The Emoticon Generation

by Guy Hasson

  He shuffled down the corridor and led her to the living room.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Professor Bates pointed at a couch.

  She sat down.

  “Would you like a drink, Dr. ...” he stared at her blankly for a second. “I’m sorry,” he smiled apologetically, as if having done a bad thing, “I forget your name.”

  “Jeneane,” she told him. “Jeneane Gold.” Her heart skipped a beat. Perhaps his 96 years were finally taking their toll. That, somehow, was more chilling than anything else.

  “And, no, thanks,” she said politely, her eyes on the floor. “I’m not thirsty.”

  Arthur Bates stood over the couch opposite, and slowly began to bend at the knees. At a certain point, his knees gave, and he fell backwards into the couch, moaning as he did so.

  “You seem very young for a doctor, Doctor Gold. How old are you?”

  “Twenty years old, sir. I, uh, began early.”

  “I was a Professor when I was eighteen,” he flashed a vicious smile.

  “I know that, sir,” she said, deaf to his tone. “I’ve studied your life.” He nodded to himself in appreciation. “If you don’t mind, sir, the reason I asked to come, well, like I told you over the phone, Professor, I work at the U. I know you never go there anymore, and...” her voice trembled. “I know your time is immensely important, but... uh... There’s something, uh... big I have to talk to you about. It’s relevant to your work. And I believe decency requires that I should tell you face to face, if you don’t mind me taking a few minutes of your time.”

  “I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all.”

  Of course he minded! His time until death was limited. Every second must be precious. Taking just five minutes of his time was subtracting five minutes from his lifetime achievements – a loss to the human race.

  “I never see people anymore,” he continued. “Please, don’t worry about my time. I’ve done my work for the day.” It was 14:00 p.m., and already he was done! “Keep me company.”

  “Um, well... I’ve researched some of your earlier works, trying to find some unexplored avenues. And I’ve also researched Professor Andersson’s work from Sweden. Have you heard of him?”

  “No, not really. I don’t keep up, I’m too busy. Besides, as I understand it, the rest are far behind me.”

  “Yes, that’s true. Most of the time, they just try to grope with your theories from a few years ago. But Professor Andersson deals with things you have never touched, and his theories are pretty revolutionary.”

  “That’s nice,” he looked at the walls as if the subject was of no interest to him.

  “Yes... But, when putting together his latest theory with your Bet-Gimmel Lemma. You remember it? It was published around 45 years ag—”

  “Of course I remember it,” Professor Bates snapped. “It’s so important, everything I have done since relies on it. I quote it in every paper.”

  “Precisely, sir. But, you see, in this small paper,” she produced a stapled, thirty-sheet-long document, “I show that Professor Andersson’s latest theory disproves your lemma. There’s a basic flaw there, so small, so strange, so unique... no one, including you, could possibly have seen it until now. It was, in fact, impossible to see until Professor Andersson came up with this theory and until someone thought to create a transformation that—”

  “What?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t bother you, except that all your theories are based on exactly this lemma. Which means...”

  “Which means that if it’s true, everything I’ve done since has been wrong. I don’t need it spelled out for me!” He exploded.

  Dr. Gold shrank into the sofa. “I didn’t think you did.”

  Prof. Bates put his hand to his face. The hand was trembling. After a moment’s thought, he said, “That can’t be. Either he made a mistake or you did. There is nothing wrong with my lemma.”

  “I’ve gone over it many times, Professor—”

  “You will excuse me if I don’t take your word for it. Show me the paper!”

  She gave it to him. He bent over it. He read it slowly, then turned a page, read a bit of it, looked back at the first page, looked at the second page again, and read it slowly. But then he turned the second page, and seemed to read the third faster. His pace quickening from page to page, he turned them over faster and faster. Amazing! Andersson’s new proof was so revolutionary, it was almost a new way of thinking, that most mathematicians were still resisting it. And yet Prof. Bates absorbed it quicker than anyone she had ever seen.

