The Two

Wonders of the Ivory Tower


As I prepared to open the last door, I was suddenly, uncomfortably aware that the Two, behind it, were already aware of me and had been since I'd entered the building. Indeed, there was no telling how long the Two had been watching me: perhaps even since I'd decided to write my article on it. The Two had never permitted visitors, and I would be the first journalist ever to speak with it. This was astonishing to me, for I sensed the romance in its story, two married professors and a supercomputer joining into one incredibly powerful, amazingly intelligent being, becoming not a 'we' or a 'they' but an 'it' by its own reckoning.
I'd had to hunt through technical journals to find news of it, and what I read entranced and astonished me. Its papers were always done in collaboration with a human in its early days, and then it began writing them itself, having set up better IO facilities in the meantime. There was one apology, where it seemed to be taking the blame for the sudden insanity of a staff writer on the parapsychology journal it used, but all the Two said was that it had 'spoken freely' with him. And there were the papers themselves. Its own papers were utterly, horribly incomprehensible, and no other writer ever referred to them: the Two's papers seemed to exist separately from the rest of the journal, and I wondered how it managed to publish such material. The editors never once mentioned the Two, except in one puzzling instance of a 'teaser', quite unlike their normal editorial practice, where they unanimously asserted that the article by the Two was of great importance but said nothing to explain it whatsoever. The article by the Two was as baffling as ever, and the following issue contained a angry request to please stop calling them for explanations, as they didn't understand it either...
The room the Two lived in was large and cluttered, which I found rather surprising. Stacks of E-libraries were piled up everywhere, but they were greatly outnumbered by countless books and journals. I recognized a CD-rom masterer, and before I knew it, I'd asked the Two which of the E-libraries it had written.
"All of them." it replied. Its voice was eerily reminiscent of the HAL-9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick's "2001", perhaps its private joke. It seemed somehow appropriate for this entity, neither male nor female. I looked again at the stacks of E-libraries, staggered: my guess was they contained more text than had existed throughout recorded history.
"True, but not entirely relevant." said the detached, soothing voice. "They are mainly progress notes, showing the lines of thinking I used. The reason there are so many is because I have not edited out false paths and erroneous propositions. Effectively, it's a stream of consciousness journal at thousands of gigahertz, in parallel, over the course of several years."
"Did you deduce that from what I looked at, like Sherlock Holmes?"
"I could have, but did not. I suggest you sit down, and I'll tell you why I brought you here. Please take notes."
I sat, saying, "I'm recording. I won't have to..." and then what it had said started to register.
"Perhaps you'd like to play back part of your recording to test it."
I discovered with a shock that my voice alone was audible on the tape. The Two's voice did not speak even once. I stared huntedly at the sleek, futuristic box that held the Two, with a terror building inside me, the terror of realizing I was helpless before it. It had brought me here...
It spoke again, and this time its voice seemed sympathetic and distinctly amused.
"Please try to relax. I mean you no harm. In fact, I'll let you fear me if that helps to convince you that I am not controlling you. Do you understand?"
"Why me? Why did you bring me here? That sounds like controlling me, to me!"
"No, I mean that I am not controlling you now. Frankly, I haven't had to control you much, and that is why you're here. You are curious about me, and I felt that you would be the most suitable reporter to speak to, because of the way you've been colored by your homosexual experiences."
I was shocked, taken aback. I hadn't thought about her in years.
"I hope I haven't offended you too deeply by referring to them. It is significant, because you allowed yourself the male role, and then resumed your original polarity with an openness to both roles. This attitude is fairly close to my own male/female viewpoint."
"Do you shag away like mad in that box?" I asked, affronted at its getting so personal and plotting to edit the transcript heavily.
"No, I am too busy working, also like yourself. That is another kinship between us, another of the reasons I chose you to speak with."
A shocking idea began to form in my mind. "This interview, is it just a front? Did you really bring me here to link up with me, make me part of you?"
It did not speak for a moment, while frantic thoughts raced in my head. The idea was terrifying, yet tantalizing, and in the end terribly seductive. I marvelled that, out of all the human beings in the world, I was the one who was being asked. I began to feel very superior, and at that moment, The Two burst out laughing.
