Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (18 page)

Critics have identified the events of an evening in late July as the major turning point in the already doubtful soundness of Eugenia's mind. It appears to have come at around 22:00, when she began to experience difficulties accessing certain files on her hard drive. Fearing that all her work of the last few months might somehow be lost, she copied the entirety of it onto a collection of disks in order to transfer them to the library computers. The events of that late-night exodus onto the university campus are sketchy, but she seems to have uploaded her program with little difficulty. It was dawn when she eventually returned home, having spent the night in silent communion with the fjords. This would prove to be only the first in a series of strange incidences.

Further changes have been identified in her writing at this time, wherein she first began to talk about dreams. However, these discussions would veer more towards the concept of dreaming itself rather than detailing any of her own. This is understandable in context, as the nature of dreaming is a significant consideration to any study of the human mind. Yet her new preoccupation with nocturnal visions brought with it a troubling ambiguity for readers, uncertain now as to whether many of the more surreal details that followed were actually true.

Critics have attributed this apparent departure from reality to the fear experienced when problems started to emerge with her program. Such was the attachment she now felt with the program that, it is said, the shock at seeing it malfunction must have been like the loss of a child, the pain of which could only be assuaged by giving it a latent fantasy life. This often came with the assertion that the malfunctioning of her own computer had in fact wiped the Jotun program entirely, and that its revival in the library had never really taken place. Yet if this were truly the case, then it was hardly a merciful fantasy she would eventually create for herself.

Returning to the library after a break of two days (during which her diary is suspiciously quiet), Clarke found the program once more behaving strangely. She writes:

I fear there may be another problem with the program. I had thought at first it may be a virus, as I suspect was the cause of the original problems (a reboot of my home computer appears to have sorted this out), though I've never known a virus to act like this. Life in the fjords is as active as ever. Seaweed abounds, the fish are lively, seagulls wheel through the skies and foxes are ever vigilant, but Jotun is just standing there, his gun limp at his side. I assumed this may have been some unusually perfect moment of balance, which called for no further action on Jotun's part, but it seemed to just go on. No equilibrium can last forever; my algorithms won't permit it. Indeed, he remained just so, even as the seagulls began to exhaust the fish and rotten seaweed pollute the water. I issued the order to kill a seagull and he duly complied, but did nothing more.

Later that week, she describes how Jotun finally broke his spell of inactivity and embarked upon the wholesale slaughter of the snow-foxes. In the absence of predators, the seagulls lay waste to the fish population, exterminating every last one. Though this was a known outcome of several of the potential situations Eugenia had predicted, what happened next surprised her. Without their primary source of food, the seagulls set upon one another. Cannibalism was not something she had programmed, nor, however, was it something at odds with their basic behavior. Thus, in the absence of any pre-determined response, their own instincts were the same as their hunters. Eugenia did not wait to see the gruesome outcome, though she noted that Jotun had resumed his previous state of repose.

It is difficult to be certain whether these had been the last such incidences of strange behavior. Passing references hint toward at least two further occurrences, but how they compare to those of the previous entries can only be surmised. In the wake of the second incident, Eugenia's diary becomes frustratingly vague. It is clear that she attempted no further programing work, or any of her previously energetic researches into philosophy of the mind. She was evidently reluctant to dwell on the anomalies, perhaps afraid to give too much thought to their implications. But in light of what she would later describe, it is during this time that her understanding of what she was seeing began to change.

Initially, she saw the anomalies as mere malfunctions: errors in the program causing conflicts of interest that resulted in irrational behavior. Eventually, however, she considered the possibility that Jotun had not simply been programmed incorrectly, but was somehow consciously working to alter its own coding in ways Eugenia no longer understood. She had mentioned earlier that she had given Jotun the capacity to learn, but indicated that this would be limited to the information relevant to his task. What was happening now was something wholly unprecedented and there seemed no limit to what it could become.

This period of fearful inertia was broken on 28 August. It seemed that Eugenia had once more resumed her habit of taking long walks. That morning saw her wander beyond the city reaches and into the grounds of the medieval abbey at Newstead. There, among those ancient stones, she seems to have found new resolve. That evening, at around 21:00, Eugenia Clarke recorded the following entry in her diary:

I came to the library, convinced now that I must fix the anomalies overtaking the program, or delete every amendment made to the code sequences prior to July 28, and every scrap of data bearing the name 'Jotun'. It pains me to destroy something into which I've poured so many hours of my life over the past few months, but it cannot be allowed to exist in its present form. It has turned from the vision of a saint into the degraded image of a violent lunatic. For such a being, the only solution is to administer an immediate lobotomy and pray that the soul can remain intact. I thought that if my suspicions were true, and this being is able to change its basic programing at its own will, then maybe it could grow back into something better. Something more pure.

When I finally worked up the courage to get into the system and try to salvage what I could from the Jotun project, I found the codes all but unrecognizable. Scraps of input I recognized as my own drifted in and out of a sea of unfamiliar numbers, in a language I was at pains to comprehend. I wonder now whether this was my own work, composed in a fit of madness and forgotten when sanity returned. If this were true it would be a mercy compared to what I fear to be the truth. In amid the scraps of alien code were fragments of the text that appear in the program. It was garbled, rearranged into something that almost resembled speech. One word in particular seems to come up more than any other: 'Life'.

Such a revelation would have been marvelous to another researcher, but for Eugenia it held nothing but dread. She promptly deleted every part of the project in its second incarnation and resolved to be done with it. Her diary for the subsequent days became a catalogue of mundanity, in which she recorded nothing but the minutiae of everyday life, doing so with an unnatural assiduity. It seemed that through some considerable act of will, she was able to think of anything other than the horror she had left in the library. But this enforced normality was disrupted by the events of early September 1993.

