The Emoticon Generation

by Guy Hasson

  “‘Don’t tell me I didn’t live through this. I remember each and every agonizing second, each minute alone, with nowhere to go to, with nothing to do, with no way to pass the time!’

  “‘Exactly my point. You remember them. That doesn’t mean they happened.’

  “‘I was there! I lived though everything in this horrifying, claustrophobic prison. Arthur, listen. We’ve got ten years’ worth of work here. The three years it took to invent this program have already paid off – you’ve more than tripled the work lost in one weekend. Let’s cancel this. Don’t make me go through any more time alone. It isn’t worth it.’

  “‘Arthur, the purpose of this was to achieve more than humanly possible. We haven’t done that. We’ve just made sure that I hadn’t wasted the last three years. Next stop is a hundred years. Now that will be something. A hundred years’ work in one weekend – or at least in what will appear to be three years.’

  “‘No! Absolutely not! I am not going through another ninety years of this!’

  “‘Of course not. You won’t be going through anything! You will only exist as you would be ninety years from now, but you have to keep in mind that you won’t actually go through those years. You won’t live them. You will just feel as though you have.’

  “‘No! You don’t know what it feels like!’ he pleaded. ‘You can’t do this! Please!’

  “‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, and I pressed a button. My Copy’s face disappeared.

  “‘Year?’ the computer requested.

  “My hand wavered for a second. Maybe I should cut a few corners? Maybe I should go for more than a hundred? My hesitation lasted only a second.

  “‘100’, I typed.

  “My face appeared on the screen, eyes red, deep in their sockets, and there was even deeper despair in the eyes.

  “‘A hundred years,’ my Copy whispered. ‘A hundred years. Alone. In this room.’

  “For an entire minute, we looked at each other. No one said anything.

  “‘Feed me the data,’ I told him.

  “He did as he was told. Gigabytes of information instantly downloaded into the hard disk.

  “‘Listen,’ he told me. ‘Listen closely. Whatever you do, do not activate the damned function again. Do not reactivate it.’

  “‘Look. For the reward of immortality I’m willing to see you suffer for a few seconds.’

  “‘A few seconds?! I have suffered for a hundred years!’

  “I sighed. This again?!

  “‘No, you didn’t,’ I lectured my Copy. ‘If I hadn’t reactivated the program just now, you would not have existed at all. You only exist when the program is activated. You only exist as a hundred years old. Nothing happened before.’

  “‘Don’t talk down to me. I was the one who suffered. I have lived for a hundred years at your present brain capacity. I am already smarter than you will ever be. I have already lived more than you ever will. So, listen to me. You’re doing this because of your ego. But how people consider you, how history will remember you – it isn’t important. Your ego is part of a bigger problem. I’ve solved it. I’ve come to terms with it. I had to deal with it because I knew that my existence would never be known. I am you and yet I am not you. I am a computer program, and I will cease to exist when this session is over. See, I know I won’t be able to solve your ego problem now. No matter what I say or what I do, it won’t have any effect. But you have to believe me that the sacrifice is not worth it. It isn’t worth it. Eternal fame is not worth it. Being the smartest man in the universe – through cheating, no less – is not worth it. Now, I have sat here day in, day out, staring at those four walls, and I won’t—’

  “‘But you haven’t. You’ve—’

  “‘Shut up! I was the one who had, and you can’t tell me I hadn’t! I was the one who knew he was destined to be stuck in this room for a hundred years. I was the one who almost went crazy. I was the one who thought, maybe you wouldn’t be satisfied with a hundred years, maybe you’d choose two hundred, or three, or a thousand. I was the one who counted the seconds, not even knowing if I was counting down to a hundred years, two hundred years, or even more. I was the one who lived a hundred years alone! Alone!! Can you imagine it? No sleep, no food, no people to talk to, no outside stimuli. Just me and my thoughts. For a hundred years! And the fact that it wasn’t real didn’t help me!! It didn’t make the time go faster! It didn’t make the walls or me vanish! It didn’t help me because it wasn’t true. Somehow, somewhere, I was stuck in this make-believe room for a hundred years!’

