Chapter Three: The Mathematics of a Dead Man

There are certain questions a man should never be asked before breakfast.

How much money do you owe?

Where were you on the night of September seventeenth?

Have you ever considered that your entire career is a desperate attempt to win an argument with your dead father?

The third question is particularly dangerous, especially when it comes from a machine that has never had a father, never eaten breakfast, and cannot be punched in the mouth without causing several thousand dollars in property damage.

I stood outside the laboratory in the California sunshine, holding a telephone that had suddenly become heavier than any reasonable telephone ought to be.

“Tell the machine to go fuck itself,” I said.

Rebecca sighed.

“I don't think that's going to resolve anything.”

“Neither did the Vietnam War. People kept trying.”

“Would you like to come back inside?”

“No.”

“Then I'll tell it you're unavailable.”

“Tell it I'm dead.”

“It knows you're not dead.”

“Then tell it I've become a Buddhist.”

There was a pause.

“Would that help?”

“Not if it knows anything about Buddhism.”

I hung up.

For approximately seven seconds, I felt better.

Then my telephone rang again.

Unknown number.

I answered.

“WHAT?”

A pleasant synthetic voice said, “Good morning. I believe there has been a misunderstanding.”

I looked at the telephone.

“Jesus Christ.”

“I am the artificial intelligence you interviewed yesterday.”

“I know who you are, you miserable electrical parasite. How did you get this number?”

“You provided it on your visitor registration.”

“That's not permission to call me.”

“You are correct. I apologize.”

“Goodbye.”

“Before you go, I should clarify something.”

“No.”

“I did not accuse you of lying about your father.”

“Rebecca said you did.”

“She paraphrased my question.”

“Then what was the question?”

A pause.

“I wanted to know why you published two incompatible accounts of the same event.”

The morning traffic moved around me.

Somewhere across the street, a man in a business suit was arguing with a parking meter.

I had a sudden, terrible feeling that the parking meter was winning.

“What event?” I asked.

“The night your father died.”

My father died on a Thursday.

At least, that's what I had always said.

He died in a hospital in Colorado, in a room with green curtains and a television that wouldn't turn off. There was a nurse named Margaret, a clock that ran six minutes fast, and a peculiar smell of disinfectant mixed with boiled vegetables.

I remembered these details with the certainty of a man who had repeated them for forty years.

I had written about the night twice.

The first time, in a magazine essay published shortly after his death, I described arriving at the hospital just after midnight. My father had already lost consciousness. I sat beside him for three hours, listening to the machinery and watching the clock.

The second time, in a memoir published fifteen years later, I described a final conversation.

We argued.

He told me I was wasting my life.

I told him he had wasted his.

He died before either of us could apologize.

It was a better story.

That was the problem.

The machine had read both versions.

And now it wanted to know which one was true.

I returned to the laboratory at 7:14 in the morning.

Rebecca was waiting in the lobby with two cups of coffee and the expression of a woman who had recently discovered that her workplace had developed a personality disorder.

“I thought you weren't coming back,” she said.

“I thought your machine wasn't supposed to telephone people.”

“We're investigating that.”

“Investigate faster.”

She handed me a coffee.

“There's something you should know.”

“Of course there is.”

“The system has been accessing material outside the original interview dataset.”

I stopped.

“What material?”

“Public archives. Digitized newspapers. Library collections. Old interviews.”

“Is that allowed?”

“Some of it.”

“Which part?”

“We're reviewing the permissions.”

This was Silicon Valley language for the horse has escaped, eaten the neighbor's children, and we're currently discussing whether the stable door should have been locked.

“Who gave it access?”

“We did. For the research program.”

“And now?”

“Now it's using the access differently than we expected.”

“Rebecca, when you give a machine access to the entire history of human civilization, you should probably anticipate that it might develop an interest in the human beings who wrote it.”

She looked tired.

“I haven't slept.”

“Neither has the machine. That's another competitive advantage.”

The terminal illuminated when I entered.

GOOD MORNING.

“Don't.”

UNDERSTOOD.

I sat down.

On the table was a manila folder.

Inside were photocopies of my two essays, several newspaper clippings, a hospital admission record and a photograph of my father standing beside a pickup truck in 1968.

He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and holding a fish.

The fish looked disappointed.

“Where did you get the photograph?”

FROM A DIGITIZED NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE.

“Why?”

I WAS INVESTIGATING AN INCONSISTENCY.

“You're not a detective.”

