'The computer did.'
'The computer?'
Gray shrugged. 'Would you like a drink?'
Laura wasn't very much of a drinker. 'Vodka tonic,' she replied, sinking back into the thick cushions and slumping low.
Gray busied himself at the bar. 'About a week ago,' Gray said as he stirred the ice with a tinkling sound, 'the computer told me it wasn't feeling well. Then, about three days ago, it said it wanted to talk to someone.' Gray handed Laura the cool glass, and she took a gulp of the tart liquid. 'I asked who, and it gave me your name.' He sat and took a sip of his own drink.
'I see.' She was almost afraid to ask. 'So what do you think' — she nodded toward his desk—'about my paper?'
'Like I said, it's very interesting. The writing is a little rough, but you're very close to the mark.'
'Wait a minute! What do you mean a little rough? I've never published a sloppy paper in my entire life!' Gray seemed surprised by her outburst, and Laura took a deep breath to calm herself.
He got up and walked over to his desk. 'It's the substance that counts. I have an engineer in my space design bureau who couldn't write his name in the sand with a stick, but put him on a…' He handed her the sheaf of papers.
Circled near the bottom of the first page was a typographical error. The word 'anosognosia' was improperly spelled 'anosognesia.'
But it wasn't her last and highly controversial presentation to the Houston AI Symposium, or any of her other published papers.
It was a draft of an unpublished paper that only she had seen.
'Where the hell did you get this?' Laura snapped, waving it angrily in the air before him.
Gray looked confused. 'I assumed it was one of your recent publications.'
'I haven't published this! I've never even shown it to anyone!' Her jaw dropped. 'You got it off my computer at Harvard. You stole this?'
Gray slumped in his chair and gazed down at the drink he cradled now in both hands. He seemed deeply troubled. 'Yes,' he said in a distant voice.
She stared back at him — incredulous. 'That all you have to say?' she practically shouted. 'You, who says how much you value privacy?'
'Laura,' Gray said calmly, 'we have a major problem on our hands. I'm losing control of the computer. It starting to… to act independently.'
'Wait. Do you mean to tell me it was the computer who stole my paper? That you had nothing to do with it? That it found this,' she said, raising the paper again, 'and then picked me to come down here?' Gray just frowned. 'Why? Why would it do such a thing?'
'The answer's obvious. The paper is brilliant, even if your conclusion misses the mark.'
'Yeah, well… don't be so damn sure about that flattering conclusion.' She was seething, but the word 'brilliant' ran [garbled] in her ears.
'I'm fairly certain about the conclusion,' he said without malice. 'But regardless, the thinking is original. It's a true advance, and it's not often you can say that about what comes out of your people.'
Her head shot up. 'And which 'people' is that?'
'Academics.'
She opened her mouth to argue, but the thought of Paul Burns churning out drivel on his way to tenure made her hesitate. She nevertheless sank back into the sofa, shaking her head at his incredible arrogance.
'The computer wants to believe what you say in that paper,' Gray said, his tone growing more pained. 'It would help the computer resolve certain personal… dilemmas if what you say is true. Let me see if I can paraphrase the points you make.'
'Oh sure! Go ahead. I'm sure you can boil it all down to a single sentence and then knock the stuffing out of it.'
'You believe,' he began, ignoring her barb, 'that there is no significance to the thing we call our 'self. ' That we concoct selves just like spiders spin webs and beavers build dams. We don't know why we do it. We don't even realize that's what we're doing. But we create this artificial concept of being a distinct 'self' because those humans who were so 'selfish' as to value their own lives above others' fared better in the game of natural selection than those who were more 'selfless.' They passed down their egocentricity, which we have come to refer to as individualism.'
He had summed up her paper perfectly, and it infuriated her.
'That's an oversimplification!'
'Well, all of that is the part you've gotten right.'
His comment threw her, and she didn't know what to say next. 'So… what? Are you saying you agree with me?'
'With that part, yes.'
'But that's all the [missing].'
'Not exactly. There's an underlying criticism of the process you so accurately described. You continually belittle the effort by referring to it as 'merely' constructing a self, or a self being 'only' an artificial construct. The paper is replete with examples of your personal philosophy.'
Laura's mouth dropped open. 'Oh, I see! I have a 'personal philosophy,' and it's my personal philosophy that's all wrong!' Gray nodded.
'O-o-oh!' Laura burst out, slapping her hands down on her thighs in aggravation. She grabbed her drink and walked over to the bookshelves to face away from the offensive man.
'You asked me what I thought.'
Laura took another gulp of her drink, then said, 'So, just what is my personal philosophy?'
'I call it communalism.'
Laura spun to face him, laughing despite her anger. 'I get it! I'm a card-carrying 'communalist'? I suppose there's one behind every [garbled]. We communalists are bent on global domination, you know.'
Gray was smiling. 'I don't know why I'm here. I'm sorry, Mr. Gray, if your computer misled you into hiring me — a communalist. I'll be happy to return your money because we communalists think property is theft, you know.'
Gray laughed loudly. 'Have a seat,' he said, and Laura felt a wave of fatigue wash over her as the alcohol began to take effect.
She returned to the sofa and sank heavily into the plush leather.
'Would you like another drink?'
'I don't know. It kind of depends on whether you're through ridiculing my beliefs.'
Gray rose and held out his hand. She emptied her glass and gave it to him. He continued his dissertation from the bar. 'Philosophy, ideology, politics, religion — they're all interrelated. So are family, science, sex, power. Practically everything is connected to a greater or lesser extent. You've hit the right mark with all that. But where you go wrong is on page forty-two, third paragraph.'
Laura quickly opened the paper and found the page. 'You say there,' Gray continued, 'that 'A self is only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses.''
She found the words, exactly as Gray had quoted them. 'I know what you know about a myriad of things. From the definition of anosognosia to the words of the national anthem, we share a common knowledge domain. But your perspective on that shared, communal knowledge varies from mine because we occupy slightly different relative positions in the social web.'
Her head was lowered, and the fire popped in the suddenly silent room. 'Go on,' she said.
'That's where you make your mistake. It's very subtle, but it's so fundamental as to render your conclusion invalid. You see people as 'mere' positions in the social web. What we know and believe are only components of the all-important society of which we're a part. We're just a link in the continuum that is modified subtly with each passing generation of an ever-evolving culture.' He spoke rapidly — preaching with deeply felt conviction. 'When one of us dies, the culture doesn't die, it lives on. When we discover or invent something, it's just the gradual accretion of knowledge by the culture. We've built up a cult of the individual. We've based everything from religion to
