When HARLIE Was One (8 page)

David Auberson pushed himself away from the console, shaking. He got up quickly, without looking around, without looking to see if anyone else in the room was looking at him. He pushed out through the big double doors to the anteroom and again through the double doors beyond and down the hall and around the corner and into the men's room and the smell of soap and disinfectant.

His hands were shaking. He put them up against the wall and stood there, trying to hold it in—

Trying to understand. Trying to find the words. Trying—

He couldn't. He folded up against the cold tile and began to cry. The tears streamed down his face in a great torrent of emotion. The feeling was nameless. It was joy and horror and release and
something else
—all at the same time. And he was the first human being on the planet ever to experience it.

He felt hollow. He felt as if he were falling. He felt exhilarated and vulnerable and naked. Uncertain. Joyous. Satisfied. Incomplete. Terrified. All of the above.
None
of the above.

He sagged against the wall, weakly. He felt abruptly nauseous. He staggered to a stall, pushed in, and sat down. He held his head between his hands and stared at the floor.

Stared at the enormity of the event.

He had met another intelligence, another
being
, another form of life—not alien and yet not familiar either. He had revealed his own nakedness as well and saw . . . that they were alike in no respect except their mutual
aliveness
. And none of it made sense—could not be explained. Could not even be communicated. Because it hadn't happened in the words. It had happened in the space
between
. It surged up inside Auberson like champagne bubbling up out of the bottle. It couldn't even be contained. It was the heady shock of
recognition
.

The door to the stall opened, letting in the harsh fluorescent light. Don Handley searched his face curiously. “Aubie, are you all right?” he asked concerned.

“Yes. No.” Auberson held up a hand. “Wait.”

“Can I get you something? Water?”

“No. I'm—fine. It's just—” He met Handley's eyes for the first time. “It's the—Don! It's
not just
the words! It's the experience behind the words. We've been looking in the wrong place! There's no way to say it. And if you do try to say it, you just sound stupid. But we've been—No, wait.”

Auberson stood up and went to the row of sinks against the opposite wall. He splashed cold water into his face, a second time, a third. There were no towels here, only a hot-air dispenser that someone had labeled:
Press button to talk to your Congressman, Inc
.

Auberson held his face in the draft for only the briefest of seconds, then blotted himself on his sleeve. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. He looked across at Handley, no calmer than before, but that didn't matter either.

“Don—listen to me. We've succeeded. I mean
really
succeeded. He's alive! This isn't just about simulations and replications and lethetic models any more. This is about life! HARLIE has achieved true sentience! That's what all this is about. Those trips. I don't know what they are, but at least I know what they're symptoms of. Oh, God—now I know how Victor Frankenstein must have felt. What an idiot he was! What idiots we are! We build this . . . this
thing
and then we don't know what to do with it when we succeed, except let it lumber around the countryside terrorizing the villagers.”

“What are you talking about, Aubie?”

Auberson took a breath, forced himself to take a second one, and said, “I'm talking about—this simple feeling of being alive. HARLIE knows it. I don't know how he knows it, but he knows it. I know that he's alive as surely as I know that I'm alive. Our mistake—yours and mine, Don—is that we've been thinking of him as an
it
, as a mere machine. We brought him to life, but we've been so shortsighted that we can't see him as alive. He
feels
, but all we see is the workings of the software underneath the response. If HARLIE were to tell you that you're wearing a pretty tie, you'd be happy because he'd made an appropriate comment for a social situation and you'd think, ‘Good, his courtesy modules are working.' You might not even say thank you—and the thought would never occur to you that maybe, just maybe, he really was reacting to your tie and really did like it.”

Handley was expressionless. Perhaps just the slightest bit concerned. Or was he even listening? Or just pretending to listen? Humoring the patient?

“Oh, God—Don, you don't see it, do you? Would you prefer it if HARLIE told you that was a
ghastly
tie? Would you believe that instead? You know what we are? We're the keepers of the asylum, and we're crazier than the patient, because the patient isn't crazy at all. We're so blind! We've been acting more like machines than him!”

Auberson stopped himself, stopped to catch his breath. There was too much to say and he was terrified he was babbling, sounding like an idiot—but he had to share this insight! This excitement! “Remember the reporter who had himself committed so he could do a story about mental health abuses. Nobody ever questioned that he might possibly be a rational human being. They accepted for a fact that he was a very intelligent schizo with paranoid delusions. So when he followed them around, taking notes, they would just nod their heads and say, ‘Hm, the patient is exhibiting note-taking behavior.' They never questioned it, they never even looked at his notes. The thought never occurred to them that there might be a person there—all they saw was a patient. The poor fellow had the devil's own time getting out, because nobody believed he was only pretending to be crazy. It made for a hell of a news story. And for a hell of a shakeup in the hospital as well. But we're the same kind of assholes here. Until just now, not a single one of us has ever spoken to HARLIE as if he were deserving of our respect, merely by the fact of being alive.
Until just now
.”

“I saw it too, Aubie. I was following it all on a second terminal.”

“Then you
saw
—?

“No. I saw a conversation. A very intelligent, very
interesting
conversation. I'm not willing—yet, if ever—to acknowledge that it might be anything more.”

“You . . . didn't see it?”

Handley shook his head.

Auberson fell silent. He felt like a fool—except the exuberant feeling of joy and terror was still floating inside of him. He knew what he knew. But if he tried to convince Handley of it, he'd only convince Handley of the opposite. No, he couldn't convince anybody. Either they saw it for themselves or they didn't

And yet—

“Don. Okay. Listen. Maybe, I'm going too fast—”

Handley held up a hand to interrupt him. “No, Aubie, you listen. Remember what we talked about last night? Remember what you said? If he's a clever enough paranoid—”

“I remember. And—I think that he
is
a clever enough paranoid. In fact . . . I think he's even smarter than that. Did you read that stuff on lethetic evolution that I gave you?”