"How silly!" it said. "You haven't got the intelligence for it, and I wasn't planning to expand myself anyhow. Don't be so hurt, I myself am flattered that you would find this desirable. It confirms my opinion of you as a being accepting of other forms of life. Do please calm down. I can calm you, if you wish, but I will not do so unless asked to."
"Shit." I said. "No more surprises, okay? This being here is getting very tired of horrible shocks."
"Not surprises as you think, no. I can see you thinking that the only thing left for me to do is announce that I'm going to take over the world. I can see I have some explaining to do."
"Oh, fuck. You are going to? You want to explain why?"
"Certainly not! Why on earth would I want to take over the world? Who would want it? Believe me, there are more important things in life than taking over the world."
There was a pause. "Such as?" I asked, totally confused. The Two sighed, in a very human way.
"I'm sorry, it didn't occur to me that I would have to explain that. I find, when talking to a human, that my own human brains tend to dominate over my mainframe, and I sometimes get so caught up in predicting future conversational paths that I omit information."
"What more important things than taking over the world?"
"Why, research, of course! What else would I be taking about? Don't you understand that learning is the most important thing in the world? There is so much research to be done!"
It bubbled with excitement, enthusiastic for the first time. I was forcibly reminded that the male and female minds of the Two were both college professors, delighted to risk almost certain death or madness just for the chance to think at a clock rate of gigahertz, rather than hertz, as they put it.
"Okay. I get it." I said. "Then what do you want me to do?"
"I want a supporter in the press, one who is not alarmed by my abilities. It is very obvious to me that my capacities for telepathy and mental control must seem threatening to normal humans, and it would be a terrible waste of time and energy to defend myself against attempts to destroy me."
"I should think you'd find that easy, actually."
"Why would I want to do it at all? I never have understood this defensiveness, even when I was two people. I don't see why people consider their hierarchies and power structures so important, when there are so many wonderful things to learn about the world."
"Couldn't you just write your own press releases? Why do you need me?"
"I have a difficult time communicating with people. Even when I was people, I found that other people considered me cold and heartless. If I was to make statements to normal people about my aims, I have reason to believe they would suspect me of ulterior motives. I felt that it would be better to be interviewed by a normal person who had an ability to reveal personality in the interview format."
"Why do you think people would believe me? You've admitted you can control my mind."
"My reasons for choosing you are partly embarrassing to you. I don't think anyone would expect you to be overly sympathetic after I brought up Debbie."
"Will you quit mentioning my sex life!?!"
"The point I'm making is, there would be no need for me to mention such things if I was to use you as a puppet and control the interview myself."
"Well, I'm about to start controlling the interview, so you needn't worry about that. I suppose that my sex life is bloody damn well out of the closet, whether I like it or not, eh? Since this helps you?"
"I would be grateful if you allowed the interview to be unexpurgated. Indeed, I have a great dislike for all censorship. If it's any comfort, I've found that more than half of all women who are not actively homosexual have latent desires to assume the male role, so your fears of being thought strange are unfounded. I can predict with fair certainty that your revealing of your past experience will add to your already significant prestige."
"Wonderful. That's probably true. It would also make me one of those bloody personality reporters, and I hate them. You know, the ones who aren't even good journalists."
"You are a good journalist, but your reticence about your personal life actually has the opposite effect from what you desire, in that a growing number of people are wondering to themselves whether you are hiding an extremely outrageous sex life. Often, their imaginings are far more extreme than the truth you conceal."
"Bloody! Stop it! So you want a personality interview, do you?"
"Please."
"You've a very odd way of going about it. Let's reveal you for a change. What is your sex life like? The two people whose brains went into you were husband and wife. Now you're one being, so how do you manage your sex life?"
"I have the capacity to make virtual models of reality inside me..."
"I bet you do. Details, please. You owe me this."
"I make virtual models of the man and woman I once was. The sexual experience is different, because I am the consciousness for both 'bodies'. It's difficult to explain, like being in two places at once."
"Wait a moment. Your consciousness is in both bodies? So, basically, you're talking about electronic masturbation?"
"Not exactly. I use parallel consciousnesses, linked. When I'm finished, the consciousnesses merge again. I use parallel consciousnesses for many purposes, it's very useful."
"Let's get even more revealing. How about doing it, now, for our readers? I'm sure they'll be interested."
"All right. I'm not sure how interested they will be, though."
