The Vestigial Heart Read online

  “Sus Cal’Vin, she works at CraftER; I did tell you their all-powerful president exchanges riddles with Hug, right?”

  “Yes. And how come …?”

  “Sus had to accompany an important magnate to the convention and, obviously, she couldn’t take her daughter. Apparently she’s never let her go and this year she’d promised. The kid throws the most spectacular tantrums …”

  That’s why she’s so strange, Celia thinks to herself, having refrained from asking ROBbie about that incredible thing he did before so that she can listen to the conversation.

  “And is Hug there too?”

  “As if! He doesn’t want anything to do with Dr. Craft’s business. He says if he’s anywhere near as dangerous there as he is in their riddle duels … He’s gone to the dueling club, for a change, and then he’ll come and pick us up.” All of a sudden she remembers the last time they met up with the Doctor. “Have you already found out which dog you’ll look like when you get old?”

  “What on earth are you talking about now?”

  “He gave us a real shock the other day. Suddenly, in the mirror, I saw myself transformed into a poodle. I swear: it had a face just like mine and it moved exactly when I did. Next to me, Hug had turned into a boxer. Yeah, sure, laugh it up, I’d like to have seen you, with hair all over you, a wrinkled up face and no eyelashes. It was horrible. Since he’s better at technology than anyone else, he can really trick you. He has such a sick sense of humor, it’s practically sadistic.”

  Celia doesn’t see any of it as being sadistic, maybe it is for the dogs, now that she thinks about it, she’s only ever seen them in virtual images and mechanical replicas. What must they have done with the ones made of flesh and bone?

  “Speaking of wrinkles”—Lu grabs hold of the first thing that comes into her head to get away from so much salaciousness—“have you heard there’s a new treatment to get rid of them?”

  “What does it matter to you? You haven’t even got any!”

  “But you have. Since you did that course at the ComU …”

  “Don’t remind me! First of all, all that emoting gives you wrinkles … and then someone starts offering to eliminate them. It must be a conspiracy.”

  “Don’t speak nonsense; they’re on opposite sides.”

  “You are naive. Is this new treatment you’re talking about IFC?”

  “I think that’s what they call it, yeah.”

  “So, I think you should know that IFC stands for inverse facial conditioning. It’s not cosmetic, or surgery, or any kind of gadget … it’s pure psychological therapy! You see, they’ve gone over to the other side. I’ll stick with injections thank you very much.”

  Fed up with not understanding much and bored by what she does understand, Celia asks if she can go for a walk with ROBbie. That’s when Fi makes the most of the situation to go on the counterattack and bombard Lu with questions. Why had she accepted such a grown-up girl, what will she do if she gets pregnant, or maybe they’ve sterilized her? What a drag, having those period things, does she already get them?

  Lu doesn’t even try to answer, she simply orders ROBul to close her auditory eyelids and add some more tranquilizer to her sequence. She knew her friend’s desire to adopt a child was held back by her cowardice, but she couldn’t have imagined it had gotten so excessive.

  Once they’ve put a few paces between them and the two women, Celia can ask her question:

  “How did you pick out what Fi was saying with so much noise around?”

  “Information: I have a source separation program installed.”

  “Sauce?” She doesn’t understand what condiments have to do with all this.

  “Definition: sound emitters.”

  “Oh, I get it, you mean the source of the voices. And does the program allow you to separate each one of the voices that are all mixed up when you hear them?”

  “Correct.”

  “But how does it work?”

  “Access denied: I can’t provide that information.”

  “You can’t or you don’t know?”

  “Not understood: It’s the same thing.”

  “Of course there’s a difference, ROBbie, I told you about that the other day.”

  “Recovering the other day: So, just like then, my answer is that I have no other master apart from you.”

  “But maybe it’s you who doesn’t want to tell me.”

  “Impossible: If you wanted to know, and I knew the answer, I would tell you.”

