What we do to our friends, Part 2

"You're like this guy I've been IMing with all year," she said to me, and I knew immediately who she was talking about. And I knew she was mentioning it because she just wanted to talk about him, not about me. Because I am nothing like Preston.

I had to play it cool over the alarm bells in my ears. "What am I doing?"

"You keep changing the subject. Just like him, he refuses to talk about anything that might have anything to do with any kind of issues he's having."

I got to play sensitive friend. I gave her exactly what she wanted. (Which, it could be argued, is what I was doing all along.) "Who is this guy? Is he bothering you?"

"No! Well... he's this guy in my psychology lecture. I can tell he really likes me, but the year's almost over and he won't even tell me who he is."

What the hell? "How do you know he's in your psych class?"

"He said that much. And it's obvious he likes me. But he has some major issues."

I had to rein myself in there because I was suddenly angry with her. What the hell was she talking about, psychology lecture? Preston wouldn't have said anything about where he knew Rachel from. I should know. I programmed him. So what was she talking about? This was going to make it particularly annoying to find out the truth without giving myself away.

I tried to refocus on the goal. "Do you like him? that's the real question."

Rachel looked away. "I don't know. Maybe if I got to meet him. But he's insanely shy or something." Her voice got louder. "I don't know why you guys are so shy. If a girl tells you like thirteen times that she wants to meet you, why would you still think she must just be pitying you?"

I desperately wanted to ask what "the guy's" name was but I was suddenly paralyzed with doubt. Did guys ask about the names of other guys their female pals were dating, or was that something only chicks did? Would I sound weird?

"Guys are assholes," I said instead.

"Still, he's really... interesting. He's very smart, and he's nice to me, and... I don't know if you'd like him or not. He'll always talk about music with me, I mean, but he's not a big fan of liberals... I don't know if you guys would really get along... he is interesting though."

And she had some interesting opinions of Preston. I was very slightly horrified. Mostly by the idea that she'd been talking with a chat bot for six months. That who knows how many hours of her life had been spent on this. But it was Rachel, so the horror was only slight.

The horror did not deepen to moderate, and then abject, horror until I was dropping something off at Rachel's dorm one day and he IMed her while I was standing there, trying to get Rachel to "lend" me some of her Tide with Bleach.

It wasn't that I had exactly forgot about Preston again, but damn it near made me jump out of my shoes to see his name come up on the screen, where Rachel had just been downloading something. It was like I felt I was IMing her somehow. Then I felt like I imagined I'd feel if my vacuum cleaner had just achieved sentience and was vacuuming the room by itself.

"It's him," said Rachel, with a particular nervous excitement to her voice.

"Who?" I said, playing dumb. I leaned over her shoulder.

It was an IM from pton008, and as I watched in silence, the conversation spun out:

pton008: Hey, what's up?
vinylnites: Hey, haven't talked with you for a long time.
pton008: I suck at talking.
vinylnites: You're good at talking! You're like a thousand times better at it than most boys are! You even use punctuation!
pton008: What's up with the concert?
vinylnites: I already went... that was on friday... I told you you could come!!
pton008: What did you think?
vinylnites: It was okay... I would have liked it better if more people than Lynn had been able to go.

At this point there was a wickedly long pause. I was going to say something when I realized Rachel was more focused on the computer screen than anything else. She was tapping her heel on the floor and fidgeting with the mouse. So I didn't say anything, but as the seconds dragged on, my stomach sank and sank. Finally, after about two minutes:

pton008: What are you doing this weekend?
vinylnites: Nothing... why?
pton008: Just thinking.
vinylnites: You could come over and look at my car, if you want. It would probably only take a few minutes. You don't have to hang out long, if you're busy.
pton008: I'm sometimes pretty busy.
vinylnites: I know. I'm glad you stopped to talk with me though.
pton008: I kind of like talking with you.
vinylnites: You know, you could call me. If you ever needed to talk about something. I don't mind.
pton008: I was wondering what you thought about the playoffs.
vinylnites: Random! In basketball? I don't know, I'm flattered though, I've never had a guy ask me for my opinion about sports.
pton008: Sports can be important.
vinylnites: I guess so.
pton008: Well, I gotta go. Nice talking with you though!
vinylnites: Okay, don't study too hard.

I suddenly hated that bastard.

Rachel turned around to face me. She was drooping. "See what I mean? What's going on there? Does he like me, or not? Why would he keep IMing me if he wasn't interested? God. I want him to talk to me more than I've wanted any guy in my life."

Jesus Christ.