  After fifteen minutes, as he was halfway through the paper, he put on his lap.

  “Oh, dear god,” he said.

  “You haven’t finished,” Dr. Gold said. “In the conclusion I show that—”

  “I can work the rest out in my head!” he snapped, throwing the paper at her. “I get it!” The paper fell to the floor halfway between them. He was staring at the ceiling, holding his eyes between his fingers. Slowly, her eyes on him all the time, she bent down and picked the paper.

  “All those years,” he whispered, “wasted.”

  He grabbed his remaining hair. “I could have gotten myself Copied when I was twenty-two. Oh my god, what have I done. What have I done?” He said, sobbing.

  “What about the papers in the room, Professor? Are they—”

  “They’re all based on the Bet-Gimmel Lemma! Each and every paper I’ve ever written since then is based on that lemma!”

  Dr. Gold, not knowing what to do, sat there, helpless, motionless.

  For ten minutes he stared at the walls and muttered to himself, at times angrily, smashing his decrepit fist against the table, at times bitterly, at times in futile despondency. Dr. Gold couldn’t leave him. In this age of immortality, she had never seen a man so close to suicide.

  “Wasted, wasted,” he mumbled to himself incessantly. Presently, he changed his mantra: “All my papers, based on one lemma. All my papers since, all based on that one—” And then he stopped, and stared at Dr. Gold. “That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That all my work since the lemma is only theories that are derived from it. It doesn’t make sense to work in so specific a field, when I could have—Oh!” Suddenly his eyes lit up in a flare of understanding. “Oh! Oh! This is his revenge on me!” Dr. Gold stared at him, bewildered. He was losing his mind. Simply losing it. Then the spark was gone from Professor Bates’ eyes, and melancholy returned, even greater than before. “All my achievements, all my life, had been wasted. All my life... wasted.” He slammed his fist against the cushion. “Bastard!” And again. “Bastard!!” He looked at Dr. Gold, anger in his voice, “Dr. Gold. Jeneane,” he wagged a finger at her. “You tell Professor Andersson that it’s a very nice proof. But I thought of it first! I thought of it first!!” Dr. Gold just stared. She couldn’t find any words. The man was rambling. She had caused the mental collapse of the greatest mind in history. “You say you studied my history,” he rambled on. “You know nothing. No one knows. I haven’t told anyone. I thought I’d take it to my grave. But I’ve kept my secret for nothing. Everything I’ve ever done had been for nothing. You want to know the secret of my success? The secret of my failure?” His face twisted in hate at the word.

  “I—”

  “Sit quietly. I’ve been holding this inside for too long. So sit. And listen.”

  ~

  “It was more than seventy years ago,” he began slowly, his voice raw, scratchy, wavering, even older than before. “I was twenty-two. Already considered by far the most gifted mathematician the world has ever seen. I had won my first Nobel Prize at the age of nineteen. Mathematics was my life. I was driven to excel, driven to outdo myself. I was already the smartest man in history. But I wanted to be not only the smartest man that had ever been but that will ever be.”

  “And you have been. No one could do what you—”

  “Don’t interrupt me. You know nothing!” Again he waved a threateni
ng, trembling finger. “I proved nothing! Nothing!” She clammed up. He took a minute to catch his breath, and began slowly, staring into her eyes, burning a hole in them with the intensity of a genius. “I was twenty-two and I was beginning to feel old. Life was such a waste, I thought. Such a waste of time. The time I spent driving to the university, choosing clothes, having breakfast, lunch, dinner, sleeping! Sleeping, for god’s sakes! Even teaching was a waste of time. I could have used that period to prove another important corollary. I spent so much time not doing my job, not pushing forward, not thinking about mathematics. And my brain cells were already dying. Not noticeably, but as they do with everyone. My intellectual peak would soon be gone.”

  “Then why didn’t you get your mind Copied?”