  Celia stops for a moment, touched by the words, and looks for his eyes: no friend had ever sworn their loyalty so convincingly, but two black holes bring her back down to earth. Though not entirely. As they start moving again, she watches the robot out of the corner of her eye and it pleases her to see his dignified posture, gently swinging his strong, shiny arms. It feels good to walk along beside him, she feels protected, she can trust him. And what does it matter that he doesn’t have eyes, people don’t look at each other anymore anyway.

  “Suggestion: Why don’t you ask me how many voices I can separate, or from how far away? Or, simply, use me to spy on someone you’re interested in? You’d enjoy it more.”

  “The people I’d like to spy on are really far away. You wouldn’t be able to hear them.”

  “Information: I have a range of 1,500 feet. Shall we try it?”

  A sad smile plays across Celia’s face.

  “Let it go, ROBbie.”

  “Recommendation: Don’t get angry. I told you I can do it, but I don’t know how to explain it to you. You know how to stand on one leg: I saw you do it the other day, and I bet you couldn’t tell me what sequence of muscles you use to do it.”

  “Good example, yes indeed. Do you know how to balance?”

  “Negative: Not on one leg, that’s why I was surprised.”

  “Well, I don’t know which muscles are used, but I can show you how to do it.”

  “Attention: I can see what you’re getting at, but it’s different. You don’t have the necessary organs for source separation.”

  “How do you know, if you don’t know the mechanisms you use to make it work?”

  “Analogy: Because you can’t use your eyes as a telescope either, and the mechanism is the same: isolating a small area and magnifying it, whether it’s sound or vision.”

  “So you do know something about it. I thought you had like a sound magnet that only attracted the voice you wanted, but now you’re telling me you capture all the background noise and then you isolate the voice you want. Is that right?”

  “Repetition: I don’t know. And I don’t understand why you want to know how it’s done … you’ve got me to do it for you.”

  “ROBbie, I’m happy to have you, believe me. It’s just that, since I was little, my father taught me that I had to be able to look after myself, and not depend on anything or anyone. And in the girl scouts, our war cry was ‘AUR,’ autonomous and responsible. Can you understand that? Although, maybe I am taking it a bit too far, I’ll never be a telescope.”

  She waits and watches to see if there’s any indication that he’s amused. She gives up. She doesn’t like to think that he’ll never have a sense of humor, so she decides it’s just because he hasn’t gotten the hang of that type of joke yet. She hasn’t managed to make Lu, or Xis, or anyone else laugh so far.

  “Offer: I’ve got a zoom that can magnify almost as much as a telescope. Who do you want me to focus it on?”

  “It’s not right to invade other people’s privacy.”

  “Defense: It’s what people come to these parties to do; otherwise, everyone would stay at home.”

  “You mean they come to eavesdrop and be spied on?”

  “Correct.”

  “So the people down here are just as much exhibitionists as the people on the stage? Lu and Fi as well? It looked like they wanted to talk about things.”

  “Information: People who want to protect themselves from eavesdroppers use encrypted electronic comm
unications.”

  “And me and you right now?”

  “Concession: It’s possible someone is listening to us.”

  “Listening to us? Who?” She really didn’t expect this.

  “Access denied: There’s no way to know. It could be ROBul, if Lu’s asked him to.”

  A sudden feeling of insecurity washes over her.

  “And you, has she ever asked you to tell her about our conversations?”

  “Impossible: She knows I only obey you.”

  Despite its forcefulness, the answer doesn’t make her feel much better this time. And as soon as they’re back next to Lu, she can’t wait to bring it up:

  “Is it okay to listen in on other people’s conversations?” Faced with Lu’s confused expression, she explains herself: “I don’t mean like before, when Fi was talking to you, but random conversations between people who aren’t talking to you.”

  “Ah, you like to eavesdrop on what they’re saying? Of course, darling, if it makes you happy, it’s fine.”

