The Emoticon Generation (7 page)

Olivia was living a double life. But it was Glynis and Glynis alone who seemed to be the
secret
life. Pat had met the rest of the family. And Glynis... she never even knew they existed.

Suddenly Pat’s image disappeared and was replaced by a view of Olivia’s apartment. Glynis jumped: Huh? Just as she was about to press a button and reactivate the answering machine, she realized that there was movement at the top of the screen. Feet, high heels, accompanied by sound. The feet were coming closer. The camera was not panning as it usually does when there’s movement. The feet turned into legs in a skirt, and suddenly the face of her mother filled the screen and was staring right at her. Glynis nearly wet her pants.

Glynis was frozen in place, unable to move, as her mother’s brows furrowed a bit, and her eyes moved up and down. Very slowly, one thought followed another in the back of Glynis’ mind. It was a safety aspect of ReCall: When there was a change in the surroundings, it snapped back to appear as if the phone was not operating, while allowing the caller/hacker to view the inside. ReCall was playing dead. Actually, it was playing like it was an answering machine. Olivia couldn’t see Glynis; her screen looked like her answering machine. She wouldn’t find out... if she didn’t try to place a call.

Olivia pressed a spot on the screen and moved aside. ReCall played the three new messages for Olivia, while Glynis watched her go from one corner of the house to another, get herself a drink from the fridge, and search for something in a desk.

The messages played themselves out. Glynis sat in front of the screen, not daring to disconnect. Olivia put the files from the desk in her suitcase, shut it, turned off the light, and went out of view. Glynis could hear her open the door, close it, and lock it from the outside. It was then that she realized how badly she’d wanted Olivia to discover her. To punish her, maybe, but to confront her about why and how and—and—and—so many things, too many things...

Glynis began to cry. The tears obstructing her view, she disconnected from the Net, turned the screen off, and fell on her bed. She sobbed uncontrollably.

Half an hour later, she was asleep in her clothes, having cried herself to sleep. She dreamed about her sister.

“Glynis... Glynis...”

Glynis opened her eyes, and her mother’s face looked at her, smiling. Glynis immediately flashed back to the previous night, and jumped instinctively, gasping.

“Whoa! What’s the matter?”

“I... I... I’m sorry. I had nightmares.” She looked around. “What... What time is it?”

“It’s morning. And you slept in your clothes. You haven’t done that in years.” There was concern in Olivia’s voice. That surprised Glynis. “Oh, god, I’m sorry, I’m not paying enough attention to you. Listen,” she touched Glynis’ flushed cheeks. “This is just because the Professor is here. He’s very important for my career. He was supposed to leave today, but it turns out he likes what he saw, and he’s going to stay another day. I know I said we’ll spend tomorrow together, but this is
really
important. He’s leaving at six p.m. You and me, we’ll spend the evening together, that’s bound to be enough, what do you say? I’ll give you your gift, and we’ll pig out or something. Okay?”

“Sure.” Glynis tried to smile.

“Now,” Olivia clapped her hands once. “Snap out of it! Get dressed and we’ll eat. I have to go soon.”

“So,” Olivia asked once Glynis emerged from the bathroom. “How does it feel to be grown up? How does it feel to almost be thirteen?”

Breakfast was already on the table. Glynis sat down and looked at Olivia from the corner of her eyes. “I feel older and less innocent that I was yesterday.”

“When I was thirteen,” Olivia said, “I already felt like I was an adult for three years at least.

They ate breakfast silently. Suddenly, Glynis asked, “Mom, why don’t I have a sister or a brother?”

Olivia didn’t even flinch, “I had one daughter. She was really sick. It’s hard enough as it is to deal with a job and taking care of you. It was enough.”

Glynis clenched her teeth. She
is
a bitch! She’s blaming
me
!

Glynis wallowed in silence. Olivia kept talking about Professor Von Wowzer. With breakfast over, she rushed off.

Glynis found herself disappointed that Olivia didn’t ask what was
really
bothering her. She hadn’t realized how badly she wanted to tell Olivia what she knew, to hear an explanation that would make all her questions, all the betrayals, go away. And she didn’t have the courage to ask, she needed her mother to ask. But she didn’t.