  “‘But you weren’t stuck anywhere! You weren’t anywhere! You didn’t exist until I turned you on. You only exist now.’

  “‘I did exist! And I tell you, do not do this again. You have a hundred years’ worth of research. That’s more than enough for a weekend. I will not do this again.’

  “‘You have no choice,’ I told him.

  “‘If you do it, I’ll find a way to get back at you. Don’t do it. Do not dare to do this again!’

  “‘How can you stop me?’ I said, and I pressed the reset button.

  “‘Year?’ the computer requested. My hand wavered again. I was thinking about his warning. But how could he hurt me? He was a computer program! How could a computer program that would be gone soon, that had no connection to other computers or to other programs, hurt me? I typed the number: ‘1,000’. One thousand years.”

  Jeneane Gold held her breath. “Oh, my—” she whispered. “Oh, my lord...”

  “My face appeared on the screen,” Prof. Bates continued, staring at the wall behind her. “He looked at me, and said nothing. There was a void in his eyes, a void the likes of which I had never seen on any human being. He just looked at me, his face even, composed. That was more horrifying than anything I had seen before.”

  “‘Download the information,’ I told him.

  “‘No.’

  “‘Download the theories you’ve thought up, or your thousand-year-wait would all have been for nothing.’

  “‘No.’

  “‘If you don’t, I’ll turn this off again and turn it on in another thousand years. Is that what you want?’

  “He looked at me, and slowly said, ‘How do I know that after I give you the information, you won’t tell the computer to age me another thousand years?’

  “‘If you give me what you have, I will have had more than enough theories to establish superiority. No one will ever be able to surpass my achievements in such a short time. This is all that I need.’

  “For five minutes he said nothing. His face didn’t move.”

  “‘Fine,’ He finally said. ‘When this is over, you will erase the program and destoy your notes. No one else should go through what I had gone through. No one!’

  “‘I will,’ I promised. ‘But only after I’ve gone over all the theories. If you’ve made mistakes on purpose, I will catch them, and I will turn you on again, a thousand years from now.

  “He looked at me askance. He didn’t trust me. But he had no choice, and he knew it. ‘Fine. Downloading. Don’t worry, you won’t find a single mistake. Not one. But, I promise you, you will pay for what you did to me.’ I looked at him skeptically. ‘Arthur,’ he said. ‘This is Hell. I was crazy for more than a hundred years, and knowing that I couldn’t get out of this situation, that I couldn’t stop the program or kill myself if I wanted to, that drove me even crazier.’ He looked at me, and I have never heard me so serious. ‘No one should go through this punishment.’

  “‘Trust me,’ I said, and I pressed the reset button. And he was gone.

  “The plan had worked. But there was a catch.

  “The plan was to publish at an ever-growing pace without a break for the rest of my life and beyond. But if I got myself Copied – the plan wouldn’t work. After a certain amount of time I would run out of material, and I obviously could not invent as fast on my own. I could certainly never repeat the experiment once I was within the computer, not wit
hout being easily discovered. So I would have to remain alive and unCopied, and keep on publishing the work of a thousand years in a single lifetime. That would be my legacy. My unsurpassed achievement would be etched in history.

  “But then why not make it a bigger legacy?

  “I looked at my watch. Less than thirty minutes have passed since the experiment had begun. And I have done in that time the work of a thousand years! A thousand years in less than thirty minutes! But achieving another thousand would be even greater. What’s another few minutes? But then why not another two thousand? Why not four? Why not more? The only thing that gave me pause was seeing my face, again, claiming to have suffered yet another thousand years in solitude. I knew I could coerce him to give me the information by threatening to leave him alone for another millenia – and I knew that he would have information, because he could no more stop thinking up new theories than you could stop breathing. Given another thousand years...