  “I asked you not to interrupt me.” She nodded and burried her eyes in the floor. “But you’re right. That was the logical option. Copy technology was into its fifth commercial year. People have successfully downloaded their personalities into computer neural nets, a perfect Copy of their mind and of their sentience. These people would be immortal, and they would never suffer from Alzheimer or any of those insidious diseases. They would never lose their lucidity or their intelligence.

  “The pressure on me to get my brain Copied was humongous. The awareness was everywhere. At my age, brain cells were already dying by the millions. My brain, my amazing brain, was deteriorating even then, and it would deteriorate every day I delayed Copying my brain into the computer. Even if I didn’t have the money to do it – at the time it was very expensive – the university volunteered to pay for it. Imagine, the greatest mind in history living forever, retaining his intelligence forever. What an asset that would be to the U!

  “But I had another fear. I knew that if I lived forever, sooner or later, a person would be born, who would be smarter than me, more capable. And I would have to live in cyberspace forever, knowing that I had been outdone, outsmarted, that I was not the best. Forever. I couldn’t bear that. For months I procrastinated, fearing to Copy myself, thinking that perhaps there was a way out, a way to prove my superiority over everybody, even over any other man who might exist.

  “Eventually, I came up with an idea. It was brilliant. If it worked. If it failed, a few precious, precious years of research would be wasted. And if I Copied my brain after the failure, it would be less acute than the brain I had had at the age of twenty-two. But my fears were too great. I decided to gamble everything in the belief, and hope, that I was talented enough to achieve the impossible. And so, I risked everything.”

  He paused, nervous. He put his hand over his mouth. The idea, whatever it was, was obviously something he had never divulged to anyone. Dr. Gold’s mind raced. But she could not see what he had done to make himself a greater genius than he already had been.

  “My idea was...” he began presently, then fell silent again. “My idea was...” He took a deep breath, and said it. “My idea had to do with the technology we had already attained, in our ability to duplicate a specific human brain. Our scientists had found a way to put the workings of the human mind in a formula, or a ‘function’, to use the mathematical term. A complicated function, mind you, with thousands of variables. But a function nonetheless. Now the function was, obviously, a recursive function. This means that to know what would happen in the next instant you have to put the data of the instant that came before. Predicting the weather, at present, for example, can only be done accurately using recursive functions. But predicting the movement of planets does not require a recursive function. Knowing what the situation is now, I could tell you where the Earth will be in a thousand years, and I will not have to compute where it will be a minute from now or a year from now or five hundred years from now to compute it correctly. I can predict the future without dealing with things that happen inbetween. But I forget who I’m speaking to. Of course you know this. Well, bear with an old and senile man.

  “Step one of my idea was this. What if I could take the recursive function that represented the human brain and transform it into a non-recursive function. What if I could put in the present details for my mind in a controlled virtual environment, and, instead of having to wait an actual year, simply press a button, and see where my mind would be a year from now. What if I could do it and not go through the middle? What if I could find a function, which let me skip right to the end?

  “That would save time, would it not?”

  Dr. Gold stared at him. “Oh, my god.” Her mind reeled with the implications. He nodded in satisfaction at her amazement. “You did this?”

  He smiled a sad smile.

  “Why had I never heard of it?” She went on. “Why is it not used? Where did you publish it?”

  “I had no intention of revealing the idea if I achieved it.”

  “But why would—”

  “Bear with me. I will tell this my way. The way it happened. The way I see it.” She nodded. He went on. “I told no one of my intentions. I began the research on this secretly, abandoning all my other avenues of study. For a year and a half I labored while no one noticed. My previous papers were still being published. It was slower then than it was today, and no one had yet noticed my waning lack of work. Pressure mounted on me to get myself Copied. ‘Later’, I told them. ‘Later.’

  “It took another year and a half. All my old papers had been published, and I had not written any new ones. People began to notice. I told my superiors that I had a few major breakthroughs I was working on, and that they would have to be patient. But, I did not really work on these theories. I would have them if my idea worked. If not, then I had been a liar and, in addition, had lost three precious years. But if it did... the rewards would be... incredible. Three years after I had begun this project, I had found a way to transform the recursive function that represented the human mind into a non-recursive function. I could predict the human brain. My plan was about to come to fruition.” He took a deep breath. His entire body trembled.