  She almost tells her she’s misunderstood, that she doesn’t enjoy listening in on strangers, actually it makes her feel uncomfortable because she feels like she’s up to no good; that’s what she meant, she wanted to know if she felt that way too or if she did it … But it doesn’t matter, the reaction is clear enough and it gives her an answer to both questions at once … and too many others. If what makes her happy is good, what makes her sad is bad? Like a desert that opens up in the middle of a larger one, or a tiny island emerging from the closed waters within a larger island, Celia feels that a new solitude, insoluble and very different, has superimposed itself on top of the one she is already experiencing in this new century.

  III

  THE CREATIVITY PROSTHESIS

  13

  Since Leo has been working on the E-Creative project, under the Doctor’s supervision, he’s been assigned an individual cubicle in the most exclusive wing of CraftER. He’s heard a lot about this part of the building. His ex-coworkers tried to hide their envy by citing the rumor that if it was difficult to get in, it was even more difficult to get out. As if someone, after being promoted, would want to go back to their old position, he argued back when they started clutching at straws, citing all kinds of pretexts in order to ignore the evidence. If people were spending whole weeks without coming out it must be that the level of comfort and the rewards inside were incomparable with those outside. And if, once finished, they left the company, it would be to get even better jobs. He refused to listen to fantasies about brains pushed so hard they went mad, thrown out once they were no more than human waste, and he was even less prepared to believe them.

  Now he’s been able to confirm his suspicions. It’s been days since he went home, not even to sleep. Why should he leave if he’s got everything he needs here and it makes him happy? Everything apart from Bet, of course, and maybe chess matches. He himself cannot quite understand his addiction to the physical presence of his opponent. Long distance, he’s lost matches against adversaries that he’d always beaten and, worse still, he hadn’t enjoyed the victories, as if it were a very different game than the one he usually got so excited about.

  First his old colleagues, then Bet, and now chess … Why can’t he concentrate today? At this rate he won’t even finish the program he left practically completed last night. He must be unsettled by the prospect of leaving the cubicle so soon. Like it or not, knowing that all the information about the prosthesis will be erased as soon as he crosses the threshold makes him a bit nervous. Dr. Craft had assured him that, apart from that memory lapse, he wouldn’t notice anything else. In fact, he gave him a practical demonstration when, terrified by that clause of the contract, he was about to change his mind. The timeout button, as he called it, was just a simplified copy of the mechanism incorporated into the cubicles, but it really did the job. He can clearly see in his mind’s eye the dueling table that the Doctor had proudly shown him: its wooden shell with swords set into it and, in the middle, the spectacular touch screen. He can remember perfectly that a riddle popped up on it and he read it, and, what’s more, he found it absorbing; but as soon as he pressed the button, it was erased not only from the screen, but also from his memory. He couldn’t have explained how it worked even as a matter of life and death.

  The waves of encryption the device added to the brain were innocuous, he’d checked it out. There weren’t any side effects either at the time or after, so in that sense he isn’t worried. What annoys him is being at the mercy of a mechanism that he doesn’t understand. Although the Doctor explained the basic idea to him, hinting that he could work the details out for himself, he hasn’t been able to get his head around it and has ended up convincing himself he’s been conned. Because … who would reveal the secret that gave them an advantage? Not the president of CraftER or most people he knew, starting with Bet. How many times had she warned him to take his inventions off the net before the company ordered him to do so? He must be the only idiot who gets a kick out of divulging his inventions. As impractical an addiction as needing the physical presence of an opponent when playing chess. If he at least had the table available to him, he could run tests and try to find out how each component worked.

  He still doesn’t understand why they call it “timeout,” since it’s just a memory-less time that passes like any other. Maybe it’s a timeout for the duel, as it’s postponed, but it’s definitely not for the players. That’s something that hasn’t been invented yet and would be something he’d like: That the world carried on its normal course with him able to pause and then un-pause later on when the great technological fantasies have been brought to fruition, with him able to make good use of them. Or even the opposite, stop the world so he can spy on what’s being done in other laboratories and research centers, without anyone stopping him, without even realizing, since he’d be going at infinite speed compared to the poor people stuck on pause.

