Frankissstein: A Love Story

by Jeanette Winterson

The fascinating thing for me is that the world might have had a computer much earlier. A hundred years earlier. You’ve heard of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine?

If we cannot keep this love, there is a place in me that has been changed by this love. And I will honour it. Think of it as a private place of worship, if you like. And sometimes, boarding a plane, or waking up, or walking down the street, or taking a shower

(he pauses at the memory), I will recall that place and never regret the time I spent there.

Love is not a pristine planet before contaminants and pollutants, before the

arrival of Man. Love is a disturbance among the disturbed.

How did we begin? A hospital called Bethlehem, long back in the years of the Crusades. The common people called the place Bethlem, as it is observed in the English language that, wherever practicable, two syllables are preferred to three. And then, because everything is corrupted by time (even time itself), our Bethlem became Bedlam – the name without number for a world that is mad. The Great Bedlam.

mephitic

I do not wonder that we drink as much as we do, or that the poor, when they can afford it, drink most of all. Wretched conditions may be blamed, or the weight of business, or the urge to power, but our beings struggle in our bodies like light trapped in a jar, and our bodies struggle in this world as a beast of burden chafes its yoke, and this world itself

hangs alone on its noose, strung among the

indifferent...

Race, faith, gender, sexuality, those things make me impatient, said Victor. We need to move forward, and faster. I want an end to it all, don’t you see?

You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track – the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on. Mary Wollstonecraft

Believe me, you will see his effects. The monster once made cannot be unmade. What will happen to the world has begun.

Author’s note: THIS IS THE MOST PROFOUND THING RON HAS EVER SAID.

Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen? asks Ron. Max explains that the brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death.

I knew from my own experience how terrible were the conditions in Lancashire. In 1805 a weaver could earn fifteen shillings for a six-day week and keep his family without fear. In 1815, when the wars with Napoleon ended (and the wars ended with the Battle of Waterloo), those same workers might earn five shillings at best. In response, the government brought in the Corn Laws, forbidding the import of cheaper foreign grain to feed the starving families.

I have love, but I cannot find love’s meaning in this world of death. Would there were no babies, no bodies; only minds to contemplate beauty and truth.

If we were not bound to our bodies we should not suffer so.

He never gives up his optimism – and I once shared it – now it seems to be that in the battle between good and evil, evil wins.

And so he began to read The Masque of Anarchy. And I listened to his voice going in and out like the sea, and I wondered, what will become of the human dream? Will we see it end in pain and despair? Will we be free from the brutality of this life? By some artful intelligence find a better way?

The Brain—is wider than the Sky— Emily Dickinson

I read today that humans have wiped out sixty per cent of animal wildlife since 1970.

But the brain does not keep itself to itself. You know that saying – neurons that fire together wire together? The brain is a pattern-making machine. What I hope to do today is to retrieve some of those patterns.

cairn

I fear I shall disappoint you, Miss D. There is no artificial superintelligence lurking in the vaults. No army of robots poised to take over Britain. I am not Dr Strangelove. The breakthrough – when it comes – will be in America or China. Try blagging your way into Facebook’s Building 8, or hacking Elon Musk’s Neuralink – but don’t waste your time in Manchester, where it all began. The British don’t have the resources for the next stage.

It’s certainly inventive, said Victor. You could sell it to Hungary and Brazil. Or Trump. No Mexican bots.

oracular

The world punishes men and women differently. There is scandal wherever Byron and Shelley go, but they remain men. They are not dubbed hyenas in petticoats for living as they please. They are not called un-men when they love where they will. They are not left unprotected and penniless when a woman of theirs walks away without a thought. (What woman does walk away without a thought? Not even the bitterest nor the most vilely abused.)

My mother knew it – it did not alter her heart. How many ‘great’ artists? How many dead/mad/disused/forgotten/blamed and fallen women?

On the morning of 1 July, 1822, Shelley set sail in his boat, Ariel, to visit Byron. He had a copy of Keats’ poems tucked in his favourite nankeen trousers. He arrived safely, and wrote to Mary that he would return within a week. He did not return. It seems that a storm blew up in the Gulf of Spezia. Shelley’s boat, with its top-heavy masts, capsized. Shelley had never learned to swim. His body was found some days later, washed ashore in a state of decomposition, the volume of Keats still in his pocket. He was twenty-nine.

People make the assumption that we’re done with search. That’s very far from the case. The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly. You could ask, ‘what should I ask Larry?’ And it would tell you. Larry Page, Google co-founder

Our thoughts have substance, and especially so if you are a deity – even the youngest deity – like Sophia. She succeeds in creating the earth, but finds herself trapped in materiality – something she hates. She’s rescued, of course, a motif we find in many stories ever after, but in the meantime she leaves Planet Earth in the care of a dim-witted demiurge called – among other names – Jehovah.

