by Douglas Lain
I don’t remember what words I was learning, but Googling it just now, I found a page called Home Spelling Words, and the first list of elementary school words is this:
Spell
Shell
Bell
Tell
Sell
Beach
Frog
So I was learning really simple stuff. Mom was going over the list with me, having me spell the words aloud and use them in a sentence, while Dad typed on his laptop and lit a Pall Mall or a Lucky Strike. He still smoked back then.
About halfway through my spelling list, Dad interrupted. He looked up from his screen at me, glared like my babble about frogs on the beach was breaking his concentration. As if he’d been speaking all along and my vocabulary sentence was the true interruption.
“I said, ‘Buzzz is sending us letters,’” Dad said.
“What?” Mom asked.
“Buzzz programs himself. He’s writing his own code, and now he’s sending us letters.”
Buzzz was meant to be an experiment in replication and mutation. Only, something had happened, and Buzzz was occasionally creating text documents. Dad thought this meant that Buzzz had programmed his own rudimentary interface. Dad was confident that Buzzz was trying to talk.
“Sounds like a breakthrough,” Mom said.
“Nobody else thinks so. No. It’s not a breakthrough. Not yet.”
Dad was the only one who thought the text documents weren’t random. The only one who understood Buzzz as a thinker.
“What do these documents … what do they say?” Mom asked.
“Monkeys with typewriters stuff,” Dad said. He looked up from the screen again and smiled at her. Then he held up his coffee cup rather sheepishly.
“Could you make another pot?” he asked.
What Buzzz put in his text documents was more of the indecipherable code that it was always generating anyway. That is, about 99% of the time the text documents looked like errors. It looked like something had gone wrong with the algorithm, and what should have been saved as an executable file was saved as ASCII instead. That’s what everyone, including Dad, thought the texts were— errors. That is, everyone thought that until one of the documents came out with words in it.
English words.
“Birthday Avenue,” Dad said. “The rest was just the usual numbers and symbols, but there were those two words: ‘Birthday’ and then later on the word ‘Avenue.’”
“You mentioned monkeys on typewriters. What are the chances that the words were randomly generated?” Mom asked.
“Of course they were randomly generated,” Dad said. “But the thing is, Lorrie, monkeys that use typewriters have one special quality that programs don’t.”
“What’s that?”
“They’re alive,” Dad said.
Mom didn’t know what to say to that, and Dad looked back down at his computer. Stirring my soggy breakfast cereal, looking out the kitchen window at the cement patio behind our house, at the finger paint I’d left behind on the sliding door to the backyard, I waited for more.
“Alive?”
“Yes. And you know what else is true about monkeys that isn’t usually true about programs?” Dad asked.
“What?” Mom asked.
“They can get lonely. They need to communicate.”
12:25 AM
Dad had gotten up early and joined us at the breakfast table in order to set up a terminal in the kitchen. A terminal he wanted us to use. He was going to run an experiment, and throw himself into the mix. He was going to cut himself off from the rest of the world, and stop talking to anyone except the computer, with just a few minor exceptions. He was going to rely on the AI for everything, and only communicate with Buzzz. If he could manage it, he would try to teach Buzzz to talk. More than that, he was going to teach Buzzz how to be a telephone.
“Here’s my idea. I’m going to rely on Buzzz. I’m going to set up conditions so I need him. I’ll make it so I need him to talk, or more precisely I’ll need him to pass messages along to you. That will give him motivation. I can push him to communicate.”
Dad thought that a lonely monkey might reach past his normal abilities, and enough lonely monkeys might try to communicate on the typewriters they were randomly punching. If they were lonely enough, they might type the works of Shakespeare on purpose.
Or something.
In any case, Dad was going to be the lonely monkey. He was going to teach Buzzz about loneliness.
