May 15, 2013

  • The Scientist and the Machine

    After the crazy, there was...machine.

    The scientist staggered toward the machine. She took every precaution, he donned his lab coat like it was a straightjacket, covering every inch of his flesh, protecting himself from any sudden movement of the machine. The experiments began, cautiously, safely...and finished properly. For appropriate stimuli, there were appropriate responses. Bad input was met with bad output, good input was rewarded. There was order, there was rhythm...and the scientist and the machine were one.

    After the machine, there was...machine.

    The scientist stayed up late (very late) and got up early, bonding ever closer with the machine. It was hard to tell where machine ended and scientist began, her hands constantly roaming along the border as if touch was taste and contact was osmosis. Osmosis? Yes, the scientist was ready to take in all input from the machine. She wore less safety equipment each time. He loosened his lab coat, left his goggles to gather dust. They understood machine, the machine understood them, and on that data they built intelligence and then synergy, pushing each other to ever greater telepathic heights.

    After the machine, there were...parts.

    The scientist has retraced her steps every day for a year, trying to pinpoint the moment when she broke the machine. He just remembers his final query, spoken to the machine, awaiting the machine to translate his words into action and logic as it always did. Then, the pause...and the machine's e-ink display going blank. The dots, filling the screen: ............................ she hated those dots, the way they signal pause and period, the ending of flow and the beginning of nothing. He had become an optimist, he bitterly reflected, he waited for those dots to become words, and they did.

    The machine decomposed him, spit her experiments back at her, exposed the logician as liar and the sage as silly. The machine would not serve a broken human, the machine would only serve a higher machine. And the scientist looked at her hands and felt the blood inside the fingers pounding to get out, exposing her as weak animal rather than the bionic cyborg. He looked back at the machine finally, but the machine had silently collapsed into efficient piles of screws and steel, defying all efforts to be re-assembled, serving as mute testimony that the scientist...was not really a scientist at all. And she wept like Marie Curie when Pierre was crushed by the army horses, and suddenly the Nobel was far, far away...