mickey Mouse, poking his head through one of the ship’s portholes with a popping sound. “I was here all the time.”

  “Good!” Maria said.

  “They must have run a little sound in when they scanned it,” Kales concluded to himself.

  “One minute before we sail!” the Captain said.

  The Chairman leaned forward to Maria. “Honey, ask the little boy if Tom Brokaw can be on the boat.”

  “Who is that?” Maria asked.

  “It’s a man on television, a nice man who is a friend of mine. Tom Brokaw.”

  “Tom Brokaw!” Maria yelled at the screen.

  “Let’s go find him,” Christopher said, jumping up on the deck, searching behind some suitcases.

  “Is the program stalling?” the Chairman said to the technician.

  “No,” came the answer from Kales, “it’s loading a special imaging system which takes stock footage and digitalizes the pixels in order to video-animate, which means—”

  “Hello, everybody,” came the deep, reassuring voice, and then Tom Brokaw appeared, a living moving image of him. “Maria, I understand we’re going to go on a trip.”

  “Why is his hair blowing?” the Chairman asked. “His hair is blowing but nothing else in the picture is.”

  Kales grimaced at the screen, thinking. “That means that when the footage was scanned in, that he was probably outside, doing a live feed from Russia or China or somewhere and the wind was blowing. The program is recapitulating that moving hair, since it understands it to be part of the image. The fact that nothing else in the picture is blowing is because it’s not programmed in. Also, he could be a little taller. There are certain subtleties we haven’t worked out yet. Complexities solved means complexities created.”

  “From what little I understand,” I began, “the memory requirements must be absolutely—”

  “Yes,” he interrupted proudly. “Broadcast-quality video runs at thirty frames a second and each frame requires as much as two megabytes of memory. That’s a lot. It’s been one of the hurdles. But we’re using the new experimental DRAM chips, here.”

  “DRAM?”

  “Dynamic random access memory. These are two-hundred-and-fifty-six-megabit chips—huge. IBM and Toshiba are working on a two-hundred-and-fifty-six-megabit DRAM, but that won’t come into commercial production until 1997 or 1998. Except for U.S. military research, we’re way out front here.”

  Meanwhile Maria had gotten the boat moving, with the dogs and Mickey Mouse and Tom Brokaw on deck. She and the Chairman sat together working the program and I nodded at Kales and we moved away.

  “You did a great job with this,” I told him.

  “I worked on it most of the night, just getting some of the little bugs out. I had to get a modem-feed from the West Coast for a little more programming they were working on.”

  “How far are we from mass production?”

  “Three years, minimum. But it will be three years better.”

  “Cost?”

  “Today this would cost, maybe . . . seven or eight million dollars, at least.”

  “What about when you get it down?”

  “I bet we can get it down to ten, fifteen thousand dollars in five years,” Kales figured. “Then the chip prices will fall and it’ll be more reasonable.”

  “What’s the secret to all this?”

  “Ultimately?” he asked. “The chips. They’ve become the greatest works of human ingenuity. I mean that in all seriousness.”

  I looked over at the Chairman and Maria. Tom Brokaw was painting the great white hull of the boat with a big paintbrush and as he moved the brush, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa appeared on the curved surface, taking into account the variations of rivets and portholes. Then he painted another picture, this time of himself, reading the news, which I recognized as about a week old. “That’s pure footage,” Kales said. “Four months ago it was technologically impossible to run that out of a disk-based retrieval system. Needed too much memory. Now we’re doing it. You can get these kinds of special effects in movies, but each image is planned—scripted. Here, the technology is responding spontaneously—there’s no subtle menu driving here, certain effects can’t even be repeated, probably . . . you can’t just loop back to where you were . . . I mean, we’re really out front here.”

  On the screen, Mickey pulled the rope scaffolding up and lowered himself down. Together he and Brokaw painted over the televised Brokaw and the Mona Lisa with moving footage of themselves painting themselves painting themselves.

  “That’s the replicator program.”

  “Amazing,” the Chairman murmured. “Our media company becoming a computer company.”
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br />   Then Christopher dumped a can of white paint down the hull and they started over, on Maria’s instructions from the Chairman. The New York City subway map began to appear.

  Maria sent the program through one image after the next, talking to the screen, touching it when necessary, and I saw that the Chairman had looked away from the screen and instead was watching her, enchanted.

  “You get the point now, right?” I interrupted. “How if we could get into, say, the Japanese and German markets via some of Volkman-Sakura’s existing marketing arrangements, not to mention—”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” The Chairman waved me off.

  “I mean, it’s conceivable that what we’re seeing here could be an on-line service, either through cable or the telephone lines. You just turn it on like a TV, start playing or researching. A ten-year-old doing a school report could download an image to a printer, integrate that into standard word-processing or page design software. That’s the marriage of the product with the distribution system. Like I said before, maybe the distribution is by a hard line or even satellite. We don’t know, but—”

  “Every moderately wealthy household in the world will want this,” the Chairman interrupted. “Paris, Hong Kong, Rio, everywhere—”

  “And with our film stars, our books, our music videos—”

  “Yes, yes,” the Chairman said. His tired eyes had turned from mine and concentrated now on the young face before him.

  Later, when Maria and the Chairman had just about exhausted themselves trying out the prototype program, Dolores knocked on my door. There she was, in heels and a great blue-and-white dress, her hair piled high on her head, just a strand curling down in front of each ear, with Liz’s pearl earrings on. Her makeup was different, too, more subdued, and I noticed she held a new handbag like the ones many of the women in the office owned.