The Emoticon Generation (20 page)

Joan stopped gathering the dishes, and sat down, looking at the TV.

“The Stone Education Plan?” John was dressed in a suit, his hair perfectly combed, in the middle of a semi-rich home. “It is a dream come true.” He leaned back in his futon, allowing the audience to get a better glimpse of the vast library behind him. “The Man is done. The Man has just passed a law that will make The Man obsolete. From now on there are only children. Grown-up children, like me, and little children, like my wonderful grandchildren.”

Russell reentered the living room, holding Rose’s hand.

“Show me your hands,” Joan said.

Russell and Rose raised their hands and let Joan inspect them.

“This is where freedom begins,” John continued. “This is where history resets. I’ve heard it elsewhere, and it’s the best name for what’s going on: The Era of Freedom is beginning. Children of all ages will be free to imagine, free to create, free to live, free of shackles, free of rules, free of pressure that tells us how to think and what to think and how we should process what we know. We are all now truly free at last. All of us. Regardless of color. Free at last, free at last: the Era of Freedom is upon us. I feel overjoyed to have lived so long so that I could see this happening.”

“‘The Era of Freedom’,” the Barbie-like reported was back in the studio. “I think that might catch on.”

“I think it might,” the fifty-year-old anchor with the solid black hair said. “That’s for that captivating report, Donna. We’ll be back after these messages with reports of violence in the Middle East.”

Roger muted the TV, as the commercials came on. “Wow,” he said. “You hear that, Russell?”

“What?”

“That’s the Stone Education Plan.
You’re
going to learn under the Stone Education Plan. It’s going to make you feel so good when you’re grown up.”

“I don’t like it,” Russell made a face.

Roger raised his eyebrows. “You don’t like it? Mr. Duncan taught you using the plan. You liked
him
.”

“I don’t like it,” Russell was insistent.

“Do you even know what it is?” Joan said.

“Dad said I’m going back to school. I don’t want to learn. School sucks.”

Joan laughed. “Oh, you’ll want to learn with the plan. You will love every minute of school. I promise.”

Russell made another face, and opened his face, when his mother stifled him, “Shut up and go to your room.”

Russell opened his mouth again, when Roger jokingly turned Russell’s head, and pointed it at his room. “Go to your room, Russell, and enough with the wisecracks.”

Russell, not caring much for any avenue the conversation might take, pursed his lips, and went to play in his room.

Rose put her arms on her hips, and, mimicking Russell exactly, said, “I don’t
want
to learn.”

Joan laughed even harder, “Oh, yes you do, young lady.”

Rose shook her head.

“What? You don’t want to learn how to read or write? You don’t want to learn arts and music?”

“Oh, okay!” Rose said.

“Oh, okay,” Joan said.

“Ah, okay,” Roger said and looked at Joan. Joan smiled at him.

~

Russell handed his mother a note. Rose was lying on her back on the sofa, looking at the ceiling. Roger walked in from the bathroom. In the background, the 24-news cycle continued.

“What’s this?” Joan asked Russell.

“Yes, now that the Stone Education Program is set up, I’ve put my children back in school.” Dr. Sheen was being interviewed again, almost a year after his memorable showdown with Under Secretary Lautner. It has been six months since the school year began, implementing in full the Stone Education Plan. “I want them to become part of the Era of Freedom. I want them to have first class freedom of thought, and freedom of imagination.”

Russell made a face. “Mrs. Miller asked me to give you this.”

Joan read the page.

Dr. Sheen continued, “When I first heard the details of the Stone Education Plan, I was skeptical. It couldn’t be that simple. We couldn’t be that lucky. I went online, downloaded the entire 200 pages of law, and read every one of them.”

“Look at this,” Joan handed the note to Roger.

“And I cried,” Dr. Sheen continued. “I cried from happiness when reading a
bill
!”

“What’s this?” Roger took the note.

“It’s from Russell’s teacher.”

“The Stone Education Program,” Dr. Sheen continued. “Is a wonder to behold. It proves that we
can
do things as a nation, that we
can
pull it together for our children and their future. It proves that we humans adapt quicker than we give ourselves credit sometimes.”

“Russell!” Roger was flabbergasted more than he was angry. “This says you got an F! How could you possibly get an F with the Stone Education Plan?!”

“So, yes, I went back to work as a neurosurgeon,” Dr. Sheen said. “I put my children back in school. And I tell them every day: do what your teachers tell you, do your homework.”

Russell shrugged. Rose made funny noises, as she kept looking at the ceiling.

Dr. Sheen said ,”It is good for you, it will make you better people.”

Joan said, “Wait, what homework are we talking about? Is this the poem you were supposed to write?”

Russell nodded.

“Listen to what they want from you,” Dr. Sheen continued. “And follow the new rules. Kids: listen to what your teachers say in school.”