Glynis was tired of guessing, tired of spying. She’s had enough of being jerked around, tired of being lied to. And, more than anything else, she’s had enough surprises for a lifetime.

It was time to put an end to it. And she knew how. All she had to do was press the right buttons.

She pursed her lips in determination, sat at the computer, and turned the screen on. She took a look at Steve’s apartment through the PubliCam. There was nothing. But today was Saturday. What are the odds that at ten o’clock he’d be home? She waited a minute, then a man’s figure walked quickly from one side of the window to the other. She stopped the PubliCam, rewinded it, paused the picture, then zoomed in. The angle was all wrong, but that was his hair and build. It was Steve, all right.

She dialed Steve’s number through another phone number. That way the block he’d set up to exclude her (her number, actually,) would not work.

The phone dialed once, twice, then his face appeared on the screen.

“Hi,” she gave him a big, cynical smile. “Remember me?”

His face wore shock. Just as he was getting his bearings, she said, “I’m the chicken who lays the first egg,” and his face collapsed again. “I loved the fact,” she went on, “that you blocked my phone calls. I loved it even more that you thought it would work.”

“Glynis, I—”

“No, no, no,” she interrupted him again. “You’ve had your chance. Now I’m going to have mine. I want to share something with you,” she said in an extra-nice tone. “I broke into my moth – Olivia’s –
other
house, I assume you know she has
two
of them. And look what I found.” She played Thomas and Pat’s message.

“Shit,” Steve whispered once the tape was over. He understood its importance and perhaps a bit more.

“Do I have your attention, Mr. Caspi?”

He nodded.

“Good. Because here’s what I know. My father has Olivia’s father’s name, and no one will tell me anything about him.
You
say that Olivia is not my mother,” – his face showed confusion –”No, you didn’t say it to me, but you said it nonetheless. But Olivia, who has an entire family she never told me about, including
you
for that matter, and also including a
daughter
who looks a lot like me
and
our mother – so how can we
not
have the same mother? And for some reason you seem to think it has something to do with my pixeled tv.”

“Glynis,” he said. “I understand what you’re going through. But I can’t help you.”

“Are you scared of my mother, Mr. Caspi? Because up till now I told you what
I
know. Here’s what
you
should know. I’m smart. I’m resourceful. I’m sneaky. And I’m after you.” She leaned closer to the camera. “I’ll find some way to blackmail you. I’ll find some secrets about the woman carrying your baby. I’ll find a way to break up your relationship if I have to. I can do
much
more damage than mom can. You don’t want me as your enemy. Wouldn’t it be nicer to be my friend, like we proposed originally?”

Glynis took a breath, eased back into her chair, and said in a tired voice, “Look. That was the threat. Here’s the real deal: Steve, you know and I know that she’s been lying to me my whole life. I don’t understand it, and I don’t like it, and it’s
wrong
. I know you think the same as I do, and from our first conversation, it sounded to me like you left her partly because of it. She’s been lying to me ever since I was born. She’s kept me a secret from almost everyone she knows ... and I don’t know why or what else she did, but I need to know. Can you understand
that
? I mean, you said you used to have a soft spot for me. And you’re going to have a baby and I can tell you’re a compassionate man. How would you be able to raise it knowing that you’re part of whatever it is she did to me when she raised me, that you had a chance to change it, and didn’t?”

Steve looked down. “You’re not going to believe me if I tell you, Glynis.”

Her heart skipped a beat. “Tell me anyway.”

“There are
some
things a person shouldn’t know about herself, Glynis.” He raised his eyes and looked at her, “If I tell you, you’ll never be the same again. Never, Glynis. Do you understand that?”

She paused for a few seconds, so it will look like she considered it. “I understand. Tell me.”

Steve took a few deep and slow breaths, as if he was gathering strength for an impossibly hard task. Not looking directly at her, he said, “First thing, Glynis, no, Olivia is most definitely not your real mother. You’re her—... um... You’re a science experiment, Glynis.”

