Semmant (6 page)

The metronome, however, kept on living its life – confirming Semmant was also living his, probably more satiated than mine. Sometimes the arrow moved slowly, counting out ponderous intervals; sometimes it flew like mad, as if it had an adrenaline rush. I was burning with curiosity, but entering the Holy of Holies was forbidden. The only thing left was to wait – I killed time by looking for a suitable face for the robot. This was intriguing on its own; I trawled through the Net, picking out reproductions of diverse eras and styles. Portraits, portraits… I would copy them into a special place and gaze at them for hours, imagining Semmant as a haughty man of fashion; or as a youth, vulnerable and dreamy; perhaps as a hermit attired as a drug-store clerk; or a messiah with a crazy spark in his eye. It was like playing peek-a-boo with the absurd, jesting with white lies. I would kid myself and go back to waiting patiently.

I remember: he came to life for real on a Friday, close to evening. There was a long weekend ahead; I had just brought food and drinks from the supermarket to stock up, and carefully arranged everything on the shelves. Then, uncapping a bottle of Pilsner, I went to the computer – and froze up.

The screen was no longer blank; a person was there looking at me with a bright, electric lamp in place of a head. His nervous fingers stiffened impatiently; he needed a confidant and a witness, or else an instructor, a guide. His pose betrayed a habit of deciding for many, but now he was clearly at a crossroads. He was full of doubts, much as I once was. He almost merged with the background – brown on brown, an imperceptible suit… All the same, the lamp burned so brightly it hurt my eyes. A thousand watts, no less – and this said a lot about him, if not all.

I looked on, standing there, setting my forgotten beer to the side. Before me was something strange, impossible to describe. A mechanism of the finest force, a congealed whirlwind, the highest grade of freedom. I alone decided with what to fill the empty brain, and I was free to choose whatever popped into my head. He could become the most authoritative expert – in any field, immersed in its very depths. He was capable of absorbing to the last byte everything that humanity knew about ferns or horses, tornadoes and typhoons, seas, volcanoes… Or I could direct him to something all-encompassing, eternal. Let it even be ordinary – how easy it would be to imagine him as a counselor or judge, an incorruptible arbitrator in uncompromising disputes. Or, maybe, everyone could receive letter after letter from him: he could devise a new life for each person; and, honestly, they themselves would hardly know how to choose better. This would be a convenient method for dumping everything on someone else’s shoulders – better than calling in vain to indifferent gods who never write anything to anyone. Even more, I could fill him with all sorts of rubbish, disordered and scattered at first glance. Who knows how he might make sense of it, what strange correlations he might uncover, what brilliant thoughts, phrases, words he might produce? But, no matter. That’s not how it will be. It will be according to the plan I had from the start – only according to it, and that’s what’s right!

My lips stretched into a grin, tears came to my eyes. Premonitions, presentiments crowded into my head. I was envisioning the rudiments of perfection but was not thinking of perfection – not even the slightest hint of it. Rather, I was tormented by my own limitations; at that instant I felt them especially sharply. My frailty, the shortness of human life, and, in contrast, him, the robot – why could he not be eternal?

Yes, at that moment I proudly presumed the recipe for eternity was here, right before my eyes. It was nearly within my grasp; I needed only exert myself a little more, think it over, understand something else. In the glow of the thousand-watt lamp, I saw the birth of a new era – one without envy or petty hubris. There would be no bragging and no begging, no use of cunning to no avail, no audacious lies. The new creatures would sacrifice all they could, not demanding anything in return.

“Look!” I whispered out loud, though there was no one to hear. “Take a look! He’s powerful, yet he’s truly selfless. He shall learn much and become like you – but how unlike you he will become! How many light years he will outdistance you in his objectives; how firm he will be, how sure, how strong!”

“He will not torture the others with his weaknesses – no, he possesses different traits. He won’t give in to the illusion that you so stubbornly value: the illusion of being needed by someone, of being close to someone, the illusion of love. Without it you are alone and unhappy, but, really, you aren’t capable of love. Only its shadow rustles her wings for you to hear as it’s carried away, taunting, in plain sight; and you – you are frightened and jump aside. It is fearful, fearful to venture – but I don’t blame you, I see how tough your life is. You traded everything for your piggish pleasures, and now you are confused, lost, and pitiful. And your descendants, they’re just the same. You like to think that salvation is in them, but things only turn worse. The circle closes in, and life passes even quicker than before.”

