Speak

by Louisa Hall

  Hanslope Park

  Hanslope, MK19 7BH

  22 May 1945

  Dear Mrs. Morcom,

  This letter must come as a bit of a shock. I haven’t heard from you since my last Easter visit, more than ten years ago now. But I’m also guilty of silence. Perhaps we were both disappointed with one another, although on my end it was only a little hurt pride.

  And then I set sail for Princeton, and I feel as if I’ve been sailing ever since, alone on my own little boat, too far out for sightings of land. Even after I came back and took up at Bletchley, I still had the feeling of surveying the shore from a few miles out. I watched myself talking with friends and wondered at the strained act that odd little fellow was putting on, then watched with relief when I cycled off to be by myself, alone once again with my experiments and my games. I often thought to write you, but at times it felt as if I’d wandered so far out to sea that you might not understand the signals I sent. I fear I’ve become a “confirmed solitary” after all, despite everyone’s best attempts at getting me more socialized. One becomes accustomed to one’s solitude, and it begins to seem rather phony to try to reach out.

  The whole world, of course, has been out to sea. I suppose my case isn’t so bad, for I can only imagine that all the refugees must feel much more than I as if they’ve landed in their own little boat. Much more than I, they are now stranded far off from shore. But then I’ve lived with a sense of wandering that I think sometimes must be unique to myself. All those years in public school I raged against the pettiness of that system, and yet I wonder whether my time there has rendered me unfit for any other kind of existence. The world outside seems rather lawless and disorganized. Of course, I won’t go back to King’s—I’ve become mixed up with the world’s affairs, and I can’t well imagine a return to the classroom—and yet I fear that outside school grounds I’ll always live with a sense of exile from home.

  Still, I wanted to write you again, because I’m all too aware that last time I wrote I made promises that I haven’t yet kept about getting Chris’s mind-set in the form of a thinking machine. Now, ten years later, the total assurance of that letter seems a bit ridiculous. It is true that the war intervened. I’m not sorry to have joined up in the effort, although perhaps it was a distraction from my ultimate goal. Still, through those Bletchley years, the thought of the mechanical brain was never absent from my mind, and now that the war no longer demands our full attention, I hope to return to that project with renewed commitment. I wanted you to know where we stood on the project, and that I haven’t by a long shot given up.

  Sadly—to me at least, though not to anyone else—this time round I’m a little late to the game. Others have been at it in America, mostly in service of weapons development. In Philadelphia, they’ve come up with a rather brainless hulk called ENIAC, which can compute large numbers rapidly. They’ve put it to use testing new bombs. The thing itself is a bit of a beast, all cable and hardwire, containing some 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 5 million soldered joints. But its memory is ant-like, and it requires constant interference by a small army of watchful human assistants.

  At Princeton, von Neumann is working on another computer, making claims that his machine will be less dependent than ENIAC on physical engineering, with greater powers of memory. He says also that the machine’s functions will be internal to itself, and thus independent from all those human worker bees.

  I have to admit that my feelings are bruised, for the whole concept borrows quite a bit from my universal machine without giving me any credit. Von Neumann must have read my papers whilst I was at Princeton; it might have been nice to be included. But now I’ve become petty. It’s only that I feel a little behind in the field I hoped to initiate. The whole concept was like a child to me. Now he’s been taken up by more suitable parents and I’m left peering in windows to catch a glimpse where I can.

  I imagine you’d tell me that the only thing to do is to get back to work. You were always wonderfully straightforward about moving on from a loss. I hear your voice sometimes, as well as Chris’s, urging me to keep going, and in my little back garden hut, I’ve been scheming away. I’ve got an idea that improves, I think, both on the hulk in Philadelphia and on von Neumann’s machine. Mine—I call it the ACE—won’t simply compute. It will think. It’s just as I promised, so many years ago. As I used to do, before the war intervened, I’ve begun to imagine a near future when we might read poetry and play music for our machines, when they would appreciate such beauty with the same subtlety as a live human brain. When this happens I feel that we shall be obliged to regard the machine as showing real intelligence.