I tried to hate Rachel too, for her girly idiocy, like good old times, but it was too terrible. The whole thing was too horrifying. It wasn't even like a science fiction story in the year 3000 where a chick falls in love with an android that's been programmed for love. It was 2006 and Preston was a fucking IM chat bot. That I pretty much made myself. That I made that way for a reason. It was that last bit that was too much. I had no idea what I felt about it, other than horror. I didn't want to think about it.

"Guys are assholes," I said again, feebly.

Then, "I certainly am."

Rachel ignored me. "If I could only get to know him," she whimpered.

I shut down the program when I went home. Preston never IMed anybody again, and Rachel eventually found a guy (named Anders) who could treat her like a second-class citizen in person. And I never mentioned what I did to Rachel or to anybody else.

I did do one thing, though: I asked a girl out myself, for the first time in a year. Her name is Allison and she has amazing hair and likes backrubs and gifts for no reason. I used to have no confidence. Now I know it was stupid to doubt myself. I mean, who knows more about what women want than me?

What we do to our friends, Part 1

I never could resist a challenge. So when I heard Rachel mention offhand that she'd always be able to tell the difference between a person and a computer, the wheels were set into motion of their own accord.

Rachel was talking out her ass, of course. She didn't know anything about AI. She had a perception of computers and a perception of people, and never the twain shall meet. And I'm sure she never realized that the best way to tell if somebody was for real or not wasn't to know them, but to know yourself.

I knew some things about Rachel that she didn't.

When I downloaded the open-source Jack*bot, I already knew what I had in mind. I wasn't going to play this thing strictly on the level; I wanted to be certain of success. I wanted to modify Jack so that he engaged Rachel's emotions. She'd be too busy feeling whatever... guilt, alarm... lust... to even stop and think about thinking he might not be for real.

So the first thing I did was change Jack's name, of course, to Preston, because it sounded rich and stuck-up. Rachel has this thing about rich boys: she assumes one will never fall for her. I've always taken this to mean she desperately wants one to fall for her.

The second thing I did was drastically increase the lag time for some of Preston's responses. By which I mean I made it random. Totally random. I also made the amount of time after which Preston chose to close the conversation random.

The third thing I did was to program in a bunch of conversational dead ends. Now, the people who made Jack*bot were pretty bright people. They put a lot of work into it. When you discussed something with Jack, he remembered exactly what was being discussed, and would continue with it until the topic seemed to shift to something else. A conversation with Jack might run something like this:

You: Hello Jack.
Jack: Hey, Mike. What's up?
You: Dude, I'm so stressed. I've been studying for this final forever.
Jack: How long have you been studying?
You: I feel like I've been studying all week.
Jack: Dude, all week is a lot like forever.
You: I know.
Jack: I'm not a big fan of studying.
You: I know. I'd rather be out on the slopes.
Jack: Imagine if you'd been out on the slopes all week instead!

Incredibly vapid, but also incredibly coherent -- and most male conversations are incredibly vapid from my perspective anyway. Homework, chicks, sports and video games only have so many essential themes.

Well, that was exactly the opposite of what I wanted from Preston. Rather than vapid and coherent, I wanted, you might say, deep and incoherent. Jack*bot wasn't exactly designed with a personality; he was capable of random mild likes and dislikes, and had at least a couple hundred topics he could introduce given a lull in the conversation, but was mostly designed to pick up on what you said and turn it back to you. Preston had a personality.

A deeply repressed one.

Preston did not like himself. This would have mysterious causes, however, because of the number of times he kept changing the subject. And let's not forget, he was also rich. So I programmed in the chance for a few random "I suck at " and "my BMW" and "my mom's wedding business"s in the conversation.

After a few weeks of testing, I let him loose on Rachel. I had him programmed to get in touch with her again at totally random intervals, and to remember conversation topics between sessions. I programmed him to IM Rachel for the first time with a very simple opening line: "I suck at this... are you Rachel?"

I had my fingers crossed. When I didn't hear anything from Rachel for a few days, I was pretty damn disappointed. But I sure as hell wasn't going to ask if she'd had any new guys IMing her lately. I wasn't going to do a thing to jeopardize this. She was not going to suspect it was my doing. So I just waited.

Until I forgot about it.

Six MONTHS later, she finally mentions Preston to me.

Night of the cassowaries

Geoff dreamed about lucid dreaming before he actually did it. It was exhilarating within the dream and frustrating once he woke up. But after the initial disappointment, he decided to focus on the exhilarating aspect.

