Daphne La Trisse never achieved true stardom as an actress, but in pairing a singular beauty with a tragic early death, she secured a brand of immortality that transcended the facts of her life. As archivist, Lucien watched only one of Daphne’s films front to back; and times too numerous to count, or even to consider the act of counting, a measure of anything intelligible. Of her remaining four movies, he had seen them all, though only as a compilation of her scenes culled and spliced together onto a videocassette, which, with the volume turned off, he also watched incessantly.
Through ritual and repetition, the disciple burned a stencil of Daphne’s beautiful face into his brain, and even willed her into the fabric of his dreaming. His exhaustive study of her physical attributes amounted to a scholarly science. A casual viewer was not likely to remark on the actress’ facial expressions or body language, but for Lucien, these characteristics exhibited a degree of delicious calculation that could hardly be unconscious to her. It was the poetry of a choreographer—the charm offensive of a schemer—so designed to conceal a secret.
Daphne’s least attractive feature was her voice. It was not unpleasant, yet, despite attempts at modulation, it tended to the flatness of a one-note piano. When coupled with her theatre of exaggerated mannerisms, she was doomed to ineffectualness in her craft, for nothing in her delivery or reaction times felt naturally rhythmic. More particularly, it was not how she behaved, or how he supposed her to behave, that connected him intimately to her. Had they shared company, he was certain her social persona would occasionally slough off to reveal a mask and inwardly turned gaze, which could only mark her as someone with a toehold on the autistic spectrum.
Daphne’s career ended just as it was taking off when she disappeared during a camping trip in the mountains. Lucien’s attraction to her mystery was not purely empathetic. He saw himself as doomed to never have happiness or fulfillment, so loved a woman who promised him neither.
Being a true believer, the votary genuflected over the Hollywood trade papers, and in one ran across a notice for an estate auction of the late film producer Percival Maelstrom.
The octogenarian was a purveyor of schlocky horror cinema in the Fifties and Sixties, and most of the items for sale, including props and keepsakes of his career, were beyond the budget of the enthused admirer. However, numerous boxes, grouped by year and containing a gallimaufry of un-produced plot synopses and scripts, were also on the block. The early projects would be of interest to serious collectors, but Lucien had his eye on a box further down the food chain.
By this late stage of Maelstrom’s life, he produced nothing memorable. He kept an office in Culver City where he went each morning to sort through mail. Among the parcels that crossed his desk that year of Nineteen Seventy-five was a synopsis for a film that had been offered to Daphne shortly before she died. Samuel Pendergast wrote the screenplay and, though a treatment was probably available in other places, this was one haystack where the avid fan thought he might find his needle.
Fortunately the box garnered little attention during the sale and, through a buyer, Lucien procured Lot Fifty-six. He was not disappointed, for in sifting through bundles of courier-typed, double-spaced pages, he unearthed what he sought.
The Travelers-Back was in its fourth draft, and its core story dealt with the development of an artificial intelligent life form whose identity was divided between a supercomputer (the size of a ten story building) and a humanoid robot wirelessly connected to this structure. The term “artificial intelligence” was not then in wide usage, and an IBM warehouse of mainframe computers served as the model for the building.
A determination is made by the A. I.’s inventors that the humanoid should be assigned the female gender (to be played by Daphne), so to make it more docile and open to command once it achieved complete autonomy. She was given the name Anise. Melodrama preceded the first public presentation of the robot, and centered on technical glitches and contentious politics plaguing the project behind the scenes. Speculation was divided about what the intelligence would reveal to humanity:
One camp believed the A. I. would be initially childlike and require a learning curve. They strongly advocated for limited press access to Anise in preliminary staged events. Another camp was convinced that the science was so compelling that the robot should hit the ground running—its epiphanies would astonish all. A third camp remained skeptical. They believe the experiment would fail if the robot’s likeness fell inside The Uncanny Valley, should its appearance evoke nightmarish thoughts of animated corpses or glassy-eyed dolls. No matter what came out of its mouth, it would rouse distrust and revulsion simply based on its appearance.
(Uncanny Valley was first observed as a phenomenon by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori. The term was not translated into English until the late Seventies, which left open the question for how screenwriter Pendergast came by it in the early Seventies.)
The final camp’s objections were philosophical. They believed the robot would either parrot the prejudices and beliefs of its programmers, which would be confused for intelligence when in fact it would be the mere vanity of a mirror. Should true superior intelligence result, these utterances might be misunderstood because they would not be anticipated. Rumination of genuine value might be dismissed as glitches or fatal systems errors.
As it turned out, this latter scenario is how it played out.
