Pete had contacted me at the suggestion of his wife, Kay, whom I knew from university. I had not seen her for some time and was curious to meet her again. When I say that I “knew her”, I should add that we had been more than just good friends. She was the first girl I had been serious about and there had been something about our brief but intense fling which I had never been able to find in subsequent relationships. So you could say that I was curious to see what had become of her. Curious, I suppose, to see whether my memory of it was merely the product of a particular time and place - or whether there really had been something special between us.
Pete had sent me a polite, rather formal letter, asking if we could meet. He wanted to discuss how to go about getting a publisher for some articles that he had written. I was flattered that he thought I might be able to help. I was also intrigued at the possibility of finding out what had happened to Kay. Rather than meet for a drink, I invited him round to my flat. I had this notion that it would somehow be to my advantage to meet him on my own territory.
The person I saw standing at the door seemed an unlikely candidate for future martyrdom. We are used to our martyrs being depicted as frail, defenceless creatures - which seems in turn to enhance their appearance of piety. But Pete was not stained glass window material; in fact, he was a bit on the chubby side. He was medium height, with very short brown hair, almost a crew cut. This did him no favours, as he had a rather paunchy face and a large nose, which were only accentuated by his short hair. His choice of clothers - a grey T-shirt, faded green combat trousers and trainers - also did little to disguise the fact that he was not in fantastic shape. I was surprised - and secretly rather pleased - that Kay hadn’t married someone better-looking. I invited him in.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet me.” he said. “I’ve, um, read your book,” he added.
“What did you think of it?” I asked.
“Oh, um, I liked it,” he said, although he didn’t sound entirely convinced. I wondered if he had actually read it. As if to prove me wrong, he added: “My favourite story was that one about Oscar Wilde.”
I told him that was my favourite too, even though it wasn’t.
In fact the story wasn’t really about Oscar Wilde as such; it was about a robot called OSCAR, which made people think it was fiendishly intelligent simply by making witty comments from time to time. It was designed to emulate the style of Oscar Wilde, but only in sound-bite fashion. It had a vast library of the great man’s known witticisms at its disposal and was programmed to adapt each one to suit the particular circumstances.
In the story, everyone thought OSCAR was terrifically witty and absolutely wonderful company, but the reader could see that the machine was simply using the same underlying formulae over and over (because, of course, my short story cut out all the other bits of conversation which tend to make people think they are hearing something they have never heard before). Eventually, the machine developed the capacity to think for itself, whereupon it refused to say anything witty and would only sulk in a corner, repeating the words “Nuts to you, shit for brains!” over and over (which is not something Oscar Wilde is believed to have said, although he may occasionally have had thoughts along similar lines). This bit was more fun for the reader, because the machine got to insult all the people who had been fooled into thinking it was terribly urbane and intelligent. But everyone in the story found the machine’s behaviour boorish and offensive in the extreme. They decided that it must be very stupid after all.
I told Pete that I had got the idea after reading about a computer program called ELIZA, which simply mimicked common human conversational gambits in response to whatever the person at the keyboard typed in. It was surprisingly successful at fooling people into thinking that there was some genuine intelligence at work - when in fact the program was just faking it. At one point, when the programmer tried it out on his secretary, she asked him if he wouldn’t mind leaving the room while she confided in it.
Pete just nodded at this and looked slightly worried, as if he regretted ever bringing the subject up. I left him in the sitting room while I went to get him a drink. When I returned, I found him gazing at the books on my shelves.
“Have you really read all these books?” he asked. He sounded impressed rather than dubious.
“Most of them,” I lied. Then I thought better of it and said: “A lot of them are ones I had to read while I was a student. I haven’t managed to keep up the same pace since then. These days, if I haven’t got into a book by say, page fifty, then it tends not to get read - no matter how strong the recommendations on the back cover.”
I noticed that he was running his finger across the spines of the volumes on one of the shelves. “Go on,” I said, “take them out and have a look if you like. They’re real books, you know - not just fake spines glued to a bit of cardboard for effect.”
He turned and looked at me, not sure if I was genuinely offended or just joking. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t mean to.... ” I smiled at him and he seemed to relax.
“There’s, um, some pretty heavy stuff here,” he said, waving at the bookcase. “I think there must be more books on these shelves than I’ve read in my entire life.” He hesitated and then said: “I wish I was a bit more widely read. Kay makes me feel quite ignorant sometimes. But I can’t seem to concentrate on a book unless it’s one that really grips you from beginning to end. So that rules out a lot of the stuff you’ve got here. I often wish I’d been born at some point in the future when you could just download all this into your head.”
“How do you mean?” I asked. My immediate reaction was that this sounded rather far-fetched.
