With his girlfriend out of state attending a library science conference, Liam was appointed caretaker of her cat. Morgan was spotted in the apartment window from below, although the feline was famously shy and vanished whenever it heard a key in the door. The nimble-footed pet’s imprint on the dwelling was as negligible as the boyfriend’s. On fruitless occasion when Morgan was addressed by the caretaker, the name proffered was ‘Schrödinger.’
Unlike his house of faded decorations, Margaret’s cheery palette of home furnishings never let Liam forget his visual difficulty. He tarried after freshening the cat’s water bowl, and reflexively shoved a flashlight under the stove.
The dim recess made the foam ball’s color indeterminable, and Liam had forgotten what color it was originally. Drawing it out from drifts of cat hair and into better light did not improve his naming the hue, although it was presumably blue, or some shade toward blue. Tossing the errant pet toy to the open rug would goad the four-legged phantom to more of the same mischief; but ritual was the currency of their mutual regard.
Liam seldom desiderated over an absentee Margaret, since her virtue as guarantor of continuity did not strictly require her presence. However, distraction that day was needed and, being in the vicinity of her landline telephone, the caretaker called his paternal twin brother, who was nothing if not a fount of distraction.
Lucien had a history of living in apartment complexes where one perpetually finds a mattress in the dumpster. As interceder, he was unreliable, despite his protest about possessing greater maturity due to him being older. (The sum of nine minutes separated the brothers’ births.) Through no deliberate design, the luftmensch became acquainted with the cartographic features of basic cable television after discovering a wire sticking out from the wall at one residence. He was not averse to pirating cable television since he assigned no value to it, and the education he derived from the programming was as thorough and varied as it was useless. Television taught Lucien many things: The Fujita Scale for measuring tornado wind speeds, the culinary wisdom of not overcooking tuna steaks, the forensic significance of orange carpet fibers turning up in the ligatures of serial killers, and the home improvement trick of filling a bathtub with water before caulking it.
When pressed for an avocation, the ne’er-do-well regarded himself as a theologian, yet belonged to no church and possessed no diploma of certification from an accredited seminary school. Once he enrolled in a related correspondence course, although it was doubtful he completed it.
Invariably the circumstance at the tower came up in conversation, and Lucien turned over a novel possibility. “I read where the North Koreans are flush with cash these days. They have a keen interest in buying up Japanese patents, including for synthetic skin used in the manufacture of dacchi waifus. They may be testing a new generation of gynoids in your neck of the woods, since the frackers may be onto their storefront dummies.”
The brother belittled this idea. “The North Koreans built a hundred story hotel they never completed. You want me to believe they’ve surpassed us in artificial intelligence?”
“Sex bots do not rise to the level of artificial intelligence,” maintained the twin. “Close enough counts in horseshoes and simulated vaginas. The only intelligence required of horizontal fluid repositories is a tape deck buried in their neck with seven minutes of insincere flattery about male nether regions. It’s smoke and mirrors.”
“Like the Internet, with its keystrokes and avatars?“
“Effectively, yes.”
“Have you been frequenting disreputable chat rooms, again?” asked Liam facetiously. “Have you been duped by bits of circuitry and binary code masquerading as insincere flattery?”
Lucien affected a critical posture. “If passing The Turing Test for authentic humanness comes down to computer software hoodwinking gullible men with credit cards then, yes, crude algorithms are as much life forms as crude viruses. Human personality is not the sort of thing one gets from an algorithm. No more than one gets cranberries shaped like the contours of a can from a cranberry patch. Maybe talking to algorithms is some artificial intelligence researcher’s idea of genuine humanness, but they all have autism, anyway. They have such a low bar for the definition for humanness, they are bound to exceed their expectations.”
“Clearly we are no longer talking about serviceable glory holes.”
The preacher launched into one of his pet sermon. “How is one to program ‘intelligence’ when ‘consciousness’ has yet to be defined? So much of human experience is indefinable, and yet, for the sake of clinical simplicity, we allow this semantical bait-and-switch to be promulgated without a challenge.”
“It’s true,” Liam allowed. “Scientists are more impressed by the discoveries of insight than the enigma of insight itself.”
The brother mused, “It’s the parable of always looking at lightning in a bottle in terms of the bottle and never the lightning, but there is more than blockheadedness at play here. We are dealing with a censorious form of Puritanism.”
“That’s a curious accusation to level against irreligious science.”