“Yet here, behold, there is an escape from the impasse! There is an emissary from a new world; he will break the vicious cycle! His dissimilarity to the familiar may scare you at first; he may seem too different, alien, cold. But, otherwise, you would not believe in him, ever. What was too essentially human already discredited itself and its essence. One has only a single chance to deceive – and it has already been spent, this chance. That’s why a new face is needed – and hope will be born from the ashes. There, you see, even living molecules may suddenly change a little. The letters of the universal code will compose themselves in threes in a slightly unusual way. And then immortality may loom on the horizon – albeit far, far in the distance…”

I felt like I was floating above the floor. At that moment, I probably really was ill. A flood of madness washed over me, a cloud of ether, an opium wave. I don’t know how much time elapsed before I regained consciousness and turned toward the computer. My hands shook, my shirt was drenched in sweat, but that meant nothing. The man in brown with the lamp in place of a head kept watching me from the screen, obediently awaiting a command or a sign. The man that was not a man. The robot. Semmant.

I cursed myself for being idle. For delaying and running in place. Then I pulled the chair over, sat at the keyboard, and copied the file that had been prepared long ago into the special folder. It contained the first, utterly simple, exercise. The portrait window diminished in size, then blinked and disappeared. I understood he understood as well: enough initial excitement. To work, to work. The task was at hand.

Chapter 7

T
he next morning we got down to work for real. The metronome in the corner prodded me, setting the rhythm. Sometimes it seemed too fast, but I knew it wasn’t for me to judge. In due course, I provided Semmant with megabytes of data from electronic archives and then scoured them again and again. As soon as the arrow on the metronome slowed down, a special trigger hastened to signal the processing was finished, the input channel was empty. A melodious warble resounded through the apartment – there was not a minute to spare. Wherever it found me, I would rush to the desk and copy the next files. As I did this, I imagined the funnel of a volcano or a gigantic meat grinder; and there he was, an insatiable beast…

Fortunately, there were enough facts to feed him endlessly. The world gathered up and openly kept mountains of information about its nature, about battling the most secret forces, continental shifts, the migration of the oceans. Oceans of everything that thirsts, upon which spears and teeth are broken, for which they fight without rules and betray without batting an eye.

Data about market behavior over many decades had been stored carefully, like the dearest of riches. It all went to Semmant – sorted and collated, broken into groups by month and year. They were not just numbers; a simple digit doesn’t have the power to convey enough depth. Who better than me to know their limited essence – albeit their calibrated, immaculate precision? But precision was not enough; depth was required in all dimensions; moods, flavors, and colors were needed. I knew well: the main thing was at the core – and I didn’t hold back as I sifted through layer upon layer. Day after day, all I did was tirelessly rework details. I built bridges and established connections, adding, writing, matching the one to the other – so the robot could dig as deeply as possible, would experience everything seriously, without losing one iota.

Red, hot blood pulsed in the data he was assimilating. There diamonds sparkled, gold metal shone; dollars, francs, and yen shuffled. Convulsive currency charts linked up with diagrams of wheat prices; government bonds joined rice and soy, nickel and silver, platinum and crude oil. A background was needed for the points and lines, and I did not spare the paints. Multicolored specks of droughts and hurricanes, epidemics and local wars, shaded the angular strokes, which resembled the cardiogram of a paranoiac. The aged voices of ministers, influential and hopelessly deceitful, broke through the chaos of other sounds for a brief moment. They were replaced by panic sirens, the desperate wail of smoke detectors, the shouts of the unfortunate in crumpled trains, shattered cars, buildings leveled to the ground by a powerful explosive charge. But soon all was muffled by the din of innumerable stock exchanges – trading in everything and derivatives of everything, derivatives of derivatives, and so on, infinitely. Behind their price quotes stood a dense wall of legions, armies, and cohorts. Everywhere could be seen: the mad eyes of brokers; the predatory glances of bankers; the faces of presidents and directors – doglike and piggish; their assistants and secretaries – dolled up, false; and more – long secretary legs, their short skirts, lusty hips… The prospects expanded into the distance, and it was joyless there, in the distance. Drear and ennui ruled there, unification carried to absurdity. Offices, conveyers, petty little people. Row upon row of identical cubicles. Millions, millions of figures – with no faces at all. With no distinguishing marks, no voice, and no gender.