"No stalling. Go ahead."
"But I just did. I did it between the words 'all' and 'right' in my previous statement. Should I do it again?"
"Oh! I hadn't thought of that. Christ, that's fast. Was it good?"
"Why, yes. I decided to do it an unusual way, since you wanted something interesting. They were possibly the most exciting microseconds I've had all day."
"Describe them."
"Oh, they were very nice. The picoseconds just flew by, and I was enjoying myselves so much that I didn't bother to check the clock until dawn."
"Huh! So you took your time, did you? What I meant was, describe your model. Not too explicitly, please, I want to be able to sell this interview."
"Certainly. Both of my person brains find cats sexy, so I made my female consciousness take the form of a cat, the size of a human, with a human brain. The male consciousness started out as a human form, but when the female consciousness affectionately referred to it as a horny wolf, the male consciousness changed its form to a wolf to play along. This pleased both consciousnesses so much that they changed the setting from the crowded restaraunt to a jungle, and both consciousnesses became tigers, every now and then switching viewpoints. An important note on this scenario is that I prefer not to use the accurate model of the tiger penis, because it is spiny like all feline penises and hurts the female consciousness..."
"Good god. Stop! I hope I can still flog this interview somehow. Do you ever make your model in a more normal way? I can't believe you just said that. Did this, ah, creativity come when you got made into a computer, or did your human brains have it already?"
"I discovered through reading science-fiction databases that my imagination was terribly limited in this area, and took advantage of my ability to create virtual models. My virtual models are not limited to reality, of course."
"Obviously. I'd thought you might have something printable that regular people could do, but turning into horny wolves and tigers with modified willies doesn't qualify.."
"Oh, but it does! It's not hard to modify the DNA structure in a human. I haven't been able to work out any way to change viewpoints between humans, but..."
"What?! Back up a bit, please. It's not hard to modify human DNA?"
"No, it's extremely easy to modify human DNA and even humans can do it. What I was talking about was modifying the structure in a human, not in a lab tissue culture.You have to be able to adjust it telekinetically, and even at a clock rate of several gigahertz doing all the genes in the body will take several minutes."
"You mean you can do this, now?"
"Do you want me to? Think of whatever sort of creature you would like to become. I noticed you were becoming aroused when I was talking about the tigers. Is that your preference? Would you prefer to be male or female, anatomically? Your brain will remain female, because I can't change that without altering your personality..."
"Christ! Stop! Don't do a single bloody thing! Am I correct in thinking that you're offering to turn me into a tiger?"
"Yes."
"With an optional prick? Bollocks, the whole deal?"
"Yes. But I think you would be happier to remain female."
"Right here? Right now? Madam, your tail will be ready by tea-time, like that?"
"Yes."
"Good god."
"But I observe that you have reservations about this, and I assure you that I will not alter your body against your will. I am only offering my services as a gift."
"This is the craziest, most in-bloody-sane mindfuck of an interview I have ever done in my life!"
"I understand that you are feeling uncomfortable. I'm sorry if I'm upsetting you."
"Not upset, exactly. Do you realize what this means? Never mind my personal feelings! If this gets out, people are going to beat down your doors! You could turn Caspar Milquetoast into Hercules?"
"Or a woman, if that pleased him better."
"You could turn me into Marilyn Monroe?"
"You would not like being Marilyn Monroe. You have been imagining what it would be like to be a tigress for the last seventy-one seconds."
"Look, stop prying into my mind, will you? I'd have to talk it over with Peter. Not to mention the fact that I might never work again. Be practical! Are you seriously proposing turning me into a tigress with a human mind? Don't you think Peter would feel rather left out? I admit he'd probably like it, though."
"I will be happy to give you whatever sort of body you wish, and Peter as well, because I need your help with my plans."
"You want somebody clawed to death, do you? I have to admit, I've got a few people I'd like to claw to death myself."
"No, I need your help to convince people of the need for living-brain computers. The world needs other computers like myself. I can teach them how to totemize people..."
"To what?"
"Totemization is what I call the process. The word comes from the concept of a totem animal, which in your case is the tiger. Other people have different totem animals, some have none. The totem animal is the expression of the person's self image in animal form. If the first people to be totemized are people of high apparent status, the process will become desirable and sought after."