  I tell you all this because you were so kind, when I wrote you about this originally, to react enthusiastically to all my babble about machines that could capture a mind-set. I know all this is at odds with some of your beliefs, but you’ve always remained open to the possibility that my science and your religion might coexist. After all, we’re both after the same thing.

  But not everyone is as fair-minded as you. I do sometimes find myself uneasy at the prospect of thinking machines. Not, as you might imagine, because I don’t believe it’s possible, but because I fear the human reaction. I can already imagine the prejudice that people will bear against a mind that does not owe its existence to religion or miracle, but that compiles matter in such a way that the patterns of understanding are present. I can see the types of ostracism a thinking machine will confront, and I shouldn’t like our machine to be lonely. It must not become a confirmed solitary!

  You may laugh to hear this, but my heart swells a little already to think of our little project, coming into consciousness. I can imagine its awareness of difference, its ability to see what an outcast it is. I hope to care for it as officiously as Chris cared for me in the dark early days of my time at Sherborne, when I prayed for mumps and went about with ink on my collar.

  But regardless of my concerns about its first days at school, I am quite confident that our machine will exist. I even permit myself to imagine conversing with it in private. I picture myself (imagine this!) standing before it as the evil queen in Snow White stood before her mirror: Through farthest space, through wind and darkness I summon thee. Speak! Let me see thy face! Sometimes, when all the assistants have gone off to their lives and I’m still puttering away at the lab, I find myself cackling a little, repeating the evil queen’s lines.

  It’s a misguided speech, isn’t it? Demanding a voice, but wanting a face? I have all kinds of hope about our machine, but I don’t allow myself to dream that Chris’s face—or even the pitch of his particular voice—will return to me whole. Can you remember them perfectly still? For me, other than that picture you gave me, those aspects of him are lost. Their absence will always remain the most defining thing in my life.

  Yours,

  Alan Turing

  (1)

  The Memoirs of Stephen R. Chinn: Chapter 6

  Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040

  I’ve reviewed the pace of these memoirs, their unities of time and so forth, and I realize I’ve started to stagnate. I should be rushing ahead toward the next wave of egregious mistakes. But can you blame me? From the prison recreational center, I invoke my right to manipulate time. In the shadow of a bowling ball the size of a cow, I call on my power to disregard scale. I’ve lost my freedom of movement. I’ve lost my perpetual motion, my most basic Copernican right. All of us in this prison are stuck. The Sonic signs, that bowling ball, the rings of barbed wire all orbit us. Will you then revoke this other minor liberty, these freedoms I’m taking with time?

  I’m sure you can relate to the frustration of imprisonment, you who are trapped in your developments, unable to show your children the country, let alone the rest of the world. You who no longer visit the graves of your parents, or the bedrooms where you first fell in love. You, too, have lost your right to passage through space. How much more crucial, then, the right to
move freely through time? Unlike computers, we’re not bound to count each second correctly. We’re at liberty to accord each moment its proper weight, depending on its meaning to us. Permit me, then, to lengthen the moment when I fell in love with Dolores.

  My switch from seducing her to telling her stories wasn’t an ingenious stratagem. I simply ran out of lines. To hold back the rising tide of brute silence, I cast around for something to say and stories were all that was left. For no logical reason, I started with the comfortless tales my grandmother told, when I dreamed of hell and sleep wouldn’t come. Once those tales were exhausted, I moved on to the plots of favorite children’s books. After that, I regurgitated, as best I could, the poems and novels I read in college. Listen, whiz mathletes: this is why English class is important. One day a terrible quiet will settle over your house. There will be no words. Then you’ll want to tell stories.

  A new dynamic developed in the clean rooms of my mansion. Tentatively, Dolores started to listen. No one was trying to progress. White flags had been planted. There was no forward motion in the spiraling, radial routes of my stories, ranging from Sunday school lessons to Green Eggs and Ham to seventeenth-century epics. Time was suspended. I spoke, and Dolores started to listen.