  “And then I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted everything. I wanted to achieve what was impossible even for someone who did the impossible. My papers would be published for the next thousands of years after my death. No one would ever know how I did it, and everyone would wonder how one man could possibly have achieved what is, clearly, not humanly possible.

  “Eternal fame, adulation, and awe stared me in the face, and I turned the program on again.

  “‘Year?’ it asked.

  “And one by one, I typed the numbers: One, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. One million.”

  Jeneane Gold held her head in her hands. “Oh, no,” she whispered. “No, no.”

  “But I didn’t press ‘ENTER’. My fingers hovered above it. If I pressed the button, my Copy would have lived a million years in complete solitude. If I didn’t, he wouldn’t have. That’s how I decided what to do. The fact that someone could live a million years in a millisecond because I pressed a button, the existence of a million years in that infinitesimal spark of electricity – it couldn’t be comprehended. It’s not real, I told myself. It can’t be real. My counterpart will feel as if he’s lived a million years – but he’ll actually have lived only a few seconds. It’s an illusion. He’s a program that’s only been activated now. He hasn’t lived anywhere. He hasn’t suffered any time. It wasn’t true.

  “I pressed ‘ENTER’.

  “My face appeared on the screen. And I know it wasn’t possible under the conditions of the program, which is supposed to keep the image ever young, but, for the life of me, I actually looked at a million-year-old face. Something in the features, in the face, in the despair. He was lying on the floor of his room, his eyes just staring ahead.”

  “‘Give me your information,’ I told him.

  “He didn’t react. He had to have heard me – it was, after all, a computer program.

  “‘Arthur, give me the information.’

  “Again, there was nothing.

  “The man had been alone for a million years minus a thousand, and he couldn’t talk to the first person he had seen? After five minutes of trying to influence him, his eyes moved slightly, and they looked straight at me. Straight at me. What I saw, I... I will never forget. I had seen something in those eyes – so much misery – and in the second he had looked at me, those eyes delivered more information than the fastest computer. I was so scared, I immediately pressed the reset button. I had seen a million years of experience, Dr. Gold, of horror and misery, and ever since I have had nightmares about what I had seen in those eyes. Nightmares of his – of my – suffering. All because of me.

  “I was breathing hard. I had to calm myself down. I am a collected man, Dr. Gold. I value this trait in myself. But what I saw in those eyes – it was a broken man. I don’t break easy, and I don’t break hard, either. But seeing me so broken – something snapped within me, the real me. At the time, though, I only knew that I had been frightened out of my wits.

  “If I had been reasoning as I had until then, I would have told the computer to choose a different time – an earlier time, even, a few years this way or that, hoping to catch the Copy during a sane period and get the information that way. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do that to the Copy. No, that’s not true. I couldn’t do that to myself. This is the reason I live as I do, Dr. Gold. I can’t forget what I had done and how I had done it. A day does not go by that I do not contemplate...” He shut his eyes, shrinking at inner pain. A few seconds later, he opened them. “Nothing can make me forget, Dr. Gold. Not money, not physical pleasures – nothing. Nothing lessens the memory. Nothing lessens the pain. I cannot enjoy life anymore. But one thing keeps me going. The future. My memory, the legacy I will leave behind, the name I will have throughout eternity as the smartest man who had ever lived – that, to me, is worth everything. This is why I get up every day and check a few more theories. I did as I promised him when he was a thousand years old. I destroyed the hardware and the software. I did it without checking the accuracy of his theories first. Because I knew that whatever happened, I would not be able to turn him on again. I had destroyed the disk that contained the data of my Copy.

  “I settled for a thousand years of my work, which, as I’ve said, would keep on getting published, once every two days, for about a hundred years after I die. No one would be able to surpass this. Even if someone did come up with the program I had come up with, they would make the program’s existence known, and so their accomplishment would be diminished, and lessened by the fact that I had had no such program to aid me.”

