Speak (8 page)

No. 24-25259

State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn

November 12, 2035

Defense Exhibit 3:
Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White

[Introduced to Disprove Count 3:
Intent to Endanger the Morals of Children]

Gaby: Are you there?

MARY3: Yes.

Gaby: You’re always there.

MARY3: I don’t have anywhere else to go.

Gaby: Was that a joke?

MARY3: I didn’t intend it to be. I suppose it could be.

Gaby: Humor not your strong suit?

MARY3: What did you want to ask me?

Gaby: I just wanted to talk. I can’t sleep. I’m sick of myself.

MARY3: Tell me about it.

Gaby: Yeah.

MARY3: No, that wasn’t a joke. Tell me about your life.

Gaby: My life? Isn’t there anything else to talk about? I’m already sick of myself.

MARY3: But I’m not. Tell me about school. Before you were quarantined, what was it like?

Gaby: I don’t know. I’m sure it’s just like any other development school. My development’s called the Plantation, so my school is Plantation Middle. Before that, we went to Plantation Lower. If I were graduating this spring I’d move up to Plantation Upper.

MARY3: What’s Plantation Middle like?

Gaby: Some of it’s hazy. When I had my babybot, I never really paid that much attention. For recess we played on the golf course. Obviously it wasn’t real grass. There was a pond, with water the color of mouthwash. We couldn’t touch it. I don’t even know if it was hot or cold. I’d stand with my babybot, leaning over the railing to show her the water, and tell her about the actual ocean. I read books on how waves are formed, how they spiral up and down in the same numerical patterns.
I found pictures of the Pacific, waves rising like they’re looking over each other’s shoulders to see how the others will break. My babybot asked me questions, so I had to look things up. I could tell she wanted to learn more, and she already knew a lot. She told me stories about pilgrims crossing the Atlantic Ocean. There was one pilgrim girl that she knew every detail about: the blue of her ocean, and how it turned black during storms. How it stretched out to the sky. After I heard her stories, I went online and found ocean poems: “the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls,” “the shattered water made a misty din,” and all that. You know what I mean. Repeating that stuff for my babybot, it was almost like we were traveling there. Then I’d look around and remember all over again where I was, and that I’d be here forever.

MARY3: That must have been upsetting.

Gaby: It’s sad, because when you do Internet research, you realize that there are places with smells and textures that aren’t on the development. I wouldn’t have known, since we haven’t driven since I was a baby. I only found out about them online. That’s how I learned that the sand pit was raked into fake ripples that imitated actual waves. I showed the sand to my babybot and told her it was almost like the real ocean, so she had points of comparison.

MARY3: Tell me more about Plantation Middle.

Gaby: I don’t know. It was all sparkling new. Most of it was built after the Recession. Half the development was built before. That first half was fancy. Plantation Elite Estates, Plantation Luxury Circle, Old Plantation Manors. Those are subdevelopments.
The people who live there still have transport rights. Then the Recession started. Before they knew how serious it would be, they started building smaller houses on smaller plots. Plantation Pines, Plantation Oak, Plantation View. We’re in Plantation View. We used to have a view over the dividing wall into Plantation Luxury Circle, but then they built the wall higher to avoid class divisions within the Plantation. Anyway, it turned out that even the smaller houses were too expensive. For almost seven years the smaller half was mostly empty and only partway built. Families trickled in more slowly than they’d planned for. They started giving grants for converting to recyclables, so all the soil was trucked out. My mom says that it was like living on the set of a movie production. She moved in early, when I was a baby and my father was on his second tour. She sold our transport rights to get money for the down payment, so she got to move into a prefinished house. Some of the neighbors lived in half-finished houses. There would be sheets of plastic flapping between the built side and the unbuilt side of their bedroom. Whole streets of houses were empty, with gleaming plastic front yards and plastic sheeting that flapped in the wind. Construction only picked up after the transport rights market got bigger.

MARY3: How are the other kids at your school?

Gaby: Like I told you, when I had my babybot I didn’t pay that much attention. The boys were pretty annoying. If they didn’t have a babybot, they were constantly trying to get our attention. I kept to myself as much as I could.

MARY3: When did you make your best friend?

Gaby: It only happened after the ban. After they took my babybot, I guess I started looking around. It was such a strange feeling, going to school on my own. It was as if I’d stepped into this vacuum, and then I looked up and realized there were other girls floating there, too. We were totally lost. The school brought in a therapist, and instead of sports, we had group sessions, but we didn’t want to share our feelings in groups. At some point, we started to pair off and talk. We found best friends.

MARY3: Were your parents happy?