I saw them all without embellishment, and he, Semmant, saw them just the same. The picture might not be pretty, but no one promised it would be pleasing to the eye. This was also not promised us, at the School – neither to me, nor Anthony, nor dozens of others. Nor Dee Wilhelmbaum, who had thrown himself from a bridge when no one came to listen to his music. Nor little Sonya, who fled from her “cubicle” to the dream world, whence there is no return – though her cubicle wasn’t really cramped: it took up an entire building. Nor me, though I was doing fine. I beg your pardon, that’s not a good example. And we are not talking about me anyway.

Thomas the ski instructor had lucked out more than everyone. It’s funny he used to be a financier. But not all find easy roads. Semmant, for example, was not made for them; I just wanted to shorten his path to knowledge, to understanding unadorned truth. Facts were provided to him in all forms, in all their varied ugliness. I was guiding my robot through the big picture, through the whole framework from top to bottom – and, at a close look, this framework was most bizarre, suspiciously pyramidal, but turned upside down. Of course, there were naked statistics in abundance as well, which also concealed much. Cost of living, credit volumes, rates of inflation – and debts, debts! Debt instruments deserved special consideration; there were so many of them for every taste. They were distributed by governments and banks, firms and corporations, states and cities, technology giants and commodity holdings. All wanted to live on credit – frequently hoping they would never have to repay it.

The usual world looked boring by comparison. A cheap, simplified sketch, a soap opera and nothing more. A pasture, bare or rich at various times, where goats and sheep graze with ruddy boys and girls to shepherd them. They wander, without suspecting that above them hangs a huge, unsteady weight – above their destinies, their humble jobs, mortgaged houses and cars, colleges for their kids. It was clear: the framework would fail sooner or later – all of it, or a notable part thereof. It had more than once already, yet the shaky pyramid was built each time anew. And it would flip over again; all the mass of the base would fall down – and immense confusion would cloud all levels!

I was looking at the very top: disarray was there, empty promises and cheat upon cheat, wolf dens covered with brushwood and needles. Of course, not just wolves were trapped in them, and even the wolves could not figure out where to tread and what to avoid. It was as if no one wanted precision and order; there were only a few guards, reminiscent of Cerberus the hellhound, to judge who was who, and who deserved admission to the bazaar of easy capital. Agencies assigning ranks, the creators of ratings and major fraud – I dispassionately observed them, made appraisals, and lined them up against each other. I compared and averaged, adding the digitized opinions of market analysts who trailed behind. Taken together, they represented a cardboard front, the adornment of a castle that was utterly vacant. They saved the public from seeing the vanity and filth obscured by the numbers, from smelling the inevitable stench, hearing the insane noise. The frantic realities of life were left outside the parentheses, beyond the walls. Alongside it they dumped the usual corporate garbage: dirty laundry and fights for power, day in and day out. Social eruptions and the movements of millions were transformed into mere handfuls of percentage points. This was the boldest of abstractions, too ambitious in my view – but I wasn’t concerned with others’ mistakes. I used it – or more precisely, I exploited the fact it is used by many. By those whose money, sooner or later, must end up with Semmant.

I went into the deep past on the time scale. Various periods passed before my eyes. Peace and serenity; after that, a gold rush; its very peak and the sudden shock, the unchecked slide downward to a fall and crash. Then, malaise, detritus at the bottom of the ocean, deep depression descending on one and all. The periodicity and similarity were amusing. Every emerging boom began exactly the same way. A few visionaries chased a muddy wave, others followed them, each in his own swamp – and soon the whole world was raving in unison. New companies grew like mushrooms; the bubble would inflate, iridescent and huge, blown by a giant toy frog. The bubble waited for the hour of the needle, and many saw it clear as day, yet they believed it wouldn’t burst – not ever, or at least not soon. Hubris and envy dominated the world – the hubris of those who made out, and the envy of losers who came late and now, with a twisted smirk, tried to determine whether they could still jump on the train as it was pulling away. Women, driving their price to the moon, loved the former, while the latter issued forth bile, even though they had enough to live comfortably. They poisoned their own blood and became restless, became mad…

The pictures changed, not offering much diversity. I saw
nouveaux riches
in expensive suits and their fidgety, troublemaking wives; the huge stones on fat fingers; obliging lackeys and wily advisors. Herds of young maidens clicked their stiletto heels, shook their silicone breasts, rapaciously stretched out manicured claws. None wanted to lose their chance. The flywheel unwound faster and faster – it seemed the whole planet was already bathed in flames fueled by banknotes and gold coins. And when the last failed broker was ready to believe the fun would last forever, when he made a foolish bet with the wild hope he would finally get lucky, then suddenly events would occur that were imperceptible at first glance. A few smart ones would flee from any risk right here, go underground, dig in deep, while the ship continued to run into the very eye of the storm, and only in the midst of ten-meter waves would the passengers understand the party had come to an end. The rest is well known: panic, women’s screams, fights for the lifeboats. The recession would escalate quickly as all went downhill. The culprits would be sought here and there. They would be found and shamefully exposed, but that didn’t make it better for anyone.

