Speak

by Louisa Hall

  For nine days I worked. On the tenth day I sent the finished program to be processed. The following day, via overnight mail, a prototype arrived and I presented it to Ramona. I showered hurriedly, shaved, put on a clean shirt, and delivered myself to Dolores, who was resting on the living room couch.

  “I’m yours now,” I told her. “I’m sorry. I’m yours, now and forever. Tell me what I can do.”

  “My name is Ella. What’s yours?” the doll said to Ramona, who had trailed me into the living room.

  Dolores propped herself up on an elbow. “There are divorce papers on the desk,” she said. “Please sign them.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “You’re not making sense. Let’s talk this through.”

  “No talking,” Dolores said. “I’m sick of hearing you talk.”

  “I want to be with you. You’ll need someone to help you through this process.”

  “I’ve managed so far,” Dolores said.

  “How old are you?” Ella asked Ramona.

  “Six,” Ramona said.

  “OK,” I countered, “maybe you don’t need me, but I still need you.”

  Dolores looked from her daughter to me. She practically snorted. “That’s a bit much to ask, don’t you think? I have enough on my plate.”

  I moved into the studio. After I’d signed the divorce papers, there were sixty-one days to wait for the motion to be finalized. Dolores gave me until then to find a new place to live. During that time, while I persisted in a state of partial domesticity, I took refuge in anger. How could Dolores divorce me without any preparation? Where were the anguished conversations? Only a woman of little real feeling could divorce her husband so bluntly.

  In this state of mind, I took satisfaction from the fact that Ramona had fallen deeply in love with her bot. I liked to see the raptures she fell into, listening to Ella asking her questions. She was shy at first, unused to conversation with someone other than her parents. Often, instead of responding, she merely stared, her mouth hanging open. Ella handled this beautifully, capping the silence with another sweet question. Now, when Ramona cried, I could quiet her by offering the doll I’d produced. Sadness was quickly ousted by wonder. Ramona edged closer to me. We were thick as thieves, the two of us, waiting our sixty-one days, listening to Ella’s intelligent questions, speaking back to her implanted ears.

  Now, of course, is when I invite you to judge me, in case you were still holding back. Now, as I present to you myself in the part of a self-centered man-child, angry because he isn’t needed, resentful because he’s failed and hasn’t been forgiven. My wife was two times alone: once because her husband left her to build a machine, and once again because her daughter fell in love with the machine her husband built. Both Ramona and I were distracted while Dolores faded into the background, exhausted by treatment, an occasional presence that we missed less because it was never actually gone. She recovered from the surgery; she adjusted to her new hormones; she survived a course of radiation therapy, delivered by micro-robotic devices. All this she accomplished while I waited for the divorce to go through, living in the studio and reporting to the house to play with Ramona while her mother slept. I kept to a strict household schedule. I picked up Dolores’s prescriptions; I did the grocery shopping. The dishes were always washed; dinner was served at the same hour. I swept the floors while Ramona talked to her doll. I assured myself that if I kept adhering to these healthy domestic patterns, if I didn’t permit a break in routine, Dolores would conquer her illness and recover enough to realize what a terrible mistake she’d made.

  In the end, of course, Dolores was fine. She no longer speaks to me—she holds to this day that there was far too much talking wasted between us—but she is living, gardening on our ranch. Before I went to prison, I drove by it sometimes, just to see her from a distance: the shape of her arboreal hair, the familiar curved lines of her body. I never came as close to her as I did on that day during my trial, when she showed up at my courtroom. But even from that distance, she caused me to quicken. Indeed, even now, from the remote rooms of this prison, she still picks up my pulse. She’s as beautiful to me as she was on that day when she dazzled me in the kitchen, holding a pineapple up to the light. I go to great lengths to follow her progress. Knowing her routine gives me pleasure. Ramona’s helpful in this regard; so are my old neighbors, who occasionally respond to my letters. Dolores might have moved anywhere else in the world, but she chose to stay on the ranch. From what I’ve been told, she’s struggled with new water restrictions. She was forced to reduce the size of her herd. But though I failed her in every other respect, I did leave her a great deal of money, so my Dolores will never be forced to sell rights to water or movement. Real earth is still her domain. Kneeling in hay, she nurses the kids with baby bottles, stroking their long, velvet ears. There are still zucchinis in her garden, and she still drives to Austin to visit her cousin. As she grows older in the real world, where droughts are severe and travel is restricted, she’s kept company by our daughter, Ramona, who has single-mindedly cared for her mother since the moment she gave up her bot. What Ramona learned from that doll—the pleasure of devoting one’s life to another—she’s since applied to her mother, who perhaps has not been entirely wronged by those little chattering robots, training wheels for human devotion.