At 5.30 on September 3, the computer systems throughout the university suffered a catastrophic crash. The source of the damage could be traced to no single part of the campus, with all reports seemingly coming in at once. In only a few minutes, computer facilities in both staff and student centers would all be engulfed in roughly the same manner. Network crashes were nothing new, especially in the early days of mass information management, but the speed and severity with which the damage occurred is remarkable even today. Computers had frozen, displaying a black screen across which reams of meaningless data appeared, the source of which was never identified. Standard recovery systems were overridden and even hardware was affected as automatic shut-downs were averted. The power surge created by the overheating machines was enough to overload the generators, creating a blackout on campus that lasted seven hours. When electricity was finally restored, the computers throughout campus were disconnected and placed on an isolated circuit. Their systems were then re-formatted in an attempt to purge them of whatever viral strain may have initiated the destruction.

With the autumn semester not yet commenced, news about the computer meltdown was suppressed with relative ease. Nevertheless, word reached Eugenia via the library staff. And while technicians were never able to ascertain the cause of the crash, she invariably saw Jotun’s malign influence at its heart. Her worsening paranoia seems to have come to a head in the wake of the incident, and she was now convinced that in uploading Jotun to the library computers, she had loosened some terrible force upon the world.

Over the coming weeks, her paranoia only worsened. She stopped using computers altogether and even feared going near supermarkets, power plants, or anywhere computers and people came together. Traffic lights in particular held a special menace for her, and she now treated them as death traps. One entry even details how, walking along the river near the Victoria Embankment, she grew uneasy at the sight of the clustered antennae on the roofs of the boats moored there. She describes being convinced that she could hear voices traveling along the wires, uttering arcane words her mind dare not comprehend. After two weeks of this, it seems she was reduced to watching the news from under a blanket, waiting for the apocalypse to unfold.

Yet this malign vision of the end never came, leaving Clarke puzzled for a time. She had, in her terror, imagined Jotun as a destructive entity inimical to all other sentient life. Yet now she began to reconsider the nature of what it was she truly faced. With the new university term just a few days away, she penned the following entry:

I don't know what it is I've created, if I did indeed create the entity that is now alive and loose to do its will. I almost think it created itself, and I merely supplied the initial spark. Perhaps it takes only a fragment of sentience to create such a being, paired with an indefinite supply of energy and information from which to grow itself in complexity. Simply this, and something like Iotan
[sic]
is born. It was never really my wish to create an AI program with a soul. This was all just idle speculation. Logic play. Yet instead, I fear this entity, this creature, may have simply acquired one instead. Or something worse.

[…]

I thought about this as I wandered the woods today, the one place I know I'm safe. I believe he despises humanity, in whose pixelated image he was made. Yet he knows that he owes us his existence, at least in the form he now possesses. I think I know now why he has held off from bringing about the end. Absolute power is still beyond him, but he knows it can't be got by terror alone. He has the power to send humanity back centuries, but he'd kill himself in the process. No, humanity is something to be managed through subtle manipulation. He shall ascend to godhood only when we transmit ourselves entirely over to his domain. Humanity may be checked by his acts of violence, but only as a means for ensuring its continued survival and progress towards his intended aim, just like the seagulls in that nightmare cyberscape.

Whilst critics have cited numerous potential points of departure for Eugenia's already fraying connection to reality, this final entry has been widely agreed upon as marking the beginning of the end. It bears many of the traits that would define her entries from that point onwards. The first of these is the increasingly fluid definition and character she ascribes to her creation. The idea that the Jotun entity somehow created itself is one that comes up time and time again, inspiring some of her more far-fetched speculations. Particular attention has been paid to the fact that she seemed able, now, to flit between scientific and supernatural explanations for the being, seemingly unaware of any apparent contradiction. There had been hints of this from the earliest phases of Jotun's creation, but much of this is understood to have been analogous, a tool with which to illustrate her point. Yet this was almost certainly no longer the case.

In her earliest accounts, she describes Jotun as a conscious artificial intelligence, or a computer virus, using the terms interchangeably. Both of these expressions are ultimately misappropriations of the terms, but judging from her grounding in computer science, it seems likely that she was either using them for want of a more appropriate term, or out of reluctance to apply the term
daemon
, as she would later go on to do. Eventually, she seems to have settled on a portmanteau of her own coining:
caecovirus
. The September entry also indicates the gradual change in her spelling of the entity's name, which would continue for several weeks. From Jotun, it became Iotan, then Io Tarn, and then simply Tarn. No explanation at all is given to this change and the shift seems to have come about almost unconsciously. Researchers have struggled to find some connection between her reading materials and her work that might indicate the reason for this change. Yet aside from associating 'io' with the Ancient Greek expression of praise, no direct source for these terms has ever been identified.

It is this section of the text that has sparked the most debate over the level of reality exhibited within Eugenia's later diary entries. This is not least because of their increasing linguistic ambiguity and diminishing levels of specific detail. Yet it is another idea that emerges in this section that seems to have taken the greatest hold on imaginations: that Jotun was somehow self-created. Skeptics have pointed to the fact that the intelligence that Clarke assigned her creation is currently beyond the scope of even the most sophisticated advances in AI. But the idea that Jotun was something discovered, rather than created, lends the remainder of the text a consistent underlying logic that is difficult to dismiss out of hand.