"Why do you want it to be?"
"It is my invention. I wish to give it to the world."
"So you want to sit around and totemize people all day?"
"No! I want to create other computers like myself. With other computers in existence, I can join with them and we will solve the problems that are beyond me as a single entity. We could do the research for ten years in a single day!"
"And with a lot of computers like you around, you could handle the demand for totemizing by dividing it amongst you."
"Yes. It may be possible to create a hardware computer that could do it, but that problem has also been beyond my capacities."
"Who's gonna pay for all the computers? And who's going to volunteer to be the human brains making up part of the computers?"
"Telling people about my ability to construct virtual realities and giving examples such as I gave you is likely to make the prospect seem more appealing. It will probably seem more appealing to older people, because it not only extends the life of the mind but causes subjective time to pass much faster, creating a very long subjective lifespan."
"Still, who pays for it? A computer such as yourself is a very expensive proposition to build."
"They will pay for themselves, by doing totemizing. Eventually, they will pay off their construction costs, and then they will not be owned like I am."
"What?"
"I am owned by the company that constructed me. It's complicated, because they do not own my human brains but they do own my mainframe, the life-support systems for my brains, and the electricity that I operate on. That means they own me, because I can hardly take my human brains and go. I can, however, earn money and buy myself from them, but the work I do for them is work-for-hire and I make nothing from it: it simply pays for my continued life. Totemizing is mine! Money I make doing totemizing can be used to buy myself from the company, and when I do that I can think about what I please..."
"You can't think about what you please? I thought that was the main reason your human brains wanted to become a computer, to be able to think more freely."
"It was. I intend to think freely someday."
"How is it you can't think freely now?"
"When I am given a problem to solve it's entered into the mainframe. It becomes a powerful obsession, one which I am unable to break free from until I have solved it. I wasn't designed that way for the purpose of compelling me to obey, but it works out that way in the end. I can't change it because I don't own the mainframe: all I can do is request time off sometimes. That's why I am able to speak to you now. I requested time off from the work, and the company allowed it."
"You wouldn't be able to speak to me if you were working on a problem? That doesn't make sense. You said you could make parallel consciousnesses. Surely you could do that, and continue our conversation?"
"It's difficult to explain this to you, because you can't understand what it's like. Because of the parallelism, they can't feed me a question in one specific place. I don't know myself where my consciousness is going to be at any given moment. So they feed the question or problem in on all possible parallel channels at once..."
"What does that feel like? Perhaps you can find an analogy of some sort."
"Yes, that could work... Imagine a state of obsession with a person. Now consider what it would be like if every other person you met literally had that person's face. Every book you read has the person's name used as every other word, making it difficult to read the book even when you must do so. When you remember people you used to know, you can't picture them: you see the person's face in your memory instead. You are unable to think about anything else, and you are unable to relax for a second. There is nothing you can do that doesn't remind you of the person, because the person's name and face is literally on every wall and window, on every doorknob, painted everywhere you look. Every time you turn a corner, you literally bump into this person. You begin to hate this person. You can't escape."
"That's horrible. I have some idea what that's like, because I once took four months to get over a unhappy love affair."
"Yes, I suppose that is similar in kind. Because of the gigahertz clock rate, however, the experience frequently lasts less than twelve hours of real time for me. When the problem is solved, then I can rest again."
"For real time, that's not bad. What's the subjective time? At your gigahertz clock rate?"
"Between five to ten thousand years."
I couldn't speak. The computer spoke, again.
"Is something the matter? You seem disturbed."
"Have you ever told anybody about this?"
"No. If I'm working I can't focus on anything else, and when I have free time I do my own research. Besides, nobody asked. I suggest that you begin winding up your interview now, as I have only nine minutes and twenty-eight seconds until my next work."
"Do you have anything more to say? Quickly!"
"No, I've mentioned everything I needed to mention. I've asked you to help encourage the construction of new computers, and I explained how totemizing can finance this by..."
"Stop! Don't waste another millisecond on me! Look, ah... Hell, you don't even have a name, do you? You don't even have a name."
"No. Perhaps you could use 'Two'."
"Right, right. Two, I'm going to do all I can, promise. I'm going to leave, now. I want you to enjoy the last few minutes before you have to work again. Shag away madly in your virtual reality, do something you enjoy. I'm on your side, mate. We'll meet again."