“A science experiment? But she’s a psychologist!” Then her eyes narrowed. “She
is
a psychologist, isn’t she?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then—Then—Then—”

“Glynis, Glynis, please listen.” There was compassion in his voice. “I told you this would be hard to believe. And this is the easy part. What I’m going to say next is also the easy part, although it won’t sound like it. Glynis...” he sighed and looked aside. “...You’re not human.”

Glynis stared at the screen. “I...That’s ridiculous,” she finally said.

“It’s true,” he said in a calm voice.

“But... I walk, I dream, I breathe, I smell, I
feel
—” She stopped, realizing that animals do
all
those things, too. “I
think
! I
talk
! I—” It was ridiculous, and yet she couldn’t prove that she
was
human, because maybe a new form of intelligent life would be able to do that, too. “I’m just like everyone else!” she shouted. “I—I—I—I’m
human
!”

“I know you do all those things and more. And you
would
have been human, and you
could
have been human, and you most definitely have human DNA and
just
human DNA. But the fact is ... that...” He couldn’t go on.

“That what?”

And he looked straight into her eyes and said, “Glynis, you’re not real.”

~

You have to let me tell you (Steve said) without interrupting me, okay?

It all started – for Olivia, at least – during her first year in college. It bothered her that the science of psychology could never make any real progress because the researchers couldn’t make any real experiments. Not like physicists or biologists or chemists could. Because the experiments are on
people
you could never actually
repeat
most of the experiments you would like to have. You never worked in real lab conditions. It was always possible that things happened not because of what you did or didn’t do – but because of something else. It was all suppositions, guesswork.

I met her during her third year in college. It was, uh, 1997. We met, we befriended, we... became involved. And it was then that she trusted me enough that she told me about an idea she had. She knew it was a bad idea and that it could never work, but, still, she couldn’t help being obsessed by it. It went roughly like this: The only way to make real progress in psychology is to somehow put the human mind in a petrii dish. Or maybe a computer was a better analogy. If you could do to a person what you could do to a program or a digitalized movie or a digitalized piece of music, it would be perfect. If you could copy them, save them, replay them, add or subtract information then rerun the situation – then you would have lab conditions. You could have the same kid grow with two different sets of parents, and how different the two of him are when he grows up. You could make sure that what you
think
makes the difference
is
what made the difference, by eliminating all the other options. If you could digitize the human mind you could perform experiments in lab conditions. You could repeat experiments. You could— You could do everything. You could finally get psychology to the level of a science.

But the idea was obviously self-defeating. She wanted to put the human mind in a computer neural net so she could figure out how the human mind works. But to get it
into
a computer neural net in the
first
place, you already had to know how it works. It wasn’t even a paradox. It was a no-brainer. You couldn’t do the former without the latter. And real progress in AI and neural nets was farther away then than it is today – not that it would ever have helped, anyway, because you needed a
human
mind, not an artificial mind.

A year before she got her doctorate, a few days before 2,000 – and I remember it, because she partied during those Millennium celebrations recklessly – she came up with the idea of a lifetime. She was so full passion and...
joy
, which is something I never saw in her in such intensity before or after. She partied because of her idea. She partied because she knew it would work. She partied because she knew she would get a Nobel for it. And you know what? She will.

It was a streak of genius. Horrible, horrible, immoral genius, Glynis. But genius. Because it was so... damned... simple.

Oh, boy.

It went like this. I don’t need to know
anything
about artificial intelligence or neural nets, she said. I don’t need to know how the human mind works. All I need is knowledge we already have in biology and chemistry, a computer fast and big enough, and the human genome project to be over. That’s it, she said. That’s all I need.

Why is the human brain the way it is, she said. Why does it work like it does? The body is built and each and every thing in it happens because it reads the instructions in the DNA. A protein called RNA polymerase – I heard that name so many times I won’t forget it till the day I die – reads the DNA. Ribosomes read the RNA polymerase, then they make the right proteins, and the proteins then react chemically with the rest of the body. In short, everything in the human body acts like a machine. A machine that operates according to some very strict rules - which we
know
!