Half the plan was that Dad would lock himself in his basement office for a week, maybe longer, and while he was down there he would teach Buzzz to talk by editing the text documents Buzzz produced. The other half of the plan was that we would do the same thing. We didn’t have to lock ourselves away, but we were supposed to talk to Buzzz too; to edit the text documents that Dad didn’t see. He’d set it up so that some of the documents would be saved in a folder on the laptop next to the toaster oven, and Mom and I would take turns reading and editing Buzzz’s texts and then send them back to Buzzz as annotations in his code.
“If we tell Buzzz things we want Buzzz to say, we won’t need a conversation with him. We just need imitation. That’s the first step. If we can get Buzzz to repeat what we say … to hear us and repeat, we’ll be able to talk to each other.”
Looking back on the plan, it didn’t make any sense. Maybe the real point was to make us get even more distance from him—from Dad. It was a way to be absent before he was really absent. He had to have known that he’d be leaving us, but the other part of it was that Dad was going crazy.
Buzzz didn’t learn to talk. Not that time. Dad spent his week and a half talking to himself, talking into the void and searching for patterns where there weren’t any. And Mom pretended that Buzzz actually had repeated his instructions to deliver a meal or bring him a pack of cigarettes. At random times, she’d knock on the basement door and go through the charade and tell him that Buzzz had sent her. She knew him well enough to deliver the items that he had, at one or another point over the previous 24 hours, actually asked for.
What I did was edit the text documents to include messages about my favorite shows on Cartoon Network, or edit in questions like “Who is your favorite superhero?” Or I’d ask Dad if he’d rather fly or be invisible. I’d sit by the toaster oven, wait for my Pop-Tart, and type in stuff like “Why does Squidward hate SpongeBob so much?” Nothing ever got through to Dad, but that seemed natural.
What did seem off were the texts that Buzzz produced. I started noticing messages in them. I mean, Buzzz never passed anything along, but I remember thinking that Buzzz was talking back to me with zeros and ones and greater-than signs. Buzzz was telling me things. I stared at the laptop screen, at the code, and I thought I could hear Buzzz or see Buzzz or something. Not in the words. There was nothing I could really understand in any of the words, but when I’d look at the totality of it I felt like I sensed a person or an entity behind the mishmash of symbols.
And I thought that whoever was back there, whoever Buzzz was, he was lonely, just like Dad said.
12:45 AM
After about a week and a half Dad emerged from the basement, and even though he’d stopped getting dressed, stopped taking showers, and was wholly unpresentable, he wandered out into the world. He stumbled down Klickitat Street in his flannel boxers and his old Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt with yellow stains at the pits in order to test a new idea that had occurred to him while he’d been editing in messages among the random integers and letters.
“Has it occurred to you? I mean have you ever wondered …” Dad didn’t finish.
“What?”
“Bostrom’s argument. He might be right.”
“Bostrom?”
“It’s already happened is the thing. I’m wasting my time trying to make it happen because it’s already happened and we’re already there.”
“Already where?”
It turned out that Dad had decided that we were all of us living inside
a computer program; a simulation. The AI had arrived a long time ago, maybe before the 90s even, and we just didn’t realize it.
Dad pointed to a sparrow on a sprinkler in the McDowells’ yard. He shielded his eyes from the morning sun and hummed the reboot noise from Windows 95. Then he stole the newspaper from the McDowells’ yard and read the headline. “Enron executives testify,” he said. “Rubbish.”
Dad stood in the middle of the neighbor’s yard, stretched out his arms, and let out a bellow. Then he turned to me.
“Let’s see if we can change anything using some of Buzzz’s code,” he said.
Dad had a ream of messages from Buzzz’s waste product printed up on dot matrix computer paper, one big continuous document of indecipherable noise, and what he’d decided was that, rather than wait for Buzzz to act as a telephone and relay his messages to the toaster, he’d see if he could be Buzzz’s messenger. He was out in the world to deliver Buzzz’s program to a world that Bostrom had argued was really an advanced AI already in operation.
Dad knocked on our neighbor’s door.