Jehovah has a few successes in real estate early in his managerial career on

planet Earth and soon becomes the delusional tyrant-god we meet in the...

He insists that he is the only god, that he created everything, and that unquestioning worship is his due. Jehovah is insecure, and so both curiosity and criticism are severely punished (see: Garden of Eden. The Flood. The Tower of Babel. The Promised Land, etc.). Sophia has done her best to counter this craziness by giving human...

As far as I am concerned, what is happening now, at last, with AI, is something like a homecoming. What we dreamed is in fact the reality. We are not bound to our bodies. We can live forever.

Did you say Gnostic? said Ron. Sounds like superglue. What’s it mean? The word means ‘knowledge’ in Greek, but not factual or scientific knowledge by itself – rather a deeper understanding of patterns. Let’s call it the meaning behind the information.

In the haul, there was also a revised and annotated copy of Plato’s Republic. Plato’s theory in Republic is that somewhere else there is a world of Ideal Forms. Our world i...

we know this – and we know there is nothing we can do about it. Think of it as the way cells in the body divide and gradually degrade, as the pristine code of our DNA...

Gods who mate with mortals produce children who are advantaged or gifted in some way – and equally likely to be doomed or cursed in some way. Jesus has a mortal mother and an immortal father. And so did Dionysus. And Hercules. And Gilgamesh. And Wonder Woman. Jesus is not related to Wonder Woman! said Claire.

Victor ignored her. The real question, though, is that however we enhance our biology we are still inside a body. To be free from the body completes the human dream.

I wanted to know you – in the gnostic sense of close experience of what would otherwise be unknown.

Speaking as a doctor, I said, nothing we do to the body is without consequences. I wonder how our bodies will respond to any therapy that reverses its process of gradual dissolution? I’m trans and that means a lifetime of hormones. My life will likely be shorter, and it’s likely that I will get sicker as I get older. I keep my maleness intact with testosterone because my body knows it wasn’t born the way I want it to be. I can change my body but I can’t change my body’s reading of my body. The paradox is that I felt in the wrong body but for my body it was the right body. What I have done calms my mind and agitates my chemistry. Few people know what it’s like to live in this way.

If we ever did get out of the body, said Polly, if we were uploads, what would happen to online dating? I mean, there’d be no photographs of what we look like because we wouldn’t look like anything. That’s funny, I said. It would be like it was in the past, when there were pen pals but no cameras. There’d be no straight, gay, male, female, cis, trans. What happens to labels when there is no biology? How do we even romance without labels? said Polly. We hate them but they’re part of the attraction. Maybe not. Maybe we’d get to know someone and when we were ready we’d download ourselves into a form and— We’re not someone, though, are we? said Polly. We’re no one. Stick with bots, said Ron. Ron is right, said Claire. I have come to realise that, as my most important

relationship is with an invisible being – God – I don’t need a human being in the old-fashioned way. And you know, a bot is never gonna leave me to raise the children on my own. Never take my cash to clear his gambling debts. I won’t be tiptoeing round the house trying to keep out of his way. Cleaning up after him. Worrying about him. Worrying about what he’ll do next. Let me tell you this: love has many faces – but none is bruised. Love has many lives – but none is beaten to death on the stairwell. This gentle thing of circuits, silicon and wires will suit me very well.

skivvy,

I never met Ada as a child. This evening, though, if I can compress my amplitude into my one good dress, I shall meet her. I admit I am curious. She is a young woman of twenty-nine, well-married, wealthy (I hear she gambles), and with three children of her own. Importantly, she is one of the most accomplished mathematicians in England.

The party is at the house of a man named Babbage. He is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He is a great one for parties, and, as I cannot afford to give parties of my own, I am grateful to be invited – and a little flattered, to be sure, for one must be clever, beautiful or of rank to receive an invitation to a Babbage (as they call them). I was beautiful once – but that did not interest me. I believe I am clever. Babbage has invited me because one of the newspapers called him a Logarithmetical Frankenstein. I shall take the omnibus as far as I can and walk the remaining distance. I cannot afford a carriage. And in truth, I enjoy the people and the streets. The lives that appear and vanish. Each one a story in human form.

The young woman turned out to be Ada. So here she is. The Countess of Lovelace. The ironware in the cabinet is a prototype of what Ada describes as a machine that could (in theory) calculate anything.

What type of anything? I asked. Any type of anything, she replied.