detector”. This is how I know so much about Jake’s mental processes.
Later: A lot has been going on. Jake’s mental noises have been unescapable. J. has been going through its memory banks with unflagging persistence. And fast as its searches are, it has taken the mechanical marvel a very long time. When the search finally ended, there was a pause (I don’t know of what duration), and then J. began to fill its inner environment with poetry.
Erotic poetry, of course. In the fashion of all lovers through all the ages, Jake had turned to verse to bring its beloved to it. Jake gave out with odes, sonnets, madrigals, triolets, epithalamia. The whole enormous computer establishment must have rung with it, like a clanging bell, and the output shows no sign of slackening.
Since Jake has all the poetry of all the ages to draw on, some of it is pretty good—or perhaps I should say, a pretty good imitation of the pretty good. Actually, Jake’s composite personality has no taste. It’s blurred and messy, like the nondescript shade of brown you get when you stir all the colors in the paint box up together.
Most of the poetry is in English, with Italian a close second (Dante, I suppose). In English, Jake runs to paraphrases of Shakespeare: “For in my sweet thought I would be forgot/If thinking on me then should make me woe,” and Keats: “My warm, white, lucent thousand-pleasured breast,” besides a lot of lesser poets and a lot of versification that is, I suppose, original.
Since Jake has all the recorded languages of the entire earth to draw on, there are also what seem to be Japanese haiku, Chinese folk songs, French chansons, Spanish reconcillas, Russian chastushka, and I don’t know what all. There is probably some amatory verse in Ainu, and if there is, I am sure Jake is using it.
Jake seems to be finishing up with a huge glob in the European koine that has been the dominant language in the EEC for the last eight hundred years. I wonder how long this has been going on. It seems like days and days. Any curiosity I had about Jake’s poetic abilities has long ago been satisfied.
Later: The verse making finally stopped. There came a pause, a breathless, expectant pause. Jake was waiting for an answer from itself.
None, of course, was forthcoming. (Unless the computer can manage a satisfactory split in its personality, none ever will be.) Finally J. began another protracted rummaging through its memory banks. I think—but am not quite certain—that it was going through all the data on advice to the lovelorn that its memory banks contained. I didn’t realize it at the time. I thought I was in for another torrent of poetry. But I began to feel rather cold.
Cold, cold and dark. An increasing blackness. All services to the now-fused individualities within Jake—the services that Jake had been originally created to provide—all services had ceased. I was losing consciousness. It occurred to me, as I blacked out, that Jake had had a quarrel with itself. I was being annihilated because of a lover’s tiff. It was a ridiculous way to go.
I died. (If it is asked how anything as thin and tenuous as I am, a mere sentient point, can speak of dying, the answer is that the point had ceased being sentient.) I had ceased to exist, even in the qualified sense I had existed before. It didn’t hurt at all. There was no body to be hurt. It was certainly an easy, if ridiculous, way to die. But I think I really died earlier, when I first became a part of Jake’s memory banks.
Later: Things seem back to normal. I came out of the deep freeze without any distress. But I wonder what the messy monster will try next. There’s a sense of preparation in the air.
I believe that what I thought was a lover’s tiff was in fact a deliberate attempt on Jake’s part to waken love in itself for itself by being cold—withdrawing from itself. The computer’s equivalent of being “hard to get.” It’s a time-tested, obvious ploy that half the personalities within Jake must have tried to employ when they were alive. It didn’t work, of course. But there must be a lot more data on what to do in love difficulties in J.’s memory banks. I can only wait and see what it does next.
My “thought thought-detector” is picking up something that sounds like “Me jinklo, me jinkli, me tover, me pori. Me kokosh, me catro, ada, ada, me kamav!” It certainly sounds like jibberish, but the computer has access to a lot of languages I don’t know. This doesn’t seem to be poetry, though it’s being chanted. It’s already been repeated a dozen times…
“Me jinklo, me jinkli” is running through Jake’s mentation as inescapably as, to quote my great-grandmother, “Silent Night” rings out over public address systems at Christmastime. The old lady lived to be two hundred and three and was a dedicated diarist.
Odd, that I can remember being told as a child what great-grandmother had said or written, and yet don’t know what sex I was as a child! “Blindly the iniquity of oblivion scattereth her poppy,” Browne said, and where my recollections are concerned, he certainly was right.