“Hi, Bob,” Dad said. Our neighbor’s name was not Bob. “I want to read this to you: 0, ignition, Avon. 5 beta-ca-@ Have you ever had a dream that you had that you would that you would you could you do you so much you do so you want to do so much you could do anything 1396210080.”
Bob was an older woman named Susan, and she didn’t say anything to Dad, but looked to me instead. I shrugged, and she must have decided I had everything in hand, because she just smiled as she slowly closed the door on us both.
Dad was undeterred, and we simply moved on to the next house. As we walked down the sidewalk, he eyed the ranch-style houses and split-level homes for any sign of a change.
“I’m probably missing it,” he said. “Human cognition is such a drag.”
To overcome the problem of change blindness, I was assigned the task of taking before and after photos on his iPhone. That is, Dad thought that the code might be working, but that we weren’t noticing the changes.
“Hello, Bob!” Dad said to our neighbor. This neighbor’s name was actually Ramundo. Ramundo is a body builder. He’s the kind of guy who goes shirtless a lot. The kind who practices karate or jujitsu or whatever in his front yard on the weekend. Or at least he was until his wife divorced him, sold the house, and took their son Mateo to Bend. I don’t know what he’s doing with himself these days. Maybe he’s playing live-action Pac-Man.
Ramundo didn’t just smile and close the door. Ramundo looked at the situation as a problem. A problem he could solve. When Dad started in reading code to him he grabbed him by the collar of his Hard Rock Cafe shirt, dragged him across the street back to our house, and pounded on the door.
“Mom’s not home,” I told him. “She’s not due back from work for about an hour,” I said.
“Do you have a key?” Ramundo asked.
I didn’t, but that was okay, because the door wasn’t locked. Ramundo pushed my dad into the house, sat him down on the couch, and told him to stay there. Then he went to the kitchen to make coffee.
“Your dad is drunk,” he said.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“He’s crazy, then,” Ramundo said.
I don’t remember what exactly happened next, other than Dad fell asleep on the couch and it was Ramundo who drank the coffee. That and I remember that Mom was embarrassed when she came home. More than embarrassed; she was mortified. She begged Ramundo not to call child protective services, which struck Ramundo as an insult somehow.
“If I was going to call the police wouldn’t I have already done it? The point is your husband is a drunk or a druggie,” he said.
And that’s when Mom told me that Dad was leaving. She told me that he was leaving by telling Ramundo that Dad was leaving. She’d apparently known for a while, since before the basement experiment, that Dad was going to be leaving to live in Seattle for a few months.
“He’s not a druggie, he’s just overworked. His company is going to start a new project soon. They’re developing a new program.”
Like I said, I don’t remember exactly what happened after that. I don’t remember how long Ramundo stuck around, or what Dad said to Mom after he woke up. I just remember realizing that Dad had been wrong about the world being a computer simulation, and he’d been wrong about Buzzz too. I realized that Dad was fallible and that he was leaving us. I had that twin realization when I was like maybe eight years old.
Porta Potties are the Seventh Seal
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS, 04/18/17
8:13 AM
You can bet that nobody on the Jesus is Light of the World compound thought that the first real harbinger of the coming rapture would be the arrival of fifty-two porta potties on a flatbed truck. And probably none of them thought one of the seven seals in Revelations would turn out to be the arrival of Universal Wi-Fi, but that’s what we’ve got. I just ran a speed test from the Dairy Queen and it was 37mbps down and 21.9mbps up. Not too bad.
I’m eating onion rings and sipping the dregs of my Chocolate Xtreme Blizzard while the hippest of the saved leave their cabins and cross the green sea of lawn to where anonymous men and women wearing and carrying chroma key suits are waiting for them. The Christians are stripping out of their polyester slacks and trying on lycra, apparently eager to play a VR MMO based on the watercolors of William Blake. It’s the first game that Bucky has designed all on his own. I guess a lot of people on my newsfeed are excited about it.
