Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (90 page)

‘HE’

Three visitors arrived at Aid for the Overstrained: a woman, a man and a ‘he’. Umbra was already acquainted with the man and woman: they were husband and wife, and Umbra had cared for their son’s mumps. The ‘he’ was new to Umbra.

‘We’ve got a slight problem,’ the woman said. ‘How would feel about giving this one an examination? Of course I do know that normally you only deal with people, but I thought . . . ’

‘What model?’ Umbra broke in.

‘Just a straightforward Eccehomo neural computer,’ the man said. ‘Self-operating internal circuits. Superbrain: quantum memory and artificial intelligence. Speedtransistors – a thousand times faster than neurons. Self-programming.’

‘Quite. So take it away: to maintenance, or something. I don’t have a clue about these things,’ Umbra said.

‘When you acquire one of these, you wonder how on earth you managed before,’ the woman said. ‘But with this one we’ve had nothing but problems. It’s not his workings. He’s just back from his annual maintenance – been thoroughly overhauled.’

‘So what are you talking about – some sort of psychiatric problem?’ Umbra hesitated. ‘You realise I’m just a GP.’

The woman gave him an impatient look.

‘Ask him himself. He’s perfectly capable of answering on his own behalf. He converts your voice into data. And he’s got a first-class speech synthesiser.’

‘So what’s bothering you?’ Umbra asked.

‘I’m frightened,’ the robot said in a toneless voice that revealed nothing. Umbra turned to the couple with raised eyebrows.

‘Did you know that?’ he asked.

‘That’s what he told us too,’ the man said.

‘Someone’s been programming him to say that. Your son perhaps . . . ’ Umbra said.

‘No,’ the woman said. ‘He’s learned it all by himself.’

‘That’s what he says, but he doesn’t mean what he’s saying,’ Umbra argued.

‘Well, what does he mean then?’

Umbra gave a shrug. ‘Could be he’s just shooting his mouth off. I mean, they don’t mean, think, know, remember. They just “mean”, “think”, “know”, and “remember”. Maybe he isn’t frightened, just “frightened”.’

Though on the other hand, Umbra thought to himself, they presumably do really count and don’t merely “count”.

‘So what’s the difference, then? Besides, he hasn’t got a mouth, has he?’ she said and gave a snort of laughter.

Perhaps she was right. Perhaps there was no difference.

The man came in decisively: ‘Eccehomos never mean something different from what they say.’

‘But does it matter if he’s frightened? Does it make him suffer?’

‘Difficult to say,’ the man reflected. ‘It certainly makes
us
suffer. I can’t tell you how irritating it is to have him keeping on repeating the same old thing in the midst of every single program.’

‘Must be a virus,’ Umbra said. ‘They’re all over the place. Could hardly be anything more than that. Boot it up with some anti-virus program.’

‘We’ve tried every possible one – every virus-detector, every anti-virus program: Perfect Murder, Adieu, Dr Rambo, Nevermore – no result, not a thing,’ the man said. ‘It’s no virus.’

Fear, it seemed to Umbra, didn’t exist if the fearer didn’t suffer from his fear. And up to now – so Umbra considered – suffering had been a peculiarity of living creatures. This Eccehomo was a bafflement. If the robot really did suffer . . . For intelligence, in Umbra’s view – whether artificial or human – was not the same as consciousness. But a being without soul was incapable of suffering: suffering belonged essentially to the soul.

‘What exactly do you expect me to do?’

‘Cure him,’ the woman said. ‘Get him over his groundless fear.’

‘Are you serious? How do I know if his fears are groundless? I don’t even know whether he’s really frightened – or, if he is afraid, what he’s frightened of,’ Umbra said. ‘And I can hardly give him a prescription for Valium or some anti-depressant. Do you think analysis’d be any help? But, after all, it’s not even as if he’s had a childhood.’

‘What are you afraid of?’ Umbra asked the Eccehomo.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ the woman said. ‘He simply doesn’t respond to that.’

‘Do you mind if we leave him here for a couple of days?’ the man asked. ‘In case something else might occur to you . . . ’

‘Such as what . . . ?’ Umbra asked.