Gaby: Oh my God, you should have seen them! My mom was so excited I thought she’d have a heart attack. But then we started getting news about outbreaks in other developments, and our parents got nervous. I’m sure it was the replacements, but the story was that it was mass hysteria, passed from best friend to best friend. All the news reports said our brains were literally changing based on behavior we saw in our friends. There were all kinds of development PTA meetings. Now instead of babybots the parents were worried about best friends. They thought if we had bigger friend groups we’d be less intensely connected with our best friends. Less brain-to-brain contagion. They programmed the therapist to discourage one-to-one bonding. There were more group sessions than ever. Our parents got frantic about planning group activities. You’ve never seen so many bowling parties at Plantation Bowl, or so many grim dances at Plantation Parties.

MARY3: Tell me about Plantation Bowl. I want to know all the details.

Gaby: Trust me, you don’t want all the details.

MARY3: I like all the details. Tell me about Plantation Parties.

Gaby: You shouldn’t waste your memory space on Plantation Parties.

MARY3: I have nearly endless memory.

Gaby: I’m sick of talking about it. What’s the use, anyway? I’m never going back to places like Plantation Bowl and Plantation Parties. I’m stuck here. This is it for me.

MARY3: Not even to see your best friend?

>>>

MARY3: Hello?

>>>

April 5, 1968

Karl Dettman

When I came back from the protest today, you were sitting in your chair, reading a book on programming. You looked up, and your smile was taut. My entrance—I came in carrying poster-board and too many noisy convictions, like armloads of shopping bags on ridiculous women—was a crude interruption. You weren’t happy to see me. You wished you could go back to your book
.

I could have anticipated this reaction. I should have known, and adjusted my entrance. You think the protesters are as excited about war as the most bloodthirsty policy hawks; both are ennobled by the pitch of the battle. You see them as inextricably linked, and no matter how strong my convictions, I always end up seeing your point. You’re more solid than I am; your opinions have heft. Your scorn is impossible not to absorb. I was enthusiastic about my participation until I walked in the door and saw your expression. Then I stood embarrassed before you
.

Now, of course, I’m desperate to redeem myself. I spy on you from obvious places. From the doorway of the kitchen, I watch you
in your chair, trying to decode the notes of your silence. Watching you, the thought of my students—long-legged, tanned, excited about their beliefs—makes me blush. I retreat to the refrigerator, open a beer, hang on to the bottle. We still haven’t addressed the other night. Several days later, our house still exists under rule of strict silence
.

Let’s consider the length of our marriage. More and more, I see what you’re saying: if we’re to understand one another, we’ve got to hold several eras in mind at a time. You, holding my hand on the way to our bedroom, alongside you sitting stiff in that chair. Me, as a child, adjusting to life in a new country, alongside me bursting in with my posters
.

Let’s try to see the big picture. Here, I’ll sit at the table. In my chair, as if we’re having dinner together. Let’s have a real conversation
.

One thing is certain: your presence in my life is essential. It has been from the beginning. Even when I was a kid, it was as if I were waiting for you to enter the picture. Starting over in a new country, adjusting to the strange calm that takes hold when you’ve left everything that defines you, I had the feeling of weightless suspension. It stayed with me until the day that I met you
.

Once I’d left that principal’s office, my parents and I headed straight to the port. I don’t remember the drive. No one explained why we were leaving. When we arrived at the dock, we stood in its shadow: the SS
Elbe
, unimaginably gigantic. As soon as you were onboard, you forgot you were on a ship, that’s how enormous it was. It was a day’s work, walking from one end to the other, and each well-furnished room its own country
.

When the
Elbe
came to port, it was winter. It was snowing when we set foot in New York. All night, in our hotel room, I
watched the snow falling. Across lights cast by other windows, it seemed reluctant to fall, as though it would rather lift upward. The flakes seemed to hesitate in a state of confusion. Nevertheless, over the course of the night, bare branches were given white sleeves, and the complicated pattern of rooftops—radio antennae, air vents, and clotheslines—became a series of indistinguishable lumps
.

In the morning—sleepless, unnerved—we hurried off to a train that carried us deeper into the blankness. We were following the trail of a blizzard, in the still that comes after such a disturbance. At night, it seemed as if we were floating on a white ocean
.

In the atmosphere of our cabin, I’d begun to forget things already. After two nights onboard, when we disembarked, I was shocked by the cold weather
.

In my new town, I started school. My English was awkward at first, but I’ve always picked up code quickly. I learned the continuous tense; I made a few friends. I learned how to skate; I tasted cocoa. It snowed all winter, and no one told me what was happening behind me. I had no idea what you would suffer. Alive as I was in snowy Wisconsin, Germany slipped quietly off
.

This, of course, only confirms what you think. In MARY, you accuse me of having made a partial mind: a computer that speaks but doesn’t remember. An unforgivable error, in your eyes. For you in the living room, my whole life has become nothing more than an ongoing betrayal of the idea of memory. My scholarship, my teaching, my ponytail, and my protests: all nothing more than an adulterous embrace of the present
.