  “I had reserved the university supercomputer for a weekend. I had previously programmed my function into it in such a way that only I could access it. A week before that weekend, I had my mind secretly Copied into a special disk that belonged solely to me. That weekend arrived. I was alone in the lab. No one would disturb me.

  “I fed the disk into the computer, and turned my program on. ‘Year?’ it asked simply.

  “‘0’, I told it.

  “My face appeared on the screen. My Copy. In the background was a very boring room – four walls, no exits, a bed to lie on so I could stare at the ceiling. It was a basic environment with no objects to manipulate. I did not need further complications in my function. The computer only dealt with a copy of me and a four-walled room. Nothing more. My Copy would have no need to eat, no need to sleep. He could actually fulfil my lifelong fantasy and do nothing but think about math day and night.

  “My Copy looked at me. He could ‘see’ me through the camera in the lab. We nodded at each other.

  “‘Ready to begin?’ I asked it.

  “‘Ready,’ it said. I pressed a button. The image disappeared. I pressed another.

  “‘Year?’ the computer requested.

  “‘1’, I typed.

  “My face reappeared on the screen.

  “‘What the hell took you so long,’ it said. ‘It was supposed to take a second.’

  “I looked at him. ‘What do you mean,’ I said. ‘It did take a second.’

  “‘I’ve been stuck here for a year with nothing to do!

  “‘That’s the way it feels,’ I explained to this other me slowly. ‘But it’s the equation. It’s not true. Only a few seconds have passed.’ He made a face. ‘Do you understand this?’

  “‘Yes,’ it–he–said after a pause. He didn’t seem happy.

  “‘I need the equations you’ve come up with during this year,’ I told him.

  “I have a perfect memory, you see, Dr. Gold, I don’t need pieces of paper to write my computations. My Copy, obviously
, also had a perfect memory. And so there were no papers in the room. He fed all the proofs he had thought of in a ‘year’ into the hard-disk. And the printer printed as quickly as it could.

  “I looked over the pages briefly. ‘Excellent! Excellent! It seemed as if he had proven things I had wanted to prove for a long time. And there had been no effort in it for me. The project was a success! ‘My gamble had paid off!’ I exclaimed.

  “‘I know,’ he said. ‘Our idea worked.’

  “‘Next stop, ten years?’ I asked him.

  “He nodded. ‘Ten years.’

  “‘See you in a few seconds,’ I told him. I pressed a button and his image was gone.

  “‘Year?’ the computer inquired.

  “‘10,’ I typed. That meant ten years into the ‘life’ of the Copy, but only nine after our last encounter. The computer automatically took the variables of my Copy’s brain at the last instant of our communication and used them to leap nine years into the future.

  “My Copy’s face appeared on the screen.

  “He looked at me, and there was an intensity in his eyes I knew only too well. He was angry.

  “‘Stop. The. Program,’ he said through his teeth, even as he downloaded his information into the hard-disk. ‘It’s malfunctioning.’

  “‘What’s wrong with it,’ I asked, my heart suddenly beating fast. Failure had too many repercussions.

  “‘It’s not skipping any time at all. I’ve lived ten years in this stupid room. There’s something wrong with the function.’

  “‘Arthur,’ I told him. ‘It’s only been a few seconds. The program is working perfectly. You only remember those years as if you’ve lived through them, you didn’t actually live through them.’

  “‘But I did, I did live through them!’

  “‘No,’ I stated calmly, ‘you exist now and have existed for the last fifteen seconds, but you retain memories of ten years which didn’t actually happen. You didn’t live them, you can’t have. The computer was turned off. And look at me: I’m as young as I was ‘nine years ago’. What you’re experiencing, it’s just memories. It’s just part of the equation – because a brain that had lived through ten years, especially our brain, would retain all memories.’