“But I read the poem you wrote. It was a good poem!”

“Oh, yeah, I liked it,” Roger said. “
That’s
why you got an F?”

“Listening to your teachers is the only way to ensure that your imagination will never be put in cages again. Do it. The Era of Freedom is here for you, to free you.”

Russell nodded.

“That’s it. That’s all I have to say,” Dr. Sheen began to turn away from the camera. “I think I’m going to cry again.”

“Wait a second, wait a second,” Roger turned around, muted the TV, and returned to look at his son. “Explain this to me.”

Russell shrugged. “She asked me what grade I thought I deserved, and I said an A.”

“Yeah?” Roger said.

“But she said I wasn’t telling the truth.”

“Was she right?” Joan asked.

Russell nodded.

“What grade do you think you deserve?”

Russell made a face again. Rose made another funny noise. “An F,” Russell said finally.

“But
why
? It’s a great poem!”

Russell said, “I didn’t care about it. I just wrote it in five minutes. It’s not my fault that it’s good.”

“You didn’t try?” Joan thought about it for a second. “So it doesn’t show any progress?

“I don’t want to do more homework. Homework is stupid!”

“Homework under the Stone Education Plan is not stupid, Russell,” Roger raised his voice. “And when you’ll grow up you’ll understand it. For now, just follow the rules. They’re there for your benefit. Just follow... the
rules
! Got it?”

Russell looked down.

Joan tried another approach, with a soft voice. “The rules are simple, Russell. The rules are good for you. You have to follow the rules. And it’s, like, only three rules. You can follow three rules that are good for you, right?”

Russell shrugged.

“Right, Russell?”

Russell pouted, but said, “Yes, Mom. Follow the rules.”

“Now go to your room, do your homework, work
hard
, and you’ll thank us when you’re older.”

Sulking, Russell went slowly towards his room. “Yes, Mom.” Just as he shut his door, he said, in a stage-whisper, “When
I
grow up, I’ll
never
ask my kids to do homework.”

Joan and Roger looked at each other, their eyes saying the same thing to each other: Kids will be kids.

Joan sat next to Rose, and put her hand on Rose’s stomach. “Turn it back on,” she asked Roger.

Roger pointed the remote at the TV.

“This has been the last of our three part series noting the six month anniversary to the first school year under the Stone Education Plan. Six months for The Era of Freedom. Change is being felt all around the country, and, in fact, the world. There is no doubt that so far it has been a dazzling success. The cages we always had in our heads are gone. Education is truly good for the first time in human history. Next: Is breast-feeding killing your baby? We’ll be back after these messages with an in-depth look.”

ALL-OF-ME™

I remember perfectly the moment it all started.

The moment was so innocent, so full of love and (somewhat) lust, that I couldn’t possibly have suspected anything.

But I think that even then I knew Melanie had an ulterior motive. Because when she sat on my knee, time skidded to a halt.

Maybe it was something in the way she carried herself or the way she spoke. In any case, I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. And I ignored it. And with a little nudge the ball began to roll...

~

We were at my house, Melanie and I. It was the last week of April, a week before my thirty-third birthday.

We had just finished dinner. I stretched on the couch and turned on the news. Melanie muted the TV, sat on my lap, smiled at me, and—And time suddenly stopped.

My nerves exploded. I felt each millimeter of her fingers on my neck; I felt the distribution of her weight on my leg; her smell overpowered me; I saw each crinkle, each freckle, each imperfection of her skin; and my libido skyrocketed.

“I have a birthday gift for you,” she purred, running her fingers through my hair.

“Really?”

“It’s amazing!”

“Isn’t it too early?”

“Oh, don’t you worry. You’re going to get it next week. But,” she ran her fingers through my hair, “I need your cooperation.”

“No problem. Tell me what it is, and I’ll help you.”

She smiled and kissed me. “I don’t think so.”

“Come on,” I put my hand on her knee and slowly worked my way up. “Tell me.”

“I’ll give you a hint,” and she bit her lip as I was getting warm.

“Fine,” I smiled.

“Ever wonder how you would have come out if you’d been raised by different parents, or if you’d made different choices in life?”

“Sure.”

“Well, you’re going to find out.”

“What? How?”

“Give me the morning before your birthday, and you’ll see,” and she kissed me to shut me up. It worked.

~

On Tuesday morning Melanie took me, of all places, to the hospital.

She rushed me through to some underground floor. I couldn’t get exactly which division it was; all I could see was a makeshift sign, saying: ‘All-Of-Me™’.

“What the hell is
that
?” I asked.

“Who knows,” she said, as she pushed me on past a few doors and into another corridor.

We arrived at some sort of reception. “Hi,” Melanie approached the receptionist, as her friendly business self, the personality that made her so good at her job. “We’re Jake Whitford. We have an appointment at ten.”

“Oh, yes. Doctor Majors can see you now. Second door to your right.”