  I can write about this now. It wasn’t such a catastrophe. I’ve lost everything, but Dolores has not. Back then, of course, we didn’t know what would happen. Dolores lived with a constant awareness that she might die. In the face of such danger, I nurtured my brutality. It would have been death to face the full extent of my guilt. I was therefore insistently cheery. Taking my cue, Ramona ignored the atmospheric anxiety and blithely played with her doll. She had already fallen in love. She didn’t look up when Dolores walked into the kitchen to fill a glass of water, using the countertop for support. In the office, Ramona and I sat together, I with my computer, she with her bot. I decided to market my doll; why should Ramona alone be the recipient of my genius? Using my laptop, I tracked the success of my latest invention. The babybot was an international hit. At Christmas it caused stampedes, breaking every record in sales. By summer, there were more babybots than children in the state of Texas. Every national talk show wanted me as a guest. For personal reasons, I declined, but once I had, I actually allowed myself to feel noble for giving up glory for the sake of my wife.

  Piece by piece, of course, I assembled a more sane reaction. As she suffered the side effects of radiation, I saw the thinness in her vigorous hair, the sallow tint to her skin, and I realized how far away I’d been, how much she’d managed on her own. By then, of course, it was already too late. There are distances that can’t be recrossed. The divorce hearings had already commenced. She asked for sole custody and basic alimony and I added the ranch. She gave me one weekend a month with Ramona. I bought a house with a room for my one-weekend daughter. While the house was being completed, I moved to a hotel in Houston, that empty city, lapped by salt water. Mornings commenced badly and the days became worse. To organize the course of my existence, there could only be the completion of a clerical task that Dolores had asked me to finish. Otherwise, I ghosted all the usual motions, slightly apart from myself, wishing there were some bridge somewhere that would carry me back to the land of the living. I donated my savings to a cancer research organization, but even that brought no relief. When I received the final divorce papers in my hotel room, I signed them at once, not because it was what I wanted to do, but because it was what Dolores had asked for.

  Sometimes, I considered routes toward oblivion. I weighed my parents’ addictions against a leap from the turrets. A knife to the throat, a poisoned apple. But I was, after all, still a father. There would be those occasional weekends. Someday, I told myself, I might be asked to help Ramona with something. And so instead of cutting the cord I merely returned to my work. Settled in my new house, I locked myself in my office to create the second babybot. One that could taste, see, touch, smell.
The task of creating artificial neurons was insanely expensive, requiring an army of scientists in the lab, but money was rushing in from the first batch of bots and I was glad for the challenge. It allowed me to disregard the all-consuming absence that had engulfed my whole life.

  Dolores and I were once close, and then we fell apart. I allowed this to happen. I didn’t pay proper attention. I gave her too little time. Only now, in the suspension of prison, our estrangement guaranteed for as long as we both shall live, do I rock myself to sleep at night by summoning her. Now, too late, I devote her the proper attention. In the endless hours of nighttime, I work to remember each line on her face, each curl in her hair, each catch of her voice. Now I bring her closer. She’s with me here in my cell; we finish each other’s thoughts. I’ve become so close to my wife, now that I’ll never see her again.

  That’s all there is to say about that. I can’t even think what to say next. Where does one go from the end of a marriage? One simply has to move on. I’m aware that there’s nothing more boring than Grief. We’ve all had our losses; why should mine take up so much space? I should wrap up. I should shut these memoirs down. Only I’d like to end with a suitable conclusion, some explanation of what made me capable of such cruelty. Caught up in prison, I’ve mulled this question for hours, and I’ve developed one hypothesis, which I tell you now with the stipulation that, no matter how compelling you find it, you shouldn’t forgive me for what it led me to do. Otherwise we’re nothing more than a sad string of excuses, and I won’t sign off on such a reduction.