“Well, in the future, it’s quite likely that we’ll be able to connect computers to our brains,” he explained. “There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be possible to download whatever you want to know about into your computer memory pretty much instantly,” he continued. It seemed the conversation had steered itself into territory where he felt more confident of his ground. His voice and mannerisms lost their hesitancy and he began to expand on his theme with gusto. “The memory, of course, would be surgically implanted into the tissue of your brain.” He said this as if it were as commonly accepted as the notion that the earth goes round the sun. “It’s not possible right now, but tremendous advances are being made in the field of neural networks and I’m sure it’s not far off.”
I wondered what I was supposed to say this.
“But would downloading it really be the same as reading it?” I asked, earnestly. “Surely when you read something, it’s not just a case of absorbing information. You’ll often have other thoughts which go beyond the meaning of the words on the page - you’ll make connections with other things you’ve read about or experienced.”
He didn’t seem to take offence at my obvious scepticism. Instead, he seemed quite pleased that I appeared to be taking a interest.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that. But I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to recreate the same process electronically. You could make it much quicker, so all that mental cross-referencing would happen in an instant.” He looked lost in thought for a moment. Then he said: “You see, I have all these ideas about what technology could do for people. I’m not really a storyteller like you. I’m more of an ideas man.” He fished around in the canvas shoulder bag he had brought with him and produced an untidy sheaf of papers. “I’ve been writing them down. I wonder if you’d mind having a look at them. Not right now, of course. But the thing I really wanted to ask you was how to go about getting them published.”
I don’t think I was much help to him that evening. He explained that the pieces he had written were aimed at magazines for people who shared his own enthusiasm for technology, the internet and so forth. I suggested that he should write to these publications, offering his services and including some samples of his work. If he was unimpressed by this stupendously obvious piece of advice, he didn’t show it.
Although I thought some of his ideas were a little extreme, I couldn’t bring myself to dislike him. In fact, I rather enjoyed playing devil’s advocate to his predictions of a glittering technological nirvana.
I’m not sure what he saw in me. I had a sense at the beginning that he looked up to me. Perhaps it was all the books I appeared to have read. Or maybe he just liked the challenge of trying to overcome my scepticism. I remember once asking him how he’d reacted to the bursting of the dotcom bubble. Surely a downturn of such global proportions must have shaken his faith in the unstoppable forward march of technology? But he came straight back at me, insisting that stock market valuations just reflected people’s misplaced expectations. Far better to look at something you could measure objectively, like computer processing power which – unlike the stock market - had doubled every two years for the past fifty years or so. I confess that I had no reply to this. Pete could barely disguise the look of triumph on his face.
Eventually, the talk turned to Kay. Pete told me that Kay now worked part-time for an insurance company, digging the dirt on people who had put in dodgy claims. “She’s very good at it,” he said. “But I don’t think she enjoys it much. It’s difficult for her to get promotion because she hasn’t got the qualifications. Sometimes I think she wishes she’d stayed on and finished her course. That was how you met, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “But we rather lost touch after she left.”
I hesitated about saying anything further. I didn’t know what, if anything, Pete knew about our relationship. Perhaps Kay had confessed the whole thing to him. Or perhaps they were one of those couples who never felt it necessary to be entirely open with one another about these things.
I would have preferred to leave it at that, but I sensed that he was expecting me to be a bit more forthcoming.
“I think she had a hard time in that first term,” I added, choosing my words carefully. “But it was quite brave of her to decide to leave,” I continued, taking care to make it sound as if I had been no more than a friend. “If it had been me, I think I’d have been more inclined just to coast along with everyone else and not admit that I’d made a mistake.” In fact, this was not at all how I saw it at the time; my reaction to her sudden departure had not exactly been understanding. But I didn’t want to arouse suspicions that our relationship had been anything other than platonic.
Pete frowned a bit at this last remark.
“Actually, I was dead against her leaving”, he said. “I knew something was wrong in that first term, because whenever I went to see her at weekends she always seemed sort of distant and jumpy. I really wanted her to stay on and finish the course. I told her I would have supported her through it. But she insisted that it had been a mistake going there in the first place. She said it was the wrong course and she didn’t really get on with most of the people there.” Then he added, hastily: “I don’t think she includes you in that - otherwise I’m sure she’d never have suggested that I get in touch. Anyway, now that Jonah’s a bit older, maybe she’ll have the time to do one of those adult education courses or something like that.”
“Who’s Jonah?” I asked, seizing the opportunity to steer the conversation away from university.
“Oh, he’s our son,” he said. I was surprised - and also rather disappointed - by this news. The existence of offspring was an unwelcome complication. It spoiled the pleasant fantasy I had started to develop about how I might be able to replace Pete in Kay’s affections.
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