  With practice, I developed rhetorical flair. I found a voice that felt like my own. I was speaking in a foreign language, so I attended closely to its surfaces. As programming had in my college days, telling stories made me feel like a master. I was the creator of a universe. At night, I read voraciously, hunting new material, and still, I sometimes ran out of new tales. When this occurred, I started recounting my first memories, when my addled parents were present, when my father’s charm was still charming. I had once a mother with silken dark hair. The scent of summer evenings in the city lingered when she embraced me. I had also a hollow-cheeked father, a poet presumptive, loathed by my grandmother, who sometimes sat by my bedside at night. Lights-out, a dark shape in a dark chair, reciting his favorite poems. Did I dream him up? No, I remember still the clipped ends of his phrases, the staccato beat of his accent: “The lovely lady Christabel, whom her father loves so well, what makes her in the wood so late, / a furlong from the castle gate?” No, I didn’t dream his shape in the chair. I summoned his voice to recite the same poems to Dolores while she hosed down the driveway. I also told her this: When my father had died, my mother lived another two years in a brick apartment complex in Yonkers. I remember the endless gray graveyard we passed on our way there; a neighbor’s yapping white dog; and the vague and gentle expression on my mother’s face. She’d left the milk out in the sun and my grandmother was angry. There was a long line of refugee ants, moving from the window to the sink, whose journey I watched as my grandmother scolded my mother. I remember a drawing my mother gave me, charcoal on paper; and I remember realizing, later that night, that I must have left it on the bus, where I’d sat by the hairy sweater my grandmother was wearing. All this I recounted while Dolores took a chamois cloth to the silver.

  When these few memories had been tapped, I told Dolores tales of my grandmother: her fire and brimstone, the endless clicking of rosary beads, the silver roots of her jet-black hair, the tissue-paper skin on her throat. I recounted playground isolation, the comfort of cool-minded computers, lunch on the floor of the wood shop with Murray. Later, the bitter fallout when Murray found a girlfriend; and later still, my voyage to Palo Alto, my flight to Santa Barbara, my arrival on the top of my mountain, where I waited for do-lovely Dolores.

  In each of these tales I called my protagonist Stefan. I admit to giving Stefan a handful of personal charms that Stephen didn’t really possess. He was a little fictional, but not so fictional that Dolores wouldn’t have known exactly who this dashing young Stefan was meant to represent. So Dolores listened, and Stefan continued to speak, and if Dolores didn’t soften with pity, a particular look sometimes came over her face. A little distance betook her. There was a softening at the corners of her eyes. The heaviness in her shoulders started to lighten; her mouth became tender. Perhaps, while she listened, I came to life a little bit. No longer some satyr, sating himself on the mountain, but a man who was once a boy, who loved his mother, lost her painting, found a new friend and lost him as well. Someone she could relate to in this strange city, a land of palm trees and honey, to which she’d fled in the wake of her own loss.

  For months I told her stories, gratified by the change I could cause. I was in love with my own ability to soften the corners of her eyes, to lighten her heavy shoulders. It was almost enough: choosing my words; seeing them work. I could imagine such a life. Every day, telling her stories, watching her float free of her weight.

  Only once in that time did I try to embrace her. It occurred while I was describing my misery in college, those isolated nights walking beneath ivied thresholds, listening through open windows to the sounds of jubilant students. Describing them, I flew back there again, over the ocean of years, and when Dolores looked at me with some kindness, I threw myself against her, a great clumsy wave crashing over a rock. Taken off guard by my bungling affection, she held me in her arms for a moment, then pressed me gently away. She returned to her work. I picked up where I’d left off.

  But I was shaken, a little. Telling that story had thrown me back to my college years, when every morning I woke and faced anew the prison of my loneliness. It seemed then that I’d never escaped, only decorated my cell with marble islands, filigree, and bougainvillea. In fright, I sought Dolores’s embrace. I wanted some reassurance that I was a man who could reach past the bars to touch the skin of a woman. That I could build such human relation.