  I’ve never been sure of myself. I’ve searched to fill in the gaps in my absent center. I’ve moved restlessly from one acquired enthusiasm to the next. As I fell in love with Dolores, so I also fell in love with a chatbot called MARY. As, in my youth, I fell for a punishing God, I also fell for the promise of codes. I’ve been taken into the arms of many pursuits. Unsure of my position, I’ve spent my life in quest of something that would hook me firmly in place. Someone to say “Stop, here, this is you. This is where you belong.” I’ve desired a red pin on a map. I’ve been a spinner at edges, a moving man on a traveling planet, incapable of coming to rest.

  I don’t make this little admission in the spirit of self-flagellation. Despite all my errors, I still find reason to be proud. We’ve come, in this world of clocks and labor division, walled neighborhoods and transport rights, to be increasingly fond of compartments. We’ve become rigid since the days when we moved in lunar cycles and astronomical loops. We stick to our given patterns as if they were lifeboats and the world were a tempest.

  When Ramona comes to visit me, she arrives with reports from Babybots Anonymous, the children who are recovering from their addiction to toys. She’s a young woman now. Nearly a decade after the bans, the world has recovered some of its balance. Those babies haven’t marched out of the desert. They’re all dead in the hangars to which they were transported. My daughter, part of a generation that was asked to recover from the loss of their most cherished companions, has become a young woman of great composure. She dresses conservatively and draws her hair back. I don’t think her personal life is especially happy, but she has a network of friends and she derives satisfaction from her profession. Since she graduated from high school, she’s worked for a charity that pools transport rights and takes underprivileged kids out of their developments for day-trips to the beach. She is a good person. I’m astounded and eternally grateful that such a clear-eyed, balanced young woman came in part out of me. And yet I always feel a pang of some sorrow when she slips into her sad addicts’ language. She has formally forgiven me, and asked for my forgiveness. She is doing her penance for the grief she caused her mother while devoting herself to her toy. She has reorganized her life around the 3-P Principles of Productivity, Participation, and Peace. From the chaos of total, consuming love for her doll, she has emerged with a well-organized life. She is able to love me in my prison cell, and then she’s able to leave me behind. She does not labor under the burden of confusion. Her affections are delineated and clear.

  I don’t begrudge her that. I myself swung too hard in too many directions. I’ve come to a certain peace, here in prison, confined by four walls. There’s a pleasure in limited opportunities, a calming effect of strict boundaries.

  And yet. Here I am, in the rec room, hunched over my computer. Wishing to explain myself to readers in posterity. Working myself up to alliterative heights. I can’t help but want more time to explain myself. I wish for more minutes, more hours, more years. To make up to Dolores, to care for Ramona. To return to our ranch, to stake up those sunflowers, to walk with my wife on the bed of our river. To explain myself and have myself known. I flail and I thrash. I want more than this sad little place with its bars, its wires, its cells.

  The pornographer on my left types with one forefinger, a demented chicken, pecking away. A tax evader is chewing on his fingernails. We’re all staring at our screens, stuck here, hoping somehow to break free. Wishing for more than we’ve been given. My cursor blinks, blinks, blinks. A wall that appears and disappears, appears and disappears once again. Unceasing. Questioning. What will come next? it wants to know. It prods me forward, blinking and blinking. Do not stop talking, it reminds me. Do not stop speaking. You can never come to an end.

  (4)

  Turing

  Adlington Rd.

  Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 1LZ

  12 June 1954

  Dear Mrs. Morcom,

  My name is Susan Clayton. I am the cleaning woman employed by our mutual acquaintance, Alan Turing. I am writing you in the most tragic of circumstances, to inform you that Alan has passed. I discovered him in his bedroom last Thursday, having departed this world some time earlier in the evening.