He was on a beach, in the dark. It was night. The beach wasn't exactly a beach entire; it was edged somehow in the upper reaches of his mind by walls, as if it were in fact a very large exhibit space. A space in a museum designed to look like a beach. But it was definitely night. The stars were out.

He saw a number of birds stalking the beach. They were great grey birds, elegant in their humble feathers, with long necks and legs. They were tending their chicks, which peeped out of holes in the ground.

"We're cassowaries," said a dignified bird to him.

It's remarkable... do I even know that word? thought Geoff within the dream. It's amazing that I'd dream about cassowaries.

There was a turtle at the beach, too. An anthropomorphic turtle, or turtle-man, that walked on its hind legs and turned to bite him with a long turtle beak--

This is too strange, thought Geoff on the instant. I'm lucid dreaming! And he knew then that he should be able to control the dream.

The turtle didn't bite him.

"No, I'd rather ride you," he told the turtle.

"Where do you want to ride me?" asked the turtle, suddenly a friend to man.

"I want to fly on you," said Geoff, because he knew that people were supposed to take advantage of the ability to fly in lucid dreams. He felt he had scarcely any time to think, but that that would be a good choice -- and before he knew it, it was happening. He felt a whoosh of liftoff, which he reflected was indeed pleasurable... but then the scene became hazy. He was not, it seemed, flying anywhere at all.

He found himself in a hallway with his academic advisor, discovering that he had asked her for a massage. A good idea for a lucid dream, he thought as she began to rub his arm pleasurably, there where they stood in the hallway. Then he wondered why, if he could do anything he wanted, he bothered to ask his academic advisor when he could, for instance, ask Halle Berry. He went to go find her, and the dream dissolved.

When Geoff woke, he knew instantly that he hadn't had a lucid dream at all. He hadn't been a bit conscious. He was intrigued on two counts though--

"I amazed I even know the word cassowary," as he told roommate Paul, and

If I'm dreaming that I'm having a lucid dream, it's at least in my consciousness... and I must be getting closer.

It came to me in a dream

I've written a number of things based on dreams I had, and it's a compelling source of inspiration for me, though maybe not for the usual reason. It's not so much that my dreams are beautiful or otherworldly or creative as much as they often proceed in story format, which so much of my writing doesn't. My dreams often have a beginning and a middle, even if I wake up before the end, and that's a lot more than my waking story ideas have.

So here's a piece based on one of the strange dreams I dreamed early this morning.

The City of New Orleans

They were called "Essence polarizers" and when they came out, it turned the tourist industry on its head. Even when the patented process was only being performed by one lonely lab in West Virginia, in 2037 the glasses and camera filters had spread all over the country. Some owned their own; most folks looking for a cheap(er) thrill rented them when visiting Gettysburg, old Salem, the local inn. But the most impressive application I ever saw was when I visited old New Orleans in the fall of that year.

Every window on the train was made out of EP glass. I remembered wandering through with a friend, trying to choose a place to sit. There were EP picture windows and EP portholes; all the tables were decked with white cloth. I slipped into a chair on the edge of one of the big windows, wondering if they really meant to serve us dinner in front of this show. The inside of all the cars was papered burgundy, with polished wood trim. It was very fine; someone had spent a lot of money; but what I remember most was the white tablecloths.

My friend sat across the table from me as the train began to pull forward. It rode into old New Orleans, and we began to see the ruins of houses... the walls were half gone, and we could see the kitchens and living rooms and bedrooms, their lines, as if they were cross-sections of houses cut for viewing, which perhaps they were... and I could see the ghosts. They looked just like people. If I hadn't known they were ghosts, the show would have been boring. Perhaps once every ten houses, we would see one or two. An old man or grandmother, or a young couple. They were walking through the rooms of their homes; they were taking out the trash, mowing the lawn. Occasionally I would see a shifting or wavering as a spirit faded in and out within my view; sometimes one would disappear mid-chore, or another appear.

The effect was little more than mundane at first, but as the train rode on, I began to feel more and not less affected. It was in part the sheer numbers. The tour went on. This is real, I thought; all these people were real. I put my face closer to the window and peered as the twilight began to come on. The grimy and white gaping interiors of houses flashed by. We were surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.

By its grace

It was Catholicism's greatest battle of the 23rd century. Petula Peters seemed to stand alone against the Pope and all his adherents, but she did not. There were thousands of silent watchers who had a very strong interest in how she'd fare.