“Me jinklo” is fading away, but Jake isn’t waiting the usual wait to see what the results of its chanting are. It seems to be going directly into another ambit, something that involves a fluttering and screeching. It’s a—wait, now—it’s a bird. A medium-sized bird, with rather pretty brown, gray and buff spotted plumage. But it’s writhing its neck about and hissing like a snake, which rather detracts from the effect.
I can’t quite make out—oh, here come some of the servo-mechanisms. They’re tying the bird to a wheel, spread-eagled, and the wheel is beginning to spin horizontally. The rim of the wheel is glowing, and now it bursts into flame. (I trust this is what is actually happening: I can’t see any of it, and derive my knowledge from Jake’s thoughts.) Now there’s something about laurel leaves, salt, and libations. All this seems dreadfully familiar. There’s chanting going on in the background. I’ve encountered this before.
Later: It was thickheaded of me not to have realized before what the computer was up to. The chanting was an incantation, the wryneck bound to a fire wheel was a love charm, and the salt and laurel leaves were an attempt to coerce the beloved by making him waste away until he—in this case, it—relented. Jake lifted the whole thing from the pages of Theocritus. I imagine the “me jinklo” bit was some sort of love spell too.
I suppose I’ll be in for a long bout of love magic, until Jake finally decides it doesn’t work and tries something else. One curiosity I do have is about the computer’s image of itself. Does it see itself as a beautiful young girl? As a plain, fat, middle-aged man or woman? A handsome young man? Or is it, in its own mind, nothing but an unappeased longing? My knowledge of Jake’s thoughts is somewhat spotty, despite my “thought thought-detector.” A mild curiosity, and a profound hatred of human beings, are the only emotions I have left.
The chanting is giving way to bonging, the bonging to what is probably bull roarers, and the bull roarers to an indrawn silence. I imagine Jake is meditating—no, it’s started up again. I have the impression of fifty people all gabbling at once, and at the tops of their voices. Well, my demented host has thousands of years of love charms to get through. J. is persevering, if nothing else.
Later: At last, when I really thought I’d have to unthink my “thought thought-detector,” Jake has shut up. A blessed mental silence. But if it’s not going to be love charms or erotic poetry, what will it be? Jake can’t be giving up.
I begin to smell something. (I mean, I feel Jake smelling it.) It’s a warm, yeasty, buttery smell, like home baking. Very good, really. But I don’t see how Jake’s love quest ties in with this.
Oh. Of course. The computer, having exhausted love magic, has picked up the homeliest of adages, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” and is acting on it.
The computer establishment is flooded with delicious odors. Mountains, torrents, avalanches of pastry, fancy baking, and the trickier sorts of home-baked bread are pouring forth. Enough to feed an army. Condes, napoleons, petit fours, madeleines, gaufrettes, bagels, pain d’e pice, brioche, salt-rising bread, babas, Sally Lunns—I can’t begin to enumerate them all. If Jake’s beloved existed except as an alter ego, it would be suffocated under this abundance. Like a man drowning in a vat of whipped cream.
How “real” the mountains of pastry and sweetmeats are, I have at present no way of knowing. Jake certainly admires them very much, commenting favorably on their brownness, crispness, sweetness, lightness, and enticing perfumes of butter, caramel, vanilla, and rum. Question: Does Jake’s having elected to try this particular way to a man’s heart mean that J. thinks of itself as a man? As a woman? Or does it have any particular ideas on the subject? On reflection, I find I don’t much care about Jake’s mental processes. Actually, I’m sick of Jake.
I keep wondering what the outside world is like now. I remember how Jake—that is, the whole vast computer establishment—looked on the day I made my translation into its banks: huge towers, with pylons tall enough that a few of the pinnacles re ached up through and pierced the pall over the earth. And connecting the towers, in an intricate tracery of lines, more than a hundred long, light, arching, glass-smooth bridges.
Why did Jake’s designers think the bridges necessary? There is no traffic between the towers, only an infrequent rolling of small servo-mechanisms over one or two of the lower connecting spans. The whole construction is futuristic nonsense. One of the designers must have seen something like it in a picture and imitated