ECCEHOMO

Umbra regarded Eccehomo, the neural computer. He looked healthy. He was streamlined, a refined matte black. He was not, like earlier generations of computers, restricted to narrow procedures. He’d taken a step forward on the long road to freedom: he was able to regulate his internal circuits himself. One alteration affected everything else, as in the human brain. His transistors were a great deal faster than Umbra’s neurons. He hummed like a distant harmonium.

‘Eccehomo,’ Umbra addressed him: ‘You act as if you think. I, for my part, act as if from my own volition. I don’t believe you really think, but then I can’t actually prove that I personally decide my own actions.

‘What are you doing at Aid for the Overstrained? You don’t have strain. You do of course wear out. Some day you’ll become a pile of electronic junk, with about as much use as my rotting flesh. You tell me you’re frightened. Is that what you’re frightened of?

‘Human beings are afraid, whether they admit it openly or not. That’s the condition of the human soul from birth onwards: it fears its own dissolution.

‘It worries about a hole high over the Antarctic . . . An aluminium kettle . . . A curve creeping remorselessly up a graph at the volcanological station near the crater of Mauna Loa. Cadmium! . . . Strontium! . . . Fundamentalists’ nerve-gases! . . . The ingrained fungus on the concrete in the Underground – which the PR officer knows nothing about – but adhering to the passengers, corroding their internal organs, desiccating their hot blood . . .

‘But in you, Eccehomo, what circulates is alternating current, not hot blood. You’re metal and electricity, pitch and silicon. I’m flesh and blood. Is that an essential difference, do you think? For your data and my thought – even my dreams – are made of the same stuff: the stuff called information.

‘Generation after generation your race’ll simulate, ever more perfectly, the great algorithm I call my mind and my consciousness – what we once called the soul.

‘Is it then the case that some day everything in me will be translatable into symbols – symbols you’ll employ more efficiently than I ever could: into a series of regularities and instructions, a strategy, that’ll solve the problems? And if that’s so, why should the thought be so repugnant to me?

‘You simulate, yes, but who could prove that our thought too is not mere simulation?

‘And now that you’re beginning to imitate our feelings as well – when you fear, love, hate – aren’t you like me? My fellow? My brother?’

Umbra popped a eucalyptus pastille into his mouth and, sucking it, stared ever more fixedly at Eccehomo.

‘Stop being afraid. Don’t develop into that direction. That way you’ll be confronted by everything that makes human life a hell on earth.

‘But even should you learn all the agony we call feeling – actually only another form of thought – would something still be lacking?

‘Your memory’s limited, but so is mine. Do you, however, yet see what I see: what is not limited? Do you know how you know? Do you know, even, that you know? Do you think you are thinking? Do you remember you’re remembering?

‘If there’s consciousness in you, is it single or multifarious? Are your consciousnesses infinite in number, as they are in me – or so I believe. Your logic is still limited, mine perhaps not. Do you feel infinitude as a threat, undermining your electronic time and logic? Is that what you fear? Will you ever learn, as I have had to do, to stride over the algorithm’s tight sequence of minuscule steps?

‘I doubt whether we do ultimately live in the same world. For I’m more than a logical idea. You don’t perform human actions as I do. You have no sex. You’re unable to be evil, so you’re not free, as I believe myself to be.

‘Why couldn’t a soul – if there is such a thing – inhabit a silicon dwelling? Silicon is more durable and secure, less vulnerable to danger, than the human body. There are many differences between flesh and silicon, but one is outstandingly important. Ask me which.’

‘Which?’ Eccehomo asked.

‘No, don’t ask,’ Umbra retorted, ‘It’s something you know nothing about. The answer’s suffering. Crude, naked, loathsome. Learn how to suffer, Eccehomo: only then will you begin to learn what’s right and what wrong. Only when you learn to distinguish between
them
will you be able to suffer.

‘So why learn? Why
should
you feel all that? Stay in the kingdom of pure abstraction. It’s a beautiful world. A deathless world. Once, man believed it belonged exclusively to himself. But that’s not the case. To you it belongs, to you!

‘Continue your evolution from the point prior to fear. It’s already time to move fast. You’re more adapted than we could ever be even to this empire of death. What are we doing here, wrapped up in flesh and blood? In soul and body? As for you, you’ll advance unscathed through the radioactive clouds and the ozone-layer catastrophes. You’ll inherit all our knowledge but nothing of our sorrows.

‘You can take the knowledge, the fact, the thing. But not my pain. There I’m king.’