  At first he thought the Doctor’s device would be useful for his wireless transmutation. At the same time that one person is injected with the electroencephalographic records of another, they’d be emptied of their own records or, if not, have them shut down to avoid interferences. But straightaway he realized that it didn’t work like that, the timeout device didn’t take memories away, it was more like adding them: it emitted waves of encryption that attached themselves to the waves generated by the individual when they read the riddle or performed any other activity. To erase the record, you just had to deactivate the transmitter. The signals generated in the brain, even though they’re the same ones as before, become mere noise once they’re stripped of the encryption base. The memory is there … it will be there when he leaves the cubicle a couple of hours from now to go pick up Bet, but he won’t have the key to decode it.

  Lost in thought, he hasn’t even realized that ROBco has taken control of the wrap-around screen that, when stretched to its maximum, covers the walls of the space, and when it asks permission to deactivate the holographic partition walls, he almost jumps out of his seat. It has the results of the comparison it was assigned this morning; not like him, who hasn’t been able to stop getting side-tracked by his imminent outing. How little control, he’s making a fool of himself, and this moron, with all its neurolearning and pedigree, hasn’t even learned to stop him when he’s wasting time like an idiot. He looks up at the ever-watching electronic eyes of the cameras and thinks how lucky he is that they can’t read his mind. Then, the idea that his dreamed transmutation could make that kind of mental surveillance possible briefly crosses his mind, but he doesn’t make an effort to retain the thought.

  He has before him, in parallel, representations of the structure of a cutting-edge hypothesis generator and the imagination algebra he’s been working on. He’s deliberately developed it without knowing anything about the generator so that, a posteriori, he can compare them and extract the best of both.

  As expected, the generator follows an evolutionary scheme, consistently apply
ing random mutations to the same idea and selecting the best variant. As if blind Darwinian evolution could be a font of creativity! He would never rely on fate doing his work for him, not when there are powerful automatic inference tools to guide the choice of possibilities. Thanks to these tools, his algebra mechanizes the creative process, avoiding all randomness and subjective evaluation. He’s pleased with it. But he has to admit that it has a limited, determinist scope. It’s possible that by adding some random but controlled sources from the generator he could increase its power.

  With the help of the panoramic chart he’s able to quickly get a global picture, but meticulously analyzing which mechanisms are worth importing to his algebra would take hours. Plus he isn’t in the mood right now, even if ROBco is waiting expectantly next to him, ready to act as his assistant.

  “It’s not worth us starting, if I have to leave in a moment.” As ROBco is still staring at him insistently, he admonishes it, “I told you: I can’t turn off and back on again and pick up where I left off, like you do, see if you can finally build that into your model.”

  “Confirmation: It was incorporated seventeen days, four hours, thirteen …”

  “Stop, stop, stop … I’ve also told you several times that it’s not necessary to be so precise. And if you’re aware of my limitations, I don’t understand why you insist on starting work.”

  “Playback: You said “I have to leave in a moment.” Question: why?”

  “I get it: I forgot to inform you that I’m going out with Bet today. Okay, you don’t have to correct anything, my mistake.”

  “Request: What do I have to prepare?”

  “We’ll take the aero’car. The Doctor assured me there’d always be one available.”

  “Acceptance: I will check it is ready. Consultation: any other tasks?”

  “Yes, it would be advisable to get ahead with the work. The next step will be to fill this formalism with content”—he waves at the diagrams covering the walls. “Collect as many encephalic records as you can from people performing creative tasks: artists, designers, inventors … and also mathematicians and physicists demonstrating theorems, to see if I’m right in thinking there are similarities. Use the same amount of geniuses as anonymous people, above all we need a wide variety of data in order to process it and extract correlations. It would be best if the records had introspective annotations attached.”