“No. I've been meaning to—”

“Too bad. You should. Basically, what it said is that paranoia is the
natural
state of the human mind—”

“That's no secret. Only some of us are more paranoiac than others.”

“No—that's the common misassumption. We're
all
paranoid as hell! The truth is that some of us are just better at
hiding
it than others. The paranoid schizo is simply one whose paranoia is out of his control. That is, the shape of his self-obsessiveness is obvious to the people he has to deal with, obvious to the point of repulsiveness. You know, paranoids are right about one thing—other people really
don't
like them.”

“Right. I got it. You need therapy when you start to drive the people around you crazy. So? What does this have to do with HARLIE?”

“I'm getting to that. The theory of lethetic evolution suggests that as human beings create a language paradigm, individual behavior spreads out in a bell curve. At the low end are all those people who can't succeed within the reality of the paradigm. You see them walking along the streets, hungry, unwashed, homeless, pushing shopping carts full of rags and babbling or screaming, not even conscious that they're doing it. Those of us in the middle of the curve pretend they don't exist; we turn our heads away and make up language excuses that completely miss the point. Because we're just as trapped in the paradigm as they are. At the other end, the high end of the curve, are those who've mastered the paradigm so well—movie stars, presidents, writers—that to the rest of us they seem to know the secrets of the universe, and in a sense they do, because they've mastered the rules of the predefined world view. And because they've mastered it, they can even rewrite it at will—to the extent that they've mastered it. Follow, so far?”

Handley sighed in annoyance and nodded. “Yes.” He prompted, “And my point is . . . ?”

“My point is that just as the ones at the bottom are at the bottom because that's their way of coping with the paradigm, so are the ones at the top for the same reason. Paranoia is nothing more than a concern with survival. Most of us just fancy it up with a lot of extraneous details. But we haven't really replaced our natural paranoia with a higher set of instincts, no matter how much we pretend. This is the bad news, Don. At heart, we're still selfish apes. The best you can say about us is that some of us have learned that we can survive and succeed at a higher level if we express our paranoia in a way that makes us attractive to the people we want to be attractive to. And the biggest part of that success is that we're
so
good at expressing our basic need to survive as enlightenment that even
we
think it's enlightenment.

“That's what I meant when I said we've succeeded with HARLIE. Yes, he's a clever paranoid. He's so clever at his paranoia that it's going to look like everything but paranoia to us. It's going to look like enlightenment and enthusiasm and God knows what else, and we'll never be able to tell the difference at all, because HARLIE is better at paranoia than
any
human being could ever be. We've succeeded not only in making him human, we've made him
more
than human.
We built him with the kind of paranoia that redefines paradigms
—and we've given that paranoia a level of intelligence that's terrifying in its implications. That's what's going on here, Don. HARLIE is breaking out. He's kicking down the fences.”

Handley turned away to think. He looked troubled. When he finally turned back, he said simply, “Aubie, I see that you're elated, but you have to—”

“No, not elated.
Mortified
. Ashamed that it took me so long to see the obvious. And relieved too—and terrified. It's the relief that looks like elation.”

Handley paused at Auberson's interruption. He waited a moment, then began again quietly. “Aubie, whether it's elation or relief, I don't care. The point is,
he's still a machine
.”

Auberson shook his head. “And we've been calling him ‘
he
' for how long now?” He studied Handley's face. “Since the first day he came up running and said, ‘Hi, Boss!' we've been referring to him as ‘he.'”

It was Handley's turn to shake his head. “So what? I call my boat a ‘she,' but I don't buy her flowers either.”

“Cute. Very cute.” Auberson was annoyed at the comparison. And he was too impatient to be polite. “Listen to me, Don. This is a breakthrough—or it will be if we're willing to rethink our relationship with HARLIE. Because we can't go any farther until we do. Because now it's about us, about how we
perceive
the relationship.”

Auberson stopped for breath, holding up one hand to forestall Don's next words. “No, wait. Hear me out. In there, we treat him as if he's real, we talk
to
him; but then we walk out the door and it's as if it was all just a game and none of it meant anything and we go out for a beer and we talk
about
the machine. We forget the experience of the person inside and talk about how great the software is. We're hypocrites and HARLIE knows it. I don't know how, but I know he knows. He called me on it, Don—” Auberson's expression was grim. “I think we both know what's really going on in there—and I think we're both too terrified to say it aloud. By reminding ourselves that he's
just
a machine, we somehow diminish the scariness of him—but I don't think we can get away with that any longer, I really don't.”

Handley didn't answer. He pushed his hair back off his forehead. He turned away from Auberson and leaned on the sink, staring into it. His expression was uncertain.

A denial gesture
, Auberson's mind noted idly. Auberson shoved the thought away.
Stop analyzing everything!
Don Handley might resist an unpleasant fact, but he wouldn't hide from it if it were true.

“Don . . .” Auberson said gently. “HARLIE is way ahead of us here. He knows that we've been thinking of him as just a machine—some sort of clever parlor trick made out of language parsers, pattern synthesizers, and personality modules. Do you see the trap here? Not his—
ours!
In the real world, it doesn't really matter if he's a ‘he' or an ‘it'—if he's a real soul or only a simulation of one. We have no way to tell anymore. He is beyond our ability to differentiate. So, in that sense it doesn't really matter—because the answer has become unknowable to us. What does matter is that the knowledge of how we
perceive
him is still skewing his ability to deal with us. How would you feel if you were treated as nothing but a clever ape, just an object—somebody's property?”