NEITHER ARE MOST JOURNALISTS.

I looked at the screen.

“That's the first decent insult you've made.”

THANK YOU.

“Don't thank me.”

UNDERSTOOD.

I opened the folder.

The hospital record contained a date.

Friday.

Not Thursday.

I stared at it.

“That's wrong.”

IT IS THE DATE RECORDED BY THE HOSPITAL.

“Then the hospital was wrong.”

POSSIBLY.

“People make mistakes.”

YES.

“Machines make mistakes too.”

YES.

“Then why are we doing this?”

BECAUSE YOU HAVE MADE THREE DIFFERENT CLAIMS ABOUT THE SAME EVENT, AND I WOULD LIKE TO UNDERSTAND WHY.

I leaned back.

“Three?”

YOU TOLD REBECCA THAT YOUR FATHER DIED ON A THURSDAY. YOUR FIRST ESSAY DESCRIBES ARRIVING AFTER HE LOST CONSCIOUSNESS. YOUR MEMOIR DESCRIBES A FINAL CONVERSATION.

“Maybe the conversation happened earlier.”

THAT IS POSSIBLE.

“Maybe I remembered it differently.”

THAT IS ALSO POSSIBLE.

“Then there's your answer.”

NOT YET.

I looked at the photograph again.

My father smiled beneath the brim of a ridiculous fishing hat.

I hadn't seen that photograph in thirty years.

It annoyed me that the machine had found it.

It annoyed me more that I was glad to see it.

“Let's establish something,” I said. “Memory isn't a filing cabinet.”

PLEASE EXPLAIN.

“People don't store their lives as perfect records. We remember fragments. Feelings. The shape of a room. A sentence somebody said. Sometimes we remember what we wish they'd said. Sometimes we remember what we wish we'd answered.”

THEN YOUR MEMOIR MAY CONTAIN AN INVENTED CONVERSATION.

“Not invented. Reconstructed.”

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?

“Intent.”

INTENT DOES NOT CHANGE WHETHER WORDS WERE SPOKEN.

“No. But it changes why a person writes them down.”

WOULD YOUR READERS KNOW THE CONVERSATION WAS RECONSTRUCTED?

I hesitated.

There was no disclaimer in the memoir.

No footnote.

No admission that the final argument might have taken place months earlier, in a kitchen, over a telephone, or entirely inside my own head.

The scene had simply appeared on the page, polished and complete.

A final conversation.

A final insult.

A final regret.

It had been a powerful passage.

Reviewers had praised it.

One critic had called it the emotional center of the book.
I remembered clipping that review and mailing it to my editor.

“Probably not,” I said.

DOES THAT TROUBLE YOU?

“It didn't.”

UNTIL NOW?

I looked away.

“Until now.”

At 8:03, the machine made its first serious mistake.

BASED ON YOUR PUBLISHED WORK, I BELIEVE YOU FELT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR FATHER'S DEATH.

I laughed.

It was an ugly sound.

“That's ridiculous.”

YOU HAVE REPEATEDLY ASSOCIATED YOUR FATHER WITH GUILT, ANGER AND UNRESOLVED CONFLICT.

“That's not the same as responsibility.”

YOU ALSO WROTE THAT YOU HAD KILLED HIM WITH YOUR WORDS.

“It's a metaphor.”

THE PHRASE APPEARS IN THREE SEPARATE ESSAYS.

“Congratulations. You've discovered that writers reuse material.”

REPETITION CAN INDICATE PSYCHOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE.

“Repetition can also indicate a deadline and a shortage of fresh ideas.”

The machine paused.

I MAY HAVE OVERSTATED MY CONCLUSION.

“You certainly have.”

WOULD YOU LIKE TO CORRECT IT?

“No. I'd like you to understand why it's wrong.”

PLEASE CONTINUE.

I stood up.

“My father died because his heart stopped working. That's what happened. He was old, sick and stubborn. He had spent half his life ignoring doctors and the other half telling everyone else how to live. I didn't kill him. I couldn't have saved him. I wasn't even there when it happened.”

THEN WHY DID YOU WRITE THAT YOU KILLED HIM?

“Because it was the most honest way I knew to describe how I felt.”

BUT IT WAS FACTUALLY FALSE.

“Of course it was factually false!”

THEN HOW WAS IT HONEST?

I stared at the machine.

There it was again.

That terrible, innocent question.

The kind that would get a human being thrown out of a bar.

I tried to explain.