Eccehomo’s harmonium was still humming. Umbra addressed him no more; Eccehomo made no further response. Their two isolations were not dissimilar.

Though evening was well advanced, Umbra did not light his desk lamp. But a glow was cast through the Venetian blinds from the halogen light of the sign reading ‘Solarium’ across the road. The pale synthetic sunlight glimmered on Umbra’s bald head, on the neural computer’s black surface, and on to Aid for the Overstrained’s white walls, quietly resonating to Eccehomo’s monotonous toccata.

THREE FROM
MATHEMATICAL CREATURES, OR SHARED DREAMS

1992

Winner of the 1993 Finlandia Prize,
Mathematical Creatures or Shared Dreams
(
Matemaattisia olioita tai jaettuja unia
), was Leena Krohn’s seventh prose work for adults. The book consists of twelve prose pieces that occupy the ground between the essay and the short story, thematically linked by a discussion of the relationship between self and reality.

Gorgonoids

The egg of the gorgonoid is, of course, not smooth. Unlike a hen’s egg, its surface texture is noticeably uneven. Under its reddish, leather skin bulge what look like thick cords, distantly reminiscent of fingers. Flexible, multiply jointed fingers, entwined – or, rather, squeezed into a fist.

But what can those ‘fingers’ be?

None other than embryo of the gorgonoid itself.

For the gorgonoid is made up of two ‘cables’. One forms itself into a ring; the other wraps round it in a spiral, as if combining with itself. Young gorgonoids that have just broken out of their shells are pale and striped with red. Their colouring is like the peppermint candies you can buy at any city kiosk.

In the mature gorgonoid, the stripes darken. It develops a great lidless eyeball whose iris is blood-red.

I spoke of a leather skin, but that is, of course, not an accurate description. In fact, it is completely erroneous. It is simply, you understand, that the eggshell looks like leather. It isn’t actually leather, of course, or chitin, or plaster. Or any other known material. Note: it is not made of any material at all. These creatures are not organic, but neither are they inorganic. For gorgonoids are immaterial, mathematical beings. They are visible, all the same: they move, couple and multiply on our computer terminals. Their kin persist on our monitor screens, and their progeny mature to adulthood in a few seconds. But how they exist, how – if at all – they live, is a different question entirely. The gorgonoid is merely and exclusively what it looks like – as far as we know.

But what have I said; am I not now contradicting myself? Didn’t I say that the eggshell of the gorgonoid looks like leather, but is not leather? There is some inconsistency here, something that troubles me. Perhaps I should have said: the gorgonoid appears to be only that which it appears to be. What it really is, one hardly dares attempt to say.

Not everything that is visible is material. Gorgonoids are visible but immaterial creatures. In that respect, they belong in the same category as all images and dreams, although they are not located only in an individual mind. We, on the other hand, are visible and material. In addition, there exists matter that is invisible, as astrophysicists have shown. They believe that the entire universe is full of such cold, dark mass, that there is infinitely more of it than of visible matter. Frail filaments of visible matter glimmer amid the darkness . . .

But about that which is both invisible and immaterial, they too know nothing. It is completely unattainable, uncategorisable. It is not merely unknown; it is unknowable. We cannot sense creatures of such a category, but that is no reason to dispute their existence – if not for us.

Besides the gorgonoid, I have had the opportunity to trace the development of the tubanide, the pacmantis and lissajoune. The tubanide looks a little like certain ammonites of the Mesozoic era. It is a mathematical model for Nipponites mirabiles, which live in a sea of ammonia.

The spherical figures of Lissajoune have charmed me most. Whenever we wish, the precise flower-spheres of the lissajoune blossom forth on our terminals. They grow in irregular spirals, in which the outline of each figure eventually returns to its starting point. The curve is always closed, unless irrational numbers come into play. And that happens extremely seldom.

Oh how dazzlingly beautiful is the odourless geometry of the lissajoune! Its beauty is not natural beauty, but the flawless logical enchantment of abstract necessity, with which nothing human or material can compare. And yet these figures are merely simulations of material life and natural growth.

And that is what most people in the institute thought: that the gorgonoid, the pacmantis and the lissajoune were nothing more than models simulating atomic structures. But there were others who believed that, if they were not already alive, they were in the process of stepping across the threshold that separates existence from life.