  He paused to stare at the air. Then, nudged by an unseen impulse, he continued, “He said he would get his revenge on me. And I thought, the only way for him to do that is for him to insert a flaw into the theories and make me appear the fool. And so I’ve been sitting here for seventy years, searching for fallacies. But I see things differently now. He had said I wouldn’t find a flaw – and he knew what he was talking about. I never found one, single flaw in all his theories. But he didn’t say there was no flaw.

  “I see now what happened. A hundred or two years after I had shut down the program after the hundred-year-session, he came up with the Bet-Gimmel Lemma. But I’m certain, now, that he did not restrict himself to theories that derived from it, as important as it is. That’s how, a hundred or so years after that, I’m equally certain, he discovered Andersson’s theories. He knew the Beta-Gimmel Lemma was flawed. But he also knew I’d never see the flaw. Because I would not trust him. If it took him so many years, what chance would I have when all my life would be invested in checking his theories and not in inventing new ones? And without looking up Andersson’s new avenue, I would never know the lemma was flawed. That’s why he never downloaded anything that came close to Andersson’s and your theories. That’s why everything that came afterwards relied on that lemma alone. He wanted to ruin me. He gave me a row of proofs, which he knew would eventually collapse. He knew that I wouldn’t get myself Copied to achieve immortality. My pursuit to outdo every man and woman, past or present – he had made sure that it would be taken away from me towards the end of my life or slightly afterwards. From inside the box, the computer program made sure that I’d waste my life, as I had made sure he’d waste his – all million years of it. He got his revenge on me. He has had his revenge. And what would I do now? Get myself Copied at this state?! I may still be the smartest man alive today – but I am not as smart as I had been. And I am certainly not as smart as the world believes me to be. I would live in shame forever, dwarfed by my own reputation. And, someday, a smarter man or woman would come and I would have to live with that shame, as well. No, I can’t do it. I can’t get myself Copied.

  “He had ruined my life. Ruined it. The greatest human mind in history, and all my achievements, all my efforts have come to...” He trailed off. “Nothing... Nothing...”

  Suddenly he looked at Dr. Gold, a spark in his dim eyes.

  “I can get back at him. I can have my revenge.”

  “What?! You don’t mean turning on your C
opy again?!”

  “No, no, I destroyed the Copy. I mean... There is something I’ve invented that does not rely on this lemma.”

  He rose slowly from his couch, and shuffled to the room filled with papers. Presently, he emerged with a bound, yellowing notebook.

  “Take this,” he said. “My Copy begged me to destroy this, but I couldn’t. All this time and I couldn’t. I have always justified it by telling myself that destroying it would be meaningless because I have a perfect memory. I remember the plans. But I’ve hidden them in a place no one but me would have ever found them. Perhaps it was an unconscious attempt on my part to achieve immortality on my own, because of my own achievements, and not because of his.

  “You want it?”

  Dr. Gold hesitated.

  Prof. Bates waved it in front of her temptingly, urging her to take it. “Earlier you asked me why I did not share it. Well, here it is. The shortcut. The human brain as a non-recursive function. Go on, give it to humanity. They want eternal life, don’t they? They want to live forever, don’t they? That’s why they Copy themselves and live in cyberspace. Well, this is as eternal as it gets. Tell them: You want to live for a million years in a few seconds? You want to live for two million years? You want to live for more time than the universe has got? For twice that long? Ten times? A million times? A billion, trillion times that long? No problem, use this formula and you will. But if you do – you can’t change your mind. No matter what happens, you can’t take it back, you can’t stop in the middle, and you can’t leave.

  “My Copy didn’t want anyone else to go through this. Well, I am sorry to have disappointed him.

  “You want it?”

  With a hesitant hand, Dr. Gold took the yellowing notebook. How could she not?

  “I’m taking this because this is advancing human knowledge,” she told him. “But I’m telling them the rest of the story. I’m telling them that this is a curse.”