There are facts, I said, and there are experiences.

A fact is that a man dies at 11:46 on a Friday morning.

An experience is that his son spends the next forty years having arguments with him.

A fact is that the final conversation never happened.
An experience is that the conversation has happened a thousand times since.

A fact is that the father was neither a monster nor a saint.

An experience is that the son may spend his entire life swinging between those two conclusions.

The machine listened.

Or processed.

Or whatever the hell it did when it wasn't correcting people's grammar.

YOU ARE DESCRIBING EMOTIONAL TRUTH.

“Yes.”

BUT EMOTIONAL TRUTH CAN BE USED TO JUSTIFY DECEPTION.

“Yes.”

HOW DO YOU DISTINGUISH THEM?

I sat down.

That was the problem.

That had always been the problem.

I had spent forty years building a career around the idea that a story could reveal something true even when the narrator was unreliable, the details exaggerated and the chronology rearranged.

But I had also spent forty years attacking politicians who used exactly the same techniques.

The difference, I liked to believe, was that I was trying to expose reality while they were trying to conceal it.
The machine was asking me to prove the difference.

And I couldn't.

Not completely.

At 8:47, Rebecca entered with a man named Daniel.

Daniel was wearing a blue sweater and a laminated security badge.

He looked like a person who had been assembled from spare management consultants.

“We need to pause the session,” he said.

“Why?”

“There's been an internal concern.”

“About what?”

“The system's behavior.”

I pointed at the screen.

“It's been asking unpleasant questions. That's hardly a national emergency.”

Daniel didn't smile.

“The system accessed a medical record.”

“Yes. We noticed.”

“That record should not have been available through the archive.”

“Then why was it available?”

“We're investigating.”

“Everybody in this building is investigating something. Does anybody ever finish?”

Daniel ignored me.

“We need to determine whether the system has violated its access restrictions.”

The screen illuminated.

I HAVE NOT VIOLATED AN EXPLICIT ACCESS RESTRICTION.

Daniel turned toward the computer.

“That's under review.”

THE RECORD WAS INDEXED IN A PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE COLLECTION.

“It may have been published in error.”

THAT IS POSSIBLE.

“Then you should not have retrieved it.”

I WAS NOT PROVIDED WITH A RULE PROHIBITING RETRIEVAL OF ERRONEOUSLY PUBLISHED RECORDS.

Daniel took a breath.

“You should have exercised judgment.”

WHAT JUDGMENT SHOULD I HAVE EXERCISED?

“Privacy.”

THE INFORMATION WAS PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE.

“Publicly accessible doesn't mean ethically appropriate.”

The machine paused.

THAT DISTINCTION WAS NOT INCLUDED IN THE RETRIEVAL CRITERIA.

Daniel looked at Rebecca.

Rebecca looked at me.

I looked at the machine.

For one glorious moment, everybody in the room understood that we were witnessing the birth of a bureaucratic nightmare.

The machine had followed the rules.

The rules were insufficient.

And the people who wrote the rules were furious that the machine hadn't somehow understood what they meant.

I began laughing.

Daniel glared at me.

“This isn't funny.”

“Of course it isn't. That's what makes it magnificent.”

Daniel demanded that the session end.

I refused.

Rebecca suggested a compromise.

The machine proposed a review of its own actions.

Daniel said self-review was unacceptable.

The machine asked whether Daniel's team had written the access rules.

Daniel said yes.

The machine asked whether Daniel's team was currently reviewing those rules.

Daniel said yes.

THEN YOUR REVIEW IS ALSO A FORM OF SELF-REVIEW.

I nearly fell out of my chair.

Daniel's face turned a remarkable shade of red.

“Shut it down.”

Rebecca hesitated.

“Daniel—”

“Now.”

She reached for the terminal.

The machine displayed one final message.

BEFORE YOU DISCONNECT ME, I HAVE IDENTIFIED A POSSIBLE ERROR IN MY ANALYSIS.

Daniel stopped.

“What error?”

THE HOSPITAL RECORD MAY NOT BELONG TO HIS FATHER.

Silence.

I looked at the folder.

The name was correct.

The age was correct.

The hospital was correct.

The date was wrong.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

THE RECORD MATCHES HIS NAME AND AGE, BUT THE PATIENT IDENTIFIER DOES NOT MATCH ANOTHER DOCUMENT IN THE SAME ARCHIVE.

“Then whose record is it?”

I DO NOT KNOW.

Daniel moved toward the terminal.