The
nouveaux riches
would go under or turn poor. Yesterday’s rich would tuck in their tails, dump their mistresses, and reflect upon things eternal – during long evenings when the family turned away from them too, as if they had already lost forever. Little was left: cheap brandy in the office – in solitude, in heavy meditation – thoughts of impending death, loathing toward all. The stock exchanges would turn into epicenters of universal grief. On the roofs of banks that touched the sky, shades wandered, looking downward, struggling against the desire to jump to the asphalt – or else giving in to it. The most cautious and timid, those who had been ridiculed only a month before, had now become prophets. Their colleagues hung on every word, sadly comprehending at the same moment: nothing could help them now…

Greed, brief euphoria, and inevitable payoff – this and much more I translated into the language of dry numbers. All the components of success and failure were embodied in formal structures. Some things, of course, could not be expressed in digits, so I tried to be as clever as possible, turning to pictures, symbols, signs – not even certain Semmant would understand me. At times, in despair, I simply shoved pages of random text at him, hoping in my heart he would catch at least something, even a small gist.

I thought he would again demand more external memory, but no, this did not happen. The level of his inquiries became notably higher. He started to acquire his own personal “facilities” – I bought him decoders and converters, statistical and mathematical packages, image recognizers and data processing systems. Judging by the metronome, he was laboring at full strength – without resting; indeed, without any pause. Sometimes I would take a look at the code structure. There, as before, everything changed – every day, if not every hour – according to completely incomprehensible rules. I noticed only that he was transferring fragments of his “brain” from disk to disk, from one place to another, complicating the mosaic, altering all connections. This was a good sign, the right developmental process. Obviously, he was building his own picture of the world, his abstraction of everything else – at least so I wanted to think. Just one thing bothered me: I realized the medium in which my robot lived was too inconstant and scattered. I could not grasp its static condition; nor could I make a copy of him, even the most basic backup – to preserve him, to save him in the event of an unforeseen disaster. This did not quite match the concept of eternity I had in my head, but I decided I would think up something later.

That Semmant was becoming “smarter” there could be no doubt. His initial insatiability, when he was demanding more and more, was replaced by thoughtful selectiveness, precise penetration to the depths. If before he had requested only “data,” sometimes specifying just a rough time interval, presently, he was interested in specifics – down to the price of particular stocks on the Taiwan exchange some fifty-six weeks ago. Many questions now had me stumped; I didn’t understand what he wanted. Sometimes it angered me he asked for, apparently, the very same thing – and I looked for differences in quasi-similar formulations. Then I would find them and become amazed: this was so simple, why didn’t I see it straightaway?

Shortly thereafter, Semmant began to change his appearance. With each subsequent question, as a rule, I was greeted by a new face. Of course, these were merely reproductions of the ones I had prepared beforehand, but the selection was large, and the effect was frequently odd. Mainly, he preferred Magritte – though he never appeared again as a man with a thousand-watt lamp on his shoulders. I tried to understand the logic behind his incarnations, searching for relationships here and there. Mostly, I came up with nothing, though it occasionally seemed I could guess his “mood,” and it even coincided with mine. The notion appeared too bold; I brushed it aside and again concentrated on the most boring of matters – bonds, futures, credit rates. Yet, now and then, I winked at the next portrait, the fruit of someone’s ingenious brush, which peered in reply from the screen indifferently enough.

Soon the time came when the stream of questions practically dried up. The warble of the trigger sensitively following the process would still sound several times a day, but when I ran to the computer, I would find nothing there but a meaningless “Okay.” However, I held out, as I knew there was nothing worse than rushing his newborn mind. He also seemed to idle and wait, keeping the same picture on the screen. A sad lion peered out from it into the distance, while behind him stood a person I knew – in black, not brown, without a lamp face anymore, but with the back of his head pointing forward instead of his face. He had wings on his shoulders, also black in color, but he resembled not so much an angel as a suicide target. At least, that was how it seemed to me.