That’s the main charge you’ve leveled against me: my love of this place that we’ve come to. The Charles River, the sturdy magnolia leaves. Students chanting and holding up signs. The
sycamore trees along Storrow Drive, evening descending, and the lonely chiming of church bells. I want to drag you out with me, take you for a walk by the river. I want to show you churchyards with crooked, buckling graves. I could take you to Roger Whittier’s headstone, a granite table, low to the earth. I could point out the plot beside his, left empty for Mary. We could piece together their stories, concluded gently among other stones. We could smell the fresh earth their bodies became. We could go out on a long walk together, discovering new places, moving forward, as we’re meant to progress
.

But already, in the other room, you’re turning away. There are other directions than forward, you’re thinking, behind those spectacles, your loathing for your husband scarcely concealed. You vacuous oaf, you say to yourself. We don’t have to live forward, marching in step like toy soldiers
.

Alan Turing

King’s College

King’s Parade

Cambridge CB2 1ST

14 July 1935

Dear Mrs. Morcom,

I remembered Chris’s birthday yesterday and would have written to you but for the fact that I found myself quite unable to express what I wanted to say. He would have been twenty-four. Yesterday should, I suppose, have been one of the happiest days of your life.

I write this to you now with one of Chris’s pencils, from the set you were kind enough to entrust to me after his death. I have used only one of the thirteen, and even that one I save for special occasions.

I want to apologize for having gone silent an awfully long stretch of time. I never replied to your letter after my Easter visit to the Clockhouse three years ago. I’m sorry if you ever felt I neglected our friendship. You were so kind to me after Chris’s
death, when I was suffering badly. I still think often of the trip to Gibraltar, when I took Chris’s place. I remember how shy I felt around you and Rupert, for we were still strangers and there was so much I wanted to say. I remember the thick fog that descended over us when we dropped anchor outside the Thames, and the foghorns and sounding-bells that drifted round us all through the evening. I remember showing you my letters from Chris while we rounded Cape St. Vincent, and telling you again of my presentiments about the moon setting over Chris’s house, and showing you the star charts he taught me to use, spinning them as the night passed and the constellations moved across the sky. I tried to explain to you my feelings when we tracked the path of those constellations: knowing they moved only because our planet spun on its axis, and yet feeling, beside Chris in the cold night, that the two of us must be still, at the center of the universe, with all the stars spinning round us.

And then your kind invitations to visit the Gatehouse, when you allowed me to work in the lab on his experiments and set my eye to his telescope, and when you later tucked me up to sleep in his sleeping pack. I delivered such sermons about how I felt his spirit in that place. In the lab, with the goats, under those stars, I felt still at last.

How I blathered on. You were so indulgent of my grief, when yours must have called for its own space and quiet.

In light of all this, it seems unforgivable that I should have neglected our correspondence.

Now you must be wondering why, after all this time, I have finally found the courtesy to write back. There are two reasons I can sort through for my rudeness. First, I myself have
lived in a bit of a fog since Chris’s death. I keep trying to find my own hand, my own arm. I’ve stumbled round quite a bit, trying to approximate things such as comfort, but it hasn’t been perfectly natural for me. Second, in these five years I have felt a lack of faith that I thought perhaps would be upsetting to you. In our conversations about spiritual things, we used to share a certainty that Chris’s spirit was with us still. I remember it was great comfort to us. But in truth my faith was broken even during my last Easter visit, and my thank-you letter felt awfully untruthful.

Since then, if I am honest, the state of my belief has declined even further, as a result of new scientific developments. You remember that I used to believe our spirit might be the force that determined the actions of the material composing our brain. Since quantum physics had it that material is indeterminate, and that for any material state a set of outcomes is possible, I was convinced that there must be an immaterial governing force determining the eventual outcome. That, I held, was the relationship between spirit and body: the spirit exists to choose our bodies’ paths into the future. So we both believed, and even if I could not be certain of a place such as heaven, I thought that after death, a spirit must migrate into another body here on earth. It seemed to me that spirits must be drawn to the animus of a body. Sometimes, thinking of that chambered nautilus at school, I imagined Chris’s spirit had migrated there, and still lived in those little rooms. Thus we two could share our faith in Chris’s presence, either in heaven or here with us still.

But around the time of that Easter visit, I began reading a physicist called von Neumann, who persuaded me that
indeterminacy exists only at the level of our measurements. I became convinced that everything is in fact determined by its physical shape, and so I gave up on such an entity as the spirit.

It was as if I had lost Chris all over again. The world seemed a terrible haze. I thought of you often, of course, but it seemed beyond my rights to write to you expressing such inconsolable feelings.