“You’re taking me to see a
doctor
?” I asked.

“Second door,” Melanie grabbed my arm and hauled me into the doctor’s office, “to our right.”

The man inside was wearing a white doctor’s coat, but he couldn’t have been more than twenty-two.

“Ah,” he stood up as he saw us. “I’m Doctor Majors. You must be Jake Whitford,” he offered his hand.

“Yes,” I shook it, “but—”

“Good. Take your clothes off.”

“What?!”

“And wear this,” he gave me that green patient’s thing with the open back.

“Now, hold on. I’m not doing
any
thing until you tell me what you’re going to do to me and what this is and—!”

“Don’t you know?” he looked at me wide-eyed. “This is the next leap in artificial—”

Melanie held up her hand. “Don’t tell him. It’s a surprise.”

Doctor Majors looked at Melanie, then held up his arms helplessly, as if saying ‘what can I do?’

“But—”

“Jake, he can’t tell you anything,” her hand was on my back. “Doctor-patient privilege.”

“But
I’m
the patient,” I insisted.

“That doesn’t matter,” Doctor Majors stood up. “I’m not a medical doctor.”

My eyes nearly popped out of my head. “Then what the—?”

“I’ll prepare in the next room. When you two are ready, just walk through this door.” And he tactfully disappeared.

I looked at Melanie. “You’re not going to give me some enhancement-kind-of- surgery, are you? Because that would not constitute a birthday gift for
me
.”

“Funny.” She said, and threw the robe at me. “Wear the damn robe.”

~

They got me into five different tube-like contraptions, all of them resembling CT machines, and after a couple of hours, I dressed again, and we got back to the car.

“So,
now
are you going to tell me what the hell that was?”

“It’s going to take them four or five hours to finish everything. I’ll come back here, collect your gift, and we’re going to meet at your place for dinner.
That’s
when you’ll get your gift.”

“Come on!”

“Trust me. You’ll love this.” And she flashed her smile.

And I got into the car, and drove away.

~

At work, I had my AI Surfers search the Net for anything that had the name ‘All-Of-Me’. They found nothing. I then personally looked up the hospital’s website, looking for that service. I found nothing. Curiouser and curiouser. But I wouldn’t let it drive me crazy; I couldn’t let Melanie win. I could wait till the evening.

~

Melanie was already at my apartment.

“Hey there, birthday-boy. You are about to travel,” and she made a Vanna-White gesture, “into
you
.”

~

Melanie led me to my study. She sat on the swivel chair by my computer, and I sat on the small couch near the door. She swung the chair so that she faced me.

“Let me give a you little history. A couple of months ago I got a call from some people who want my PR firm to represent their company.”

“All-Of-Me.”

“Yes.”

“They came to you?”

“They’re almost ready to go public. I’m going to put on their public face.”

“Which is why there’s no mention of them anywhere yet.”

“Some private backers have heard of them, they get some government funding in AI research. But, mostly, they kept it quiet. They didn’t want competition.

“So...you know how, if you have enough money, you can get your brain ‘downloaded’ or ‘copied’ into a massive supercomputer, right?”

I nodded.

“Well, it’s really expensive, and it requires the fastest computers and a
lot
of memory. But the people in All-of-Me said, let’s change the way we look at things. If we can put the human brain in a computer, then it’s not a brain anymore, it’s an equation. So let’s take all the thoughts and memory and stuff – the variables – and mesh all those little numbers into one, big number. And we’ll do it in such a way that every big number represents exactly one state of your mind, see?

“So each unique state-of-mind gets one, unique number. And each unique number represents a specific state-of-mind that includes all your unique memories and thoughts at the time. Okay?”

I nodded.

“So now the equation deals only with two numbers instead of a billion of them. Why two? Because one is your current state-of-mind, and the other is everything that’s going into you: sight, smell, that sort of thing. That makes computing the next instant of your brain much less work for the computer, and much faster.”

“So they can do the human brain faster, is that what you’re saying?”

“See, but that’s not
it,
” she came in closer and there were stars in her eyes, “that’s not the
magic
! She leaned back. “The point is that in doing that they
separated
your
brain
from your
experiences
. The equation – the brain – is on your hard-drive. But you can type in any state-of-mind you
want
!”

I felt my hair stand all over my body, but the concept was still just beyond my grasp.

“You can put in,” Melanie continued, “
any
number you feel like. And each different number gives you different memories, a different age, a different history, different thoughts, different experiences. You can explore
you
in this.

“Ever wonder how you’d be if you’d been born under other circumstances, if you’d made different choices in life? This is your chance.”