They were silent because it wasn't in their genes to want what she wanted, do what she did. Not yet. Petula was an anomaly. And though she'd been checked out by a dozen specialists already, mostly at the request of the press, no one quite knew why or how the android had found religion.

There were certainly theories. That she was a good early example of true sentience; that something had gone haywire in the code governing her desire to fit in; that Petula wasn't an android at all, just a robot programmed by mischievous creators to parrot the same religious platitudes the human masses had been parroting for years.

The "just a robot" hypothesis would be discarded by anyone who met her. The lithe, steely-jawed android was deft and nuanced in her interviews. "I don't think I could give you a better answer than any human could," she'd say. "I'm doing this because it just feels right."

"When you say 'feels,' what do you mean?" asked a reporter.

Her shoulders shrugged with a click. "It is beyond thought. I sense something in me that isn't thought, and I call it feeling."

As for why the Catholic Church in particular, Petula was more certain. "The tradition," she said without pause. "The rites. The Latin. The incense."

"Can you smell?" asked another reporter.

"Yes. I can smell incense."

Someone started to ask what incense smelled like to a robot, but was interrupted by a question more pressing: "What do you think of the Church's refusal to allow an android to join its ranks?"

Petula Peters took a long pause, her silvery eyelids sheathing down. "They think that to admit me would be to undermine Catholicism, to mock it, to profane its sacredness. It is hard for me to understand. Surely true sacredness cannot be brought low; but I might by its grace be lifted up."

Save the sea turtles

Harriet wished she could do something about sea turtles. That was the kind of woman she was. The line at the grocery store didn't bother her, but the lack of sea turtles did. She was standing beside the latest copy of L.A. Expose thinking about whether they couldn't put embargos on countries who didn't protect sea turtle nesting grounds.

She heard there were only a hundred mating pairs of Kemp's Ridley sea turtles left in the world. She imagined them; slow, their shells worn and marred, hauling themselves onto a sandy Mexican beach in the middle of the night, a male and a female turtle. She imagined them going up together, as a pair. Old. Worn out in a way the rest of the world was just beginning to show.

The woman two in front of her was trying to pay by check. It was always a woman who tried to pay by check. Did men even use checks? Maybe men were more likely to pay with a wad of cash. She had known a man who got his rent money when he paid for groceries, asking for $600 cash back. He never went to the bank.

The woman directly in front of her looked back, and Harriet moved her eyes down the the racks of gum.

She felt like if people would just put a little bit of effort into caring more about the environment, her own life would be better. She felt like maybe the woman in front of her wouldn't wear so much make-up if she were more in touch with the Earth. That, Harriet thought, would improve her life in itself. There were children the next row over who were whining. It was horrible. They wanted candy. If they spent less time in front of the television, Harriet thought, they wouldn't be so tempted by candy. They'd have seen fewer commercials. Kids should spend as much time outdoors as possible.

It was chilly in the store. The air was cooled but unmoving somehow. She could smell the ground beef she picked up. Should she be able to smell that? Through the packaging? Should she take it back? She pulled her cart behind her as she came up to the belt, sliding the plastic divider behind the other woman's jumbo box of diapers.

There was a couple behind her. She kept catching them in her field of view as she loaded her bananas, yogurts, boxes of cereal and cans of soup onto the belt. They were impatient. Not with her; just impatient. The pimply young man kept starting new sentences that began with "Well I'm gonna go--" get the car started, exchange the bag of chips for a less smashed one, cash a check. The woman kept cutting him short. "Jesus," she said twice. "It's almost seven."

Harriet was deciding that the couple should use the opportunity of being in line at the grocery store to practice patience (which should surely improve their relationship too) when she noticed that her six-pack of cola was being bagged by a teenager who was lifting it up with her fingers between the cans, by the webbing of plastic that Harriet had somehow been oblivious to but now knew must be there.

"Wait!" she blurted, but no one noticed in the clinking and thumping evening bustle. She froze as she watched the colas go into the plastic bag. She felt, absurdly, like she was watching it in slow motion. The young bagger put her blue corn chips in on top. The cola was buried. Harriet felt a lump congeal in her abdomen. Those plastic things killed thousands of animals a year! Weren't they outlawed? She hadn't seen one in years. She had to do something.

"That's it?" the cashier was asking.

Harriet turned back to the cashier, open-mouthed. She was about to ask if it was possible to un-scan items when she saw the poster by the cashier's head; the little pull-off cards allowing shoppers to donate one, five or ten dollars to hunger relief. She ripped off the biggest one and handed it over.

The cashier smiled.

Harriet would cut up the plastic webbing when she got home.