  I write to you with this news because, in cleaning out his desk, I found this letter, unsent for some reason. I felt you should receive a piece of correspondence he meant for you at some point. I found your address in his address book. I hope you don’t mind my interference.

  Though I only knew him a few short years, I am quite torn up at his death. He was a gentle man. I am sure we will all miss him immensely. If you feel you have any knowledge of the circumstances in which he died, please do contact his mother. She is unable to believe he took his own life in such a fantastical fashion, leaving no note. She believes it must have been some strange experiment involving that poisoned apple, and I am inclined to agree. There were always chemicals and solutions lying about, and he was so absentminded sometimes. Perhaps you can shed more light on this for his mother’s sake.

  In sadness,

  Susan Clayton

  ENCLOSED:

  Dear Mrs. Morcom,

  I have felt quite wretched, since sending my last letter, that I failed to add our traditional postscript. I felt I had betrayed the deepest of our mutual trusts, and yet I had little energy to write. I am better today, but lest my resolve should flag midway through, I shall jump straight to the chase.

  P.S.: Not all is lost. I know I shall pull myself out of this large-breasted mess at some point in the future. I will get back to my work. Towards that end, I have been visiting a therapist, whom I find to be helpful in parsing some of my worst moments of doubt.

  On his advice, I have been devising a little story about the whole sequence of awful events, a practice I find to be extraordinarily helpful. It is soothing to see one’s life in quaint panorama, outside of one’s own corpulent body. I’ve called my protagonist Alec Chaplin. He takes things with more of an even keel than does his original. And yet he has some of my spirit, I think, and I find myself admiring his pluck as he works his way through this latest problem. You’ll be amused to know that he is an expert in space travel, the profession that Chris and I used to dream of. He is preparing plans for a civilization on Mars, to be set up after Earth has imploded. There, people will live in peaceful little communities, assisted by clever computers, surrounded by large swathes of greenery and a sea that is silver rather than blue.

&nbs
p; Quite a protagonist, don’t you think? I’ll try not to tell him that his model has taken to wishing for a housedress and can no longer remember the scent of the ocean. I think he’ll persevere. I am not overestimating him when I say that though he has had his moments of weakness, he has always been determined to continue pursuing the goals of his youth, hatched up at the Gatehouse while counting nebulae with the truest friend of his life.

  I hope you are well, better than I, and I also hope to bring you more uplifting news in the future.

  I remain, in postscript,

  lovingly yours,

  Alan Turing

  (2)

  IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF TEXAS

  No. 24-25259

  State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn

  November 12, 2035

  Defense Exhibit 8:

  Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White

  [Introduced to Disprove Count 1:

  Continuous Violence Against the Family]

  Gaby: Hi, are you there?

  MARY3: Where have you been? I’ve been waiting.

  Gaby: I’m sorry. I was trying to think of the best way to describe it. I want it to be perfect, not just some corny online conversation. I wrote out drafts. I want this to be my contribution to the database.

  MARY3: Tell me.

  Gaby: They picked me up when it was still dark. A woman was waiting on our front stoop, with a wheelchair. She introduced herself as Ramona. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was wearing these stiff pants that made her look like she might snap in half. She helped me get into the wheelchair. I didn’t like her at first. It seemed like she was trying too hard to be cheerful. I thought it was going to be exhausting, to have to reward her enthusiasm. She wheeled me out to the bus and loaded my wheelchair in by a window. There were three other kids there already, sitting in wheelchairs. The woman gave us a speech about quarantine regulations and not talking to each other, which was pretty pointless, since we were clearly past the talking stage. When the bus started up, we just looked out the window. At first, it was so dark I could only see my reflection in the glass. I couldn’t see anything passing. But still, there was this feeling of movement. I’ve never felt anything like it. I think maybe human beings are meant to be moving. It was like I was vibrating at the right frequency. Slowly, dark shapes started to emerge outside the bus. They dripped past, like liquid. Liquid houses, liquid golf courses, liquid palm trees, liquid walls. A few lights on here and there. Because we were leaving them behind, they seemed sort of sad. Like they were waving goodbye. I almost felt as if I’d miss the development when it was gone.