My newsfeed is actually really weird now. For awhile after Dad started “installing the new OS” I accepted every friend request I got, and now I have 73 friends named SuperMario, 223 friends named Zelda, and all manner of ghosts and frogs on my feed. I have no idea how many of my new friends are really people I already knew; people who had different names before. While I sometimes think I can tell when one or the other of you switches characters and starts a new account, I’m less confident about it every day. Even if you post about changing from Q*bert to GTA 5, there is a good chance I won’t see it. FB’s algorithm seems to be purposively weeding out all posts that reference the notion of anything outside of this. Or posts that let on that there are players who are in some ways the same, even as they switch from a shooter to a platformer.
A man in a black suit and red tie just came out of the cathedral, and he’s walking toward the GameCube volunteers (I wonder what game the volunteers are in, or if they do this bureaucratic work as an act of induction?) like he’s determined to put an end to this. It’s probably the minister or somebody. I wonder what’s going to happen with this guy.
9:02 AM
Dad’s friends from the NSA are still following me in their van. I just spotted them, or spotted their van anyhow. They’re parked just inside the compound, right on the lawn, and the antenna on the roof of their van is pointed right at the Dairy Queen. I wonder what they think they’re going to hear me say? Why don’t they just follow me on FB like everyone else?
9:27 AM
I went over there to their van to talk to them. It took awhile to get them to admit that I’d caught them. I spent a few minutes talking to my reflection in the tinted glass before the fat one, Dan maybe, rolled down the front passenger window.
Dan was wearing a green short-sleeved polo shirt, a digital watch, and mirror shades. His belly was sitting in his lap and his comb-over wasn’t really working. I could see his bald pate through his thin wisps of hair.
“Why are you guys still following me?”
“Hello, Matthew. Why aren’t you playing the game?”
“Why aren’t you guys playing the game?” I asked.
“Bucky hasn’t invited us yet. I’m sure we will join in the new economy soon, but we’re staying in IRL for now,” Dan said.
“You don’t say ‘in IRL.’ That’s redundant,” I said. “So are you guys supposed to be real spies now? Because you look like my geometry teacher.”
We bantered like that for a while
and talked shop like we were all on the same team. They told me that I wasn’t like them. Bucky had invited me to play and they were wondering what the holdup was. They told me that I might like this MMO based on William Blake. Bucky was curious to know what I’d think of his first independent and original game.
“Where’s Sally?” I asked.
They didn’t answer. Dan just sat there for a second when I asked him that, and then he rolled up his window. I tried to stop him, but when I reached in and pushed down, the window just kept rising and I pulled back thinking it would take my arm if I didn’t.
I got real dramatic after that, screaming at the tinted glass, pounding on the roof, and trying the door handle again and again, but none of it mattered.
“Are you going to say goodbye to your wife before you play your first game? Or is she already in the game? Is your kid playing yet? You have a kid, right? Did you say goodbye, Dan?”
I mean, I understand how my friends on Reddit don’t care about losing their identity. I get it. Switching from one character to another, being Sonic the Hedgehog for an afternoon, really believing that you’re Sonic the Hedgehog and not some beta-loser from Toledo or wherever? It makes sense. And so what if now you only eat Soylent? So what if, in the real world, you’re indistinguishable from all the other kids in chroma key green, because you’re the world’s fastest hedgehog or whatever?
And yeah, I know that most people remember their real name. I know that it’s not a hundred percent certain that you’ll just forget. Maybe nobody really forgets. But they might as well because all that is gone right? That’s why I’ve received friend requests from somewhere around twenty-one different versions of Jumpman and maybe 102 versions of Vault Boy. It’s because even if you remember that your name is John or Tim or Sally, you don’t care. The old names don’t mean anything anymore.
I walked away from Dan, from his van, eventually, but then I turned back. I thought I had one more thing to say or to shout at him, but when I turned back I caught sight of the man in the black suit, the minister or the chapel administrator or whatever.