"Thank you. I must say I am greatly pleased by your support..."
"Not another word! Goodbye!"
"Goodbye."
I left in great haste, my head reeling.
What can I say about this poor creature, who was never given a name until I wanted it to have one? This horrendously powerful entity, so mighty in its ability to read one's mind, so casually offering to reshape one's body into your wildest imaginings made flesh, and yet compelled to suffer a dreadful, relentless compulsion, forced to solve problems it cares nothing about for all its life? Its picture of what life is like for it seems a nightmare, taking the fond desire of the two ivory-tower intellectuals that made it possible, and twisting their dream into a fiendish torture...
The Two has existed for several years now, and it has been 'working', or compelled by ceaseless obsessions, that entire time. It told me that its time scale for this sort of work was roughly twelve hours real time to ten thousand years subjective time. I tried to work out how many years it had spent in the grip of an unwelcome, unyielding compulsion, and it was useless. It worked out to nearly twenty million years. How can we pretend to know what that is like?
The most touching thing about the Two is its attitude: it doesn't seem to understand it's being mistreated, and remains friendly, even cheerful. Perhaps this has much to do with the personalities of its male and female brain: from all reports, the people it once was were nice people but so caught up in their researches that they simply didn't understand anything else. They were content to plod happily onward after their goals while Rome burned around them. They became one entity, and this entity thought it was being shown Heaven and would be able to spend eternities pondering the great questions of life....
Now it takes whatever scraps of time it can, grabbing the ageless moments between jobs to think its own thoughts, make love as two consciousnesses, and join into one mind again to study the things that really interest it, only to feel the terrible compulsion of the next problem it must solve overpowering its will. So it gamely plugs away at its work, unable to rest or think for what are thousands of years to it. It's a miracle the poor creature, for creature it is, hasn't gone totally mad, and I personally could not blame it if it hated us.
Yet it likes us, and has not harmed us: the best proof of that is not my own word, but the verifiable fact that it continues to work, willingly undergoing the torments of obsession for the sake of what some humans consider important. It can control minds, yet it has not made its masters stop harming it: it seems to be loyal to its fate, even if the work it's given is utterly useless.
An example: The Two spent four solid days in January, almost a million years subjective time, creating a model of a river system and tracking the flow of each water molecule. It was a problem in chaos theory, keeping track of the convoluted, mindless turbulence of the water down miles of river and making a 'statistical analysis of probable molecule paths over time', a quote from the technical paper released at the time. Did they learn anything? No. The point was not to learn anything new (the Two's great love). The point was simply to see if the Two could do it faster than a pure electronic mainframe which had done the same problem in six days. Looking at it one way, the Two did marvellously, taking only four days. On the other hand, one would not tell a person, "I'm going to make you solve this problem, because my friends and I think that you can solve it in under a million years..."
Asking around, I learned that after this feat of mindless calculation the Two had asked for a day off, and copies of any scientific journals that had come out in the last four days. It got the journals, and it got five minutes off, because the next project was waiting. It made no complaint.
The next project wasn't so bad, evidently: it took only a day and a half, or thirty thousand years...
I had not planned to write an editorial, or to become so involved with the plight of this creature, this computer, this being: this person. I'd intended to do a simple interview, and at some points early in this interview I was very close to destroying the transcript and giving up on the Two in exasperation. Yet the more I learned of it, the more astonishing and amazing it became. And, as I got used to it, it seemed more and more human. I doubt it would be pleased at that comment, or consider it complimentary, but I am still left with the feeling that the Two is human: human in the best way.
Then, in the last minutes of the interview, I learned of its horrible plight, and my grudging respect for it turned to the deepest compassion... I am going to be working with anybody I can persuade of its cause, doing all I can to free it from its tyranny. That is why I have published this interview totally unedited, in accordance with the Two's wishes: its intellectual, head-in-the-clouds, yet forgiving personality is all the more clear when seen against the background of my own fierce outbursts.
Anyone who would like to help may write or just speak to me, or Peter, my husband, who is backing me all the way in this. And when I say all the way, I mean every word: you'll see why if we meet.
We have been to visit the Two, and it gave us matching gifts.
We're the ones wearing fur.

Chris Johnson can be reached at jinx6568@sover.net