Galatea 2.2

by Richard Powers

It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I’d already absorbed head-on. I’d long ago developed all the needed antibodies. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.

Anyone reading this by accident or nostalgia a hundred years from now will have to take my word for the novelty.

Inexhaustible protagonists from every time zone posted to the continuous forum a dozen or more times a day.

The groups at the Center could now read journal articles months before they hit print. The data Autobahns had no speed limit.

The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.

I’d mastered the art of surviving narrative whiplash. No reason, in theory, why I couldn’t regroup again. Go on and work forever.

What little diversionary work remained I dragged out for all it was worth. Two Kbytes of new text or four of reasonable revision honorably discharged me of the day. Beyond that, I could indulge my remaining hours in good faith. A page and a half freed me to go and do as I liked.

Mozart, the Clarinet Concerto, middle movement. The one that C. had thought the most pained palliative in creation.

inexorable

For years, back before I saw the photograph that led to my retirement from software, I’d made a living by writing code.

I saw myself as a character in this endless professional convention: the Literary Lurker. Novice symposium dabbler, who no one knew was there. But even lurking left a signature.

Again the summer suit, the last scientist not giving congressional evidence to wear one. His skin had the pallor of a sixties educational TV host. He looked as if he’d taken self-tanning cream orally.

burlesque

diluvian

He never lived long enough to be anything but a story.

But I wasn’t about to give Dr. Lentz the pleasure of this narrative.

I searched the bandwidths, postponing further the hopes of a jump start. I did Boolean searches across incomprehensibly huge textbases. South, train, and picture, ANDed together, within a ten-word range of one another.

sere.

Granted, neural networks performed slick behaviors. But these were tricks, the opposition said. Novelties. Fancy pattern recognition. Simulacra without any legitimate, neurological analog. Whatever nets produced, it wasn’t thought.

I told myself that the key thing was to choose and get down to it. After all, wasn’t a story about figuring out what the story was about? Mornings passed when a sick knot in my stomach informed me that I would never write anything again. I had nothing left in me but the autobiography I’d refused from the start even to think about. My life threatened to grow as useless as a three-month-old computer magazine.

We entered those two glorious weeks when U.’s weather made it seem that anyone alive could start again. Recover all lost ground.

He made some point that the half-dozen others at the table refuted with exasperation bordering on disgust. Science looked a lot like literary criticism, from across the room.

The real problem was belief. My eighteen-year-olds never believed that the reader was real, that they themselves were real, that the world’s topics were real. That they had to insist as much, in so many words.

saurian

She closed her eyes, to help her visualize. Thought looks up, or off, or in. Away from the distraction of what is. Would a thinking machine, too, turn its simulated eyes away?

I wrote about that job years later, in my third novel. I used Taylor as model for my hero, a man who gives up a promising career in science to devote himself to music composition. And I cast myself as the shiftless graduate-school dropout who squanders his talent.

lacunae

coeval,

“I might have known.” Lentz sounded disgusted with himself. “Too much retention. It was learning. But learning got swamped in its own strength. The creature was driving itself batty, holding on too tenaciously to everything it had ever seen. Dying of its own nostalgia. Mired in the overacquired.”

striate

“Quixotic?”

Where is your library?” “Lost in transit.” Diana cringed. Her hand flew out like a magician’s released dove, but stopped short of my shoulder. “Sorry. It’s none of my business. I just wondered how you can work. All my notes are spread over the margins of my texts. I’d be lost without them.” “Lost is not so bad. It’s practically an advantage in my line.” “Mr. Powers, Mr. Powers.” She shook her head again, tisking through her grin. She did not buy me. But the sales pitch, at least, tickled her.

Most of the residential streets were still brick. The houses had verandas, balustrades, features that have passed out of the language.

Ah, the library. I booked like a madman for the Master’s Comp. Nine months, up in a study carrel on deck eight.”

Memory was a parasite, he proposed. It opportunistically used perception’s circuitry for its playback theater.

Conscious intelligence is smoke and mirrors. Almost free-associative. Nobody really responds to anyone else, per se. We all spout our canned and thumb-nailed scripts, with the barest minimum of polite segues. Granted, we’re remarkably fast at indexing and retrieval. But comprehension and appropriate response are often more on the order of buckshot.”

“That’s a pretty figure of speech, Marcel. And doubtless it’s the sign of some nominal intelligence on your part. But have you read your own school papers lately? Give me Middlemarch, I’ll spin you off a few amorphous generalities, all qualified and deniable.” “What do you know about that book?” I asked, too quickly. It was Taylor’s book, the one he’d given his scholarly life to. The one I’d written on, analyzed for him. The novel where I’d discovered novels. The mere title in Lentz’s mouth sounded creepy, as if I’d been spied on.

amorphous

Occam’s razor,

fecundity,

“No, it doesn’t. It just means we have as good a shot at this as any waffling poseur. We can get our supernet to sound exactly like a fashionable twenty-two-year-old North American whiz kid imitating a French theorist in translation by, say, this time next month.”

“I’m serious, Marcel. I’ve seen the stuff you’re talking about. Gnomic is in. We just have to push ‘privilege’ and ‘reify’ up to the middle of the verb frequency lists and retrain. The freer the associations on the front end, the more profound they’re going to seem upon output.”

fata morgana

for-fend.

No matter how long and elaborate history’s procession, the eye meeting it along the muddy road is always first person singular.

Our happiness may never have been more than bravery. Assume a virtue, if you have it not.

I commenced that million-and-a-half-word associative memoir that Lentz would harass me with by name, a dozen years later.

Ethan Frome.

reconnoitering,

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.