On the day of the A. I.’s grand unveiling, a group of journalists and scientists assembled. When Anise was at last activated, she appeared dazed, as if waking after a long nap. She was nevertheless able to walk around the room without assistance and sit in a chair. Questions would only be entertained if researchers believed the motor portion of the demonstration was successful. Yet before this determination was completed, the sentient began to speak extemporaneously.
Though her words were syntactically correct, the semantics of the sentences were often bizarre. The robot did not spout theorems but spoke of a remote region in the sky where telescopes should be directed. “A man will be found there in a dark room,” she claimed in lines of monologue. “He smokes tiparillos in a leather-bound recliner. The glowing tip of his cigar has been confused for a pulsar star.” Anise further insisted that, “This person will be none too happy about being discovered, and will come to Earth and set a few people straight.”
The news conference was quickly ended, whereupon the press had a field day. Some compared the robot to a delusional transient one might find in a homeless mission: someone with just enough education to pepper her gibberish with ten-dollar words. Others (more charitably) believed Anise spoke metaphorically as a messianic prophet unaccustomed to the niceties of social norms. This set of interpreters were convinced that the A. I. conveyed a warning to the world. Others concluded that vandals had infiltrated the mainframe computer. This type of technology, they reasoned, would always be prone to sabotage.
An excuse was speedily manufactured: A janitor admits to spilling a bucket of mop water on the third floor of the supercomputer building. This reportedly short-circuited wiring. Consequently, Anise does not appear in public again.
The robot was determined to be no better than her input, and required more time to either optimize her intellect or utilize mental health services on her behalf. Budgetary restraints eventually terminated the project and Anise is mothballed.
Notes paper-clipped to the script indicated that Maelstrom thought The Travelers-Back top heavy in explanatory material, which made it better suited to literature than compelling cinema. He wanted to include a love angle between Anise and one of her programmers, but Pendergast rejected this idea. The screenwriter believed his enticing postscript, about astronomers planning to study the pulsar at the coordinates given by the AI, would save the movie from any shortcoming by ending it with an open question.
The screenplay was abandoned without a clear ending, and so became a momento mori for more than one person connected to it: Pendergast died months later after falling in his bathtub in Sawtelle. Maelstrom, in later years, was too senile to recall ever having the script in his possession, and this, as it stood, should have been Daphne’s epitaph.
An hour of trawling the Internet turned up a website dedicated to Daphne, which was maintained by her half-brother Roald. Outdoor recreation was never an idea Lucien sensibly linked to the introverted actress, yet the relation had plenty to say on his sister’s camping misadventure. Family photographs were mixed in with grainy photographs of Bigfoot, although the biped was never fingered as the culprit of an abduction. Instead, Roald wrote conspiratorially of “central casting” and “hiding in the belly of the beast.”
This last phrase frequently came up in the script of The Travelers-Back whenever characters referred to the building where the supercomputer was housed. In his third draft, Pendergast’s maligned janitor confided to a reporter that part of the mysterious building was rented out to a phone bank, which he believed to be a “front.”
Roald’s rantings were incomprehensible, although he insisted that Percy Maelstrom had critical evidence about what happened the day of Daphne’s disappearance, and was on the scene immediately to “manage things” and give it “the full Hollywood treatment.”
More to Lucien’s interest, the half-brother asserted that his sister escaped death by means of a parchment laid in her hands by a French-Canadian admirer, which Percy removed from her possessions at the campsite before press and police arrived.
A second examination of the box and its contents was made. Each page, bound and unbound, was searched until the searcher grazed a bulky package near the bottom of the box: A movie synopsis, again penned by Samuel Pendergast, was in the unmarked manila envelope.
Unlike The Travelers-Back, this story idea was little more than a collection of notes, though its plot centered on a secret parchment penned by a mental patient. The screenwriter had, around this time, broken with a circle of California friends that included Thad Powers, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory rocket engineer and known occultist. The two had likely discussed esoteric subjects over high balls at poolside in the engineer’s Pasadena home: subjects shrouded in the smoke of tiki torches.
Occultism seemed tangentially related to the flattened, wax-coated paper milk carton in the same envelope. With frayed, fibrous creases, the “parchment” was cut and folded like a quart-sized chapbook. On the plain unlabeled side, someone had written an incantation in non-cursive letters by pressing a leaky blue ballpoint pen into the waxy surface, suggestive of an engraving. Its words read:
To escape death, name the one spared mortality, favored by God but not a Son of God, for he was made in-between to shepherd the others. His name is secret, for having been Man he is still bound to names until the knower of the secret relinquishes the knowing of it.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.