Lucien justified his claim. “Scientific reductivists, with less and less to do on the empirical side of things, have calcified around a kind of theological point of view, one where, by extension of their decentralizing materialism, they not merely trivializes man and his astonishing uniqueness, but deny him any virtue. This trivialization is not only to elaborate on man as a minuscule specimen in an infinitely vast Universe, or to demote him as a very recent development on the long-lived evolutionary tree of life, but to judge him as a creature of lowly moral and intellectual standing. If a poet supposes the colors of flowers exist for his edification, then, like finger-wagging churchwomen, it is the job of the Copernican to remind him that color evolved for the utility of attracting pollinating insects.”
“You take this personally.”
“Emotionally, I do,” clarified the brother. “I have a bug up my ass in a way a simulated sex worker could never imagine.”
“And emotion is your critical distinction?”
Lucien explained, “Science fiction offers us countless stories about robots having logic by design, and gaining emotion by experience—but these are different conversations. There is no more emergence between emotion and logic than there is between Michelangelo’s David and the geology of marble. Reason differs from logic. Feeling mediates reason, and it is as impure as it is essential to reason’s operation. It’s like rubbing a bit of spit and dirt into every wound as a curative.”
“Or a little grease into the cogs?“
“These metaphors, at any rate, are something a machine may not relate to as actionable intelligence. Our sense of self is largely constructed in the left hemisphere of the brain, yet we apparently have a sense of self in the right hemisphere as well, although it is mysterious and peculiarly projected outward when this part of the brain is stimulated, as during episodes of profound grief where apparitions of loved ones materialize, often along the left side of the body. The question is: Is this merely a coping mechanism or an untapped means of communication.”
The brother sought a timely segue. “How’s Mom doing?”
Lucien quieted. He took no delight in interruptions during his tirades. “She hangs on,” was his moody answer. “Every day she wakes up, I claim my mantle of humanity.”
“Then she’s to account for your personal evolution?”
“My relationship with Mom is the only genuinely emotional relationship I claim, if that is what you mean. She can bitch at me, or sit quietly in a room with me for hours. Her company is never an imposition on my intellect.”
“Is that the autistic’s definition of love?”
“By a process of elimination, I must conclude it is. Love is doomed to be abstraction for the autistic, no matter how genuine. It must be considered among a reckoning of quantities as what’s left over after everything else has been put in Ziplock bags and labeled.”
Liam conceded, “It sounds like the sort of thing that evaporates once a microscope is turned on it.”
“No one in their right mind would turn a microscope on it for precisely that reason,” the brother insisted, “which is why artificial intelligence, and its Cliff’s Notes definition of humanness, is rubbish.”
A voice broke in on the extension. “Liam…?”
“Mom?” bleated the son.
“Are you coming home Thanksgiving? I need help with the turkey dressing. You’re my official taster. Nothing tastes good to your old Momma anymore. I think your brother is spiking my ginger ale with Strawberry Boost.” (The phone tended to droop in Blythe’s wilting hand, and her voice began to drift out.) “Call before you come down so I can put away groceries for you. I’ll hide your snacks from your brother.”
“Yes, Momma.”
“I better go,“ she said hurriedly. “This is costing you money. Know your Momma loves you.”
“Love you, too, Momma.”
She dropped the handset on the hook, and the clearer signal left Lucien breathing ponderously into his mouthpiece. “Mom’s under the impression you’re coming home for Thanksgiving,” he said.
“I come home for Christmas. Should I come home for Thanksgiving?”
“Christmas was Dad’s holiday. Thanksgiving is Mom’s. He was about the toys. She’s about family.”
Liam weighed his brother’s declaration.
“Jeopardy comes on at three-thirty,” he was lastly informed. “I need to get Mom’s Pringles and Afghan ready.”
The call concluded on this note, leaving the caller feeling exposed in his negligence. He imagined he still heard his feeble mother dawdling with the extension, though, inevitably, miles were added back to reestablish life in his world away. The sense of estrangement dissipated.
The youngest son spoke to his mother too infrequently, and the strength of her voice was like a barometric measurement taken after an extended lapse. At no point in her decline had he been aware that a change was underway. There was nothing dramatic about it but the bookends. Only his disrepair tended the form of a middle.
The caller could not think long about this lingering silence, about the insertion of so much time into a void of so little distinction—not without it eliciting regret.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.