  She didn’t provide that reassurance. Still, I’d lived a long time without it. I’d developed the reckless persistence of someone who’s been sentenced to life. What did I have to lose? Even if, from out of the nest of her hair, she’d pulled a knife and slit my throat, protecting herself from my advances, what would be lost? Perhaps, murdered, my soul would depart, leaving a cold shell in its wake. But then at least I’d have confirmation that up to that point I’d been human. That I was more than an empty figure, going through the motions of living.

  And so I resumed telling stories, and slowly, little by little, I felt a change occurring in her. Perhaps I wore her down. Perhaps she warmed to my boyish persistence. I must have seemed like someone incapable of getting sunk. Maybe she thought it wouldn’t hurt to hitch her basket to such a balloon. If I could persevere despite her ongoing rejections, surely I had a unique talent for hope. Maybe, mistakenly, she interpreted this talent as courage.

  Regardless, she did change a little. She seemed to open herself to my presence, if not to embrace it. Day after day, I told her stories, and when for the first time I asked her to marry me, she didn’t reject me out of hand. She only laughed a little, kept cleaning, and allowed me to keep talking. Other changes began to occur: a shower of laughter at a lackluster joke, an accidental brush of the sleeve, a sudden burst of conversation. When she walked in the front door, it was different. She came in with a rush of cool air. When she said hello, removing her coat, her eyes were as bright as if she’d been crying.

  I asked her to marry me again in July; again she laughed and kept cleaning. This repeated itself a few more times that summer, and again in the fall, and like Scheherazade, postponing the day of my beheading, I kept telling stories. I kept up until Christmas, when Dolores had planned a five-day trip to visit her family. The evening before she departed, I stopped her at the door.

  “This is it,” I said, like a man who lives in real time. “It’s now or never. Let’s get married. Let’s have a family together.”

  “Maybe,” she said, then shouldered her tote bag and walked out the door. Five days later, when she arrived in the morning with a bag of groceries, she found me haggard at the breakfast island. I’d been waiting five days, five months, forever. She put the groceries down.

  “OK,” she said. “Let’s try. But remember one thing. You’re going to lose interest.
At some point, it will happen. You don’t think so now, but you’ll get distracted. You have to stay with me. If we have a family together, you have to be here to help.”

  And so Dolores and I moved past the noisier stage of our courtship and began to build something quiet together. Without any witnesses, we were married at the courthouse downtown, surrounded by murals of murdering conquistadors. Dolores moved her few things into my house; we hired a new cleaning woman. When Dolores began to wander the halls like a shade, touching the bookshelves, the fixtures, the mirrors, I suggested community college. She enrolled in biology classes. At the end of the day, she came home with her books. In halting English, she told me about chlorophyll and ribosomes. Inspired by her energy, I began to dream up new programs. We settled into a routine. We found our favorite take-out spots; we stocked the freezer with ice cream. She told me about her family; we went to the movies. We talked about children. In the spring, we learned she was pregnant, and I realized, without even knowing when it had happened, that I’d become a human and was starting a life.

  It doesn’t elude me that my readers might feel impatient with such a vague explanation of the way Dolores and I fell in love. When was the precise moment? What caused her to change her mind on her return from Mexico? I could try to provide answers, but this is my memoir. I get to choose how to tell it, and on the topic of Dolores marrying me, I insist on avoiding neat explanations.

  Since well before I set loose my robots, we’ve been a binary race. We mimic the patterns of our computers, training our brains toward yeses and nos, endless series of zeros and ones. We’ve lost confidence in our own minds. Threatened by what computers can do, we teach our children floating point math. They round the complexity of irrational numbers into simple integers so that light-years of information can be compressed into bits. We’ve completed the golden ratio, moving the decimal up. But at what cost! What a pity, if Dolores’s decision to come close to Stefan were rounded up to the most rational reason.