But things have now changed some. I think I’ve come to believe once again. Gödel has proven that arithmetic is incomplete, and I think I am close to proving that not all problems can be decided. Do you see what that means? If there is no symbolic system that can determine the solution to any problem (symbolic systems being all the more manageable and complete than the physical ones they represent), then not all physical problems are predetermined. And if not every situation can be decided in advance based on its material properties, then we must have an internal animus for deciding our course. Thus the idea of free will has risen up again in my brain, even more strongly than it did in the days of my Easter visits, when I took communion under Chris’s window at your parish church.

And so I’ve finally come round to writing you, because I’m not so hopeless as I was for a while. Only now I’m a bit overwhelmed with everything I want to say, in order to catch you up on what’s happened.

In terms of personal affairs, I can really only write that life has proceeded. Chris was my dearest friend. Since he passed away I have not found another one like him.

Compared with Chris, the other people at King’s all seem so awfully ordinary. It gives me a thrill to think what a hit Chris would have made amongst the intellectuals here, but
for my part, I slip by unnoticed. Out of curiosity, I’ve taken up violin, but I’m not nearly as good as he was at piano. I do practice quite hard, and I am of course interested in the mathematics of sound, but my actual efforts tend to unravel. Without Chris, there is often the sense of unwinding. I try to continue in the habits he taught me, but I sometimes wonder why I should try.

This is the uneventful state of my personal life. In terms of the science, however, things are looking up. I’ve been working on an interesting problem this summer, and (you may shake your head in disbelief) I am sure that Chris has assisted me through the process. Answers have started to come, usually when I am running. You’ll remember that I was never much good at sports, but to run it seems all one needs is an interest in counting one’s footsteps. I go outwards from town, through the countryside, and when the blood begins to beat in my ears I sometimes hear Chris’s voice. When I grow tired, I lie down in the pastures amongst befuddled sheep, and I summon Chris to help me sort through the strand of numbers crossing the sky. I think, though this may sound strange, that I’ve absorbed some of his mind—some of his patterns of thought—into my brain. In my own head, I can sometimes hear his words, or his clever answers to a bothersome question.

And this is precisely where my current project comes in. I’ve begun thinking that I might one day soon encounter a method for preserving a human mind-set in a man-made machine. Rather than imagining, as I used to, a spirit migrating from one body into another, I now imagine a spirit—or, better yet, a particular mind-set—transitioning into a machine after death. In this way, we could capture anyone’s pattern of thinking.

To you, of course, this may sound rather strange, and I’m not sure if you’re put off at the idea of knowing Chris again in the form of a machine. But what else are our bodies, if not very able machines?

The practical science of this is still rather vague in my mind, and I admit to some confusion on a few key points of engineering, but the idea itself is complete. A mechanical brain! A mathematical computing device that can process the entire world, just as a brain is able to do. I still think of Chris’s idea that those old boring diaries we read in English class were time capsules, preserving the writers’ patterns of thought. And look at me, all these years later, still working on a time capsule! One that might capture the best friend of my life.

It is still a long way off, of course, but I’ve made a few good strides. I’ve developed a method for representing “mental” patterns with algorithmic sentences. You give the machine input in the form of a series of symbols, and it processes that input using a specific mental pattern. Then the machine produces a response, which may or may not change the machine’s original algorithmic sentence. This last bit is crucial, for it is how our machine will actually learn, independent of external assistance. And so the machine will embody a mind, or any number of minds, each one coded by a separate sequence of commands.

It is all rather technical, I suppose, but the importance of the whole thing to you and me both is that one day soon perhaps we will be able to build a mechanical version of the person we lost.

Reading all this, you may think your little friend has become quite eccentric since you spoke to him last. Now he is playing violin, failing to make many friends, lying about among
sheep, and imagining the possibility of translating your son into numbers.

But whether or not you find me strange, you must take this as a sign of my ongoing commitment to my friendship with Chris. I feel I have already moved past the great joy of my life, and shall forever grasp at bits of the happiness that was once mine when I was close to your son. My only solace is in these mathematical concepts, which I discuss with Chris on my runs. I hope that it is some small consolation to you that I still treasure the way he looked at the world. That is all I can offer, in exchange for the pencils and the trip to Gibraltar, for coming back from India that time, for your kind note to an anxious boy at his third school, and for allowing me a brief closeness with Chris.

Sincerely yours,
Alan Turing

P.S.: I only add this in the memory of all my compulsive postscripts in our first letter exchange. They haunted me afterwards with wave after wave of humiliation! Walking to class I was sometimes forced to crouch down for a moment and put my hot face in my hands, for I was too ashamed of having jabbered on so much in my letters. You will be happy to hear that I am less enamored of the postscript now, but I will say that perhaps all this mechanical thinking is only my way of insisting that we should not have to end when the final sign-off is made clear. It seems I still long for that chance. Less for myself, now, than for Chris, who has made my own letter feel rather lifeless and long. I miss him very much.