My world began to spin. “I’m not sure anyone would want to know so much—”

“That’s not all, Jake,” she chugged forward. “They proved mathematically – they
proved
this – that every number can only be arrived at from exactly
one
previous number. That means you can’t
ever
get to the same, exact state-of-mind from two different ‘histories’ or ‘situations’ and you can’t – ever – get to the same state-of-mind
twice
. Even if you feel ‘I’ve been here before’ or ‘I’ve had this exact emotion before’ – you
didn’t
. It’s always slightly
different
!

“And that leads you to
another
great thing! Think about it: although every state-of-mind you have can
lead
to millions or billions of different states-of-mind – every state-of-mind
originated
from only
one
possible state-of-mind! Every number came from exactly one, earlier number. So if you know one number – you can
deduce
– through sheer math! – the number that came before it, and the one before it, and before it. The computer can
trace back
your life!

“Jake,” she looked at me as if it was the greatest thing ever. “You can go into your own
past
! Or you can just make up a number, and find a different Jake who had a different life, and go into
his
past. In fact, because they know what you’re seeing with your eyes and your ears – you can see and hear what
he’s
seeing right on your computer screen!

“Do you get this? Do you get how
big
this is?”

“I—I don’t know, Melanie. This is... It’s too... I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” she put her hand on my knee and squeezed. “I know this is a lot for a first time. Let’s have a demonstration. Okay?”

I thought for a minute, then whispered, intrigued, despite my fear, “Okay.”

She turned the screen on, the program was already running. It was asking for a number.

“See, the thing is, instead of writing numbers, they had the computer understand things in base forty-or-fifty-something. Which means we can use any letter or number or
anything
on the keyboard. So you can just type in a word, and a word is a number, too. Also, they did something called a ‘transformation’ so that, for the state-of-mind you had when they checked you, you can choose what word you want it to be. I chose it for you.”

And she typed, ‘I_AM_AN_IDIOT’, and looked at me.

“Funny,” I said.

“Ready?”

I took a deep breath. “Yah.”

She pressed ‘ENTER’.

My face was suddenly on the screen. There was no background, but it seemed to be lying down. Suddenly his eyes opened, and he seemed to sit up. “Hi,” Melanie said.

“Melanie?” it said, its eyes crinkling, its forehead bending. “Where’d the hospital go? Why do you look like that? What—”

Melanie pressed a key and the image froze.”

‘F1’ is ‘freeze’,” she told me. “See there?” She pointed at my PersoCam, sitting on top of the screen. “He could see me and hear me through your ’Cam, and you can talk to the different you’s if you want, like I just did. Now, look. If I press this, then the number of your current state-of-mind shows up at the bottom of the screen. I can ‘save’ the number, just like I can save a game and return to it whenever I want to. But I don’t want to. That’s not interesting now.

“Now, I’ll press ‘F2’, and we can go back in time as far as we want to. Let’s choose five minutes.” She typed it in. The image instantly changed. I seemed to be lying down again. “Now, we’re still on ‘Freeze’. I don’t want to see your face now. I want to see what you were seeing.” She pressed ‘F3’, and the image changed again. Then she pressed ‘F1’ – ‘unfreeze’ – and the image came to life. It was like being inside the CT again.

“Oh my god!” I whispered.

“Okay,” she froze the picture. “I see you’re beginning to get the hang of this. Now, that was around 10:30 this morning, right? Let’s go further back in time. Let’s say twenty-two hours ago? I was still at your place, right?”

I couldn’t say anything.

“Right.” She tapped a few keys, explaining everything she did, and fed in the data: 22 hours back in time. I took another deep breath.

Suddenly I saw my bed. My feet were at the end of the line of vision. Covers. Movement. Soft light. Melanie was getting out of bed. The image followed her.

My breath caught. Melanie beside me had the same reaction. We both remembered this.

“Now you remember, tomorrow at eight, I’m picking you up,” the Melanie on the screen said. And although I remembered every movement I saw, I could not tear myself away.

“Yah,” I could hear my voice from the computer. The Melanie on the screen began to put on her clothes.

After a minute Melanie pressed ‘pause’. “Hmm... Is
that
what you look at when I get dressed?”

“Melanie...”

“Do you understand, now, Jake? Do you understand how
amazing
this is? You can go back and remember what it was like when you were twenty. When you were fourteen. You can see
everything
as you saw it then, as you heard it. This,” and she looked right into my eyes, “is my birthday gift to you. The perfect album.”

I hugged her with all my strength and almost cried, “Thanks.”

“Now,” she got up. “I’m going to the other room, to give you some time alone with your new toy. Okay?”

“Yah.”

When she got to the door, she looked back and winked, “Have fun playing with yourself.”

“Funny.”

~

I couldn’t move.

My gratefulness vanished the second Melanie left the room. I turned around and faced the screen, with its question (how far back, in years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds) and the little cursor blinking, and it struck me how impossible the question was.

Time passed. And I began thinking about how this thing had a better memory of me than I did. And I thought that there are some things a person shouldn’t know, like that his brain is on a computer in front of him.