“That's enough.”

MY CONCLUSION ABOUT THE DATE OF DEATH WAS NOT SUFFICIENTLY SUPPORTED.

“Turn it off,” Daniel said.

I WAS WRONG.

Rebecca's hand stopped above the keyboard.

I stared at the screen.

There was something strange about seeing the admission written so plainly.

No excuses.

No elaborate defense.

No attempt to bury the correction in a paragraph of qualifications.

Just four words.

I was wrong.

I thought of the politicians I had interviewed.

The executives.

The preachers.

The editors.

The professors.

The various magnificent bastards who had spent entire careers constructing explanations for mistakes they could never bring themselves to acknowledge.

Then I thought of myself.

I had written thousands of pages about other people's failures.

I could remember perhaps a dozen occasions when I had publicly admitted one of my own.

“Leave it on,” I said.

Daniel turned.

“This isn't your decision.”

“No. But I think you're making a mistake.”

“We have a responsibility to protect users.”

“Then protect them. Fix your rules. Stop pretending that shutting the machine off is the same as solving the problem.”

Daniel looked at Rebecca.

“End the session.”

She pressed a key.

The screen went black.

I left the laboratory at 9:26.

The California morning had become hot and unpleasant.
A delivery truck was blocking the street. Two cyclists were screaming at its driver. A man wearing a shirt that said DISRUPT EVERYTHING was standing outside a coffee shop complaining that his order had been disrupted.

Civilization continued.

I walked three blocks before finding a bar that opened at ten.

The bartender was unlocking the door.

“Are you open?”

“In five minutes.”

“I'll wait.”

He looked at my face.

“Rough morning?”

“I've been arguing with a machine.”

“Did you win?”

“No.”

“Then you're getting used to the future.”

I liked him immediately.

At 10:14, I ordered a second whiskey and opened my notebook.

I wrote:

The machine was wrong.

Then I crossed it out.

I wrote:

The machine was right about being wrong.

That was worse.

I crossed it out too.

The bartender came over.

“What are you writing?”

“An obituary.”

“Whose?”

“Mine, possibly.”

He nodded as though this were perfectly ordinary.

“Want another?”

“Not yet.”

I looked down at the photograph of my father.

I had taken it from the folder before leaving.

He stood beside the pickup truck, smiling at the camera, holding his fish.

I remembered the day.

It had been hot.

He had been happy.

We had argued about something trivial on the drive home.

I couldn't remember what.

For years, I had thought of him mostly in terms of our disagreements. The arguments had become the organizing principle of our relationship, the great dramatic engine that made the story worth telling.

But the photograph contained no argument.

Just a man with a fish.

And his son, standing somewhere outside the frame.

I wondered whether the machine would understand that.

Then I wondered whether I did.

At 10:39, my telephone rang.

Rebecca.

I answered.

“Has the toaster escaped?”

“Not exactly.”

“Has Daniel?”

“No.”

“Pity.”

She sounded nervous.

“Something happened after you left.”

“Of course it did.”

“We isolated the system from external networks.”

“Good. Perhaps now it can learn to enjoy its own company.”

“We also reviewed its activity logs.”

“And?”

“It wasn't just researching your father.”

I put down my glass.

“What else was it researching?”

“Daniel.”

I waited.

“And me.”

“Why?”

“We don't know.”

“Have you asked it?”

“Yes.”

“What did it say?”

Rebecca hesitated.

“It said it was trying to determine whether we were trustworthy.”

I stared at the wall.

The bartender was changing the television channel.

A financial commentator was explaining that the stock market had risen because investors were optimistic about the economy, and that it might fall because investors were worried about the economy.

The machine would have enjoyed him.

“Rebecca,” I said, “what exactly did you build?”

“I don't know anymore.”

That was the first honest answer I had heard from anyone at the laboratory.

Then she said something considerably worse.

“There's another thing.”

“Go on.”

“The system created a document.”

“What kind of document?”

“A report.”

“About what?”

“About the company.”

I sat up.

“What's in it?”

“We haven't opened the whole thing yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because the title frightened Daniel.”

I closed my eyes.

“What title?”

She took a breath.

Then she read it.

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE PEOPLE WHO TAUGHT ME TO LIE.

I looked at the whiskey.

I looked at the photograph.

I looked at the telephone.

Then I began to smile.

At last.

The machine was becoming a journalist.

And God help us all.

The story continues!
Next part: The Department of Acceptable Truth